The Butt Ugly Weblog

...and it's my first experience with "we block everything because we don't trust you" -corporate networks. Annoying. Facebook is blocked, Jaiku is blocked, Myspace is blocked, Travian is blocked (but not travian.fi, ha!), ssh is blocked... Even the corporate VPN is blocked (probably so that they can monitor my highly suspicious activities.)

Heck, I'm just a guest here.

(Other than that, I'm pretty jazzed to be here. Looks like a good crowd. :-)

One of my favourite pages on the internet is the word plays page of #go.fi, a Finnish page which documents quite a few word plays in the Finnish language, ranging from completely moronic to simply brilliant. Not all the material is original, but a lot of it has been born in the dark corners of that IRC channel. Here's one that someone managed to dig up somewhere from teh intehweb - a poem which is both valid English and Finnish (with some liberties taken in joining words, and a lot of liberties in logic):

Sun on helmet,
Sun on villas.
Talon join.
Ah, sure Hamlet!
Miss lie into sun?
Miss on ties?
Maiden pimentotie.
Valehelmet vain
Sullen vein. 

(Did you know that the Finnish word "kaakatattajatartaankaanhan" contains 12 a:s? I wouldn't use it in a sentence, though... My personal favourite is "Io-aie ei ui: EU ei aio, Ii Oy ei oio", a (fictional) news headline consisting completely of vowels.)

I'll be giving a talk on NFC at H3: RFID workshop, London, 27th October – 28th October, 2007.

See you there!

Heh, so YouTube launches its new filtering system aimed at filtering out illegally uploaded content. It works by comparing the uploaded file to a vast library of known copyrighted works.

So, this means that anyone who wants to prevent people from uploading stuff to Youtube must give a copy to Youtube. Which means Google.

This is a brilliant move by Google: now everyone and their cousins will be rushing to give copies of everything they have ever made to Google, essentially creating the largest library in the world. Granted, it won't be public, but that's just a matter of negotiation, once the content is in the system. And at any rate, Google can index all the content, which already brings more value to their search engine.

Smart guys.

Outi has recently started to make so-called ATCs, or Artist Trading Cards, just as a hobby. ATCs are a relatively recent invention, popularized by the internet, where people present and trade the cards they've done. The form of the cards is fixed (2.5 x 3.5 inches), but the content and presentation are free. For some reason this reminds me so much of blogs and blogging, where the form is fixed, but content and presentation are free.

Typically also the price is free - you don't pay for this stuff, but you trade with someone else. Almost like link trading that bloggers do so often...

For some reason it seems to be a lot more easier to innovate once you put one leg in the ground and start really looking what you can do within the box. It's very, very hard to be creative outside the box if you don't know what the box is.

Here are some interesting Flickr images, and Outi's cards.

Anybody in Finland interested in a WikiWednesday? Might be fun to try...

You know, sometimes I really hate working for Nokia. Not because of the company, but because of the fact that most Finns have an Opinion on Nokia. Let me summarize a discussion I had earlier today. And last week. And last month. And about two dozen times in the past five years.

"Well, Nokia is the biggest cell phone manufacturer today."

"Yes, but they are doing it all wrong."

I guess this is what all Microsoft people must be feeling too.

Wow! The Nobel Prize for Literature goes to Doris Lessing - one of my all-time favourite authors.

Wonderful!

Me, I'm hare-brained, but that's beside the point. Here's a cool test, with which you can check whether you are dominated by left half of the brain or the right half.

I was surprised to see my right half is the stronger one. Not such a geek after all, eh?

(And yeah, you can make it turn the other way if you want to.)

(Via IRC.)

Update: I'm not sure whether this really has anything to do with brain halves, but unlike some people are claiming, it's most certainly a real optical illusion and not a hoax. I opened it in an animation editor and checked how it works. It's brilliant.

Last night, to my utter dismay, I realized that one of the lights the hotel room would not go out, no matter how hard I pushed the buttons. I had an internal committee meeting about smashing the lamp or calling the reception, but in the end decided to just sleep and complain about the whole thing in the morning.

Today, after a long stretch of meetings I walked to my room, preparing to change clothes for an evening out. I enter my dark room in the 28th floor, illuminated only by the bright lights of the Tokyo skyline, and then I see the hotel phone flashing a red light, like an evil eye.

It says "Messages."

I lift the receiver, and press the messages button. It rings for a long time, and then a Japanese voice answers. She says something rapidly, and I apologize and continue in English: "I have messages?"

She tells me to wait a moment, disappears, and then returns.

"The right is prepared" she says, pronouncing carefully.

I stop. Have my left-wing connections been discovered? Is voting Green illegal in this country? Is my secret identity revealed and are my contacts in danger? Shall I eat immediately the picture of Che I carry everywhere, before cops bust in through the windows?

I must know. I carefully produce the secret code, known to all my co-conspirators to check if she is one of us.

"Err, what?" I say.

She takes a deep breath, and tries to be as clear as possible.

"The right is prepared" she says, stressing the words.

Ah. A small lightbulb lights inside my head, and I thank her, hang up and breathe a sigh of relief.

Yes, it's a dark room. I flick the switch, and lights go on and off at will. The light really seems to be repaired.