Mind Itch

Mind-Itch dot com!

2006-05-11T13:24:00.000+03:00

Thanks for visiting! You can find us at http://www.mind-itch.com

Ladies and Gents ..

2006-04-25T14:40:00.000+03:00

This will be my first double-post to both here and Mind-Itch.com, which means that we have finally opened up our new home with the technology to support multiple writers and just to customize the whole thing to look nicer.

Of course, we haven't had the time to do that yet, but let's not go there. So, please update your bookmarks as we will do in the near future, we'll probably copy all the old postings to the new MI as well.

Some other good news as well, the move is almost done and my thesis was PASSED (huzzah!) and I got my apartment in Riga packed and ready to go for the delivery guys to break my stuff up.

More news later.

End of Silence

2006-04-02T16:49:00.000+03:00

Whoom. That's the sound of time passing by at the speed of light. It has been a while, but I just haven't had the time nor the energy to liberate my thoughts. See, we just finished moving to our new flat last night. Before that there was a lot of packing, sorting, organizing and especially calling people because they didn't show up for the move.

I don't know what's it with people, that makes them so scared of helping others. Or maybe I just don't have good-enough friends :). Anyway, stuff have moved - now what's left is to get the furniture from the store (sweet), clean (not sweet) and organize the rest of the stuff (semi-sweet). Thank god we're getting most of the furniture new, so we didn't have to carry them over from the old place.

Also a lot of other things happened, spent a long weekend in Riga with my main man Ben and sold my friggin' apartment in the same city (super sweet), meaning that I'll have to go there to pack up (really uncool), but hopefully I'll have some good help there to help me do the thing and good thing is that most of the stuff is already packed, so it'll be just detailing - to make sure that the company that delivers the stuff will deliver them intact.

Allright, back to unpack. Enjoy life, spring is coming!

np: K.O.S. (Determination) from the album "Black Star" by Mos Def

ps. Actually had to post this from Blogger instead of ecto, seems like there's something wrong with their match. Well, manual labor it is.

Seven steps to Kevin Bacon

2006-03-16T19:07:00.000+02:00

You all know about the game where you need to trace a connection between a Hollywood actor to Kevin Bacon in a maximum of seven steps. I've found a way to make the game easier - Watch X-Files.

Jack Black (School of Rock), Kurtwood Smith (70's Show), Jewel Staite (of Firefly fame), Lucy Liu (Ally McBeal - she's actually speaking mainly chinese in her role in the X-Files), Tony Shalhoub (Monk), Terry O'Quinn (John Locke from the excellent show Lost), Christine Willes (Dead like me) and Willie Garson (the gay buddy from Sex in the City, Stanford) are just to name a few since I've been watching X-Files (again) starting with the first season and it is just astounding how many now-famous actors have graced the show with their cameos and minor parts. I'm now in season three and those names popped in my mind just while writing this.

Of course, X-Files was a really big show at that time and it had a different thing going on every episode with different people. I'm sure it has been a great springboard for many young actors to come.

Real busy again, hitting off to Riga in a few weeks, setting up the new apartment and moving in on April Fool's. Hope it's not an omen.

I am Victory

2006-03-05T17:19:00.000+02:00

Whew. Got my thesis finished on friday. Huzzah!

Now I'm faced with boredom, so much time, so little to do - which is really rare. I'm constantly on the edge of getting up and starting to do something, but then again, I haven't had a lot of chances just to relax lately, so why not indulge myself?

Yesterday we went to see the Rat Pack, the remake of a classic show with Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin and damn that was a sweet show. They performed with a full big band, besides from the violins, which were synthesized - but in general the guy who they were "imitating" sounded just like the real thing (never actually hearing the person on stage alive though, but at least they had the mannerisms correct.)

They will be in Helsinki for another week, I suggest you go and see it.

Now back to Duke Ellington and his groovy razzmatazz.

Ta ta.

Writing, geeking, marketing.

2006-03-02T19:53:00.000+02:00

Aw shucks. Although writing is really nice and creative and all that stuff, it has one bad side - it takes time to write and since Mind Itch will not become a link festival or a news copy room, I'll actually have to think of what I write. I do realize that no one actually cares about generic things, like what somebody has done for the last week or anything of that sort - we are always looking for some benefit, be it the fact that most people read personal blogs that show a picture that is poorer than of those of the readers'. You know, you feel better because someone is doing worse than you?

At least it looks like we'll have a hosting facility and then we'll just get our geek squad to start laying out the techy bits to make the blog worth the while.

np: Paranoid from the album "Hidden Treasures" by Megadeth (har, har, har)

Gluttony

2006-02-26T10:37:00.000+02:00

Ah, there are a few good things in having a birthday. I haven't celebrated my birthday in years, but since we hit round numbers this time, I decided to invite some friends over and enjoy life. So friday went nicely, watching curling and ice hockey and getting wasted.

Saturday we decided to have a gluttony day, since this was my real birthday. Went on a shopping spree and got pretty much everything I could lay my hands on, I had several revelations when paying and noticing that "oh, I didn't remember taking donuts". Anyway, yesterday was a day full of pizzas, chicken wings, bratwurst & sauerkraut, carelian pies, horse sausage, candy, nachos, salsa, guacamole, cheddar sauce, pickled gherkin and a lot of other stuff downed with good drinkies of course. Didn't eat very much in quantity, but it was real nice to just let go while shopping and get all the crap you usually don't get because it would be just pointless.

What was worrying, was the fact that the teller didn't even flinch at the mountain of fat, salt and sugar standing across his counter. Well, Finland is the good number two on the fattest country on the list, so I guess some people might do that more than often. Yuck.

Man I'd like to get this darn blog to rock, rock, rockety rock and get the new stuff online.

np: Ain't Sayin' Nothin' New from the album "Things Fall Apart" by The Roots

Born as Ghosts

2006-02-19T15:51:00.000+02:00

Sunday. Olympic fever is surrounding, encompassing and overwhelming the world. Well, the western world at least.

Working hard to get Mind Itch properly set up so we can have our full range of writers coming up and showing their love for the world, now trying to find a good deal on a hosting partner where we could put ourselves, hopefully I'll have something concrete next week.

np: Distance from the album "Stabbing The Drama (Digipak)" by Soilwork

A Trashed Rose

2006-02-13T16:21:00.000+02:00

Mental imagery. While working in the advertisement and marketing industry, I've had the opportunity to see great ads and beautiful messages, strong messages - powerful messages. But still, there are a few things that are just so elemental and iconic. Think of a single rose in a trash can. Just a single rose. Why is it there? Is it dead? Have there been any holidays that usually deserve roses? Are there any places that would have roses close by? Was it left by a man or a woman? Was it left in anger or in love? The best image doesn't only answer questions, but gives more of them.

Still sick, I was driven home from work - understandably. I sound like Lance Henriksen (You know, Frank Black from Millennium or the android from Alien). Now I'm lying in the bed, listening to the Engadget podcast and doing a presentation about marketing. My brain is having big difficulties multitasking stuff at the moment. Which is why I'll not babble any further, but will continue doing something that does not require thinking.

Cheers.

I'm just a man

2006-02-12T14:57:00.000+02:00

Currently my head has only room for one word: phlegm.

Sure, the stress of things undone has lifted and thus my body has been able to rest and lower its resistance of the elements. Friday held a farewell party for a colleague, the tab was open and the bar was aplenty. Had to wake up early to present my thesis' first draft via Skype - which worked out just nicely, but that resulted in the fact that I didn't have as many hours to sleep as I would've wanted. Same thing on saturday, there always seems to be something more interesting to do than sleeping.

People are funny. Everybody seems to have such strong opinions about a lot of things, and most of them contradict with each other, not even starting to compare them with interpersonal relationships and opinions.

Still, it's so nice to be back in Finland, it's been like three weeks and yes - it's time for the first strike. Again something to do with drivers and their union being pissed about something because of somebody tries to be mean and help these guys work less overtime. But yeah, that would be too easy. The parliament decided to not continue the worker movement restrictions - meaning that in the near future these guys can be replaced with immigrants who would even work for smaller pay.

Eh, I think I'll take a nap and try to gather some strength for tomorrow's labor at the office.

np: Prisoner from the album "Transistor" by 311

Remember March 11th will be 311 day!

Standard of living

2006-02-04T15:22:00.000+02:00

Saturday morning, a long time since I've had the opportunity to wake up later than single digits. Lovely. Although the fridge did its best to keep us up all night, gurgling and making noises, I think it's about to die or something. Funny thing about the fridge is that it was the second time it did that, but it only makes the sound during the night.. maybe it's a were-fridge or something. I need to check it out but it just feels like there's no point since we're _just_ moving out. Only thing we need to do is find the place to live in. Trust me, that has proven out to be the most difficult part.

When you get to a certain age, you know what kind of place you want to live in. Simple, sure, but when the demand for those kinds of places is higher than the supply it results in two things - higher prices and low availability. Now, thinking myself of being some sort of a business man, thinking about investments and all that - going with the flow of a pricing anomaly seems very foolish of me, if we would be talking about stocks or bonds I wouldn't touch them, even with any other investment property - I wouldn't bother looking to that general direction - but we're talking about my (our) future home. Which we will live in for the next five years at least.

We know what we want. We want three rooms, so we can have some peace of mind when we're both home at the same time. We need an office room, since we don't want to bring work to the rest of the apartment, and we also need the arts room, so that should justify the need for a third room. One room is for the bedroom and one for the living room. We need a lot of space for clothes, so a place with a wardrobe would be high on our list. We want high ceilings, because they're just sexy. We want to have enough space in the bathroom for a proper washing machine and I need a good kitchen, including a dish washer, since I'm used to it and I cook a lot. We also need a place were there's good enough public transportation around, so that means we want to be in the downtown area, since we need to travel a lot and there wouldn't be any sense in living far away from the places we need to be constantly in. We also want to have a balcony, because you can spend nice summer days there or just dry laundry, also very handy when you have a party and friends who smoke. I would also like to have a sauna either in the apartment or at least in the house, I've lived too long without a sauna and I'm sorely missing having one around so I can go there when I want to. Of course, it can't be too expensive, since I'm not a millionaire (yet).

So far we've browsed through hundreds upon hundreds of ads, finding 5 interesting options - three we've had time to see - and one of those three is interesting - but it's in the street level. I'd really like to get this thing done and start planning the next phase of my life. Hopefully next week we'll have time to go see the two other apartments and make the decision to buy our future home.

Respect to the east coast mind itch homies, you've been a plenty! ;)

Kiss and make up

2006-02-01T23:51:00.000+02:00

Rock and Roll! Finally got the first draft of my thesis done, meaning that I will have a few weeks time to breathe and concentrate in working and creating some good karma all around. Been having quite long days lately and that's why it's been a bit quiet with Mind Itch lately, but the wagon is rolling and hopefully we will be able to move to a new server soon and set up the real Mind Itch we want to get started with.

Now the latest Family Guy episode and catching some ZzzzzZZzzzz's.

Peace out.

np: Kiss And Make Up from the album "Babylon" by Skindred

The Cult of the Acid-spitting Llamas

2006-01-30T09:21:00.000+02:00

What would be cooler than having your own personal cult? Well, of course having Darth Vader's suit would be ostensibly magnificent, but we can't have it all. Even though if I would have the same gargantuan sized corpse holding my beautiful brain over six feet over mother Gaia.

But what do you actually need to run your own cult? Well, you need followers and some hard-core disciples - apostles, you could call them. You also need some crazy principle. Too many concentrate on the destructive things, suicide, murder, aggression, religion, football and what have you - I would concentrate on the nice things of life, such as llamas. Especially the genetically engineered protection machines that would spit acid at will. Totally awesome. No one would expect that kind of defense. Then you also need a back story, which isn't an issue for a group of talented bs-generators such as us. We would weave tales of grandeur together with national epics, tie them up with messianic messages and stories of incredible miracles that only tell the tale of the impending doom - and then just sprinkle some llamas and acid here and there and create the most ultimate creation story that encompasses both intelligent theory AND evolution, while having so many conspiracies and soap opera style plot twists that even explain the massive redneck-like-family-values that increase our inbred world (ask yourself, who ELSE they would have sex with? eh? That's right. No one.)

Ok, now that we've pissed off every single christian reader of this blog, we can concentrate on funnier things. Sorry for the delay with the post, people have been very insistent in wanting to read more. One brilliant person was even checking whether I had updated when I was sitting right beside him and I had spent all of the time from his last check with him. Talk about habits, eh? I finally got myself back to the Bloc, and had a great weekend there, doing nothing at all and walking out singing Mos Def's Brooklyn with the authenticity of a redneck playing intelligent. Brought some 50 lb. of clothes and shoes with me, imagine packing that in one suitcase.

Second week starting in the office and it's fun so far. More comic updates this week as well.

Peace out.

Back in the USSR

2006-01-16T21:13:00.000+02:00

Well, I'm not. But I'm planning to be for the rest of the week, cutting my ties there and and meeting with friends in a massive debauchery of immoral acts and a lot of talk and laughter expected.

I went to my new office today for the first time, the people seemed nice, young and interesting. There's a lot to be done and I can't remember the last time I've been so interested in getting to do something. Everything worked out just great, got everything settled and things are going smooth. The thesis is getting there, I just sent it today to my supervisor for him to check it out - let's see whether I'll have time to repair the damages ;)

Anyway, more My Name is Earl on the way - so a bag of nachos and a fine woman beside me, what more could a man want?

Here's the latest strip. (as soon as I get my shit together from Latvia I'll get some decent tools to start drawing.)

Word.

Oh yeah, more classics last weekend - Back to the Future trilogy (GREAT SCOTT!), Robocop (I'd buy that for a dollar) and Quantum Leap (!!! FA!!!)

woot!

2006-01-11T16:30:00.000+02:00

Well, today was the meeting and I'm happy to say it was a success and thus I have decided my next job, which I will start in two weeks or so. This option came totally out of the blue, but it quickly became the most interesting one and I'm really happy that I was found good enough for the position.

This naturally eases everything else up, as now I can do some planning and start executing my plans further. Writing the thesis (or doing research more than writing) all day again and pretty tired due to a really early meeting in the morning and late sheep-counting last night. Well. A few more hours and I can take a nap.

Here's the first comic of Mind Itch. I know, vector crap, not detailed enough, but it was the best I could do whilst hacking the thee-sees.

Peace out.

Doggystyle

2006-01-10T16:46:00.000+02:00

There's a dog park just outside our window, thank god it's six floors down so the barking doesn't bother too much. It's quite relaxing and sometimes amusing to watch the dogs play together and a wanna-be behavioral psychologist like myself it's rather educational as well. Just now, there were only two dogs there, but I was still laughing to see a St. Bernard chase a Jack Russell around and around. The feisty terrier seemed to have unlimited energy and the hulking cognac-carrier was getting behind more and more with each circle. Great entertainment. Reminded of myself chasing a greased piglet.

Been hacking at the thesis all day again, and will continue after this short break of blogging. It's starting to take form and the exponential amount of new questions brewing from each answer seems to be smaller and smaller all the time. What a relief. I'm making good pace and should be ready easily on time before the first draft deadline looming in February.

Tomorrow morning will have one meeting that might change my professional life, let's hope it will be as interesting as the one I had last week.

Stay strong.

np: Smaller And Smaller from the album "Angel Dust" by Faith No More

Future Itch

2006-01-09T20:55:00.000+02:00

Dear Readers!

If you look in the top right corner, above the "about me" crap - you can see a paypal donation button, available for your use. As you've probably noticed, we're planning to move to a different service and whip up a new domain with the more good stuff than ever before, but the downside in it is that it costs money to maintain a service and even though this is a hobby and hobbies are expensive, any support would be highly appreciated.

A buck helps.

Thesis-tastic

2006-01-09T20:21:00.000+02:00

Hurgh, thesis writing all day and still continuing until the lady of the house returns from her daily labor. We're going to go and check out a new apartment tomorrow, which seems really nice and it's even really close to her our apartment in Helsinki, meaning that I won't have to carry too much stuff too far away. Huzzah!

Some other stuff on the whole building-up-a-thing-people-are-interested-about, you can check out the drawing in the box above, giving some hint on what direction we're heading to.

This week I'll know what I'll be doing for the next two or three years, which is pretty cool and when I'll make that decision it might prove to push a lot of changes in motion, moving to a different country etc. I'll keep you updated on what's happening with everything. Hope you like the cartoon style.

About a girl from the album "Unplugged in New York" by Nirvana

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

2006-01-06T23:41:00.000+02:00

Aretha was right, we should all have a little respect for each other. Today I have participated in a most interesting discussion about the so-called lower level jobs, which most definitely are not low level in any way except the way the school recruitment agents promote their schools and degrees to have people study with them.

It seems like people have lost respect of their own jobs and values, lower level jobs seem always be only transitory in western countries. Naturally this will be a little distorted when you have a schooling system that is free and almost everybody with simple hand-eye coordination can get in - meaning tens of thousands of new students accepted each year waiting to sign in after graduating.

Our way of life would not work without cleaners, postal workers, police and what have you. I'd like to see the MBA to fix his own car or do his HVAC installation, I'd like to see the Engineer to heal their family or clean their own pool. These people earn their respect from me and I try to remind them of the important work they are doing every day by being as easy and helpful as possible, but now I've noticed that these people themselves don't respect themselves.

When I was a kid, the postal delivery guy was an important guy, of course he was less important than say a fifty years ago, but he was still a messenger - delivering important information (of course, later in life I learned that they only deliver bills) and keeping us informed with our newspapers and stuff (this was before the internet sold out.) Today, the postal workers are mainly part-time workers who don't give a flying fuck about what they are doing - they're just in it for the quick buck, trying to get through their school and student loan payments. When you go to a restaurant, the people there are not proud of what they are doing. In the discussion I was having, there was a great example of a trio of businessmen eating in a restaurant and the waitress being ashamed of working there, and the businessman just told her that without her no one would be eating there. That was a great example of how the world has changed to a differently valued system that is corrupting our values from within.

Pretty screwed, huh. This lack of motivation passes it forward, since when the only person you see outside your shitty day at the office looks like she would like to slit her wrists while selling you a cup of coffee will not make you feel like prince Charming for the rest of the day. Is this a change for good? The old saying says that the more things change the more they stay the same, doesn't seem to apply here. I wonder why.

Well enough of that.

Movie stuff (hey!) - Lord of War was pretty damn good, I have a love-hate relationship with Nick Cage. He's somehow charming (I just saw him in National Treasure - another one of those don't-spend-a-buck-in-the-theatre-but-rent-it-later-things) but somehow so annoying. Still, the movie was funny in its realism and witty sarcasm. Might even buy it.

Oh yeah, got our first visitor from Brazil - how cool is that. Though I think the poor dude just lost his way somehow, but that's another continent for the blog. Huzzah!

Peace out, have a nice weekend - I'll be off in a rare opportunity to rock with my band tomorrow. WooooT!

Firefox

2006-01-05T20:46:00.000+02:00

Whoa, Sixty-Two percent (62%) of all Mind Itch readers uses Firefox! That's good going. Microsoft's IE is a good second with 20 percent.

Yes, that's a small sneak peak of what's to come.

np: Sugartime from the album "The Complete Sun Recordings 1955-1958 (Disc 3)" by Johnny Cash

Cheek to cheek

2006-01-05T18:08:00.000+02:00

Yo.

Seems like things are progressing as planned or even better. That's something new. Though, it's funny how people generally complain that they can't get a job due to the fact that they don't have experience or education or neither, wherein I'm in limbo due to the fact that I have "too much" of both. Without education or experience you can always get a job doing whatever or go study so you could gain those two. By limbo I mean the fact that with great power comes great responsibility, and with those two come demands of what I want to do for a living. When I find something I'd like to do, the other side of the table usually think that I'm "too good" (oh the irony) for the job as they expect that I'd get bored too quickly.

This might be the case with some black sheep in the fast-lane of hyperactivity we call the world today, but I have no quarrels of doing simpler things as I've always been resourceful and proactive enough to keep myself busy. Still, it's pretty hard to deliver this message to the other side of the table when they only see your CV and a dazzling show of talent, which is called the interview. It's not like this is something new to me, I've been in this limbo for the past 4 years while growing my education and experience constantly - this means that pretty much the only way for a guy like me to get a job is to know people, who hire or know people, who know people.

Speaking of knowing people, comes an issue that we have been discussing quite a lot with my friends and my beautiful bride: Efficiency thinking when meeting people. I can't help but evaluate people I know and meet on whether they are or might be relevant to me or my future. If not, I rarely spend too much time with them, which is kind of sad but on the other hand I just don't have time to please everybody I meet and as the saying goes - life is too short to spend with assholes.

(I'm writing this while eating an orange, hope my keyboard doesn't get all sticky. Yuck.)

On a lighter note, saw Sahara last night - again one of those movies on which spending the few buckaroos for the theatre experience is just not worth it. However, I was amused by it - Steve Zahn is a funny guy and Matt McConaughey has the greatest smile. Penelope Cruz's accent is quite annoying, but thank god she keeps mainly screaming instead of talking in the movie, so that' s a relief. Also it was really refreshing to see a movie with very little product placements after the Island's product placement orgy .

I think that's enough for today, probably be back tomorrow - later dudes and dudettes.

np: Without Moral Restraint from the album "Reasoning the Impossible" by Chimaira

Parade of Cheese

2006-01-04T20:44:00.000+02:00

Well, today held a most interesting meeting. Let's hope that will come into fruition, since it seems to be the most interesting talk so far about my future. I should have some concrete information on my decision by wednesday next week, but I have a simmering feeling in my gut that I will find out sooner.

More and more people are reading Mind Itch, a big hand to all of you big hunks of love out there, it's really nice to think that someone gives a damn (or gets lost real easy surfing the web.) People have even learned to google Mind Itch properly and avast, they have found us!

Oh yeah, some more game nostalgia - NES Punch-Out - damn! I used to play that game when we were wee lads with my childhood friends when the 8-bit Nintendo was the hottest shit out there. It still is, damnit. I was always a PC guy, I only had a Sega Megadrive later on meaning that I had to live at go to my friends' house to play some quality console action, since PC games back then were .. lacking. Still, about Punch-Out: It's crazy how well I still remember all the opponents and the strategies to beat their asses black and blue, only three more fights until Mike Tyson himself. I wonder if kids today even know who Mike Tyson is? Do you? Are there any kids reading this blog? Stop reading! Go tell your parents that you went to a bad web site and they should burn your monitor because of all the foul things it has touched.

Also had a message from my old job telling that they miss me in there, "the office doesn't feel like the same anymore." .. they never were much of liars, seems like they're getting worse.

It's kind of tricky, being too lazy to maintain more than one personal blog and having the urge to divulge a lot of personal stuff as well, but since that's not an option due to the fact that people know me and I don't want them (you) to know that it's me that's writing that stuff. Maybe I should start one of those anonymous blogs and become a social porn superstar!

And some words about movies that have touched me in one way or another.

The Island was something I didn't expect much of and thus skipped it in the movie. Watched it last night and I was pretty right about my estimate, and due to my knowledge of the key plot - it was not too difficult to concentrate on the massive amount of product placements in the film. I don't think there was a frame without a product placement. Some eye candy, some nice effects - oh wait, no there weren't. Ewan McGregor is still cool, but he's way better in The Long Way Round.

Also had the "pleasure" of watching The Exorcism of Emily Rose, apart from the well cut trailers I saw plenty of I knew the apple inside to be rotten. It was a pseudo-christian mythology-related-ally mcbeal-drama with some John Carpenter remake-effects. Only thing cool was the different languages and especially the part where Emily tells her possessor's name - I even made it as a SMS alert with Audio Hijack (which rules).

Let's see if I can put it here somewhere, don't bitch about the legal mumbo-jumbo, I don't care. Nah, too lazy to do it.

Some people have asked me what kind of music I like, hence I will list the song playing when I'm writing. Probably doesn't bother anyone.

Satan Is My Motor from the album "Prolonging The Magic" by Cake

Anxiety

2006-01-03T09:44:00.000+02:00

The return of the gangster.

I have 34 days, 6 hours, 23 minutes and 6 seconds before I need to return the first draft of my thesis. I started doing it yesterday. I was a bit nervous, but then I had a little help from my friend and it didn't seem so bad. Now I just need to get my interviews and questionnaires ready and sent so I will have ample time to do the research.

The time for writing is good, because Family Guy, American Dad, Veronica Mars, Prison Break, Rome and many other addictive series are on break - but Battlestar Galactica's third season is starting this week! Hallelujah! Of course, I should be writing my thesis mind map now instead of partying about nerdy sci-fi action through my blog, but _can_you_dig_it. It's just that damn good.

News of my upcoming departure from Latvia have reached the ears of my mates, creating a ripple effect of mixed emotions. I can't say that I'd miss Latvia as a country due to its misgivings, but the friends are more important than any country. And while there naturally are people also in Latvia and there are new friends everywhere I go, you manage to find new siblings some times, and it always a sad affair to depart from this good relationship.

Let's see if this week will deliver the news about my new job.

Peace out, all the people who have an itchy mind.

Feliz Whatevaah

2006-01-01T22:05:00.000+02:00

Björk is singing about craving, I've been in bed all day. Prison Break is so damn cool, the ultimate TV fix. Why can't all series be like that, especially when you have the ultimate TV media in the top of your lap, delivering continuous goodness all the way. Give it to me mommas!

New Year. New Tricks. They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks, .. -- Just got a massive Karma punch right in mid-sentence, there's just something about ex-***friends and current ones, don't add up. Great way to spoil the evening and the next one, guaranteed awkwardness hundred per cent, damn it. Crap, now I totally lost my flow with the news.

Well, I'll keep this short.

Last night was quite a nice party with some 60 musicians, we even had a friggin' snare drum with us in the snow to play some marching tunes while coloring the sky. Came home at about six or something, can't really remember the time though, stayed up for a little while longer. Met a lot of new people, made some new friends whom I will never see again and some that I will see again. Also saw a lot of people that I should've met a long time ago and I also remembered that I don't like Ouzo in any form.

Got a great mail from a really good friend of mine, he rules.

Well, I think I'll roll in my misery for while, watch some telly and try to get this grogginess out of my head. The feeling doesn't help, though.

Damn history.

Itching Mind

2005-12-30T16:16:00.000+02:00

Nar-nee-aa. I actually never intended to have so much movie stuff going on in the blog, but since people seem to read it and I enjoy writing it - what the hell, hasn't killed anybody. I won't ponder long with the whole Narnia issue, just to make the point that it was pretty good, visually awesome but lacked in few small things:

1. Too many scenes directly copied from LOTR (weapon smithing, anyone? Only thing missing was good music and Saruman)
2. Rushing the scenes (in the book & TV series the death of **cough** takes a long time, now it flies by in 20 seconds)

Also, some sort of announcement. Mind Itch will develop in the coming year, we will expand our writer base and move to a more permanent home, update our graphics, internationalize our crew and try to become interesting. Sort of a collective you see, because I think my mates are bloody funny. And they're always funny when they're bleeding (har har).

Nerve-wrecking waiting on the whole issue of starting the next year, waiting to hear whether I get a job here before I head back to the Soviet Bloc, I'm optimistic. Would be really nice though.

Also, due to my return to the motherland, we're starting up new band and we are actively looking for the following visionaries in the capital area:

1 x Drummist
1 x Bass Slasher
1 x Guitareer
1 x Keyboardist
3 x Hornist (Saxophonist, Trumpetist and Trombonist or mixed combo platter)

Anyway, if you know or are an artist interested in some groovy jamming with some cool dudes, let us know.

Well, I'll hit you with some updates as soon as I hear where my life is going. Nerve-wrecking, it is.

Peace out.

March of the Pigs

2005-12-27T13:26:00.000+02:00

Ham.

Nightmares.

The Pigs take up resistance, barricade themselves to the slaughterhouse.

Chaos ensues.

This Christmas was rather nice actually, even though we had to drive quite a bit to meet all family members, but it's just that easy when you have the right company with you. And not just Christmas, there have been quite a few other changes in my life - although more on the mental side. Due to the fact that I'm getting married next summer, I will move back to Finland for at least a few years and I realized that there's no point to keep delaying the inevitable. Can't say that I'm thrilled of the prospect of returning to Finland per se, but the external reasons override my personal preferences.

The Chronic(-What?-)cles of Narnia has also come to the cinemas, meaning that we definitely need to go see it. It's funny how few people actually know about the old classic. My generation saw the TV series, which rocked and I'm expecting quite a bit from the movie. At least the theme song rules.

I could bitch about the car taxation of Finland, probably leading me to sell my car before returning as I would have to pay over 20 grand of taxes, which I think I'll pass and get the bus pass.

Later boyos and girlies!

Ham-boy

Skype, Wikipedia and a world of ignorance

2005-12-16T11:33:00.000+02:00

Seems like I'll never get to my Christmas ranting, but I promise it's on its way.

Hello from Finland! Just arrived last night and after a cold beer, sauna and some traditional Finnish food (tacos) I got to bed and spent a lot of time watching the good ol' Superman (the Gene Hackman-bad-hairdo-version) and damn it was boring. Anyways, after a well-slept night I saw the morning paper's weekend extra (Nyt) having Skype as its cover story. Somehow the life of a nerd doesn't feel so far away.

The article was the basic non-tech-person-writing-about-the-second- coming-of-Jesus-Christ-that-is-called-Skype, but there are two things that bugs me when people are writing about Skype - they make it sound like Skype invented audio conferences over the net - which they didn't, even MSN Messenger offered audio conferencing before Skype was a mere glimpse in the Swedes' eyes. True, Skype managed to do two things well: Market themselves as first movers and - this is second point that bugs me - market Skype as being free.

Free. Skype is not free as in free beer or as in free speech. First of all the technology is proprietary, meaning that
the chat function cannot be used through multi-account IM clients and basically people can't develop it freely - so much for free. Same thing with the calls, it's not free to call to a phone somewhere and you always have costs from your broadband etc. It's the same thing as if a mobile carrier would advertise that "EVERYBODY CALLS FOR FREE! (You just need to pay for those calls which are not toll-free numbers.)"

But in general, Skype is doing a lot of good things for the industry as a whole and who am I kidding here, marketing is all about hypocrisy.

I was approached by a mate from Sweden regarding the credibility on Wikipedia and he did this just before Nature magazine's article on the topic came out. Seems like Wikipedia is almost as reliable as the stalwart that is Encyclopaedia Britannica (sic), with Wikipedia having 4 factual errors per 3 errors of EB - but we have to take note that Wikipedias articles are way longer, so that should give Wikipedia some serious credibility. It's the only encyclopedia I use these days and I suggest you do the same and bring your effort to improve it.

The fun thing has been that the Wikipedia issue has been in many magazines and news portals, so it seems like the free encyclopedia is gaining some serious credibility even from the press.

You know what's creepy? Your mom sending you funny pictures through internet :|

King Kong

2005-12-15T09:46:00.000+02:00

Oh my, oh my.

Unlike Doom, there are some movies that I have a lot of expectations about. King Kong is a classic, there's no denying that. Its strength lies behind a great story, that cannot be spoiled no matter how poor the movie would look. But this something Peter Jackson has done for King Kong is just something magnificent. When the first King Kong came out, it awed people by its progressive technologies and shocking animation - it showed a world before unknown to people and that's what kept people tied to the great story.

PJ's King Kong truly gave this same experience, not only did the movie look unbelievably good, but it was mesmerizing. There was more action in three hours than Steven Seagal's career put together, there were more emotions than all the crappy Christmas movies Hollywood produces every year and there were more CGI than in George Lucas' wet dreams. Just when you thought that the heroes got out of trouble, there was something else waiting just around the corner.

It just feels like everything in the movie just clicked together, the cast was very good - seeing excellent performances from Adrien Brody and Naomi Watts, not forgetting Jack Black who was actually acting really well and he didn't even need to do that thing with his eyes, but his transformation of an aspiring movie producer to a raving lunatic was done admirably well.

Then there's Kong, the towering colossus. From the start, the soundscape and the image of Kong were breathtaking. They portrayed a powerful, yet graceful image of the great ape. And to make sure people understood how much he kicked ass, he took on THREE (3) T-Rexes, while carrying the blonde heroine in his hand, or leg. It was really, really cool.

The movie had the basic three parts, a beginning (introduction to characters and setting), a middle (jungle wars 3000) and the end, which begun after Kong kicked some Jurassic ass just before he was captured. I was mainly crying the last hour of the movie, since somehow PJ managed to create a bond between myself and Kong and because I knew what would happen, it just made it worse.

The credits revealed that Andy Serkis (Gollum from the Lord of the Rings trilogy) was Kong, and maybe Serkis is just that good or he knows what PJ means when he says something, but the final acting of Kong on Empire State Building was excellent, thus increasing the sadness of his ultimate fate.

It also looked like Peter Jackson was trying out some concepts for maybe another Tolkien film, the dinosaurs were excellent practice for Smaug and the portrayal of strength is something that's needed. In my opinion King Kong has proven that Peter Jackson can take a good story, keep it and make it look good - which is exactly what the Hobbit will need. (Except that in this one, Glamdring NEEDS to glow like Sting did in LOTR). Of course it's not only PJ that's doing all the work - he has good writers with him, Philippa Boyens and Fran Walsh and the crews from WETA workshop and Wingnut.

I can't wait.

Oh yeah, leaving to Finland tomorrow to spend the Christmas with my bride and our families, might be a small lag in writing here, but I should I'll have some juice in cursing Christmas.

More Doom and ranting

2005-12-10T15:29:00.000+02:00

Continuing on the topic of Doom - no, not the crap disloyal movie, but the original classic and especially its music. I was asked to perform on a few songs on the Doom 2 remix project, and since usually remixes are pretty crappy similar to the loyalty of the movies I went out to check out the backgrounds of these dudes making the remakes of the classics. It seems like they have already done the same treatment for the first Doom and boy do the songs kick ass.

Check them out here, use the torrent file to save their bandwidth, please: http://doom.ocremix.org/

Doom was something what was über-hot when we were kids, fragging classmates with a 14.4k modem (which are now called dial-ups, because you need to go through the internet ;)) and even though I usually got my ass kicked, I have fond memories of those days. I royally suck in multiplayer FPS games, and I've actually never even specially liked multiplayer games in general.

I don't know about most people, but for me games are like books, they have a story and sometimes you even have the possibility to change it, although this trait seems to be endangered these days. I can't recall any new game where you could get so lost that you couldn't find your way back, unlike in oh so many adventure games of the mid-90's. Of course you can't get lost in a book, but when the games I like are similar to books (Sci-fi, Fantasy, Adventure, Strategy) - It's just stupid to play them head-to-head, since that would be like reading a book where people would constantly change what you're reading.

Speaking of good games - about a month ago I spent a weekend playing old Lucasarts' classics (by using SCUMMVM) and finished Sam&Max, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle and Fate of Atlantis. It was crazy how difficult some of the puzzles were and I was seriously wondering how the hell could I have played them through when I was a kid. Also it was pretty surprising to see how short and linear the games were - when they felt huge as a kid. But if they would have been books, they probably would have felt huge also. As the games I like are like books, it means that some games are also like good books, you can read them over and over again over a decent interval - such as the classics I just mentioned.

Still, there are some good games coming out once in a while. I just finished Splinter Cell - which was basically Thief in a modern environment and it was a really pleasant surprise, as was Halo. And yes, I'm pretty damn skeptical about new games, especially if they're made for the console.

But that's how it goes. By the way, Open Transport Tycoon kicks ass, but there just one bad thing, tool tips are missing. Quite annoying when being so used to them.

Until the next time, I think I'll be ranting about Christmas.

Go out once in a while!

2005-12-05T13:02:00.000+02:00

Do you remember when we were kids and our parents told us to go out because we were spending too much time with the computer? (I'm guessing that those kids like me and my friends are also the ones reading blogs.) Little they knew, that we would more or less be making our money by using computers. I think that this trend has been always existing, before computers the kids watched too much videos, before that too much television, before that it was probably too much books. Probably in the stone age there was a kid, who wanted to stay in the cave and just paint cave paintings and his parents were grunting him to go out and practice mammoth killing.

I'm sure that we will be just the same. But because it seems like computers are here to stay and most of the people I know are using computers several hours per day. I - being a nerd, am using my Powerbook constantly. It's my morning news paper and my source of TV series, it's my work horse and it's my communications tool, it's my gaming machine and a tool for creativity. Seeing as my bride is also fluent with computers, I see us using computers quite a lot in a possible future where we have children - meaning that we would be quite hypocritical to send our kids out in the blizzard outside. Although, now that I think about it, my parents were watching just as much TV as I was when I was a kid, and they still pushed me outside :).

Of course, I spent my youth playing basketball 5-6 times a week, meaning that I was usually pretty tired and didn't have much interest in doing any extra exercising and now I can say thank god I spent a lot of time with computers.

Well, let's see what the future holds.

Being a foreigner

2005-11-30T22:00:00.000+02:00

It's funny the way people treat you when they realize that you're a foreigner. If you're outside the "basic" countries of your comrade citizens, such as how Canada and Mexico are for yankees and Sweden and Estonia are for Finns. Especially if you're living in a country.

I've always taken the approach of immersion, fully blending to my current environment and survive with the local language and culture. It's fun to measure my knowledge level by testing myself against different barrier thresholds, now I'm in the four-questions barrier in Latvian and getting better all the time. The question barriers are all about the fact how many questions and witty ripostes you can deliver home before one has to switch to a more universal language to tell that I have no idea what that last question meant.

Still, for the issue of being a foreigner. First of all, the locals are friendly towards me, because I'm something special. I'm a red M&M in a bowl of brown ones some neurotic psycho has sorted for his weird fetish nights. This means that when I speak, people tend to listen, because I bring the wisdom of the large world or something. Honestly I have no idea why this reaction should be as it is, of course my background has been playing with kids around the world, so I might have some zany issues with my views. But when I've asked this from other ex-pats, they have told the same story. Cool thing is that I get to meet people I wouldn't usually meet, but now I can - because I'm a friggin' foreigner.

The coolest part however is the fact that now I'm meeting fellow foreigners and natives of my home country and they also have a quirky view of me, they think I'm a god somebody, whilst if I'd live in Finland I would probably just be any man on the street. Being an ex-pat is always a humbling experience, no matter how long you do it. Changing the scene is like changing your brain, it's just weird at start and you can't do anything except wonder why it feels like people are staring at you. It's hard to get by and the worst thing is the relying on others, even though it can be a prolific experience.

On a personal note, if you haven't heard about a band called The Cat Empire and like cool Ska-Jazz-Dub-Rock-Goodfeel-tunes , you're going to love this band. They're an Oz band and totally kick ass. One of the bands of the year for me, they even have super-cool signet rings in their web-shop. The little nerdy music fan within me starts to raise his head when I listen to this music.

Also, there are more and more people reading my writings, it would be pretty cool to actually here something about you. Especially about the contingent on the East Coast in the States, which seems to have taken a massive approach. Spread the word and hit me with a message to know what you think about my stuff, if you even do :) Hate mails are just as appreciated.

Also, I'm thinking of moving my blog to my own server, does anybody have any idea if I can move my old posts there? Of course I can just use Ecto and republish them to Wordpress, but if it could be done any easier, it would be cool. Blogger has made it quite annoying to do any kind of design on the site.

Holla back, aight!

Snow

2005-11-29T12:43:00.000+02:00

There are some things which you just need to see to believe. I can't name any now, but I'm sure there are some things. I wanted to rant about global warming and green house effect, but then I realized that every damn winter these days is damp and slushy, like a popsicle in your shoe and to be honest I don't even like the cold. But, being Finnish and all I feel revitalized when I step to a sub-zero temperature, the air is crisp and it even feels that I can see better. But then I'm brought back to reality when I need to face the snow castle built upon my car which I need to remove with a flimsy plastic brush.

Now, weather is something you can talk about always and to anybody, and it might seem like a poor excuse to write a blog entry about weather. You're wrong, because we can take wild tangents and speak how different our perspectives about weather are, especially in Winter. I have a good mate here in Riga, he's Welsh Cornish (and really sensitive about it) and to him, the near-zero temperature last week was "cold" when for me it was annoyingly warm, since most of my winter gear are suited for the polar-bear-slashing-igloo- heating-put-your-tongue-in-a-street-sign-freeze-fests that are Finnish winter, at least the ones you remember.

But if there truly are a few miserable things in the world, such as taxes, hairy women, clubbed baby seals and Microsoft - this pseudo-winter is surely one of them. Why?

1. Everything is wet and it's not clean wetness but this kind of evil goo that spews all around your clothes and car and it just won't go away (until it dries up and you breathe it in the summer).

2. The indecisiveness of it all: Is it gonna rain? Is it gonna snow? Is it gonna spew evil goo, is it gonna change during the day and the clothes I selected in the morning will be totally useless and hot? Let's take a scenario here. It's freezing cold and snowing in the morning - you take a thick padded jacket and long johns, your Mother Russia leather gloves and a Brezhnevian fur hat knowing that you need to carry them around all day, but you won't get nut freeze and you'll be able to conceive children. What do you know, in three hours then sun is shining and there's more water everywhere to make Titanic look like a beach party - you're hot, you're wet and by sweating you're getting even hotter, making you sweat even more. If you should take your coat off, it would instantly freeze again ensuring that you would get a cold.

3. Everybody is grumpy due to aforementioned reasons.

4. Santa Claus can't come on Christmas! Maybe we should have Orange County Choppers make Santa a bad-ass chopper to deliver his message.

5. It's dark, because you don't have the snow reflecting the little light we have. That again results in more expensive electricity bills.

6. It makes people blog about this pseudo-winter.

Right, I think that's enough ranting about snow. Trying to do a radio jingle at the office, it's quite hard to fit stuff in ten seconds that would be not just witty and perfect, but also personal and effective. Still it's way better than looking outside.

Have fun, leave some comments, getting quite a lot of people visiting here. Give me your snow updates!

Doom

2005-11-24T22:54:00.000+02:00

Today I finally went to see something that I've been "waiting" for the last ten years, when they first announced the coming movie project based on the legendary first person shooter game, Doom. There are a few things I don't understand when doing a movie based on a book or a game - why reinvent the wheel?

We all know what happens if you select a good product and use its parts to deliver a high-quality movie experience by paying attention towards detail and try to find the best compromise of the original content and the possibilities of cinema. Peter Jackson's adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is a good example of doing things correctly and literally by the book. They used the characters, the places and the plot - why can't they do it with Doom for example?

Originally, the game Doom is based on Mars (check) and the main character is a marine some cool Acronym Fighter (I think it was Rapid Response Tactical Squad or some other pseudo-militaristic bull) and the gates of hell open and demons break loose and start laying waste to the unsuspecting mortals, where the main character will slaughter his way to the gates of hell alone with a grim attitude and kill the disciples of Lucifer with a different range of weapons there is some crappy plot twist about a failed genetical experiment with an extra chromosome (with a degree in psychology) from a dead Martian civilization who have created some sort of star gate. Then this Acronym-super-trooper-squad of guys (with idiotic aliases such as "Destroyer" and "Reaper" and they even have massive space rifles that can actually check their ownership and call their masters by their name) go through the gate with the basic symptoms of molecular space travel fly their and get their ass kicked and then the good-bad leader turns worse and the bad-good second guy turns better and they fight and guess which one bites the dust?

So, because of this Resident Evil-ish "surprise" of genetical engineering gone wrong forces the movie makers to redesign everything. Even the whole name of the game and movie lose their meaning, since the word "Doom" holds a lot of biblical meaning, easily allowing the original plot from going on. Especially when the biggest fanboys are old-school Doom-players and were naturally expecting to see the pentagrams and inverted crucifixes and the same monsters. Now we saw the same monsters, but they weren't the foot-soldiers of hell, but they were some old doctors turned evil. Great.

So, by having to invent everything again they cannot produce the same quality because they haven't got the resources for it and it is very probable that someone has done it earlier. And by not using the original content, they make sure that their only fans will tell their friends that the movie sucks. Who's producing these things?

Well, I wasn't expecting anything and I had already heard the bad news - so I can't say I was disappointed. But still the overall quality and the lack of common sense is just very hard to understand in this time of quarterly business and requirement for high profits.

Oh yeah, and my thesis proposal was accepted and I got my thesis supervisor. Seems like the end is truly near :)

Homes for the homeless

2005-11-22T11:48:00.000+02:00

All right, back in Latvia once again. It was surprising to see that there had been some snow here and the weather seems content in settling to the negatives. Probably it means that winter is actually coming finally, although I'm kind of hoping it would be over already.

Coming to the office this morning I noticed a homeless guy pulling a cart made out of wood and cardboard, he stopped in front of our office building and walked down to the loading area where there are a lot of cardboard boxes. I was joking to my colleague that he found a new house here and we continued inside. Now, three hours later I saw the guy still working out back and he had a massive pile of cardboard on his mobile home, maybe he took my proposition literally and is gathering material for his new home.

There are quite a lot of homeless people in Riga, most of them are old, screwed out of their pensions and safe life when Soviet Union collapsed and the new nations did not (do not) have enough resources to give decent social services for these old folks. That's why you see so many old ladies cleaning the streets around the day. For a person coming from Finland, this is somewhat stressing and strange, but when in Rome ..

Well, at least I hope this guy can set up the finest cardboard castle available in Riga and invite his homeless buddies for a christmas snack.

Back to work.

More Television

2005-11-15T23:09:00.000+02:00

Ok, this might sound like the worst thing to do when you have lot of work and a thesis to write, but recently my cable TV operator sent me a letter that they are upgrading their digital system and I'd need to pick up my decoder card from the nearest service center (which is, by the way, in the worst place available considering parking.)

Well, between me picking up the card and them upgrading their system to block all channels I had virtually no channels available, except those Latvian ones but their novelty value has worn off a year ago. Thus, having no channels I had a lot of time, too much it seemed sometimes. I read two books in this time, though this was due to traveling for two weeks in a row.

Last saturday I finally managed to pick up the decoding card after a sobering walk through old town with my friends and when I got home, trembling with excitement I noticed that they had approximately doubled their channel offering - up to about 105 channels.

Of course, most of these channels are the turkish, russian, romanian, italian, spanish and what have you useless channels - but there were a few pearls available.

There's one channel called Arirang, which is a Korean channel filled with news and cool advertisements from local producers. I honestly don't know who the channel is aimed for, maybe Korean ex-pats, but one thing I've noticed - Korean soap operas are cool.

On the pique of elitism is the Wine TV - A channel about wines. Even though I am a well-known wine connoisseur and gastronome extravagant, this channel is filled with something that has a round, bitter, ashy aftertaste and a vibrant and relaxed color. It's filled with sentimental violin music and massive helicopter camera drives over huge chateaus and a deep, masculine voice flagellating on his own ingenuity over whatever topic he's babbling this time.

Also I noticed that now I'm a proud owner of five (5) MTV channels, and yes, they're all Music Television. I've got MTV, MTV Hits (are they showing so many crazy frog commercials series and reality shows these days, that they actually need another channel to actually show hip music videos?), MTV Base (which is a Hip Hop version of MTV, although they play the same music and show the same shows than normal MTV, except there's more "bling".) Then there's MTV 2 (the channel where they save most of the good music and their volume level is about 50% higher than other channels) and MTV Europe, which is MTV with European Crazy Frog commercials (different phone numbers).

To make sure I get my daily dose of music, they also packed German music channel VIVA for two channels and VH-1 also with two channels - so that gives me 9 music channels - and that's just in European languages. There are also Russian music channels, if I ever find myself longing for slavic, sorrowful hip hop.

Oh yeah, next to the always-cool-nerd-channels (Discovery etc.)there is one cool channel, which I respect as a musician. It's called "Performance" and so far what I've seen has been opera, a Paul Simon concert and some really American-looking oldies singer, which was pretty cool. They also have live jazz and all kinds of cool stuff.

Well, enough of that. Leaving the country again on thursday, I should be back on monday morning if everything goes as planned. Enjoy la vie (as we say in the wine channel) until the next one.

Ta ta.

Thesis Time

2005-11-13T14:54:00.000+02:00

So far, I've spent the last quarter of my life studying while working full-time, but now it feels that I've come to a point where I actually feel the difference. It's thesis time.

12 hours of classroom life left, drinking stale coffee, eating overly sweet pastries and slowly breaking down surfing in the internet. I think there are a lot of guys in my class, who would've lost their sanity without wireless internet.

1 exam left, no more of spending nights working on a finished exam, just because you need to artificially add literature references, which are a pain in the ass, since you have to spend extra time on trivial matters.

So after I'm finished with those, I'm only left with the thesis. Even though it has been hard to appreciate those annoying tasks and some courses, but at least now I know where to find literature references :).

So the next goal is in February, submitting the first draft of my thesis, hoping that everything will go fine until then.

200 days

2005-11-10T23:14:00.000+02:00

Seems like the Gods of Blogging (not you Boing Boing) are mocking my feeble attempts to redeem myself.

It's been nearly 200 days from my last post to Mind Itch and the only think I'm wondering is where all the time went. I know that I've been busy, but 200 days seems like an eternity, especially when you remember your childhood and when two months to christmas felt like years.

Anyway, I've been pretty busy, I know - mainly setting up a new company called Barracuda, nifty little corporation with its personal blog which can be found in http://www.bcuda.com/fish/ - It will feature not only myself, but my partner in crime Ansis Egle and probably a few visiting stars.

Since Mind Itch will not have to be my personal semi-official playground, I can finally release it to be my personal ranting grounds, where I can be more active and I'll still have only one place to think what I'm saying.

It's still crazy warm in Latvia, closer to ten degrees and usually November should be pretty cold.

I'll keep you posted and remember to check Fish out of Water in the abovementioned address.

Cheers.

Resending

2005-11-10T23:09:00.000+02:00

I just wrote a new article, but it seems to be lost in the void. Darnit.

Blogging & RSS

2005-04-24T15:20:00.000+03:00

How many of you have noticed that most blogs consist of mainly links to other blogs? Which usually have links to other blogs, et cetera until you actually come to a blog that has some original content. This has been one of the key reasons for not blogging in the general sense but since e-mail is starting to be a sad media format for this sort of information delivery, I thought to finally listen to my readers and whip up my very own blog.

Since then, I've already found the world of blogging to be a rather elaborate place where thoughts are spread far and wide. But since a million other blogs are filling the ether with their own rambling, (many of you are very good though) there are easy ways to get lost.

Well, in comes RSS the Really Simple Syndication which surprisingly offers syndication really simply. Who would have thought that in 2005 there would be something simple. I won't go too deep with RSS since you can go google yourself. Still, eWeek had an interesting article regarding how RSS feeds are penetrating the corporate and social networks in a different way.

Read the eWeek article

I've been using RSS feeds for soothing my information hunger for a long time already and while the readers have been developed (I think readers are more effective than, say, reading through your browser - I like Firefox and it's live bookmarks though.) the sites are still lagging on the development. I would appreciate seeing more personalized data available with decent filters.

So, send e-mail to sites and ask that they incorporate RSS feeds to their sites if you see that necessary. That's what I do.

Telecoms in Latvia: Ericsson, Cisco & IBM aim for Latvian IP TV

2005-04-24T14:21:00.000+03:00

Juris Kaža has updated his blog on Latvian Telecoms with an interesting topic relating for a IPTV triumvirate of techology in Latvia.

Telecoms in Latvia: Ericsson, Cisco & IBM aim for Latvian IP TV:

The Future of video rentals

2005-04-24T14:14:00.000+03:00

Although the Internet has already provided a lot of possibilities to the video rental and pay-per-view industries: Electronic Program Guides (EPG), online movie catalogues and information services have helped movie watchers to enjoy more of their cinematic experiences.

Now, however, time being a very valuable resource – the tedious 30 minute movie selecting and driving to the rental store just to stand in line and notice that the movie you want is already rented out might not be a problem with the next generation of home cinema.

Currently the world is caught in a wind of change, making people more wary of new technologies and their spending habits. DVD has risen from the ashes of VHS to be the new victor, but Bluray and similar technologies are lurking behind the corner and a truly digital, unphysical medium solution is a near certainty in the future seen already in the appearance of hard disk recorders in our living rooms and the viral spreading of peer-to-peer exhange of (illegal) movie copies.

This next step in the digital evolution is already taken up by several traditional manufacturers, such as Philips’ Streamium and Microsoft’s Media Center products which have been hailed as something that might produce a working digital entertainment environment in normal houses. Having the services closer to the consumers we are able to see the subtle change of the consumer wave turning slowly towards a digital world.

This time is a promising era for introducing new services, such as our idea of a easy access, entry-level, low-cost digital video rental system that works through the broadband systems of our houses and delivers cinematic pleasure when demanded by the consumer. Since there already are a lot of video rental companies out there, such as Blockbuster – using the existing infrastructure and brand will help the penetration of a new service considerably.

The key issue is to return video rentals back to their position where they had a strong presence in the entertainment market before Internet and it’s piracy and fast moving sharing. Rental companies will have great benefits using their contacts to movie companies directly, being able to promise that their delivery channel is a legal one and through the co-operation with hardware manufacturers they are able to produce a hardcoded, working Digital Rights Management (DRM) solution that is both fast and easy to use for both the consumer and the movie encoder and secure enough to turn the movie executives heads from their Internet=Piracy point of view to a more open and developing direction.

On a strategic level, the effort must conquer the following aspects:

1. Movie encoding and quality issues
2. Co-operation with hardware manufacturers
3. Digital Rights Management
4. Very user-oriented User Interface
5. Co-operation with movie companies
6. Technical issues

Since DVD has taken over the market, video quality demand has risen to a new level and the consumers expect nothing less, the MPEG4 technology is a method to pack video to one tenth of the size with little loss in the quality. With specified hardware, this might be the optimal solution. Specific players having a decoding chip would offer system developers a platform to design and improve the output of the MPEG-technology.

The DRM is an issue that is standing in front of many doors: Investors are afraid to put their money to unsure ventures, movie companies dare not deliver their movies fearing that they will spill out of the box and be lost to the great void of the Internet, normal users don’t want to pay for something they think they might get for free etc. With a generally acknowledged DRM standard the market would be very approachable. Since networking equipment all have a specific MAC-address we will be able to decode user-specific systems, secure and flexible to both the intellectual property owner and the user.

Many people tell that setting the timer on the VCR is difficult, one might think that their fear is at least equal in speaking of digital movies downloaded to a small box under your television. The user interface (UI) is a key component in this venture, it has to be easily localised, very graphical and most important of all – logical. The systems of remote controls and our experience from web design research should be able to create a working system.

Having movie companies in the process is a very important, since that will give the marketing channels and resources available to the rental companies. The background structure of the service being similar to the idea of Apple’s iTunes music store. The largest problem with technical issues is the scalability, since users will require a fast service, we need to have enough resources to provide the rush of people all wanting to see Titanic 2 or some similar super-hype movie and the system cannot be too massive and expensive to maintain while a nice summer day when everybody is outside.

Profitability will come from the savings of physical locations: Renting premises, staff, physical media which we don’t have to think which will be a success and which not, since all products are available to everyone all the time. Also we can use advertising partners with the service and charge a premium from those who do not want to see any advertisement.

The competetive advantage on the service is it’s convenience and speed factors, plus having an online solution offers a virtually limitless selection available for the user. Another benefit for the users is to have access to a database such as offered by the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) and similar cognitive solutions as used by the Amazon webstore which recognize the taste of the user and can offer a list of movies that is created from the previous selections and evaluation of the viewer.

The system can also be used in hotels, hospitals and other public places where the current systems can be replaced by a proxy server that replicates mainstream and popular movies to be available fast to the users. The whole system works as a streaming solution from a mosaic style network with local proxies available for larger communities or critical locations in urban areas.

As a project, the system design is mainly modular technically and network based with movie companies. The payment system can be done in several ways, credit cards, online bank systems, charging with the subscription and usage cards sold in retail chains which also work as great competition prizes adding more value for advertisers.

Wireless = Paperless = Personalized

2005-04-17T13:51:00.000+03:00

Personalization can offer huge performance increase for education and also help to save in costs and the environment. A paperless school can teach students to use today’s technology naturally and effectively as a part of their own knowledge. The learning process as a whole needs to change to accommodate this availability of information by teaching the “on-demand deepening of knowledge” methodology to train people who are able and willing to use the technical advances as a direct part of their own knowledge.

Introduction

Remember the change from landline telephones to cellular phones? The time after we could answer everywhere, anytime and any place? This next phase of mobile communications of wireless availability and easily retrievable information will change and has changed everything.

Who needs libraries when you have a laptop in your bag full of information worth a hundred libraries? If you want to be really old school, you can pick up a DVD-version of the Encyclopedia Britannica or whip up your wireless net and log in to Wikipedia. Now you're probably asking how this will change anything?

The penetration of information availability

Well, more and more schools are having increasing numbers of laptops in their classrooms. Rooms with wireless Internet, with people who know how to search information from the net basically in real-time with the topics of the professor. When will this change turn from the teacher using this resource in teaching instead of students finding all the answers before the teacher finishes the question?

I’m checking my professors’ facts all the time regarding case studies and similar, so much actually that some professors are pretty annoyed about me knowing too much – since working with case studies sometimes requires people NOT to know too much in order to keep the discussion unbiased. But on the other side this enables me to benefit from my wide knowledge working together with my strong data retrieval skills – a method which I call “on-demand deepening of knowledge”. I can participate even deeper in to conversations; I can check facts and give valid information and thus enrich the conversation and the learning experience.

Teaching methods in general also need to be changed, since there is no need to make people transfer information to their heads but to make people understand and learn how to use that information for the required purpose. Since there is no need to remember every little detail from each fact, but the general layout of things and how they relate to each other. This means that also changes are required from the faculty’s side in terms of how subjects are taught and that data retrieval skills are more important than a good memory of details.

How could the system benefit from this?

This change will, of course, change the current system in total. Imagine a standardized environment – paperless school, where all students have a personal laptop with an open-source learning platform both in their personal units and the school in general.

There is no need for books, paper exams, or specific classrooms – all the books are in digital format available on the school platform in easily searchable databases with related topic linking and user contributed notes (which have been a great add-on to information if you look at technical manuals such as the one PHP offers, example), exams are held in a secure online environment with improved security, always the right amount of exams, automatic answer checking and just so many things that help the teacher concentrating in the main job of showing the students their mistakes, not just going through exams mechanically – leaving space for human errors.

Since there’s no need for specific classrooms, the classes can be held anywhere in the range of the internet connection – outside if it’s a nice day, home if one is sick but wants to study at home. No more forgotten study books, bent backs and spinal problems due to having to carry a 60 lbs backpack five days a week for 12 years, no more computer phobia since starting young would give a good learning curve and when the user interface would be designed logically the usability would be increasing productivity even further.

Personalized studying bring effective results

One of the largest problems with schools is the huge difference between students. I’ve had to suffer personally from this standardization of students where everybody is progressing at pace with the dumbest and slowest kid in the classroom – ironically this kid is probably seen slow and dumb just because the teaching methods used are wrong for the kid, therefore making all progress minimal.

The online learning platform would offer truly personalized, progressive teaching methods which not only adapts to the way the students learns but also would learn from the student how to portray information. Imagine a French class where the grammar tests would progress according to one’s skills, the more advanced students would have more advanced assignments and games like crosswords or charade style games to keep them occupied while the slower students would follow along.

Same goes with pronunciation: The students would have personal headphones with a microphone speaking directly to the platform that would have speech recognition and voice pattern matching to teach correct pronunciation and could give personalized topics for children to stay interested in. Just changing the subject from cars to ponies might make girls concentrate more to the text, even though the learning experience would be the same.

The students would have the chance to take all their notes to their own personal unit and they would have the chance to revisit old classes and their material directly in a logically usable search to find the important things. The search results would show all relating documents, such as the assignments regarding the day and mouse-hover translation of words.

The matter of personalization would also be another thing deepening the learning experience; every student would have the chance to personalize their own system with their own graphics, color and fonts most suitable for their eyes and just to make it more fun.

Too expensive or are the benefits larger than the initial investment?

The cost of having a personalized unit for every student with a life cycle of about four years would cost about the same as buying the books for each student and investing money to the school library. Economies of scale would join the game when the quantities would grow. Having a few extra laptops in case of something breaks down, with docks in classrooms where the computers would charge and automatically backup themselves to the storage servers inside the school network would ensure the integrity of data.

The amount of information gathered from the student’s progress would help the school to have concrete statistics in real time of different learning methods, failures and successes. The statistical data would also show the students teacher directly on the personal needs of the specific student and where they would need more exercise. In an example having Matt, who is a natural talent in mathematics do his math assignments quickly and then concentrate in his problems with English language while the others are focusing on the math problems.

Commercial education is already offering personalized learning plans and logically we can deduct that personalization will create better results: Studying is basically selling the information to the student so that our marketing effort stays in the students’ mind, we can see that having something to relate to eases the process of understanding. Online stores, such as Amazon are notorious with their personalized content but as we can see from their long history and good results, that they are doing something correctly.

So, before I will have time to do more accurate research, discussion and comments would be welcome to have other points of views on the topic and information on similar research would be appreciated.

On European Globalization

2005-04-12T13:42:00.000+03:00

The European Union expanded almost a year ago to include the Baltic Countries among others. What changes have we seen as a result from the merger?

The European Union is currently the largest, most powerful Regional Organization in Existence known to man with an astounding GDP of 10 million million (or thousand billion) Euro, with an 22,300 Euro GDP per capita - Although the new participants are lagging behind with a GDP per capita closer to 10 thousand Euro than 15 thousand.

All European Citizens, as all citizens of EU member states have the right of free movement inside the union, in theory. In practise the grace period from the older countries has stopped the free movement of people as in workers, but since there is a loophole - it is legal to use foreign labor through work force rental companies, the elder member states are just doing harm to themselves by losing tax Euros from not having these people paying taxes where they are working in.

This will probably mean that in the near future, these limitations will have to be removed and true freedom of movement will come forth to create a more competitive and flexible workforce. I just hope that not only low-GDP countries' citizens leave to the higher-GDP countries, but the professionals move against the grain to the opposite direction to increase the GDP of the lower-GDP countries, since we can logically draw that when people who will work for lower wages go to a country with high wages, the GDP will respectively fall.

So how can we benefit from the coming change? Start up two-way recruitment companies? Start up companies that enable the higher infrastructure by using older technology from the higher-GDP countries who already have a very knowledgeable, saturated workforce readily available and with a large over 5% unemployment rate on average there should be need for people to move.

I as for one will be here in the "frontier" pioneering further the expansion and paving the way for my "more european" colleagues arriving in the Baltics, what will you do?

np: Weapon of Vanity from the album "Stabbing the Drama " by Soilwork

On blogs et al

2005-04-11T20:09:00.000+03:00

Being some sort of a freshman regarding blogging, as I've done with several other "new technologies" it's taken a while for me to accept it a part of my life, including with RSS and even CSS (!) for heaven's sake.

I used to do a lot of web development and designing in end of 90's but when CSS came and I thought that "damn, I've done this for so many years and this new crap will mix me up totally" and I slowly drifted away from web design. Even though I feel to be on the edge of new technology, I seem to be more of on the Stable release cycle rather than cyber-surfing the nightly-development builds.

Recently I've had a lot of changes in my life, forcing me to take another point of view on how things work - even web sites. Even though I'm not a man of extremities, it tends to make a difference. While researching the available Open Source Content Management Systems for my work and other projects I found myself deep inside the world of the web. I took a crash course into CSS and found out how great it actually is! I refreshed my memory on PHP, since my last effort on it was to study the use of PHP in 2 days to help (make) a school final project for a female friend of mine. I think I learned more than she did from that effort, and still she got the diploma - well, isn't learning the point?

The point? Oh yeah, there's some point - I've found my interest in designing web again! Of course in this time it's nothing special, but still having nearly ten years of experience of webdesign should come in handy when starting off new projects.

The Tao of unbiased consultation

2005-03-03T11:58:00.000+02:00

The dictionary definition of 'unbiased' is unprejudiced. In today's business world someone consulting someone without a catch is a paradox. Why?

When you google the words 'unbiased consultation', you get approximately 360.000 hits from a wide variety of companies telling that they are less biased that the zealous neighbor company, who of course tell just the same thing. If there would not be an issue with being biased, why there would be so many websites advertising that they are the unbiased ones? The problem is that there's money involved.

As we all well know, money is the root of all evil and causes people and companies alike to behave oddly in order to try to make more money. I can't actually tell when the change happened, from "consultation for the good of customer" to "keeping the customer in the house as long as possible by making ourselves invaluable" but I bet it was somewhere between the IT bubble starting to grow and it's bursting. When there's a new, massive industry emerging with a small amount of people knowing anything gives consulting a nice incentive to maximize profits in the short run, and what the hell - "let's make ourselves so important to them that we'll have nice profits also in the long run!"

So, at first it was all about making money but then more consulting companies started to emerge, merge and spread like a vile disease on every corner of the planet. This naturally creates competition and the customers started actually to realize that they were being milked, causing more schism towards the consulting industry. There are several reasons for people not to like consultants, the biggest reason is that most consultants do not have enough knowledge and experience in the topic they should teach others, I will not even mention the lack of fresh ideas, creativity or even common sense.

When the consulting companies started to feel the wind at the top, they made the consultants sales people (What drives sales people? That's right, money!) by giving them quotas, cutting their salary to a small base with a possible bonus and making them responsible for new client acquisition. Now this would all be nice and dandy IF the consultants were sales process consultants or business developement consultants, but we're speaking of people specialized in coding, databases and other not-so-flamboyant specialities. Ask yourselves that would these people rather a.) Pick up the phone and start cold-calling new clients or b.) Make the most difficult and problematic database front-end only gods and this guy know how to use - just to make sure this guy doesn't have to think of changing jobs in the next few years?

I thought you would agree. Talk about unbiased consultants.

So, when I had a seminar in E-Commerce and IT Project management in my MBA program, I brought out the idea of true unbiased consultation.

"Provide a solution for the customer, with the customer as if this is the last thing you would do in your life - so that anybody could pick up from your tracks and continue the work."

This utopistic idea requires a lot from the consultant: Comprehensive and coherent documentation to make sure the customer and the next guy understand what was the situation, what was planned to be changed and what was changed. A true consultant should make sure that the changes make the effect they were planned to. One important thing related to importance of the consultation is the consultant realizing his/her own skills and limitations - and most importantly understanding that the possible customer might not actually need the service.

A true, unbiased consultant maintains the position as consultant by providing a good and beneficial service to the customer.

What happened to getting there?

2005-03-02T13:36:00.000+02:00

Have you noticed that in the world today, traveling does not seem to be going to place a to place b anymore. This is usually also the reason men don't like jogging, since what's the point to run from one place back to the same in an hour later. Maybe it's due to all those road trip movies, which always seem to have the notion "It's not getting there, it's the journey" behind their respective story. Travel agents seem to have watched their movies well and probably bought the screenplays to make sure they have all pieces of their puzzles.

I need to travel a lot and it seems that flying is the only travel method where the main point is in relocating between places - although the reason to this might be that there's no room to do anything else - even in first class. Airbus is bringing out a model that might bring a change to this, having a top floor including a gym and a bar and whatnot. Boats and ferries are the worst, since these floating restaurants are right there on the nerve.

There must be some kind of pirate gene in homo sapiens since the rocking of a boat under their feet seem to introduce a new behavioral mode of drinking, looking for booty (arr) and unnecessary fighting. Weekends are the worst, since people don't need to wake up in the morning and casual travelers like myself are a rarity. This is why there's a need for cruise ships and they are widely used, but the same effects have been in other ways of transport since someone invented that people should pay for entertainment.

Cheap flight companies have thought of this whole traveling thing, just offering cheap flights from place a to b. The problem is that they can't make enough money by just flying so they fly from close to place a to some town near place b from where you need to take a bus that leaves in the middle of the night packed full of angry passengers who are too used to having bingo nights and karaoke. There is always a lot of discussion of comfort when a new cheap airliner is coming to the market. "How will we live an hour flight without food? How will I stand two hours without seeing a movie?"

The horror.

I just want to travel to get where I want to go, enjoy to travel, not the extras relating to it.