hiidenkonttibeta

I was feeling bored (after tuning RSS/PHP/CSS code for too long), and went walking around the city center for a while, playing tourist and snapping photos of old buildings. There are several around the market place and Rotuaari, but these are a bit further away:

While wandering about, I also found a new Asian food shop (“Sweet Thai Chili” or something, haven’t seen it before) and bought take-away Chinese food from a place on Uusikatu I first spotted two weeks ago. They had a very basic menu and their chili chicken wasn’t anything special. Too bad, a good Chinese fast food place would be welcome.

Yesterday was Juhannusaatto, the Midsummer eve. I was invited to friends’ place. ラッキー! It was raining heavily in the morning, but it became a pleasant summer day after all (よかった, since じてんしゃでいきました).

Rainy clouds, a bit wet road, and food :-) The mushrooms filled with blue cheese were especially good. ありがとうございます!

You may notice that まんぴつ looks a bit different now. Actually it’s quite more different than just the looks – I switched from Movable Type to WordPress (had to modify WP a bit, mainly to be able to upload multiple photos easily). It still requires some tuning, but it’s already good enough for using.

I had to make some compromises with the looks and usability .. resulting in some links that don’t look like links. Clicking the title on the top (“まんぴつ by hannu”) takes you back to main page. The entry subject is also a link, a permanent link (“permalink”) to that entry.

I hope you like the new, cleaner look. I tried to get rid of all the unnecessary junk. まんぴつ should be OK in any browser, but Mozilla/Firefox users get rounded corners as a free bonus ;-)

Yesterday I got an Apple iMac. It’s colour is called “strawberry” and it’s as hippy looking computer as there is available (there’s of course the Flower Power iMac, which beats this one..):

But I would personally avoid any strawberries of that particular shade of reddish.

It took a long while to find a good iMac (this one is 400MHz G3, with 384MB of RAM which I upgraded to 512MB) for somewhat reasonable price in Finland. I have a special use for this one…

Another batch of random photos from last few days..

The street repairs are spreading – the bus has to twist between the fence, street light and wall. In the next phase the driver probably has to gather some speed and jump over the missing street with the bus.

The next two are from the company’s summer party. First one is an employee band, the second one is Finnish iskelmätähti Paula Koivuniemi (with a whip in this photo). Most people seemed to gather in the front of the stage and know the lyrics to all her songs. As for me, I can now name two of her songs, “Aikuinen nainen” and “Anna mulle piiskaa”.

Then there’s two boring photos from omake (Oulun manga- ja animekerho) video watching evening (土曜日にありました):

First one shows Yuna from Final Fantasy X trailer. The second one is the menu for Interstella 5555 – 5tory of 5ecret 5tar 5ystem, which is a bit over hour long “music video” for several Daft Punk songs. It tells a story, but with animation and music only – no-one speaks a word in it.

If the first part of the Jaloklubi was a disappointment of sorts, the rest was a total opposite. Skyforger‘s set was probably the best metal gig we’ll see this year in Oulu – the audience was a bit larger than during Dawn of Relic’s set, and a lot more lively.

This Latvian band just plain rocks. Five bearded guys, dressed in Medieval-like clothing, singing in Latvian, playing their folk-influenced melodies with fast and heavy backing, and with bagpipes and kantele. This was also the first time I’ve seen anyone headbanging with bagpipes.

They call their music pagan metal, and their songs seem to be about the old gods and ways and rituals. I bought their album Pērkonkalve/Thunderforge after the gig. If it’s even close to the power they raise on their gigs, it’ll spend quite some time in my CD player.