hiidenkonttibeta

I took the morning flight to Stockholm on Tuesday, spent business hours with all things VoIP, evenings wandering around the Gamla Stan, and flew back on Thursday.

VON is a very business-oriented conference, in other words “boring”. They don’t fill your bags with useless toys like superballs with blinking LEDs, stuffed penguins and two years worth of T-shirts, like they do in Linux Expo (and in CeBIT, I guess). Instead they ask if you need to verify the QoS of the VoIP service in your 300,000 subscriber network and hand you a business card. I got a couple of T-shirts anyway, one of them after “blogging” by filling up some questionnaire. I never figured out how it was related to blogging.

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I’ll be flying to Stockholm early tomorrow morning, and staying there until Thursday. It’s a business trip to VON Europe 2005 conference, and I recently found out that most of the other attendants seem to be CEO’s, Vice Presidents, and other high level Managers of several sort. And then me, level 12 nerd (figure out a scale by yourself, rolling a d100 could be a good starting point). I’m thinking of having a disguise, i.e. wearing a blazer over my Megatokyo T-shirt. Perhaps that way they won’t do extra security checks or point fingers at me unless they cast a detect nerds spell (or notice my well worn black jeans). I hope there’s some presentations in Tech-speak, I don’t speak Management-speak very well.

The schedule is full from morning to evening, so I probably won’t have time to wander around the city. Too bad, I would have liked to look for the little shop selling prog CD’s in Gamla Stan. It might be a good candidate for a shop carrying Swedish prog, for example: Nucleus by Anekdoten, Lonely Land by Landberk or Hybris by Änglagård. I don’t know if they’re the best albums by these bands, I just looked them up, but the artists themselves I know by their reputation and by absolutely wonderful Symphonic Holocaust by Morte Macabre, a group consisting of Anekdoten and Landberk members.

(And by pure chance this entry has 2112 as a timestamp. Hail Eris!)

A local fabric shop advertises a free sewing service:

.. but only if your curtains (something called side curtains, whatever they are. I use curtains which are hung in front of the window, functioning as a strong filter for visible light) aren’t 300 meters wide. Not a problem for many, I’d guess.

Spooky.. just when I was starting to make this entry my amplifier slowly turned the volume down to almost minimum setting, all by itself. Had to think a bit to figure out that there’s no such quiet part in Opeth’s The Moor (from excellent Still Life album), but with 11 and ½ minute long prog metal songs you can’t always be so sure.

Anyway, I quickly visited a supermarket today, and saw this grill:

What’s the connection between the Morning Star and cooking? Perhaps they’ve trying to convey the idea that the Bringer of Dawn also brings forth the time of breakfast? I know some people who truly enjoy grilling, but I find it hard to believe that more than a few people actually grilled their breakfast. The mean surface temperature on planet Venus is 480°C, which is hot enough for cooking, but this is rather far-fetched even for marketing department imagery. They could at least have given a bit better hint than a picture of some horned gnome with a pitchfork.

They take the park benches away from the parks at autumn. This year they brough new ones to Ainola park:

Maybe there was a problem with people moving them around? Now these, they don’t. But these will also be very cold to sit on anytime but on warm summer evening, when the sun has warmed them up.

Stockmann has displayed Iittala’s glass birds for a few weeks. They are decorative pieces, I believe the common use is to buy one as a gift to someone, if you can’t think of any useful gift.

Here’s some of the red ones:

Quite a difference in price between the small one and bigger ones. The most expensive I saw costs 690€. They are unique pieces of art, and apparently much sought after by collectors globally, but in that price class I personally value a bit different kind of glass.