hiidenkonttibeta

There’s “Japan Pop” exhibition in Tennispalatsi art museum (exhibition?) in Helsinki. We had to visit it, of course. First there was a section of old Japanese woodcut printings (? “puupiirros”), the predecessors of modern manga. Then there was a big section of manga – the favourite part being a room with descriptions of different manga genres on the walls with examples and a collection of manga from the whole spectrum hanging from the ceiling for people to read:

They were in Finnish, English, Japanese and French.

Upstairs had an exhibition of paintings by modern Japanese artists.

Arrived in Helsinki a bit ahead of the schedule. The most obvious difference between Avroliner planes and those used by Finnair (Airbus, MD) is the placement of wings: Finnair’s planes “sit” on the top of the wing, Avroliners “hang” beneath the wing.

I’ll be flying to Helsinki this evening to attend a 3-day training there (actually it’s a 5-day training compressed in three days, and I know next to nothing about the subject in advance, so it doesn’t sound like a holiday).

The plane Blue1 uses on that route is one of Avro RJ Avroliner series. Reading the descriptions I’d guess it’s RJ85. Apparently they’re quite new planes, so perhaps they aren’t yet too fall-prone.

Ookay, so, the Autumnal storm that was supposed to hit us a week ago seems to be here right now. The sound of wind blowing between the buildings woke me up at around 5 o’clock in the morning. It rattles the glass coverings of the balconies nad makes the trees on the front yard dance. There’s also water in the air, but it’s hard to say if it’s actually raining. I wouldn’t go out with an umbrella..

When I was watching the storm in the kitchen window, there were two electric blue flashes a few seconds apart lighting up a part of the cloudy sky some blocks away. Somewhere around the railway I’d guess. Maybe the news will tell if something fell on the railway powerlines causing damage.

Yesterday I finally did the thing I’ve been thinking about since Spring – I got myself an Apple iMac. I was able to get it locally here in Oulu, right off the shelf, for a bit cheaper than the price in Apple Store.

My plan was to use it side-by-side with my Linux PC for a while, and gradually switch to Mac (after transferring all my data, and maybe doing a Linux install in iMac for dual-boot setup). But things don’t often go as planned.

This morning I was reading my e-mails on the Linux PC, went off for a few minutes to make some sandwiches, came back and my monitor was dead. The power LED was on, but all it displayed was black. Even the built-in setup menu of the monitor itself doesn’t work.

So now I’m switching to Mac a bit sooner. I’m wondering if this iMac unit I’ve got is as quiet as it should – I can hear the fans (and/or the hard disk) easily from another room, >6 meters away. It’s definitely noisier than I had hoped for, but I’ve never heard other similar iMacs in a quiet room.

This year we made our fall foliage watching trip to Pallas instead of Aakenus. The fjelds in Pallas are about 300m higher than Aakenus, but since the hiking routes also begin at higher altitude, there’s a lot less trees on the way to the top. And since the colourful trees make the most of fall foliage, this probably wasn’t so good a choice after all.

We aimed for Taivaskero, a bit over 800m high fjeld a short way (about 3.5km) from the visitor centre (and hotel). It was really windy, and quite cold on the top – so cold actually, that there was snow on the shadowy side of the rocks on the top:

Because of the lack of trees, the only fall foliage colours were on the ground, with occasional patches of red among the plants:

There’s a stream in the gorge between the fjelds, passing the hotel and visitor centre (visible in the photo) on it’s way to the lake. The water appeared from the fjeldside, beneath some stones. It was very clear, and very cold. I filled my water bottle there.

On the way back an ice-cream lorry followed us for a while:

It’s a somewhat strange sight on a road to a fjeld in the middle of Lapland.