hiidenkonttibeta

At last my homepage updating project is completed! I’ve been writing HTML+CSS, tuning some images and occasionally testing on different browsers (Linux Mozilla Firefox, MacOS X Safari+IE, win IE5.5 + IE6 + Opera 7) for 6 hours straight (Morte Macabre’s dark mellotron prog helps) to finish the damn thing today. Still many minutes left ;-)

Now I’m celebrating with single malt, writing a mail to advertise the update and bragging here about it. The address is of course:

Technical details: all photo originals are on film, mostly on Fuji Sensia/Velvia slides. They’re scanned using Minolta Dimâge Scan Speed and Vuescan, edited in Gimp. All HTML is valid HTML 4.01 Strict, hand-coded in vim or generated with scripts.

Woohoo! I got my bokken today:

It’s Japanese, made of Japanese white oak.

On Thursday evening, leaving kung-fu lesson, I realized that we’ve got a lot more light nowadays. Turning on the light in my bike wouldn’t have made a lot of difference. Lo-fi version of the world was a lot darker, though:

But we Europeans cheat in this, by using the daylight saving time.

Anyway, it must be はる already – there was liquid water and a lot of birds:

The first one has 百わ or so sitting on the ice just below the horizon, and the second one has two しろい swans in it, the dot just below the smoking pipe might be one of them. Or was it the dot a bit closer to the lower left side corner? Well.. it looks like birds are pretty much invisible in the lo-fi せかい… Third photo shows some colourful poles in the water, probably marking the channel.

わたしのアパートの赤シーリングランプ. This inverse effect is funny – the red lamp shade turns white, the white walls turn red.

Another day of training endured. Today’s topic was “Influencing skills”. How did they upload such a feature into our brains? It’s a bit more complex operation than just listening to someone who is telling about the secrets of influencing.

One of the first tasks involved walking 8 meters around a table, standing on a “stage” (a piece of tape on the floor) before an audience of ten people, watching them for a while (apparently as if you were going to tell them something important) and walking back. All of this in silence. Then, the audience told what kind of impression this amazing performance left in them.

On the second round we did exactly the same routine while holding a neon-pink dishbrush.

Now, this may sound easier than it is. Is the dishbrush the reason for my being on the stage in the first place, or did I just happen to have it with me, and how to hold it naturally in either of the scenarios? On the other hand, how do you give meaningful feedback on someone’s pink dishbrush holding skills, so that this fellow may become a better human being?

Another task was to invent a new use for a random object and to sell it to the next person. My object was a light pink (pink, again) loose ball of wool. I was also one of the random victims they asked to describe their object for everyone – my alternative usage was to mix it with ketchup and use it as a mashed-up brain or intestines in a B-class horror movie. They didn’t ask me any more.

No updates for a long while.. ごめん. The city has looked utterly boring and gray lately, so no photos. And I’ve been playing busy updating my homepage (soon about half done – but this includes scanning of photos, there’s still one category to do…) and trying to catch up in Japanese. We’ll have our last normal Japanese lesson next week, and then there’s some discussion sessions in smaller groups. “Tell about yourself” and other fascinating subjects. Eep..!

Here’s a list of kanji we’re supposed to learn this Spring from the Japanese course materials (not including those already among the ~50 I listed before):

joki, kukka, oppiminen, mennä sisään, (oppilas), katsoa, aikainen/nopea, koulu, punainen, aiempi, taivas, henki, sade
pohjoinen, etelä, maa, samanlainen, lumi, itä, taivas, länsi, pääkaupunki, korkea, kaupunki, lause, isä

kieli, ystävä, tekninen, paikka, metsä, ulkopuoli, meri, tapaaminen, lähettää, syödä, käsi, yritys
sähkö, keskustelu, lähellä, auto, suunta, sininen/vihreä, pysähtyä, koira, merkki, äiti, leikata, lanka

Note that the Finnish “translation” is far from exact, it’s only giving a hint of the meaning in some cases..

Wet, heavy snow has been falling in Post-It sized flakes this week.

dirtyice biketracks whiteyards snowyparks