Conan on TBS

Oh yeah. Conan's new show is starting on TBS on the 8th of November. Definately going to watch. I do not want to forget to watch the first show. That is why I added the counter.

BTW. Still getting lot of hits because of the blogs I wrote about Conan earlier. That's cool.

Nantes, Pays de la Loire, France

Nantes, Pays de la Loire, France

My work travels took me to Nantes in the latter half of September. It was very nice there.

Fuck this turned out to be a very short post. =D

Ps. I honestly don’t have anything else to say about this topic. Here are some pics.

Paul Auster: Brooklyn Follies

Paul Auster: Brooklyn Follies

Picture from Wikipedia

Brooklyn Follies ended up in my bookshelf after a sale at the local bookstore. If my memory serves me correctly it was three paper backs for 10€, so I got quite a good deal.

Brooklyn follies is a book Paul Auster first published in 2005. Mr. Auster is well known writer in the United States and probably he is well known among European book worms. Paul Auster first made is big break in the 80’s with his New York trilogy.

Back to Brooklyn. The book starts with section where divorced cancer patient, Nathan Glass, is looking for a place where to wait for death. Of course it would be a very short book if this would be the only story arc in the book. The events in the book start to roll out bit by bit and at the end of the book the lives of the characters have gone through a total transformation. But I won’t tell you if it takes turn for the positive or not.

The language in the book is very light and enjoyable to read without being simplistic. It feels like this book had been quite easy to write for Mr. Auster. There couple of things that annoy me in the book. Firstly in some place the book unnecessarily underlines the liberal east coast attitude and thinking, like in the section where one of the characters (Nate or Tom can’t remember which)  thinks about the events in Kosovo. Secondly the ending is a bit dull, maybe in 2005 it was still effective way to end a book, but somehow as time has passed the world did not end in September 2001. Yes the events created lot of suffering and problems but I think we now have other problems to solve. Book could have more universal appeal if it was not so tightly knitted to turn of the century USA. As a snap shot of its time the book is however very good.

By no means is “Brooklyn Follies” a bad book. Auster is able to paint a picture of Brooklyn that this believable and very likeable. The themes the book handles are something that many of have felt during our lives and continue to feel. Brooklyn follies is a very light book and not that intellectual, but it will definitely touch you emotionally and tells you something how we should live our lives.

BeBook model "One"

There was story on the local paper that my local library lends out e-book readers. I immediately thought this is something worth checking out. So I went there got one. The library lends out model “One” made by Bebook, which I guess is a manufacturer from Holland. Here are some of my thoughts about the reader.

BeBook "One"

First of all I was quite delighted that I did not need to buy any books in order to try this gadget. You can download thousands of free books from BeBook’s webpages. Most of the books have been digitized under the project Gutenberg and they are in pdf-format. The selection of books covers quite a big range of languages and I was able to find some interesting books also in my mother tongue. I ended up reading two and half books. I read two classical novels and half from a book that explains the universal esoteric meaning of Kalevala and how it discusses the same themes as all other religions of the world. It ended up being such bologny that I could not finish the book.

The first thing you notice is how light the device is how similar the weight compared to a real notebook. The buttons are placed so that you can choose pretty freely so how you hold the device. You can change page holding the device only with one hand and you can do this with both left and right hand.

The e-ink display of model “One” was still quite pleasant to read even though technology in it is already two years old. The 6 inch screen gives you very book like feeling. It is fun to notice that reading a screen does not need to put stress on your eyes. This something were e-ink technology is far superior compared to the lcd-screens found on tablet computers. You were also able to zoom the text and rotate the text around on the screen.

Then a few words of the user interface of model “One”. The basic operations are quite easy to execute. You just push the number on the keyboard that corresponds to the title/action on the screen. The system is not that advanced but it works reasonably well. The user interface of devices that have a touch screen is far superior to the system found on model “One” and would be very nice to see e-ink screen with touch sensors it would be so much easier to just point at what you want.

The device has the ability to show pictures and play mp3s but I found these features a bit poorly implemented. I put some pictures on a SD card thought that the device would be able to resize and turn them the right way. I guess not. There seems to be a lot of limitations on what kind of pictures this device can show and at what resolution. The mp3-player worked out just fine but the usability was not very high. You are better of using another device for listening to music.

In conclusion I would say that using BeBooks model “One” is a positive experience and I never would have thought how easy it was to adjust reading books of a screen. This really made a believer in e-book readers.

Still I would not rely completely on e-books, because batteries do not last forever. What happens if you do not any power to charge your device? Also traditional books rarely brake down.

You can find more information about BeBook from their webpages.

Do You Know Hurley?

Hurley -Weezer

It is the one with face of that fat guy from “Lost” on the cover. Yes, that is Hurley, the new album by my  favorite band Weezer. This band got me through high school with out too much damage.

I did not know that Weezer was releasing any material this autumn. I think I got the news maybe as late as beginning of September that the album will be released on the 14^th. So two weeks ago when I was in France I picked the album up from a local record store and used it as soundtrack when I was wandering around Nantes.

That’s enough about that. What about the album itself? Is it any good and how does it compare to Raditude and Weezer's previous albums?

Well on the first listening you notice that the album rolls (and rocks) very smoothly. The track list is maybe not entirely “all killer, no filler” but there are no really weak songs and there every song could be a single. Actually the first single from the album “Memories”, compared to the other songs on the album, is not the best song on the album. One, I guess strange, feeling I got listening this album for the first time was that you do not need listen to it second time for you to start liking it. You do not have wait for it to grow on you.

Let’s admit it Maladroit, Make Believe and Red Album were not the best albums. Yes, there were good songs on those albums but something just was missing. Weezer started to experiment new styles on the Red Album and finally I think they have found what they have been looking for. The overall mood of the album is focused and relaxed. The songs, to me, reflect the mind of person who has had a done a lot of fighting with oneself and now is on clearer waters and has found some sort of a balance. Maybe this is more about my own experience the past few years I project to the songs.

What are the songs you should check out from this album? I think at the moment my favorite tracks are “Ruling Me”, “Unspoken” and “Hang On”. These are also the songs you should also give listen. There are two bonus songs on the album that are definitely worth a listen (or two). First one is the wonderfully hilarious, but still a song with meaning, “All My Friends Are Insects”, the second one is the cover of Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida”, which has violins and bells ringing in the back ground.

I am happy to see Weezer put out such a good album. They have moved on and have a new voice and style of doing music that has some familiar elements from the past but also a lot of new attitude and ideas to keep you interested.

Track list:

1.      Memories

2.      Ruling Me

3.      Trainwrecks

4.      Unspoken

5.      Where’s My Sex?

6.      Run Away

7.      Hang On

8.      Smart Girls

9.      Brave New World

10.  Time Flies

11.  All My Friends Are Insects

12.  Viva La Vida

13.  I Want To Be Somebody

14.  Represent (Rocked Out Mix)

I want to leave you with track from the album. This one is "Unspoken".

HTC Wildfire

I’d been thinking about buying a smart phone for long time, but never saw that spending 500 euros for a smart phone was worth it. I had been interested about getting a HTC phone, I almost bought the Legend, but not until the Wildfire came out I decide to part from my money. Having used the phone a month I would say that you get quite a good and solid phone considering price.

I have been quite impressed with the navigation applications that you can install on Wildfire. I have been frequently using AndNav2 and c:geo. AndNav2 for storing maps and routes and c:geo for searching geocaches. Both of these are free.

My Wildfire is running Android 2.1 and it performs reasonably well. I’ve had quite a few crashes, but the system recovers quite fast and so far there have not been any major issues. The software is not as good as the Apples operating systems, but considering the price of the device it is acceptable. I must say I am waiting for the the 2.2 update of Android which should come also to Wildfire. However I am a bit sceptical when it arrives. The update should have arrived Q3, but now it seems I may have to wait a little longer. In some discussions there have been statements that it may not come at all.

Android Market offers a range of apps and games for you to download but the amount of programs is not as great as in iTunes. There is another catch that rises from the hardware of Wildfire. Wildfire is not equipped with very fast processor and therefore not everything that is on offer on Android Market is on offer to the Wildfire. So if you are looking for serious gaming or other applications that require the processor to pack little more punch then the Wildfire isn’t the phone for you.

If you are on a budget and looking for a Android phone I could recommend Wildfire to you. The phone does not have that WOW factor iPhone or Ipod Touch had back in the day but it is a solid device and should serve you well for couple of years.

Funny or Not?

A few weeks ago I bought the new book by Hugleikur Dagsson, a comic artist from Iceland who makes comics with extremely dark humor. Almost always the jokes test the limits of good taste. You check out what I am talking about at dagsson.com. The jokes on the front page are of the not-so-offending-kind, but you will get the idea. The book I bought is called in Icelandic "Okkur 4". In Finnish the book is called, freely translate to English, "Laugh Pervert, Laugh".

Now to the content of the book. I thought that nothing would shake me and I would think most of the jokes would be hilarious. But I was wrong. Of course one thing that the author wants to do is to test the limits of your humour, I do understand that much. Still some of the jokes were just too brutal and there was no joke or twist in them. And there are quite a few of those in the book.

Second thing is that it seem that this kind of humour works only in small servings at a time. Reading the whole book at once is just too much. My favourite joke in the book is the one were wife farts and the husband says "our marriage is over". =)

After reading this book I felt immensely disgusted and amused at the same time. Which I think is what the author is aiming for. If you want to laugh and wonder who writes this kind of immoral shit I recommend that you read Okkur 4.