This is how I see it
here is where I stand
this is who I like to be
the road lies ahead
The future owes me nothing
the past is way behind
all there is, is now
everything is new
This is how I see it
here is where I stand
this is who I like to be
the road lies ahead
The future owes me nothing
the past is way behind
all there is, is now
everything is new
The last night in Metz.
I’ve been inviting people to see me during the last week for several occasions, and despite me trying to organize things, everybody came tonight. The surprise was great – I would have been stressed about it had I known beforehand. The party ended just minutes ago, and I feel I had nothing to do with organizing it. Vincent brought chairs, some drank tea, some vodka, some wine, some beer, but nobody seemed too drunk at any time (some pistachio shells flew around the room during the night though). I offered everything I had in the cabinets (pistachios, sunflower seeds, eggs, soup, …) and people brought their own stuff. Lukas made omelettes. Some French people joined in at one point of the evening.
They gave me a book with photos and writings and drawings from everybody as a gift, and I feel like I have gotten way much more attention than I ever could have deserved. I feel too glad about it all to be cynical, it was beautiful. They made me sad for the fact that I am leaving so soon. :) There was quite a mess here but people cleaned up before they left and told me they’re coming again at eight in the morning to help me clean up! (The cleaner lady will organize an inspection at ten in the morning.) Wow.
Tomorrow to Poland, at around 17 hours.
It feels really spring-like in Metz, already. So finally I feel like it was worth it to come to northern France also because of the weather (the autumn was pretty bad). The flu is doing good to me, too. Slowing me down when I don’t have the guts to do it by myself.
Otherwise: thesis writing, talking with Minna and other friends online, preparing for my trip to Paris with Eeva this weekend.
I am slightly bothered about Facebook taking over my blog; status updates and all the social interaction engages me so much nowadays that actually writing even just a bit longer posts seems irrelevant. I’ve already expressed it all in IM discussions and status updates, so blogging feels like repetition. Maybe I should just start using this blog for something more substantial than my personal whining, since that seems to have a better arena in Facebook nowadays.
On the other hand, Facebook does it by great social UI design, so maybe I will just be happy. I still hope very much that an open platform that does it even better will supercede them soon.
During being in my current flu, I have learnt to use Twitter better (by adding the friends of friends who seemed the most interesting) and it actually seems some use at the moment.
Also, I took Flock into use today and the integrated experience actually seems pretty nice. I am blogging this from Flock. The UI does not seem to allow setting a category for the posting though so I will have to go to wordpress to fix the language category for this, after all. I’ll take that back: the Flock editor asks for the category after pressing Publish. I still have to check which categories I have used from my blog page, though, since I cannot remember all the categories this might fit into.
At times the flock UI is very cluttered and as my screen is only 1024 pixels wide, adding a sidebar to that makes many modern sites scroll. I actually think that is the fault of modern web design and not that of Flock.
Heli arrived on last Friday. It’s been good.
Özhan, l’artiste took a photo of me and Heli yesterday. I haven’t been featured on Deviantart before! Not that we are recognizable, but still it’s cool. The weather in Metz really is that melancholic. No wonder Verlaine and folks liked it here.
It was a good and peaceful new year. We drank a bit (not too much like I did in Paris on Saturday when I got a stomach disease), and found a nice small bar where it was fun to dance. It was somehow amusing that the DJ played all the songs from Youtube, though :D.
We have also been playing Mario, taken lots of photos, talked, wandered around, seen lots of sights, prayed, relaxed, written, gotten lost and then found, talked with people in a couple of languages.
Tonight, going to see Hunger. Nähdään nälkää, heheh. Heh. Hee… öh.
This is not based on migrating the database, but on keeping both systems, Nucleus and the new blogging software working, and the old one’s URLs intact (using some simple .htaccess magic) while adding the new one’s urls.
The downside is that when Nucleus has security holes fixed, you have to keep upgrading it, as well as the new one. This could be solvable by making a static mirror of the nucleus site using, say, wget. Then you could delete the old nucleus installation and just upload the static files in their place – but you would not have the posts in any semantically rich format any more – unless, of course, you backed up the old database before doing this. Continue reading “Ultimate NucleusCMS to any blog migration (here, WordPress)”
Came from Tokyo a week ago (also photos now online). Below are the assorted ramblings from the trip, written mostly last week’s Saturday the 15th. The title of the posting is a writing on a t-shirt I saw in Tokyo (no, I couldn’t get it with me, someone was wearing it). By the way Bemmu is planning to have a similar trip next year, if you’re interested.
On the morning of the day we flew, my mom called me that there’s a Typhoon in Japan. I got a bit scared but nevertheless we took off. Once we arrived to Narita airport, the Typhoon was said to already have passed Tokyo. I misplaced my passport for a while but eventually found it in a wrong pocket. A bit later, the airport loudspeaker announced some flight being late, “we are sorry for any convenience”. Welcome to the land of Engrish.
The ryokan, a hostel kind of a traditional, simple housing, was sufficient and actually rather cozy :). There’s a shower and an ok toilet. The room, shared with three other guys from the group I’m traveling, has air conditioning (not in all rooms I hear). The air conditioner and the shower both had control panels which allowed setting the temperature in celcius grades. The controls were in Japanese though so it took a bit of trial and horror ;).
On the first day we made an omelette kind of a meal in a small restaurant, each of us for oneself. It was delicious though the timelag was still heavy on, I think, all of us. On Saturday it got a bit easier. We had a gorgeous Japanese (?) breakfast at the price of around 3 euros. Soup, two kinds of salad, a kind of tea I never quite got used to, rice, eggs, sausage. We shopped, there was a bookstore with quite a few storeys, one of which had books in english and other languages besides Japanese. Gaming. Karaoke, blur, queen, wonderful world, Japanese pop for those who had a clue about the language. Street shows. Photos. Engrish. Souvenirs. Milk. Tobacco smoke in game houses. The Japanese society has smoking issues. Tobacco is sold in vending machines.
I am no Japan or manga (etc.) enthusiast myself, and I don’t know the language. Alas, many of the cultural nuances were probably left unnoticed for me. I did get a lot out of it nevertheless; much of the fact is thanks to Bemmu, who arranged the trip in the first place. He knows the city and Japanese well enough that basically, whatever we wanted to do, we could.
We ate lots of more or less strange foods, though most of the time they were very edible indeed. I don’t remember any names though, thanks to the three scripts the Japanese use, none of which I know, and the strange sound of the language. I enjoyed grinning at the Engrish and the “philosophical” writings that were quite common on the streets. I loved the moment we spent in a tea house, sipping green tea and before that, eating the funny little cake — and trying to do this according to a sort of a traditional style. Instructions were given on paper. We also visited the Ghibli (Totoro, etc.) museum, though again, those who knew more about the subject enjoyed it a lot more than I.
The days were pretty full. A lot of it was just traveling around and seeing famous places. As The ones in our group who knew more about manga, anime or Japanese shopped for a lot of that stuff. Others bought electronics, which can be cheap, though new stuff is roughly the same price as in Finland. I got a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ8 for about 28000 yen (just under 200 euros; it had been in demonstration use). It was fun trying to find a wall plug adapter for the camera, Sakari, one of us luckily knew what electricity is in Japanese so we went arond asking for a “denki adaptoo for juurop”. Finally found it, too, for about one euro (180 yen).
Towards the end of the week it somehow got a little lonely, though lots of people were around me most of the time. I was happy to meet Marlen from Switzerland (along with a Canadian guy whose name I fail to remember), who also stayed in our ryokan. On Wednesday we sat in a pub and later rented a karaoke room (a quite popular local hobby). They even had Fiona Apple! :).
On Thursday Arttu, Jonna and Miia from our traveling group joined us, and we found a more Japanese bar, the keeper and the other guests of which we got to know during the evening. Marlen knew Japanese, otherwise we couldn’t have communicated almost at all. It was so much fun, the barkeeper showed a photo of his son and told us that I look like him ^_^. We ate jellyfish and drank several kinds of drinks, and several middle aged men chatted with us, mostly about Japan and Finland. One of them, I understood he was psychologist, even offered flowers for all the girls we had with us there. Then he concluded “I won’t give any to the guys”, and everyone had a laugh :).
And then, yesterday, the farewell. Woke up at 5 a.m. Japanese time, the plane took of at 11 a.m., and we landed at Helsinki-Vantaa around 15:45, Finnish time.
The flight was an experience in itself for me, due to technical reasons :). The backs of seats had entertainment systems, allowing to enjoy a selection of movies, tv shows, music, games etc. The system itself made an impression: a simple gui with relatively original controls: a double-sided wired remote with a microphone and an orientation sensor. It also had a credit card reader, allowing phone calls and sending 2$/piece e-mails and SMS’s. Too bad it was buggy and I got it to crash, though thanks to that i found out it was Linux-based, seemingly a virtual machine of some kind.
Comments
Jonna Kettunen wrote on September 22, 2007 at 20:03:
Wow, mahtavia kuvia, mahtava kirjoitus matkasta ja kerta kaikkiaan MAHTAVA KOKONAISUUS! n__n
Yksi pieni virhe löytyi (..en minä ole liian pikkutarkka, e-hen..!), nimittäin baarireissultamme viimeisenä iltana. Psykologi/lääkäri ei antanut kukkia meille kauniimmille osapuolille, vaan se ensimmäinen mies, joka istahti sinne peräkammarin puolelle, missä mekin oltiin. Tosin, en hirveästi muista hänestä mitään, kun hän lähti melko aikaseen pois. Mutta anyway… u__U’
Toivottavasti tuo valaisi edes jonkun verran. :D
Ps. Teidän kanssa oli tosi hauskaa Japanissa! <3 meidän kaikkien pitää vielä tavata, eiks je?
pilpi (pilpi.net author) wrote on September 22, 2007 at 23:35:
Hihi, kiitos kommentista ja kehuista! :))
Joo muistelin että se oli se jälkimmäinen mies, koska tosiaan se eka lähti niin äkkiä. Noh… :)
I am available for hire! Usability evaluation and testing, software development, Moodle development. See portfolio
Please note: there are newer howtos at ubuntu forums (howto1, howto2). These are probably more thoroughly tested than mine is. Thanks.
Dansguardian (nowadays E2Guardian; see commercial options) is efficient, even mostly out-of-the-box web content filtering to protect from the filth flowing on the internet. On Ubuntu Linux (which rocks), do:
Continue reading “Setting up DansGuardian on a single home PC running Ubuntu”