Yes, April Fools’ Day was yesterday and here is my favorite prank of the day.

Google TiSP (BETA) is a fully functional, end-to-end system that provides in-home wireless access by connecting your commode-based TiSP wireless router to one of thousands of TiSP Access Nodes via fiber-optic cable strung through your local municipal sewage lines.

The whole thing is utterly hilarious, but this is the best part:

#5 Plug the fiber-optic cable into your TiSP wireless router, which has a specially designed counterweight to withstand the centripetal force of flushing.

Anyway, read the whole thing here and check all previous years’ Google April’s pranks here.

May the link be with you.

Mladen

Radio came to town. Yes, the one invented in the 19th century. Until just a few days ago besides the building’s constant humming, there was practically nothing to cling to aurally. Tired of all those too many times heard mp3s, it was about time to get a radio. Before I’ve only managed to steal a few moments listening to Radio Helsinki over the Net. In spite of getting those waves wirelessly, I’ve been spatialy confined to a seriously limited listening area. But radio, come on, doesn’t it feel like the beginning of the 20th century again. Nostalgia? No, futurama. If only Internet waves were as ubiquitous as radio-waves are.

And in those brief three days I’ve been able to enjoy much wider variety of radio programs than I could ever have imagined. It’s no joke. In this ‘not enough room to swing a cat’ apartment, sound waves in Finnish, Romani, Samí, Albanian, Kurdish and Persian bounced off the walls. I’ve even listened to news in Croatian, Serbian, and Serbo-Croatian, all at once. Just imagine, it felt like the 1980s again–so Yugo-nostalgic. And all this without touching the dial once, courtesy of Sveriges Radio P2. And nevertheless, it is the Swedishness I am much more exposed to. A whopping 10% of total Swedish population comes from abroad or has origins outside of the country. Swedish national radio station P2 couldn’t reflect this fact better.

On the other hand, I’ve almost already forgotten what it feels like to overhear a conversation in a very familiar language in a foreign land (not in boring English). But here, on more than one occasion I’ve had a chance to listen in unintentionally. Particularly memorable was a middle aged lady in the metropolitan bus explaining in Bosnian to the party on the other side of the phone connection how her partner doesn’t know how to do anything, not even drill a hole in a wall, not to mention that he’s not able to hit a nail with a hammer; all he does is watch TV and surf the Net all day long. He must be lucky, I thought.
Here’s a more gripping evidence of cultural patchwork in the city of Göteborg. Sure there are many Chinese, Thai, Indian, Japanese, Italian restaurants and Kebab stands, but most of them are purists, serving only one choice of food. Catering to a niche. How about Sushi-Pizza, Steak House, Asiatic BBQ specialized restaurant? Not a slightest problem. I guess I should have a lunch there.

Another cultural ephemera which made a lasting impression I’ve found at a second hand store nearby the just mentioned restaurant: old Swedish bands’ records. I was sifting through some useless junk and these turned out to be one of a few gems found there. I’m pretty sure that we have all at some point admired the abominable hairdos of a few decades ago, but please, just take a look at these covers for more than their hair. Hilarious.

And this is just the top of my rambling iceberg. More gems from Sweden coming soon to a blog near you.

Mladen

This time not posting to my blog was not caused by procrastination, but rather by the St. Internet not being on my side. Yes, Sweden is one of the most wired societies in the world where practically every citizen takes the access for granted. Also, it is a place where you get even the unfathomable 28MBit/s link for peanuts for the even more inscrutable 16€ per month–yeah, it is a turn-on for the geekier readers, believe me. And you get it within a few days. A dream come true for anyone like me, and much geekier people. All that until I you wake up and smell the coffee, fired onions actually.

Not so fast my friends. All things mentioned in the previous paragraph are true, including the smell of fried onions. Unfortunately difficulties do arise when you move to Sweden and want the Internet at the same time. Because before Swedish ISPs will allow you to send your mom an email from the comfort of your new home, you need nothing less then a Swedish social security number. Ta-dah. Until then, surfing equals to surfing on an artificial lake where you, naturally, have to pay someone big bucks to make those waves and surf for you.

And it is expensive. Just as everything else, but the at-home-Internet, costs more then you would expect, paying for sunny and windy weather is no exception. Approximately 5€ per hour, or if you use such commodities the way I do, then it’ll cost you 3,720€ per month. Not exactly peanuts anymore. Of course, there’s always an option of sponging on your neighbors’ links. It might be mildly unethical, but it falls out of the question when all of the 38 connections are encrypted and you don’t want to be more than mildly unethical. For once I wished my neighbors were a bit dumber.

I wanted to abstain myself from any direct comparisons, but really, I can’t. When I first moved to Finland it was a Saturday night. By Monday afternoon I was connected to a pretty fat pipe–much earlier than any of the withdrawal symptoms kicked in.

Mladen

Tomorrow I’m traveling to Sweden and I’m teeming with anticipation. Even though I have briefly visited the capital city of Stockholm a couple of times, I’ve been nothing more than a tourist there. This time it’s for real; backpacks are packed, cargo is on it’s way and the plane leaves early tomorrow morning from Vantaa. In a nutshell everything is ready.

This time the move is very different from when I’ve moved from Slovenia to Finland. Then my knowledge about the Nordic countries and Finland was in bits and pieces. But basically I was pretty much clueless in comparison to the whole range of insights I have gained about the Finnishness and Nordicness, which also meant I was ready for anything. But now all these insights I’ve gathered here have more or less permanently tainted my perspective on my new host country too.

Let me think. What is the usual opinion about your immediate neighbor? Whether a drunkard or a country next door, it’s likely you have strong emotions about them. So, what do today’s Finns think of Swedes–the nation who ruled Finns for no less than 600 years or, what have I already learned about my new host country from Finns?

Sweden is the land of bureaucracy and restrictions. I’ve already had a few encounters with the bureaucracy, but am yet to face any restrictions. However, Finns like to say that no fence in Sweden is allowed to be too low and nothing should be too daring. Figuratively speaking, that is. I’m looking forward to experiencing a Swedish roller-coaster, though. I know that spending a day on Finnish ones gives me at least a two-day hangover.

The people. If Finland is the nation of butches, then Swedish men are overly effeminate. As I’ve been told over and over again by Finnish men (and sometimes women too), Swedes are in fact so feminine it’s not uncommon that Finns label Swedes as gay. How so? Swedish men wear pink shirts and make-up, regularly visit solariums, carry purses and are overly gentle and tender by nature. You get the picture. Quite distant from their violent war-loving conqueror beer guzzling Viking ancestors I say. But then again, that’s retrosexuals speaking about metrosexuals.

The language. Swedish language takes an interesting twist when it comes to expletives. After all, I though that Slovene language has the worst expressions of profanity as “Three hundred hairy ones!” is quite a tough one to swallow by the recipient (”Tristo kosmatih!” if you were wondering what it might be like in the original). Was I wrong or what. Swedish definitely tops it off with “Sjutton!”. Seventeen as a swear word? Give me a break.

More about the language. If Finns call it kännykkä, English speakers mobile phone, Swedes named it nalle, or literally a teddy bear. Teddy bear? What the hell? The term first appeared in the 1990’s when the only owners of mobile phones in Sweden where yuppies. Consequently mobile phone got nicknamed yuppie nalle, or teddy bear for yuppies. Later when yuppie nalle became accessible to practically everyone, yuppie disappeared and nalle stayed. So tacky that it sticked.

Telling bad jokes is dull, but the one that follows tells in just few sentences what I wouldn’t be able to tell in a few paragraphs if I want to be politically correct. It’s again about how many Finns feel about their neighbors Swedes (I heard it from a 10-year old girl, in fact). Here it goes:

A Finn goes rowing on a lake in a canoe. When he reaches the middle of the lake, the omnipresent God comes up with an idea to make a little experiment.
So, he removes the left side of Finn’s brains and Finn goes: “Yksi, kolme, viisi, seitseman,…” [”One, three, five, seven,…” in Finnish].
Then God returns the left half back and takes the right half away.
Then Finn goes: “Kaksi, neljä, kuusi, kahdeksan,…” [”Two, four, six, eight,…” in Finnish].
God scratches her head and a moment later takes Finns’ brains away completely. And the Finn starts counting: “Ett, två, tre, fyra, fem, sex,…” [”One, two, three, four, five, six,…” in Swedish].

Gotta catch the train now.

Mladen

I’ve had tons of fun in the past few weeks, even though they’ve mostly been permeated with something people usually dislike: moving. Yes, I am moving again. This time I’m moving from Jyväskylä, Finland to Göteborg, Sweden. And as you can imagine, I’m really looking forward to seeing what’s life like in Sweden. Which also means that I’ll write about that too.

Moving around is fun. Sure, it can be a bit stressful doing all the paperwork and trying to figure out all the packing so that it’s done right on time and as efficiently as possible. There’s always just that one more book I’d like to read before I pack it. It could take forever for me to move, I guess.

But with moving also comes a fine opportunity to clean up your life a bit. You definitely learn to throw stuff away. This experience is especially therapeutic for a person like me who always finds a use for something, somewhere, at some point in the very near future. You see where I’m heading. You should just take a peek into my hard drives. Thus seeing all those papers go into recycling bin is nothing short of exhilarating. But most important of all, I have finally got a hold of my library. Or at least that part of my library that came along to Finland.

For a while I’ve been looking for software that would be able to handle my books without much effort on my behalf. After sifting through all kinds of applications it boiled down to just two options Delicious Library and Booxter. If it was for the mere eye candy, Delicious Library would have won, but Booxter does the job much, much better: it searches through 26 different databases from Brazil to Sweden, retrieves enormous amounts of information about many books and exports to all the formats one would ever want (almost). Job well done. And it really made indexing my library a breeze, even though I don’t have a web-cam or a bar code reader and had to type all the ISBNs. Even if I have had twice as many books, it would still be fun to do it.

Writing and packing during the day, watching movies at night. For the past seven days I’ve seen a movie each night and finally caught up in many ways. I have had sort of Woody Allen retrospective going on for a while now. Woody is just incredible. His movies are so eloquent, full of details and incredibly fun dialogues, characters and interactions.  They are so life-like I can imagine myself watching them all over again when I see them all. But most recently I’ve seen Zelig, Love and Death, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask and Manhattan Murder Mystery. Great stuff.

However I’ve also watched Spike Lee’s impressive documentary about the disaster caused by the hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in August and September 2005 that was ran on the Finnish public TV station YLE last week. As I watched When the Levees Broke, I’ve more had an impression that the documentary is really about the breakdown of solidarity in the US. It’s just sad to see how individualistic, myopic and money centered the US society has become. I highly recommend this documentary that kept me bolted down for every single of its 255 minutes.

Mladen