Monthly Archive for June, 2007

Summer in Finland, pt. 1: Viviparous lizards

wstryder June 29, 2007 1 Comment

Vivaparous lizard

[humongous size pic]

Somebody (or something – which is a much more frightening thought) had stepped on this poor little Viviparous lizard at our kesämökki and left it dying on the porch. The viviparous lizard, which we call sisilisko, is the world’s most northern lizard and the only lizard native to Finland. It isn’t poisonous and it doesn’t bite. Don’t try to capture one though, because it is a protected species in Finland. If you harass one, it might drop it’s tail, altough I never saw that happen when I used to catch these as a child. These guys are über-cute and are crawling all over our kesämökki :)

9:59 am Tags: , , , , .

10000 spam messages blocked!

wstryder June 10, 2007 0 Comments

Spam wall by freezelight, Creative Commons Attribution, Share Alike 2.0

Wow, Akismet has protected my blog from over 10000 spam messages. The lucky 10000th spam message to be blocked by Akismet was posted on my blog last night from Quebec Canada, and it read “Relevant information about pregnant woman lactating….” – congratulations!

I’m looking forward to not seeing another 10000 spam messages on my site.

11:00 am Tags: .

OMG! Finnish fertilizer used in terrorist plot!

wstryder June 9, 2007 0 Comments

Fertilizer Bags - by etm21This is the most ridiculous headline I have read in a long time.

Men convicted in British terror plot planned to use Finnish fertiliser for bomb

OMG, they planned to use Kemira GrowHow’s Finnish fertilizer? Why is that information relevant? Who the hell cares? I bet Finnish Nokia mobile phones have been used as detonators in more than a dozen terrorist attacks. I think it would be real big news if the Al-Qaida NOC hidden in a cave in Afghanistan ran Linux, a Finnish innovation! Perhaps next week we’ll hear that Evil Terrorists are now buying meters of Marimekko fabric, stockpiling vast amounts of Iittala glassware and getting horribly drunk off Finlandia Vodka. Who knows, maybe the next big terrorist attack against the US will be inspired by a Renny Harlin movie. Now that would be big news.

1:12 pm Tags: , , .

Gottfrid Svartholm raided… a year ago

wstryder June 7, 2007 0 Comments

The Pirate BayTrust a digg article titled “PirateBay proprieter raided by Swedish police!”? Apparently somebody at ITviikko regularly scans digg.com for juicy headlines and figured this article must be big news since it has been dugg over 900 times. Gottfrid Svartholm, better known as anakata, now has a pretty blunt statement on his website:

Note to (stupid) DIGG users: This message is from LAST year! D’oh!

They removed the topic from ITviikko but it’s still available at digitoday.fi. Mistakes happen, even to topnotch journalists (not to mention enthusiastic diggers).

3:21 pm Tags: , .

Congrats Teemu, Ducks and the West Coast!

wstryder June 7, 2007 0 Comments

Yuck Yuck Yuck, by MPR529

Yeah, not a bad victory. Oh and I totally agree, Helsinki is pretty hot.

9:49 am Tags: , .

EveryScape – Discover the world

wstryder June 5, 2007 2 Comments

EveryScape screenshot

Just check it out. EveryScape is darn impressive. Sure you could view Flickr pics from a beautiful city placed nicely on Yahoo maps, or download GoogleEarth to view the world in 3D, but EveryScape is something totally different – you get an actual 360° image of the scene. You can rotate the view and move along to the next block… just try it for yourself, no registration needed and all you need from your browser is flash. I wonder how long it will take them to scape tho whole world though. Currently they have a whopping 5 blocks of downtown San Fransisco scaped, so I think they have a long way to go still. When they do get it done, it’ll probably be really awesome. Meanwhile, you could just go for a stroll downtown – now that’s the most realistic experience you’ll ever have.

12:57 pm Tags: , .

Taloussanomat adopts Creative Commons

wstryder June 5, 2007 0 Comments

Taloussanomat, a major Finnish financial newspaper, now uses CC BY-NC-ND
license on all their online articles (via Antti Vilpponen). They also have a page clearly explaining the license terms and information on how to use the license, along with a piece of html-code that you can use on your own site. This is pretty significant. It means that you can safely quote an entire article from their news service, or use it as part of another service. I like Taloussanomat every day more and more. Not counting the ad-infested frontpage (Adblock pretty much solves that problem), their website has everything you’d expect from a quality service.

I’m looking forward to the first online news service to use CC-licensed pictures from Flickr. I don’t get why they don’t do that already.

12:03 pm Tags: , , , .

How to rob a convenience store

wstryder June 1, 2007 0 Comments

Hot coffee - a dangerous weapon! by Me (cool diffusion filter btw)

Energy Fiend describes a nice strategy for robbing a convenience store:

  1. Fix a cup of black coffee.
  2. Go up the register to pay for it.
  3. Throw hot coffee in the face of the store clerk.
  4. Grab money from register.
  5. Run.

This trick was used in The Shield season 4 episode 3. In the episode Dutch and Claudette were investigating a robber who was using hot coffee to disarm store clerks. Unfortunately Dutch leaked details of the investigation to a suspect and created a copycat. That was a good episode. 

Now that Lost is on a looooong break, I might have time to watch The Shield again. Haven’t seen a single episode of season 6 yet.

Or I might do what Cartman did and just freeze myself until Lost is back on air ;)

9:59 am