Last weekend I finally completed the trunk which I’d spent the previous two weeks of evenings and weekends working on. Here it is:

Although it was sometimes interesting to learn new things, like how to use my new jigsaw, I must say that most of the work was terribly boring and it’s a great relief to finally get it done. I now plan to take a few months’ break from this kind of project, and get on with the rest of my life :-).

Kiasma
Originally uploaded by Greygriffin.

I’m at the café of Kiasma, Helsinki’s modern art museum. This is my first time blogging from a café with wireless Internet – very cool! Unfortunately, there are only five cafés in Helsinki with free wireless Internet, and the charges for the paid services are more than double what you’d pay in USA.

In particular, two of my favourite cafés, Carusel and Kappeli, have these charged wireless Internet services. If one of them was free, I’d probably go there pretty often.

Luckily, I have a mobile phone that I can use to connect the laptop to the Internet. It’s not nearly as fast as wireless, but for most purposes it’s OK. I have to use the mobile phone to connect the laptop to the Internet at work, as the company wireless network won’t accept connections from private machines.

New toy
Originally uploaded by Greygriffin.

I’ve been planning for months to buy myself an Apple Powerbook laptop, and when the latest company bonus came in I finally gave myself permission. Of course, I had to have the best: although this is the smallest model (12″ diagonal screen) so I can easily carry it around, it still has a large hard disk, wireless LAN and Bluetooth, and can read and write both CDs and DVDs.

The plan has been that I’d use it to post far more often to this blog, and to do some programming experiments (especially learning a new programming language called Ruby).

Another thing that should be arriving soon in the post is a miniature USB memory card reader for Secure Digital (SD) cards, the type our tiny Canon digital camera uses. So then I’ll be able to take photos with that camera and upload them from wherever I find a café with wireless Internet.

In fact, because my phone (a Nokia 3230) has Bluetooth, I can use it as a modem and connect to the Internet with my Powerbook wherever I am. It’s not very fast then though – browsing works OK, but you see the images downloading one by one. Probably not very good for uploading megapixel images…

Anyway, a cool tool – I just have to learn how to get the most out of it. Should be fun!

April snow showers
Originally uploaded by Greygriffin.

It’s that time of year in Helsinki when you never know whether it’s going to be warm and sunny, or snowing again, The flowers in this tub didn’t look very happy.

We had another of our board games evenings (they’re usually every second Tuesday). This time there were 9 of us, and it was at our place. While waiting for Sami & Sarita we played a quick game of 6 Nimmt!, then we played a couple of games of Lupus in Tabula, i.e. Werewolf.

Pirates of the Spanish Main

Then we split into two groups. The two Michaels & Scott played Pirates of the Spanish Main, while Eve, Sarita, Sami, Mari, Séverine & I played Citadels, which Sarita enjoyed very much when we played at Iris’s place last time.

Citadels

After the others left, Michael W., Scott, Eve & I played High Bohn, an interesting explansion for Bohnanza. All in all a good evening, and just a shame it had to end so soon!