Archive for March 10th, 2006
Supermarket beers in Finland
Posted by Jilles in Uncategorized on March 10, 2006
One of the things that take some getting used to when moving to Finland is the beer. Quality and price are, well, different. I don’t really care about the price but quality is something different. You have to lower you expectations and standards in this country when drinking beer.
A big problem here is the notion of supermarket beer. Similar to Sweden, Finland has an alcohol percentage limit on what is legally allowed to be sold in the supermarket. For the real stuff you need to go to the pub or to the state owned liquor stores. Both of which will charge you steep prices. Somewhat to my delight the alcohol percentage limit is at least higher than the limit in Sweden where it is an unworkable 3.5%. At 3.5% most beers taste like shit, and that includes the full range of Swedish brands I can think of (Spendrups, Pripps). Swedish beers taste like shit even with the legally required bit of water removed anyway.
Finland on the other hand maintains an almost workable 4.7%. 4.7% is quite close to the percentage of most Dutch lagers which hover around 5 -5.5%. Real beer of course wants to be 5% (or above). You have to do some dirty tricks to get normal beer below 5%. And that is exactly what the Finns do, dirty tricks. Not only do they do it with the local beers, but they also do it to the imports 
. You can actually buy a 4.7% Heineken in this country (Heineken can of course be expected to add as much water as is legally required, they have no shame). Of course Heineken is watery to begin with. Adding water does not improve it, I can assure you. Other brands that shamelessly add water to their beer products include Stella, Becks and an odd beer called Hollandia which i’ve never heard off. Probably even the Dutch homeless would frown upon this particular lager.
Some Finnish ‘specialties’ I’ve sampled over the last few months include Olvi, Koff, Lapin Kulta, Karhu and some others not worth remembering. I’ve listed them in the order I like them best. Olvi and Koff are quite tolerable though both a bit lacking in taste. Lapin Kulta and Karhu are definately worse. Both come with a strong taste, but quite unlike beer. Lapin means rabbit in French and I suppose kulta could very well mean piss in the beautiful but difficult finnish language. Nevertheless it seems to be quite popular here. All of these ‘beers’ exist in ‘normal’ variations as well. Koff in the pub is quite allright, actually. However, drinking any of the Finnish beers in large quantities is not recommended. At 4.7% they will have almost the same effect as normal beers. However, the taste (or lack theroff) makes the whole experience not quite as enjoyable as it would normally be.
Luckily there is another option for the thirsty supermarket shopper: British & Irish stouts and ales. These are very popular in the supermarkets here. And for very good reason. With an alcohol percentage typically below 4.7% no dirty tricks need to be performed on these fine beers to make it legal to sell them. Currently I am enjoying a nice can of Boddingtons (an ale from Manchester), conveniently containing only 4.7% of alcohol. Other beers I’ve enjoyed over the past few weeks are Guinness, Caffrey’s and Murphy’s. There’s quite a few more brands I can try. I’ve even sampled a few tschechian beers which are quite enjoyable as well.
x-plane 8.32
Posted by Jilles in Uncategorized on March 10, 2006
The previous time I posted about x-plane, it was to comment on the then newly released world scenery, which at the time I could only admire via the provided screenshots. Also I was waiting to order a new PC. Well the new PC is in use for a couple of months now and today that 6 dvds I ordered last weekend arrived today. The six dvds cover the world until a little south of Helsinki (too bad) and north of Antartica. When I say cover, I really mean cover. Cover, as in 60 GB of goodness.
It shows. The x-plane world is very detailed. I only tried out a few areas. I took off from Newark to land (well sort off, didn’t make much of an effort to make it a proper landing) at la Guardia a few miles distance. This is a nice route that crosses manhattan and really shows off the flightsimulator and scenery. Basically the upper limit of what you get to see is cpu and memory bound. I have a dual core amd X4400 with 2GB. Plenty of horse power, but not nearly enough for the maximum settings. Clearly this architecture is built for the future (i.e. next decade). Luckily, it all scales down very well. Basically the scenery consists of very detailed terrain and generated objects. The generated objects take into account terrain type; area and expected building height. The settings for the amount you can display range from none, few, default, lots, tons to extreme. It’s tempting to go to extreme.
After all I have a dual core machine with a nice nvidia 7800 GT card. Plenty of horse power for running doom 3 or half life 2 at maximum settings at 1600×1200. However, extreme really is extreme. When flying over new york in real life there are buildings in every direction as far as the eye can see. With the settings set to extreme and visibility to 20 Miles, you literally have tens of thousands of objects in visual range. I doubt PCs exist that can draw that at a reasonable framerate today. And flight simulators require a reasonable framerate of course.
Adding to the problem is the roads setting, which, when set to extreme, draws every road it knows about in visual range. That too is quite a bit of road when flying over NY since it uses actual map data to render roads. So in short, reasonable framerates on my machine mean trading off between viewing distance, number of objects, number of roads, texture resolution (when set to extreme it eats video ram like crazy). Forget about using the maximum setting for any of those except maybe texture resolution. Luckily everything still looks great with the settings moderated a bit.
It’s just really frustrating to be constantly aware of the fact that you are not seeing close to 25% of the data available to you because your bad ass gaming machine just hasn’t got the super computer capability required to do so. It still looks very realistic of course, no complaints about that.
Besides, NY is just a place to take off or land. The beauty of this scenery is that you can fly to say Chicago and have plenty to see on the way. All terrain features are there, mountains, hills, canyons, highways, towns, small villages, rivers, lakes and other things you normally see from the air, all in the right place. Coastlines are extremely detailed (all the NY piers are there). Setting roads and objects to their default settings sort of removes the suggestion of flying over a real city but the rest of the terrain stays as detailed as it is.
When you leave new york in MS flight simulator (which fits easily on a single layer DVD) there’s not much to see. Grey and blue lines suggest where by approximation main roads and rivers should be. The terrain is dull with autogen scenery roughly corresponding to what it thinks the terrain should look like based on the limited data it has. It’s a desert of dullness out there.
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