Posts Tagged finland
Photos Nov 2008 -Now
Posted by Jilles in Blog Posts on April 13, 2009
I finally found some time to upload some photos.
I went to Berlin in November to apply for the job I now have. Then I spent Christmas in France. After that, I moved into a temporary flat in Berlin on February 1st. On my first visit back in Finland, I visited a friend in Espoo who lives close to the sea, which was frozen. Finally I took some nice photos of Berlin in my first few weeks here.
The nicest of which is the view I had from my temporary flat:
I no longer live there and photos of my new place are coming soon. I probably will take a few at my upcoming house warming party: Friday 17th from 21:00, feel free to drop by if you are near.
Time for a little update
Posted by Jilles in Blog Posts on April 1, 2009
Hmm, it’s been more than two months since I last posted. Time for an update. A lot has happened since January.
So,
- I moved out of Finland as planned.
- I stayed in a temporary apartment for a month. Central-home is the company managing the facility where I lived (on Habersaathstrasse 24) and if you’re looking for temporary housing in Berlin, look no further.
- I managed to find a nice apartment for long term in Berlin Mitte, in the Bergstrasse, which is more or less walking distance from tourist attractions like Alexanderplatz, Hackeschermarkt, Friedrichstrasse and of course the Brandenburger Tor.
- I re-aquainted myself with Java, Java development, and lately also release management. Fun days of hacking but the normal Nokia routine of meetings creeping into my calendar is sadly kicking in.
- I learned tons of new stuff
- Unfortunately German is not yet one of those things. My linguistic skills are ever pathetic and English remains the only foreign language I ever managed to master more or less properly. On paper German should be dead easy since I can get by mumbling in my native language and people can still figure out what I want. In practice, I can understand it if spoken slowly (and clearly). Speaking back is challenging.
- I’m working on it though, once a week, in a beginners class. Relearning stuff that 3 years of trying to stuff German grammar in my head in High-school did not accomplish.
Moving is tedious and tiresome. But the end result is some genuine improvement in life. I absolutely love Berlin and am looking forward to an early Spring. I was in a telco with some Finnish people today discussion the weather. They, so how’s Berlin. Any snow there still? Me: no about 20 degrees outside right now 
. Nice to have spring start at the normal time again. Not to mention the more sane distribution of daylight and darkness, throughout the year.
A shitload of updates is overdue. For several months already. I have a ton of photos to upload. Wordpress needs upgrading. And some technical stuff might need some blogging about as well. Then there is still some unfinnished papers in the pipeline. So, I’ll be back with more. Some day.
Nearly leaving Helsinki
Posted by Jilles in Blog Posts on January 28, 2009
I realize, I haven’t posted to my blog for quite a while. Part of the reason is that I have been busy organizing my move to Berlin. Another part is that the hosting solution I use for this blog has some scalability problem that I seem to run into whenever I try to do anything. I’ve given up several times on posting. No time to resolve it right now, but I will after my move to Berlin (i.e. adios suckers: I’m going to find more competent hosting). For the same reason, I have been neglecting photos.jillesvangurp.com. There’s some Berlin photos waiting to be uploaded (from my job interview in December) and of course Christmas photos from my parents place in France (again).
Speaking of Berlin, I’m moving there next Sunday already. My plan is to move into a nice furnished apartment on the Habersaathstrasse courtesy of a company specialized in this sort of thing: central-home.de. They were one of a few places recommended by a new colleague (thanks!) who also moved to Berlin recently. The place seems nice enough and the killer feature is that it is 200 meter from work, which should help cut down on those commute times. I’ll use this as a base to find a nice new apartment to move my stuff in. I’ll have to fly back to Helsinki a couple of times in February for work and to get my things moved at the end of the month.
Aside from that, it seems my stay in Helsinki is coming to an end. I had imagined my last week to be a little more fun but as it is, I’m in bed with a pretty bad flu. I’ve been flu free for nearly a year but last Friday it came back with a vengeance. Fever, sore throat, total absence of desire for anything resembling food, tired, etc. In short, flu sucks. In any case, by Friday I should have recovered enough for a little get together with some colleagues in the one pint pub in Ruoholahti (16:00). Feel welcome to drop by if I somehow managed to not invite you.
Finnish politics and SMS
Posted by Jilles in Blog Posts on April 1, 2008
What is it with Finnish politics and SMS messages? First prime minister Vanhanen dumps his girlfriend by SMS and now a foreign minister gets fired over some SMS messages to a stripper.
Dutch beer
Posted by Jilles in Blog Posts on November 7, 2007
While doing my shopping today I encountered a whole pile of six packs of “Royal Dutch“. On closer inspection of this beer that I never heard of, I learned that it is actually brewed in license of Posthorn, a brewery based in my home town (if there is such a thing), of Breda. WTF! I have never heard of this brewery and I was born in the damn place. Googling for Posthorn, or post hoorn as it would no doubt be spelled in dutch I was not able to bring up much more than this. A pretty sad party center on the Haagweg. Note the rather generic, mirrored logo on the can here.
Knowing something of Breda beer history, this is probably what is left of the Oranjeboom beer that until a few years ago was brewed in Breda. Basically interbev liquidated (pun intended) the whole brand and closed down the brewery in Breda. I have no idea what the Royal qualification in Royal Dutch refers to. I don’t imagine our water managing crown prince Willem-Alexander of Orange (aka. prince beer) had anything to do with this.
Of course Post Horn duely added water to meet the Finnish super market beer upper limit for alcohol of 4.7%. I must say, it tastes better than the average finnish beer. Similar to Becks if I’d have to pick something similar. I’ve tried several different Finnish brands in the nearly two years I’ve spent here and basically have decided that any non Finnish beer is probably better than any Finnish beer. I’ve sampled some pretty obscure foreign brands, even from my own home country, and they all taste better than boring Olvi, Karhu, Lapin Kulta or Koff. Especially the supermarket varieties of those are filthy stuff.
This Royal Dutch, is the second brand of fictional dutch beers I’ve encountered in the supermarkets here. The other one is labeled “Amsterdam”, which is apparently not worthy of the Grolsch brand of the beer company that produces it. Grolsch actually is pretty nice and I’ve even encountered a Finnish 4.7% export version of it in some supermarkets. Complete with the obligatory “beugel” bottle. Amsterdam is a pale shadow of this and indeed not worthy of the brand.
Digiboksi
Posted by Jilles in Uncategorized on September 24, 2007
Digiboksi is Finglish for DVB-C set top box. I bought one on saturday and had it replaced today by a different one.
Basically the story is that Finland is replacing good old analogue TV with digital tv. Terrestial analogue signal went dark a few months ago. A few weeks ago the ‘interesting’ channels (i.e. the ones in english) disappeared from the cable and the rest will follow in February.
So, I went to the shop for a digiboksi. Since I barely watch TV, I just wanted something that was cheap & something that worked. So I pretty much randomly selected the Samsung DCB-B263Z in the shop (hey it was black, matches my other equipment). Normally I’d do some research on the internet for such a purchase. Unfortunately this product seems to be specialized for the Finnish market so most info available seems in Finnish. Hence the randomness.
So I bought it, plugged it in and about ten minutes later was watching TV. I was quite pleased with the picture quality. The UI seemed nice too. Then it crashed. WTF! Anyway, to keep this short: it is a known issue, basically the shops are selling products with broken software. Sigh. So, after about 4 crashes in less than 24 hours, I went back to the shop today and mentioned the word crash. No need for further explanation. Apparently, lots of people are bringing these things back (I know at least one other guy). Five minutes later I walked out with a Handan 3400.
So far it seems reasonably well behaved though the picture quality is slightly less nice than the samsung (was a bit smoother and crispier). I managed to improve it slightly by disabling the built in contrast. If this one crashes as well, I’ll try another brand.
websites and stupid assumptions
Posted by Jilles in Uncategorized on August 27, 2007
I just went to a blog and wanted to leave a comment. So the site redirects to blogger.com where I can leave a comment. The site correctly detects I am located in Finland. Very good! That’s so clever! Amazing what you can do these days!
The only problem is that like most of this world (barring around 4-5 million native speakers) I don’t speak Finnish. Not a word. Really, I have a coffee mug that lists pretty much all knowledge I have of this beautiful but incomprehensible language. I haven’t even managed to memorize most of that. And somehow I don’t believe “maksa makkara” (pay the sausage?) is going to help me here.
So, no problem, lots of sites make this mistake. Just click the little “gimme the english version” link that surely must be hidden somewhere …. missing in action. So I check the url …. no obvious way to change fi to en there either. Maybe on the frontpage …. nope, www.blogger.com insists on Finnish as well. So www.blogger.com is unusable for me. Lets just hope it doesn’t spread to the rest of the world. That would be really annoying.
Anyway, this assumption of setting the language based on IP address is just stupid and wrong. First of all, the site should respect my browser settings: doesn’t list Finnish, at all. Neither does my OS. And the browser sends this information as part of the http headers so you can know that my preferred language is US-en. Secondly, Finland is bilingual and for some 500.000 people the right language would have been Swedish. I happen to speak some Swedish at least. And finally any modern country like Finland has a large number of travelers, tourists and migrant workers like me. So not offering a way out is just stupid. Confronting hundreds of thousands of users (just in Finland) with the wrong language when each of them is providing you with their preferred language is even more stupid. Additionally, not offering a link for English is just retarded.
Husky Rescue
Posted by Jilles in Blog Posts on February 26, 2007
I should listen stuff I don’t know more often than I do. Husky Rescue is a cool Helsinki based band with a nice new album called “Ghost is not real”. Well recommended.
Winter has come
Posted by Jilles in Blog Posts on January 23, 2007
I thought it was a bit chilly this morning while walking to work. I just checked with forecastfox: -18, five degrees colder than was predicted yesterday evening for last night .
Finally, winter has come.
Musa sapientum fixa est in aure
Posted by Jilles in Uncategorized on May 2, 2006
A long time ago, I learned Latin in school. Latin is a dead language, and other than appreciating sites like this, it is of little use to me. In fact, I’ve forgotten most of what I learned.
But today I discovered a nice web site, kindly provided by the Finnish broadcasting company, that might be useful to me. My Finnish is still maginitudes worse than my skill in many other languages, including swedish, greek, portughese, spanish, french, italian, latin and rivalled only by my ignorance of e.g. japanese and chinese. So reading the news in Latin might actually work for me .
Sola lingua bona est lingua mortua
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