Blog got a new home

I moved this blog in new address: http://huokaus.org/journal

Update your bookmarks and don't bother this address anymore. I converted old posts from here also.

2006

It's soon february and I still don't have a job. I need a job because it's time for my practical training season at school. I have to get five months working experience and my studies continue at September. So 7 months to go and basically, 2 months time to find a job.

Besides that I have two maths courses unfinished that I should have passed already. That means a lot of work at home. Something I hate, and never really been good at: distance training. Fuck it, if I wasn't this lazy I would be in school taking part on every lesson because that helps. It really does!

My bike got stolen (again) a week before christmas eve (24th). I was pissed off at first, but now more than glad actually. I got most of the money spent on it back by insuranse and bought a new one, which I'm totally in love with. (I wish the snow would go away and spring would come and I could go biking and and...)

Anyhow, yesterday they called my from student apartment assosiation thingie and told me that there was this cool apartment for me and my girlfriend available at first of March. That's very cool. We will take it naturally. It's very cheap also.

I got a great inspiration to make levels again and actually made some. Even updated my webpage with record lists and so. Yipee for that. Some time ago today, though, I tried to make just a regular level but failed. It turned out to be truly horrible - basically just another stupid level with nothing new to offer, nothing exciting at all. I tried to fix it but I got absolutely nothing out of my head.
I heard a voice in my head telling me that "this isn't your thing, leave it for the people who know what they do!".

Shortly after that I realized that it's not me. At this state I feel that mostly every level sucks and is a repetation after another. Maybe I'm just too tired.

I am the walrus. I am the walrus. I am the walrus.
I watched The Big Lebowski again yesterday. What a hilarious movie.

Suhina the Hedgehog

On June earlier this summer my girlfriend finally decided to get an own hedgehog. It's been her dream many years and now she got a great opportunity she just couldn't turn down to. Hedgehogs are not very cheap, this 'African Midget-Hedgehog', or however it's written in english, was well over four hundread euros. I was suprised also how valuable they are. I guess it's not any big deal if you really want one and know you'll love it.

Along with Suhina we also obtained a nice two-floor box for him which is really nice. It has a runner, opportunity to take a sandbath and a little cottage for him covered with soft fabric to make sure he can sleep well during days.

Yes indeed, hedgehogs are night animals, which I find very unfortunate. This fellow wakes up around midnight and stays up about four to six hours and starts sleeping again. Lazy animals? Well at least Suhina loves to use the runner and he really messes up his box in just one night. Can you imagine, he actually craps while he's running the wheel.

A real bachelor flat if you ask me.

Suhina, just as hedgehogs in general loves to have their food contain grasshoppers and different kind of worms. Preferably alive. Now isn't that just wonderful? :-)

Suji

During our holiday abroad we decided that after we'll get back home we will seriously start looking for a little baby cat.
It took a while because we don't have the possibility to go very far. We had to be quick because only two more weeks till regular school and work starts. The kitten has to get used to his new home before we can leave him alone with our two dogs.

Then all of a sudden we found an excellent announcement. The place was very close to us, around 10km away. Next day we went to see the place and as soon as we saw Suji, we fell in love to him at once. His mother gave birth to five babies, his father is unknown.

Suji was ours.

His name Suji comes from japan, meaning stripe. Suji has two beautiful stripes at the back area of his upper body. Suji's earlier name was 'Pontus'. We didn't like it at all so we gave him a new own name.

Then the most interesting and worrying part, showing our dogs their new family member. At first it looked like it didn't go too well since they were all over Suji. Couple of days passed and things started to change little by little. Dogs weren't so interested in what he does, and what's the most nicest thing is that Suji isn't afraid of the dogs at all. He hardly notices them during his cute little games.

Now it's been six days since Suji got here and every day he's more enertic. I have little worries if he will be too enertic. We'll just have to teach him the way we live here.

Sunny Beach, Bulgaria

Imagine Bulgaria, what do you see? I personally wasn't aware hardly at all in what kind of state the country is. We saw many beautiful pictures of Bulgaria's tourist attraction cities and they looked really allright. One of those was Sunny Beach. It wasn't too expensive either, so we booked that last winter.

Finally it was time to go at August 7th. I haven't been on an airplane for over fifteen years; I didn't think it was such a big deal and all. It's just flying, thousands of people do that every day. Our airline was Bulgaria Air, unfortunately. I really would preferred Finnair but things aren't too fancy when doing it the cheap way.



Ok, finally at the plane. I even got a window seat. Then it happened, fear took over me. Stressfully long way to the main runway. Slowly the plane drove towards it and then it really was time for take-off. The whole experience is really fascinating if you haven't experienced it for so long time.

Three hours later we arrived at Burgas airport. A bus took us to the building where our passports was about to be checked. Oh, how fun was that. On our line there was this guy who spoke bad english and was asking all kind of more or less strange things from passangers, it wasn't very pleasant so to speak. I don't understand how could it take so long to check a freaking passport! I'd say it took about five minutes for each person.

Finally after that we got to the 'other side'. There was our traveling guides waiting for us and directed us to the correct bus, to Hotel Continental ***. One side note, the weather in Finland before we left was quite cool, cloudy and so. Naturally, it wasn't that hot in airplane either, so when we step outside the plane at Burgas, I first thought there was some really warm cooler or something blowing towards us till I realized that all it was, was just plain sunshine. It felt really warm. The whole bus trip to our hotel was quite painful. ;)



Burgas was around 35 kilometers from Sunny Beach. The bus trip went well and the travel guide talked all kinf of things about Bulgaria. The first impression of this country: quite... strange. It was clear to me immediately that we are talking about a poor country. There was ruined buildings all over, cute but sad looking donkeys and the whole view was sad. Well, we drove trough one or two little poor towns. At this point I was ready to face anything as our hotel. This just didn't felt good.

Then all of a sudden we drove into another world. A world of beautiful hotels and streets full of restaurants and shops. It was Sunny Beach. A beautiful 'thing' built over a poor land. It's was like an oasis at the desert. We arrived to our hotel which was pleasant as well.

Sunny Beach is full of little street shops offering you brand clothes for ridiculously cheap prizes. Somehow it felt wrong seeing and old granpa walking in diesel outfit. ^^





The beach was magnificient! 6 kilometers of clean and fine burning sand of The Black Sea. Salty Black Sea, what an experience it was to swim on it. Though I didn't like the fact that you could walk 100 meters while still only having water as high as on your knees.



Local currency was Leva. One euro meant two levas. Therefore comparing prizes was really easy. A regular pizza cost 4 levas which was 2 euros. Not that much. Btw, if you happen to order 'meatballs Bouliar style', don't actually expect getting _balls_. Instead you get a 1.5cm thick ground meat stake. Oh well.. it was allright as it's taste. Drinks wasn't that expensive either. I just loved the happy hour, almost in every restaurant you get two drinks in a prize of one. :)





We knew the hygiene part wasn't very good at Bulgaria so we were careful with it. Never water from faucet, only bottled. Always disinfect hands before eating and so.

It was our fourth day of our week holiday. We ate a regular breakfast, another pizza as lunch. Then we found this shop serving ice cream. We ate different types of ice cream but it didn't stop us from getting our stomachs bad. What a painful evening it turned out. My girlfriend got all right at the morning but my stomach was bad till next evening. Ouch. Then luckily it got all right as well. Next day, our sixth we both realized that we were about to get a local flu or something. Our throats were itching strangely. Anyway, it wasn't so bad yet so we continued our holiday. Later on saturday the flu got really bad, my girlfriend couldn't actually move at all from bed. How unfortunate. Luckily it was our last day and we were already missing home.

Oh the joy of waking up on our last day at 2:30am. Our bus to airstation departed at 3:30am. Ah well, it wasn't so bad, we get to sleep at airplane and the time went by quickly.



It sure felt wonderful to be back in Finland. Everything just feels so much better here. I'm just happy I've been granted the possibility to live in such a developed country.

Chilling, chilling...

What's been happening lately?

Well, June went by and I'm unemployed but that doesn't matter really. It's been a long time since I had so much free time at summer. I'm just chilling.

I got my new bike some weeks ago and I've been cycling alot. During past week I bought a better cycling meter for the new bike and so far total riding distance is ~100km and I wasn't even riding this week that much. Yesterday for example I was at our friend's wedding whole day.

Yeah, yesterday's weddings, those were my first ones. Great weather and good food, cool!

My old bike got stolen last week. At the middle of the day from train station. Too bad. It was parked next to my new bike but it was there so I was actually more relieved than angry. It was in pretty bad condition anyway.

Weather has been really, really great during past weeks and it seems to be great for the next week also. Tomorrow we'll be leaving with Shira and Yvane to my grandparents summer place at Särkisalo. It should be really fun. What a terrible timing with this new World Cup 512 level being released. ^^

Wasted

Unfortunately I couldn't find a solution to fix the damn pedal problem with my bike.
I'm simply unable to attach the pedal properly because the body of the bike, where the pedals are being attached is damaged. I've tried to fix it by trying various of things without success.

I bought the bike under two months ago. It was old used costing me only 25 euros (+ expenses to bring it here) which made like 35 euros all in all. After that I have bought several things including saddle for 10 euros, brake lumps for 3 euros, chain for 7 euros, chain fastening part for 2 euros, basic travel meter for 7 euros, a socket only for attaching pedal for 3 euros and a spoke key for adjusting rims for 5 euros. I also bought several basic tools needed to do specific things which I didn't have yet but that's okay since I will need them anyway. So all in all I could say that the whole package has cost me around 60-70€. That's not much compared to the things that I learned along the way.

I decided to give up. Fixing the problem would have cost quite some money and I didn't think it's worth that because the bike itself is so old. I surfed to my favorite netshop where I could buy things for part payment and found this cute thing for 199 euros. Hopefully it arrives during next week.

The other day I got a nice little job, I cleaned one familys laptop from several viruses and an annoying trojan horse. They paid me 50 euros for that. I try to think that for money compensating the expenses I had with my current bike. Heh.

It rained whole yesterday. My wish came true.

Relaxing sunday, in a way

I became ill again. Just a flu I think. Throat hurts and I feel exhausted. Good that I have no things to do, even on monday (how nice is that?)

I still have some troubles with my bike and there seems to be no good solution to it. I guess I'll just have to give up and start getting used to it. I have one thing still to try though. But as usual, it probably doesn't work (wow, that's was positive).

Other than that, I feel quite relaxed. I'll just clean my desk, maybe take a shower and play Final Fantasy VIII some more. I'm around 60% of completion and it's really nice this time when I have really paid attention to the script.

World Cup

Across/Elastomania has it's fifth world cup going on. Even though I knew I haven't played the game 'seriously' (seriously in this context should be defined seperately) for a very long time, I decided to play this one 'seriously'.

Now, after four weeks and four events, here we are. I played the latest level probably more than any of the three past events and I had high expectations after last sunday. Having high expectations meant for me that I wanted to fight in top-5.

Week went by and it ended up being a disaster. I ended up over twenty seconds behind the winning time. This has really been the most frustrating world cup event for me till now.

My positions on the last events has been 24th, 30th, 20th and some another not-so-good position on this fourth event.

Seems to me that I just don't have it what it takes to compete world class anymore. In a way it's sad, but it doesn't matter. I'm happy I can still get myself to compete 'seriously'. I just don't have the desire to success anymore. How could I be angry to myself because of that? It's just a plain natural thing that we all are going to dash against at some point.

On the other hand, it pissess me off because I'm not able to help my team to compete as well as I hoped for. I think they had some expectations of me. Well, I think they can live with that. I'm just really happy I belong to such a nice team that I don't have to stress about things like these so much.

So what's going to happen next? I will probably keep on scattering to even more pieces along the world cup. I will just, from now on try to make it not that 'serious' for me. I would not like to hear my girlfriend asking me again "how long do I have to keep listening your raging?"