we listen to radionova in work, its a pretty mainstream radiostation with lots of the same songs over and over. my work day is about six hours, so i can expect to hear every song at least twice over those few hours. (this is their top 20 most played songs, which i am pretty sure is their entire playlist)

1. lara fabian - wonderful life 2. yö - pettävällä jäällä 3. kalle ahola - rumat lapset 4. juha tapio - arvaamatta tuuli kääntyy vastaan 5. christian walz - wonderchild 6. zen cafe - taivas on kirkas ja napakka 7. anastacia - heavy on my heart 8. titiyo - lovin’ out of nothing 9. good charlotte - i just wanna live 10. laura bono - non credo nei miracoli 11. within temptation - memories 12. maroon 5 - sunday morning 13. k-maro - femme like u 14. katariina hänninen - paha tuuli 15. geri halliwell - ride it 16. kent - max 500 17. negative - about my sorrow 18. europe - the final countdown 19. rob thomas - lonely no more 20. avril lavigne - nobody’s home

the n series by nokia got me a little worked up/hyper on wednesday when i first read about it. the centrepiece of the series is the n91; it looks good, has a built in 4gb hard drive along with endless other features and is being tipped by some people to be an “ipod killer“, all thats very well and good.. but the one thing that gets me is that the phone wont be released until the end of the year! the length of time between the unveiling and the shipping should be as short as possible, by the time its released it will be just another one in a crowd of mobile phones with hard discs built in.

i am sure that the engineers are working away to get the prodict finished and ready for mass production in time for the fourth quarter of the year, but why are we hearing about it now?. whenever a product is unveiled there is always a lot of people talking about it, its new features, the way it affects the current marketplace due to its features and so on, but the problem i have with this phone is that by the time it is actually introduced the market and the world around it will have moved on.

in comparison with nokias style of unveiling products is that of apple. they announce on a monday and sell on the tuesday, thereby taking advantage of the instant hype that their unveiling generates. “here is our new blah blah” shouts steve jobs “… you can buy it tomorrow in apple.com or in your local apple store”. in (perhaps an unfair) comparison to that of this n series phone “here it is! … you can buy it somewhere in the last three months of this year in a local phone shop, that is of course depending on your location in the world, oh and just before we start to sell this phone, we will unveil a new even better phone that will go on sale in the q3 2006″.

i still want one though now i have lots of time to start saving!

helsingin sanomat buys radio helsinki!

a bit of a surprise when i read it this morning, but from what i understand from the article there will be a lot of “cross marketing -mahdollisuuksia” between nyt (the newspapers friday events supplement) and radio helsinki. makes sense.

(update: english version of the helsingin sanomat article here)

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blogger tests darren.

after spending some time at the pixelache festival, we walked around kiasma for a while. as per usual so many good things going on there. highlights were some pictures of ireland and other places by finnish photographer heli rekula (one of the pictures/video instillations was of an island off the coast of ireland that i only knew by its english name (the great blasket island) but in this piece it was labelled using its original irish name “an blascaod mór” so it took me a few seconds to decipher it).

other interesting pieces where some photos by finnish artist miklos gaál. i had seen some of them before in a magazine we got in college from the finnish paper maker amerpap. the photos are for the most part out of focus, but have a streak running through them that is in focus. these in focus parts give an optical illusion of everything being in minature, its a really nice effect and something that is hard to describe. there are two examples on this page (the top one being heitaranta (a beach) and the bottom pic is of a protest march, both being taken in helsinki city centre)

next up came my favourite. the piece was called “kylä” (village) and it is by the finnish artist jaakko niemelä. it has a disc of about 1metre diameter rotating. on this disc is a small town made out of wire to give a wireframe look. a light shined upon the rotating village and the shadow created (in the picture below) was such a simple yet incredibly effective piece, i sat there staring at it for ages as it spun around and around and around. i want it

after this a piece by the finnish artist ilkka halso caught my eye, but it wasnt until yesterday when i was reading an article about him in fin magazine (more about this soon) that i realised that it was all computer generated. the image called “theatre 1″ had a computer generated auditorium, but the stage was a waterfall. when i saw it in kiasma i thought it was some fancy new japanese theatre, but it was all an illusion. the series is on his website you can download a pdf of the series or just look at the images. some really fantastic ideas and effects on there.

update: some of exhibits end today (24th of april) so hurry if its today and you are in helsinki.

we went to a few of the performances at the pixelache 2005 festival last weekend that was held (mostly) in kiasma. i went to a talk on wikipedia in the morning that was mildly interesting, it was pretty early so i think everyone was still a bit sleepy. in the afternoon we saw two performances in the main auditorium.

the first (pictured above) was called “a day on earth - what time is it?”, two screens tell of two people, one in japan (yasuko tadokoro) and one in montreal (thien vu dang), music was provided by christelle franca and patrick watson. the two scenes on screen showed the days of the two people, doing the same thing at the same time, showers, cycling, walking around and so on. a really nice performance.

the next performance was an odd one. called “iis:006″ by rybn/eol, it used visual, aural and olfactory senses. it consisted of a lot of photos of (i think) paris using long exposure, then depending on what was on screen various odours were released to give a more real sense of what was going on. the music used was pretty intense for most of the piece. all in all it worked pretty okay, it was a bit too long, too loud and my clothes did smell too much after it all but it did leave much more of an impact than the first piece earlier did. some of the effects used in the long exposure images was incredibly effective and if i didnt loose my camera a few weeks back i would be out taking similar pictures but alas i cant. the odours released were for the most part slightly overpowering and almost distracting, at only one point did it work perfectly : a scene that had several photos of a desk with a bunch of flowers followed a few seconds later the smell of flowers wafted through the theatre. fantastic stuff.

today out of the blue, some friends emailed me a song i was looking for in 1998.

finnish isnt in the top 100 languages of the world, if i had thought about it before i wouldnt have been all that surprised when i did find it out today. on a related linguistic matter, i did find a page that has an example of the 2,253 different forms a finnish noun can take.

the march issue (no. 417) of the french photography magazine “photo” has some great pictures from the “ashes and snow” exhibition i talked about two weeks ago. go check it out as it gives a great impression of the overall style of the show. also some pretty incredible and disturbing tsunami images in that issue.

flights booked for some time in dublin, then up to northern ireland for my sisters communion, then beatriz wedding in madrid, then a few days home in limerick then back up to dublin. may 20th to june6th. jeooow