it can be difficult to remember exactly when all the super markets close here in helsinki – all sundays in spring they are closed, then they open up – but not the next sunday after that (as its finnish mothers day). then they open up again. can cause some confusion.

a few hours spent messing with phpicalendar, its template, css and javascript files. its not perfect, its not even all that useful to pretty much everyone on the planet – but thats what the internet is all about. ishelsinkiopen.com

so on the homepage of rté i notice a flash graphic with a picture of the boys in green:

i click on the picture and im taken to the next page

hmm, no id like the score please. video only works in ireland, audio works worldwide but i could be listening for a few minutes before i actually get to hear the score and get an overview of what i missed…

i do notice “irish international” over on the left hand sidedbar. i click and i see the following:

so irelands biggest soccer match of a few months and no story updated about the match in eight hours! no word on the team, the first half etc. madness.

same thing happened a few months back when ireland played new zealand in rugby. the match was on at 1715 irish time, i checked the rte website at 2120 finnish time (1920 irish time) and there was nothing whatsoever about the match – probably because ireland got hammered. it seemed that the entire rugby section wasnt updated since before the irish rugby match started, indeed the only mention of the match was a match preview story from the day before.

my almost daily heckling of rte.ie goes on.

(to give rté its fair dues, im sure their coverage on radio + television of both matches in question was fantastic)

as of right now last.fm has 36,658 members in finland (population of 5,2 million) – ireland has 6,072 members (population of 4,1 million)

living in an epicentre of mobile telecommunications i am expected (by some of my friends in ireland) to have a super fancy nokia phone (the company is finnish – ergo they must be really cheap here – the same logic that had me on my school tour to holland/amsterdam when i was 13 hoping to buy dozens of blank c90 tapes as philips were a dutch company. flawed logic it turned out to be).

phones arent subsidised here in the same way as back in ireland – something that costs 50euros (phone + contract inclusive) would cost 600€ here (phone). so when i came back last week from a few days away i noticed all these ads full of old bulky brick phones “suomessa on melkeinpä euroopaan vanhimmat puhlimet – siirry nykyaikaan” (in finland, the phones are almost the oldest in europe – come into the present). so the anti subsidising law was withdrawn for (3g) phones from april the 1st. so now there is at last some way of getting a cheap phone.

my current operator, saunalahti (a virtual operator), has these amazing deals – in most cases you get a 3g phone for free – but pay 20euros a month (including 3000minutes a month!!!!). a great offer – but a bit overkill for my needs (i make on average 8 minutes of phone calls a month) – it was tempting though!.

in conclusion, the fizzy cola sweet i got in k citymarket yesterday wasnt too nice. fingers crossed some new packages come onto the market soon that give me a free cool phone and free smses or something.

i check my web logs every few days to see whats going on, who is linking to my site and so on. its the needy part of me. anyway, over the last month or so ive seen new people linking to me, not the nice kind but more the spam kind for some reason. i have no idea why. but out of the 468 sites that linked to me so far this month about 80% are stupidily named sites like the ones in the image above. other ones that i was able to block a few weeks back involved learning how to play various types of card games. strange world we live in.