A smooth 3x17" setup. Though, one screen was for my OpenBSD box, and two for my main desktop. I was running Xubuntu back then it would seem. I also seem to remember trying Gentoo for a few months around that time, but i don't think i have any pictorial evidence to support my claims. The cactus on the left there sadly passed away last month after years of malnurishment and bad care.

Here we have my iBook G4 (also taken in 2006) that i had back in college, as well as my Nokia E60. I liked that phone. Man it was built to fucking last, and it had Symbian S60 on it. What you see there is my right hand, the iBook, and the phone during some lecture. The phone, if i recall, was running some S60 IRC-client, so i could uh.. multitask? Something inane like that, but it felt cool at time time. A lot of us had Apple laptops back then. Some had Sony's.

There's one last apartment of my own that I don't seem to find any pictures of. My first place after I moved away from my parents in '05.  Then of course, I'm going to raid my parent's old photo albums to try and find pictures of my *really* old workstations from the 90's. That ought to be fun!

Some explanations may be in order. No, not all systems were hooked up at the time. But most were in some use or another at some point in time. Either for practicing something, a lab or something, or just in storage before it went to some new owner. On the printer on the left, the Canon Mp500 (which was a good piece of work despite not working in Linux), is a disassembled X-box 360. The first one i owned, which broke, and was out of warranty, so naturally, i had to take it apart.

Those speakers i got from M, and were really fucking good, except they broke down a bit after this picture was taken (i think?). The white box under the desk was my OpenBSD box, which still exists (though in a different piece of hardware, and with a later version of OpenBSD). I still have that Keytronic KT-2000 on the left there, and it's a superb keyboard to this day. The chair sucked dicks, and was discarded later, when i was able to get an old office chair from the company i worked for at the time.

I've done very minor contributions, because I'm not a programmer. More on this later. What I've done includes mostly submitting bug-reports, the odd translation effort here and there, and some documentation (mostly the latter). I've always like documenting stuff, because I know how much it can suck to use a program that has little to no documentation. I've worked in customer service, and in the help desk, so I think I have some kind of idea of what the end user wants to read in regards to documentation. Of course, this isn't based on decades of working with people, but some years.

This question gets tossed around a lot. "How can I help? I couldn't program my way out of a paper bag!". I've taken a few programming courses in my life, trust me. From basic, perl and php to c++ and assembly. But I don't like it. I'm not good at it, which is probably a product of the former statement. If you don't like something, it's generally very hard to get a grasp of the subject. The closest thing I'll do to programming is writing shell scripts, or modifying some existing perl or python script to suit my needs. I can read source and kind of understand what is happening. Kind of like how i know Spanish. I can get the topic of the conversation or the sentence, but god help me if I have to produce anything more than "Una cerveza, por favor". As a kid, I remember me and a friend worked on a role playing game in BASIC. It worked pretty well and we had implemented buying and selling items, gambling and even combat. But then my friend, who later went on to become a whiz kid of mathematics or whatever, suggested we take up a more advanced language and port the game over to that. At this point my interest dwindled and the thing kind of died out.

But I digress. Back to the question: How can I help? The four main answers that usually get spit out are:

• Help new users by tutoring them
• Document something that needs it
• Translate a program
• Report bugs whenever you see them

Helping new users should be second nature to all geeks. We all start out somewhere. B used to say, "Senior guys don't fuck with you, they teach you". Paraphrased. Your mileage will vary, as most people are not so friendly towards the budding geek. Some are outright hostile, telling people with seemingly stupid or simple questions to piss off. This is a major problem in free software and open source in my opinion. Personally, I love explaining how something works, as soon as I understand it myself. It's a few minutes out of your life (as long as you remember your "No, I won't fix your computer" t-shirt), and can set someone off on a lifelong hobby or career.

Documentation. Now this usually splits people down the middle. Sometimes literally. From my experiences, most people hate it. It's that arduous task that someone has to do after a project is completed, because no one thought of doing it as they went along. Documentation, I am afraid to say, is usually of utter shit quality; hard to read, badly structured and written for someone like the writer (as opposed to a new user). Gurus will rarely look at documentation anyway, except when smoke starts rising, so why not gear it toward the new user instead?

Translation. This I've personally found out is pretty fun. If you're adept at a language, and most of us have at least one primary language that they actually know, why not share it? Some projects make translation easier than others. They give you a file or files and you translate the different bits that are designated, like pieces of the UI, menus etc. Though, not everyone has a knack for language, and the result ends up as a horrible mess. But at least it's a start. Usually better than google translate, anyway.

Reporting bugs. This is a mixed bag. Some programs make it very easy to report bugs. This is key. If reporting bugs is a fucking hassle, nobody will ever bother, except for the developers, and they rarely see all of the weird issues that the actual users do. If you've ever done help desk duties or tech support, you know that sometimes the end users can create such a mess inside a program, I doubt any automated testing or developers poking around would have found. They should be the ones doing testing. But since they are not as savy as you, the developer, you need to meet them in the middle. If a crash happens, and it's fairly controlled, give the user an option to automagically collect relevant data about the software, the plaform it's running on etc, and then send it off, along with a brief description of what you were doing. Some are really good at this, like Firefox. Some are notoriously bad.

Also, a bane in any bug reporting system is usually duplicates. New users have no idea that there could possibly be someone else with the same issue, and the end result is 50 reports on the same issue. And then you have devs and community managers running round telling people to "search first and then report". If this isn't easy, nobody will bother. Granted, usually someone will either point the user in the right direction, or even merge the issues. Sometimes, all they get are some hasty quips and a closed bug report. Improving these systems, in my opinion, should be a priority. Make the system look up key words from already posted bugs, and then try to match those up with what the user is writing. If we find similarities, suggest courses of action, or give clear, simple instructions on how to proceed with uncertainties.

Users also neglect to report key issues, and instead the reports are usually "I was typing and all of a sudden everything went black, please fix it!!!!11". The solution might be user education, but also, automated data gathering, and clearer instructions on what to include and in what kind of format.

Of course, none of these issues will fix people that simply neglect every bit of documentation, information and guidelines. But it's a start.

In closing, not everyone is a programmer. I remember back in college, a lot of courses centered on programming. And I felt desperate. Is this all IT is? Programming in different languages? The school seemed to think so. Some pushed through. Most didn't. I think out of some 40 odd students in my class, less than 10 graduated.

And eventually, I found what i was looking for: A job in IT that isn't programming. And here I am, installing server clusters for programmers to use as platforms. Who'da thunk it? It isn't all just programming!

So that's upcoming.

First things first. My grandfather passed away on the morning of the 13th last month. He was 91. I ofcourse, attended the funeral, and I was a pallbearer. It was a short and beautiful event, though sad. Crazily enough, it was the first funeral i've attended. And i'm close to 30 years old. I guess they'll become more common as i get older ...

Ok, sad subjects aside, and onwards. I finished my mega-reading project, "REAMDE" by Neal Stephenson. I'm probably going to spoil some, so if you wish to be unspoilt, move to the nexst paragraph. The book was a whopping 1100 pages or so, and possibly the longest book i've ever read (i'm not even sure my 60's paperback edition of Lord of the Rings is longer?). The book starts off as a rivetting drama, but in the end decays to cheap thrills and action, in my humble opinion. The characters are well built, and some are downright likable. The main plot sounds interesting: chinese gold-miners strike back with a virus that extorts people to give away their virtual money, which is then converted to real life currency. The book centers around the maker of the game, and his family. The events are kicked off when some russian gangsters have their money stolen by the chinese goldminers,, and go on a revenge-binge. Sounds cool? I thought so too. But the last few hundred pages lose sight of thise entirely, and even the game is pretty much forgotten. Instead, we're wrapped in this cat and mouse game that is played between Islamic terrorists, and a bunch of more or less innocent people caught in their wake, somewhere in Brittish Columbia.

I'm not sure what I'll read next. I considered The Hunger Games, but then, everyone is reading that, plus it might be a kids book like Harry Potter, so I'm not so sure I want to risk it. Plus it's three parts or whatever? Another series i considered was Game of Thrones. I've seen season one, and reading anymore will most certainly spoil the rest of the show for me. Then again, people usually say you should read the book before you see the film. I don't know. I've considered Kevin Mitnick's autobiography "Ghost In the Wires", but i haven't gotten around to ordering that yet.

Cabin-season is beginning. We're heading out this easter weekend. We had massive storm damage during december, so there's a lot of stuff to work on once we get there. We bought a new chainsaw so we can start working on cleaning the lot. We'll have enough firewood to last us, honestly, a decade. I'm really looking forward to going there. I've missed the place, i've missed the projects, the nature. Which is a stark contrast to what i do for a living: sitting in front of a computer 8-14 hours every day. But i love that too, don't get me wrong.

I was raging over some random blog, where a chick is describing how a bar used to be different in the "good old days". And then i remember this chick is 22 years old. Now, i don't know how young she was when she used to hang out in that bar in the "good old days", but uh.. *grinding of gears*

Augh. Well, the weekend went well. It was slightly cold, but not too cold to do things. We were cleaning up the yard from that storm i wrote about. There's so much crap everywhere it's not even funny. Warmed up the sauna for the first time this season, which was fun. We had to break the ice, literally, with an iron pike or whatever it's called. Still had about 7 -10 cm's of ice there, so it'll be a good month  or so before we get rid of the ice entirely. Usually it's on the first of may, at the latest.

We should go watch Iron  Sky at some point here. I had the opportunity to see it as part of some.. uh.. half-day-seminar/excuse to see the movie for free, but i passed for some reason. Probably because i want to see it with H. On this topic, i was reading some crackpot's blog about how Iron  Sky is actually a propaganda-film to prepare humanity for the eventual coming of our uh.. heavenly benefactor space-alien types. Oh and they oppose communism and represent the same values as the aryans. Great! ...

A picture of my setup (sans the actual computer) from December 2003. Funny how times change.

I'm on my winter vacation this week, which has been of.. varying quality. I've had days where i've been able to rest. And i've had days where i've been totally swamped, or unable to calm down. I'm a bit of an ADD case, really. I have trouble sitting down just doing nothing, even if that would be the best course of action for any given moment. I need to be doing something.

I sold some old stuff this week, just to clear the inventory a bit, and to make a few extra bucks. In fact, i've made about 70 this week selling old crap that i had no use for. I sold a WAP54G access point, an old Acer laptop which was lacking most parts, but worked pretty well considering. And I sold my broken 30GB iPod Video. Someone got a cheap 1.8" drive out of that deal. I had no use for it, and it had been sitting in storage for at least a year, maybe more. I still have some stuff that i'm trying to unload, but i all in good time.

I have a Leatherman Surge. A nice big hunking block of metal which does most things that you would ever need to do in life. It, however, broke down a while back. Just a part of it actually. A spring that holds the screwdriver in place got.. lost. Somehow, somewhere, it sprung lose and now the tool won't stay in place anymore. So, i found the original receipt, and found out the place that imports and services Leather..men.. in Finland is in Rovaniemi of all places. That's around a thousand clicks north of Helsinki. I emailed them about my problem and they said "Sure, that's covered by the 25 year warranty, send it in!"

Brilliant.

So, i find a suitable box, wrap it in some bubble-wrap, and ship it over to Rovaniemi. I hope to get it back next week, better than ever. I love that tool.

I'm on page four hundred and something of REAMDE, and it still manages to be an interesting book. It has taken some weird turns from the somewhat curious  start. The premise is wild. Chinese gold miners for an online RPG turn rogue and screw with the wrong people. Reading about this plot made me order the book instantly out of sheer curiosity. I think i saw it on  Boing Boing or something.

While sorting through my old stuff, i found a box of old processors. Well not "old" old. But still. Pentium 1 and onwards. I'm putting them back in a box. Where are all my older bits and bobs? 486's? 286's? 8088's? Lost! Lost i say.

A bobble-head Storm Trooper is looking at me. Bobbing away. Oblivious fucker.

I'm going to order some tickets to New York for July. Hope 9. It will cost an arm and a leg. Luckily, the Euro is getting stronger vs. the dollar, which makes the trip cheaper. I'm kind of scared to travel there again. Reading about the recent incident where someone was sent back from the states because he wrote some Tweets which were interpreted as threats. Just.. surreal? I guess. Anyway, i calculate the trip will cost me a cool 2500 euros at least. Not accounting for food, travel in NY and so on. Oh boy.

Next week i'm going to be at a Cisco course. Imagine that.

The weather today was the shittest it's been in years. We had a huge dump of snow, combined with cold weather which played havoc with traffic. We had huge pile ups, traffic stuck up the wazoo. I picked up my son from daycare, which is a 10km trip, it took me well over an hour. And i tried to be clever, and took the long way around. So did a few thousand other people apparently.

The largest accident saw some 30-50 cars get wrecked. Some people even had to be cut out of their vehicles. Just insane. There's a video of one of the crashes here. You can see people are driving way too fast, considering they can't fucking see in front of them. Oh shit! 30 cars are wrecked and there's no way around! Screeeech! *Bang*. One would think that since we've had winter in these parts for a few hundred thousand years at least, or like.. ever, we'd get the hang of it already. But no. We still manage to fuck it all up.

Trains are not running, buses are stuck and crashing into cars. Since, after all, we're living in this cold and arid part of the world; surely we can't buy trains that run during WINTER. And we have a state run railway, which means, we're paying out of our asses for a service that isn't even designed for this country. "Oh boy! We didn't anticipate ice and snow...". Great going. And who would we complain to? Our representatives at parliament? Oh that's a good one. I mean, this is a problem that can be solved after we throw enough money at it. Design rails and junctions that work in cold weather. Heat them. Spray anti-freeze. Whatever. Get trains that have sturdier undercarriages and brake systems that don't freeze. And if  you think they don't exist, talk to the Russians, or the Norwegians, or something. Or put some people on the problem. Get a research team and pay them enough money to solve the issue. Then order new trains and rails with these specs. But no. Instead, we just keep on doing a bad job, and raising prices while we're at it. We should be sitting on sold gold thrones with the way ticket prices are going. Maybe a foot massage on the way to work? Yes please.

Ok tomorrow is a new day. I intend to start it with hot coffee, bacon and eggs. Looking forward to it. And for once, i'm actually feeling tired! I've been having some issues sleeping lately. I have two types of sleeping pills. Ones that work always, but leave me too groggy to operate the next morning; and ones that kinda-sorta work, and take about 2 hours to kick in. But now i think i might go to bed, au naturelle, and perhaps, if i am extremely lucky, i'll be able to sleep a solid.. 8 hours, and wake up without a head ache.

Good night, and good luck.

I remember having a Canon MP500 which was a nice multifunction printer back in the day. Well, this was in 2006 maybe? So not *that* long ago. But still Before that i had a Canon.. something or other, A3-size printer. Neither of these had any support. They were both initially listed as "Paperweights" on the Linux Foundation OpenPrinting list. I think it was that. Whatever equivalent we had back then.

Canon was absolutely unrelenting. They would not support Linux, even if the foundation offered to make drivers for them, if they would only send some hardware to them. Kind of hard to make drivers without specs or hardware. Eventually we got some generic drivers, and the MP500 started working, somewhat. Resolution was limited to about a third of what it was supposed to be, but it worked. A great day. Many times i considered just throwing the Canon out, and getting an HP, which have always had impeccable hardware support under Linux. But, that didn't seem right. I was having a first world problem.

Reading the OpenPrinting page today i see that Canon is still somewhat of a troubled vendor when it comes to Linux support. Oh well. The MP500 broke down, and printers are usually not worth fixing out of warranty (hell, they are usually not even worth using after the initial bundled ink runs out...). I decided to get an HP, and settled on a cheap multifunctional called F4580, probably no longer for sale. Works great. There are several driver to choose from, and they all seem to work great. Now though, the scanner seems to have broken down Oh well. The printer still works...

So we've come a long way in a little over 10 years. Devices we hadn't even heard of are now supported under Linux, and you really don't have to think about what you are buying, unless you need specific fringe devices that are not say.. consumer grade. Most of the stuff you can get out of Verkkokauppa will most probably work when you plug it in. Some vendors even have Linux-sections on their support sites, but mostly it's all built in to the OS, if you're using one of the mainstream distros (some .deb or .rpm based one).

To follow my distro-hopping, I'm currently running CrunchBang on my desktop, and Debian 6.0.4 on my work laptop. I have a windows 7 virtual machine if i need to use something that absolutely need windows. Debian was a bit of a hassle to set up so that i'm pleased with it, but it's mostly done now. I started with a net-install which had pretty much nothing built in.

I've also been working on preseeding an Ubuntu installation. Basically an automated install of ubuntu that configures the system in a certain way based on a .seed file (well you can call it whatever you want, really), which contains answers to questions that the installer makes, and other settings. It was about one work day or so to have everything running smoothly. I now have a 11.10 .iso which can be booted, and it's completely hands-off. When it's done (within 20 minutes or so), you're at the login. Might come in handy at some point. The most difficult part, for some reason, was the keyboard layout and locale-settings. They just wouldn't stick, or it'd interrupt the otherwise automated installation by asking me some question. Eventually, i started from scratch, using the 11.10 preseed example, and got everything working. So it was probably a brain-fart on my part at some point.

The next step will be testing various distribution methods, the first being a PXE-boot type installation, where a TFTP-server dumps the image onto the installing computer and runs it. Should be interesting.

Still waiting for ICS for my Desire Z. CM9 is rumored to be supported on that phone too, but there isn't so much as an alpha out yet. I've seen some videos of this particular phone running CM9, but they are probably self-built firmwares or some CM developer trying things out. So i'll have to wait a little while longer on this one. I'd even appreciate a nightly for the 2.3.5 series android that i'm running now. They halted all nightlies for the CM7 series while CM9 was being developed. I've been looking at the changelog for the next nightly, and it's already like 2 pages long. So they could just release something in the meanwhile for us tinkerers to play around with. Pretty please?

First of all SOPA, PIPA and the less known global fuckbuddy, ACTA. So there isn't going to be a vote on SOPA. Great. PIPA is still moving ahead and it, or some re-titled successor will probably end up passing and becoming law. The protest were great and all, but how about ACTA? Where's the blackouts and protests against ACTA? It's a more widespread evil uncle of SOPA. It doesn't just apply to copyrighted software or media, but would basically make ISP's liable for stuff that their customers do, and by doing that, force them to enact draconian logging and archiving policies. Imagine being a small ISP, and having to build a whole new infrastructure to log what all your clients are doing. Either you do that, or you get sued to hell when one customer does something funny. And is someone paying for all this new logging-infra? Probably not. So it's either goodbye for the company, or then we're going to have raised prices everywhere for all kinds of on-line services. The other alternative is that we're either going to end up with state-run communications companies, or a few big monopolies that control prices and services throughout the industry.

Not to mention what it'll do to personal privacy (what little there is left). ISPs can already monitor what you do if they want (for technical reasons, mainly), but they may *have* to start doing that, just to protect their business.

Why wasn't there more noise on ACTA? Perhaps because of SOPA and PIPA, and the noise behind that. Perhaps because ACTA was basically drafted and signed behind closed doors. No public discussion, no expert witnesses or commentators. Just good old politics. The agreement was signed on the 22nd, in Tokyo, in case you missed it. It now has to be ratified by each member state, but the pressure is on. You didn't sign ACTA? Oh well, then I guess we'll take our business elsewhere! Sounds like the way to go.

Poland is among the only countries that have had any large scale protests (correct me if I'm wrong here). Where's the Internets when you need them? I hope we'll have more protests as the member states start to try and ratify the law locally. I know where I'll be. (The first one against the wall when the revolution starts?). I also hope that Finland will have the decency to put it up for a public vote, or at least a parliamentary vote. Not that I have much faith in those fuckers. It's going to be "I'm 12 and what is this?" *signs paper*. Some Wikileaks stuff on ACTA here.

Some highlights:

• In its article 27.3 the ACTA agreement calls for "cooperation" between rights-holders and the Internet service providers. The very same mechanisms are called by the European Commission as "extra-judicial measures" and "alternative to courts". It means that police (surveillance and collection of evidences) and justice missions (penalties) could be handed out to private actors, bypassing judicial authority and the right to a fair trial.
• In article 27.4, ACTA will allow rights-holders to obtain private data regarding the users of Internet service providers, without a decision of a judge. This is a dangerous breach to privacy. The article is non-binding (using the "may" verb), but this could be changed further, by way of amendment (see below). This would generalize a much criticized procedure included in the 2004 IPR enforcement directive.

Civil sanctions could also weight on technical intermediates and be used to pressure them to accept "cooperation". The “damages” section of the civil chapter validates the "lost-sale myth" whereby the industry claims enormous profit losses using biased methodologies. The text requires "pre-established" damages, as well as "additional damages," which means damages not based on any actual proof of harm and akin to a criminal sanction.

• Article 23.4: Criminal sanctions for "aiding and abetting" infringement (it sounds just like IPRED2, which is not part of the EU acquis). These could also be used against Internet technical intermediaries and technology providers as a way to force them into accepting "cooperation" with rightsholders.
• Article 27.2: This reference to the enforcement of “means of widespread distribution for infringing purposes” is very worrying. It could be interpreted as justifying the implementation of provisions indirectly criminalizing blogging platforms, P2P networks, free software, and other technologies that contribute to dissemination of culture and knowledge on the Internet.

My friend Macandron is leaving for a round-the-world trip with his girlfriend. Good luck, and have lots of fun. And remember to see all the places!

I'm now starting a week of winter vacation. I think I'll try to read my book, and rest a whole lot. Not.. doing..much. Then it's back to work. Lots of good stuff going on there, also lots of tough stuff going on.

It's dead of winter now. Not terribly cold, yet, but we do have some snow here. Not as much as last winter, but some. January-February tend to be the coldest months in Finland. On average.

My grandfather is still in the hospital, and not doing well. My father is getting rather tired, because he's kind of keeping it all together. It's been a long few months. I saw my grandfather at the hospital in December, but he was kind of a shell at that point already. Partly there, partly not. Hope he's not in pain.

OK, from these cheery subjects onwards! My son just fell asleep after a grueling 1½ hour battle.. He'll turn five soon. He's a great sport, but after a long week at work, you kind of wish he'd just..sleep? You know? Sometimes? Because I know that come 0800 tomorrow, he'll be dragging me out of bed to turn on the TV and make breakfast. No problem. Nooo..problem..

I'm now going to stop typing, get a cup of coffee and watch Inception with H.

Ta-ta.

We had a major storm before Christmas, which hit our country home pretty badly. We had 15 trees fall, most of them huge. They managed to mostly miss the different houses and buildings, but the cleanup is going to take months. It ripped up 100+ year trees with roots and all. Along with that, we had some collateral damage to the water-pipes that were underground (now not underground), and some TV-coax-antenna cables. I have some pics in my Google+ account. If you wanna check some of them out, check,  http://grelbar.net/damage/

My grandfather is in bad shape. He has been in the hospital for like two months. He's 91. I think he's getting close to the end here, but i don't really like thinking about that. He is afraid at the hospital, because he is cut off from everything. He hasn't lost his mental functions, but he's on a lot of medication, so he gets confused. He doesn't know what time it is, or what's going on. It was kind of sad to visit him there. But he's had a good life. He's a veteran of the Winter and Continuation Wars (he doesn't talk about his experiences, perhaps because he lost all his brothers to the wars). He was a pharmacist, as was his father. Born in Viborg, which is no longer a part of Finland (lost to Russia). Anyway. Good guy. Lots of respect.

Planning for Hope Number 9 has begun, and as it looks now: I am going. With H. So it's New York come July! Again. I got a mail from the volunteer-organizers asking if i would be helping out this year again (as i did last time), and i think i will. Such a cool experience. I calculate that the trip will cost around 2500 euros. Which is not a little sum of money. It's about what i make a month after taxes and stuff.

Work is still good, though a bit rough. I'm going to get VMware certified this month. Also some new interesting internal and external projects.

I'm also planning to get my ham radio license with B. It will happen this year. Planning to get some hand held Yaesu radio to start off with.

The distro i'm using as of today is Debian 6 with openbox (built from the ground up by me), and on my home machine, Crunchbang. Which is.. the same thing, only pre-configured. I went through trying Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu. I was on Arch for many months, also Archbang. It's just not for me anymore, Ubuntu and it's children that is. Arch is kick ass, nothing to complain, but it's a bit more high maintenance (since it's a rolling distro) than the .deb-based ones.

Let's see what else. I'm reading REAMDE by Neal Stephenson. It's going to take a few more months to get done, since it's 1100 pages. Also, i bought my first E-book! The book is called: "SSH Mastery: OpenSSH, Putty, Tunnels and Keys", and i bought it from a site called Smashwords. Based on the experience, i can recommend it to anyone interested in getting an e-book or two. They offer a variety of formats, the price is right, and the site is easy to use. They also support Paypal (who, despite their shitty behavior in regards to Wikileaks and others) is an easy way to handle online payments. Unfortunately. I wish they were worse. I wish they killed baby seals more often. The book cost 10 dollars. So less in euros. 130 pages of solid SSH knowledge. I'm gonna devour that fucker.

Oh, and the presidential elections. We, luckily, had a sane result for the first round. In Finland, the presidential elections work so that if no candidate gets over 50% of the votes (rare), there is a second round between the two candidates that gathered the most votes. This time around, we will have Sauli Niinistö, and Pekka Haavisto on the second round. Niinistö is from the Coalition party, and Haavisto is from the Green (!) party. Neither one will piss me off too much. Pleased with the results, mainly because we ran the risk of getting a nationalist, Timo Soini, as a president. Luckily, the people who would have voted for him were either drunk, or temporarliy sane, and he only got 9.x % of the votes. He had wanted a two digit number, but he didn't even get that. The people have spoken, now shut the fuck up.

A thing of note, to all the conservatives reading this blog: Haavisto, the Green candidate, is a vegan and openly homosexual (and in a registered partnership with a man). I love this country <---> this much more than yesterday. Thank you to everyone who showed that we are not all redneck yahoos with 20th century values. If a gay candidate can get nearly 20% of the vote, we still have some hope. So put that in your pipe and smoke it.

One more thing! My good friend Macandron, is embarking on his round the world trip. Good luck to him, have fun, and learn a lot!

That's all. For now.