PageRank?

Well, to be honest - I really don’t update this site very often. But better than parking, it’s still here as an occasional hobby project. Honestly, I’m even open for offers to sell - but on the other hand, I don’t see any big compelling reason to do so - I like this domain as I have registered this term for my use as a company handle already in 1993. That’s 20 years ago now.

However, as for these hobby projects - I just checked around a little, and noticed this site had a pagerank of zero. That I found was peculiar, especially since I’m reasonably well up on the list in a Google search. I know for sure I’m not spamming this site anywere, have no reason or interest to do so. As with the ads on this page, they are purely academic - and this peculiarity, a zero pagerank of academic interest. What happened? I’ll try to find out.

Anyway, now back to some real issues (i.e. spending the weekend with the kids, and then preparing for an intensive work week again)

Why I love the Apple TV

Rumor has it Apple will just release a new TV set.

I have to say I’m partly excited, but also slightly worried. Because I love the Apple TV, it has been a great and very useful addition to my domestic digital life, however with every iteration some key functionality has been stripped away.

First I have to say my use is very limited, and I guess I’m a pretty bad consumer. For me it’s a front-end to videos I already have, stored on a computer on iTunes. All of course legal; but I’m not a big spender. 99% of the use is for my kids, and they keep watching the same shows over and over.

This is the beauty of this device; it’s simple, easy to use and robust. Just connect it to a TV and play. Kids scratch DVD’s really bad and after a few hours in their hands they start to skip and studder.

So what I do is I rip the DVD’s to files (I’m sure I stretch some laws here, however I keep all the original DVD’s as backup anyway) and use EyeTV to timeshift childrens programmin, then they are all in iTunes in a library and my kids can watch their favorite shows on the TV set whenever there’s good time for it.

But this is where the iterations of the product has started to bug me slightly.

The first generation AppleTV was a truly stand alone device, with a disk where the files where stored. That was great, I didn’t need to keep the mac with iTunes running 24/7, but just when needed and it would sync whenever there was a new show. The UI was also super simple and perfect for kids.

But electronics don’t last forever and it started to develop some weird green lines and dots on the screen, so eventually I had to upgrade to the AppleTV2 without a disc. Small, running much cooler and faster was of course nice. But the lack of a drive meant a change in my setup; now I need to run a dedicated media server just for it. Technically it makes less sense to use an AppleTV when I also need to dedicate a separate computer for the same task.

Then Apple decided to start pushing other videos in the UI, and the private library became slightly harder to find in the UI. No big deal for a tecnically savvy adult, but for a three year old a bigger challenge UI wise.

So what will the AppleTV3 bring with it whenever it comes? Storage hopefully, gigabit ethernet maybe - and no more crippling please. 

Bad English.

Language is a key part of my everyday worklife. I listen and speak to people, read and write stuff constantly. While I get to speak my own mother tongue at home with my kids, that is not the language I usually work in. Neither is Finnish, the dominant native language in my home country where I live and work, but most of my work day is communicating in English. The multicultural and international environment is great, I truly enjoy it - and don’t mind a slight misunderstanding here or there, especially while talking you can quickly double check things.

But where this becomes a bit awkward is on the official side. When documents like diplomas, titles, letters etc need to be written in English - still a foreign language to most of us, a very small percentage here are native speakers, errors are not as easy to brush off as something equally funny and cute. They are embarrassing.

The question rises, what should be the demand level for such documents then? Finland has been bilingual for years, so we do have a tradition to translate stuff - have official documents in multiple languages. We should know this already. But also the quality of the language used in the “other domestic” language has deteriorated. Does it matter? 

I think it does. It’s not that I want to police the use of language. I truly don’t mind a punctuation error or word spelled wrong, but the accumulation of these errors does worry me, because language is the way we communicate - and if we ignore the noise in this communcation, also our capability to understand each other is eventually hampered. This will start to happen at the stage when words are interpreted wrong, semantics become obfuscated or sentence structures turn their intended meaning upside down. We just need to pay attention to the language we use. Nothing more, nothing less. And ask for advice, double check, if not sure.

Blogging is so yesterday...

Well, maybe not quite that - but in a way it’s not as much part of the flow and signals that are trending now. Why is that? Well it takes a bit more to start writing an entry in a blog that just not a response to something, and even if we complain about the short size of a tweet, it actually also lowers the threshold to start writing.

Of course we love to complain that a tweet is too short for whatever we want to say, but therein lies the beaty. We can blame it, not us.

Today I read that political blogs in Finland are becoming more professional and less personal. Good news! It is relevant and essential for a democracy that a political debate is open, transparent and well documented. Our elected representatives should be expected to be able to formulate longer than one sentence opinions. Based on those views and opinions we can make our own judgements in the next elections. Campaigns are superficial, this is where the action is - in real life.

Time to do more research for a change!

This august was the tenth year I was working as a teacher in the Media Lab at the University of Art and Design Helsinki, now called Aalto University. It has been a great time and I truly enjoy the job. For the last few years I’ve been in charge of the MA in New Media programme, and while it’s been great too - the stuff I enjoy the most is experimenting, exploring and working with all these great people, brilliant students and colleagues.

The bureaucratic tasks are really not my cup of tea, even if I don’t mind doing them and naturally see the reason for such taks as well. With the exceptions of scheduling - creating calendars is like a big puzzle!

Now writing in past tense might be a bit wrong, I still do enjoy this very much and look forward to continuing the same for as long as I can - but right now I’m going to take a few months of to really focus on research.

It’s not a long time, but I hope to get my algorithm for narrative inertia one major step forward, maybe some tools and articles written along the way.