Fast pace keeps going. During the last few monts, I've been quite a lot around. I've taken the bike when the weather has been nice, although November was the rainiest month ever recorded in the Seattle history. I visited the Seattle Aquarium, which was pretty nice. They had quite a few different fishes around, and feeding of the octopus was also interesting show. Then there was the Nihon Aki Matsuri, the Japanese Fall Festival at the Bellevue Community College. The festival consisted of many issues around japanese cultural things. The festival was quite nice occasion to see many things about japanese living.
I also received two dwarf hamsters, Daisy and Nibbler. They are the same race as most of my previous hamsters too, roborovskies. They are just so adorable. They have nice tubing-style cage to run around. For a christmas present, they got some extra tubes and a second wheel. Sometimes they run the wheel so much, that it's better to have the cage away from my bedroom so that I can sleep at nights.
On one morning, me and 2 of my co-workers got up too early and headed to North Bend, WA. There's popular hiking area around Mt. Si. It's quite steep hill, which rises more than 4000 feet, and the trail to the top is about 4 miles long. The age is starting to have an effect, I forgot my camera on one rest area along the trail. I noticed the camera missing after about half mile futher. I descented quickly back to the rest area, but the camera was gone. Then continuing back up rapidly to catch my friends, they called me just before I catched them and told that someone had picked up the camera and given it to them after asking if they were missing one. So I got my camera back, and also got extra mile hike up and down the steep trail.
Daisy
Finally getting up, the views were quite nice. You could see quite far away, and the houses near the start point seemed to have shrunk really small. After having some snack and resting a little, we headed back down. It's surprisingly hard to climb downward, as you might think the gravity is doing most of the work. Especially with such steep hill, you really must work your way also downward. Although I'm not really into hiking, I might do the climb again sometime. I really enjoyed the day.
Late fall there was a Finnish/Scandinavian meeting at the Scandinavian Heritage Museum in Ballard. Me and few friends headed there on a rainy day. Inside the museum there were several stands presenting some Finnish items or things, and many had drawing for Finnish items, food and chocolate and such. I also met woman whom I had met last summer when she held a gathering at her house. I found out that she teached the Finnish language at the University of Washington, and was adverticing the courses at the Museum.
Then on one Saturday, as the LA Lakers were visiting Seattle Supersonics, we decided to go see the match. The tickets were just $60 for quite decent location. Although I'm not really a fan of basketball, the game was fine. However the KeyArena was not really full, so I guess the atmosphere can be even more exciting when the stadium is full. I'm hoping the January 6th, Saturday will be sunny day, or at least non-rainy. One Finnish guy here has 2 season tickets for the Seahawks, and occasionally he has the other ticket unused, and offers it for someone to use. That means, next Saturday I'm going to see the Seahawks first playoff game against Dallas Cowboys. I've heard that the games are really great to see on location, so I'm really waiting for that.
A week before Christmas, there was worst storm for a decade. The storm cut down a lot of trees and caused huge blackout around the Seattle area. I had just arrived home from a business trip to San Jose, when suddenly the lights went out. Arriving home I already heard that several areas were without power, and when I was driving the freeway home, there were really lot of lumber on the road. On top of that, the temperatures were quite low, so trouble was on the way. I was lucky, I had power out only for about 24 hours, but most areas were without power for several days, some even for more than a week. Nighttime temperatures went even below the freezing point, and knowing the local housing, it's not fun without heating. I wrote some report during the few days, but it's only in Finnish and I don't know if I ever get to translate the texts. However, it can be read here.
As many of you know, currently there's 3 different game consoles from three biggest console manufacturers. Microsoft has their Xbox360, Sony has the Playstation3 and Nintendo has Wii. Xbox360 and PS3 are quite powerful machines with amazing graphical capabilities. Wii is significantly weaker system in terms of processing power, but it has something which might catch your eye: the controller is really un-conventional. It looks and feels like a smallish remote control. It has only few buttons, so many might wonder how you're going to play with it. The thing is that it has motion sensors inside, so instead of moving the thumb-sticks in the controller, you wave the controller around. Sounds stupid. Yep, so I thought also.
New Year 2007 at Seattle
PS3 has almost no interest to me at the moment. There's many reasons for that, one is the highest price of all consoles, one is the fact that none of the games is really that good to justify the price. I think I will buy it in 12-24 months, when the game developers can use all the resources available from the PS3. The architecture of the console is so difficult that current games, although good looking, don't use the console capabilities to the full extend. I'm sure the coming games will look great, but currently I'm not interested. The fact that it has Blu-Ray drive is a plus, but for me it doesn't justify the purchace still. I watch lot of movies, but I don't think the DVD-quality is that poor that I would need to upgrade immidiately. I know I will have both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD someday, but that day is not yet here.
Xbox360 has several reasons why I would like to buy it. The Xbox Live, the internet connectivity, is just great concept which was already published with the previous Xbox. The Live is really good extension to the console capacity, and with the Xbox360, Microsoft added several features to it. For example you can purchace old retro games and new small development games for quite cheap online directly to the console. The console has been in market for more than one year, so the game developers can make really spectacular games for it, even though on paper PS3 should be more powerful console. Quite recently Microsoft also published new service which is quite neat, you can rent movies from Live, and then the movie downloads itself to the console hard drive, and you can watch it when you want. The price is quite competitive, and they also offer HD movies. In addition to this, there's HD-DVD drive availabe for Xbox360, but the drawback is that Xbox360 with HD-DVD costs the same as PS3.
But then I saw the Wii at stores. First I laughed for the stupid controller, but I don't laugh anymore. It's genious! It brilliant! Spectacular Spectacular! As you take the remote looking thing, Wii-mote to your right hand, and the other "device" (there's no good word to describe it), called Nunchuck to your left hand, you feel stupid, but as you start playing something with them, you understand that this is how the games should be played, and you wonder why it took so many decades to develop such a simple but brilliant control system. It's difficult to describe, so you better go see yourself. The best place to look how it works is YouTube. Do a search for example for: "Wii crazy girl", "Wii tennis", "Wii fishing", "Wii bowling", "Wii golf".... It's just so great, see yourself.
The bad thing was, that even though Nintendo was able to provide the stores with more Wiis than Sony could do with PS3s, they were both sold out everywhere. Ebay and Craigslist were full of people trying to get money from those who really wanted one of those consoles. Microsoft thanked the supply problems of those consoles and sold about 2 million units as the christmas sale. PS3 price at store is $599 for the deluxe model, and they sold for several thousand dollars during the first few days, but soon came down under $1000, and around Christmas they were available in many stores so the Ebay sellers didn't get profit anymore.
Also Wii price soured in the first days, and although Nintendo provided as many units as they could, everything was sold in short time so the price stayed high. The retail price is $249, and the Ebay price was around 400-500 dollars. I had hard time paying that much overprice, further encouraging for that kind of activity where people purchace consoles just to sell them for profit, so I searched Ebay and Craigslist often to see if I could find myself better price. Finally few days after Christmas I got one, bundled with few games for the retail price, so I got my Wii!
I have some games for it. The Zelda of course, but also Excite Truck and Super Swing Golf. The golf is quite good, you really have to train your swing to make repeatable good swings in the game. The Zelda is somewhat a disappointment, at least the beginning is really slow, and I hope it gets better as I get further. The Red Steel is combination of First Person Shooter and swordsplay. In first person shooter mode, you use the left hand Nunchuck to move yourself around and interact with object, and the right hand Wiimote is used to point at the enemies and shoot them. You really have to point at the screen to hit the enemies. One problem with the point & shoot -system is that I haven't found way to calibrate for different screen sizes, so the pointing is not really accurate for the 92" projection screen. I have some trick-around ideas which I'm going to try. Hope they help the problem. There's infrared transmitter placed under the screen to help with the pointing. I ordered second one from Nintendo for $10, so that I can open it and try to modify to fit the screen size.
As I bought the Wii, I figured out to enroll to one game rental service. I'm paying $12.75 a month for rental of 3 titles at one time. Se basically I can have 3 games for less than $5 a month each, and when I get tired of one game, I send it back and get the next one I want. So unless I play one game for more than 1 year, it's cheaper to rent it than buy it. The company also rents DVD movies, so I guess I will keep usually 2 games and circulate the third option with the movies I'd like to see.
For the New Year, I went to downtown Seattle. The fireworks were at the Space Needle. The show was quite nice, although there was quite a crowd so for example the search for a free parking spot was a challange.
I'm now planning that I should buy myself fly fishing gear. Some of my co-workers told me that there's great rivers around in the Washington state, so I think I should go see what they look like myself. Some years back I went once a summer to North-Norway for fly fishing with my friend, so I wouldn't mind doind that here either. I guess the most difficult thing is to determine good day when the weather is good enough to go fishing. Too often the weather changes in 15 minutes.
PC-stuff follows (worse than the console stuff above), non-nerds can skip next two chapters. Early December my server had some sort of breakdown. It's running Fedora Core 3.0, and it has OS on /dev/hda, and there's also hdb and hdc present. Hda had some corrupt which made the server crash. The server is located at my friends house, so he booted and found out that some of the hard drive had corrupted. However it was able to boot up and everything seemed to work correctly. For few hours. Then the mail server stopped working, although the web server still was ok. I connected via ssh and commanded reboot to fix the problem. The server didn't come online, so my friend made new reboot and now the web server came back online, but the email server stayed down. As a precaution, I wanted to do backup. I didn't have any Linux-machine at home, so tar seemed to be best way to backup while having all the attributes saved. Interesting still, I noticed that 2 folders under the html-folder had vanished. I wonder if something else had vanished also that I didn't notice.
Then I had some idea, I bought external USB hard drive, and got myself Fedora Core 6.0 install CDs. I was able to install the FC without having any internal hard drive, so that the whole OS was in the external drive. With FC running, I started backuping with just copying the most important files to hdb and hdc, and then started rsync to transfer everything to my local PC here. There's so much stuff, so it's still under work. Most folders are now transferred. When I have everything stored, I'm planning to ask my friend to remove the hda and try to install the system to hdb. Few days ago I went to #Fedora channel, and asked help for the email server problem. In just some 10-15 minutes, the problem was solved. /var/spool folder had master.pid for the postfix, which prevented the postfix to start. Removing this file fixed everything. So currently everything is running, and I'm doing the backups. I also though if I should install the server here in Redmond, but I heard that the local ISP is blocking incoming http port, so it would require some tweaking, so I think I'll stay with the old system as long as it works.
Recently I had a chat with my supervisor, and he told that it seems there's enough work to extend my contract. I need to apply for visa extension also, so it requires me to travel to Finland before summer. I think it's nice to visit Finland, see some of my friends, but I think it's nice to come back for longer stay. I'm waiting for what the coming year is bringing with it. So far I've mostly travelled in nearby locations, so I think I should go see some other things too.
