antti.vilpponen.net

Wikipedia has decided that it will block certain US government body IP-addresses. The reasons are below (from here);

The editors from these IP ranges have been rude, abrasive, immature, and show disregard for Wikipedia policy. The editors have frequently tried to censor the history of elected officials, often replacing community articles with censored biographies despite other users’ attempts to dispute these violations. They also violate Wikipedia:Verifiability, by deleting verified reports, while adding flattering things about members of Congress that are unverified.

(via Kasa, MeFi)

Done! My photos on Thailand are up on my flickr page. Go see the set here - I only have some 50+ photos as I didn’t want to spend too much time walking around with my camera. After all, I spent 4 days underwater ;-)

Update: Damn - I forgot I now have my flickr photos on my website! You can check the gallery out here (there seems to be some problems with not all photos showing up correctly).

I got back on Saturday from the warm temperatures of Thailand. I managed to get my PADI diving course done and some fun dives on top of that as well. 10 days away wasn’t too long, as I easily could have stayed a lot longer in the easy going Koh Tao island.

I’ve got some photos I’ll post online as soon as I get them from my camera - hopefully later on tonight!

I’m off to Bangkok and from there to Koh Samui for 11 days. I’ve been so busy I haven’t even had time to blog! Expect more blogging and photos once I get back…

I’ve seen this advertising in so many places that I decided to blog about it. The ad promotes a skiing centre in Joutseno, some 15-20km north of Lappeenranta. Somehow a typo has managed to find its way into the ad (Ranteet is suppose to be rinteet). With the typo the ad reads; “Now all wrists are cut open at Myllym?§ki”, when it is suppose to mean, “Now all slopes are open at Myllym?§ki”.

But in my opinion whoever came up with the ad was a genious! :) The ad was published in a free local publication in Lappeenranta. Thus quite many people saw it but I doubt that with that kind of a typo the ad is being passed all around the Finnish internet, especially around people who live in this area as they know the place. Promotion taken from an offline world to online where it is being e-mailed and shared with people everywhere. A very good viral piece of advertising, although the message isn’t exactly what it is suppose to be :)

I’m sure Myllym?§ki hasn’t seen this much traffic on their website for a while.. and it could be just because of this funny little ad.

Damn, just when I thought I’m not susceptible to word-of-mouth marketing I fell for it. I even wrote about this in the distractions, but Pando is damn cool! It works automagically from behind firewalls and transferring large files from one another is made easy… something I’ve been looking for a looooong time.

The catch is that it sends a .pando file to the receiver with the download information for the file you are really sending. After this the file is uploaded to Pando’s server and the receiver is able to download it from there. Cool eh? How come nobody ever came up with this idea earlier? This is very useful for people behind ridiculous firewalls (like me) who cannot use traditional p2p-programs to share media files (in the “not-infringing copyrights” way).

Here’s a direct link to Pando Beta, it’s available to both Mac and PC users :-) sweet.

ps. On a more technical side to bloggers; remember to update your plugins! I had some problems with my categories2tags -plugin as it wasn’t WP2.0 compatible… drove me nuts and now it works a-ok!

Microsoft finally came out with something good :) They created a plugin/codec for Quicktime that is able to play WMV files without problems. It’s called Flip4Mac.

I installed it and so far it works without any problems.

I went snowboarding today. The hill is only 70m in height and some 400m long. The result; 10-15 runs, sort of badly hit knee and a couple of very cool landings on my butt. I’ve done some snowboarding 3 years ago, but on my second run I was already able to go pretty fast and not fall over that bad :) (one fall, mind you!)

I’m definitely gonna go again. It takes a while to get used to it, but practice makes perfect right? :)

VoipStunt is a new company that has brought it’s service to public beta. The cool thing about this is that you can call popular destinations’ landlines for free! That sounds pretty good but it gets better, with this you can call any landline in Finland for free! Once they come out with a mac version I’m getting my copy for sure :)

Have a go at this game and try to solve the problem; getting the bunch of people to the other side of the river.

Here are the rules:
- the raft holds two people at the same time.
- the dad can’t be with any of the daughters without the mom being there.
- the mom can’t be with any of the sons withough the dad being there.
- the thief can’t be left with any family member without the police.
- only the police, mom and dad are able to steer the raft.

I managed to solve it - but can you? :)