In case you haven’t guessed, of course I said no.

 LUCKILY, I AM OLD ENOUGH TO MAKE MY OWN DECISIONS WITHOUT MY PARENTS CONSENT.

_end rant_

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I was asked this morning by the Project Manager on the Space Systems Finland side if we (me and my room mate) minded staying here for 1 more month (which would make 3 in total), so apparently they are happy with our job.

He said he wanted to know our availability first, and then he would contact Critical Software to make it happen.

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To show you that this is a truly MULTIMEDIA AND 100% INTERACTIVE BLOG (well, sort of, I suppose…), here’s a video shot by me while driving my bicycle from work to my hotel room in Espoo, Finland

Ps.: no, I don’t know the girl that is most of the time in front of me, nor have we at any time exchanged eye contact.

and sorry for the quality, but it’s hard to make a video while hand holding a mobile phone riding a bike.

oh oh oh and yes! my hair does look funny when I enter the elevator (because of the speeeeeeeeeeeeeed during the bike ride. OH YEAH!!)

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So… It’s pretty cool to stay in Finland, since their houses are very well isolated, and so indoors you don’t feel the cold, right?

WHAT IF, IT’S 28º C OUT THERE?

It feels like I’m inside a oven. Air Conditioning? No! It’s always cold in here. Fans? Why?!It’s always cold in here.

damn it. I’m sweating like a pig (well almost)

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Baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more! (you’ll understand it by the end of this entry).

So… It is uncommon for me to post during the week, because there isn’t much to report (hotel<->work).

So, this blog is about random stuff, so here they go:

• the water thingies on the fake lake behind the hotel get turned off at 22h, and turned on at 10h
• 90h from now (+/-) I’ll be boarding on the plane to go back to Portugal for a few days
• I have created a variable on my QT/C++ project called goldenRetriever (odly enough it is a regular expression )
• my roommate even makes noises while eating a BANANA!
• weather: HOT HOT HOT right now it’s 22:16, but it’s 19º C! (though today it rained a lot for a very short period. like a tropical kind of thingy, ya now? It was raining cats and dogs!)
• today I did my swimming once again
• on the previous post my father suggested, as a joke I believe, that I should also start running. Well, now my girlfriend also read that, and told me that too! Damn you conspiracy!!

What is love indeed?

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Gonna start posting some random youtube clips.

enjoy

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Lake Bodom (Bodominjärvi in Finnish, Bodom träsk in Swedish) is a lake in Finland located on the suburbs of the city of Espoo, not far from Helsinki (60°12′34.92″N – 24°30′42.99″E). The lake measures approximately three kilometers in length and one kilometer in width.The lake is notorious for murders that occurred on the night of June 4, 1960, when four teenagers (two boys, Nils Gustafsson and Seppo Boisman and two girls, Tuulikki Mäki and Irmeli Björklund) went on a camping trip to the lake and were mysteriously attacked while sleeping in their tent. Three of them were killed and one survived. This event is commonly referred to as the Lake Bodom murders. In June, 2005 the only survivor, Nils Gustafsson, was charged with murdering his friends. On October 7, 2005 the district court found him not guilty on all the charges laid against him.The increasingly popular metal band Children of Bodom, who are also from Espoo, took their name from these murders.

got this from wikipedia.

So yeah… That’s where I went today (the GPS accounted for almost 47Km, but it was much more. You can see on Google Earth, if you load up my file, that there’s this straight line (that’s where I lost connectivity to the GPS), and of course, I didn’t do any straight lines). A great place btw

It started off just like the other days, except that I ate a good bowl of oatmeal in the morning so I had the strength for the rest of the day, and I’ve also did some coding in C++/QT/libssh (kind of a personal project).

I was told that that area in particular is really cool, with lots of lakes and trees, so I fired up Google Earth and tried to get my bearings. So…. That’s about NO from the hotel, right? And so I went.

KML file (opens with Google Earth).

You can see on the image above, the path I did, what time I took to do it, and some important places I think you should visit.

I saw, a cemetery, in the woods (really cool), because all the graves had lots and lots and lots of trees around them

, horses, a dog contest (the dogs were all like the one in the photo below, so I guess it was only a contest for this breed. One thing really funny that I saw there, was this little girl (her mom and dog were participating on the contest (well of course, it’s both of them ), that had lots of badges, as if she was a dog, and had won lots of categories. Really funny stuff!! This was right next to the Bodom Lake.

Also saw people having a bath on the Bodom lake, and some really cool forests (you can see from the map that I was surrounded by _green_ most of the time)! I love it when I can ride the bike on really dense forests, where you can only hear yourself (me doing lots of breathing obviously ), and all the birds and stuff.

One thing that I have realized, and haven’t shared with you yet, is that when riding a bike, traffic really does stop for you on the crosswalks, which is surprising, and refreshing if you ask me.

When I got back to the hotel, I had to do, the now traditional, swimming thingy. The deal is, I try to swim for about 15 minutes (well… after such a long walk, you really can’t ask more from me ) the butterfly, on a really cold swimming pool, but only using my arms (which gets you tired really fast, but develops your upper body a lot. Hey… My legs are having enough exercise as is!).

I will be in so much better shape when I get back to Portugal! You better believe it!

Random crappy shots:

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You see? It’s crazy! It’s after midnight and there is still plenty of light! (it gets “worse” by the day!)

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An entry about last.fm. And why not? It is what has been keeping me sane for the last days.

Last.fm is the flagship product from the team that designed the Audioscrobbler music engine. More than ten million times a day, Last.fm users “scrobble” their tracks to our servers, helping to collectively build the world’s largest social music platform.

Last.fm taps the wisdom of the crowds, leveraging each user’s musical profile to make personalised recommendations, connect users who share similar tastes, provide custom radio streams, and much more.

Founded by Felix Miller, Martin Stiksel and Richard Jones, we are a London-based company with a music-obsessed team of developers and creative professionals from around the world.

It’s never been this easy to share your taste and discover new music. Welcome to the social music revolution.

So… What do they mean by “scrobble”? Basically last.fm provides you with a plugin for your favorite mp3 player (xmms, Winamp, Amarok, Windows Media Player, iTunes, etc…) that sends back to the last.fm servers what musics you listen to, enabling them to “know” what kind of music you like, and who else has the same musical taste as you do. Now. This is very interesting, because then, you can check out what musics have your “neighbors”, as they call them, have been listening to. And well, if you have a similar taste, why not listen to some of the other artists/tracks they have been listening to recently? It’s great! That way you can find many new artists.

But that’s not the end of it! last.fm is like a multimedia encyclopedia of artists and tracks. You can see what albums have an artist released, what tracks that album has, and you can even listen a bit of those tracks, so you can see if you really like them. You can also see information related to the artist, how they began, where are they from, etc…

And no, there’s even more! My favorite part!

They also provide you with their own music player for several platforms (Linux, Windows, Mac OS and FreeBSD), that enables you to listen to on-line radio.

But the thing is, you may choose on this program to listen to your neighbors’ tracks, which means that you’ll stream and listen to music that is very likely to please you, because your neighbors have the same taste as you do!

As you can see from the screenshot below, you will even get information about the track/artist you are currently listening to. If you don’t like the music, you can skip it, Love it or Hate it (literally), and of course, all of these choices will be accounted for to “build your taste”.

If you want to listen to something more specific, you can do that as well, by searching for Artists or tags.

Don’t like this program, but still want its capabilities? FEAR NOT! You can use something like Amarok, that does the same as this player, and doubles as a really awesome mp3/ogg/etc player.

You can check out my last.fm account here.

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