Flickr!

OMG! I just payed for a free web service!!

That's right. I subscribed to Flickr Pro. I know all the photos I shoot in the future are going to be digital so why not start using a good solution from the beginning. I get 2GB upload stream each month whcih I know is more than enough for my photos. And I can store unlimited number of pictures.

I also like to idea behind tagging and sets. I know not all are happy with them. But I didn't have such a good structure on my computer for my pictures. Maybe that's why I haven't been interested in taking or publishing photos. Maybe Flickr will make me want to shoot more pictures now...

So let's see how Flickr does! I loved it the period I tested it with 20 megs of upload a month and I feel it is like made for me.

SIC's Club Show 2006, Helsinki

We took a small trip to Helsinki today. We took Elvis to a dog show for the first time with us. It was SIC's (which stands for Italian Greyhound & Cirneco dell'Etna Club of Finland which we are members of) Club Show 2006.


The show started at 10a.m. and because we don't own a car and we had to take taxi, the train, taxi to get there - and the same back - we had to take a train departing at 6.30 a.m. *sigh*. It was a really beautiful morning and we had time to eat our breakfast at Töölönlahti, Helsinki which was nice.

The feeling at the show was family like. The same people seems to travel to different shows and they know each other. So it didn't feel the least a competition after all. We had the chance to meet all of the sisters to Elvis (the dog) and his parents as well. And he was excited about it, of course! The weather was hot and maybe a bit too hot for Riki, as you can see from the picture. Overall it was quite a nice experience!

Ok, so what was the outcome of the show and/or competition? Well, Elvis didn't qualify in his class. Although Elvis got some good comments from the judge, he felt Elvis was too unsure of himself. After all, he has a tendency to freak out of even the smallest thing, bicycles and trollies for example. So I felt he did ok after all. Here is what the judge said about Elvis (translated from Swedish to English):

"An elegant puppy. Beautiful skin, correct expression. Good eyes, thin fine lips. Excellent ears. Good angles (?) in front, ok breast depth. Good angles on the rear feet. Moves good from the side and back, although still a bit sloppy. Needs to be a bit more sure of himself."

So taken into account that Elvis is only soon 9 months old and this was his second or third apperance in a dog show, I think he did quite well! I couldn't see large differances between the dogs so I feel Elvis got quite nice reviews.

I set up a small collection of the photos we took at Flickr. Go see them by visiting this set.

Air conditioning

I never saw myself being one of those who buy air conditioning at home. But the weather has been so hot the couple of past days that I cracked. I think you cant put a price on a good nights sleep.

It is ugly as hell and has a quite loud noice. But the room is at nice temperature of 21C :) That's all that matters!

My bike is hot!

I was riding my motor cycle for fun because the weather was this time so great (approx 9 months of the year the temperature in Finland is below 15C...). The sun was shining from couldless sky and the temperature was at 30C (a bit too hot for riding a bike with all the gears on).


I ended up in Paimio. A really beautiful small town in the country side approx 30km from Turku. I stopped for some Coce and ice cream and suddenly these two nice looking girls come up to me. I was stunned because usually no attractive looking girls come suddenly and talk to me ;) They asked if they could photograph themselves on my bike! Of course!

I think they were from Russia and I have no clue what they were doing in the middle of nowhere, Paimio. But I hope they got some good pictures :)

My new mobile phone - a Sony Ericsson K610i review

Today I received my new mobile phone, Sony Ericsson K610i.

I had been waiting for "The Perfect Phone" for some while because my earlier phone, Sony Ericsson K700i, is having some construction problems with the joystick (that Sony Ericsosn won't of course confess. But it is a general known fact that earlier Sony Ericsson joystick's are crap, dust collectors).

To put a long story short, I just have to say that I really like the K610i! You can read other general reviews of the phone (for example at Mobile Review) so I wont write anything conclusive. Just give some of my opinions based on some hours of playing around with it.

Pros

• 3G - I don't know if 3G has delivered even half of the huge hype from the past, but I just have to love it! It's not like wireless broadband but a great improvement from GPRS. Maybe the speed difference feels like the one between a modem and a ISDN connection; nothing like ADSL but a great improvement! 3G was one of the reasons I chose this phone.
  
• size - it's small. I wanted a small phone over a full features Nokia 9300i communicator for example. Weighting at just 96g it lighter than my previous phone, K700i. It's a bit taller in size, but then again a but thinner.
• RSS - a perfect application for a mobile phone. I what I really love, is the integration between the RSS reader and the web browser. If a web site has a RSS feed, I can subscribe to it directly from the web pages. I can schedule the feeds to be updated automatically or manually.
• Blogging - Blogger is integrated! I can take a picture and publish it directly on my blog without needing to login first. When I first published a picture from the phone, I got a new blog. But when I logged in to this "temporary" blog, I got the chance to merge the mobile blog with my real blog and then in the future all the entries are automatically published on my blog. It's really well implemented! You can take a nice picture and publish an entry for it in literally seconds.
  
• Camera - ok, so the camera is not anything like the one in K800i. It doesn't have autofocus or a flashlight. But who cares? I am not intending to replace my digital camera with my phone. The camera is a really decent 2MP camera that I can take snapshots with. The image manipulation features integrated in the phone are really good which will compensate a bit from the lacking quality of the camera. I can for example take panorama pictures, adjust color levels, brightness, eliminate read-eyes and other basic stuff.

Sony Ericsson has promoted very stongly Sony's Walkman brand. This phone does not have the Walkman MP3 player, but the MP3 player is really decent anyway! I can find songs by artist, genre and playlist. And the MP3 player is playing in the background so I can continue to use my phone as before. Nothing fancy, but works better than in older Sony Ericsson phones.
The phone also includes a Memory Stick micro card reader. I am thinking of buying a 512 MB memory card to hold some music :) (The phone description says that the card is not included, but my phone had a 64MB card inside!)

And needless to say, the Sony Ericsson's GUI is supirior to the Series60 GUI! It's really fast and intuitive. All the settings are in correct places, I can make my old shortcuts and the general placement of menus and icons just feels right, in contrast to the S60 GUI.

Cons:

• The web browser is unable to render event slightly more difficult web pages. I haven't tried using it with "Smart-fit" turned off or without pictures. But I guess Opera Mini will have to do.
  

Sony Ericsson K610i is a great replacement for my K700i! It has all the features I looked for in a modern mobile phone. One can always ask for mobile TV or iPod-like MP3 players in mobile phones, but I already have an iPod and I don't think I currently need mobile TV - I don't really watch TV anyway. So I was looking for a mobile phone and got one that suits me really well.

My bike

This is a picture of my motorcycle. Its also a test to send a picture from my new Sony Ericsson K610i phone :)