ALT
3 RTA!
Alt party - Helsinki Finland January 2002
Neatly reformatted from the Acorn Archimedes A4 Laptop generated original by
me, and made by various contributors. Well done people! CiH, Jan 17th..
Principal contributors to this farce..
'CiH', Chris Holland, the so-called "editor".
'Asteroid', John Hayward, who kindly donated the Archie laptop host.
'Felice', Rich Spowart, now we finally know the story of your scene nick!
'Q-Funk', Martin Eric Rachine, a very persistent viewpoint!
Various smaller contributions from the likes of Mr Pink, MSG, and a very
cute Finnish babe called Heli.
---------------------------------<Start>-----------------------------------
(Asteroid kicks off..)
Let's get on with the RTA..
I am sitting using the A4 in the cafe area of Stanstead airport after
finishing off a plate of standard egg, bacon, sausage and beans affair
supplied in most of these places. The A4 decided it didn't want to boot
initially, despite me pulling the battery out and complaining at it, but
after a few times of turning it on and off it sprang into life. This should
be interesting using this little machine as the basis for RTA and for some
Archimedes demos, but also at a party where many weird flavours of computer
will be seen, a lot of people probably have never seen this one =o)
2.05 Unfortunately this little Archimedes laptop was heavily abused from the
school who used to own it. The screen sometime decides it doesn't want to
work sometimes, the battery has seen better days, and often the machine
shuts off without much warning. Anyeeway, we are now in the departure
lounge and I've found a power socket!! Over to CiH..
14.05
We are running on stolen Stanstead Airport electricity. Mains sockets rule!
But seriously, some American person with a loud voice and a mobile phone
doesn't have any irony about his person.
This is the first contribution to this latest and fully electronic realtime
text, typed in the departure lounge, more later, and time to let Felice have
a go.
CiH
I wonder just how long this electric thing is gonna last before someone
comes over and politely asks us to stop using it. Hmmmm....
anyway, just chilling out at Stansted after a dump, waiting now for
boarding, which should occur in a few minutes. There's a flight off to
Amsterdam just now, it'll probably not be as cold there as it
apparently is in Helsinki atm :)
Felice.
(A long pause follows, whilst aircraft hurtle through the void, and time
differences are made up. The text resumes at the residence of the Q-Funk, a
previous ALT Party survivor, and wannabe Finn?)
21.37 Ok, we are now at Q-funk's place, interesting journey, requiring two
bus rides, and a longish walk in between.
Came across at least 6 different McDonalds along the way, in several
shopping malls. Not as many interesting historical buildings as I've seen
in previous cities which have hosted parties like Gdansk, Dresen, Utrecht,
etc, but there is a huge impressive railway station with large clock, and
museum also overlooking a square. Almost everywhere is covered in snow, it
looks very spectacular covering road sides, and steps on the fronts of
buildings. Q-Funk's flat is thankfully nice and warm but the concrete stairs
on the way up look very dangerous. :o/
asteroid
21.45hrs.
Usual Finnish joke no.1, played on all unsuspecting Alt Party goers every
time...
Let's walk them across town, carrying an armful of heavy stuff, in a
reenactment of Napoleon's 1812 Russian retreat (the lite version!)
So it proved to be the case this time as well. On a trivial note, not as
much winter as we were led to believe, I'm not disappointed! We're at the
residence of Q-Funk, with Linux (PeeCee) and Atari TT with Mint, in a slow-
booting race. In a corner, Felice is playing with himself, (With his phone
of course, what WERE you thinking of!?) I covet this laptop John, beware!
(Bwa ha ha ha! (Evil laughter etc.))
CiH, Frankly, I think we were better off with the toilet paper?!
Hmmm, sounds like neither of our phones here are working properly atm. We'll
have to get that sorted out fairly soon if we get the chance.
Q-Funk is currently reading his way through a WispaBite chocolate bar,
which are not available here in Finland. Amazing, no ?
Felice.
(No...)
What was scary was whilst sitting on the bus, Q-Funk was telling us about
his flatmate who had been drinking a lot lately and seemed to be paranoid
and was accusing Martin of hiring someone to kill him, I was thinking when
we got into Martin's flat what 3 strange British guys would look like to him
especially one with a odd-looking rugged case which might contain a
high tech weapon a specialist European assassin may carry!
asteroid
23.37hrs
L-l-l-ate l-l-log entry!
Mcdonalds, of burger fame are prototyping their answer to Burger King's
'Whopper'. This is known as the 'Mcfeast'. There is clearly still some work
to be done, as it cannot be eaten whilst staying whole, and falls apart
disastrously apart in your hands, messily. Indeed, they have to serve them
in a protective cardboard collar, which only serves to disguise the eventual
denoument for a short time.
They also trademark their fries carton, and fiercely defend their right to
it with a handpicked team of lawyers, who are highly paid to do this. What a
bunch of arseholes!
Looks like we're in for more unfocused wandering around with bags of stuff
tomorrow morning. O' what fun! Okay, all for the minute.
CiH, but Hesburgers DO rule still?
After Maccy Dee's we went into the neighbouring Esso station to get
chocolate and whatever, I noticed all the drinks were covered by tarpaulin
and I noticed local beers in chiller cabinets had padlocks on them. Damn!
Have to get booze just before we get into the party venue :o)
Asteroid
23:52 -- Q-Funk's intro philosophy
It was nice to greet the Maggies again and to finally get to meet John too,
especially after such a busy and somewhat depressing afternoon trying to get
yet more Microshaft shiite talking to one another to no avail.
In a sense, it felt like Turku all over again, with the added pleasure of
several more years sharing stories on IRC over the years. Even though we
only see of each other maybe once a year, it really does feel like meeting
old school mates one hasn't run into since childhood or something.
As I have said several times over previous years, IRC really is quite far
from this cold, impersonal computer thing; it really is a social gathering
of global proportions, where people separated by borders or continents get
to know one another better than they might know their next door neighbors;
IRC really is the first sight of a growing world community and pretty much
the only remaining interest I have in Internet.
Indeed, whatever else I might have once seen into it has vanished under
corporate America's mercantilism or wannabe world politicians' senseless new
anti-hackers, anti-crypto and anti-freedom-of-online-publishing laws, not to
mention the gigantic failure the dot-com business has been in recent
years... Hmmm... Wait, I take that back: even though Linux and Open Source
Software have yet to conquer the desktop, there is still something almost
magical about the quality and variety of software that has emerged out of
the whole movement and, while it sometimes in a very crude state that
produces unexpected results, I am incredibly enthusiastic about how nicely
things are progressing.
I guess that's gonna be my stance at this 3rd installment of Alt-Party:
Atari might be dead and Linux not there yet, but hell isn't it amazing all
the neat ideas that come out of there and how great the folks one meets in
the process? So, yes, it's more about cool people with great ideas,
progressively forming their own world community and building the tools to
unite it -- completely outside from any previous traditional legal or
commercial framework -- not about a bunch of no-life, emotionally
disconnected nerds terorising everyone and their granny by cracking into
their bank accounts using evil tools of network terrorism.
Noo... I guess more to come tomorrow, after my workday if done and I meet
the folks at Gloria. -- Q-Funk
FRIDAY JAN 11th, or Day Two of the party.
07.46hrs
"We are the dead of night."
"We're in the zombie room.."
But seriously, it's morning, it's too feckin' early, there are too many
typos, and Q-Funks screensaver is too damn tastefully nude! And now John has
come to join us..
CiH, I can't feel my face, what's going on, helllp!
7:51
Here I was thinking I dreamt of a tiger, until my GSM's alarm clock woke me
up and made me realize that CiH roars louder than the lions at night!
Perkele... Oh well, it's still nice to see them Brits again, but goddammit
when do I ever get any sleep this week? Between the schizofrenic roommate
who thinks I've hired the mob to get him mugged and the various turmoil
resulting from juggling between 3 equally demanding dayjobs... *yawn* Unkle
Q really wishes he'd miraculously end up in a massage parlour for the
weekend, wind back the clock and THEN spend the Alt weekend as scheduled.
7.53
It's a bit early yet, but we are all up and deciding what to do about how to
plan the morning ahead before the party starts. We live in hope ...... YAWN
:)
Felice.
(Another lengthy break in the text as we wander out, all over Q-Funk's
workplace, where the availability of free fast internet distracts us until
we finally get to the Alt Party place..)
Had lunch in the canteen in Q-funk's office, food is superb, definitely
could get used to working there. :o)
asteroid
13.05
We're at Gloria, and typing in the dark!
But seriously, we spent some time at Q-Funk's workplace, a shiny metal hi-
tec affair with a plaited blonde reception-babe. Spent the morning web-
surfing until my web-shorts were full of gritty particles of loose HTML
script. Then lunch at a high quality works canteen. Fortunately, excess
walking with heavy equipment didn't feature prominently, as Q-Funk saw
sense, and we got a taxi here.
Felice is setting up his Falcon, it seems to be missing a few keys!! Upon
this discovery, misgivings about Q-Funks energetic drag through the cobbled
streets of Helsinki yesterday resurface. At the very least, Felice's Falcy
chipset will have been thoroughly reseated by the pounding that its
travelling case took last night!?
The Res Gods are in the house, they are clustered around Mr Pink's Sony
laptop, impatiently awaiting monitors for the rest of their stuff.
John H. is off to listen to Felice's Falcy....
CiH.
Well, it seems to be mixed news with the Falcon at the moment - hopefully
later on when we can get a screen, even if it's a TV of some sort, we can
sort out whatever problems there are.
Felice.
13.29
The true test of how good a party place is, is in the state of its toilets.
The loo's at Gloria are funny, in a strange kind of way, tiny cubicles
showing scars of possible past misdeeds? and an ultraviolet light! So I'm
sitting in a blue loo! Actually, I preferred to give my eyes a bit of peace
and quiet and sat in darkness. It could get very, very, interesting if the
staff don't keep up with the cleaning?
CiH, I'd leave it for ten minutes, if I were you.
16.05
In this mid-afternoon phase, the party is creeping up gradually. Most of the
afternoon has been very quiet, but more people are showing up, more
computers being set up, and some stumbling attempts at tuning various exotic
8-bit hardware and synth combinations are also going on.
We've been a bit light in demo showing so far, but there is the saddoes
consolation standby, the net connection in the main reception, if the semi
darkness in here gets too much.
CiH, put some lights on!
16.20
A slight update to the last entry, got to see some unreleased new effects
on Baggio's Falcon. These are very nice looking, and very advanced,
including some slick transformations. Don't think there is going to be
anything from them for this party though, not unless it features the twin
concepts of "Boys" and "Spice"? In fact, I don't think there is going to be
a lot with an Atari theme coming out, just a lot of coding to progress
things a a bit further?
The same seems to go for events in Pinksville, otherwise known as the
Reservoir Gods Grotto, their latest project, Godpee seems to be very
advanced, but as you all know, it 'aint finished until after the party. I
also caught sight of the collaborative project with a well known French
group (not sure if I can mention this by name as yet?) This is playable, but
clearly incomplete.
Still, we've got the impending Chosneck issue to look forward to.
CiH, first with a tiny fraction of the news?
17.45
Fifteen minutes to the opening ceremony...
Some of the live musicians, the power tool specialists, have got in there
way too early!
Q-Funk has arrived, and robbed his monitor back off MSG, much TT-based
mayhem now follows...
CiH, got the T-shirt, yet to see the party?
17:58
Nearly time for the opening ceremony and things are starting to bounce.
Where's Pahartik ?
Felice.
18.10
Q-Funk has got this idea of relocating upstairs, which may be more
comfortable, if you include concepts such as 'isolated', and it is rather
too out of the way of the main action. There is an excellent view from up
there, but not of the main screen.
It is getting to the stage where we're starting to get settled in now?
CiH, up stairs, and down again?
18:22
Turns out Pahartik belated his departure from Tampere and won't be in
Helsinki until about 19:00, so we'll have to wait before we setup our subnet
and go fetch my Debian box back in Espoo. Still, had one heck of a crappy
working day and am happy to finally be back in Gloria. Q.
19.55
Pizza and forced march back home. The route back was o'er slippery hill, and
ice-covered dale. John H. had the best job of the lot, which was carrying
Pahartiks monitor with him. Both it and John made it back home intact. Yes,
we picked up our favourite hippy cowboy dude person from the railway
station.
Live music is running, an interesting combination of a nuclear emergency
alarm, and the sort of squeaks and groans that you get at an SM parlour?!
CiH, let the odd times roll!
20:00
Yep, one or two slippery hills but not too bad. I am still wondering where a
screen is gonna come from so I can use my Falcon, pondering the idea of
maybe picking up a cheapo TV from here in Helsinki, just to have something
to do .... Not that I'm bored or anything, but it's gonna be a big pain in
the butt if we've carted all this hardware with us and were unable to use it
at all.
Felice.
(Guess who forgot the time!)
Trying to use some of the plentiful games and demos for the Acorn but they
all seemed to be saved as ADF images, to unencode them I need use of a PC
and some 720k disks as the only software I know to extract them is a basic
DOS util which then writes the file to individual sectors of the disk. Not
having any luck so far.
Party is now pretty busy with every table covered with something,
The amount of cables going everywhere is scary. It is inviting an accident
of some kind =o(
asteroid
20.45
Ple-e-e-ase can I have an accident, pleeeaase!?
CiH, inviting trouble, and a friend...
21.50
A Vectrex invader attacks our table space, needless to say, he is welcome!
(With open tentacles??)
John H. got some image files working at last, and even the odd demo.
Oldschool effects look very bbblllluuurrryyy on this LCD screen. Also the
demos dated from the time where demo coders learnt to make scrolly text, but
just before the time they learnt to make the other, more interesting parts
of the demo...
Q-Funk, Pahartik, and Felice have gone wandering again, maybe to bring back
a screen for Felice's Falcy? Maybe Q-Funk will settle down and start logging
some party attendance time, as opposed to travelling time? Has that man got
restless feet or what?
Meanwhile in the Res Gods corner, Mr Pink patiently shows Ripley what he is
doing. She desperately looks around for the Finnish equivalent of the
emergency 999/911 number, but fails..
CiH, this realtime will self-destruct in......
22.10
About a minute after the last log entry, the live C64 music starts.
It scrapes in my head and pierces my ears, in a really cool way. I'm
starting to get that proper 'party feeling', impending fatigue, eye level
headache, and an underlying grimyness that screams for deep cleansing. I
know this feeling well from past parties, so have learned to welcome it as a
friend.
Plenty of time for resting later, after all, it is only ten past eight in
'back-home' time.
CiH, they come for you, with their broken milk-bottle fingers, and white lab
coats, they do!
(Err John, try not to forget the time???)
Out of the machines here, the C64 seems to be the dominant non Intel based
platform, and as well as the original beige "bull-nose" and later whiter
units, there are the more esoteric 128s and a slightly odd smaller C64 which
looks like it's been cut in half and glued together!!
There are two Vectrexes (should that be Vectri?) now, and personally myself
I have a soft spot for this little toaster console, there is just nothing
like it, and Vector graphics are just so damn cool, even though the colours
are made of the transparent plastic sheets that clip over the 10" screen =o)
Weirder still are two Finns who have been given a Silicon Graphics Indy,
this purple semi tower cube thing has an odd looking removable chassis
holding the motherboard and cards, on the graphics card there is a 'cast
list' containing a credit to the engineers who made the thing. At the
moment it's dead, and they have been given a challenge to to resurrect it,
if they can they can keep it!! At the moment, they have desoldered the
NVRAM battery as it's close to 10 years old, replacing this would be a good
idea, would cool if they can get it running, as those machines are so
horrificaly expensive new. Guys if you are reading this, and still can't
find anywhere that does a battery, try www.battery.co.uk, they are good for
specialised batteries for old machines. Asteroid
22.35
C64 live music rumbles, or rather, growls on..
"If it's too loud, you're too feckin' old!" or,
"If it isn't very loud all of a sudden, then you've feckin' well gone deaf!"
CiH, Monty on the Run was NEVER like this, surely??
23.50
The midnight hour approaches..
We've been taking cover in the lobby area for the last hour, as the act that
followed the C64 live music was definitely too feckin' loud!
Felice returns with telly/monitor/rgb thing for his Falcy, moment of truth
as to whether the damage it took last night is more than skin deep or not,
approaches. Felice got wrong video lead, so moment of truth goes away again,
more than slightly narked at being prodded awake and dragged out of its warm
and comfortable bed.
Never mind, it's nearly the midnight hour, and time for Saturday morning.
Just hang on a little bit longer.
CiH, ah, wait a minute, Felice returns...
23.55
Felice's Falcon.. It works.... Yaaaay!!! SHE RIDES!! (Or boots.)
Saturday 12th Jan, or DAY 3
0.00 DONG!! Cih informs me its midnight!!
Felice has a pretty young Finnish girl asking him what he's doing on the
Falcon, he showing her Maggie #20.
I am playing Star fighter 3000 on the Acorn A4 and it looks very very
impressive but I want to plug it into something better than greyscale. I
hijack a monitor off a PC running some Linux command shell which hasn't
really done anything all day. Trouble is that I change modes to RGB to run
some other games and the screen goes blank, and I can't use the PC monitor
or LCD display. I head off to bed and decide to sort it out in the morning.
I sleep for oh, 4 hours and get woken up by Mr Do music, the MSX is being
used on the projector screen and is pumping out the same bleepy tunes.
After much searching on the net I manage to reset the NVRAM on the Acorn and
she runs again, and I catch up with the RTA.
Asteroid
08.50
I've had an interesting, not to mention annoying night.
Quite apart from the normal hubbub, there was a continual soundchip racket
coming from the big screen, and even bigger speakers. I got up for a while,
and chatted with a couple of the organisers and a nice bloke from a PeeCee
crew who works at Housemarque, Wiztom's place of work. Got his business card
in my pocket, but I won't reach down for it right now, as I might hit one of
the sleeping Reservoir bodies crumpled on the floor by accident, and have
their eye out, or something.
All alone with an internet connection, I even got as far as typing in a
brief mid-party report onto the DHS bulletin board, based on the Friday
night rumours and innuendo. The things we do when we can't sleep and get
bored.
I went back to bed shortly before 6am,and I might even have overcome the
soundchip racket, but for the extra noise factor coming from an inacessent
fat bloke with a King Henry IV pudding bowl styled haircut, bellowing "Otto"
from the balcony, quite close to where we were. Alcohol is believed to be a
strong candidate for an explanation. (For the haircut, at least.)
At this present moment, I'm up with John H. fiddling to get my SCSI working
with Felice's battered but proud falcy, what next? breakfast I suppose?
Someone has just triggered the Castle Wolfenstein alarm clock. Nice of
them...
CiH, we're in the noisy Zombie room?
09.20
Cappuchino rules. It does less damage on the way down than Gloria's
expresso.
CiH, we're in the coffee room...
10.07
Checked out Q-Funk, still working away.
Two command line windows open, and just a hint of nipple on the desktop?
What do Linux programmers do in their spare time? - Lust ineffectually!
CiH, can anyone tell me where to find this keyboard?
11.35
We went out for some food, but found the slackers version of Mcdonalds
instead. Not open until 11.00hrs, tssssk!
We came away with something a lot better tasting, and prepared with loving
care. The local supermarket does some brilliant hot dogs. Perfect! To make a
good day even better, some lights have come on, and the Reservoir Gods
banter stream has resumed.
CiH, Reservoir hot dogs are essential.
morning: mrpink/rg and msg/rg on da keyz
greetings 2 all sc3n3rz.
fuckings to disco mobile, ddt and rally driv3rs.
we have lites! no more RGB 000 in the RG Grotto!
passing the keyz on the left hand side to MSG ...hey..in a worm bag..
well the 5 ours sleep was good and it back to msx on ssdesigner...
it's far too dark for AGBz so the /|\atari will have to be used more...
greetz to all gamecube owners..
12.50.
I was sitting with Wiztom earlier, and started to feel very tired, As Wiztom
isn't really such bad company, I figured that my brain was starting to spin
down, so I crashed out. Just where the controls for the very big screen are.
So when people with loud Finnish voices start to climb over me, it's time to
get the ferck out. I relocated to a better neighbourhood, in the corridor..
Ho humm.
Now we're talking to Twilighte, the other UK person, and big Oric fan.
CiH, always in the way...
13.30
C64 demos are still winning friends and influencing people..
15.30
Why away so long?
Well a few things. Firstly a longer session and demonstration of Twilighte's
world of Oricness. Including some of the games he's written, also including
the combined co-production demo with D-Force, which picks up where the
STNICCC intro left off, including even more awesome screen-mangling. He
didn't have an actual Oric with him, but the Euphoric emulator did pretty
well.After considering Felice's Falcy case mangling escapades from Thursday
night, this is a good move.
Afterwards, watch John H. crash and burn in Starfighter 3000, often.
Then to Mcdonalds, who had figured they had better stop slacking, and start
serving food again. Here, I discovered the 'safe' way to eat a McFeast. This
is simply to take the cardboard collar surrounding it at birth, fold it an
half, and contain the lower, leakier part of the burger in it, This is over
90% more effective than the previous method of letting it slip through your
fingers. But why don't they make a good job perfect by printing instructions
on the side of the packaging??
Okay, I'm off again.
CiH, I'll sort the typo's out later, alright?
15.45
We're watching a strange combination of laserdisk and MSX. And it is used as
a case study for software developers in how not to do multimedia games. It
has a general farty smell about the place, which can be summarised as "Great
background, crap game."
The background spools off the CD, has been pre-rendered, and looks gorgeous.
The game has been stolen from a 2600 VCS.
CiH, oh hang on, here comes the title sequence, AGAIN!
16.00
Another laserdisk epic, I think this one is called "The many deaths of
Cowboy Jake" It has a wild west setting where the player/hero is given no
time at all to react, and he dies, in several horrible ways, the end.
These laser disk games are great, why didn't they ever catch on?!
CiH, he's BEHIND you!
16.07 Just had a brief play with the Pioneer PX-7, with its Laserdisc add on
box on the big screen the stereo sound and motion video looks stunning on
the screen, but the games are heavily watered down Atari VCS games with
extremely blocky sprites. But its an interesting novelty, the discs are in
their sleeves and look mint and the big chunky arcade controller feels nice,
and appears to be imported from Japan, albeit the system has extremely short
term playing value.
Many of the Laserdisc films and games were often hyped as 'motion pictures'
now I know why, motion = as in shit. =o)
asteroid
www.edome.net
The URL for pictures from this very party :)
17.35
The games compo has drifted by, the C64 live music makes a swooping return.
A little 'design' feature from upstairs. A fast asleep, or more probably
dead(?) drunk person, has been left covered with chairs, Is this Q-Funk's
alcoholic paranoid delusional flatmate?
And no, we've checked and counted carefully, it's not one of ours...
CiH, at the running out of things to say stage of the evening.
17.56
Just had the games tournament which I signed up with a few of the gods,
playing some snake like game on the Atari 2600 only to get my ass whipped by
one of the Finns, as he had a proline Atari joystick compared to my clumsy
looking joystick. Tash suffered a similar fate and so did some of the gods.
Those who got past the first stage were invited back to play Tank on the
Intellivision.
Asteroid
(Biggest factual error of the party coming up, what was shown at the demo
competitions was alright, but less overwhelming than we expected.)
18.40
Present rumour state. There are up to eight good quality demos for the demo
competitions, not to mention all the little joke intros and semi-live
performances wrapped around a dozen lines of BASIC code that made the
previous Alt party competitions so memorable. Indeed, Setok is even
suggesting that there may have to be a cull of the more inconsequential
entries. From what I saw, they seem to be dominated by Commodore 64 entries,
with a Macintosh demo to hold up for the high end. Also, if my eyes are
working correctly, a Vectrex demo?!
Not to mention the possible return of the Vic 20. For the Atari end,
buggerall really, apart from Wiztom's little effort, which is going to be a
record breaker of a sort that is of interest to other coders, but not
otherwise setting the world aflame? A more general return to proper demo
coding has been suggested by Wiztom, so we await future developments with
great interest.
It's going to be a long but very interesting night,
CiH, demo rumours mongered here! Get 'em whilst they're hot!
Got to see a fake demo, without a computer!!
Consisting of clever manipulation of a set square, several sheets of acetate
on a overhead projector!!
Asteroid
19.50
First live act nervously setting up on stage.
Home brew Vectrex carts are being putting together hastily by the chaps next
to us. The laptop they are using can emulate a cartridge using a hacked
cable, or blank cartridge board is filled with a game EPROM chip. RJ says
Hi, (The 'RJ' in Question was the guest speaker, Robert Michal, the creator
of the Amiga and Lynx, who was here this evening!)
dem dem, dem dem. Dem, dem - DEM dem dem!!! (The veccies start up tune if
you didnt know!!)
asteroid
Yeah John, they wear vector vegetables on their head!
CiH
Yeah but its difficult drawing brussel sprouts om a 10" vector screen.
Aha, this is where things start to fall apart...
Just talking bj{\246}llocks, Scandanavian style :o) - Asteroid
We had a guy mixing Drum N Bass and a digeridoo, apart from the fact that he
didn't appear to have had much practice, seeing as he was only able to blow
it once in a short while. I know playing Sax and trombone is difficult, a
metre and a half drain pipe many times more, so I guess. (Asteroid)
21.45
Tiredness and confusion rule...
And many, many typo's...........
I've been away for a while, sort of a half-hour 'microsleep' to keep up.
People were very funny during the live music compo. Setok has been taking
singing lessons from a whale, with indigestion. The bloke with the digeridoo
seemed to tragically cut short. Almost saying "Wait, there's still another
minute to go!" Coming up next, the hell on earth modfile compo (with no
samples!)
Sample Reservoir Gods joke overheard earlier:-
"How did the Swedish weatherman bring an Atari demo crew into their winter
forecast?"
"He announced that there were 'New Sleet Developments'!!"
KERCHINGGG! Ladeeez an' chennulmun, thankya veryy much!
CiH, now John's taking an (unfunny) turn.
22.02
Having noticed lately we have a lady who maybe of indifferent gender. She
appears to be well dressed but had a large square chin and more worryingly
carries a pair of handcuffs on her handbag and appears to be wandering to
and fro from the toilets and cloakrooms. It wouldn't appear she is here to
do coding, music, or general social banter amongst computery talk and
politics. Hmm.
A big Amiga picture appears on the screen it appears to be Workbench 1.2-1.3
or something, I think the bar should be selling rotten fruit and eggs to
chuck at the not so great entries. =o)
asteroid
22.42
If I stare long enough at this screen, something will form out of the milky
vagueness?
22.50 Funny the reservior gods have disappeared somewhere. WHO LET DA GODS
OUT? WOOF, WOOF-WOOF, WOOF WOOF!! (sorry memories of that song whilst in
Utrecht last year :o)
Just realised the guy who was playing with the Vectrex next to us, was none
other than RJ Michal, who designed the Amiga and Lynx!! (John)
22.55
And he talked to us, said jokingly that he had flown thousands of miles from
California, just to see his precious Amigas in action here, but that was a
lie really, as the reason for being here was actually to do with work. This
was when the early stages of the live music compo were running, and we
explained to him that things were likely to get very silly from here on!
He was also interested in our Archie laptop, and I ran the Fishtank demo
just to show it could do cool graphical stuff, which he said was 'awesome'.
And all of this was without us realising who he was. Oh the missed
opportunity for getting the real inside dope on the bad old Atari Corp days,
and the Tramiel family. He was also very interested in the Vectrex next to
us, and spent quite a bit of time there as well.
CiH, where opportunities skip gaily by...
****party top tip!!****
Discarded pizza cartons make useful packaging for PC motherboards. Plus
if any food matter is accidently left inside, when the board is taken out
and put in the PC, when overclocking, any small bits of mozerella cheese
cooked on the CPU may make a tasty snack for those late night coding
sessions. (John)
23.35
The final leg, waiting for the demo compo.
We were treated to camcorder excerpts from Felice's STNICCC 10th anniversary
bash, just over a year ago. Quite a short, sharp summing up of the whole
STNICCC experience. Ah, those memories, the luxury accomodation, great FREE
food, and sleepless nights, so some things do remain constant from party to
party.
RJ Michal to speak now..
Felice on the ball camcordering him.. Good move mate!
I'll sort this lot later!
Among other things, he said:
There were an estimated 500,000 Amigas still in use (out of 10 million
sold.) This was gratifying for a system created over 15 years ago.
He unsurprisingly described Microsoft as soulless and corporate.
The Amiga was intended to be creative, open and with full low level access
right from the start.
He considered if something like the Amiga might ever happen again?
His follow-up designs, the Lynx and 3DO were encrypted, and not open
systems, these were 'corporate' decisions, which he fought against.
ALthough lately, the Lynx encryption has been broken open, with the
possibility of more open homebrew development raised.
He lamented the loss of a grass roots input. (What might now be called the
'scene'?)
For the best chance of a revival of the 'Amiga' ideals, portable
comunications devices with computing and gaming capabilities is where it's
going to be at. With the current Wintel duopoly, personal computers are now
'settled' in their form and function. He did express great hopes for Linux,
and easy to use versions such as 'Lindows' opening up a grassroots community
and homebrew development again.
His last project 'Redjay', was intended to give Playstation standard
graphics on a mobile device, but this failed and went under. This was going
to be left as an 'open' system. He said to watch this space, in the next
year or so, in this field, for the next 'Amiga'.
(Midnite - It's Sunday the 12th Jan!)
He took questions after the prepared portion of his speech. One of these
concerned Atari, and his dealings with them.
He used to make snide remarks about Atari, apologised for neglecting to
mention the direct competitor hardware to the Amiga, the Atari ST. He now
recognised this as valid as the Amiga. The initial Amiga history started
with Jack Tramiel, forced out of Commodore, first seizing on the Amiga
as an Atari badged C64 killer. This was going to be the Tramiel revenge on
Commodore. However, Commodore got there first. Both the Amiga and more
especially, the ST were rushed to market as a result.
Robert is a lively and intelligent speaker, still with lots of enthusiasm
for his field, and twice as much tonight, sensing a receptive audience.
CiH.
00:45 Q-Funk
Interesting to hear from an ex-Atari then Amiga designer what we had known
all along: that Atari's founding family (the Tramiels) were nothing but
rotten businessmen on a vengeance stroll at their previous employer. This
explains why Atari corp never gave the impression that they had any passion
in what they were doing and why they ended up hiring an ex user group
co-ordinator (Brady) as their PR guy at some point and, even then, Brady
always gave the impression that he was fighting Atari management.
Tramiels could not be brought to bother marketing their products at all,
even if their lives depended on it, for one good reason: they only wanted to
get even, not to impress and amaze. Thus, as our guest speaker pointed out,
a LOT of corners had been cut as the first ST was rushed out. (we obviously
all cursed at one point or another why the hard-disk port was 80% SCSI
compatible but then not quite, why the screen modes were almost compatible
with PC equivalents but not quite, etc.
In retrospect, Power Without The Price has meant that Atari cut corners in
the wrong spots. Lucky for them they had MIDI ports and got the music
market, ironic that these ports came in because Atari wanted to save
themselves the troubles of developing sound chips.
In a nutshell, Atari users have seldom been passionate at their hobby
because, yes, there was not a damned thing to write home about, while Amiga
users AND designers enjoyed their ride.
(Ed-Note: Not ALL of us non-passionate, surely? The ST series would be
entirely dead and buried a long time before now, if the cynicism ran that
deeply and completely.)
(QF adds: let's be honnest, if it weren't for the MIDI port magically
handing the electronic music market to Atari, the ST would be as exotic as,
say, a TI99/4 or Spectravideo!)
(Ed note again:- You might be right from a North American/Canadian
perspective, and you are 100% right about the Scumiel family's
mismanagement, but you're forgetting the large take-up in Europe as a
mainstream home/gaming machine from 1987 to the early nineties, and a lot of
Germans did get ST's and the later members of the family for serious
professional purposes. So they must have seen something worthwhile there?
The ST MC68K family seems to me, to have survived the unfortunate
circumstances of its conception and birth and done quite well since. Was
this something to do with the "passionless" Atari users perhaps?
Oh yeah, I was forgetting that you share a birth nation with Leonard Cohen
(grin!) Lighten up Q, it's not always as bleak as you paint it.
00.50
New headline for the day - "3 Alt Demo Compo delayed by Amiga designer!" It
was interesting in his speech, that he was able to mention and discuss Atari
by name, something which he couldn't do for a long time, but he was still
not able to mention Jack Tramiel (the original pointy-headed boss) by name,
unless specifically asked.
For the record, since the Tramiels sold out the remnants of Atari Corp to
JTS, they have effectively completely retired from business life, the scars
from their Atari experience proving too much? There is no Tramiel revival to
come. Which might be a curious kind of relief to the rest of us!
CiH - At last, acting like some kind of journalist?
01.05
Time for the demo compo..
Well what a demo show.
Pretty much no piece of old school hardware was left untouched.
We had demos on the C64 and 128, Vic 20, MSX, Gameboy, Vectrex.
RJ Michal gave a big talk on the golden age of computing, his dislike of
Microsoft attitude towards no competition and unnecessarily bloated
hardware. There were many, many questions asked and answered and too much
to mention here. It was amazing to be privileged for us to listen to a man
who has been directly involved with some much loved platforms, the Amiga,
Atari Lynx, and the 3DO.
Felice has videotaped most of what RJ spoke, but he spoke to a load of us
for a long time. I think it will be a good idea to get the audio put onto
MP3 so most of the active Atari scene can download it.
(Asteroid)
02.15
Competition impressions.
Well it's the usual ALT Party eclectic mixture, the ass kicker, the joke
demo, and the 'What the f#ck was that?" release.
The Ass-Kickers, there were three this time. Viznut was back in town with a
Vic 20 demo even better than his first one, where he seems to have invented
an entirely new screen mode called 'truecolour' for the basic Vic! But he
has got tough competition from a well executed if difficult to see Gameboy
demo. Then there was a Vectronic demo, which got lucky off some stunning
blue lense-flare when it was shown through the video projector. This made it
look 10x cooler than it would have normally done.
The Commodore 64 and MSX occupied the middle ground, with a memorable joke
demo for the C64, and more or less 'Basic' designs on the rest. The sole PC
entry (class of 386) did reasonably well with an ST'ish release as well.
The demo which had people guessing as to whether it was real, fake, or the
showing of it got completely bolloxed, was the Mac demo. Setok swore
afterwards that the preview he saw was completely different!
But nothing for Atari or Amiga, although there was a hint of something from
Wiztom earlier. What happened to that?
CiH, an Altparty demo showing, isn't really happening, until the Vic 20 demo
shows up!
02:40
Well, what an interesting night, seriously :) RJ Michael, one of the guys
responsible for the Amiga, Lynx and other stuff over the years arrived and
gave a rather interesting talk, pictures of which should be included with
this mag all being well - with hopefully the full talk itself minus the
questions being hosted on Altparty or Fishpool's servers. It was good to get
an official (ie, minus Future Publishing's imaginary ranting and raving a la
ST/Amiga Format) report of just what happened and how he, as a founder
member of the computer industry, sees things today. He'd also been to the
Alt Zone at last year's Assembly party, which must have been good !
People around here are busy with stuff, the guy and rather attractive
brunette have been coding all night so far. On our left, the Reservoir Gods
are still going strong. Tash seems to be looking a little bored ... (QF:
doesn't she know that Unkle Q is the remedy to girly boredom? ;-)
Felice.
(We all collapse for a while, attempt sleep again..)
11.50
We're back, and we've had just enough sleep to numb our lips and disable our
motor co-ordination!
Sleep note for next Alt - Why not have more space for sleepers, less space
for freeform expressionist nocturnal drunks, and make sure the two are more
effectively segregated the next time!(QF: I second that! Been woken up by
rampaging drunk arses whose feet bumped into me not once, but twice, each
morning! The alcohol prohibition should be more tightly enforced, IMHO.)
Around 4am, the omens were not encouraging. My airbed pillow has
disappeared, and possibly one or two other things from that corridor,
judging by the over-active search party which was doing its thing around
5am. There was a lot of other foot traffic as well, most of it quite happy
to leave the big doors to the noisy central hall gaping open. Eventually, I
don't know when I did get to sleep, and slept to around 9am? Got up for a
while and cleaned up, went back to bed for a bit, and now, I'm back again.
Chosnek, the Polski Falcon only diskmag has made it out, but at 7 meg for
the download, we need to organise something serious. We have a good internet
connection, but not enough blank floppies! Aaaagh! The few disks we have got
are ex-Windowze 95 installation disks, which might give you a good idea
about the basic lack of quality (g!)
CiH, I'll buy the person who pinched my pillow a drink, but only if I get to
piss in it first!
12.00 woken up a tad disoriented, its kind of later than I hoped, but I
think I have slept well. The Vectrex guy next to us, has a small LCD
display running on single board computer, the Vectrex is running a short
looped demo with a bouncing square which he admits is similar to a windows
demo but he says it's his first demo on the Veccy and I think it's a great
first try being such a unique machine. - asteroid
12:27 Q-FUNK
Well, yesterday evening went smoothly and saw some progresses to the TT030
Homepage layout and content. I went for a short stroll downtown with
Pahartik to fetch some food, fine-tuned my Debian setup on the Lintel box,
generally stuffed my belly with all sorts of healthy goodies while typing
mails and improving the Web page and enjoyed Pahartik's sporadic but funny
comments.
I said before that this party is mostly a social gathering to me and this
really is so. Getting to spend a few days with friends one hardly ever sees
outside IRC really is quite nice, but I really wished there were fewer
drunk, fucked-up arseholes and more girls like the one sitting by Felice's
side. As Bela Fleck & the Flecktones so brilliantly put as a song title:
Mars needs more women!
Speaking of that, let's hope I'll get more lucky with the Russo-Estonian
girls in Narva, than with the proverbialy drunk average mentally ill Finnish
girl who spent her X-mas holidays as a bachelorette (like about 60% of
Helsinki females, according to a recent poll) because she was too proud to
say yay to any guy asking for as little as a the evening's last dance on New
Year's eve... (Ed note: When you say "dance", surely you mean "f*ck"?!) -
No, I mean the evening's last slow dance at discos, where bachelors make one
desperate last run for it. Finland doesn't put much of any slows any more,
like everywhere else, but they do keep the tradition of lining up 3 slows in
a row to end the evening.
(Ed-Note: But when it comes down to it in the end, it DOES still mean a
f*ck!! Dancing is horizontal foreplay, after all!)
12:52
Finally back in the land of the living again after a while - maybe about 7
or 8 hours, I don't know. Having a drink of hot cocoa right now, it is very
nice - all credit to the bar staff here, who, whilst they haven't exactly
sold a great deal on the food side have had nice stuff available. People
are in the process of leaving the party, but there's still a fair bit going
on, which is good. The guys with their collection of old 8-bit computers and
other rare stuff have their table open for viewing - there's some nice gear
there as well. It's good to see that kind of stuff has a good home to go to
- it's all in excellent condition!
Felice.
Some music is being played as we just come back from McDonalds, which has
some strange stuttered voice through a vocoder, giving a very similar effect
to the mid 1980s hit "Nineteen" - Asteroid
13.55
Packed up my stuff, found the inflatable part of my pillow again, it was at
the top of the constantly disturbed sleeping corridor, so obviously some
drunkard spotted it, thought "Huurrr, sleeeep!", and borrowed it for the
night. Had a brief missing clothing scare with a shirt that I had forgotten
from the balcony and the previous night. It was a shirt bought for me by my
girlfriend, for Xmas, so it was the last item of clothing I would want to
misplace by a long shot.
Music note for Felice; "N-n-n-n-nineteen" was written by the Hardcastle
Paul, rather than the McCartney Paul..
C-c-c-c-CiH!
15.10
Still waiting for the competition judging/results.
15.40
Setok presides over the party remnants to announce the results. No surprises
for the demo compo winner, it's Viznut and his magical Vic 20 again.
The proper results in full will follow in the main report. I'm too tired and
lazy to do it all myself. Thoughts slowly turn to going.
CiH, but it 'aint over until the boring bugger sucks!
(Another big gap, John H. fills in the elapsed time nicely with the next
bit.)
22.10
There is a twinge of sadness as everything has been packed away, I thank
the Amiga people on the next table for lending us their VGA monitor.
Q-Funk phones for a taxi to take us back to his place, and for some reason
the taxi controller doesn't seem to understand we need a larger car to take
5 of us and all our gear along, and the car they supplied us wasn't adequate
to take us all. It takes two hours to get a mini van with is suitable to
get all of us in.
Back at Q-Funk's place we phone for a pizza and then take a sauna. The
Scandinavians have these saunas not just for health benefits but as a social
get together, and interesting excuse to sit bollock-naked with your mates
inside a boiler room. I am not sure exactly how it improves your health,
but if it cleans your skin it must be a good thing, as I don't remember
seeing any Finns or Swedes with spots.
Asteroid
22:44
Yep, as Asteroid said, it took a while before the taxi finally arrived -
something about some confusion between the taxi controller and whatever else
was going on. We got back to Q-Funk's place, got all the equipment carried
back into the warmth of the apartment and then went for a sauna and pizza in
that order, ordering the pizza in from a firm called PizzaTaxi. Very nice
actually, they stayed hot for a long period.
It's gonna be interesting to see just what happens regarding the sauna for
the after-party celebrations, after all we have Ripley (Tash) with us - as Q
wrote earlier on the alt-party realtime stored on the web, she is pretty
cute even clothed ! We'll have to see what happens - whatever does, I'm
pretty sure she's seen it all before anyhow.
Atm we're just chilling, talking about various topics such as Linuz, BSD,
www.farts.com, flights - most topics under the sun. We'll probably be off to
bed in a while.
Felice.
22.52
It's time for Felice to move and let me have my turn, in the shufflebottom
Pizza cafe acorn keyboard thingy.
His stark-bollock-nakedness himself, Q-Funk has got dressed, and we are all
thankful. Q-Funk's sauna is very small and compact and we were all close
together (Jeez' this gets worse!) Pizza followed, in satisfactory, rather
than snack quantities, and now the independently running process daemon
called 'tiredness' is starting to catch up, and overtake...
Much sleep, then the post-party sauna tomorrow, a big fella called Setok
will groan "Boring buggers suck!" at irregular intervals, and much more?
Probably some skilful sauna avoiding flinnying from the Gods, how close will
it get this time?
CiH, boring buggers sleep?
(QF: solution is that, since Leon seemed to believe that going in with
Wiztom's sister might convince him to give a try at social nakedness in a
boiler room, a close alternative is: heya mate, wanna see yer sister
neikid?)
14.01.02 10.16
What a weird night, hey I can type this on the A4 without getting out of
bed, laptops are just great aren't they?
Firstly CiH's loud storing as at full belt, although only for a short time,
I drift off to sleep only to wake with the lights on, my worst fears are
confirmed as Martin's flatmate has come back unexpectedly, he is talking non
stop, and keeps asking if we have any alcohol or weed we can give him, I
tell him we have neither as I assume all the beer is all gone, but he finds
half a bottle of it in the fridge. He is telling me got beat up in a bar
and doesn't know how he provoked the guys, he doesn't look too bad, just a
couple of cuts to his face and hand. It's quite clear that he is out of his
tree, but he seems harmless if a little scary at first, he's not the first
choice of flatmate for anyone.
At 9am his mobile goes off several times, when it gets to the 7 or 8th time
I get out and try and answer it but I can't see what the buttons are in the
dim light and I can't seem to answer the call, eventually I manage to wake
him and he answers 2 or 3 calls.
It's light outside and I am the only one awake so far.
(Another long gap, and time filling to pick up the trail in the next RTA
extract.)
21.10
We slept to 1.30, or 13.30 if you must, apart from the memorable
interruptions, firstly at 02.00, then at various times later on, from the
mobile ringtone from hell.
When we did eventually get up, and got to meet the errant flatmate in
question, by daylight he seemed to be alright. but I'd agree with John that
he's not the best person to be close to, for if/when he does blow up, you've
got a good chance of catching a lot of the pieces in your face!
We got into the centre of Helsinki, and made necessary phonecalls (Hi
Nicky!) and ate even more necessary food, ending up at Molly Malone's for a
while. Now we're in the pre-post party mood (hope you understood that lot?)
and waiting to reacquaint with Setok and co.
CiH, and no I haven't got any weed or booze!
21:17
I've not seen you with any whisky yet Chris ? Maybe some of Teque's is
possessing your mind a bit .....
But seriously, it was an interesting night, having managed to get a fair bit
of sleep caught up with, it was time to meet Q-Funk's interesting flatmate,
Mark. We made it into Helsinki city centre, taking in a drink at Molly
Malone's and a small meal at some pastry restaurant, similar in fact to a
few places in Cambridge that I have been to over the years or so.
Managed to phone Mum from the same line as Chris phoned Nicky, left a
message on the answerphone so that should pacify her a bit. We're awaiting
now the post-party, coming up in a short while from now ....
Felice, and nope, I've got no weed or booze either ! :)
21.05
The Q-Funk forced marched nightmare resumes. To get to the post-party sauna,
it was suggested that it was going to be an easy walk "of two kilometres".
The latest theory has Q-Funk as the reincarnation of some Japanese WWII
prison camp commandant who makes his prisoners walk through the jungle to
the cries of "You build Railway!!" or some such thing.
The summary of the journey might go something like this:-
Easy stretch half a mile gently uphill, cross multi-lane highway, slide
perilously down a grass bank covered in deep slushy crud, fall arse first in
deep grey slushy crud. Force march through shopping centre, dodge buses in
shopping centre car park, go along bit of road where there strictly isn't
any pavement, more general forced marching. Then up some stairs which gave
us a false ray of hope, but we are deceived, and the infinite blackness
stretches forward once more. Eventually we get to the apartment complex
where the party is located, but finding the exact place proves "complex" as
well. After several attempts at the wrong place, we finally get there, at
the bottom of a 45 degree angled skating rink.
O' what fun. As far as I can tell, it wasn't just 'two kilometres' either!
Things to do right now:- Make Q-Funk find another way home, at gunpoint if
necessary.
CiH, has this dude ever heard of the nursery rhyme about the Grand Old Duke
of York?
Whilst we were at the shopping mall, I learned something new, the cult 70s
kids TV show the Moomins is a Finnish creation, so much in fact, there is a
store selling everything on the things!! Who cares about Harry Potter or
Pokeyourbum??
Now in the pine panelled building and I am not sure what entertainment is
planned for the pre-post party, saunas are interesting but I don't think I'd
want to do one for more than 10 minutes. Reading my little book of Helsinki
and mentions Finns are very technology savvy sort of people and everyone is
chatting and playing with their mobiles, there's about 20 of us here so far
and I am not in the best of moods for partying but I did enjoy the couple of
beers I had at lunch time but the odd times I have been sleeping as making
me feel a bit funny, but I expect things will be pretty cool soon.
- Asteroid
21:25 Q-Funk
Well, OK, one thing I've learned during this weekend: while Finns consider
that walking a few kilometers is no big deal and actually good for the
health and to find time for reflecting upon whatever, most foreigners -
especially anglophones, as Mikko B. who happens to come and meet us at the
after-party place, points out that Canadians also avoid walking whenever
they can - simply cannot handle the idea of walking more than a few meters
at a time; anything beyond explicitly requires the involvement of some
motorized vehicle. Well, alright, lesson learned. Chill out, guys!
This asides, I am still a bit shaken by my alcoholic flatmate's behavior
last night, but it seems we might make it out of it in one piece after all.
Asteroid and Pahartik have volunteered to support my recommending he
volunteers to go for alcoholism treatment or, otherwise, agreed to come with
me to support my filing a complain to the police about the flatmate's
involvement with drug dealers resulting in a brawl at the local dive.
Let's hope something good will come out of this. If not, I guess I just
might relocate to Narva alltogether... if push comes to shove.
21:44
Down at the after-party party now, things are swinging a bit ..... 2 ladies
have also joined us, one being Ripley and another who I don't know, but they
both look pretty cool so that's OK. A lot of crisps have been eaten so far
(one packet with the amusing name of 'MegaPussi' - nope, not referring to a
certain part of a woman mind you - but still they taste good. Maybe we
should have stopped by some store on the way here to get some stuff in.
Felice.
21.55
Now Pahartik can't manage all those potato chips on his own, can he :)
Where's the coke?
CiH, rapidly putting back the fat he lost on the way up...
Did the sauna thing again, smaller room than I expected so only 8 of us
could get in, so small groups of us went in at a time. What was strange was
when farting in a sauna with your whole body muscles relaxed, farts produce
a much more different noise then in any other situation :o) - asteroid
feeling rather refreshed
I mentioned to Q-Funk I was hoping the guy with the video camera wouldn't
come in, and then I was horrified to see QF wrap around his towel and dash
off exclaiming "That's a good idea!" hoping he was joking, in we went. What
was slightly worrying was sitting on the pine benches, as some hairs in the
lower half of you get trapped between the slats. Ouch!!
22.30
You're an idiot for giving Q-Funk that idea! Hope you got a good price on
the film rights "Hot in steamy in the Sauna!"
Sauna suspense surrounds some suspected Flinnyites? Will the Res Gods go in
or not. There's a nice blonde Finnish babe sitting next to us, so we're
explaining the workings of this realtime to her.
CiH, he washed, but he won't go...
22.32
Yep, been in the sauna and hmmmm, what an experience !! Now we're wondering
when Tash and Henrietta will go in ....
Felice.
22.35
Oho, so you've been talking to her beforehand? You got her name, but did you
get her phone number???!
CiH, pushing his luck further than advisable.
22.44
Well, I think that's her name .... not that I know for sure :)
Malc has refused point-blank to go into the sauna ...
Felice.
22.45
Ah well, must be something to do with one of the party games that was
discussed. "See who can hide the sausage the furthest"!?
CiH, but only if we get to go to the ladies sauna!
22.50 Strange to see Malcolm from the 'gods so quiet and not wanting to join
in. Looks like they will get their legs pulled for next few parties to
come. :o) asteroid
23.00 I was just chatting with these English guys for a minute and they are
nicer than I expected at first :) (They just talked about being Brittish and
I called them English and maybe they won't like it but... oh well) Hei hei,
pitaa varmaan kohta menna kotiin ja valmistautua huomiseen duunipaivaan
opintoneuvojana, siis heti syopakaareen jalkeen piti sanomani. - Heli
23.05
We don't mind being called English, we've been called much worse things than
before. :) Nice to have you on here, Heli!
CiH. pint of Koff please!
You mean 568ml?? - asteroid
568mm? Thought we'd agreed not to get involved in the "Hide the Sausage
furthest" competition!?
11.28 It appears after a fair bit of persuasion, Tash has gone in the sauna
with Particle guarding the door making sure no one else goes in. -
asteroid
23:44 ..and fellas were questioning Partycle's way of being bit too far
polite.. :) -Jyrgen Uah! WTF? RTFM! bukkake! I know, I suck.. ;)
DAY, Errm, It's Tuesday the 15th of January.
21.45
It's a long time coming for this log entry, but we managed to pack a fair
bit in today.
Q-Funk left us for dead at 08.00, we slowly roused ourselves sometime later.
Eventually hitting upon a mostly conscious Mark to let us out, so we headed
downtown into the city centre.
After stopping for food, we hit the Computer club bookshop, with a large
selection of Linux stuff, Windowze getting a grudging look-in. Afterwards,
we went onto an experience all its own, the museum of modern ars ("ars" =
"arts"!) Immediately, a series of weak arse related jokes flowed out on cue.
"Do you want to look at my ars??" Perhaps the least worse.
John H. reaction to a moment of highest high culture, gazing out of the
window of one of the most avant-garde places in Finland, looking on at the
Finnish House of Parliament, he spots a railway track, and cried out "Oh
look at the pretty choo-choo!" as a train rolls past. (Nice one John, remind
me NOT to phone you, the next time I feel like a trip to the Tate Gallery!)
A lot of the Arts were 'Ars', but all of it was interesting. Some of it,
including the 'Tower of Babel, made up out of decomissioned radio and audio
players of all ages, was very interesting. There was one filmed installation
which owed a lot to some of the cheesier older techniques of our demo
coders. Recursive sprites, anybody!?
After we were all cultured out, we eventually found Q-Funk, and then
encountered one of the last remnants of Soviet Union era retailing, when we
went to pick up his cable modem. There was a very long wait attached, which
the shop attempted to mitigate to some extent, with internet terminals, and
a selection of films and tele programs on the big screen. They could have
done more perhaps, a cafe, some toilets, a place to sleep??
After some more semi-coherent wandering around the centre of town, evening
drew on, and we retired back to Q-Funk's place, not too long ahead of the
man himself. Now to bring us almost up to date, Q-Funk has got his cable
modem going, and someone may well get around to making that crucial phone
call to the Pizza Taxi before long??
CiH, hurry up, I'm blummin' starving!
22.15 Yep, I reckon this place was inspired by Jim of the British TV series
'The Royle family" the art show was "my arse" indeed.
It was full of lovely bits of technology like DVD players, 40" plasma TVs,
projector monitors snow-flavoured iMacs, etc displaying completely pointless
tat.
There was a few interesting things, VW Beetle hung upside down with bits of
it strewn around the room, and an interesting futuristic model village but
little you could call art, in fact the most enjoyable piece of art the whole
day was the yellow tropical fishies tank in the computer book and software
shop.
- asteroid
22:25
Getting hungry now .. seems like the pizza-place stops delivering after 10pm
or so ... hmmm, weird or what eh ? One of those things I guess. Gonna go out
shortly to get some food, probably from the garage or somewhere like that.
Felice.
Wednesday 16th Jan - FINAL DAY!
10.50hrs
And we're off back to the sunny(?) UK today, at least it might be sunny, but
if we're landing in the dead of night, how can we tell??
Q-Funk was so pleased that he got his new cable modem, that ordering pizza
slipped right out of his mind until it was too late. So we went and got some
frozen pizza's and sated our hunger in the oldschool fashion, cooking them
ourselves. That, and some heavy IRCing meant we didn't get to bed until
sometime after 01.00hrs.
For now, a taxi to the airport (to deposit heavy luggage) and a swift return
to Helsinki centre for our last few hours is on the cards (punch-cards?)
Meanwhile, in the outside world, the next bugfix for Chosnek slowly winds to
a conclusion
CiH, so who got the video rights for the sauna party in the end?
10ish
Got up after much farting from all corners of the room :o) Breakfast is
yesterday's pizzas and coke, using Q-Funk's nice shiny Motorola cable modem
on a Compaq 486 which seems to cough and wheeze its way around the net
sometimes, whilst the TT is happy as a IRC terminal.
15.55 Spent many too long getting lost with Paavo's not quite accurate
directions, so we did our own thing back into town and found McDonalds and
thankfully spent time eating in the warmth, although the toilets required a
funny token coin to get it which was slightly strange. After a quick phone
call to Martin we are rendevousing at Molly Malones, which I am typing now
whilst drinking a coffee. - asteroid
My watch says 15.55 as well?
More wandering in the land of the lost, we left Paavo to find Q-Funky on his
own, so we buggered off back to town to retrieve the situation. Now we've
recharged our food batteries, and are waiting in the congenial, if expensive
locale of Molly Malone's, to make a second attempt at meeting the mad
Canado-Finnish bearded person with a wry outlook on life.
Strange moment from the party that pops back into your memory unbidden, as
it wasn't properly processed in the first place, because it happened at 4.30
in the morning, and I'm still not sure if I was hallucinating things at
that time of night.
One of the drunk guys was wrapped in a binliner, the top half of him. He
hopped around, sightless, whilst the others led him about.
Now what the hell was going on there?
CiH, and it's nearly all over?
16:02
Nearly all over, yep, it's been pretty good week away all in all. Managed to
get plenty of sleep as well for a change - bit noisy at night but generally
not too bad. The best memory I have of the party itself is pretty much from
talking to Wiztom and Baggio towards the middle - they were showing off some
classic stuff and smelt like they'd been smoking something weird as well
.... classic.
Felice.
Memorable things? hmm, Being slightly worried about Martin's flatmate
coming home unexpected, and he did!! And being asked "do you have any weed
or alcohol?" in a dead-pan, deep Finnish accent, the guy could of been a
comedian. Chatting with nice blonde Finnish babe, the fake demo done with a
pen and acetate, jokes about arse and megapussii, seeing Helsinki's snow
covered buildings and landscapes, drinking in Molly Malones, listening to
techno at the party created on a circular saw and Commodore 64.
This is my first trip to Finland and it's been a great experience, and I
really do like this place.
- asteroid
16.01 17:30 EET / Q-Funk
Getting back from yet another excruciating day at the school, where yet more
apparently unsurmountable ISDN problems prevented me from achieving contact
with the outside world from the science lab's Linux gateway. Perkele! It has
to be said that ISDN support in Linux truely sucks big bananas. Compiled
the kernel with the correct device driver for the card's chipset, included
every PPP support option, installed isdnutils and... nothing. The damn IPPP
wrapper still complains that PPP support doesn't appear to be present in the
kernel. Pahartik tried to help as much as he could while dropping by with my
stack of Debian CDs, to no avail.
Anyhow, finally made it to MollyMalone's to enjoy one last drink with the
Brits, before going to have supper with them and accompanying them to the
return flight. There. Today's news. Getting meself something drinkable then
returning to finish this bit. /nick QF-Kalja.
17.17
Mine's a pint, Q-Fey!
CiH, and it won't be better in the morning!
17:21 Q-Beamish
So, yes, as the Brits correctly pointed out, finally getting my cable-modem
delivered and set up was really a nice feeling; being without my own
connection for so long felt worse than a whole year of abstinence (I kid you
not!)... well, OK, coitus deprivation IS also a burden, but that's an issue
I am not likely to verbose here, thank you.
One really cool image was yesterday, looking at the Maggies and Pahartik all
tethered to either available networking device (Felice: TT on vconsole,
CiH: Debian on X, Pahartik: VT connected to the Debian's serial console),
with gloomy slime-green glow lighting the room.
This is where I hereby introduce the slogan for this year's party and its
proof-of-concept, as demonstrated in my very own bedroom with these
visitors' help:
ALL YOUR TERMINALS ARE BELONGING TO US!!!
At the risk of repeating myself, my own take on this party has less to do
with technology than with people: P2P an Internet see their true power in
uniting people physically distant from one another. I've met Pahartik and
the Maggies thru IRC ages ago, became acquainted with folks from various
places around the globe and even got around deciding on Finland after
discussing each other's customs and possibilities on the dating and
employments aspects, not to mention political systems.
Internet empowers the individual and opens up possibilities, my own life
certainly atests to that; meeting people who made this all possible again
almost feels like one of those days where a child acknowledges his parent's
contribution in their upbringing and realizes, looking back, how far things
have progressed and what improvements has found their way in.
I probably cannot ever be thankful enough to people like Felice, Pahartik...
and several others too numerous to mention, for the doors my meeting with
them and relocating to Europe has opened. Given this, I cannot but strongly
disagree with whoever said that the 'Net is a cold place filled with
networking criminals; my Internet has been filed with nothing but friendship
and new possibilities, possibilities that never cease to augment with ever
new person I encounter along my journeys over the cyberspace. Oh sure, what
common interest holds us together is a fascination for old computers and all
things electronica, but that is just an excuse for group identification.
Hackers are just yet another social group with ideas of their own and, come
to think of it, some pretty creative and sane ones at that. Alt-Party...
Feels good to be home and surrounded with my best friends again. Have a
safe trip back home, Maggie team; nice to finally meet Asteroid too, come
back any time mate.
/nick QF-suru
Feeling a bit sad that we have come to the end of our stay here, first time
in Scandinavia for me, I've enjoyed the Finns fun attitude to life, a mixture
of old fashioned and futuristic buildings, snow and ice covered landscapes,
countless McDonalds plus it was great to meet Martin for the first time.
Although the flight home was two hours late , this gave us a bit of extra
time to natter in the airport bar and sample the Czech beer that Q-funk was
telling us about. Eventually when it was time to say goodbye and we were on
the plane there was a group of Finnish businessman who were giving the flight
crew some hassle by laughing loudly and ignoring the seatbelt instructions
and drinking beer they had brought on hidden in coke bottles, when confronted
by the not too happy stewardess who had sussed out what they were up to.
Once we landed and said goodbye to Chris and Rich and planned to book my
journey home not realising exactly where Stansted was in relation to London,
it appears we were quite some distance away from the tube network anyway.
I glanced at the screen in the airport which mentioned the last train went
at 11.59 and my watch says 5 past 12. I decided to hang around the airport
until the small hours when the first train would come. This wasn't too bad
as it was well lit with plenty of security staff about and other travellers
sleeping on the chairs, there was a few times I had to quit sleeping when a
Spanish bloke on a little electric car adapted with two spinning buffing
things decided that 3am was an ideal time to clean the floors which involved
chucking everyone off the seats, him and his colleague struggling to drag
the heavy seats across the floor making a loud and annoying grating noise,
driving the car around in a zig-zag fashion around where the seats were and
then doing the same with the other 3 sets of seats with similary annoyed and
sleeping passengers. After drinking expensive airport grade coffee waiting
around while this chap to finish his job, thankfully it got closer to 6am
and I got down a long and winding tunnel to the railway platform to catch a
train bound for London then Portsmouth.
Asteroid - powered by caffeine
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