The ALT 3 Reltime Text! 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. -------------------------------------------------------------------- (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.ð 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? ó18:22 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. ñ17.56 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 ...ó (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 ó12:27 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!ð 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?ð 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.ð (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.ð 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 ---------->The End!>-----------