Today is the day of Kalevala, the Finnish national epic – and so all of Helsinki is decked in Finnish flags.

Kalevala means “Land of Heroes” and was basis for some of Tolkien’s Sillmarillion, according to the Wikipedia.

Via 2lmc, The beeb announced they are going to do their (pseudo?) p2p time-shifting media player using Microsoft DRM (at a meeting for designers…).

I sigh – Slashdot, predictably goes bonkers.

If you have a tolerance for /. you can find some nuggets in there like this one, which makes a good point about a public corporation that sets great store by it’s perception as a ‘trusted brand’ but seems to have little trust in its users:

Why consider all the Internet users/customers as thiefs? [sic] Imagine a shop where you are systematically checked walking out, will you come back?

and this one

…there’s a much deeper issue here. The BBC has been in existence for most of the 20th century and their archive includes a very detailed log of global history throughout that time as well as entertainment programs. The value of that archive cannot be underestimated as a historical, social and political eductaional resource for future generations – therefore, if it is to be “opened to the public” then it must be done so in a manner independent of DRM enforced by an American software company! Otherwise, the public ends up paying Microsoft to access information that should be accessible to all, no matter whether they can afford to pay MS for a DRM license.

…the core issue here is maintaining the right to free information. Just as anyone (in the UK at least) can stroll into a public library and have free access to important historical books, the factual BBC archive must be handled in a similar fashion, even to the point where there’s a PC in every library to be able to get to that archive also.

Sigh. I guess they could spend some of that post-Hutton goodwill.
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UPDATE: to the second quote from /., Tomski points out that he’s conflating the iMP with the creative archive, which will be DRM-free and be as close to a creative commons as possible. Fair enough. Still not sure about Tom’s assertion that “Of course the iMP will have DRM”…

Giant robot spotted on flight to Oslo.

Shame I can’t sell the story to Eddie Clontz any more.

as in…

“you said it wasn’t art, so now we’re gonna rip you apart”

Unless you read this with a feedreader, I guess with my design I’m already in by default. Has anyone created a snapshot gallery of grey tuesday sites around the web? Matt Haughey is right – The Grey Album is one of the best bits of hiphop in years.

One of my favourite groups, The Avalanches create incredibly rich and dense sampled soundscapes. The legal constraints they came up against in the release of “Since I left you” mean we will never get to hear what they consider their best stuff…

“as word spread about The Avalanches, they found themselves in some surprising conundrums.

“I think if we thought it would be so widely listened to, we wouldn’t have sampled some of the things we did,” Chater says laughing.

Oddly enough, the roadblocks to sample clearances didn’t include Madonna, who allowed the group her first legal sample in the form of the bassline from “Holiday,” but rather from other, seemingly innocuous sources.

“It was frustrating when Rogers and Hammerstein were like, ‘You can’t use their stuff, you have to take it off the record,'” Chater says disappointedly. “There’s lots of stuff that didn’t make it. There’s a much longer version of the album that we’ve got that no one will ever hear.”

What a shame.

Abe from Abstract Dynamics has a wonderful post on Le Parkour and social constraints in the city, with a very beautiful illustration. Maybe his post will be transformed like mine was by Google, into an aleatoric place for conversation by freerunners. More on this eventually…

Playing with my new Casio Exilim EX-Z4. I first got tempted when Barak showed me his Exilim and some of the neat features like the auto-white balance graphing.

On first impression, it’s a very, very nicely designed product – with the UI and the industrial design both delivering utility and delight in equal measure.

The proof of the pudding will be in the eating of the photons though.

• Francis Wheen: How Mumbo-jumbo Changed the World
  

  “By 1989, Francis Fukuyama was declaring that we had now reached the End of History. What colonized the space recently vacated by notions of history, progress and reason? Cults, quackery, gurus, irrational panics, moral confusion and an epidemic of mumbo-jumbo.”

• Cool design solution – the citynipple: Spinning cones on the underside of pedestrian crossings to allow blind people to sense when it’s safe to cross.
• Aphorism of the day #1: “There is No Demand for Messages”
• Amazing, detailed comparative mythological/historical analysis of the Zelda canon.
• Aphorism(s) of the day #2:
  

  “Margaret Mead once said “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Generations of zealots have tacked these words up on various walls, never noticing that the two systems that run the modern world – markets and democracies — are working right precisely when they defeat these attempted hijackings by small groups.”

• (Abraham) Blazin’ Squad:
  

  “A good social software programmer could do well learning from the great social engineers and machines of our time, the waiter and the restaurant. The restaurant provides a table of you and your companions. It provides the setting (food and drink) to make the conversation comfortable. And then it disappears in the background, allowing your conversation to develop on its own.”

• “You Won’t Believe What We Put On A Phone!”
• Global Frequency TV pilot gets the go-ahead
• Singularity-ho! Wardrobemalfunction.com gets registered in hours after the event.
• I’m enjoying the provocative, prolific bubblegeneration
• Free PDF downloads of Shell’s scenarios looking forward to 2020-2050

• More Beyonce: Hypergene on the ultra-fast hitmaking machine of iTunes + RSS.
  

  “P.S. We’re still amazed at how few businesses (and we mean those selling products – Amazon, BestBuy, JCrew, Macy’s, etc.) are utilizing RSS as an advertising medium.

• Will Davies on the split between information and criticism
• “Do I look stupid in this TrackBack??”
• “The trouble with architects is that they talk so much about teamwork, but actually believe that architectural practice revolves around the cult of personality.”
• KunzruWatch: When Hari met Toby. He has a new book coming out apparently, where he goes all Michael Crichton… Excellent!
• Twisted my knee on a ski-lift yesterday. Tiger Balm is awesome.
• Veen and I are going surfing
• One of the world’s greatest pieces of architecture is in San Diego: The Salk Institute by Louis Kahn.
• Oh, and there’s some conference-or-other on too.

If I buy a cartload of Pepsi in the USA, and bring all the little yellow bottletops back to Europe – will I be able to finally download some songs from the iTunes Music Store?

The T’s and C’s seem to suggest I won’t:

“7. ELIGIBILITY: You must be thirteen (13) years of age of older and a legal resident of the United States residing in the fifty (50) states or District of Columbia to be eligible to win a prize(s). Employees of the Apple Computer, Inc., Pepsi-Cola Company, its bottlers, their respective parents, subsidiaries, divisions, affiliates, distributors, suppliers, printers and advertising, promotional and judging agencies (collectively, “Sponsor and Promotion Parties”) and the immediate family members of such employees (parent, child, sibling, spouse) and/or persons living in the same household as such individuals (whether related or not) are not eligible to win. No groups, clubs or organizations can participate in this promotion on behalf of the group, club or organization.”

So how will they enforce this? Pseudo-geographical IP range stuff? Or will I have to show my passport when buying Pepsi?

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* I cannot read, write or say this word without immediately repeating it in my mind in a Beyoncé voice. That’s all.

Apologies to John Lennon.