Season's Greetings!

It is darker here today at noon than in the middle of the night in midsummer!

I'm not kidding, It is unusually dark because we have very little snow this year and the sky is gray.

But the Christmas tree is spreading some light inside our livingroom.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all!

No. 3

This is my masterpiece no. 3:

A Very Cherry Chocolate Cake I made for my birthday today.

Yum! It is the kind of cake that makes you gain a few pounds only by reading the recipe. :)

Another cold morning

The weather has been really nice here the last few days, but the temperature drops down to several degrees below freezing point at night, so all the plants and trees are withdrawing into hibernation now.
But the frost gives nature a nice touch at sunrise.
The bright yellow and otherwise coloured spots are not hot pixels in my D90, they are miniature suns in the frost particles.

Bye,bye vegetables

The vegetable growing season is definitely over today.
The thermometer stopped at -1.5 C at 2m. above ground this morning and the vegetables in our garden got literally frosted.

Very crispy and crunchy stuff I'd say... :)

Wood, autumn flowers and a lifesign

Finally I've found some idle (LOL) time to create some input to this slowly expiring blog...
Below you will find one of the reasons for me being absent:

One evening Ingela came home and told me that our friends in another part of this village were cutting down some trees in their backyard and had promised them that we will take care of the trunks to use the wood in our fireplace. Well, these trunks turned out to be some 65 cm. (2 feet +) in diameter and there were plenty of them!
In the picture you see just a few of them but when they all were piled up aginst my garage wall, the pile was abut 1.5 m (5 feet) high and 4 m. (13 feet) long. Each piece was cut down to1.2 m long (4 feet) to fit across my trailer.
It was working most every evening and many weekends for five weeks to cut them to size and chop them into a neat pile of wood containing approx. 4 cu m. which will keep us warm at least one and a half winter.

The autumn has been rather warm, only a few outbreaks of frost, I was collecting the furniture away from our backyard yesterday, emptied the greenhouse from the tomato &c plants and water barrels. All is now set for the winter to come.
Much to my surprise I found some flowers at the southern wall of the greenhouse, a Musk-Mallow and a Garden Strawberry are obviously thinking that it is still summer, the later still trying to produce more berries!

On the front side of the house there is a still very healthy Water Avens:

And our lawn is invaded by Fieldfares, pulling worms out of the lawn:

The picture above is shot through three layers of glass, through a window, but still usable. I have traded in my Nikon D3000 for a used Nikon D90 and found a bargain Tamron 70-300 mm zoom-lens, the most of the pictures above are taken using that combination, edited and ehanched using Photoscape, the best free photo-editing sofware there is according to my opinion.

Our last teenager turned 19 yesterday

Ian turned 19 yesterday and is here prepared to attack the cake.

Congratulations Ian!

20 years of GSM phone calls

Today, 20 years ago Mr Harri Holkeri, then PM of Finland made the first official call in the first working digital GSM mobile phone network in the world, that of Radiolinja (nowadays Elisa) in Finland.
The call was made from a car, both parked and in motion. as described here.

Photo by Lehtikuva/Sari Gustafson

The first "handheld" GSM  phone was the Mobira (later Nokia) Cityman,big as a brick and nicknamed "Shoephone" :

In Finland (in cooperation with the other Nordic countries) we already had an anlogue network called NMT, working on 450 MHz and later also at 900 MHz which in fact was reserved for digital communications already back then in the early eighties.

Those early "mobile" phones were big as military backpack radios and cost even more than the car that they usually were installed in.:)

The discussions in Europe regarding the upcoming digital mobile phone network went on for most of the eighties but in 1987 all the the standards and communication protocols for the new digital mobile network were in place and the rest is history.

Many of my friends who knew me as a radio communications Geek wondered why I never jumped on the NMT-900 bandwagon which allowed for really neat handheld analogue phones in the beginning of the nineties  but as I knew what was waiting round the corner I did not make my move until 1994 when I bought my first real cell phone and it was a digital GSM phone of course. A Motorola 5200

The price was then 3400 FIM or 570 EUR which would  be something in excess of 1000 EUR today taking the inflation into account! Horrible... But I could send and receive text messages, the problem was that there wasn't anybody I knew to send messages to until Ingelas' mom bought one. :)

Today you get a top of the line Iphone for the same amount of money and you can be online surfing the web  nearly everywhere in the world!

Subtropical weather for some days now resulting in a violent thunderstorm as I write and this afternoon I'm going on summer holidays for four weeks! Yay!

Ian

Our youngest son, Ian, graduated from High School last Saturday!

From left to right: me, Lukas, Ian, mom

Mother's Day

Above you see (some of) Ingela's gifts for Mothers Day 2011.
The greenhouse got finished around noon today and we celebrated it in there with a glass of bubbly.
The cake has a story of its own. Some weeks ago we were watching the Swedish version of "Master Chef" and that cake was one of tests in the semifinals and I (silly me...) opened my big mouth and said something like "that doesn't seem so complicated, I'll make you one for Mother's Day..."
Well... it's a Schwarzwald Cake (Black Forest Cake) or at least a Swedish version and it wasn't that easy...
But it was yummy anyhow although I'm certainly not anything close to a Master Chef. :)

It has been a warm and sunny day,  Ingela's mother visited us, we grilled salmon and vegetables and enjoyed my cake as a dessert.
Hope you are all well out there!

Alive and a new project

Well... blogging is not my preference no:1 nowadays but a life sign now and then won't harm I think.
The winter seems endless this year, we have had bouts of snow and outbreaks of cold lately, last Tuesday morning the temperature was down to -17 C when I left for work. A lot of ships are stuck in the ice of the Gulf of Bothnia and the icebreakers are working 24/7
But the light is back, the sun is rising a little bit more every day and we have temperatures exceeding 0 C regulary every afternoon when it's not cloudy.
The return of the sun brings inspiration and that Pete Townshend vinyl I found last month triggered me to bring out my moms old record player from the garage into the house and take a look at it as my old turntable left the  house along with Lukas last year.

The record player-tuner-amplifier combo is a HEA Stereo 3040 FM from 1974 and the interesting part is the turntable itself, a Lenco L78, made in Switzerland, built like a tank and virtually indestructable, the platter itself weighs close to 4 kg and the rubber mat close to 1 kg! There is an overdimensioned squirrel cage shielded pole motor inside, big enough to rotate a big hammer drill. The tonearm is not any top of the line SME or Decca but it is not far from those. In the headshell sits a decent cartridge from Pickering, a XV-15/625E

Said and done, I gave it a test drive some weeks ago, the turntable worked OK but the sound was unbalanced, faint and crappy.

As the amplifier specified as 2x15 Watt RMS at 8 ohm is a typical solution for the seventies it was not hard to track down the problems, some dried out electrolytic capacitors had to be changed, the idle current and voltage symmetry to be adjusted. As the final touch I changed the 6" woofers in the speaker boxes to new ones with huge magnets and converted the boxes to bass reflex boxes.

Now there is sound enough... :)

This is going to be an intermediate solution though, the Lenco L78 is going to be tweaked and tuned to perform even better and will get a new solid undercarriage and the amplifier will be disposed off and replaced with a tube amplifier, maybe a single ended class A solution 2x20w using KT 88:s or Russian GU 50:s 

When all this is going to happen is another issue...

UFO:s spotted or how I learned to clean the sensor

A while ago Ingela started to complain about some Unidentified Flying Objects that showed up in her pictures taken with the D300 every once in a while. Upon investigating the causes I found out that the cause must be dust specs on the sensor. Well not on the sensor itself, but on top of the IR and Low-Pass filter on top of the sensor.
I searched for a clean brush, put the camera in sensor cleaning mode and started sweeping the filter.
Well... I got rid of the original dust specs, but introduced a lot of new ones instead.. Aarggh!
After 30 minutes of sweeping my dust-tracking photo looked like this:

It looks terrible, doesnt' it? The picture is created by photographing an even grey surface at close distance with a zoom lens zoomed to 200 mm and manually focused to infinity and at the smallest possible aperture, in this case f: 32.

In real life, the only dust specs you can spot were the two big ones in the upper-mid part of the picture and they would start to emerge at apertures above f:11 and the smaller spots at f:16 to f:22.

Photographing could continue with some limitations like apertures below f:11, if possible, and arranging pictures so that even surfaces like walls or the sky would not coincide with the dirtiest parts.

In the meantime I ordered some cleaning equipment from here: Micro-tools in Germany (yes this stuff can be found in Finland as well, but at twice the price) and found this eminent website: www.cleaningdigitalcameras.com where one can find all the information one needs to successfully clean one's sensor.

When the stuff arrived I went to work with good confidence and after two rounds of sweeping using "the Wet Method"  my dust picture looks like this:

Great improvement indeed. The remaining dust specs seen in the picture are so small that they will hardly show up in any picture unless the aperture is smaller than f:22 and they happen to coincide with an even surface.

When I started to search for dust in the D300 I found out that the Dust Removing (shaking the filter at start and shut down) feature was shut off and has so been since we bought this camera! It is now turned on! :)

We have been suffering low temperatures for the last two weeks, but today it is slightly above zero! Yay!

Pete as a decoration piece

It seems that Ingela and I have differing views of how to use Pete Townshends album "All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes"...:)

It all started last Sunday when Lukas and I went to the yearly vinyl record fair in Vasa. I was browsing through a big box of unsorted albums, 3 EUR each, when I bumped into this album in a very good condition, removing the record out of the inner sleeve I couldn't find any scratches whatsoever. To me it seemed unused. 

So I immediately bought it of course. This bargain spurred my thoughts onward to start searching for "White City" but I spent another 1 1/2 hours searching for that one without luck.

When I came home and showed the record to Ingela she immediately snatched it out of my hands, thanked me for this nice piece of decoration and installed on a shelf in her office!

Well, I must admit that it looks very good there alongside withe the quotation from "Baba O'Riley".

The inner sleeve containing the record is though stored in my collection of vinyls. :)

In the meantime we have got a lot more of this bloody white stuff we love so much... Not!

Well it makes the surroundings brighter and is rather decorative as you see. But when you have to clean your driveway repeatedly and it makes your biking rough you get tired of the stuff.

The picture is shot across the street from our kitchen window last Sunday.

And the temperature plunged down to -23 C again today.

The tealights are keeping us warm and cosy though!

Snowday

Arrggh...! This is what we woke up to this morning.

Mother nature decided to suddenly dump another 12 inches of snow upon us overnight.

No biking today. Ingela gave me a lift to work after we had worked for 1/2 hour to clear our driveway and get the car out of the garage.

Photo of our front entrance by Ingela

Our R&R son Lukas is 20 today!

He was born the very same day that George Bush Sr. launched operation Desert Storm .

Happy Birthday!