Thank you Scandinavian

Travel

They really saved my bacon on the flight home to Ireland at Christmas. I arrived a bit late at the airport and the ground staff were very nice, helpful and extremely efficient in getting me on the flight by remotely checking me in, sending my bags through specially and fast-tracking me through reserved queues. Thank you very much SAS!

New Consoles – What’s the point?

Tech

With all of the recent hoo-haa about the release of new consoles from Sony and Nintendo, I remembered getting a PSP last year for my birthday not long after it was released. Since that time, it has been left largely unused because simply, the quality of games available has not been great. In fact, I have only just bought a game that feels as fun as Final Fantasy on PS2 or Goldeneye on the old Nintendo console and am now using it every day. Now I see that Final Fantasy is due to come out in 2007 and the review of FIFA 2007 makes it likely that I will get both in the not too distant future. But, I would wait a year before getting the console for Sony or Nintendo and get an XBox 360 or a PS2 instead. PS2 consoles costs around 100 Euro currently and those consoles will drop in price as products bed down.
It’s all about the games, stupid.

A license to sin?

Uncategorized

From the New York Times

Kivetz also interviewed 69 students from Columbia University who had returned one week previously from winter break and found that as a group they were split in roughly equal numbers between regret and contentment for having worked or partied. But when Kivetz talked to alumni who graduated 40 years earlier, the picture was much more lopsided: those who hadn’t partied were bitter with regret, while those who had were now thrilled with their choice. “In the long run,” Kivetz says, “we inevitably regret being virtuous and wish we’d been bigger hedonists.”

Quintessence – 5am

Music

It’s been a hell of a long time since I have really loved a CD until this last week. I picked up a CD by a Finnish new jazz group called Quintessence called 5am and from the first listen, the dreamy sounds and lyrics have had me hooked since. I experienced a similar reaction to the first and only album by Nuspirit Helsinki which I played most of late 2002 – early 2003. What is in the water in Helsinki that produces such beautiful and original sounds?