Site Log

Here are all the messages generated by me and my occasional frustration over the years :)

14-Oct-2003 | SETI in real time

Busy busy busy... so i had to let off some geekly steam.

You might be familiar with SETI@Home. You might even know that there is a team for Freaks Mailing List members. And it is even possible that you know that i advertise about this on these pages. Well here is where it gets cool (yes, in a geekly way).

The statistics for the Freaks team on these pages are now updated daily.

("Why?", you might ask? Well, because it's possible :)

14-Mar-2003 | this site sucks :)

More of that sweet frustration, folks. I just got myself a new Nokia 3650 (schweet!) and have been surfing here and there and with that, i have concluded that the usability of most sites suck, when browsed with a small handheld device. *nados is no exception (ok, i knew that already, but still...). The old frames mechanism makes this site totally useless, for one thing.

As a sidenote, i will --eventually-- do a thesis on small device usability. Maybe i can use this site as testing ground for how things should be...

2-Feb-2003 | nothing you can't do with emacs

I knew you could brew coffee with Emacs (ok, maybe you can), but i had never surfed the web with it before. And just as a small reminder of the almost total lack of usability for these apges, surfing *nados with Emacs is a painfully enlightening experience. In other words, it's terrible. But it's my fault, and that's what makes it worse.

Still, maybe i should maintain my focus, and support primarily the browsers that hit *nados most, plus the ones i like. This would mean Opera, Konqueror, Mozilla and IE (i challenge you to pick out the browsers i like from the one that gives *nados the most hits ;)

In any case, *nados will still be written with Emacs, if not browsed with it, in the future.

28-Jan-2003 | crash!

Boom, crash, bang (so to say -- but rather not). The server this site resides on crashed severely earlier this year, with few (current) backups. Much of *nados needs to be built again, based on old stuff (this sitelog is an example :). Beware of falling letters!

9-Jan-2002 | stuff fixed

OK, so now the top stuff of the page works with both Netscape and other, less crippled browsers. Oddly enough, it lost some formatting in the process.. I'll be looking into those side menus shortly.

I realoze by looking at the browser stats that i keep getting a constant and surprisingly large stream of Netscape 4.7x users and i'm sorry and rather embarrassed that the pages look so crappy with Netscape! Bear with me!

7-Jan-2002 | oh the bugs!

Just downloaded and installed an old version of Netscape (4.79), because Netscape 4.7x still shows a good hit count on these pages. And good lawd these pages are buggy with it! The header of each page is broken (so i fixed it -- or kludged it anyway). The news show only one the first half of one article! Oh dear. Stuff must be fixed.

4-Jan-2002 | this page

What used to be separate pages for the Message of the day ("MOTD") and Changes can now be found on this page, Site Log. I thought i'd combine them, as they contain pretty much the same kind of stuff anyway.

31-Dec-2001 | new stat engine

Last change of the year :) The statistics engine, interesting to geeks, web anoraks and me only, has been updated. Go have a peek at the stats page (click on the last item on the menu bar on the left of this)

28-Dec-2001 | site engine bugs

Oh dear. I tested this site with Netscape 4.x the other day, and the top lines are all wrong. I guess i'll have to install that browser as well, for testing purposes (llaurén uses Opera, Mozilla and Netscape 6 :)

07-Dec-2001 | site engine updates

Why is it that always when i have the least time for it, i start hacking on features of this site? Tomorrow i have an exam which i still have hundreds of pages to read, and what i've done is updated the script that do the news and wrote a script to do the headers for all pages. The header-script is so far connected only to the main sections of this site because now i really got to study :)

I still think that the home page is very, very messy.

19-June-2001 | Interviewed h

Happy happy, joy joy! This Monday, i interviewed Steve 'h' Hogarth. I shall try to put the interview as mp3 files on the site. Any one out there who would like to transcribe (parts of) it?

4-May-2001 | Anoraknophobia for birthday

Hey there! Thanks to EMI Finland and Jan-Erik Suni, i got Anoraknophobia today! I've got a radio show later today (guess which band i will be playing? which album? :) and a birthday on Sunday. Not bad!

16-Apr-2001 | gigs gigs gigs

Just because i like Spock's Beard (and because they have a relation to Marillion through the Transatlantic band), i also put the Beard's European dates on the Current » Gigs page.

16-Apr-2001 | back from eden

Back from my holidays to Galápagos and Ecuador. Yes, i'd rather be a tortoise from Galápagos, or a span of geological time, than be living in these dog years. But this is my life, and if nothing else, i have a faster internet connection and can update this site again.

So how many of you have swam with ten thousand tropical fish, wearing a Fish t-shirt? Or suffered from sunburn (or watched the Galápagos sunrise) in a Afraid of Sunlight tee? :)

08-Feb-2001 | yet new gigs

Added the Marillion Anoraknophobia gigs to the Current » Gigs section.

30-Jan-2001 | The man with the left arm

Ouch. I broke my right elbow two weeks back, in an IT-related working accident :) I was scootering around the offices on one of these kick-scooters (you know, two wheels, aluminumn thingy, steering, The Fad Thing at IT companies at least here in Finland).

Spent almost a week at the hospital. Had to wait 40 hours (without eating or drinking, except for the IV) to get on the operating table. And was operated for six hours.

Now the elbow is so much better that i can type pretty fluently with two hands. Thank goodness.

On one sidenote, *nados broke the 70k-visitor mark yesterday! Thankyou, all!

On another sidenote, i cannot understand that i haven't written anything for this motd section for a year. Man, time goes fast!

30-Jan-2001 | new gigs

Just a quickie to inform that the Marillion University tour gigs now are available on the Current » Gigs section.

12-Apr-2000 | news engine on line!

While i should have been chasing a deadline at work and another one with my studies, i instead wrote a news engine which shows --well-- news articles in the news section.

So far the news engine (called newsmaker) can limit the number of articles to display and undestand which articles are expired (and therefore should not be displayed), but there's support for showing articles within certain time restraints and even for other news editors!

Now i only need to implement these features... :)

20-March-2000 | new look

Well, after six years of darkness, *nados is now shifting into a new and lighter (p)age. Tell me what you think of the new colours!

20-March-2000 | new records

Last week i got SMPTe: Trans Atlantic. Today i got two copies of marillion.co.uk (both addressed to someone else than me, living almost where i do, but slightly mis-spelled :). All i can say is wow! Reviews any day soon!

13-Mar-2000 | more cosmetics

Having tried for ages to make the home page look nifty on both IE and Netscape, i have finally given up on positioned divs, whistles and bells, and rewrote the whole crap again using tables. OK, so it's not as techy, but at least it works :)

16-Dec-1999 | cosmetics

Having a Real Job surely takes it shares of my time. I haven't had a decent chance to update *nados for ages. Thank goodnes i am in the middle of my exam period, which means that i have a good excuse not to study but to do some this and that on the site... :)

OK, nothing much was actually done (i've become slightly more serious on the studying field over the years) but i gave the Marillion Albums section a nice facelift.

OK, back to Networking...

15-Sep-1999 | i've got marillion.com

I have it i have it i have it i have it i have it! Yaaaaaaaargh!

7-Sep-1999 | Flash!

I have a job these days. A Real Job, one might say (because it involves computers -- anyway, that's also the reason why i haven't been updating these pages very regularily). We have a copy of Macromedia Flash hanging around here at the job, and i though i'd fool around a little with it.

These days, if you have Flash 4 installed, you'll see a little welcome screen the first time you log on to *nados. Cool?

The index page is still broken with Netscape 4 (hey, it looks great with Netscape 5!) but i added a little extra chrome for IE and NN5...

27-July-1999 | more dynamics

Good grief! Hasn't there been any decent changes on these pages since April? I can't believe it!

No, actually, there is one thing i have forgotten to write about, and that's the random lyric on the home page (dhtml version, you'll need a browser of version 4 or above).

Anyway, there are a few cosmetic changes, like dropdown menus here and there. See if you can spot them!

20-June-1999 | gig list up

I finally got to make the Gigs list in the Current section working. If only there were some Fish of Marillion gigs to display now...

Oh, btw, i just came home from a 50 km walk (don't ask why...) and everywhere hurts!

15-June-1999 | it's a small step for man (not)

Hey, today is my third anniversary! So what, you may say? Well, a guy can get a bit mushy at times, can't he, and after all, we had a special version of Lavender as the entry-to-the-church not-really-a-march music (and greetings from Mark Kelly :)

But that wasn't really why i wanted to write this. See, for once i'm pretty satisfied (heck, i'm going bonkers inside!) of what IE can do with stylesheets. Swoop your pointer over the menu to the left, and you'll see. And it's done entirely with CSS. No JavaScript at all. Funky, man!

02-June-1999 | the frustration of technology

Once again i am pissed off -- because of technology. First i sit half the night tweaking the style sheet of the home page, and when i get it "just right" with Internet Explorer, i find that it's totally mucked up with Netscape Navigator.

No, i'm not going to fix it today. Thank Bob i don't do this for a living. Too bad i didn't do as much for the job that pays me during this time... Oh well, there's a day tomorrow too.

28-April-1999 | rule dictatorship

I am seriously considering to change my policy with which online cd resellers should be represented on *nados. Up until now, there's been CDnow, Music Boulevard, CD Universe, Netinlevy and even Amazon. Well, since there really isn't that much traffic to any of these resellers from here, and now that CDnow and Music Boulevard are merging, i might as well skip CD universe and Netinlevy as well. We do, after all, have a much better represented online cd shop here in Finland.

Amazon is another thing. I really have just two links from my site, one from the home page, one from The Man of a Thousand Faces lyric (found that one yet? :). I know they are also selling CDs, but how many out there are actually out to get a book? Moreover, they have this rather complex system of "different" Amazons (one in USA, one in Germany and so forth). All would need a separate link, and --what worse-- all would need a separate account from me. So at the end of the day, they are more work than pay (oh, and they don't allow me to shop a book through my own link :)

Enough of babbling. The benevolent dictator --that's me-- has had his word. I guess it's soon time for action.

28-April-1999 | hit counter restarted

D'oh! Due to a stupid error of mine, the hit counter on the "new improved" 4th generation browsers' home page had, well, stopped at a little over 2200 visitors. It seemed a bit strange that the counter would show the same value a whole week... i got a bit depressed that nobody is visiting my site anymore. Well, now it's fixed.

20-April-1999 | dynamics

Some small updates on a few Marillion Albums. If you have version 4+ browser, a tracklist will pop down when you are looking at the almbum lyrics. Implemented on Script, Fugazi and Radiation so far, with more to come.

09-April-1999 | netscape 4.0x compatible

PHHHEEEEEW! There's a strange bug in Netscape 4.0x, which has caused the "new, improved" *nados home page to crash the browser. There's no problem if you're using Netscape 4.5x or IE 4.x (haven't tried it with IE 5.0 yet).

Anyway, now it's fixed with a plaster of workaround. But it works, and that's good enough for me, right now.

09-April-1999 | calendar submission made easy

The rather cryptic Calendar Submission form has been made a whole lot friendlier to use. It's still far from perfect, but at least now you know what you should fill in... :)

09-April-1999 | joining *nados also made easy

If you're from Finland, or happen to know a lot of Finnish, you may want to join *nados. This has also been made easier.

If you don't know Finnish, don't bother :)

Oh, and if you're not already a member of the *nados www pages mailing list, then join this list!

9-March-1999 | themes

I made a new and much cooler interface to the Marillion Desktop Themes (for Winduh-boxen) that

22-Feb-1999 | these strange lyrics

Just noticed that i didn't have lthe lyrics to This Strange Engine here. Well, now i have.

10-Feb-1999 | New homepage layout

The home page for these pages have changed, so that if you are using a v4 browser, you're seeing another homepage altogether. Please tell me what you think!

3-Jan-1999 | Fish pix UI improved

The nados Fish pictures user interface has been improved, thanks to a lot of JavaScript. OK, so i could have done it the brute-force way too, but this was much cooler. And took a lot longer to implement :)

21-September-1998 | radiat10n day!

Today Marillion's tenth studio album RADIAT10N is released. Today the lyrics of RADIAT10N is set free. Go sorf to the Albums section!

21-September-1998

Put back the Radiation lyrics on the Radiation page.

24-August-1998 | poof. gone.

I AM VERY FRUSTRATED!!! The lyrics for Radiation, which i sat up all wednesday night and typed to this site, have been banned by Marillion/Racket. In other words, i have been a bad freak.

The thing is, that the very nice chap Jari from K-TEL Finland (who always provides me with both Marillion and Fish stuff, along with other occasional goodies, for my radio program) told me in good faith that it was quite okay for me to put the lyrics on line. Well, he was wrong. And now i have lost sleep, respect and confidence. But i have gained frustration, so that's ok.

In another letter from Racket, i was told that the band wouldn't be that upset if the lyrics would be there after the album's out, which helped some. But i still feel strangely disappointed.

The one thing that i can be at least a little satisfied with is that *nados was first with the lyrics, once again.

24-August-1998

Poof. Gone.

Eric from Racket has, on the behalf of Marillion, asked me to remove the Radiation lyrics from my site, so i promptly took them away, not to upset any one out there (except maybe for a few upset Freaks, but read on!). He said that the band wouldn't care that much if the lyrics re-appeared after the album was out, so i'll put them back on line then.

On a bitter note, Fish published six of his new lyrics to the Freaks Mailing list, which i'll put on this site rsn.

I did however publish a review of Radiation (which i wrote before i got that mail from Racket).

20-August-1998 | first one again!

Fonkee fonkee fonkee! Today i received the new Marillion record Radiation. And now, as the first site on the 'Net, *nados carries the compleat lyrics plus the press release for it, and does so with the kind permission and cooperation from Marillion's label here in Finland, K-Tel. Last time it was Afraid of Sunlight. Fonkee indeed!

20-August-1998

Added the lyrics and press release for Radiation -- again as the first Marillion/Fish site on the 'Net! (last time it was Afraid of Sunlight. I do admit that i was rather lazy when This Strange Engine came out...).

27-July-1998

Finally put the track listing to Real To Reel/Brief Encounter, Made Again (due to a CSS weird bug, available at least in Netscape Nav 4.5, the formatting is not the best) and the remaster info to Misplaced Childhood in the Albums section.

23-July-1998

Hacked a bit on the Calendar. The difference? It now works :)

22-July-1998

Yow! Now there's a Calendar page in the Current section! Ok, so it's a bit empty right now, but if you've got anything freakly related, then submit it! The entry will show until the end of the month it happens.

If you think the URL http://www.tf.hut.fi/Nados is too long, use the shorter URL http://come.to/nados (or come.to/Nados).

21-July-1998

Added an interview with Fish on Bulgarian radio. Thanks to Chuyo!

16-July-1998

Fish wrote an excellent letter to the Freaks Mailing List concerning bootlegs. In the true bootleg fashion, i edited it and put it on my site. It's on the Reference section of the Archive. I guess the Big Guy will kick my ass now.

13-July-1998 | fight the censorship!

Okay, that was a pretty provocative headline, since there's not really any censorship to fight on these pages. However, there was total blankness on the home page earlier today and over the weekend. I'm not exactly sure why the home page was, well, blank, but that was what it was.

What i did was put comments around the style sheet info on the home page, so that you wouldn't get stuff like p { font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif } .link { font-weight: bold; color: lightblue; /* font-style: italic; */ margin-left: 4px; margin-right: 4px; margin-bottom: 0px; font-family: Manson, Mason, sans-serif; } on your screen if you hadn't got a stylesheet compatible browser. Well, it seemed to mess up everything, rendering the page, well, blank.

The problem is now fixed -- thanks to *nados member Ursula to point this out! -- and i hope i have no (serious) bugs bugging out in my code.

7-July-1998

I'm currently working on a beyond-cool dynamic JavaScript-engined terrybly fonkkee insert-favourite-hypeword-here implementation of these pages. It will be cross-browser compatible (eventually), but for now it only works with Netscape Navigator 4.x. You are free to check it out -- at your own risk!

While not doing that, i also published a page, some eight hundred and seventy of you already had found, though i had hidden it pretty well, the page of essential food and drinks for the aspiring Freak. Or simply recipies. Check it out. Too.

2-July-1998

Did some more work on the Tales from the Engine Room page.

29-June-1998 | *nados - better than boredom!

Got some feedback today from a surfer bored at work. He was bored and told me that these pages are great (thanks Shawn!). Thus it can be noted that *nados is better than boredom :)

29-June-1998

Since the *nados www site mailing list currently has only six members, i moved it to the Feedback section. Not much of an update, but perhaps this will generate more list members.

24-June-1998

Finally, i've had some time to update a little this and a little that on these pages again (which means that some work i should do has been left undone, bu what are deadlines for...).

Petri Laine has sent me a short story, Suomalainen Rapsodia (Finnish Rhapsody), which i've published on the Views section of the Archive. If you don't understand it, chances are you're not fluent in Finnish... If i get more stories like that, i'll make a new Stories section!

I've twiddled a bit with JavaScript (some from the Netscape DevEdge site), which i hope won't render this site completely unfunctional :) Much is not operational yet, but if things act weirdly, contact me!

Also, i today joined LinkExchange, so there'll be a few ad banners popping up at weird places on these pages. Hope they don't disturb that much.

22-Apr-98

Finally there are textboxes for you to fill in on the anagram page instead of a mailto:-link. Still no automagic checking of the answer, though...

8-Apr-98

Suffering from severe overload.. anyways, managed to put the first version of the Feedback page up, along with Fish's excellent Spice Girls concert review on the reviews section.

21-Apr-1998 | geek jubilee

Soon it's jubilee time again with 2^15 visitors. Cool.

25-Feb-1998 | happy the man

Today i'm a much happier man than, say, a week ago. For those who don't know it, i host a weekly prog show on the Finnish Broadcasting Company called Into the Mist (plug :) and yesterday i received Fish's remastered Vigil album! Thanks, Dick Bros!

As my duties towards these pages, i'll type down the rather interesting stuff that Fish's written on the accompanying liner notes, plus the new tracklist an' all that.

Oh, today is my Dream Theater special on into the Mist. It'll be DT for a solid hour. But next week, i'll definitely be playing Jack & Jill from the "new" Vigil.

25-Feb-98

Added Clutching at Straws, B'Sides Themselves and Holidays in Eden to the Albums section. Still only the lyrics, but anyway. Also added Script, and a few nifty lines of javascript.

20-Feb-98 | be a voice in the crowd

Help make the *nados web site better!

I started this mailing list for the *nados web site a few weeks back, but i haven't really promoted it much. What i thought was, that it would be a nice forum for you and me to discuss what's good and what could be improved here.

If you've got something to say, then go to the About page and enter your address in the Mailing List box. And here you go!

19-Feb-98 | 30k goes *pling!*

Yow! It seems as *nados is going to pass the 30000-hits mark during this or next week! Again, if you're the lucky winner, send me some mail!

18-Feb-98

The Archive section has become rather bulky lately, so i've split it up into subsections.

7-Feb-98

Hacked the stats-script so that it now

The stats counts the hits for the home page only.

4-Feb-98

The Stats page (see the button at the bottom of the button column at the left? Click it) now shows a graph of the "client demography". The full statistics are still around, but i doubt that it's very interesting for most readers...

22-Jan-98 | no sleep 'til brooklyn

Here again, and the clock's after midnight. Haven't slept decently a single night this week, and i still haven't got the sense to go home.

I've been updating on these pages for a few hours today -- four or something -- and though i got a lot of this and that done, i still feel a tad depressed. Why the heck am i doing this? I mean, what do i get from pouring hours upon hours on a website devoted to Fish and Marillion? Shouldn't they have sites of their own with people who do the www for them?

Well, i'm very aware of Fish's tight budget. And i know Marillion doesn't exactly swim in moolah either. Still, a small `thank you´ of sorts would be nice. A Christmas card or greetings on the birthday (check Itchy's archive for that). Or any comments on how i'm doing.

If there's any one out there who's to buy any Fish or Marillion material (the Racket CDs not counted), you could always do it through the Shop link in the Archive. That way i know you're there...

Actually, i used this web promotion site tonight, can't remember what the name was, of course, to push my name on every major search engine around there. Let's see if we can get that visitor counter to pass 30'000 soon?

OK, enough of that.

22-Jan-98

I've put some new albums on the Albums page, which soon is to replace the Lyrics Section (now they sort of work together), but the big news is...

There's a *Nados WWW site Mailing List now, powered by ListBot! To join it, go to the About *Nados or the Feedback section and click on the Mailing List button on the left.

On this list, which is not the Nados "disorganization" mailing list, but a list for discussing what you'd want out of these pages, and for me to tell about new additions on the *Nados site.

18-Dec-97

Nothing much lately -- busy studying. Did a few minor brush-ups on the pages, so that the colours would show up nicely even if you're not using stylesheets (which you should. really.).

Also, i tried this little Javascript snipplet which should do the "hover" effect on an Internet Exploder (4.0) and nothing at all -- not even crash -- on Netscape Communicator. Now since here at school, i can only use Netscape's Nav, then i really have no clue as to if it works at all. Mail me if the thing bums down with your browser.

26-Nov-97

Well, well! Now the Albums section is starting to take shape. It used to be a Netscape4-only section, but i rearranged the whole thing to comply to the "*nados standard".

Most album pages are still the good ol' lyrics pages; the only albums which have their own subset are brave and This Strange Engine.

26-Nov-1997 | get me a life

Again i'm sitting here at the School's multimedia dungeon, having no life at all. I've neglected anozzer four hours of valuable studies (and an exam period is coming soon) and i should be getting to work. I've a program today (on the radio).

Don't tell my wife :)

25-Nov-1997 | how i hate incompability

It is not the first time i get pissed off (pardon my Finnish) about how differently style sheets are interpreted in NN and IE. This time i experimented with border-left, border-top etc. attributes to get nice and button-like bars on the left of the page. Well, IE does the thing just like i'd expected, but NN, which previously had rendered the dark blue backgrounds all the way from margin to margin, suddenly colours only the background exactly behind the text!

Rats.

Then i found this really exotic workaround. See, first i define border to none. After that i explicitly define the top, left, right and bottom borders. And -- avót! -- it works. Sort of. Seems as if NN doesn't support the border-left (etc etc) tags after all.

This is the first time that anything on this site has looked better with IE than NN. How depressing.

24-Nov-1997

Rearranged the Intervews section.

Now the problem is that Interviews is a subsection of the Archive, but i have a problem figuring out how i should place it in the hierarchy, you know, so it would be nice and intuitive, perhaps even logical!

19-Nov-1997 | 25k-hits

Ach! The *Nados home page has cleared the 25'000 hits border! Thank you, all surfers!

I was so upset that i missed the event -- i thought we were still on 24'800-something when i last checked in, but i was reading a cache'd copy -- that i just had to write an entirely new page -- this one -- for that. Oh well.

12-Nov-97

16-Oct-1997

29-Sep-1997

19-Sep-1997

25-July-1997

24-July-1997

14-Jul-1997

7-Jul-97

2-Jul-1997

1-July-1997

30-June-97

17-May-1997

Greetings to all Norwegians!

8-March-1997

13-Dec-1996

12-Jul-1996

30-May-1996

15-Apr-1996

3-Apr-1996

7-Oct-1995

5-Oct-1995

26-Aug-1995

18-Jun-1995

1-Jun-1995

31-May-1995

30-May-1995

17-May-1995

20-Apr-1995

25-Mar-1995

23-Mar-1995

19-Mar-1995

12-Mar-1995

16-Feb-1995

14-Feb-1995

9-Feb-1995

6-Feb-1995

5-Feb-1995

2-Feb-1995

2-Jan-1995

29-Oct-1994