Log> Some countries are more equal

Hi from the BA lounge at Heathrow. I just changed my address details from the UK to Finland with the British Airways Executive Club, and lo and behold, the Tier points required for the all-important Silver and Gold cards nearly halved. If my address was in the UK, I'd need a whopping 1,500 Tier points to gold status. Now, with a Finnish address, I'll only need 800. I would've hit Gold long ago had I known about this. I'll run some more searches about this soon, but if you care about getting priority treatment and pampering at airports, you should check if you could benefit from this too. The good news is, I'll hit gold after two flights on my First-class world tour (pending actually going on the trip and not just hanging out in Finland, tour managing heavy metal bands).

Log> Last day in London

It is my last day in the London office at Google today. A couple of more days to complete in Helsinki next week, but I'm almost completely absolutely done. And I just got this wonderful little memorabilia. Thanks Paul & Stina. Now off to empty the drawers into a cardboard box...

Stupidity> Smells like marketing

When The Onion mentioned the Fall Out Boy - Honda Civic Tour in this piece about a lost Jimmy Page riff, I thought they were joking. They were not. Not that Fall Out Boy isn't a perfectly shit emo act without any artistic merit who are quite suitable to peddle a middle-class car cheap enough for small-souled ride-pimpers, but to add insult to injury the first result Google gives is Punknews.org reporting on this wonderful event. A site calling itself punk, spreading the gospel of Honda Civic... The smell of marketing permeates everything.

Sounds> On tour with Battlelore

I've just changed my plans a bit. Jussi, from Battlelore called yesterday night and asked if I'd be Battlelore's Tour Manager* on their upcoming European Tour. Around Europe for a few weeks with a heavy metal band made up of old friends? Yes, please!

(*yes, this is the glorified title given to a roadie who's also resposible for making sure the merchandise doesn't get stolen)

I'll need to reschedule the Mauritius flight, and this could even mean that I'm cutting something from the African part of the trip. I still intend to go of course, but this opportunity is way too interesting to pass.

With my newfound freedom, I've found it's easier and more interesting to say 'yes' to things instead of 'no'. I've never been good at saying no anyway. Now I don't have to.

So, I just went out and bought their new album. Rock solid. Clearly their best album to date. The samples on the site (just click the song names) give you a good idea. Try out We Are the Legions, or Beneath the Waves. Generally my taste in metal is a bit faster/darker, or alternatively very progressive and experimental, but Battlelore have actually found a distinct sound for themselves and continued to develop in that sound. Evernight, the new album, is indeed heavier, tighter and more menacing than the previous albums, and quite removed from the almost flighty tunes of Sword's Song, which featured - to my ear - some odd synth sounds and mixing decisions (though it also included their best song to date, Khazad Dum, pt.2: Silent Caverns; the mp3 sample unfortunately doesn't include the raging beginning of the song).

But that's all for now. I'll be touring with Battlelore from later in April. Raise your swords!

Tech> Ooh, shiny: It still has that new Mac smell

It's been long since I've had a laptop, having resorted to the excellent PowerBooks / MacBook Pro's I've work with from Google. Over the weekend I received my Black MacBook and am utterly impressed. The first thing - the shiny screen is better both indoors and outdoors, and is superbly sharp.

The weirdest thing just happened, though: I was saving the image from the splash page of Tumult records, and tried to move the Camino window by grabbing it from the side and dragging it. After releasing - it sprung back, and vibrated to a standstill on it's original location on the screen, like a physical spring. I've never seen that before, wasn't able to replicate it and haven't had any problems using it since.

Maybe Camino was just protesting the image on the Tumult page.

Oh, and I updated the front page of the domain, which had remained static for some 4 years.

Log> Sights> Albania, Macedonia, Kosovo

My stomach feels like it is still on the mountainous strips of potholes that are marked as highways on the Albanian road maps. The feeling is most likely due to a valiant effort at lunching on a steak that was likely roadkill a few days (or weeks) ago somewhere on the littered backroads of Eastern Albania.

My friend Juha and me had joked about taking over a small country at some point or another for a longer time now, and Albania sounded like a good place to be more intimately aware of. We landed in Tirana on Thursday, spent three days there and then rented a car for a road trip to Skopje in Macedonia, and Pristina in Kosovo.

In a nutshell, Albania is a beautiful mess. Tirana has serious infrastructural problems still; the houses are in bad repair, streets uncontrolled and full of potholes, waste management non-existent. But the people are friendly, warm and honest. Not once did we have a problem or even a suspicion of being ripped off or otherwise treated as outsiders, despite the reports of the corruptness of the country. I'm shortchanged in London much more than I'd expect to be in Albania. And despite not a lot of people speaking (any) English, we managed to communicate, be understood, ask for directions and give rides to elderly hitchhikers heading vaguely in our direction. In Tirana, we didn't see anyone else identifiable as a tourist. One of the highlights was a great 12 rounds in a Tirana boxing match where local Qato narrowly defeated the challenging Russian, and the crowd went wild.

We didn't have as much time to spend in Macedonia, but the contrast was blatant. Infrastructure is superior, food is more varied and better presented, English is spoken more widely. An interesting observation was that in Skopje at night there were women walking by themselves (home from the gym, to the cafe, at the bus stop, whatever), which I didn't see in Tirana, and thinking about it now, would have seemed out of place there.

Kosovo, by comparison, was easily the most developed and western of the places we visited. It wasn't even as trashy, whereas some roadsides in Albania were just blue from all the plastic bags and bottles that had accumulated in the gutter. The UN influence was everywhere: KFOR, UNMIK, OSCE, EU and some national development agencies had their vehicles all around Pristina. There were many more western brands visible in advertising (and mostly not counterfeit, mind you), and Euro was the only currency in use, even in the ATMs, which is sort of weird since this temporary, nigh arbitrary 'Unmikistan' has no real ties to the Euro zone or hasn't inherited the currency from Serbia, for example. The trip concluded with a 300 km, 8 hour drive from Kosovo to Tirana on a road of potholes, bunkers and half-rotten dogs.

There are photos of bridge crossings, a boxing match in Tirana, rows of bunkers, expats in bars, locals on the front seat, anti-Ahtisaari posters and other general weird beauty over in the Picasa Album.