Note: The older the entry, the unlikelier outside links are to work.

So I got that Commodore 64 emulator working on my mobile phone now, and I have to say it's the best way to pass time with my phone so far. Seeing that classic blue screen saying "READY" with a blinking square underneath it on my phone is rather amusing. Unfortunately not too many people out there can share the experience, since I don't think this Nokia phone has sold too well. Still, I can spend the time waiting for a bus by playing a classic game of all time, Law of the West. In its simplicity it's very entertaining for a surprisingly long time. Basically, there are 11 different characters you have to talk to and get some information out of them most of the time. If you choose the wrong lines to say, you usually end up having to shoot them. Very simple, yet riveting.
Luckily, you can also get a C-64 emulator on your PC if you're dying to play the game, although I think the graphics are a huge turn-off on a big screen (with the phone's tiny screen, it doesn't really make a difference). But if you're interested, you can find the emulator and good instructions to install here. After awhile, the game does get a bit repetitive, at which point it's nice to have the 'walk-through'. And just to show you that the game's not that simple, here's another walk-through, with different solutions to a few encounters.

I can't stop wondering what information can't be found on the internet. It's still a bit strange that if I want to find out something about something obscure like a computer game made in 1985, I can just type it in a search engine and bam! Unfortunately, this still seems to work best for completely unnecessary information. For something serious, the internet is not yet the authoritative source. But just wait for a couple of years...

In case you haven't figured it out by now, I think technology's pretty cool. Not only has it and will it solve all our problems, chances are it's going to continue changing the world in unimaginable ways. You'd think something like mobile phones were pretty radical, just wait and see once genetic engineering, artificial intteligence and other stuff really get going. What will the world look like in 30 years? It's totally impossible to say, which makes it so interesting to live in these times.

Ok, so my point today wasn't meant to be "times are a-changing". Rather, I wanted to present some less-than-mind-shattering ways of using technology. For example, using your microwave oven to create nice special-effects (I have a pretty new microwave, so I haven't dared try these!) Let me know if you're bored and decide to go for it.
Another kind of interesting aspect of technology is how it can be used for nostalgia. On this page is a program I'm definitely going to try out with my phone as soon as possible. It's like carrying a C-64 in your pocket!

As was warned, nothing happened here at Kekkuli for almost three weeks. Well, nothing in terms of new posts. But things haven't been totally dead. Quite surprisingly, our statistics service tells me that the average number of visitors per day has remained almost the same throughout October as it was in September. On the one hand, you can take that as a sign that we have enough occasional visitors to check us out once every three weeks to compensate for those people that usually look us up every day (somebody out there might even have us as their start page, who knows.) On the other hand, you can take it as a sign that those search engine bots and spambots looking for email addresses find their way to us at the same constant rate, caring little about whether there have been new posts or not in October. Bots also don't answer polls, which would explain the measly "7 votes received" on that poll I put up (ok, so it was one of those polls with little point even I probably wouldn't have answered. Why is the internet so full of them? Because they're an easy way to fill up screen space? Do you think that's maybe what we're doing?). Still, it's the visitor numbers that (I) count, so it doesn't matter whether they're real people or not.

One result of some kind of search bot has been an increase in emails that look identical and start like this:

Dear Portal Administration!

I have recently come across your site and liked it very much.

I suppose that the visitors of our resources belong to the same social group and my site could be useful for your audience so I suggest to exchange our links. This will help both of us to increase Link-Popularity and accordingly get top positions in many searching system, Google for instance.

After this general introduction, these messages tell what the other site is about and gives the web address where you can add your page to their links. Ok, so a relatively good idea, only it doesn't really work with us here at Kekkuli, since we don't have a permanent collection of links (we did originally, but then I figured it was redundant, since links is pretty much everything we post). Besides, I don't always see the connection that's supposed to exist between our audiences. So ok, "news, books and regional information about finland" I can sort of understand, although it's not too often that we bring out our Finnish background. And yeah, I guess I've travelled around Russia quite a few times in recent times so that a "site is dedicated to travelling to Russia" might have some small bit to do with us. But for a moment, an email that said: "My site is dedicated to guns" just blew my mind. Big Guns dot com? Anyway, visiting that site gives sort of a reason for this, although it's not entirely clear to me who did what, but apparently something illegal is going on.

So in compensation of three week's quiet, you now have what might be one of the longest posts in Kekkuli ever. Sorry about that, usually we try to make our posts sufficiently compact for those 15-second attention spans of today. Forget about 15 minutes of fame, by the 8th minute nobody remembers who you are anymore.