Hullujen Päivät revisited

Went to Stockmann's Hullujen Päivät again, and to some more stores. Wanted shoes and felt very virtuous about not buying any, since already have more shoes than Imelda Marcos. Besides, they were not particularly good. Good shoes are not easy to find nowadays, and many look good and have a good brand name, but are not good anyway. I have Clarks that have shoelaces that open all the time; if I had any sense I would have bought new shoelaces a long time ago, and someday I will. In Aleksi (or is it Ois now?) they always have Eccos that are "2d quality"; this always makes me feel like quoting the Russian classic who said that there is only one freshness: the first, which is also the last. In fact the Eccos that I was wearing this winter were apparently 2d quality as well, although they did not say so: their soles got worn to holes, literally, just in one winter, and it's not like I was even running around a lot.

Went to Akateeminen with the feeling that I won't buy the DVD+-RW drive that they had on sale, but did anyway. Now I am feeling guilty, which is not a common feeling for me. I decided I'll try to be virtuous and not buy anything else till the next salary; then I bought mangoes, to which I am still allergic, and eggplants for some reason, and then figured I needed toilet paper too.

After such a huge spiritual effort sports are out of question, especially since buying toilet paper in Stockmann during Hullujen Päivät goes for a martial art. After that a person needs bed and tea and possibly a mango. Having relaxed with all of the above I tried to dye my hair blue but failed. I know that blues are harder than reds, but it seems totally unfair that Schwarzkopf's Igora that has worked so well for me in red has totally refused to dye my hair blue.

Having successfully, or rather unsuccessfully, dyed my hair blue I tried to insert the drive into the computer and vacuum clean the space behind the computer.Wasn't hard, but upon booting I noticed that the computer finds the new drive quite well, but not one of the old ones. After a little fucking with software and a lot of swearing I opened the computer again, and realized that the drive doesn't work too well without the power. Besides, I remembered that the damn thing was broken anyway, so disconnected it altogether.

The thing still does not work (in fact it works but not the way I want it to), gets mounted to the wrong place, and I need to update the DVD-playing software. Also need to update the firmware to make it zone-free, but this can wait. Frankly, I don't know why anyone bothers to protect the region code system with RPC2. Even if they managed to make the drives region-coded in an unbreakable way, the prices on DVD readers are so low that anyone can afford to have one for each region they need, especially since the vast majority of people in Europe, myself included, need only two regions: 1 and 2. In fact also I like to watch DVDs from 3 and 5, but in the region 3 they sell pretty much everything in the region 0 version as well, and in 5 it's hard to get the actual DVDs since I don't usually feel like sending my credit card number to any store located in region 5.

Besides, a lot of movies marked region 1 or 2 are in fact region 0 as well.