Ryan Thai is one of the best Thai restaurants in Helsinki. The place is located on Kasarmitori and it seats something like 40 people or less.

The food is excellent, as usual in Thai restaurants. The taste is somewhat different to the other Thai places in Helsinki, but I cannot tell what’s the difference.

The interior has run down a bit, but the service is cheerful.

www.ravintolaopas.net/ryanthai, Pohjoinen Makasiinikatu 7, Helsinki, +358 9 629 600

Kellarikrouvi is a traditional Finnish restaurant near the old market hall. The place is easy to miss on the street as most of it is on the basement.

The menu is inclined a little bit towards Finnish dishes, but there is also more international favourites available. The food is nothing special, good fare, but there are better restaurants in this price category in Helsinki.

The service is not the best that I have encountered, somebody could describe it as ’sort of blunt’. Effective, too.

Kellarikrouvi, www.royalravintolat.com, Pohjoinen Makasiinikatu 6, Helsinki, +358 9 686 0730

My Mac arrived today! I asked the driver to call me before the delivery, but they had just dropped it to the general postal area in my workplace. Fortunately I went to pick it up, otherwise it might have circled around for a couple of days before landing to my desk…

It has been ten years from the previous computer that arrived in a designed box. That computer was Commodore’s Amiga 4000. At least the boxes have developed from those days.

I can’t study the computer properly before the weekend, but then I’ll lock in our study and fiddle with it for a full day. Not longer, as I have to pack stuff to our Asia trip and also celebrate a pre-Christmas — we can’t take all the gifts with us to Singapore, so we’ll open them in Finland.

Sokeri-Jussin Kievari is a traditional Finnish restaurant in an old converted barn. The place is located in Pikisaari, an island just in the front of the Oulu city centre.

The fare mixes some international twists to Finnish cuisine. The menu contains, for example, fish, game, meat and mushroom dishes. Some menu items, such as Rössypottu (soup with bloodpudding) are special to Oulu region.

The food is good, maybe a little too bland for my taste. The service is Finnish, waiters are not very chatty.

www.sokerijussi.fi, Pikisaarentie 2, Oulu, +358 8 376 628

Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein is surprisingly good museum in the middle of the small capital, Vaduz. The permanent collections contain both modern and classic works, paintings, sculptures and graphic works.

The museum is not huge, and it is easily explored in an hour — a suitable break in a day trip in Liechtenstein.

www.kunstmuseum.li, Städtle 32, Liechtenstein, mail@kunstmuseum.li

My Windows XP saga continues…

Sanna is today having a farewell party to one of her colleague. I promised her to tape the first episode of Angels in America. We have a DVB-C card in our living room PC and I was planning to use it to record the show to the disk.

After coming back from work, it dawned to me that when I installed Windows XP a while back, I didn’t have time and energy to install the digi-TV card.

I visited Hauppauge’s homepages, downloaded a set of drivers, tried to install, and failed. I read some discussions, visited the pages again, downloaded something else, tried to install, and failed. Rebooted, of course, between every single step. Booted XP to safe mode, removed everything, installed again, and failed. Opened the PC, removed the card, restarted Windows, shut Windows down, installed card, installed drivers, and failed. Removed drivers again, checked BIOS for any help (nope), installed again, and failed again. Tried to install from CD and failed. Finally, changed the card to another PCI slot, and Windows XP asked to install the drivers, succeeded.

After a couple of reboots, I could install the digi-TV software. I also had found out instructions for Helsinki cable-TV and followed them. No channels found. Tried several different ways to approach the problem, all of them failed. Finally turned off my firewall(!) and the channels were found. I had to search for them a couple of times to get all channels (or at least I think that I got them all).

The next problem was the audio. No sound from digi-TV. First, I installed the drivers for sound card and that helped to get some sound of the box. But not from digi-TV. I read all instructions and discussion forums for finding the solution, but failed.

Currently the box is recording the show and I have no clue whether it’ll have sounds when Sanna is going to watch it. I tried to verify it by watching the currently recorded MPEG file with Windows Media Player, but it couldn’t open a file that somebody else is writing to. And I didn’t have any proper codecs, so it may be that Sanna can’t even see the picture…

The whole process made me once again so frustrated with Microsoft technology that I have hardships containing myself.

I really don’t understand the following aspects of the problem:

1. Why does digi-TV card show as a network adapter to Windows?
2. Why do I have to turn off the firewall while searching for the channels?
3. What is wrong with Hauppauge’s customer service, as there is no single good FAQ or set-up instructions available?
4. Why all answers can be found only in forums?
5. Why do I bother? (This answer is simple: because of Sanna)

Almost immediate update (22:20): After writing this rant, I went to check the situation with the recording — fearing for the worst that there would be an error with the file or something. Nope, I watched the last three minutes of the show (seems to be worth of watching), stopped the recording and checked the file with Windows Media Player. It fetched a codec from the Internet and played the file flawlessly and with sound!

As I sidenote, I checked the situation with my forecoming Mac. After tracking the shipment with three different numbers, I found out that it has been tried to be delivered on Friday and after that it has been staying in a warehouse in Vantaa. Nobody bothered to call me.

When I called them, I also learned that the shipment can be delivered only during office hours. This box is coming to my home and I should stay put for two to three hours waiting for the delivery. Fortunately, I could change it to my working address.

I don’t understand why Apple can’t use Finnish postal services, as they can deliver also in the evening and post offices are open till eight?

Hides in Shape is a luggage specialist store that offers several international brands such as Samsonite and Victorinox.

The place is seemingly small on the street level, but there is a lot of bags and cases in the basement. We got excellent service in this store, the clerk presented all possible models and answered all our questions with ease. We ended up buying a Victorinox trolley that has been an extremely satisfying travelling companion ever since.

www.hidesinshape.com, 555 Madison Avenue, New York, NY, USA, +1 212 371 5998, info@hidesinshape.com

Chinatown Restaurant is nowhere near the New York City Chinatown, but next to the Union Square.

The selection is huge, as usual in Chinese restaurants. The food is good basic Chinese food, nothing special, but the price / quality ratio is very satisfying.

The restaurant is a small and a little bit too dirty for comfortable eating, so I suggest take out as the primary option. They have free delivery when ordering worth of $8 or more.

Chinatown Restaurant, 238 East 14th Street, New York City, NY, USA, +1 212 228 1852