Wanderlust

As a professional, you just need to be creative at monday mornings, too. There isn’t time to wait that spark to hit you. No worries! Just relax, make a cup of coffee or tee and take a INSPIRATION BATH.

Inspiration bath is something, where you surf trough some good lookin’ and outstanding graphics/photographs/websites/what ever. Maybe you will get some creative energy out of it, or perhaps catch a few ideas or tricks.

For graphics/photographs DeviantArt or Flickr are one of the best places to start, but how to find good websites? Google? Nah!

CSS Zen Garden used to be the one, but that was like over 6 years ago…

CSS Line is Finland-based, but they accept websites from all over the world. Obviously it’s still mostly just finnish ones.

In Templatemonster.com they sell layouts. It includes a lot of Very neutral/boring looking material, but you can find some good ideas from there.

Vierityspalkki – uudet julkaisut – Finnish (big) companies publish their recent works in here. Campaigns, company websites… everything. Good stuff and a lot of background info (in Finnish, though).

And just to list, don’t know these too well: CSS Lite and CSS Remix

These are of course good galleries to find out trends in modern web design. And then what do you do? You BREAK those trends. Don’t follow what others are doing (that much).

I’ve been getting questions about stock -resources I’m using. I don’t know about the best ones, but these are in my bookmarks.

Free textures (for commersial use also):

• CGTextures
• Mayang Textures

Cheap stock images:

• iStockPhoto.com -also sounds & videos

Free stock images (for commersial use also):

• stock.xchng

Plus! Did you know that in DeviantArt there is a category for stock -images? Usually you can’t use them for commersial works, but it’s a good archive otherwise.

…and yeah, it’s a good thing to own good enough camera. ;-)

My new portfolio is shining!

See it.

How the years go by and so much is gone… I just found an old train-ticket between the pages of “Winnie the Pooh”-book. I was reading it on the way to Turku at summer 2005. It says on the ticket; “Civilian-service card must be presented” (for ticket was free for me). People go to do civilian-service instead of military-service in Finland if they don’t want to join army. It was my last day on service. I bought yellow flowers on the way to the trainstation, from flowershop next to the marketsquare. They were going to close that shop few days afterwards.

In Turku, it was over +20 °C warm in the park of old church of Turku. Cold wind was rising among the river “Aurajoki” and it made corners of our picnic-cloth to dance.

Today it’s -20 °C, though I’m still on my happiest mood!

Todays hitchhiking went very nicely (with umbarella), without too much waiting on the roadside. From Pärnu, Estonia I got best hitchhiking ride ever. In-city bus stopped right there front of me. Driver was swedish woman, though she was living in Gdansk, Poland. Buss was coming from a factory and she was driving it to Tallinn.

We didn’t have any good commong language, but it went well with combination of three languages. ”Tack so mycket, it was dobra travel, dziekuje! Do widzenia! Heijdo!”

Then I was stuck again, this time in Tallinn. Next ship will departure at 9pm, so I’ve been waiting here many hours. So not, Tallinn is beatifull.

So far partylife of Riga hasn’t been too wild, even it’s a lot of tourists around old city. This time it was friday, and woah!

It started by dancing some ska punk with teenagers at some art college. My latvian mate who I met in Poland last summer was performing without a last string on his guitar on these parties. Thats what I call punk. Pity I didn’t have more time to chat with him, but Riga is so near Finland. And I just love Baltics.

After that I spent some good’n'grazy time with bunch of CouchSurfers. So much australians again! Riga is full of them. And finnish people too. Dancing, dancing.

I left Riga today, not too early though. After last night staying up for a very late, I knew this would happen: I’m stuck somewhere in the countryside of Latvia. Salacgrīva, only 10km to Estonian border and it’s raining cats’n'dogs.

I found some fanzy hotel, but just too expensive for me. “Sprichst du Deutsch?” Nein… But somehow I managed to bargain the prize under a half of it’s original. Yep, that’s still possible in Baltics.

One more day before school starts again.

I just love streetmarkets of east-Europe. Also in Riga this big one near main railway station is super. I wish we could have this big and diverse places also in Finland. You can find Everything for cheap prizes. Electronics, meat, cheese, vegetables, tee/coffee, shoes, bags, hats, tobacco, waterpipes, jewelry, umbarellas, papers/pens, candy, cookies/cakes, mushrooms, everything made out of plastic, fabrics and somebody was even selling funny looking plastic bags and nothing else! On one meat desk there where whole pig hooked on the wall. Off all those animal parts they where selling, many of them I didn’t have any idea. “Does that come from animal? Really from a cow?!”

Shoes and everything else execpt food seemed to be mostly pirated. Adidas shoes for 10 euros? No way. It’s so much of cloöthes also, so buying these must be popular though. About quality I don’t know, maybe they are good enough.

But food! Oh. So fresh and good looking. Would be paradice to live next to this kind of place.

I’m doing a short hitchhiking trip to Riga, Latvia. Why? Just for fun – we got one week autumnleave from school.

Traveling by hitchhiking usually means having an adventure and I mean even before you get to where you are traveling to. So it was this time too. Almost half of my trip I needed to make in Finland. It’s 150 kilometers from Jyväskylä to Tampere (whitch I hitchhiked) and then 177 kilometers to Helsinki. I was trying to HH for over an hour in Tampere, but I was freezing to my bones. Cold wind and wet snowing. Why to make lovely hobby so horrible? To trainstation, it was then. I wanted to spent next night in Tallinn, so I actually needed to catch up last ferry too. So I was being also practical, not only lazy sunday-HH’er. (Though it was monday).

Next morning was routine for me, a bus 18 from center to the hitchhiking place. Last stop and thumb up. Woot! Still raining, freezing cold and four other hitchhiker before me on the road! After buying more warm clowes+umbarella (and great lunch) from nearby market, I finaly started other half of my trip, outside Finland. Towards Latvia! I must look like a robber or something with my dark clothes and black winterjacket. Not so fast HH’n this time, I mean. All drivers where speaking finnish, for it is easy to learn for estonians and it’s common to work in Finland. Near Latvian border I jammed totaly, next to some 24h-open gas-station. It was dark already and I’m not carrying my tent. Finaly some estonian roadtrip-boys took me – all the way to Riga. Want to come to Amsterdam with us? And back around Sweden after one week. Not bad idea!

But naa, I dropped out in a circle-road that goes around Riga. It was dark and over 9pm. Just road, but whoa! There where three russians trying to fix some old’n'rusty car of them. I found myself pushing that cars engine on. When it worked, I got ride to Riga. Yay!

Finaly I’ll try to write also in english about my wonderful travels and adventures, done mostly by hitchhiking and backbackers -way. I just needed to get over that feeling of… you know, when you don’t feel too comfortable with your language skills. You might be telling always at the beginning of new conversations something like “oh sorry my english isn’t blah blah…”. People notice that anyway, it’s no point telling it. Now I feel comfortable enough.

I would still appreciate you giving a comment when I’m writing something silly. Or I AM a silly person doing grazy stunts sometimes, but just when it comes to misspelling. ;-) That’s how I’m learning, trough feedback. I’m native finnish.

Finnish speaking readers can check my Wanderlust in finnish