Friday, August 22, 2008

Finland Blues

Yesterday I finished up my sections of the GaCIT summer school tutorials. I think it went fairly smoothly, much better than at CHI 2008, possibly because of the higher sophistication of the attendees—grad students with some eye tracking experience vs. novice users at CHI. The other contributing factor here is the week-long format compared to the compressed one-day schedule at CHI. So here I had time to set up the lab concept before letting students get their hands on the Tobiis. I think that was fairly effective (at least that's what one of the students said).

After class we went out to El Toro, as students wanted steak for dinner. Nice place with very good food. Somewhat expensive, but that's Europe on a weakened dollar. After dinner I got a tip on a live blues act in town: Erja Lyytinen.

They were great, but only played one set (and a couple of encores). Wish they could have played longer. Today's the last day of the summer school, tomorrow I'm off to Helsinki. I'll have one night there before boarding the plane home early Sunday morning. A couple people here have told me to consult the calender on the Blues-Finland web page. There appear to be two blues acts, one at the Hill Street Bar, the other at Bar Mendocino. If I could use the iPhone in Helsinki, I could probably locate these bars fairly quickly using the Google map, but I'm afraid that each map tile coming in via the cell connection would cost a pretty penny. So I think I'll have to go "old school" and carry a map around.

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