Welcome to uncle Joni's travel stories
The small city of Porvoo in southern Finland is not one of the country's UNESCO World Heritage sites but it certainly should be! I had heard that Porvoo is a nice city but I hadn't quite understood exactly how nice! The beautiful weather surely played its role but I think no weather could drag the beauty of Porvoo down much.
What makes Porvoo so special is the wooden colorful architecture found all over its old town. It made me think of a bigger, more lively version of the old town of Rauma. Rauma isn't ugly by any means but can't quite match Porvoo.
The bridge on the right leads straight into the heart of the old town of Porvoo.
Now that we have moved back to Finland but still remember what Romania is like it's time to make top ten lists for best and worst things in Romania.
Let's start with the good stuff:
Top 10
10. English is widely understood
Most (young) people in Romania speak more or less good English, which makes everyday life quite easy and pleasant as long as you speak English as well :).
9. Internet speed and price
300/100 Mbit/s fiber to our living room for five euros a month. I think no further arguments are needed!
8. Cultural events in Bucharest
Bucharest is a big city and there's always something happening there. Free concerts, exhibitions, parades and markets just to name a few. We visited many free events with Inna and had a lot of fun!
iMapp Bucharest 2017 Light Show. One of the free events we visited.
We paid a visit to my parents in Hollola and Lahti and were lucky enough to see the lake Vesijärvi covered in a thick layer of fog as well as a full rainbow!
The empty and cold harbor of Messilä
A couple of innocent fixes turned into a coding marathon once again. Here's a list of things that I've changed or added. Some things are visible and some are not.
- Changed the horrible md5 password encrypting to bcrypt. Much better.
- Added a new "Account" page, which replaces the old login/logout view. Through the account page users can change their basic information (name, email address, time zone) as well as log out from the page. The old "Log in"-link is visible when the user has not logged in yet.
- Added time zones to the web page. Users can select their time zone at the account page after which all the timestamps on the web page should be in the selected time zone. The list of time zones is automatically updated once a day through timezonedb.com, which is not at all necessary but something I wanted to code anyway :).
- Users can change their password by clicking the "Change password" link at the Account page.
- Added a user management page to the admin section for, surprisingly, user management.
- Added the possibility to change dates for news items. It makes it easier for admins (me :) to write draft news items and publish them later with the correct date.
I tried to test everything at least somewhat thoroughly but there might be some bugs around anyway. Let me know if you encounter some! You should also change your password so that it's not stored in md5 any longer. It's fine if you use the same password again (saving it will change it to bcrypt).
The weather hasn't been all that bad here in southern Finland so I decided to make good use of it. First we went to check our surroundings with Inna in a leisurely way by cycling along the coastline here in Espoo. It's funny how our surroundings here in Espoo do not look anyhow special when we look out the windows but less than two kilometers away the views are absolutely gorgeous!
The second ride I did alone mostly along a route called "Reitti 2000". It's apparently originally a hiking route that starts in the central park of Helsinki and heads north and east to Vantaa and then to the national park of Nuuksio. The route is 110km long but I skipped the final part that would have taken me back towards Vantaa instead of Espoo so I only cycled 102km that day. It still was more than enough to make my knees feel very, very uncomfortable. I also have to start learning how to fuel myself during longer exercises like this. Bananas and sandwiches do not work anymore!
This beach is less than two kilometers from where we live. The water isn't very warm though ;).
I've tried to make the page work better on different devices and resolutions over the past two days. The page should scale a lot better now and users of mobile devices might notice that the menu on the left is missing and has been replaced by a new "Navigation" link on top of the page. This navigation link opens a menu very similar to the one visible on the left side of the page on desktop computers. Photos and font sizes should scale now as well and should work on almost any given resolution.
I made some other minor usability changes here and there as well. Clicking the banner picture will take the user back to the home page and on trip pages there's now a link to the previous page if one exists. I've wanted to add that link for so long but have always forgotten... :).
Please let me know if you encounter any weird behavior or scaling problems. I only have one Android phone and desktop computers here to test with so I don't exactly _know_ how things look on other mobile devices for example. Thank you in advance for your help!
Finally things are looking a bit more normal. It was quite a stressful and busy week. Three days of driving from Bucharest to Finland followed by two days of driving back and forth between Espoo and Hollola to get our belongings from Hollola to our new apartment. Then there's all the bureaucracy and putting things in order at home. Everything's not perfect yet but at least there's light in the end of the tunnel already.
I finally upgraded the server this site is running on from Ubuntu server 14.04 LTS to 16.04 LTS. Things didn't go as smoothly as I had hoped but I hope things are back in working order now. Let me know if something is not working. The downside is that my Internet connection in Finland is ridiculously bad and it seems like there's nothing I can do about it. I might try to change the page to work together with imgur and the API they offer (would make loading images a lot faster), but that'll be a major undertaking and not something I can finish in a weekend I'm afraid.
We were really busy driving so there weren't many photo opportunities on the way from Bucharest but here's at least some pictures for you to see:
Avoiding thieves with a car full of stuff somewhere in Poland
Inna found a job in Espoo so on Friday we'll head back towards Finland. I'm sure it'll be an interesting drive once again! Things already got interesting now as apparently falling ice from the roof had broken the windshield of our car. Getting it fixed here in Bucharest wasn't expensive but the car repair shop needed an official statement from the police that I haven't been in an accident with the car.
Getting the aforementioned paper was quite a challenge because my car isn't exactly legal in Romania at the moment. The car hasn't been inspected since 2016 and any car that is in Romania for over three months is supposed to be registered in Romania, which I haven't done either. The police threatened me with a fine of about 2500 euros and said that they could take away my plates and papers of the car. In the end I got away with "a strong warning". Now the interesting thing is that the police didn't exactly see me driving the car although it was quite obvious that I had done so. I guess I could have just told them that I will have the car towed over the border to Hungary to avoid the fines :).
Moving to Finland means that I will have to move my server from Romania to Finland as well, which means that this website or the gallery will not be accessible for some time. If everything goes according to the plan the website will be back next week. Perhaps on Wednesday.
The broken windshield
I changed the width of the page from 800px to 1024px to better accommodate bigger pictures. I think it looks better now at least on desktops. For mobile users I tried to make the thumbnail function work a bit better. Now the thumbnails should open in the middle of the screen and always fit the screen as well. Changing the orientation of the device when the thumbnail is open can still cause some strange behavior though. I will also try to make the menu on the left responsive so that it's not taking so much space on the screen when using smaller devices. Julia was kind enough to let me know about a problem with the new photo books and Firefox. That bug should be fixed now as well :).
I think I forgot to mention it here but about a month ago I went back to Ciucaş Mountains to try to conquer the highest mountain there. This time I hiked with a group of Romanians, some of whom I knew beforehand as well. We had a great day out and we even managed to make it to the summit. Visibility at the summit wasn't any better than it had been when we tried to get there with Inna though!
Cold and windy summit of Vârful Ciucaş
I just finished coding a new feature for the page. It's quite similar to the old photo books but this time I can add pictures of any size and aspect ratio and the viewers will always see the whole picture regardless of the screen they use. Let me know if you prefer the old photo books (for example here) or the new ones (Israel and Jordan photo book).
Finally I had the chance to visit Petra!
Comments
Let's hope the possibility for editing comments will make people comment more as they don't have to be afraid of mistakes anymore :).
Edited by Milton - 11.06.2011 12:25
Edited by Milton - 10.01.2013 21:49