All text, pictures and code contained within these pages and their subsidiary servers are copyright 1996-2003 Jani Patokallio.  Personal use is generally OK but credit me for it, anything else requires permission.  Link freely but only to addresses under iki.fi (see the tech notes for an explanation), otherwise the links can and will be broken.

Fuzzballs

The mysterious black fuzzy ball whose portrait graces quite a few of my web pages is a Makkuro-kurosuke named Sproing.  Makkuro-kurosuke is Japanese for "pitch-black blackies" (someone else's translation), which are reclusive little hyperactive creatures that inhabit the attics of abandoned houses.  They're featured in the animation classic Tonari no Totoro.  I captured mine at Hakuhinkan Toy Park in Tokyo.  Sproing lived for several months attached to my DJ bag and one day ended up digitized in my camera.  A few minutes of Photoshop, and the rest is history.  You can even get one as a link icon from the J2J page.  Unfortunately, the original Sproing ran away on a windy autumn day in Helsinki, but his memory remains...  and his spring-loaded big brother Rizzi still enjoys vibrating in the girliez' laps.

Technical nitty-gritty

There's quite a bit more to my home page than meets the eye, and for most part you can thank IKI (Internet-käyttäjät ikuisesti ry / Internet Users Forever) for this.  IKI provides me with three services: mail forwarding, WWW forwarding and domain forwarding.

Mail forwarding means that mail sent to my IKI address, [email protected], is forwarded to a destination of my choice.  Currently this means my HUT account, but while I was in Japan my mail went to my company account.

WWW forwarding means that all hits to my WWW pages under http://www.iki.fi/~jpatokal can also be directed to a location of my choice.  Currently this too points to my HUT account.

Domain forwarding is the newest and neatest feature, which allows me to assign my IKI domain jpatokal.iki.fi (and its alias www.jpatokal.iki.fi) to an IP address of my choice.  Currently this points to my personal server brahman.tky.hut.fi, which contains several large data repositories like my mailing list archives and my photo archives.

What all this means is that my website is 100% portable.  I can copy it to a CD or two, plunk it down in a new machine in a new place, tweak my IKI settings and everything will work just like before.  This is also why you should never link or bookmark to any of my non-IKI addresses, as they will be broken eventually as I move around.

And all this for a one-time fee of about $25!  I still think it's the deal of the century.

Disclaimer

All opinions expressed in these pages are mine, mine, mine.  Don't join a cult, commit suicide, or buy securities based on them.  You've been warned.