Titanic - A Night to Remember

April 14th-15th 2012 marks the 100th anniversary of the tragedy of Titanic. The world's most luxurious ship sank after hitting an iceberg on it's maiden voyage taking over a thousand lives to a chilling grave. Still today, the story of the "unsinkable" ship remains perhaps the most notorius in naval history. I want to commemorate the occasion as I have always been keen on history and the Titanic disaster became familiar to me after seeing James Cameron's Titanic and reading the book "A Night to Remember"by Walter Lord.

First off I want to give big credit for Cameron and his grande movie. It is a true masterpiece of motion picture. Honestly, I didn't fancy the teen love story in it as I'm not much into romantic movies. To many, just mentioning the movie brings fanatic emotions either for or against Leonardo DiCaprio. To me, the movie was much more important as a whole than just pondering if Leo is an annoying brat or not. I think the setting is perfect for a love tragedy because there was so much tragedy altogether; the plain bad luck that the ship had, the lack of lifeboats, the class distinction and so forth. Just looking at the list of survivors tell you the sad story of how badly 3rd class passengers where treated and I think all that was well told in the movie.

I like it how the movie combines historical drama, action and even some humor. Some times the mix seems to be a little too "Hollywoodish", but mostly I think Cameron handled the story with a great respect to the real events. I must recommend reading the fantastic 1955 book "A Night to Remember" by Walter Lord. It tells the story of the Titanic based on the survivors' stories and strictly based on fact. No additional drama is needed, I might add. Titanic had real-life heroes and real-life villains (or cowards to say the least) and what I really like about the movie is how well they and their deeds are represented. I did a school study about the movie and researched the backgrounds of the people in the small side roles in the movie and they are very recognizable, they even look like their real-life models!

So if you are planning on going to see the Titanic 3D version or just play it from your old DVD, read the book first! It makes the movie much more interesting and (if possible) even more tragic as you know that some of the good people in the movie were real and did their best till the very end.

I recently read how James Cameron changed the starry sky in the movie to match the actual sky on that fateful night at the place of the sinking after having a note from astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson. I think that just shows what kind of a perfectionist Cameron was with this movie project. No regular viewer will even notice the stars have changed places, but as a gesture it's awesome.

May the story of Titanic live on, it truly is a night to remember. Safe journeys.

Image: Paramount Pictures/AP Photo

Tracking ships, planes and satellites!

It's inspiring to live in a world where technology and the internet have revolutionized the easiness of sharing information - and made vast amount of knowledge available to everyone. There's actually so much information that quite a bunch of it is totally useless too. But even useless stuff can be cool and that's what this post is about.

Have you ever wondered where that big jet flying in the skies high above you is actually heading? It's possible to find out with Flightradar24.com! It's kind of amazing that an average Joe is able to track all the flights and see their real-time position on the map. For years, I've suspected that an intercontinental route is going just above my hometown of Rauma, and checking out Flightradar a couple of times has proven that - there's planes going from especially Japan, Dubai to USA. So, check out the site and watch the skies from a new perspective =)

  People suffering from lost sense of balance and vomiting, must be the Baltic Sea...
or Tallink Silja ferries!

But it doesn't end there! If your friends are on a ship, say, like the "Swedish ferries" going from Turku and Helsinki to Stockholm, you can stalk the exact locations of their party boat. Or, if you're about to head out to enjoy the archipelago, you just might as well check out if the big ships are going to pass you by for a nice photo shoot! Track the ships with Marinetraffic.com

And finally, you can even track the satellites orbiting the Earth! For a reasonable, satellite specific tracking you can check out www.n2yo.com. If you want to to see all of the satellites, you can check out Google Earth Blog page that utilizes the 3D map view familiar from Google Earh. It tracks 13 000 satellites! Makes you wonder how many big brothers are there, watching down upon us? =D