Wow, what a great turnout in Helsinki for our seminar series. The Finns turned out en masse for our special VIP event. The sneak peek of “Thermo” really got them all excited – thanks, Mike for one-up’ing Jason and I again! The seminar day itself was full of fun as well – albeit, some of the attendees decided to stay home instead of braving the cold, blowing sleet and rain. But for those that did turn up, we packed their brains with tons of interesting ideas, tips and techniques.

The best part of the seminar (for us internally) was that we finally solved a puzzling “bug” in Dreamweaver CS3. Stephanie had been plagued on stage by some really weird behavior when copying and pasting between Photoshop and Dreamweaver. Her images would randomly not appear on the page, or even replace the previously pasted image when she had clearly given the image a new name. I finally solved the problem when I realized that the issue occurred when she was moving internal CSS rules to an external sheet. Even though she gave the sheet a name of “styles.css”, Dreamweaver created the new sheet as “untitled.css”.

The issue is with the dialog “update” in Leopard. Unless you actually click into the dialog to select a folder, the name you choose is not actually applied to the file. Stephanie had simply been giving the file a name and hitting OK. So, if you’re seeing this problem, click into the dialog to change to another folder and then back to the one you really want.

Of course after the seminar, there was only one choice for dinner… well, actually, there are two choices for great dinners in Helsinki. (My apologies to my Finnish readers… there are many, many great Finnish restaurants, but since I get to Finland only 2-3 times a year, I like to visit my favorites!) Anyone who loves a good steak should definitely visit the Grill It restaurant in the Radisson SAS Royal hotel. They make simply the best steak that you can get on the European continent. And if you don’t believe me, check out Jason’s opinion.

The other insider tip for a visit to Helsinki is the Garlic Restaurant. Every single item on the menu has garlic in it – from the drinks (Stef’s “Garlic Mary” or Mike’s “Garlic Beer”) to the garlic steak, pork tenderloin to the dessert (yes, there’s garlic ice cream) or the garlic coffee. This is an amazing experience from start to finish… IF you’re a garlic fan.

The evening concluded with a visit to what we had “hoped” was a real ice bar experience, since we had “forgotten” to head for the ice bar in Stockholm (don’t even ask how we “forgot” since it is literally around the corner from our regular hotel). Unfortunately, the Helsinki ice bar is not nearly what the Swedish version is… instead of a large, hopping bar with good music, we were greated with a converted meat locker – with a maximum of 12 people allowed in the “room”. It was still fun – but I’m not sure the $14 Apple Martini was really worth it. Hmmm…


At any rate, Helsinki, you’ve once again been fabulous hosts.