Christmas holidays...

So Christmas came and went and this was the first year that I didn't spend it with my immediate family. Actually, I was completely alone the entire Christmas, and it was quite a welcome change (not that I mind spending time with my family, quite the opposite, in fact). No stress, no real human contact, just lying around and so on. Oh, and I did watch both Bridget Jones movies, and I have to say that they still are very brilliant (and for those that say that they're only for chicks; sod off!). They are really quite clever and I'm actually pretty happy that Mr. Darcy still was the one who came out on top. Maybe because I identify myself more with Darcy than Cleaver. Well, ok, I may not exactly be on par with Mr. Firth, but oh well. The films did, though, trigger some fairly sensitive and personal memories and scratched open some old wounds, but I think I can safely say that this is a healthy and most likely the final part of a healing process of sorts. Good as new, at last. But of course these things have no place in a blog, especially not mine. I'm not that open. ;)

Overall the break from normal life for the extended weekend allowed lots of time for introspection (again) and I am actually fairly pleased; I can, with quite a bit of certainty, say that I am learning more about myself each time and I think I'll have to take a moment some time during 2007 and try to figure out and organize a lot of thoughts and try to get them on paper.

Anyway, I did also get around to planning my schedule for next spring and I decided to start my BSc thesis and also keep log of the process on my web page (available here, only in Finnish, though). The topics seem quite interesting, but I still have to see if I can actually do the thesis as I'm only taking the course on managing a software company this spring, and it's listed as a pre-requisite for two of the BSc thesis topics. Hopefully there'll be room to negotiate a bit - otherwise I may have to push the thesis to next fall.

In any event, I also typed up a list of resolutions for 2007 and put that online, too (available here). The idea is simple; I'll set that as the homepage for my browser and I'll have to confront that screen every time I open up Firefox. That way I can't get away from those. In addition, by making the resolutions public, Google will most likely index them (as will The Way Back Machine), and I'll seriously have to work towards keeping them. The toughest two will be getting my BSc done entirely by next Christmas and getting a place as an exchange student in some eastern European country. I guess we'll see what will happen in about 365 days...

Rate of Change

"Every action has an equal and opposite reaction." Newton's third law, if my memory serves correctly (ha! I know something about physics even though I haven't gotten around to passing my obligatory physics courses!). Although I guess that is primarily applicable to mechanics, it might have some interesting applications in other fields as well. Anyway, if you consider the current ICT field, it's obvious that in order for a company to be succesful, it must be able to react to changing situations immensely quickly (first-mover advantages, anyone?). This of course has some practical implications as well - namely that the individual people who make up a company need to be able to also react quickly and reinvent themselves as the need arises. All in all it would seem that the entire culture of doing business in high-tech is being pumped more and more full of steroids every passing year.

So, about Newton's third... That would explain why in the recent year Morgans have started to look very appealing. Well, ok, they still won't be very practical in your typical Finnish climate, but come on; a car for which you have to buy door handles from the options list has got to be immensely cool! Morgan Motor Company itself has been operating the same way since it was founded in 1910 and their cars are still reminiscent of the cars the predate the war. Perhaps because they, in fact, do. I guess you can't go further away from the rate of change of the ICT world than that. Unless you want to look at the British bespoke clothing scene, which predates the Morgans by a hundred or so years...

Equestrianism

I just love the Rolex commercials and I think the marketing campaign has been one of the better ones. The commercials all contain snippets of the same song with traditional strings mixed with a modern backbeat (I hear this was specially made for Rolex and isn't based on any existing track) and show bits and pieces of various "prestigious" sports - tennis, golf, equestrianism, car sports... Place the different disciplines and athletes on a high enough podium and make them seem cool and then associate yourself with that. It never fails.

Anyway, I still would never wear or get myself a Rolex (*cough* yeah, like I'd even afford, but it's nice to play with ideas... :), but I think I actually should try equestrianism at some point...

Hi ho, hi ho...

... it's off to [the] opera we go. Eugene Onegin on the 27th is now on the agenda. Just got the tickets ordered.

The future

I recently got to take part in a nice seminar about the current and future stuff happening in the internet world and N. I can't remember the fine print of my NDA, so I guess I won't be saying that much about the N part, but sufficient to say that just as OPK has been drumming, there seems to be some sort of movement towards becoming an internet company.

Anyway, the most interesting parts of the seminar were when a couple of investment bankers (Mark Tluszcz of Mangrove Capital Partners and Doug Richard of, well, many things) took the time to come tell us about what the future seems like and so on. The general consensus seemed to be that in the cellular world (at least), the operators will be taking quite a beating and will become increasingly irrelevant. Perhaps not now, or not next week, but it'll happen as they will be reduced to mere bit-pipe suppliers, pushing one bit from one node (be it a server, a handset, etc.) to another at a time. VoIP, etc. Oh well, I think that this is nothing new, really, but it's always nice to be able to throw around big names to back up your views; thirst is nothing, credibility is everything.

Asides from the impending doom of the operators, the guys talked about some of the other trends, such as the fact that Google may have a tough time in the future, since even they can't beat search engines that focus on certain specific topics (e.g. real estate). I can see where Mark was coming from, but Google does have some advantages, namely the current size, the user base, the shear size of their bank account and the fact that they have the cash to hire the best of the best. But yes, I can see a small niche for specialized search engines, that's true. What else? Eastern Europe continues to remain strong, etc. And a comforting thing is that even though everyone else has slimmer phones than N these days, both Mark and Doug seemed to agree that N are the leaders in phones, thanks to the feature set and capabilities. In addition to the bankers, the same type of message was heard from Oliver of MobileCrunch. Comforting to know that even amidst all the RAZRs and KRZRs, N still seems to have a decent looking future. Oh, and I can also see why Mark and Doug are backing players that are bent on shaking up the status quo; they're both investing in small businesses and that's where the profit is at. If you can shake the foundations, you'll make a huge profit. So of course, as always, their views too are skewed a bit. But not as much as some, I would argue, since if you truly want to see the future, follow the money. And I'm guessing these guys have a couple of dollars.

Save the planet, they said

This week's The Economist had an interesting article about ethical food and whether or not it's really ethical. Overall ethical food products consist of three groups; organic foods (save the environment), Fairtrade products (save the poor farmer in some 3rd world country) and local products (support local farmers).

The article suggested that producing organic food is less efficient and in order to produce the same amount of food by organic methods than what is produced right now with more efficient methods would require us to just about eliminate the rainforests; that much land is needed. Fairtrade products in turn help drive down the prices of a market that is already overflooded with goods and gives the 3rd world farmers the message that instead of diversifying, they can make a buck by driving the supply up and prices down even more. And buying local products in turn hurts the 3rd world farmer by disregarding his goods and then the environment because producing lamb in Britian takes more effort and resources than doing so in New Zealand and just transporting it the Britain.

Overall this just goes to prove that nothing is black and white anymore. Grey is, has and will be the trend for the next century.

Marketing Management & Luck

The exam for Marketing Management was today and let's just say that I got moving a bit late in the semester when it came to preparing for it. In the end I didn't even have time to delve that deeply into Kotler & Keller, but thankfully there were rather decent summaries at the end of each chapter which helped create a rather good high level view of what the course was about. Additionally the questions in the exam couldn't have been better for me.

They'd also done away with the multiple choice questions part, which has traditionally been the hit or miss part of the exam. I stumbled a bit in the first exercise in which you were to explain various terms briefly. The maximum was 10 points, I'll venture a guess that I should get about five.

Then there were the essays. Three essay choices and you had to answer two. The two I did were on differentiation (what is it, what are the different dimensions of it and then examining how IKEA differentiates itself from the competition) and segmentation (what is it, when should it be done, advantages/disadvantages and then how the traditional segmentation model differed from the "Strategic Segmentation" concept which was discussed at a lecture). And best of all, English was allowed. Overall I'd say that the exam went extremely well considering the amount of effort I put into it.

I'm starting to get to the conclusion that school, in fact, isn't that difficult at this level either. It's just a question of optimizing workload and goals. I'm satisfied enough to have a grade average of 3 or higher, preferrably closer to 4 than 3. Of course 5s would be nice, but they're hardly worth the extra effort, especially if that extra mile would most likely increase the required effort by an additional 40-50%. Oh, and right now I'm becoming increasingly certain that I indeed want to do my minor at the dept. of industrial engineering and management.

What if you didn't have to sleep?

I guess most people at some point in life play around with the idea of not having to spend the 8 hours a day sleeping. There also seems to be quite a large consensus that the sleep, however, is needed for a human to function properly. I ran across polyphasic sleep today, and I guess I'll have to do some more reading on that, since it seems quite interesting. To be able to cut back sleep even to 5-6 hours without adding the extra tiredness would be incredibly nice.

Two problematic issues are that it requires a rigid schedule, which I'm not sure I can fit in my life right now (considering the fact that students do occasionally party, and that needs to be offset with proper sleep) and secondly that I have some actual obligations, like work. And I'm not so certain that I'd be able to explain to people well enough why it's imperative that I sleep for 20-25 minutes ever couple of hours. This might, however, be an interesting experience if I ever have a long summer vacation again, though.

More calculations

Ok, after my recent blog entry where I complained about my salary, I figured out that to lift my mood a bit, I should look at some statistics about the salaries for people with MSc degrees in Finland. TEK (the Finnish Association of Graduate Engineers) compiles salary statistics on a nearly yearly basis, but alas they only publish those for their members on the web site.

Anyway, a survey they conducted for the year 2005 shows that things that affect MSc salaries are

• focus on computer science (+7.7%)
• employed by the private sector (+13.8%)
• working in the Helsinki metropolitan area (+7.8%)
• male gender (+5%)
• emplyed by a company with 250+ employees (+2.1%)
• 5+ travel days per year (+6.4%)
• 2.5+ hours of overtime work per week (+3.9%)

There were more things, but these were the criteria that I figured I could meet. So by multiplying those, the overall benefit would be +56.5%. TEK also suggests that a fresh MSc should get paid 3070 euros/month. Now if you take into account the supposed +56.5% increase, that would amount to about 4800 euros/month of gross income. And I'm assuming that TEK's statistics don't take bonus arrangements into consideration.

Then assume that with the overtime work, the average working week would be 40 hours long and there are four weeks in a month for a total of 160 hours of work/month. That equals 30 euros/hour. Also, considering that I'll hopefully be graduating in four years, this'll have to be adjusted with inflation. I can't be arsed to get any statistics on that, so I'll just add a yearly inflation of 1% to that, for a grand total of about 4990 euros/month. So now I know what I should be aiming at...

And now I have to admit that I don't feel any better. I would've been happy with the three grand that TEK suggests. But now because of these damn statistics, 3k sounds sort of... Well... Small. Not to mention my current salary. Oh well, I think it's time to get back to Kotler & Keller, lest I want to ever graduate.

Independence

It's the Finnish independence day today (6th of December) and Finland is turning 89. And as corny as it is, I think independence days are good days to reflect on the whole concept on a personal level. I myself aren't that patriotic a person - those who know me will undoubtedly consider this quite worthy of an Understatement of the Year award. The problem that I have with all this overly patriotic stuff is that it just promotes nationalism. Nationalism itself may or may not be a good ideology, I guess that's still up in the air, but there are problems that it causes. Nearly always there are nationalistic ideals behind racist behaviour, national stereotypes are often funny, but also insulting, and wars/conflicts more often then not have nationalistic zeal in the background.

On a similar parallel, the Olympics and other sporting events that promote competition between nations often result in bigotry - "Damn svensktalande bättre folk, go back to Swedenland and learn to play ice hockey!" I don't remember when I've last watched any sporting event between nations. But the whole nationalistic element in sports doesn't further global integration and interaction.

EU has also been a controversial topic in Finland, at least within certain groups. There are quite many people who are fairly skeptical of the benefits that EU has to offer. That's of course understandable, if the default mindset is that "I'm primarily a Finn and proud of it". That mindset should change to "I'm a European and proud of it". At least that would be a step in the right direction. And hopefully eventually we'd reach a global mindset and we would consider ourselves as citizens of the same world, regardless of the region where you live. And at this point, I guess I could go run in some beauty pageant and tell about my vision of peace on earth. Luckily I'm cynical enough to take all of this with a grain of salt and acknowledge the fact that because of human nature, this will never happen.

Now, don't get me wrong, independence is nice and everything, but I just feel that some things that are pretty integral to the concept of independence are very negative and might even overshadow some of the good things. As such, I didn't celebrate independence in any special way; I just lied in bed with my laptop, surfing the web, listening to music, etc. Might've had something to do with the fact that we had our Christmas party with some of the trainees from N...

Notes on juggling...

How good a juggler you might be, external events may still cause you to drop a ball or two...

Ok, so now that the biggest deadline is behind me (well, maybe it was just a local maximum, i.e. downhill until it's uphill again and the next one will be even bigger), I think it's time to reflect on some issues and recap the learned lessons. I think the most important thing to note is that as competent a person (*cough*, that's still being debated), some things might not always work out. And then there are the other people, the other systems, the external stuff that you typically depend on. And they can fail too.

So, some concrete examples, then. I pulled off a small miracle by actually getting a working piece of software done and packaged by the deadline for the Computer Network assignment. Out of the two protocols, I implemented both, but there was some sporadic glitch occuring in the link-state routing protocol - I'll venture a guess that it's caused in a situation where the network contains more than one optimal route to a given node. The implementation of Dijkstra's algorithm that I based my solution on - as a typical Dijkstra implementation should do - only creates a spanning tree with single routes and only picks one of the optimal routes. I didn't think of this until it was too late, and didn't have any more time to start changing anything. But I guess I'll at least get a 3 from the exercise, a 5 if the assistant who's grading the exercise got laid the nigth before... And with some clever planning, I got my marketing exercises done too, though I must say that the essay on business-to-business customer relationship management was complete and utter bullshit. I think I only had about three or four actual points in the entire essay and the rest was just filler words and lacked all actual meaning.

The next deadline is on Thursday, and that'll be the 5th phase of the Software Development Methods project. Needless to say, that's looking somewhat problematic right now, especially since the SoberIT site is down right now and instead of using the 90 minutes on the train to work on the project, I ended up blogging this entry. So much for automatically assuming that the machines at the uni would be reliable enough to stay up. This isn't the first time that I've had to postpone work due to the SoberIT site blowing up.

Anyway, today there's a Christmas/recruiting party at Accenture, so that'll hopefully be fun. Hopefully this'll shine some more light on the actual future views on the consulting business and what sort of things would be available for a person of some technical competence and understanding of business. And tomorrow we'll be having a Christmas party with some of the guys, who were also trainees last summer at N, at my flat. Still have to go get a bunch of wine and stuff. And a cool Christmas hat. But alas, I guess I'll need to dedicate the entire Finnish independence day (6th of December) to doing the SDM project, so that'll cut back on the partying quota for Tuesday...

Pandaemonium

It's fun to see how different people react under stress and pressure. As much as it might be a cliché, some people fall apart and start acting according to the old rule of "When in trouble, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout" and give up on everything. Other people, in turn, get a lot more focused, efficient and are able to go the extra mile. I don't know exactly where I fit in with all of this, I guess I'm the type that continues to be confident that I'll be able to pull something off until the final moment, when I either do pull it off or fail. The trick is to set your own personal goals higher than what others expect you to accomplish; that way even if you do fail to meet your personal goals, there's a slight chance to still get something concrete done.

I also like airports. And cafes. And overall places that are busy and crowded, especially when I need to be able to think. There was a discussion at work regarding the working environment and some people voiced issues that the open office was too noisy and something would need to be done about that. I feel quite the opposite, the noise, life and all things related are able to help me focus on something. I'd even go as far as to say that if I don't continously receive signals of whatever sort, I can't really feel completely at ease. Even when I'm alone, on my laptop, doing something, I typically keep at least a couple of internet relay chat windows open so the text keeps scrolling by. I don't necessarily even have to read them, it's enough that something's happening. The curse associated with the current multitaskin lifestyle.

Or perhaps it's a symptom of me being a left-handed person - I read somewhere that people who are left-handed can typically have a lot more things continously under work than right-handed people on average. E.g. right now I'm blogging, I have the chat window open in the background, I'm working on my computer networks project and I have Kotler & Keller open besides me as I need to do some multiple choice exercises for the marketing course. Tomorrow evening at midnight I guess we'll see if I pull this off or not...

White Teeth

White Teeth is a rather brilliant book on the life of immigrants in England through a couple of generations. I read it quite a while ago, but today the topic sprang back into mind. Not the immigrants, though, but the white teeth.

As I'm sure some people who may or may not stumble across this blog already know, I'm having a rather large project with my jaws and teeth, and I get to be 13 again and got braces (the orthodontic kind...) again last winter. Brushing my teeth has been a fairly mechanical operation ever since; how can you really judge the job when you can't even see your teeth from all the metal contraptions. I just brush for a while and that's it. But apparently that's not enough, and I got to go through a 60 minute training today on how to properly clean my teeth, and the whole operation is starting to feel like rocket science. I mean, I now have four different kinds of brushes for brushing my teeth and tonight I stood about 15 minutes in the bathroom trying to brush my teeth like the nice dental hygienist girl had instructed me. It's pure hell and I don't see myself investing 30 minutes every day for brushing teeth. It's just too much.

Anyway, 2-3 more years and then I'll have a nice smile, or so they tell me. Too bad I don't usually smile that much - such a waste...

Pressure...?

My schoolwork is going straight to hell. Forgot to sign up for that damn Algorithm Analysis & Something course and the DL for the obligatory home exercises is this evening at 8; 1.5 hours away. Well, I wouldn't have needed the 5 credits anyway... Accounting & Profitability? Skipped the exam, hadn't had time to... No wait, I just hadn't prepared. 3 credits... Puff! (Granted, I'll take the exam in January.) And so on. And the courses that I still actually do still have left all have exams and exercise deadlines coming up; a router emulator needs to be written by Friday, the multiple choice questions and an essay on some random topic need to be done by Sunday. Then the Software Development Methods exercises, which have taken way too much time already... (Try doing all the work intended for a competent three person group all by yourself due to... Well... Some unfortunate circumstances.) Pressure? Pfft! What's that? Bring it on!

Umbrellas

Just stumbled across James Smith & Sons again today, and I think that I will have to get one of their umbrellas. And no, this isn't a trip down snobbery lane, it's much more of a thing related to quality, as I recently described. Luckily I just talked with a friend of mine and he told me that he was planning a trip to London in early 2007, so I guess I'll have to try to get him to grab me one of the umbrellas while he's there...

Shoe maintenance...

One of the best feelings in life is the one after taking a long shower, putting on a crisp and clean white shirt and freshly polished shoes (and then of course the other clothing articles, too...). There's actually a joke in Finland regarding how you can determine whether or not a business traveller at an airport is a Finn or not; just look at his shoes. And like behind all jokes that are based on stereotypes, there's truth behind this one too.

On introspection...

Introspection is quite a fun hobby, and I think quite many of my blog entries actual deal with a certain need to understand myself (yeah, and because of this, they may not make for very entertaining reading to others, but that's not really my problem, now is it? :) . Even though many people have commented on the fact that I supposedly am very open and give out a lot of information about myself, I would actually describe myself very reserved and keep certain inner topics closely to myself, and to a select few others (aha! it's only now that I can precisely define what I meant earlier). The people who actually know me very well in turn have commented that if I'd spend all the effort I put towards introspection towards something "useful" (their definition, I think that's relatively subjective :), I'd be able to achieve quite many things. Oh well, I guess I'm doomed, then.

Anyway, I've acknowledged the fact that according to the MBTI test I'm an INTJ (Introverted, iNtuitive, Thinking, Judging) and that I fit the short description of the type. The problem with short descriptions are that competent people can usually craft short pieces of text with which anyone can reflect against - think about horoscopes, most of the time they don't actually say anything, but you feel that it's meant precisely for you; the horoscope itself is just so general that everyone can reflect his or her personal situation against it. That's why I've been fairly sceptical with the results of the MBTI test (especially when considering the fact that I don't really feel like shelling out ~100 dollars for some test like that and have only done some unofficial, free tests).

Now, I was just going through random topics on Wikipedia, and stumbled across the INTJ topic. I'd read it before, but had missed quite possibly the most interesting stuff there; the external links. Turns out that there was a page with a relatively detailed description of the INTJ personality, and it was eerily close to me, my views, etc. And I know this thanks to the endless introspection that I do. It also offered some clearer and more exact solutions to stuff that I hadn't yet been able to fully explain and motivate for myself. But(!), not so much good that not something bad; there were one or two things that I didn't fully agree with. For one, the article suggested that INTJs are very loyal to organizations/goals/etc. I sort of understand and associate with this, but I would suggest that instead of being fiercely loyal to an organization, I'm even more loyal to myself. I don't do charity unless I see something in it for me. I guess that's the cynic inside me talking again, but that's how I feel. The endgame or motivation for something, however, doesn't need to be purely selfish. I may do something classifiable as charity just because I feel that it furthers something that's close to me, my beliefs and my views.

That said, I'm afraid that this entry may actually be one of the most honest and open entries that I have written or will write in the future.

Christmas is coming...

... and I'm buried in a shitload of work (both workwork and schoolwork). I've already done ~11 hours today (~8.5 hours at work, ~2.5 hours of school stuff) and I've yet to get anything finished. The Software Development Methods phase 4 deadline is on Thursday at noon and that's going to take at least a couple of hours more today and about six hours tomorrow. Then I have to get my hours for this week in at work and that means going in on Friday. And on Saturday I have my Accounting & Profitability exam for which I've yet to start preparing for. Yay! Top that with some social obligations tomorrow evening, and there's no more spare time.

And if that wasn't enough, the CN course exercise is due on the Friday, December 2nd, and that's turning out to be slightly more tricky than I had predicted...

Now for some interesting math... I would guesstimate that I do about 30 hours of work-work a week and something like 35 hours of schoolwork on top of that. That's about 65 hours of work per week. Now, the student allowance for me is roughly 320 euros/month and I get paid for something like 20 hours per week at work and that's about 900 euros/month of salary for a total of 1100 euros/month minus taxes. Now, 65 hours/week equals 9.3 hours/day (if spread out evenly through the entire week) and with 30 days in a month, that's about 279 hours/month.

Now divide the 1100 euros/month with 279 hours/month, and you get about 3.95 euros/hour minus taxes. That's less than what they pay at McDonald's. And according to Kela, I make way too much money and I get to pay back the student allowance eventually. So overall I earn about 3.22 euros/hour minus taxes. There's something inherently wrong with the system. In order to study and live a decent life, I need money. And because of the small amount of student allowance I get, I have to work part time to earn a bit more (and I'm being paid too little at work, too). And then Kela decides that I am too rich and I have to pay the aid back. Amusing.

All the while the leaders of the country want students to graduate faster and get employed right away in order to start earning more money which can then be taxed at a higher percentage. And in the meanwhile companies also want us to graduate, but that's not enough since we should also have work experience on the side. And right now that I'm gaining more work experience and furthering my studies, I get slammed by the government, which wants its money back, and by the company, which pays me too little.

Ah, it's certainly fun to be a student.

The problem with blogging...

We've been promoting the use of wikis and blogs at work as means of collaboration and dialogue amongst people. The initially reaction to wikis was very positive and we actually witnessed that people started adopting them fairly quickly. However, there were some concerns voiced and the largest issue was that of restricting the viewers and editors. That itself goes against the nature of wikis (and also blogs). The idea is to allow anyone and everyone to read and contribute, and if we institute measures to restrict access, the whole nature of the system changes. The cool thing about wikis is not the technical stuff, but instead the social aspect.

Now this brings me to the problem with blogging. As much fun as this is, the problem why I stopped blogging the last time (and the time before that, and before that too...) was that I can't just type anything I want here. Granted, obfuscating names goes a long way, but people are clever enough to still figure out what's going on. And some things are just not meant to be written down. A pity, actually, but I guess that's just how things are. There'd either have to be multiple levels of access control or multiple blogs for different subjects, and that's not fun anymore. Oh well, no discussion on endgames and long-term personal strategies on this blog, then. :)

Journey to Reims

Every year there are one of two things that will be engraved into your mind and they'll set the overall theme of the year - or how you'll remember it afterwards in the following years. As I've been bitching and moaning lately, this year the theme will be "All work and no play destroys T's social life". Unless some drastic measures are taken, my social life will have consisted mostly of school, work and going out to bars with the same core group from the uni, and even that's been declining a bit on my part. Well, at least the salary's good... *cough*

So anyway, following my previous encounter with the theater (which was brilliant), this Saturday it was time for some opera. Rossini's Il viaggio a Reims (or Journey to Reims) had been brought to life by Dario Fo & Co. at the Finnish National Opera, and granted, I was a bit skeptical on whether or not I'd make it through the three hours. It turned out, however, that it was pure brilliance. Even though it was written in the 19th century, it still covers some topics that have recently become increasingly relevant in our 21st century lives. And when the curtains closed for the final time, it wasn't relief that I felt. In some way I think I could've just went on and watched it again. I could go on and rave about it further, but suffice to say that it was great. And the company was also great, a big thanks for H for taking the time out of her busy life and accompanying me there and making sure I didn't do anything too stupid during the show... :) I think I should just learn to focus more on doing fun stuff and cutting back on work+school lest I become a boring person who lives in a cubicle and you get the idea.

On snobbery

This topic is something that has been troubling me for a while and I can't give a clear answer on it. So let's see if I can get something rational about it down on paper...

Being a snob is something that has become a sort of long running joke with a friend of mine. He accuses me of being a snob, but I don't really consider myself one. I'll grant that I get annoyed of people who buy fake Louis Vuitton bags, and other such things, and I would typically leave something unbought than to buy a fake, or a copy. But that's not because of snobbery, as defined by dictionaries. The primary reason is that I don't like cheating, plagiarism, or anything of the kind. And with fake goods, the problem is two folded...

First of all, someone went through the trouble of designing something, creating a brand, etc. It isn't easy to create something like that. That's something that should be recognized and given credit to. By buying fake stuff, you're in fact not supporting or giving credit to the original creator, but just acting in a childish "I want, I want, I want" fashion. The motive must be some sort of posing, since fake goods are typically of lower quality. Which brings me to the second point...

Because of the cheap price, the goods are typically of lower quality. I'm a firm believer in betting on quality over quantity, mostly because poor people can't afford to buy cheap. It's not because of snobbery, it's because I value quality, that I try to always buy the best that I can afford at the moment. If the quality which I can afford doesn't satisfy me, I just don't buy it. And this seems to be something that may appear as snobbery to some people, but the motives are what distinguish between snobbery and something else.

So to sum it up, no, I wouldn't consider myself a snob, as I'm not trying to elevate myself to some class I'm not in nor am I trying to imitate such classes. And as far as I know, those are precisely the key points of snobbery. I'd rather like to think that I lean more towards perfectionism and value traditions and handicraft. As a matter of fact, I would even go so far as to suggest that the people buying fake purses are in fact a rather large group of snobs themselves. Granted, the end goals are sometimes the same (e.g. I wouldn't mind wearing an Omega Speedmaster), but whereas a snob would obtain something - the Omega - to show off, I would want it because of its beauty, elegance, quality and because I value the knowledge and skill required to make a watch of that calibre. And that's the key point.

Move over, movies...

I'm slowly starting to assume the stance that while movies are ok and all, theater and other forms of art may be even better. Or maybe I've just had luck with the stuff I've seen so far. As I blogged before, the stuff during the URB festival were excellent and tonight I saw €uroja Taivaasta (Euros from Heaven, sorry, the site's only in Finnish), which was just brilliant. Granted, it had quite a bit of Salo-specific stuff which wouldn't be understood by people who haven't lived in Salo for at least a couple of years, but. And unlike with big Hollywood blockbusters, the money goes more or less straight to the actors and people behind the entertainment, not to some faceless corporations. And that's always a plus.

Commercials...

I haven't owned a TV in quite a while, so I can usually avoid most commercials fairly well (well, ok, every time I walk out the door, I'm subjected to umpteen different forms of adverticements, I know, I'm taking TU-91.1002 Marketing :). Most commercials are rubbish, but then there is the occasional good one, too.

Nokia's been in a bit of trouble in the press lately. Motorola had the tremendously cool RAZR, etc., and N just can't seem to stay on the ball. All the cool kids have dumped N long ago. My personal phone is still from 2000 and I haven't bothered to get a new one, so that makes me either incredibly cool or incredibly outdated; I've been told retro is the thing right now. Anyway, I went to see some movie I can't even remember a while back and I saw the commercial for the N93 - the one with Gary Oldman, the one below, and as far as advertisements go, it was immensely cool. And I'm not even saying this because I'm sort of biased (*cough*), it really is...



In addition, I also went to the N Flagship Store in Kamppi to check out the concept, since people had talked about it at work. The whole experience was incredibly pleasant and I actually started thinking of purchasing a phone from N as my next phone; six months back I was about to jump ship and buy a Motorola, but just never got around to buying a new phone. The clerks were nice and very helpful - something you can't take for granted in Finland these days. I wondered about the data transfer rates on the E series phones, but the non-3G phones didn't have a SIM in them for me to test. Now, typically in Finland at this point the clerk basicly tells you to piss off, but this guy actually went through the trouble of fetching a SIM from the back so I could test how EDGE faired against the 3G network in a real world scenario. I was sold. Well, ok, I still haven't bought a new phone, but when I do, I think it'll have to be a phone from N.

I think more companies should focus on selling an experience like that to the customer. At no point was I harassed about actually buying a product. Nor did I get a feeling that the clerk was staring at me from behind the counter and wishing that I'd buy something or fsck off.

Oh, and Moby's In My Heart was also a brilliant pick for the N series commercials...

No biz like showbiz...

Breathtaking...

Update 2006-11-13: It seems that someone took the video down from YouTube. :( Oh well, anyway, it was a video of Fred Astaire doing Puttin' on the Ritz. And it's still brilliant.

"Sorry, our e-store isn't open right now..."

There's been an increasingly disturbing trend in, atleast, Finland concerning web-based stores; namely that they appear to close for the night. It wasn't too long ago that one of the key arguments for web stores were that they would allow you to not only do your shopping from anywhere, but also any time that suits you. But now VR.fi (Finland's only railway company) allows you to only buy tickets from around 6 AM to roughly 11 PM. Granted, they're still open longer than the actual physical ticket offices, but...

Tonight I tried to buy tickets to a showing of Rossini's Il viaggio a Reims, but the Finnish National Opera decided that I'm not going to buy tickets, since it was passed 10 PM. For crying out loud, it's not as if computers require overtime compensation! Why can't a buy some bloody tickets when I want to buy them?! WHY?!?

Long time, no blog

Been nearly 20 days since I last blogged, and if an internet year is three real months, then that means that I haven't been blogging in nearly a quarter of an internet year (or something, been a while since I last took part in a basic mathematics course, and even then they just did a bunch of Fourier transforms instead of anything remotely practical :).

Anyway, one thing's at least becoming very certain; work won't end by doing it. I thought that this part-time job would bring some balance into my life, and in a way I was right. But the balance right now is that work+school take up 75% of my time, or something. Oh well, I guess I could be worse off and the assignments at work are actually fairly interesting. Can't say that much for all the accounting and profitability stuff at school, though...

Today was a good day

For the majority of our lives, we're dissatisfied. Or at least I usually spent more time worrying about long-term goals and such than being happy with the present. But today was one of those days that was just a good day. And it's good to mark those days in your calendar.

Anyway, today was me "big" moment, my first real presentation at N. Granted, it was a short presentation and on nothing that important in the grand scheme of things. But I've held a presentation at work before in front of this many people. Overall the situation was actually fairly relaxed and easy. And my portion turned into more of a dialogue than a monologue. We were already late with our schedule, so there was added pressure to cut things as short as possible, but apparently people were actually interested about what we were discussing. On another positive note, I got a lot of interesting insight on the stuff we've been working on and a chance to meet guys from different parts of the world.

And to top things off, we had a nice dinner in Suomenlinna and then headed to a local pub on the mainland with some other guys from work. It's events like these that return your motivation and show that the things you do might actually have some point in them, too.

Who said getting to work was easy, anyway...

As said, my old contract ended last Friday and my new contract began today. And of course things didn't go very smoothly. I came to work a bit after nine and just walked in as normal. Then when I got to the fourth floor and tried to enter the actual working spaces, it turned out that my access rights to the building had been revoked. Well, luckily social engineering is easy and I just waited a while and followed someone else who happened to go through the door.

It turns out that even though my contract had been renewed, all of the systems hadn't been updated and that in turn ment that I had indeed lost my access rights on Friday. Luckily I still had our HR contact's contact information in my phone and I got her to bully my access rights back from the security guys. Only to have them expire again in the afternoon. And after a few emails I got them back again. Can't wait to see if I can still get to work tomorrow or not.

Oh, and I'll be having my first day off from work this Wednesday (I'm working 20 hour weeks from now on, so I can focus more on my studies and actually have a couple of days out of the office a week. Yay!) and to celebrate I thought I'd go get some sushi.

I <3 My ThinkPad

The ThinkPad arrived last night and I've spent the better part of today just oggling at it. Yes, it's that cool. Really. It's slim, it's professional, it has the immensely cool IBM worldmap background image and the stylish ThinkPad worldmap screensaver. Oh, and even though it is a used machine, it was in an incredibly good shape. No signs of wear anywhere.

And on an unrelated note, I got my first speaking gig at work. I'm supposed to talk 10-15 minutes about wikis and collaborative software and how our unit at N might benefit from them. As well as showcase what we've been doing with wikis this summer. There'll be around 50+ people present, but my only concern is that the time is quite short so I'll have a difficult time to fit in everything I want to so...

Speaking in public

As I previously mentioned, my contract is getting extended. Yay! Well, today at work I was tasked with giving a presentation on wikis and what we're doing with them in front of a decently large group of people (50+) . To say the least, I'm a bit nervous. The only presentations I've held have been the ones at school and those have been on the lines of "I don't really care how they go since they won't really affect anything." But this is the first (of hopefully many) presentations about a real subject in front of real people in a real life environment. Oh, and of course I get to type up a bunch of PowerPoint slides, which is always nice.

My ThinkPad was also shipped today, although it appears that the seller got it to the post office late in the afternoon, so I guess I'll get it on Friday at the earliest. Bugger...

Sidenote: Laptop

Just a quick note: I finally ordered a laptop today. And it is... *drumroll* NOT the Apple MacBook.

I, in fact, ordered a used IBM ThinkPad T40 with an SXGA+ (1400x1050 px resolution for those who don't speak über-geek and a large resolution for those who don't even speak geek) display. Overall I think the MacBook just looked too unprofessional and that subconsciously I still wanted a good machine that'd just work and be sturdy. And I still can't use a touchpad.

Anyway, I'll blog more about the laptop once I get it.

Hell desk

The past couple of weeks have been hectic, to say the least. Trying to balance fulltime work and school leaves fairly little spare time, so I was looking forward to spending this week by just lying on the couch in Salo. To further increase my chances of being able to just stare at the ceiling and relax, I even left my laptop and course books in Helsinki. And what happened...?

My brother had been building a new computer for himself and I'd promised to throw his broken motherboard to a shop in Helsinki to have it changed under warranty. And of course in the end I had to build the machine for him. Yay! And an additional bonus was when I discovered that another one of the machines at my folks' place had been infected rather thoroughly with viruses of whatever types. This being Windows we're talking about, it was just a lot more simpler to format+reinstall Windows and have everything solved that way. So not quite the relaxing weekend I had in mind.

Luckily I did have time today to quickly drive over to Turku to have coffee with a friend of mine. And as a general note, don't get the Chef's Salad over at Börs if you're in Turku. It's not worth the money and it was in fact quite apalling, to say the least. You can get better salads for cheaper from Cafe Esplanad in Helsinki, for example.

So...

... I was in the market for a laptop. These decisions are always difficult since four digit figures are rather large for just about any student. The two real choices are either a ThinkPad (T or X series) or an Apple (MacBook, most likely, but haven't entirely ruled out the Pro either). The problem? Well, the MacBook looks cheap and like it's trying too hard to be too stylish. It's trendy, no doubt about it. But that's all it is. It'll look cheap and plasticy in a year or two. Plus it's too popular at the moment. The ThinkPad, on the other hand, has always looked the same. It's black and unassuming. It looked good a decade ago, it looks good now, and it'll stand time for the next decade too, assuming Lenovo keeps making it that long.

A rather good analogy, in my opinion, is suits. Go over to some trendy and hip store and get the thinly cut dark suit with two buttons, thin lapels and so on. It'll look good on you for half a year. Perhaps even a year. It'll cost rather much, since it's extremely trendy right now and carries the name of some new hip designer. But if you invest a bit more in a bespoke suit, you'll have a suit that'll turn heads even years from now. Perhaps you can even pass it along to your son, who knows.

So the choice is clear, then. I'll go with the ThinkPad. But there's a slight thing. The ThinkPad is, as per the bespoke suit in the analogy, a slippery slope. I was looking at an X41 Tablet up for auction on a Finnish e-auction site yesterday. Even if I got it for 1000-1100 euros (it still has warranty until 2009...), I'd then need to drop 200 for an X4 Ultrabase. And then 300 euros for a new, bigger battery. And now the price is in the MacBook Pro territory. And hands down the MacBook Pro will most likely beat the X41 as a single computer. But here's the thing. The MacBook Pro will break the 2 kEUR barrier. And that brings it right in front of the T-series, which is only slightly more expensive and is argubly The Best laptop series in the world. I'm not joking, it's that good. If I walk around the office, everyone has a T-series and the people who don't, they have an X-series. And now the price of the laptop has risen from 1 kEUR to 2.5 kEUR. That's 2.5 times the initial budget.

At this point I should note that today I made up my mind. I'm going for the MacBook. It's cheap, it looks cheap, but the value for money is rather good. And traditionally people who buy Apples pay good money for used machines, so chances are fairly good that I can eventually get rid of the MacBook with a decent price. I actually went to the local Apple dealer today, ready to buy the laptop. But it turned out that everything and then some has been sold and I'd most likely get my hands on one in two weeks at the earliest, probably three weeks, perhaps even more. So I chucked away 399 euros on a black overcoat. And yes, I do own a number of overcoats already. Don't ask...

The 'This Year' Syndrome

It's that time of year again... Every autumn when it's time to go back to school I, like so many others, vow that this year will be different from the ones before. That this year I'll practice more self-discipline than ever before, reach the stars, etc.

So naturally the best way to start is cleaning the flat. Which I more or less did (well, ok, I still need to wipe the dust off of all the books as well as wash the toilet and the bathroom...). I also got rid of about 15 kilograms of paper. All of the notebooks, lecture slides, exams, exercises, and so ons from last year. And I must say, I should try to keep the flat in better shape. Additionally I think I need to get more folders and try to keep all the papers in order as it turns out that I've archived all of the bills and other important pieces of paper from 1999 onwards in a storage mechanism known as a heap (sorry, couldn't resist the comp.sci. humor...) and by separating bills from the papers from the bank from the tax stuff and so on into their separate heaps, things would become a lot more tidy and I might actually find something should I need to. Oh well, perhaps next year. Or the year after that...

Excuse me...

... I seem to have dialled a wrong number. Sorry.

What's so difficult about uttering the simple phrase above? Sure, it takes you 2 seconds to say after you figure out that the person you just called isn't the person you meant to call. Shouldn't be that difficult, but for some odd reason it is, at least for some people. I don't know if it's only related to engineers, but I've encountered very much of this with my work-phone in the past few months. The latest person was a Mr. T. Kopra of a Finnish technology company who decided that manners are overrated and hanging up without a single word is the way to go. Congratulations for him and perhaps even he'll eventually figure out the correct way to handle these sorts of situations.

The other side of life

For as long as I can bother to remember, and especially in the last year or so, I've been quite a materialist and obsessed with a whole range of things; good education, good jobs, good pay, etc. A sort of tunnel vision, if you will. Fairly typical for engineers. *cough* Yes, I know, some people have pointed this out to me in a delicate fashion and I might have sometimes either consciously or unconsciously disregarded that.

So anyway, tonight on my way back to my flat, I saw the cutest little creature; a small, innocent hedgehog crossing the road. That triggured some sort of eruption of emotion; I was seriously concerned for the hedgehog and all the dangers it encounters in an urban environment such as Helsinki. I felt really sad. And that's a feeling I haven't really felt in a while, mostly because I've been too busy looking out for myself and my interests. Me, me, me. I feel sick. I'm still trying to process what happens, perhaps in vain, but that's the rational side of me taking over again.

If nothing else, this entry should remind me later on, when I'm back to my typical egotistic self, that there are other creatures in the world in a potentially worse situation in the world and that every once in a while it might be healthy to just stop and just let go of the overly rational way of life and to just feel.

The ironic thing is that two posts back I was in quite the opposite state of mind. Just something to think about...

School's starting...

Yep, so school's starting once again and the new batch of freshmen will be arriving sometime this week (Wednesday?) and officially the semester will be beginning in two weeks or so. This autumn appears to have the potential to become a rather interesting one. My original contract at N was until the end of September, so I'll have to work slightly longer days so that I can catch at least a couple of hours of lectures each week. And even then I guess I have to play a bit of catch-up.

I've met tons of interesting people at work this summer, too. Many other trainees. And I have to say that right now my motivation to continue my studies is higher than it has been in quite a while. I've been in the incredibly lucky position to witness what it's like in The Real World this summer and gotten more insight on what exactly it is that I want to do when I "grow up". As a result I have a bunch of courses from the Dept. of Industrial Engineering & Management this autumn, and this might prove to be a fairly good and interesting thing in at least two ways. Firstly, it'll offer something slightly different from the Comp. Sci. & Engineering courses I've been doing for the past two-three years and will hopefully provide further motivation. And secondly the structure of the courses is different from the courses of last year in the sense that they focus more on exams based on books and an occasional exercise here and there instead of having endless hours of lectures and exercises. Oh, and that's a good thing since it might allow me to think about the possibility of a part-time job...

A puny attempt at articulating some thoughts...

For as long as I can remember, I've had problems with a certain group of people. Finland has a fairly nice welfare system and a general policy of "not leaving anyone behind." That's swell. Finland also has the highest taxes around. That's not so swell. The aforementioned group is that of the idealists who like the welfare system, want to make it better, want more money and at the same time bitch and moan about the mindsets of the people who pick up the bill. I mean, come on, that holier-than-thou routine is getting old. And fast.

Ever since childhood, everyone is out to instill the "aim for success and work 'til you drop" mindset. That's justified with models and books and research which show that overall things are better if everyone strives for their own/the community's collective success. I won't comment on that. Many people more intelligent than me will most likely know better. But what I do know is that my patience is running out in regards to the welfare system and what it's costing for me. I pay taxes, I have my goals set, I work, I study, etc. And when I go to a bar with some friends, I have various welfare cases harass our table, culminating in some drunkard aiming a punch right in the face of a friend of mine. That's unacceptable.

What's even more interesting is that Kela most likely pays the drunkard more than it pays me. And I'm a student. Investing in me would create more goodwill between me and the government and would perhaps even entice me to stay in Finland after my studies. But right now the situation is that the support I get from Kela doesn't even allow me to stay alive. I work during my vacations from school to raise money so I can study more. But they've also capped the amount I can earn before they'll start cutting the money they pay me. And that's ok. I can deal with that if those are the rules. And then I have some idealists pounce on me and lecture me on how my views of the world are distorted and I have a twisted view on money and how to use it. This coming from people who think sitting around with drug addicts and watching movies all day long constitutes as real work. Nature doesn't have a welfare system; it's the survival of the fittest and the ones who can adapt the quickest. Dragging along extra weight is not worth the effort. What should be done instead is provide everyone a level ground to jump up from (i.e. to ensure that everyone has the chance to the same primary schools, etc.). And then if some people fall or don't jump high enough, that's their problem. Better luck next life.

But under no circumstance am I interested in listening to the hypocritical bitching and moaning and the associated sniping based on stereotypes that these idealists who also lack a real understanding of why evolution works and why driving people out of countries with draconian taxation doesn't. Or otherwise transfer the money that I've paid for the welfare of others back to me; then you can say whatever you want and albeit still lacking weight, it's more credible than what I've had to put up with thus far.

And finally, a note: this was most likely a provoked response to a shitty day, tiredness, etc. Most likely I won't sign the above verbatim in the morning, but...

Breakfast

I usually don't have the time or the energy to eat or make breakfast; I just eat a large lunch at around eleven to make up for the lost energy. That said, I've recently rediscovered the joys of breakfast and how to pamper yourself by outsourcing the breakfast making to an external entity. In this case a cafe. And today I checked out the offerings of the Tintin-inspired Cafe Tin Tin Tango in Töölö. And I have to say that I instantly felt at home there and will be frequenting it from now on. It's not exactly the chic and trendy, ultra modern cafe, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's the same reason as why I'd take a Morgan Roadster over some soulless German; it has something incredibly cool about it. You can't really say what, but it's the sum of all small things.

Oh, and supposedly I look a bit like Richard Branson. I guess I have to get hold of the pictures that a friend of mine took today and do a survey or something before I completely swallow that. But hey! I wouldn't mind being Mr. Branson...

Scratch that, then...

Ok, so the plan about getting a new phone will have to be scratched. Even though a new phone would be nice, my primary computer, an IBM ThinkPad T21, has just died, it seems. Very annoying but by no means that surprising or catastrophic. Luckily I just keep my important files all over the place on multiple computers. Even Murphy's Law can't destroy computers at three different locations (and additionally the backup mechanisms that are at place at the school) and simultaneously destroy all of the DVDs. I hope. *knock on wood*

So anyway, I don't think I can live without a computer and for the past couple of days I've been just surfing around and looking for a new laptop. All the machines I'm interested in start from roughly EUR 2 000, which is a bit too much for a student. I've also been following Apple and an interesting venue would be to get a MacBook for roughly EUR 1 100 and then selling it next spring and get something else. The hardware seems ok and I'm fairly interested in seeing the much hyped Mac OS X in action.

I need a new phone...

Yeah, that about sums it up. Right now I still have the communicator from work, but I'll have to return that along with all the other stuff at the end of September when my contract ends and I go back to school. My personal phone has been a Nokia 6210 for the past 6 years (yeah, the shock, the horror, some people can actually use the same phone for more than 6 months).

The problem in general has been that there really haven't been that many interesting phones from my point of view in the recent times. Right now I think I'd either be looking at a Nokia E50 or an E70 with the E50's price being roughly half of that of the E70. But the E70 has all the cool gizmos and features I just have to have... Add along the fact that I think that my personal laptop has been going through a long and painful death and it seems like the coming autumn may be a fairly expensive one...

URB

So, tonight was yet another show of URB06 at Kiasma and I was actually able to convince a couple of friends of mine from the uni to tag along. And they actually seemed to like the show quite a bit even though they were fairly skeptical at first. Apparently not everyone has an open mind by default when it comes to modern art.

Anyway, the repertoire was

• Mindman & Felix the Beatboxer
• Irven Lewis Dance Theatre
• Jussi "Focus" Sirviö
• HK 119

As previously mentioned, I'd actually gotten a glimpse of Felix earlier this year and he still continued to amaze me with the human beatboxing. Just amazing. Although it has to be said that I think he pulled of a better set the previous time I saw him. Now he was pretty much drowned by the DJ mixing his sounds. Or at least that's my opinion.

Irven Lewis & Co. were quite possibly the best act of tonight. Period. Jazz dancing, like jazz itself, may seem quite chaotic and appear to lack all structure, but it is immensely cool. And very difficult; I should know, I've tried it (well, ok, one or two lessons and I've never done aerobic before, so I was usually going the wrong way, etc.).

Jussi was also fairly good. I've not seen that many breakdancers before in real life and even though I don't listen to the music associated with the dancing that much, you still have to respect the guys who can break.

And finally HK 119. I had a slight idea of what was coming, but that didn't really prepare me for the real thing. To sum it up in a few words, Heidi Kilpeläinen's show was weird. I'm not really sure whether it was good weird or bad weird, but I'm starting to lean towards the former. I guess I'll have to keep my eyes open and see if I can go see her live again sometime and perhaps then I'll be able to form an actual opinion... But overall the show was great and considering that the tickets were cheaper than movie tickets these days, the value for money was outstanding. I think I should just stop going to movies altogether and start frequenting shows like this more.

Of sleeplessness

Yep, so now that we've discussed how nifty it would be to be able to sleep for just three hours a night we get to the topic of how unnifty it is to sleep for six hours a night. The last time I slept for more was last Sunday, when I slept for eight hours. Before that, I can't really remember.

Anyway, I guess I'll go off to read a bit and then hit the sack and try to clock my six hours worth. Going to go see another URB show tomorrow; they sold out the 7 PM show with HK 119, Irwen Lewis and Jussi Sirviö, but luckily they're arranging a second show at 9 PM with Felix the Beatboxer taking part too. I was actually lucky enough to see Felix do his stuff earlier this year in the Don Johnson Big Band's party for their new album and all I can say is that that guy rocks. Anyway, more on this on Thursday, hopefully.

Of sleep

Ok, this is going to be a cliche, but... Why do we sleep one third of our lives? I mean think what you could do if you'd cut your sleep to, say, 3 hours a night. A quick comparison will show that if you sleep for eight hours a night, work eight hours a day, commute an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening, that leaves you with six hours of handling chores, meeting friends, going out to see Ursula Rucker, and so on. Unless you phase in some overtime work. And the 8+ hours of continous work, at least for me, is pretty exhausting. Being a student, my attention span is roughly three hours. After that I have to do something else.

So consider a world where you slept for three hours. Say from 1 AM to 4 AM. You get up, commute and get to work at 5.30 AM. You work for four and a half hours and it's 10 AM. Go to a museum, catch up on reading, whatever. And eat. It's 2 PM. Go back to work, clock four more hours of work and by 6 PM you're out of work and not even nearly as tired as before, since you've had a nice four hour break from work in the middle of the day. So you can actually go meet friends and do something asides from crawling home and dying on the couch. And there's even 7 more hours until it's 1 AM and time to hit the sack. Ok, ok, this is just one scenario. Other people could plan their days differently, but the simple fact is that if your day went from 16 hours to 21 hours, you'd certainly notice the difference.

And now on an entirely different note: how do men in movies and on TV keep their just ironed shirts so crispy and wrinkle-free all day round? That's unpossible!

Night driving

Night driving is something that I enjoy immensely. Or actually it's not specificly night itself, but an empty city in general. Be it night time or a very early morning. When the entire city is sound asleep and the streets are deserted. I think it has something to do with the fact that even though I consider myself a fairly urban person, I'm still somewhat of an introvert. Or a borderline introvert/extrovert, according to Myers-Briggs. But then again, that's nothing unusual, I would think, and many people feel the same sort of comfort that stems from solitude and the calmness.

Anyway, too bad I didn't remember to snap more photos of the city tonight, but I have added some new pictures to my Flickr page.

The public persona

I just finished watching the Bourne Identity (a very good movie, considering it's indeed a Hollywood movie) with Doug Liman's comment track. Doug was giving credit on multiple occasions to the guys and gals doing the makeup, hair, wardrobe and similar stuff and emphasizing how difficult it is to achieve a natural yet good and stylish look and avoid the shallow and phony stuff seen in many poorer movies.

This led me to do some introspection and wonder how much time and effort I (or any other person, for that matter) use at a daily level for all things related to my vanity. And where exactly does the line between vanity and hygiene exactly reside. Ok, washing your hair every once in a while goes to hygiene, but styling your hair a couple of hours a day is just vanity. But the borderline is difficult. For example, at what point does shopping for clothes cross over to vanity? And overall, how much effort do we actually put into trying to create a perfect public persona for ourselves while still striving to have our personal look appear as natural and as easily maintainable as possible.

Competitiveness

I've been playing tennis once a week with a friend of mine for a month or two now. Mostly every Tuesday morning, just before work. I've gone to a number of tennis courses when I was younger and the reason why I stopped it was because I tend to be fairly competitive in whatever I do (or did, when I was younger) and sports just stopped being fun when all you aimed at was victory and anything less caused great upset.

Anyway, since then I've grown up a bit. At least I think I have. These days I can actually enjoy a variety of sports without being obsessed with winning. But the interesting thing is that when we play tennis, the warming up by hitting balls around a bit is pretty much useless. I just can't seem to get the ball over the net or when I do, to get it to stay in. And the same thing applies to my friend, as far as I can tell. But as soon as we stop warming up and start counting points, the game improves immensely. All of a sudden we're able to keep the ball alive a lot longer and have long rallies. At least for me this is mostly because of my competitiveness trying to gain control again; defeat is unacceptable.

So in a way, if tennis is an analogy for life, it would appear that trying to subdue my competitiveness just holds me back and makes my life that much more miserable and brings failures along with it. If this is indeed the case, then perhaps instead of just trying to be nice to everyone and striving for some obscure ethical goals I should be focusing more on actually getting results and going after the things that really matter to me. Dunno, just an idea.

On a related note, I stumbled on a review of DeRossitt's The Rules of Ruthlessness online today and that may be precisely the book I should look into next.

Perpetual backlog

The photo above is of my perpetual backlog of books on my nightstand. Every time I pop at Akateeminen, some book always tags along until my nightstand resembles a leaning tower of books, defying gravity. Well, ok, not really, but now it's nice and tidy again. Except for the unopened new Economist, which I shall be digging into as soon as I hit 'Publish Post'. G'night.

My Life 2.0: Redux

Considering the nature of my current job and my employer, I figured that I should delve more deeply into the world of e-personas. So I have my blog, my calendar, my music list and homepage online. As does everyone and their dog. So what has happened since?

Well, firstly, it seems that MySpace is a really big thing in the Rest of the World (i.e. the other side of the pond), so I of course had to register there. No real idea what I'm actually going to do with it, but regardless, my presence on MySpace has been established. Yay!

But did I stop there? No! (Well duh, wouldn't make a very interesting blogging if I did now, would it...) So while enjoying a nice salad at a local cafe, I figured I could document all great meals I've had, and instead of reinventing the meal, I mean wheel, I decided to investigate the offerings of Blogger in regards to mobile blogging of images. But it turned out that I couldn't really get that working for some reason or another, so instead I recalled that there had been a big hype surrounding Flickr, so I instead registered there. And their system actually works and I have a foothold there also.

So now the real question is, will all these new thing-a-majics really fit into my current lifestyle and will I actually learn to use them. Or more importantly, will I ever bother to use them...

Edit: Oh, and how could I have forgotten! I'm even more chic since I also have a del.icio.us account!

Of nine-to-five days

Ever since the semester ended and work started, my social life has taken a nose-dive. After work I come home exhausted and just fall on the couch and stay there until I hit the sack. I can't really explain it. It's not like the work I do is that exhausting; it's a typical white collar job. And therein lies the problem, most likely.

Most of the year my official occupation is student. So I have lectures I go to, etc. But there aren't really any real obligations. Sure, I have to get N credits over the semester to get money from the government, but the required number of credits is so low that that's hardly a problem. And on any given day, I most likely am at school for two or three hours and then just hang around for the rest of the time. So that's the only reason I can think of why my days now consist of sleeping and working. But luckily school is starting again in a couple of months, so I'll be back on track to slacking off again...

My Life 2.0

It's amazing how the internet has spawned a new breed of people and what's equally amazing is the extent to which people go in sharing their life. With blogs, services like Last.fm and so on, soon you can have your entire life online. The corporate world seems to have also caught onto this trend and for example, what'd be better for Google than to provide everyday services for people and being able to analyze and build an incredibly precise profile of a single person.

Right now I have my personal calendar at Google, the music I play at Last.fm, my blog also at Google, my link list on del.icio.us and so on. And Nokia Research Center just published a port of the Apache web server for Symbian, so pretty soon you can host information about yourself from your mobile phone; you can share your contacts, your calendar, your availability information and so on right from your phone.

A while back I even played with the idea of putting up a persona wiki into which I'd write about me, my views, my relationships with other people and so on. Basicly a wiki to document my life. I soon scrapped that idea since I most likely wouldn't have any friends afterwards since some things are better left unsaid...

Corporate Strategy

It's summer, the semester is over, I passed all of the courses I took and now I'm working. Great. And as a matter of fact, I'm actually enjoying my current situation and that's a really big thing for me. Anyway, I went to grab something to eat downtown today and I of course had to go by Akateeminen (a big Finnish bookstore) and as typical, couldn't get out without buying anything... And this time a book named Exploring Corporate Strategy (Johnson, Scholes, Whittington) tagged along.

I have a choice coming up shortly on what I'm going to minor on. I want to read something from the Department of Industrial Engineering & Management and right now my two choices are either some minor from the lab of Work Psychology & Management or a minor from the Institue of Strategy and International Business. I talked to some people earlier in the year and it appears that possibly the most hated course in ISIB is PRISMA (or Principles of Strategic Management), so being the logical person that I am, I'm going to try to solve my problem concerning the minor by reading the course book for PRISMA and the based on that do my decision. *cough*chessslidesets*cough*

Sailing

Went sailing for the first and probably last time this summer; the boat's leaving for ARC (Atlantic Rally for Cruisers) in a couple of weeks and I most likely will be pretty tied up with work for the foreseeable future. Regardless, the sailing was fun, as always. Have to find a new hobby for the rest of the summer after all, apparently. I still want to try archery and canoeing before winter, so there's at least some kind of a plan.

Anyway, regarding the ARC, I've recently been designated as the webmaster of the blog of the project (layout, hosting, etc.). It's online here.

Of summer parties

The company summer party was on Wednesday. I've been to one of N's summer parties before in San Diego and the whole nature of the event was completely different. In San Diego the event was a whole family event on the beach and had this nice laid back atmosphere and people were just mingling. A very nice event, all in all...

In Finland, however, it was completely different. When I first got the email about the party, the first thing which popped up from it was the age limit; 18 or older. This sort of gave away the theme of the party: drink as much as you for free before heading off to the after party where drinks cost money. This seems to be the general way things in Finland are celebrated, so I guess I'm just fighting windmills. But still.

The actual party was at a parking lot-ish area, where thousands of people were crammed together. And all in all I found it fairly stressful. The positive things, however, were that I got to meet some of the other summer trainees and they seem like an interesting bunch. Fairly international, so I even got to practice my English a bit again and overall networking is always a good thing.

Spontaneity

Spontaneity is a dying thing these days, apparently. At least forms of it. Back in the good ol' days people would just drop by unannounced and going to the park to just hang around didn't need to go through a process that makes the decision making at Brussels look agile. Or perhaps I'm just spending too much time with the wrong type of people.

But regardless, mobile phones are here to stay and everyone has their calendars synch'ed to their phones, their laptops, their PDAs and some calendar application online. That's fine, but is everyone really so busy that all that is warranted? I mean, come on, that's not quality of life if you have to run around all the time and to meet friends you have to book appointments weeks in advance...

Anyway, we did a spontaneous trip to ESO (Eteläsuomalainen Osakunta, a type of fraternity appartment) after hearing that there was supposed to be a party there from a friend who'd heard it from a friend. Turned out that there really wasn't that big a party there and that initially they didn't really want to let our group of four people in, but after some chatting, we finally wound up inside drinking beer and making new friends. The worst part was the slight hangover this morning, but even that was beat and I ended up doing a 13 hour day at work. Well, at least now I can leave work somewhat earlier on Friday and catch a train to Salo to go meet up with some older friends.

Work as usual

I started as a seasonal trainee at a large telecommunications company about four weeks ago and things are finally starting to normalize. Of course the hype around trainee positions at such companies is huge and the first few weeks fly by with a continous feeling of euphoria. But then the honeymoon is over and you realize that it's typical company, just like anything else, just like those smaller companies you've worked for before. Don't get me wrong, this'll look good on my CV and I do learn lots of things daily, but the problem from my point of view is that I'm not getting very much technological competence as I'd like to; instead I am learning about how large organizations work and how things get done or don't. That's of course very important too, but...

On the plus side, the benefits are great. Gyms, saunas, phones, etc. The pay is decent and of course since it's a trainee position, the tasks given are also such. So yeah, overall, this is a good place and offers good networking possibilities, but it isn't exactly what I imagined it to be, but then again, nothing that's hyped will ever meet expectations.

Summer's here

Summer's here again and I'm giving another shot at blogging (actually the fourth shot, to be precise). Let's see what'll happen. Hopefully this will beat my previous record of two years. And yes, it is possible that I can actually keep something up for at least two years...

So anyway, a quick combination of mission statements, visions and whatnots, or a short description of what I'll be writing about: this blog will most likely contain random rants and tiny mundane bits of events that have happened to me. Nothing big, nothing glorious, just some things from my life, my work and my studies.

Oh, and why the name? I really don't know. I guess it's a combination of The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the fact that coffee breaks seem to be the best things in life, at least sometimes. And supposedly someone else has also thought up of the phrase, since Google returned some results on it when I did a quick search shortly before setting up this blog. But such is life.