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.