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...