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phone is still from 2000 and I haven't bothered to get a new one, so that makes me either incredibly cool or incredibly outdated; I've been told retro is the thing right now.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.