Why I am boring

Cars can be a source of endless debate. Just go over to a local pub and you can pretty much start a heated debate anywhere by throwing some car-related provocative comment. Naturally, you can also get beaten up if you don't know when to shut up, considering the amount of intoxicated buffoons who reside at a local pub. But that's another thing. Debates centering around incredibly expensive cars are also always nice, considering the fact that no one has typically ever even seen, let alone driven, any of the cars that are debated.

So considering this, I decided that I want to argue why the Aston Martin DB9 is so brilliant. And why, because of that, I'm a boring person. Consider your typical debate over fast cars. There's always a Ferrari, perhaps a Lamborghini, some AMG tuned Merc, a Porsche and whatever. But the point is that just about all of the debated cars are in the sports car or supercar category. Granted, they're quite possibly incredibly fast and can go around corners decently well. But I happen to be keener on grand tourers. I guess the whole idea that I can have a fairly fast car which doesn't sacrifice ride comfort on the altar of POWERANDSPEED just attracts me more. And of course, a car has to also be discrete. A Lamborghini is anything but. And Ferraris, well... The DB9, styling-wise, is just lightyears ahead of the style of the other manufacturers. And that's an absolute truth.

And then there's the brand. What Aston symbolizes is something that the other manufacturers can't get even close to, at least from my point of view. It's the understated elegance, the craftsmanship, it has a soul. Ze Germans can undoubtedly make brilliant cars and I guess I'd be lying if I'd say that I'd be unsatisfied if I owned a Porsche 911 Turbo. But it just feels so cold, so sterile. As an analogy, I guess one could argue that whereas an orchestra that's perfectly in tune and executes some piece flawlessly might (and actually should) be the ultimate goal, over a long period of time that just gets boring. No, wait, that actually wasn't that good an analogy, as an orchestra that's not in tune will also get incredibly annoying fairly quickly. But I guess that sort of describes the situation.

Overall I'm fairly boring because the F430 doesn't do anything for me. It lacks the finesse. It's sort of like some teenage punk, lacking the maturity and the appreciation of the finer things in life. It's a show off. It's the Rolex of cars. Well, that analogy is also a bit flawed as Rolex isn't, even in the technical sense, a top watch maker. You can find more expensive and more impressive (again, in a technical sense) watches elsewhere. The Ferrari is arguably a brilliant piece of engineering, but the status it has just doesn't attract me. I don't want to go to the track and shout POWEEER! while driving sideways. I want some elegant, soulful car with which I can pop in Monte Carlo to have lunch and drive to Paris for the night. And I want to do that while being subtle and not attracting too much attention.

But alas, this is in no way a relevant problem. And most likely never will be. At least for me. Maybe I should just get back to schoolwork and stop daydreaming.

Music

Music is such a wonderful thing. I'll offer a guess that just about everyone will agree with that. But I've noticed an interesting thing with myself. I don't even know what the current top-40 list looks like. Haven't known for quite a while. It seems that I'm stuck in the 90ies. But being stuck in some decade or some specific genre doesn't mean that you're stuck in a one single thing (like the people who wear through their favorite CDs). It's unbelievable how much music has been written. And the network that is created by just following one artist to another keeps on growing and growing. I was recently writing how brilliant Craig Armstrong's stuff is. Well, I just recently stumbled upon E.S. Posthumus, and it's sort of craigarmstrong-esque, but still have their own sound. Granted, they started in the early '00s, but still. I'm guessing that over 80% of the stuff I listen to and continue to find is from the 90ies, although the balance is beginning to shift a bit more to "contemporary" music now that I've been attracted to Amie Street and the like.

Archery

Continuing the line of interesting hobbies, we had the chance to try archery with a recurve bow at our team's workshop yesterday. Naturally, I sucked at it. Never been that good at shooting with things. But as a hobby, archery seemed very interesting. I guess one could say that I'm not that big a team player, so sports which I can practice as an individual have always appealed to me more. And archery is precisely that. It's also a more of a psychological than a physical sport. And the discipline it requires... I guess I'll seriously need to look into taking that up as a hobby.

Mindsets

I was visiting Accenture in November (or was it December). They have fairly nice offices in Ruoholahti, pretty near the Nokia buildings. Actually part of the same block, essentially. Anyway, I talked to some guy who's apparently in some sort of lead position at the Finnish operations or something. I was interested in hearing what sort of attitude Accenture has towards supporting their employees if they decide to pursue a second academic degree or work towards doctorate degree. I was sort of surprised to hear that the company per se does not encourage their employees in this regard and overall remain fairly neutral.

Some wiser people have told me that although initially when you graduate, the piece of paper you get is important when looking for jobs. But after 10 years nobody cares which degree you've already forgotten. I guess they have a good point. But in my opinion there are some things that a degree will teach you (at least in the ICT field and when talking about Finnish MSc (eng) programs)... Firstly you learn to get projects done. Mathematics might not be the funnest subject, but you learn that work is work is work and you have to do it. Additionally you also demonstrate that you can finish larger projects; you did graduate right? That's the first large project.

Then there's the mindset. Recently I've been studying quite many software business and strategy related courses. It has changed my view of the world slightly. Now when I encounter a new idea or piece of software or anything, the first thought is: how does one make money with this? You find yourself looking at the angles without even noticing it. That's a big thing with any degree. It'll teach you the mindset, how to approach things. And this is a major point why I'd want to study another degree for myself at some point. Don't get holed in the single box, since things are never black and white. They're shades of grey and by being able to assuming different viewpoints is, in my opinion, a great advantage. Of course this is also part of the personality traits that were passed onto us in one way or another. But don't underestimate the power of learning and conditioning yourself. And that can cause not only positive things, but also negative. I've recently experienced this first-hand and I'm not entirely certain I like myself right now. But we're all learning and continously adapting to change and external stimuli.

Information addiction

I don't know, I may have already blogged about this. Or not. And yes, this is quite a cliché, but it's just so true. Many people say that when you finally turn your mobile phone off and cut yourself out of the information distribution loop altogether is luxury and something to strive towards. I call bullshit. It's not true, at least not for me. I don't know if it's because I haven't been able to detach myself for a long enough time, but I find that I have to know that I have at least the possibility of getting my hands on information at any point of time with little work.

The mobile phone is turning into a more and more important part of my daily life. This itself is something that I would have been fairly skeptical of just a few years back, but oh well. I mean, firstly it's a phone that I can carry with me all the time (well, duh! and the SMS capability). Then I can get my work emails pushed to it, which is nice. I can synchronize it with my Google calendar that's online. I can browse the web, I can type blog entries on it (painful), I can send pictures, location data, presence data, set up an SSH connection to another box so I can check IRC and my personal emails, etc. And that's just with a phone. The interface is a bit of a pain and it's slow, but I can do that. Then there's the computer, which brings the entire multitasking dimension to the equation. RSS feeds, music, blogging, reading web pages, IM, emails coming in, etc. Everything open all the time. It's when you silence all that that I get sort of annoyed. Think about giving up coffee, for example. Or I would imagine cigarettes would be an even better example. Although I don't really see that many negative effects in being tuned into the information flow as long as you are able to manage it relatively easily. It just takes some time to sort routines out, but afterwards it's fairly nice.

I don't really even want a vacation, in fact. I mean, sure I'd like to travel, but just cutting all the lines to my daily life, that's something I don't want to do. So if I do travel somewhere, I'll sure as heck have my laptop and phone with me. It gives an entirely new dimension to life and increases efficiency. Where to eat today? Let me just quickly check some reviews from this site or possibly use this location-enabled feature to see what's close by. It's not fairly romantic, I'll admit that. And that's quite possibly the biggest issue with all this.

Customer loyalty & buying books

We had some guys from the Boston Consulting Group a while back talking about various current trends and other things. They also touched on the trend of "trading up" as they called it. The idea is that more and more consumers start buying premium brand products in the segments that they value and then to finance these premium purchases, they offset the difference by buying cheap stuff in other segments. So for example, to finance my new Boss overcoat, I'm going to eat rice for the next month. So the natural evolution, then, is that the middle-class players who aren't quite competing with the premium brands but also aren't in the price game will just die a boring death.

In the past few years when I've been buying something, I've been preferring small, local companies. Even if they charge a bit more, but at least I get good service and that the money goes to financing Finnish entrepreneurship. For instance, I could purchase my contact lenses online through some company and save a bit, but instead I use the small, privately owned optometrist in Salo. The service is always nice and personal and they know my name. The same thing goes for clothing, fairly often. There's this nice place in Salo called Eino Heino, which has brilliant service and quite a decent inventory. And history.

So I tried to order some books from BookPlus last night. Nothing fancy, just some stuff from the list I keep on my homepage. I gather the books into the shopping cart, go to the check out and start filling out the forms, and... Database connection error! Brilliant. Oh well, they're still a decent company, so I restart the process, select the books, check out... Database connection error! And it happened a third time too. Long story short, ended up ordering the books I wanted (and then some) from Amazon.com. If the service becomes degrades or something in the process doesn't click, then that's it. I know what I want, I know what price I'm ready pay and if something doesn't just work, I'm not going to jump through hoops, especially if I'm the customer.

However, depending on how this Amazon.com venture (I've never bought anything from there before) goes, I may just move back to BookPlus. We'll see...

More great quotes...

I think this one scene from The Thomas Crown Affair is just pure brilliance. It is... Pure genius...

The Psychiatrist: I want you to talk about women.
[waits for a few moments]
The Psychiatrist: Mr. Crown?
Thomas Crown: I'm sorry?
The Psychiatrist: Women. You get to talk about women.
Thomas Crown: Oh, I enjoy women.
The Psychiatrist: Enjoyment isn't intimacy.
Thomas Crown: And intimacy isn't necesarily enjoyment.
The Psychiatrist: How would you know? Has it occured to you that you have a problem with trust?
Thomas Crown: [smirking] I trust myself implicitly.
The Psychiatrist: But can other people trust you?
Thomas Crown: Oh, you mean society at large?
The Psychiatrist: I mean women, Mr.Crown.
Thomas Crown: Yes, a woman could trust me.
The Psychiatrist: Good. Under what extraordinary circumstances would you allow that to happen?
Thomas Crown: A woman could trust me as long as her interests didn't run too contrary to my own.
The Psychiatrist: And society? If ITS interests should run counter to your own...?

Thesis troubles...

Haven't blogged in a while as I've been fairly busy on quite a few fronts. Schoolwise I've been juggling quite a few balls in the air at the same time. I finally got everything done for the Management of a Software Company course I was on. The course was actually quite interesting and the exercises were very good - although they did take some time as you had to actually look into them before just typing away 15 pages of text. Then there was the Stanford Prison Experiment paper for the Basics of Work Psychology and Leadership. And the plans and preliminary reports for the Multimedia Technology course. And then of course the thesis...

The thesis is actually turning into something of a problem. I have a feeling that my scoping has gone terribly wrong. I decided to embark on a venture to look into the motivators and challenges associated with IT outsourcing and then conclude by looking at how the motivators and challenges change when the outsourcing company is an SME. All nice and smooth, right? Wrong.

I think the scope right now is way too broad and I'm getting swamped with material. Additionally I don't want to touch the scope anymore since that would require even more time more digging for material, and I don't have any extra time. Then there is the completely idiotic requirement that the thesis has to be written in Finnish. Come on! There are like two papers written in Finnish about it and the terminology is in English! How the heck do you translate offshore outsourcing into Finnish in the first place? What about motivator? I mean, this is just plain stupid. I guess I could go on and on and on, but instead I won't. Sufficient to say, I think I'm quite deep in shit right now.

Valoa kansalle joka pimeydessä vaeltaa...

Or "Let there be light!". Someone installed a new lamp over my cubicle while I was gone. I'm not quite sure that that's a good thing, either. After five minutes, I think it's a bit too bright...

Edit (5 minutes later...): I found the button that turns the lamp off! Huzzah!

Monday mornings

I typically will argue the point that I'm not a sadistic person in general. As, I'm sure, the majority of folks also aren't. But I'll also argue that there is some small sadistic tendencies in everyone (check out the Stanford Prison Experiment for some interesting points...). Mine is that every Monday morning when I have a car and am driving to Helsinki, I get extremely happy in traffic. I put on some Stan Getz or whatever and then just chill in the jam and just enjoy all the people who're completely pissed off at the traffic jam. I don't know why, but I sort of enjoy the situation. Maybe because I don't have to experience that very often as I always commute to the opposite direction when compared to the masses and my commute is something like 7-15 minutes via bus.

Cufflinks

Can't remember if I've noted this before, but cufflinks are quite possibly the best things in the world. They're the extra mile towards differentiating yourself from the masses. Especially useful for work-related things. And especially disregarded and ignored by most. But nonetheless, I think that in certain situations it's extremely important to quietly give out the message that you're the type of person who also focuses on the small details on the quest to perfection.

An interesting statistic which I've come across in the past six or seven months is that just about all management consultants appear to wear double cuffs and cufflinks, about half of the venture capitalists I've seen wear double cuffs and cufflinks, and just about no ICT consultant wears cufflinks. Naturally the situation may be different, but this is just something I've noticed recently when looking at the appearance of the people who've been lecturing to us at school or at work-related seminars. Also gives some food for thought; at least I'll be wearing cufflinks to all future interviews...

Escape

Craig Armstrong is an amazing bloke. The guy does incredible stuff. Just came across Escape from some movie he'd scored. Amazing song. Mixes these heavy drums with slow and dragging strings and tops it with a choir. The feeling and the atmosphere is unbelievable. When the choir kicks in, it's like the feeling after a long and dark storm when the first rays of light penetrate the clouds and the heavens open up the fight with the darkness. These clichés don't do it justice, although perhaps the song itself is quite full of clichés itself, too... But yet it's so fresh that I could just listen to it non-stop.

Body mass index

I think the BMI has been more or less dubbed as useless among the people who are capable of any sort of rational thinking. I've also been somewhat critical of it, but an even more interesting thing is that I just weighed myself and right now (in the morning) I was slightly below 90 kilograms and height-wise I'm roughly 190 centimeters. As such my BMI is about 24.9 and the line for obese is 25. Yet people are continously reminding me that I need to eat, so I guess that's motivated by two possible scenarios: a) people have some hidden agenda and want to see me get fat or b) I'm thin. Since I'm entertaining a guess that it's not the former, that only leaves the latter left. And right now I would personally say that I'd need to gain a bit more mass... So much for the BMI.

Jeans

Ok, so the last post was about suits. Today I went looking for new jeans from Salo (yes, I know, I could've picked a better town for this...) and it turns out that getting jeans is incredibly difficult. You can't just go in and tell them that "I want a size 152 dark grey suit with slight pinstripes in a slim cut, side vents, two buttons and notched lapels". Or I guess you could, but they'd be lost. Or I'd have to learn the jeans jargon.

Anyway, after 15 minutes I got sort of desperate and decided to just go to the next store and just take something that didn't have holes in the pockets (see? I'm quite an easy customer after all). So now I bought some random jeans that didn't have holes in the pockets. The entire purchasing process was also quite interesting. When I came into the store the girl started asking what brand I wanted. Brand is a completely secondary thing, in my opinion. Especially considering that they weren't even selling any especially prestigious brands. I'm sure they make a decent buck with the inflated prices, but this itself is an interesting case, as I some blokes from the Boston Consulting Group were giving a lecture a while back and they talked about the trend of trading up. Trading up is essentially the phenomenon of people focusing on some things that are important to them and shelling out the bucks to buy the premium product (or brand) and then scaling down in something else to make up for the dent. This in turn leads to the top, high-end brands and the bottom low-cost suppliers to lead the way and leaving the guys in the middle to deal with a slow and painful death.

Secondly, who the hell actually wears the jeans that they sell these days? I mean, there's only a marginal group of jeans from the catalog that you could actually wear to work. And what is it with the ultra-slimness? This iteration of the ultra-slim trend in clothing has been going on for a year or two now, wouldn't it be time to ditch it once and for all and banish it for all eternity? Ultra-slimness in clothes is not in any way aesthetic - not in suits, not in jeans. Period.

Looks like this is turning into a rant and I could go blasting away at a lot of stuff, but I think instead I'll just stop now...

The problems with suits...

The problem with suits is multifold. Essentially getting a good suit and looking great in it is a long-term process involving sweat, money, and time. Or that's the conclusion that I've come to. Granted, I don't have any first hand experience.

The problem is this: to look incredibly good, you first have to invest time and effort into getting your body into good shape. Then you have to invest more time and effort into maintaining yourself in good shape. Although one might argue that this should be done anyway, so it's not that big a deal. But at least to me it takes some work. I mean, it's not like I'm in that bad a shape, but that's mainly thanks to buying some free weights for myself. So now I just daily do a bunch of sit ups, push ups, squats, throw around some hand weights, etc. But sometimes there may be a week or two during which I do nothing. And this year I've been to the gym at work... Oh... Three times? Pathetic.

Then the problem with suits. The suits that come from the rack rarely fit just right. Then there's the whole process of adjusting the suit, or should be. I haven't been arsed to, since the 152 sized suits with a slim cut for the jacket suit me (no pun intended) decently enough. And every time you buy a suit, it should be the same process. And what if you change brands? You'll have to check the sizing again.

So then... The money. Bespoke. Costs like hell, but should be worth it. Now you have to find a tailor. Then you, according to some guidelines, need to have at least two to three jackets/suits made to see the quality and get to grips with your tailor and for the tailor to get things just the way they should be. Apparently they'll naturally create - draw, cut, sew - the suits to fit you just right. But there is some small variance.

And then the issue with personal taste. Being the slightly slim but tall person I am, and also been putting on some mussle mass, I would want my suits to have form fitting jackets and a sharp shoulder line. Something you'd imagine that a somewhat sporty suit would have. Except that it shouldn't be too clean, i.e. the shoulder padding should look just ever so slightly as if it'd form according to my shoulders, but still flatter the torso by giving a sort of athletic look. Without too much padding.

Difficult? You bet. And without being able to drop two grand a suit (in pounds sterling...)? Doubly so.

Sleep, she is for the weak!

... and right now I'm starting to think that it might just be better to acknowledge that in fact I want to be weak and sleep. And have a vacation. When you start getting back responses to emails you don't even recall sending, it's getting bad (and no, I was entirely sober; heck, who has the time to drink these days let alone waste a day being hung over...).

Online music

For a while I held the opinion that online music business won't just work thanks to idiotic DRM-limitations and too high a price tag. And other annoying stuff. My opinion started to slowly change when I tried out Apple's iTMS. Of course it still had DRM. And it was decently expensive considering that you didn't even get the physical CD. And then you had to rip the DRM away so you could actually listen to it. No wait, I'm in Finland, I can't talk about overriding DRM protection. Silly me.

But the point remained, the Apple user interface, again, was done brilliantly. Without even noticing I had spent somewhere around 30 euros there. But it was still sort of annoying. Enter Amie Street. I'd actually been aware of Amie Street since the end of summer, 2006. I'd even plugged it and the idea in some conversations with people, but never actually got around to spending any more than 10 minutes with it myself. Until tonight. I paid them 10 bucks and was essentially expecting to get a couple of albums for that money. And mostly crap. But instead I bought the couple (three) albums and lo and behold, they were actually fairly decent. And I still have somewhere around nine bucks to spend! I can see how this service would, in the long run, be actually able to make a dent in my wallet. At least a larger dent than iTMS, not to mention the people selling physical CDs. I can just click-click-click and download a new album. And it'll cost something like 20 cents. Do that ten times and it's still just two bucks. Do that on 90 days a year and it's already 180 bucks...

Oh, and a shameless plug (I'm entitled to these because a) it's my blog and b) I don't even know the person who I'm plugging, this time). Go listen to Manic's stuff on Amie Street and possibly buy something if you like it. Brilliant stuff.

Hideous card...

So I decided to join the 20th century... I've been a firm believer in the fact that I neither want nor need a credit card, but the plans to move abroad for a while essentially spawned the understanding that I would need to bend my principles a bit. So I went ahead and ordered a Visa from Sampo. Swell. They even let me pick the image I wanted on the card from a predefined set. I picked the black card. A simple, black card. No image. Just black. Neutral and stylish. And fairly often I wear at least something black, and at times I'm completely dressed in black. Simple decision, huh?

Well, the card arrived yesterday, and it was black. But it had these little sparkling bits on it. To sum it up, it was hideous. I was planning on actually starting to use the debit card features of it since they're a lot more widely supported than Visa Electrons, with which I'd been living before. But my god... The card looked so hideous that I don't think I can even take it out of my wallet, let alone pay with it.

So naturally, after a bit more than 24 hours of contemplation, I put in a new order for the same card but with the standard Sampo image on it. Hopefully it won't be glittery...

The Modern Road Warrior

Well, ok, I don't really travel that much, but I've been noticing a trend in the stuff I buy. Especially electronics. I like small, durable, and wireless. So what do I have with me when I do travel?

• laptop (Thinkpad T40)
• external hard drive (small aluminium LaCie USB drive, 100 GB)
• mobile phone (Nokia E70)
• headset (some random Nokia Bluetooth headset)
• a bunch of chargers (this is actually a real problem!)

If I have to be able to do work, then I'll need to either take along another laptop or replace the T40 with the work laptop and of course the SecurID card.

And then of course a pile of books, clothes, sanitary equipment (toothbrush, contact lense stuff, haircare stuff, face-care stuff, etc.), and a portfolio case with relevant papers/magazines and so on. Previously I've been typically lugging along a duffel bag and a laptop bag, but recently I pretty much got rid of the laptop bag and just throw the laptop and other stuff in between clothing (works well, I don't fly that often and I typically have my bag with me at all times).

It's nice to know that packing has become a routine already. I guess I can pretty much pack a bag for a week-long trip in about 15 minutes. The only problems are jackets; you can only take one with you without any hassle...

Phew... That was close!

I've been advocating this On Demand (with apologies to IBM...) lifestyle for a while. What this means in practice is that I don't keep any food at my flat, usually. If I get hungry, I go and get something to eat... On demand. Also works with other aspects of life.

Anyway, on my way back home from work, I decided to go get some müsli for the morning; I'd already picked up a box a while back but of course I had taken the wrong type; it was by some random company and tasted like crap. Anyway, got the right box of müsli and on a whim decided to actually get some chicken filets also. And by this point the people who know me must be shocked - me buying some raw materials which implies I'm going to cook! The horror...!

Long story short; I ended up cleaning my flat, doing the dishes and then, just before actually starting to cook I walked out, walked to the local Chinese restaurant and grabbed some takeaway food. Danger averted!

And on a completely different note; a small survival tip for anyone employed by N who happens to have a phone number that's exactly identical to a general telephone conference number and is different by only one number... Start blacklisting the phone numbers that most often call you (e.g. meeting room numbers, telephone switch numbers, etc.) and never answer anyone calling from any number you don't know if the phone rings on the hour or on the half hour. It's just one of these nice little things you learn to live with when you're at a large company...