joker.iki.fi

Hello all, just wanted to say hello from the capital of EU. I’m currently doing a 5 day course here and then spend the weekend here with my wife and daughter.

There’s very limited connectivity and I don’t have too much time to blog from here, but I have done some writeups offline on my mobile. I plan to post those here, perhaps even today. Good that the Android phones are just about to be released, so that I can start to really maintain my blog. Seems like all the keyboard time I currently have go to something else than creative work…

Anyway, this city seems nice enough. It’s very much possible to bicycle here and it’s very easy to get around. The traffic is pretty ok and food and beer is good. Prices seem to be pretty standard across EU nowadays so no big surprises here.
Belgian people are quite much like the french, but bit more friendly and helpful and at least here they tend to know a few words of english.

This course almost feels like a vacation. Title is “Embedded Linux” and it’s organized by Linux Belgium. Nice people and interesting agenda. I basically wanted to know how nowadays people do embedded systems using linux. When I last did lowlevel stuff in Linux it was back in the 2.2 kernel days. It’s totally a different system nowadays and you have all these cool tools like Busybox. It’s very cool stuff that’s happening and now that everyone is creating devices on top of Linux it’s very nice indeed.

I find it hard to understand how life is like it is nowadays. This week is a good example. I have to plan everthing I do EXACTLY since otherwise I miss something that I need to do. Like, if I talk on the phone an extra 10 minutes, this makes me miss a meeting where I need to be. If I spend 10 minutes longer than planned changing diaper for my daughter, that makes me miss my bus which again makes me miss the metro and this makes me miss an appointment where I need to be or is away from the time I can do productive work and if I miss that I start to miss deadlines. If I miss deadlines I need to play catch up with the tasks which again makes me miss some freetime.

It’s a vicious thing really. I know it’s only temporary. The work can’t continue like this forever. My daughter is not so demanding when she’s older, at least I hope so. My wife can’t make anymore so much plans (for me) when she needs to start working after maternity leave. But I feel that I’m really running on fumes now.

I’m just about thirty years old. There’s no way I can keep this pace up until I’m fourty. Or I could, but I feel that I would not see fourty if I tried. Another thing that’s a big problem with this insane hurry, is that it’s by no means efficient. It’s just absolutely impossible to be creative and motivated if you are constantly just bouncing around trying not to miss anything.

The complete lack of free time is very frustrating. All of the things I know I enjoy in life, I cannot do. I probably need to stop writing now since I don’t have anything positive to say now.

Man, it’s that time of the year again. The weather is getting so cold that a jacket is a must and everyone is sick, or getting sick, or just getting better. I went running this morning and after that I felt like crap. I typically feel very energetic after morning run, but not this time. I was still at work, though. The project I currently work for seems such that if I miss one day, I need to spend two days hunting down people and information. Nevertheless, I didn’t have fever so I guess it was safe to show up at work.

Towards the evening I have started to feel a lot better but I’m kind of scared about tomorrow. Luckily it’s Friday.

Another thing, this reminds me that I need to buy another set of puncture-protected tires for my bike. This year the first cold weathers will come early and then the city will again put sand to all the roads. Damn. I say let those old ladies slip. I want to get from A back to A with tires intact. Last year it was something like 7 or 8 times I needed to change an inner tube on the road or get back home walking or call my wife to pick me up because of broken tires.

I wonder will they sell puncture-protected tires which are still as light and easy-rolling as my current ones.

It feels like it might be again time to make this blog more active. During the last year or so it really hasn’t been that active (only a few posts or so). It’s not that I would not want to blog. It’s just that I have not had the time. With the new baby and hectic work, it’s been impossible to spend time to this blog.

It’s pretty much the same situation still, but now I actually see many good things coming to their place and these may enable me to get more free time on the keyboard. That, and I have high hopes for Android phones solving my mobile online problems. The HTC Dream is supposed to be out any day now, let’s see when these babies get to Finland.

The new server machine is also pretty sweet. I managed to put together a dual-core system with 2 GB or memory and close to 2 terabytes of RAID-5 storage. I build it around a dirt cheap motherboard and 640GB S-ata disks and I am really impressed even if I say it myself. I mean, it cost ~500 euros and I have myself a server that can fulfill all my needs for years to come. It’s truly remarkable how cheap commodity PC hardware is nowadays. The reason this surprised me was that I had not paid attention to hardware and price of hardware for two years now. I mean, if you don’t play the latest PC games and don’t run windows, you practically can satisfy your hardware needs with only few pennies nowadays.

So I have a hopeful feeling. The weather has been totally sucking lately, but even that has not got me down. When you spend half a year changing diapers and working long hours, the fact that it’s about to come to an end is really heart-warming. Sure, the diapers and work are still there, but keep getting easier. At least it feels like it today.

A short summary why joker.iki.fi has been offline for quite some time now.

• A new baby in the the house takes all of the free time
• I got fed up with the problems the old web server had
• I purchased a new server
• Didn’t have time to configure it until today

What else? Nothing much. Lots of changes lately, mainly due to new baby. During bad days, I at times feel that I’m ready to shoot myself in the head because I just can’t take this anymore. During good days it’s ok though.

I have been worrying a lot about my mental and physical health lately. Combining a busy job and busy family life, while trying to stay in shape and to educate myself has turned out much more difficult than I thought. I still have some resources left but I have constantly a feeling that the batteries will just run out at some point.

Ok, enough ranting. I’m going to go to sleep now, otherwise I’m history.