joker.iki.fi

It’s again been a while since my last update and the reason, once again, NO TIME. At work I’m no longer at probational period, and work has started to pour in. Currently the workload is rather good, not overwhelmingly much but enough to keep me busy. Surprisingly lots of travel. I have travelled more during this four months than in last year. It’s still ok and I am still confident that this was a right choice for me. Workwise, I get to do more concrete things now than before - less powerpoint and more technology.

Homewise it’s been ok. It’s not too dissimilar from the situation at work. The family keeps me again very busy but there’s a direction for the better now. Even my wife is not anymore constantly sleep deprived and she really has enjoyed her part as stay-home mummy.

Finnish summer is again what you would expect and I have managed to find some free time again, so I guess I should not complain. Let’s see where I am in a month or so…

I can pretty easily summarize the average day of my life. The following things happen during the 24 hours.
8 hours or work. This includes the work done to earn the money to pay everything.

8 hours of home. This includes the household chores, like cooking, cleaning, going to the store to buy necessities like food and clothes and so forth. Also, taking care of the baby is part of this. Changing diapers, feeding her and so forth happens within this 8 hours. Then there’s also the maybe 1 to 2 hours (maximum) that I can actually spend with her. Like playing and going outside to play and walk and such things.

Then there’s the last 8 hours, which goes to sleep. Or should go to sleep. If I want to do anything extra, like play a game, write some open source code, watch a movie or read a book, it’s away from the sleep time and it’s not possible to do for a long time since at some point the lack of sleep catches you.

I’m pretty certain that this can’t be it. The content of life I mean. I also consider myself being lucky enough to have a work that every now and then actually feels like it makes sense. I couldn’t imagine what it would be if I just spend my working hours doing some repetitive trivial bullshit.

Many people say that after a while it all gets easier. I wonder if they mean like it gets easier like you accept it as a fact that this life only gives you so few hours of fun time and rest of it is just work. Or, do they mean, that there starts to be more good hours. I wonder.

Anyway. I would not like to live my life like this, really. I mean the ratio of fun, even if you count sleeping as fun, is just not good. I think I should write a facebook application where people could record their ratio and we could compare. If people constantly score the same figures as I do, let’s commonly agree that the world is royally fucked and call the UN.

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.

Hi all, and warm welcome from Venice.

Our tour to Italy is nearing to it’s end, it’s still two days in Venice and then it’s time to go home.

It has been a nice journey and like I promised I have kept a travel journal which I need to proofread when I get home and then I put it online.

Overall, I think we got a good overall of Italy, maybe falling a little short for the southern part. We also managed to visit a bit of France during our three days at Corsica. Overall, our trip has covered the following cities/towns/villages:

1. Rome
2. Civitavecchia
3. Golfo Aranchi (Sardinia)
4. Olbia (Sardinia)
5. Santa Teresa (Sardinia)
6. Bonifazio (Corsica)
7. Moriani (Corsica)
8. Bastia (Corsica)
9. Savona
10. Milan
11. Venice

To my surprise it doesn’t even feel like that we’ve only been skimming the places. Granted, some of them are just kind of pass-through places where we just have waited some time to get a ferry but most of those are still small places from which you can get quite a good impression of by just walking around the town square.

Anyway, stay tuned, I try to post the travel journal and more thoughts about Italy, Sardinia and Corsica when I get back to Finland. I end this entry with a scene from Venice I shoot last night.

This is a scene shot from Wooden Bridge passing the grand canal of Venice.

Hi,

Sorry again for the deadly silence in the blog. May and June were insanely busy so I didn’t really feel like blogging and didn’t really have time at the rare occasion that I felt like it.

But now, I have vacation all of July. Today we leave to a tour of Italy with my wife and I have high expectations from the trip. I have never been to Italy and the goal of this trip, apart from the obvious quality time and relaxation, is to see a bit of Italy.

I try to keep some sort of travel journal and do some blogging when we have internet coverage. I have a lot of gadgets, including cameras, laptop, GPS and my trusty old Nokia E70 with me so I guess I can do quite a bit. That’s the good thing when travelling with my wife. We actually stay sober and peaceful enough to do some intelligent and educating stuff as well. When travelling with friends, at least with most of them, there’s typically too much beer-drinking and stuff to actually sit down and do something that requires a focused thought.

Anyway, have fun you all and I hope that the server stays up and functional for the two weeks that we are abroad. I am not really worried about the server as such but our DSL connection has been quite unreliable for some reason in the last months. But alas, let’s hope that everything will be fine and ok, both in Italy and back home.

See you all.

Just watched Prison Break. For those from abroad, one of the commericial broadcasters, MTV3 is airing it here on tuesday night prime time. I have to say, todays episode was just about the most exciting episode of any TV series I have ever seen. Today they got outside the wall for the first time. The way they have created the atmosphere is just amazing.

Ok, there are always those who will say that this is just another American stereotype-ridden cliché series, but I have to admit that I really admire the writers, actors and others who make the show happen. It’s not very easy to make entertainment like this.

I wish we get even close someday.

Yesterday Monster.fi has received an interesting job listing. I wonder if this is real or some elaborate publicity stunt or if Monster.fi has been owned…

In case it is and Stream Partner Oy or Monster pulls the ad, I made screen shots:

First image
Second image

Update: (10:57 am)

Seems that they pulled the ad. It’s no longer visible in Monster.fi search. If someone hears what it was about, let me know, ok… =)

We just got back from Nousiainen. My wife’s cousin and his wife were celebrating their 30th birthdays (their birthdays are really close to one another so they tend to throw a common party).
I have to say that I had very good time even though I didn’t really know others from there except my wife, her cousin and his wife. It was really easy to talk to pretty much all of these people and I even managed to be quite sober through the party (I think I tend to sometimes compensate some social pressure with alcohol, maybe =).

It’s fun to know that I can still be around people who are pretty much completely strange to me and still manage to have a lot of fun. I think I have more proof to contradict this than to prove it. I would like to consider myself a social person but in reality I haven’t had that much contacts outside my immediate group of friends lately. This was refreshing for a change.