i summon one kim

I’ve been in Finland for roughly three weeks now, and I’m finally beginning to actually organize my life. Not that I’ve been slacking all this time, but it has just been time on auto-pilot. Now I have to start planning what to do in the medium to long term.

I sprained my foot towards the end of my visit with my brother and his family. I had to walk on crutches for a while, but the doctors have confirmed there are no broken bones. (Many thanks to Gudrun and Juha for all the help while I couldn’t do much in Germany, and to my parents as well as Laura and Arto in Finland!) I still can’t walk normally, but I did leave the last crutch at home as I departed for Helsinki a couple of days ago.

I got my car cleared through customs yesterday. The moving company says it takes them until “Monday or maybe Tuesday” to get the car out of the container, even though the shipper said the container would be released today… I can’t wait to be driving in my own car again!

I was having trouble with ½ and ¾ in an article I was trying to publish on another WordPress-powered site. First I thought my browser was acting up, but soon became doubtful and realized I should look at the source of the page generated by WordPress. To my surprise I saw that the entity codes had been deliberately mangled.

I tracked down the source of the problem in the WordPress code. This patch fixes the problem.

Call me an Internet addict (it might be accurate, actually), but I’m very used to having broadband Internet access always. I consider having available on-demand (some might say “constant”) access to my Internet-connected servers the norm. I read my mail on-line (in plain text, no less). My RSS aggregator is on-line on the web. I contact my friends on-line on IRC.

Yet there are times when I’m not online. Most commonly this used to be while commuting to and from work. I’d be on the train for about an hour each way. My favorite pastime for the commute was reading. But sometimes I would have liked to write down some thoughts, either for the blog or maybe for an email reply.

I knew about offline blogging tools but I had never really looked into them. I had experimented with Windows Notepad and the Blackberry memo application. Both are fine for writing the bulk of the text, but the “cleanup” tended to be too tedious: there are a number of fields you still have to fill in before a blog entry can be published or an email sent out.

I recently went through the weblog clients listed in the WordPress Codex to see what my options were. I chose to install w.bloggar on my laptop. With just a little bit of configuration (and a couple of tweaks on my non-standard WordPress installation to accommodate language selection) I had successfully published a test entry. Quite painless so far.

With w.bloggar I can set all the common post attributes (title, tags, timestamp) without any of the tedious cut-and-paste that would be necessary without a dedicated offline blogging tool. Once I’m connected to the Internet I can easily open each saved post and publish it. (That statement will be validated by the fact of this post appearing on my site…)

There’s a first time for everything: I got out of bed in the middle of the night to write an entry in this blog. I’ve considered it a few times in the past, but never actually done it before.

I just arrived in Germany yesterday, and I was hoping to conquer jetlag with the usual method of staying up late without any napping in order to sleep soundly through the first night. Maybe having nodded off on the train is the culprit, but I woke up at 3am and could not go back to sleep.

Last night after dinner I was eventually ready to fall asleep standing up. I enjoy conversing with my brother and sister-in-law, but it is obvious now that my brain was mostly storing rather than processing at the end of the evening. A trip to the bathroom was enough time for it to completely wake up, and at that point it was a total avalanche of thoughts!

You know how sometimes in the evening you cannot fall asleep because something is stuck in your thoughts and won’t go away? It was sort of like that, but different, because after each thought there was a new one pushing its way through. And there was no end to it — conversations from yesterday; tasks to tackle once I arrive in Finland; that it’s really a fact I’m not living in the USA anymore; and so on.

Finally at 4:30am I gave up and thought it would be better to actually focus on something. So much easier than a constant merry-go-round of random thoughts in your head.

Well, that was that — I’ve signed my termination papers at work today. It’s an odd feeling not to have a job, even if I’ve known for months that this day was coming. If I wasn’t moving at the same time I’d have absolutely nothing to do right now… :-)

I’ll need to tie up some loose ends tomorrow: a bit of cleanup at the apartment, mailing my friends a list of stuff I can’t take with me but seems too good to throw away, figuring out what to pack and how (I wasn’t thinking straight when I had the big suitcase packed in with the household move and left too many small ones behind), and do some last minute shopping. That should be it.

I rented a Dodge Dakota to drive for a week. I’ve found out it is just a bit bigger than an average parking spot…

Olen tehnyt tänään täyden työpäivän. En tosin sen homman parissa, mitä alunperin suunnittelin. Tarkoitus oli saada seulottua rojua pois muuttokuormasta, mutta se taitaa jäädä huomiselle. Ellen sitten innostu päivällisen jälkeen vielä ahkeroimaan. (Ruoka kyllä yleensä väsyttää, mutta kahvi voisi piristää.)

Rakensin itselleni tänään henkilökohtaisen budjetin. Budjetointia on tullut tähän mennessä harrastettua vain pari kertaa vuodessa töissä. Vaan samanlaistahan tuo on omankin budjetin luonti, periaatteessa. Paitsi että töissä lopputulos on paisutettu toivelista, jota ylemmät tahot puhkovat. Oman budjetin lopputulos taas kertoo, kauanko voin olla työttömänä ja minkälaista palkkaa on saatava. Ensimmäisen osalta sain ihan piristävän tuloksen, mutta jälkimmäinen oli lähinnä pelottava, kun kokemus suomalaisesta palkkatasosta on vielä olematonta.

Hyödyllistä apua budjetointiin löytyy mm. näistä:

• Pankkien sivuilla on laskureita lainojen korkojen ja muiden maksujen laskemiseen (oma koti olisi kiva)
• Liikkeiden ja postimyyntiyritysten sivujen avulla voi arvioida kodin hankintojen hintoja (pesukone, tiskikone, mikrouuni, televisio, astiat, vaatteet, …)
• Vakuutusyhtiöiden sivuilla on laskureita vakuutuksia varten (ehkä ilmiselvää, mutta enpä huomannut ajatella, että nekin olisivat netissä; kotivakuutus, autovakuutus, tapaturmavakuutus, sairaskuluvakuutus, matkavakuutus; ei ehkä kaikkia, mutta tuossapa aluksi miettimistä)
• Julkisen liikeenteen laitokset (esim. YTV), jos aiot kulkea julkisilla kulkuvälineillä esim. työmatkaa
• Verot voi laskea laskurilla, mikä on tarpeellista palkkoja mietittäessä
• Tulli kertoo muuttokuorman maksuista (hyödyllistä luettavaa, jos tuot auton)

Ainakin itselleni suureksi avuksi olivat kaverit (erityisesti Artsi, Haka, Laura ja Otto) ja vanhemmat, joilta sain kysellä vinkkejä ja arkipäivän tietoa. Monet kiitokset jokaiselle!

Probably about two weeks ago Artsi told me I might like In Absentia by Porcupine Tree. So I got it uploaded to my iPod so I could listen to it on the train. Indeed, I liked it. I didn’t think progressive rock was made anymore, but apparenty I was wrong (you could search for “neo prog”). In Absentia is an airy and happy album — I kept it playing while I walked from the train to the office, and it went well with the cool breeze of that day. Of course, as always, there is a price for finding new music: I now own five Porcupine Tree albums already.

A new album was just released a couple of days ago and is called Deadwing. It has a much heavier rock sound. I’ve only listened to it twice, so I can’t yet say too much, other than that so far I seem to like it.

However, I’ve been more drawn to their older material. Right now I’m listening to the Stars Die double album, which is a compilation of their music from 1991–1997 released under the Delerium label. From what I understood from the biography this material is mainly solo work by Steven Wilson in tribute to the 60’s and 70’s music that insipired him. I really want to make note of my favorite songs and look up the albums on which they originally appeared.