i summon one kim

The border between Finland and Sweden is a naturally formed one: it follows the Tornio and Muonio rivers and their feeds. On the drive to Kilpisjärvi there are many beautiful views of the often wide river. Even though there don’t seem to be that many bridges connecting the countries it seems that villages have sprung up on the same spots on both sides. I wonder how it is today: could you just take a row boat across to visit your neighbors on the other bank?

We saw reindeer today! Before I could take a picture they had already run into the birch woods and practically disappeared, as far as a camera is concerned. This is not at all what I remember from 30 years ago about reindeer. Back then I recall they were jogging peacefully on the road in front of our car, or collecting outside our front door in the morning. Speaking of the woods — a lot of green still among the yellows. Maybe we are a bit early still, even though the forecast has already been below freezing a few nights.

The road keeps narrowing the further up we get. In the end they can’t even fit the lane divider in the middle of the road anymore… It’s good that we arrive at Kilpisjärvi early enough before the camping site is closed for the evening. It is just into off-season already, apparently, so some places have already closed for the winter and others have narrowed their operating hours. Something to remember next time, and maybe even plan a little more in advance and check which places are still open.

I have been wanting to go to Lapland to see the autumn colours (ruska) for a few years now, but somehow always managed to put it off due to busy schedules. Last year I decided I would make sure that the trip wouldn’t slip another year anymore, and I stuck to that regardless of everything else going on.

My dad has been hiking in Lapland with my brother a couple of times, so he was immediately into coming with me on the trip. Hiking not being exactly my thing we took advantage of the RV my parents have. We’d be overnighting on camping sites, so we’d have hot water for washing and could refill drinking water easily.

However, the first night dad spotted a nice rest area by the Tornio river before we got to the planned camping site in Ylitornio. Instead of driving on, we decided to stay — it was late enough anyway, as we hadn’t started too early from Kauhava that morning.

Englanninkielisillä on sanonta ”hurry up and wait” (olisiko se ”kiirehdi odottamaan” — kääntäminen on aina niin vaikeaa). Se on kuvannut melkein kaikkea muuttamiseen liittyvää. Tavarat tuli seulottua kiireellä kesäkuun puolivälissä, että ennätin ennenkuin pakkaajat tulivat viemään kaiken pois. Onnistuin kiitettävästi — toivon mukaan rojua tuli muutettua varsin vähän (takaisin) Suomeen. Sen jälkeen kontti taisi odotella parikin viikkoa ennenkuin se lähti ylittämään Atlanttia. Suomeen se saapui elokuun toisella viikolla. Ensimmäisenä kiirehdin tullaamaan auton, vain odottaakseni vielä viikon saadakseni sen kuormasta… (jatkuu…)

I never got that good at small talk, although I think I would have gotten a passing grade already. Well, Therese Catanzariti explains the whole Finnish silence deal on Crikey in another entertaining and insightful article. I will now have to keep my own habits in check, to make sure I pass as a Finn again.

Fortunately I still feel comfortable with silence, but now I wonder if I might be making others uncomfortable by accidentally “switching on” small talk. Apparently I’m already shaking hands more than an average Finn would. Maybe it’s good that I never got a hang of the whole kiss-on-the-cheek custom…

I know I’m already expecting a response to my emails, rather than assuming success from silence. However, I don’t think this really comes from being Finnish, but from the fact that email is no longer a reliable means of communication. There are too many content filters (often disguised as spam prevention tools) that silently drop messages, so some kind of an acknowledgement really is necessary nowadays.

Not everything is considered a user (driver) preference, apparently. Temperature display in Fahrenheit or Celsius is switchable, but the odometer readout cannot be switched to kilometers just like that. Daytime running lights (DRL) is mentioned in the manual as an option that can be configured by the dealer. Did you know that a U.S. radio cannot tune into all frequencies on the FM band?

This weekend Otto helped me get some things reconfigured:

• temperature display
• odometer readout
• daytime running lights

The radio still needs to be adjusted. The 2003+ Audi A4 models have more on-board diagnostic capable devices than a single K-bus can handle, so there are 2 buses. Unfortunately the equipment we had could only communicate with the first bus, and the radio appears to be on the second bus. In any case, there is supposed to be a country ID there (if its values were just known).

Read on for the details. (more…)

WordPress 1.5.2 on pääasiassa tietoturvapäivitys. Päivittäminen on helppoa: kopioi vaan uudet tiedostot vanhan asennuksen tiedostojen päälle. Suomenkielisen paketin voi nyt ladata tutusta paikasta:

http://kimmo.suominen.com/sw/wordpress-fi/

Jos törmäät ongelmiin, voit kysellä apua suomenkielisen version postilistalla.

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…)