Bd frenzy

"The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons", said Dostoyevski. What do you think? I'm sure he didn't think much of the level Imperial russian civilization after having been to Siberia! Whatever... anyway, I've been slacking. I need to find a new job, preferably one where I can do the rest of my work-practice & final theses - and get paid. Picking up a few free-electives & a 4th language would not hurt.

The Sony mp3 player is supposed to be fixed by this week. What a bunch of shit, only took them 4 weeks. Breakfast waits. Today's my dad's 59th birthday. Yesterday was my mom's 58th. We're going there with Minna later on today, to take part in the celebrations! On the topic, explore the wonders of the birthday paradox! And oh yes, do find out your half-birthday. Always good to have more excuses to be cheerful.

Good times.

There isn't that much school. And I'm starting to get used to it. Scary. Been a good few last days, mates. Been to Tallinn. Been Go-Karting. That's a lot of fun! Ali left us, he's pretty close to old London town by now. Cheers mate, see you soon :)

I bought a new toy: an HP DVD burner. Seems pretty nice. I got got rid of my old Pioneer DVD drive & an even older Plextor cd-burner. I wonder if they're worth selling even? Maybe one day I'll build a second computer... you never know! I'm due to go to town shortly, to catch up with Minna. She'll be coming from a job interview. We are to go shoe-shopping. Yee-haw! :P

Well

Tennis, Tallinn, tennishh.... and so on. Bloggin is not as easy as it used to be. I hope I haven't run out of things to say. That would be bad.. Stay tuned for better days. Btw. that Finnish history through books project (if I've even mentioned it), I'm in the years 1920-1940 now. Going strong. :) It's not so bad you know, knowing why some of the streets in your hometown are named after certain persons - even if that is not directly implied in the text...

The Dire Straits' song "Planet of the New Orleans" has just gotten a whole other meaning.

It has begun

School. I have 3 courses this period. What a joke. I'll have all the time in the world to figure something out for the final thesis, or get a better temp job. When you've gotten used to keeping busy, this going to school for only mondays and tuesdays is really fucked up. I'm not used to sitting around doing nothing. Though I tried pretty hard today. Didn't get out of the house for anything else than to buy some food across the road. I'm glad I managed to do something else yesterday. Ali asked me out to play tennis a few days ago, and so we finally went. Could have done it sooner if it was not for the weather. Anyway, I've improved my shots quite a bit in the last (and only) 3 times I've done it this summer. Too bad the season is starting to draw to a close. Indoor courts are too expensive imo. Soon it'll be possible to start playing Squash again. The two courts that me & Martti have been using were closed for the summer because of renovation. Let us hope they've fixed them & that they open them up soon!

Wow

My name is so and so, and I am an alcoholic. Not really, but that came to mind when I woke up today, around 10am. We celebrated Minna's moms birthday up till almost 6am. Doh. But nevermind that, I INSIST that you go right now, and download Google Earth, I'm absolutely blown away by it. I've been playing with it for a while, and it seems to be quite frankly the best possible Atlas ever made. If I were rich, I would buy Google stock :)

Reelin' and Rockin'

Well, we did not make it to the theatre, or to the movie. From around 6 to 11, we were with Emmu, making tortillas, eating, drinking & watching some DeviantArt her friend has shot (she knows everyone on those picture galleries, and is in some of them herself). Later on, At midnight - we went to Manala, a nice joint downtown. There was a show with "The Manala Allstars band" (Marzi Nyman, Pirjo Bergström, Mariko ja Olavi Uusivirta & others). They had selected 17 different lovesongs, preferably with lewd or suggesting lyrics, and turned them around & made new and cool renditions of them. I personally really liked "Sukkula Veenuksen" (Shuttle to Venus) and "Fiilaten ja höyläten" (different, finnish lyrics to the tune of "Reeling and rocking" by Chuck Berry).

After the show, we met Maisa & went downstairs to eat. Manala is an excellent place to eat while on a night on the town. They're making food all the way untill 4am. Saw Sauli Niinistö in the restaurant, and later on also in the mens room. He was not too impressed with the drunking urinal-users who wished to engage in conversation with him while releasing their bladders (I was almost expecting someone to be stupid enough to try to offer him their hand while doing the deed with the other hand - they would have later been able to exclaim that they had shaken the hands of two 'chiefs' at the same time! :P) Anyway, for those of you not in the know, Niinistö is running for president. I think he just might be the strongest competition the current president, Tarja Halonen has.

Today is Minna's moms 47th birthday. I expect that we will go over to pay our respects around 6pm for dinner. It feels just like Sunday today. Maybe it's because we are free from all work & study related engagements today. Quite often Sunday has been the only whole day we have together.

Run around

Yesterday we went to see Astrid Swan perform. She was good, let's hope she makes it. I bought her autographed cd for 15€. Sort of like Aimee Mann, if you've heard her. Helsinki is having a party week, celebrating, well, err.. Helsinki. There is a lot of free arts, music & theatrical happenings all over the town. Today we'll go out to see some play & a movie, the details for both of which are unsure to me. I'll comment about them later.

Now it is time to take my Sony Mp3 player to an official after sales service joint. The poor thing's menu button is stuck down. So whenever I try to change a song, it just pops to the menu. Great. First I called the company that sold it to me. They told me to talk to the importer. The importer told me to refer to the official Sony after sales service. (I really enjoyed the run-around, thanks guys. Goddamn incompetent, responsibility-dodging bastards!) Just look at that site. They haven't responded to my emails, but I got through to some clerk there, who just told me to ship it in. I'll deliver it personally and see to that they take a quick glance at it/fix it before I leave. I feel really comfortable giving them my baby to tweak/fuck around with! I guess Sony is running out of funds, or they just don't give a shit.

It would be nice to open the player and fix the spring that's bent myself (that's my SWAG, anyway) but the chances that it'll blow up in my face & ruin the guarantee are too high!

-- update 16:46

My impressions of the place were quite accurate. The clerk receiving my player & typing out the documentation refused to yield any relevant information. Nor did anyone take a look at it. They took it and gave me a receipt and said "don't call us, we'll call you". Haha, right on.. bastards!

Dear diary...

I will make no excuses, or apologies for lack of updates!

Summer is almost over, and I'm done with work, at least for a week. It was a nice couple of months, the weekends full of fun & enjoyment. I'll try to resume active updates from now on. During the course of this summer, I've read tons, and gotten hooked to audiobooks. Expecially ones made by The Teaching Company. History mostly.

It would feel shallow to me to start typing in detail about how my summer went, suffice to say, there was the Pori Jazz, many great weekends @ different summercottages, lots of barbecuing and a couple of trips to Tallinn. Not the greatest summer ever, but way better than the last one.

School & studies will resume at the beginning of September. Minna started in a private art school today, let's hope she likes it.

Screw Stahanovism

Hello, the weekend was a blast. Had an impromptu party later on friday, after shopping, going to Kiasma, and drinking cider outdoors.. Saturday we had 3 graduation parties to go to, with little sleep & both of us hangover. We pulled it off like heroes, though we left the last place before midnight. Sunday we slept late & went to my brother's place for some coffee & delicacies - it was his 29th birthday on saturday (but we missed it because of the grad parties). Our presents to him were a t-shirt & poster made by by M.C. Escher. We walked to Minna's parents later, and picked up my birthday presents, and something they got us from hungary.

I've been working for two days now, and let me tell you, there wont be much to write home about.

I

Work ethics

Nasty, I begin work in 5 days. Arbeit macht frei.

Bicycle

It's time to whip out the bicycle and go pay a visit to my parents. Minna's working, so I have all the time in the world to do whatever suits my fancy. I picked up a new memory stick today, the little bugger cost me 70€. My parents are thinking of buying a new digicam, so I'll have to go and talk some sense into them - so that they won't buy "the one on sale at Gigantti" or whatever. A good place to start www.dpreview.com... Anyway, I better get on the road, I promised to show for coffee between 2-3pm. I'll get a good 15km worth of cycling today, yay! One-way shouldn't take longer than 20 minutes. Adios.

Last week

If I nothing proper happens this week, I'll be doomed to go back to the warehouse on monday... that's when I'm supposed to start my 11-week grind there. Fucking hell, and I've tried to _hard_ to look for a job. I need to get out of this country. Where the grass is greener, and proper jobs plenty! Who am I kidding? Ahh... Maybe when I graduate, I'll be finally able to get a decent job. Not a proper job, but a decent one. This is my last week of freedom for the whole summer, unless of course I end the Odyssey short. I might be happy with working just 2 months, or just 1 month... to scrape together enough to survive the summer. Though how much fun is it just to 'survive'. Need skills to pay the bills, and preferably then some. Weekend went by fast, didn't even notice it. Picked up a few books from the library today. One is on war prisoners, it'll set the mood for going back the warehouse :X

Computers suck

Great day today. It's been sunny outside. But guess what I've been up to? Last night, one of my 512Mb DDR sticks decided to go nuts. To make a long story short, it totally fucked up my Windows partition with all the weird errors it was causing. Of course I didn't immediately figure out just what the hell was causing all the weird errors. Luckily, I had two sticks, so it was fairly easy to test which one was the evil bastard, by using memtest. Now all I had to do was just revert back to a backup copy of the partition. But guess what? My backup was almost 6 months old! But have no fear - I always knew I was a louse backup-cloner, so I had a backup batch file running nightly, which copies all the important documents, files, settings, etc.. that I have one the windows partition. Now I just have to do the grievous task of putting everything back in it's right place.

I could have been outside enjoying the sun if it was not for two things: 1) I managed to burn myself pretty damn bad already on sunday, when I went to the local cliffs to do some reading, for about 3 hours worth. With no sunlotion, or t-shirt. The night towards monday was spent in agony. Yesterday I stayed indoors for the most of time, except for going to play squash. I still resemble an indian with my torso, though it's starting to get better.

Tomorrow I'll have a job interview for a fund-assistant job. Let's hope all goes well. This friday I have a re-exam in swedish, have to find the motivation to study for it from somewhere. It's a 5 credit-unit course, which ran a bit over half a year. I do not want to re-take the course. There! That's my motivation. It's 22.5'c outdoors.. terrace time, big time. But alas, poor me has to study, pooey pooey. Might as well get to it. Adios!

School's out for summer!

Yes ladies and gentlemen. The exams are over, the coursework is done. It's time to relax for a while. I ended up with pretty decent grades I have to say. And it's not too bad to notice that you're already 2/3 done. I'm a little ahead of schedule, and things are going alright. One thing that's been a constant cause of concern for me, however, has been the summer job issue. Yes, so far I have not secured anything better than logistics work. Meaning very basic logistics, mind you.

I'm terribly sorry for the lack of updates, but I have no spine. Err maybe I do, but not enough for daily/weekly updates. I'll try to fix that. Honest! Let's see.... what has happened since the last post. First week I had 2 exams and finished most of the coursework. 7-8th May we were at my parent's summer cottage in Perniö. That was a great time. Sauna, burning brushwood, target practice with a "22 scoped rifle & walks in the surrounding forest paths. Just what I needed to recharge the batteries for the coming week! Monday I had Business Strategies exam, which was a bitch, I ended up writing 7 pages... On Tuesday I had another exam, this time in Quality Management.

Wednesday
May 11th was my 25th birthday. I did not celebrate it much, as I had a databases exam during the day, and squash in the evening. But behold! When I came home, Minna had fixed a wonderful meal, which we then proceeded to feast upon, accompanied by a rather good red wine.. When it got close to midnight, we went to the balcony and I opened a bottle of sparkling wine on the minute that I turned 25. Romantic? Silly? The bottle was expensive, but turned out it had a poor taste. And! I also managed to break a champagne glass, as I was reaching for matches which were on the other side of the table -- and the lapel of my leather coat tipped the glass... which of course went into smithereens. I hope broken glass does indeed bring good luck, as 'they' say. Thursday was a quiet day, spent studying for the final exam in Cost Management.

Friday
I had the exam in the morning, and after it spent some time in school, drinking coffee, chatting & smoking cigarettes. It felt surreal that school was over. And that two years had passed. It took a while to sink in. Later on in the evening I went to Osku's place for a bit of pizza & alcoholic beverages; which was his & Jenni's way of saying "thank you for helping us move on Vappu, despite the fact that you were hangover/drunk at the time!". We had a blast, and I really didn't want to leave the place (I was there from 7pm to a bit after 10pm I think) - but I had to get to Valtava (or whichever way you type it --- the new 3-story bar/diner that has opened between the railway station & main post office - I think it used to formerly belong to Finnair.)
I met school comrades Ville, Carina, Tara, Niina & Leena there on the second floor. I ordered some Budvar. I don't think I had too much to drink. Conor showed up a bit after midnight, after he had finished work. (I see a pattern here, by the way... whenever Conor shows up after work to a bar where I'm at, all hell breaks loose later on..) - Anyway! I believe everything went fine & was under control until it got close to 1am, and the devil incarnate, senor Osku made his entrance (with Jenni of course). This evil man was on a mission to get poor me drunk as a skunk. To succeed in this fiendish task, he began injecting alcohol into me, in the shape of shots of varying kind. Frankly, don't ask me what they were or how many there were, because it all starts to get a little hazy for me after the 2nd or 3rd shot. See, I'm not even sure of that. Anyway! The 2nd floor bar closes at some point, so we were asked to move downstairs. Apparently while there I managed to stumble into a waitress - all apologies, miss. I didn't remember us going downstairs, so it's hard to say anything more about it. But we stayed there until the bar closed, and Martti, bless his soul, walked me all the way home. I managed to fall twice on the way. I also walked into a streetlight. Well anyway, I got home around 5. Minna wakes up. There's some hassle. I throw up, crawl to bed. 6am: Lights off.

Saturday.
Birthday party. I woke up initially around noon, feeling surprisingly okay given the circumstances. Minna went to the shop, and got some Jaffa (soda) & Sparkling water for me. She fixed me a meat pie with two sausages & brought it to bed, too. Ahh, lovely creature! I stayed in bed & managed to catch sleep again, while she left the house with our upstairs neighbors Karo & Eeva. They went to shop around, trying to find us a new garden table (for the whole house community), some plants & seeds, and finally some food and beverages. This Saturday was booked as a community effort/work party. The idea is to clean up the large wooden house where all of us (6 apartments, 10 people) live, and then after the chores are done, have a good time. I woke up around 5.30pm. This work party was supposed to start around 6. My birthday party was set to start at 8pm, with some of the first guests arriving a bit earlier. I rushed to the shop, bought some more sparkling/mineral water, and you know, the usual hangover cure-kit. After I had gotten all the stuff in me, I started feeling a bit better. The next two hours were spent cleaning, vacuum-cleaning, and mopping the place. I almost started to lose faith when it was a bit after 7pm, and it felt like the whole thing was so unfinished. I wanted to have the work bit of the work-party over by the time my birthday party was supposed to start. See, my idea was to have the work party & my birthday as a sort of combined grill-fest-free-for-all. The neighbors are such good people & friends, that I would have invited them anyway. The house budget really ran out after we had gotten the gardentable, the plants & a proper Winmau dartboard & something to drink (12-pack, some ciders). So the barbecue foods, salads & booli was on us. I am letting you know all this just so you kind readers are not tempted to think that: as there is/was a housebudget for the 6 apartments, of which some of it is commonly used for partying & boozing, that I would have the evil mind of putting my birthday on the same date to save money! There, I’ve said it. Anyway, moving on. The time between 8-9pm was a bit of a hassle, with half of the guest having arrived. I rushed out of the house to do some work on the balcony, or downstairs… But luckily it all worked out perfect. We fired up the grill a little after 9, and had a GORGEOUS time. The evening consisted of eating (duh), drinking, sauna, darts-games, playing Alias as pantomime. People started going to bed after midnight, but the some of us kept going. Conor & Jonna, my brother & Jarno were there until around 6am. Me & Minna stayed there for 3 hours more, just by ourselves. I guess we talked, danced & drank whatever was left. Sad affair! Oh dear… last time I checked the clock, was when we were already in bed: it was 9.30am. Ouch.

Sunday
Slept late, managed to go to Minna’s parents. Lovely dinner. Fairly uneventful day otherwise.

This week has been spent mostly on recharging batteries, applying for work and sneezing. Birch trees are messing with me, but I’ve got the meds now. It’s starting to level out. Long update, you can probably see that I ran out of energy. I typed it all in one go. Hooray! Thanks for reading if you made it this far!

Vappu

Wow it's been almost a month now. A lot of things have been going on and I just never got around to typing about them. I should get a phonecall early this week, to let me know if I got the job or not (doing purchasing at a publishing house). I skipped going to my swedish exam today, because three days of drinking and partying finally caught up with me. How lame. I'll take the re-exam date & ace it there. No worries. I did not have time to prepare for it anyway, what with Vappu and everything going on. Cross fingers that I get the job :D I'm hungover, tired, bored, and feeling guilty. What a great way to start a week! I have a couple of papers to hand in mid-week, plus it's final exams time.. Where's the motivation? Hello? Two weeks, and "school's out for summer", yeah!

I think I'll just fire up Stronghold II and built a few medieval castles.

Ursula!

Oh yes, my friends. It's time to go to Ursula. The weather is sweet, and Kaivopuisto awaits. I'm gonna go meet Ali there, it's a classic place for us.

Btw.It seems like fairly busy times again for me & Minna. We get to spend maybe like 1-3 hours per evening together. It sucks! It's been ages since we've last had a chance to cook properly together - with a little wine and so on... hrmm

Wellm we are going to see the play "Putoavia Enkeleitä" tomorrow, should be fun. Then I'm going to a gig on thursday (Ben Granfelt-Band & Crumbland), venue: On the Rocks. Then, it's time to work: friday evening + saturday morning, blah! Oh well, at least school pressure is starting to ease off a little. Today was a day off from school for me, but I still had to wake up at around 10am and work till 1:20pm doing *sarcasm* interesting *sarcasm* stuff like Fault-Tree-Analysis, Ishikawa diagrams & Pareto Histograms. The course is Quality Management. Iso 9001 and so on. Fantastic! :P

Anyway, it's time to Call Ali and go outdoors. Clear blue skies and +8'c wait for us. Plus a pint or two..

APRIL

Hey! Update time. What's happened? I got the English project done, finally! Does it make my life any easier? Guess :P We saw Scandinavian Music Group live at Tavastia on wednesday, for the 4th time now. I confess, I'm a fan! :) They had videocameras there, maybe we will end up on tv or on a dvd.. we were around 1,5 meters from the performers. It was a special setup: unplugged & acoustic, they had moved the stage to the center of the floor, with tables around it. Pretty neat. We finished watching the Napoleon DVD, it was a whopping 6 hours. It was pretty good, but they should have made it into a 25 hours series :P I hear there's a 3 dvd special version that goes up to 8 hours, damn. I'll have to keep my eyes open for it.. :)

I have still got a whole bunch of schoolwork to do (sorry for the whining) - it seems like they don't let off (anyone else tried to squeeze in 42 ECTS worth in a spring term?). It gets rough, I'm telling you. But hey, after this term's done, it's all steady sails from then on.

It's Saturday. I'm stuck inside writing papers, while Minna's already gone to the gym, and is now horseback riding. Later on she's going to go to Tavastia to listen to Funk with some girls. It is good at least someone is living it up for the both of us!

I had a great yesterday, so I'm all recharged and happy. I got the Kela thing sorted (they asked for some more information "or else", but I managed to get it, so there! up yours, KELA! Later on in the evening, we went out for supper, proper winin' and dinin'. You can figure out the rest... quality time.

I’m feeling pretty good both physically and mentally. The weather outside is fucking glorious. A walk doesn’t sound like a bad idea at all. I should fix Minna’s bicycle (the rear wheel’s blown). Hmm. I didn't go to work today. But I'll have to make this Saturdays shift up by working both next fri and sat. Oh well - then I'll see how it feels, whether I could stand it for another summer in a row. I think I already know the answer for that. You know, they've given me two weeks to decide if I wish to continue there for the summer or not. I'm pretty certain I'll say thanks but no thanks. I'll find something better. I don't see myself working there for another summer - I need to move on, progress. Maybe it'll happen quicker if I fire myself? Actually, I should let them fire me so that I can get unemployment benefits should I need them. So far, I have still yet to score a summerjob. I'm active and bugging people left and right, something's bound to come my way soon..

Anyway, life is good. Our London lounge lizard, Ali, is coming back to Finland this Sunday. Let’s go for a few beers on Tuesday, Ali? Monday’s hectic for me.

Conor & Jonna had their 1 year engagement anniversiry a while ago, and this picture is devoted to them! Sorry Conor old buddy :)

Easter holiday

Howdy. It's already Tuesday, is it? Geez. Time flies. Quick wrap-up: worked on Saturday, it was very tiresome and boring. Came home, and after a while we went to Maisa's 21 birthday party. It was a comfy affair, with food, wine and music as the main entertainment. On Sunday we cleaned up the apartment and went to Minna's parents for the classic Sunday supper. On Monday I went downtown and picked up three tickets for a Scandinavian Music Group unplugged concert (for me, Minna and my brother). I also Checked out Anttila because I had heard that they had quite a few good DVDs selling for cheap. Kill Bill volumes 1 and 2 were selling for 11€s a pop, not bad. I got myself something else though. Memento for 6€, No Man's land for 12, and finally: Napoleon, for 22€ (yes, that wasn't cheap, but hey - it's over 6 hours long!). I wonder when I'll ever have the time to watch them.

I spent over 7 hours today struggling with Sebbe, we were working on an investments project that's half the grade of the course. What a way to spend the 'holiday'. I've completed 1800 words / 4500 for the English project. Yay! I have a week left to do it. Better start the typing right after I'm done warming up my fingers with this blogpost!

Still no sight of a proper summer job, though I've been turned down from a couple of places. It's looking to be another spectacular summer. Fucking hell. I don't remember being this stressed in a long time. Looking for jobs which are hard to find is the worst, let me tell you. That, plus this totally unnecessary stress regarding schoolwork is getting to me. It's lowering the quality of my life. When did I start to care? Have I grown old? Well, I am turning 25 this year. Maybe that's it. Then again, maybe it isn't. Who is to know? All I know is - I'm on my holiday, but it is near impossible to enjoy it. You're NOT on vacation if you have serious shit to do. Anyone who has ever been worried about getting a career or hell, let's just call it "a job that doesn't fucking blow", must know what I'm going through. I'm sure I could have made it in the IT industry. I have the credentials to show that I can walk the walk. But it just got so boring.

Hell, maybe after I'm done with my current studies, maybe I'll just apply to study History at the University of Helsinki. Now there is a topic that's always been close to my heart. Computer stuff I know, but I don't read computer literature on my free time. History books, I do. I watch programs about it, browse websites... I'm hungry for the stuff. I had a conversation with my schoolmate and upstairs neighbour, Conor, about this. We both noticed that the respective fields that we are studying are not really enough for us to be even remotely interested in the literature. At least, not enough to read that stuff on our own time. For me, that's almost as good as saying I'll never make it in the field. For an example, the guys and girls on the TV show Apprentice or Diili make me want to puke. But then again, reality TV in general does that to me.

I suppose that if you want to be really good at something you should prolly have natural crawing to do so - and some capacity for learning it. Right now I'm basically semi-interested, and am just stuffing all these courses and all this material down my throat. I'm getting through the exams with decent grades, but forgetting most of it inside a few weeks. Economy and how money makes the world go around are still interesting topics to me. But perhaps my real interests lie elsewhere? I originally explained it to myself that it is better to keep history as a hobby, since I didn't like the idea of being forced to read about time periods and people that did not interest me. I don’t see how I figured that it would be more enjoyable to be required to read about shit that didn’t interest me half the time. Go figure! I have to end this rant, as it’s too long and I have to get back to the English Project.

My blood pressure is slightly on the rise, by the way. Is it possible that my body finds stress un-agreeable?

Telegram

Priorities elsewhere. Holiday starting soon. English project dragging behind. Work tomorrow.

Week went by

Hello there. Happy womens day, to those of you who it applies (I guess only one girl's reading this blog.) I've been keeping busy. School sucks as usual, it's taking up most of my time. So far no summerjob, but I've scouted quite a few potential candidates. I may end up working for the city of helsinki, of all places. Let's see what happens. I'm gonna send out a bunch of applications in the next couple of days..

Today was my investment's exam. I'm expecting somewhere between a 2 and a 4. We'll see. Next midterm is Business strategies. Enough of school. I've started reading Peter Englund's Poltava. Seems pretty nice. I've gone through three of his other books, and they've all been absolutely superb. If you ever want to get into the 30 years war & the 1600-1700 era, he's your man.

I bought Minna some tulips, and did the dishes, but ran out of energy and bought a frozen pizza for supper, sorry hon :P It's gonna be another of those busy weeks when it seems that you have no time for anything that you would like to do (outside your compulsory commitments).

I'm looking forward to week twelve, when I'll have a luxurious week's holiday. May it come soon.