Only slightly bent

Nobody wants to be a victim of a crime or other nasty incidents. While most people are still honest in that you don’t have to be constantly on high alert, some crime avoidance strategies are in order especially when you’re traveling in some unfamiliar areas. But when you start thinking about what you need to look out for, the strategies for crime avoidance are surprisingly different depending on where you’re going.

“Common sense”-advice such as being careful with your belongings, not going in dark alleys flashing lots of jewerly, not keeping all your money in one place, using safety deposit boxes when available, not carrying lots of cash and so on and so on are appropriate all around the world. But that’s just the obvious stuff and in many places you don’t really need to be that careful about pickpockets. For example:

• In the US one can, in most cities, avoid 95% of the crime by simply avoiding certain neighborhoods of the city. That’s usually not a very difficult thing to do and crime generally is really not as common as people often believe.
• In Finland, you should withdraw all the cash you’ll need before getting wasted in a bar and then wobbling to an ATM after a dozen beers. That’s begging for trouble. Or you could also maybe try not to get wasted… Similarly, night-time food or taxi queues are good places to pick a fight.
• In many crowded countries/places, pickpockets are your biggest concern. So no loose handbags or wallets in the back pockets.
• In very crowded places, the crowd itself is dangerous. Masses of people often behave seemingly irrationally and it’s happened more than once that stampedes kill people when panic ensues. Not long ago, a thousand people died in Iraq when a simple rumor of a suicide bomber panicked a crowd and people jumped off of a bridge and trampled each other.
• Then we have the so-called natural disasters that have been dominating the news lately. The good news is that weather-related phenomena are usually rather easy to avoid: when the time comes, leave the area. When warned, protect yourself. Earthquakes are a bit trickier than that, but who forces you to live directly on top of a fault line?
• The most dangerous places like your home, driving in traffic and other everyday things can also be made safer by some simple decisions; don’t smoke in bed (better yet, at all!), take care of your electrical appliances, have a working fire alarm + an extuingisher, get a safe car, don’t drive tired or when drinking, eating, using a phone or doing any other stupid activity etc etc. Basically things that should be common knowledge but surprisingly often aren’t.
• When flying, check the airline’s safety record. You don’t want to be flying on an airline that is black-listed somewhere; the EU-wide black list should be a good resource soon. Also, do not leave your baggage unattended – something we hear at airports ad nauseam. Essentially it’s good advice though: not because somebody would slip a bomb there or steal it, but because the security personnel is likely to take it away and you’ll end up with all kinds of hassle trying to get your own things back.
• Some interesting tips that I ran across in the Finnish Turvallisuus-magazine dealt with violent people and more specifically, type II alcoholics of whom Finland sometimes seems half-filled with. People of this type behave erratically and violently when their blood sugar levels crash after the spike caused by drinking – if you work in e.g. a customer service, it might be good to have some fruit juice readily available on the desk that you can offer people. This will get their blood sugar levels back on track. Another good tip was to keep your hands visible at all times as a delusional person may think you’re reaching for a weapon even if you reach for the mentioned fruit juice.

And just as an additional thought, practically nowhere – and I repeat nowhere, with the possible exception of Iraq – is terrorism your number one safety concern.

Finally, not all things are avoidable no matter what you do – so a healthy attitude to take is probably to assume that eventually you will be a victim of a crime, small or large. One should also understand that possessions can be replaced, life cannot – and that panicking is no good whatever happens. What you can do is some minor prevention: take two-sided copies of all your credit cards, passports and such items and keep the copies in a safe place. Having the copies makes the act of cancelling and re-ordering everything much easier.

It occurred to me that around these days I have been writing this blog for a year already. I had a moblog earlier, too, but the technology was not quite mature for that at the time (and, IMO, still isn’t to the extent I need it to be) so that died off after a few months of experimentation. This, however, has become a convenient new location for my random rantings, thoughts as well as a photography archive and a place for other contents that used to reside on my homepage.

Through the blog I’ve gotten to know a few interesting people (you know who you are) and that alone has really made it worth the trouble. The blog has also been a great place to write down my thoughts on all kinds of issues – some of them have been made into posts, some have been deemed stillborn and deleted before publishing. I realize Only slightly bent might be easier to read if it was focused on one specialized subject, but that hasn’t happened nor is likely to ever happen – for better or worse, the mishmash of topics is bound to continue.

As the seasonal holidays seem to be creeping up on us, here’s a great wish I was sent last year (original author unknown). With this, I thank everyone for reading Only slightly bent during the past year or so & I’m looking forward to many more (years and readers)!

Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, non-addictive, gender neutral, celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practised within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all and a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2006, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures and their contributions to society and without regard to the race, creed, colour, age, physical ability, religious faith, choice of computer platform or sexual orientation of the wishee.

By accepting this greeting, you are accepting these terms. This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal. It is freely transferable with no alteration to the original greeting. It implies no promise by the wishee to actually implement any of the wishes for her/himself or others, and is void where prohibited by law and is revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher.

This wish is warranted to perform as expected within the usual application of good tidings for a period of one year, or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday greeting, whichever comes first, and warranty is limited to replacement of this wish or issuance of a new wish at the sole discretion of the wisher.

Whenever a new communications service is launched, the operators are worried about those who will “abuse” the service – paradoxically, these people can also be called early adopters or power users, and there is often a very fine line separating the categories. These are the people who will sign up for an “unlimited” service assuming, perhaps naívely, that because it says unlimited, it is unlimited, and then use it accordingly.

Of course we all know there is no such thing as unlimited (even less so in wireless), and this category of people have brought down more than one unlimited flat-fee service around the world soon after they have been launched. Of course, it boils down to the fact that on a limited medium, you cannot offer an unlimited service. But then again, a flat-rate plan for something like mobile data, streaming video or browsing is exactly what the consumers like. So there must be some clause (according to traditional wisdom ideally printed in very small font) that somehow sets some limits on the unlimited.

Now the trend seems to be that such “abuse” is being limited by putting bandwidth caps on it, like Saunalahti on their €10/month all-you-can-eat mobile data plan; they reserve the right to de-prioritize the traffic and limit the throughput to 64kbps if needed. Something like that is exactly what you have to do to maintain service quality for all, but I don’t quite agree with the implementation. Instead of burying the limitations under some obscure ToS agreement, I think it should be clearly stated what constitutes as “fair use” – even if this figure would change frequently as the network improves. Something similar to Google’s GMail “space counter” at the bottom of the interface, a constantly increasing number that lets you know how much space you have at your disposal. We need a simple traffic light or a gauge for our service use.

Another key issue that needs to be tackled is a change of attitude – treating the network abusers as valuable users and early adopters much rather than something that needs to be kept away or gotten rid of. Often your “abusers” are the key people for viral marketing, the ones telling about their great experiences (providing it has been one) to other people. They can expose weak points in the service delivery by, in essence, stress-testing it. They even provide valuable data as to how more and more subscribers will behave in the future.

Because that is what will inevitably happen – if their usage wouldn’t increase, today’s abuser is merely tomorrow’s power user – and an average customer a little bit further down the road.

Photo by freefoto.com

This latest case has been brewing for some years, but it just goes to show that the world of royalty fees paid to the entertainment industry is getting weirder every day. At the same time when return-to-the-middle-ages style pillory punishments for copyright infringement are contemplated in Finland, a German Court of Appeals has ruled that it’s perfectly fine to be forced to pay copyright fees for a PC, some 12eur in this case. Beautiful. So not only is it the media and the CD/DVD-stations that are slapped with these fees but the PC, too. What’s next, speakers? Heck, why not mandate a copper and optical fiber-tax, too, since that material is often used to transmit music.

The whole thing has crossed the line to absurdity a long time ago. It’s analogous to being forced to pay road taxes to all other countries in the world since we could drive in, say, New Zealand, if we wanted to. Obviously this is not done because here on Planet Earth, it’d be considered ludicrous!

I wonder when paying all these surrogate fees will amount to legal justification for “illegal” music downloads, since the music has already been paid for in more than one way – because in the minds of people, that line has been crossed a long time ago.

The human need to categorize, sort and group things together is amazing. One of the most visible signs of this collective obsession (especially, it seems, in the marketing world) is the almost annual emergence of yet another “generation” of people or some other, smaller group classificiation. One common thing about the new “generations” is that they are usually also classified as forgotten, lost or otherwise neglected.

We have the “baby-boomers” which is still a somehow understandable generation. Then later on came the Generation X. In the past years the list has exploded: we’ve got Generation Y, Generation Z, the Internet-generation and who knows what else. As you cannot launch a “generation” every quarter without coming across as more than a little dense, other smaller groups have had to be introduced. Thus was born, for example, the metrosexuals and the resulting backlash, the retrosexuals. Now it’s all about the MeWe-generation.

Oh – give – me – a – break. Curiously lot of these new generations and groups have been utilized mostly by the marketing world, with even the terms often coined by them. Can’t have a whole generation of consumers fall outside the great advertising machine, now can we? Oh the horror to be neglected from targeted advertising!

Poor whatever, that’s us!

Photo by freefoto.com

This round of small weird things focuses on office canteen and meeting room things. There would be plenty of other weird things to tell from those environments, but these will suffice for now.

Hey kids, get out of the juice barrel!

This is the juice barrel / bowl / container / whatever at our office canteen. I don’t understand why it has to have a warning sign not to dunk kids in the juice. Well, okay, it must originate from the US, but one would think that kids who understand what the warning sign is about would be smart enough not to jump into one head first anyway. Oh the sign is meant for adults? Well they should certainly know better than to let their kids swim in their soft drink container.

We have what for dessert?

Another thing from the canteen: one day, further down the line from the kids pool..I mean juice barrel, I noticed a rather strange dessert. This amazing concoction was called lingonberry ginger-bread yoghurt. It didn’t look anything like yoghurt. Nor Ginger-breads. How about lingonberry then? Weeeell, even that’s stretching it with that color.

Disclaimer: I didn’t dare taste it, so for all I know it could’ve been delicious.

Yeah, right..

In any case I say it’s fusion kitchen gone too far.

And I thought it was supposed to shut up when you turn it off..

Eiki makes data projectors. What comes to data projectors, I’m sure they’re fine projectors that accomplish their job as any good projector would. What bothers me is their behaviour after they’re done working. When you turn off an Eiki projector, instead of shutting down, it starts emitting this infernal hum from supposedly running the fans at full speed trying to cool down the lamp as fast as possible. Fine, sure, whatever – but why does it have to do it in a fashion that makes the noise level increase multi-fold compared to its normal, lamp-on operation? I would much rather have it humming silently for 10 minutes instead of filling any room with noise for a couple of minutes. Isn’t there an option where you could change this behaviour?