Only slightly bent

Earlier this evening, I was carrying a box of stuff to our basement store, accessible through another staircase. Outside, I was greeted by an approximately 10-year-old boy (give or take a few years) – who in Finland never talk to strangers unless they want something. So as he said “Hi! Where are you going?” my mind started racing – what’s it to him where I’m going? Does he want to get in the building? What for? To do something evil? Is he going to beg for something? What’s up with this kid? He must have something on his mind..

Before I could utter an answer, he clarifies “Which staircase?” and I mutter “Umm, B” while walking towards the door. So he whips out his key, opens the lock and holds the door open for me. Totally flabbergasted at this stage, I manage to say “thanks”. Next he cheerfully says “You’re welcome! Have a nice evening!” and luckily my reflex reply of “Thanks, you too!” works because other parts of my brain were trying to solve a mystery; what is this? Is this a trick of some kind? Why’s he being so nice? Am I on candid camera?

From my astonishment I finally came to the conclusion that he was just an abnormally nice kid. There was nothing wrong with him, there might not even have been any strange errors in the space-time-continuum – I had actually encountered an extroverted, polite & nice small person.

Sadly, it says something about the society when something as simple as a nice kid seems entirely out of place and a strange thing. Nice people should be the norm, shouldn’t they? Unfortunately, at least here, they’re not.

A while ago my bank approached me – by phone – with a “great” offer on a credit card. The only problem? I already had the card and their marketing department seemed to be blissfully unaware of that.

Now it was my ISP’s turn; yesterday they sent me an ad letter (and personally me, too, with my name & all on the envelope so it was not mass-advertising as such) offering – you guessed it – exactly the same service I have had for years!

This is pathetic. Just how difficult can it be to have some basic level of intelligence in ones Customer Relationship Management system? How long do we have to wait for Finnish companies to learn even the very basic CRM best practices?

Every now and then I find it amazing that I am no longer a twenty-something, someone who could be considered “youth” under some age categorization. Instead, I believe I now belong to the vague category of “young adult”. I hope there’s plenty of learning ahead on this road called life, but below are some of the observations I have made so far are, along with quotes by people who can put things better than I can:

On People: No matter what you do, it’s impossible to please everyone. It doesn’t matter what you say or how you do something or don’t do something, there will be people in the world who are offended to some degree. This unfortunate human trait leads to the fact that everyone just can’t get along – and that, with all of our imperfections and flared-up emotions, leads to much worse things. I believe that is one of the single greatest flaws in humanity, the inability to just get along and live peacefully with other people.

And one should note that this is not necessarily a call for greater tolerance to everything, although tolerance in general would certainly help in some respects. But it’s also true is that too much inexcusible behavior is already tolerated, “understood” or explained away.

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

– Krishnamurti

On Beauty: The world is full of beautiful, wonderful things that many people cannot see. It just takes a different perspective – beauty is ubiquitous and no matter how it seems, there’s still a lot beauty left. And if you can’t find it, why not try to create it?

On Destruction: On all scales from petty vandalism to essentially raping the planet, many of the beautiful things are being destroyed at a pace that is nothing short of appalling. I can only wonder if humanity as a whole realizes its utter dependence on earth in time to prevent a near-total die-off. As I noted on the book review of Collapse, the world is on a non-sustainable course. The sort-of good thing is that the situation will get resolved. Whether or not it will get resolved in civilized manner without the death of billions of its human inhabitants is an entirely another matter, one that despite popular opinion, is not SEP (Somebody Else’s Problem).

After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say “I want to see the manager.”

– William S. Burroughs

It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard
the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for
blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.

– William Tecumseh Sherman, Union General
in the American Civil War (1820-1891)


On fairness: The world is not a fair place by any standards and very few people get everything they want or deserve – and those that do, it’s mostly by chance. We who live in the “western” world have so far been mostly isolated from basic problems such as getting access to clean water and enough food; yet, the world has more than enough problems for everyone. There is a good prayer on this topic that has a lot of truth in it:

God, grant me the strength to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Life has been quite busy lately, but there’s always time to occasionally squeeze in a movie or a TV series episode or two. Most recently, I’m hooked on Grey’s Anatomy, but more about that a bit later. Also, the third season of Desperate Housewives is about to begin and I’ve heard a lot of good things about Prison Break which I haven’t gotten around to at all yet.

Anyhow, here’s the round-up from the past couple of months. This time around there’s a short review of a TV series, too – one which hasn’t been shown in Finland so far, so a spoiler warning is in order.

She’s the Man

I went to see She’s the Man with some reservations; despite consciously trying to avoid reading movie reviews these days, I had bumped into many that slammed this one. While experience should tell me that it’s a sign of a good movie, I was hesitant. The basic plot is that Viola is desperate for playing soccer and the girls team is cancelled… so she joins the boy’s team, disguised as her brother Sebastian.

That hesitation, luckily, proved unnecessary and She’s the Man was very positive surprise. While I’m pretty sure there was a very limited amount of original or otherwise brilliant elements in the movie, but it was a good, fun feel-good romantic comedy. For that, I’ll give it 4 out of 5.

Hell’s Kitchen, season 2

Hell’s Kitchen was one of the best TV serieses of last year, and I was really looking forward to this summers season. Gordon Ramsey really can turn on the heat for the candidates in the kitchen.. I wish I could apply the show but alas, it’s for americans only. Anyway, during the first few episodes, expected characters were gotten rid of and obviously some favorites surface. In the long run I was amazed that the arrogant Sara managed to hold on as long as she did, but was glad to see her go when she finally did.

So it was Virginia and Heather for the final two, and in my opiniong Heather totally deserved to win. Virginia I’m sure is a good chef, but she always seems to crack under pressure.. her admiration of Ramsey was apparent from even her final comments after hearing about her “loss”, which was good for her in that case. All in all a thoroughly enjoyable season and luckily, there’s a third season coming up next summer.. 5/5.

Elizabethtown

Life is not that great for Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom) – he has just lost his job after making a colossal mistake, costing the company hundreds of millions of dollars and is about to become ridiculed throughout the industry. As if that’s not bad enough, his suicide attempt is interrupted by news of his semi-estranged fathers’ sudden death. Fully intending to soon come back home and finish his interrupted plan, he heads to his fathers small Kentucky hometown, Elizabethtown, to make funeral arrangements.

On the way there, he meets an eccentric flight attendand Claire (Kirsten Dunst) who gives him thorough instructions on how to find Elizabethtown, among other things. What Drew finds in Elizabethtown is not what he expected – there’s a whole small city mourning his father and welcoming him there with open arms. Later, bewildered about all that’s going on, Drew calls Claire and the two end up talking hours and eventually meeting – but do things really click between them or not? Elizabethtown starts out feeling a somewhat strange movie, but ends up feeling great. Dunst is wonderful in her role as Claire and the rest of the cast is not too bad either. 4½ out of 5.

The Break-Up

The idea had some promise; describing what happens when a couple still lives under the same roof after breaking up. However, The Break-Up is clumsy from the beginning – the initial break-up is dumb and not a real break-up since neither really wants to end the relationship.. Then comes a series of dumb and dumber moves by both parties until there is very little left in the relationship to salvage; it is only at the very end that the two can talk on the level that they should’ve been talking all along.

While I have no doubt that such non-communicating couples exist, it makes one wonder how they stayed together so long to begin with. Not without a funny moment or two, but generally not so great acting and the movie comes across as just a series of ploys instead of a real movie with developing characters. As such, an average 3 out of 5.

Failure to Launch

Tripp is 35 and living at home. Home where he’s not wanted anymore and his parents are starting to realize he may need a big kick in his butt to get him to move on. So that’s where Paula comes in, a professional “interventionist”, who Tripp’s parents hire to get Tripp to move out of the house.

Things’d be boring if everything worked smoothly, so of course they don’t. Tripp and his past turn out to be more complicated than Paula is used to seeing in her clientele – not to mention that she might actually be falling for him. Further complicating things can be found from Tripp’s friends and Paula’s roommate, who all manage to get involved in a messy situation. Failure to Launch was a nice enough comedy, but nothing too special – another average movie at 3 out of 5.

Anja & Viktor

A Danish movie with a promising idea; high-school sweethearts Anja and Viktor face a crisis when Anja finds a good job and moves downtown; her life is suddenly filled with exciting work and attention from men – including her ex who now works with her, to Viktor’s great disappointment. Viktor decides to solve their problems by becoming a janitor in the house Anja lives in, but somehow that doesn’t ease things.. soon feeling estranged and hurt, Viktor ends up doing all kinds of dumb things. With Anja given a chance to go to New York for some months, can they work things out or is it over?

Like I said, the idea was promising, but that’s about where the positives end. There’s a confusing and entirely unbelievable sub-plot of Viktor’s younger brother and his friend doings weird stuff and the movie would’ve been better off without them. Also, the characters are left very shallow without much depth. With a few tweaks the movie could’ve been a good one, but now it was a bit of a shallow and disjoined story and as such, I’ll give it 2- out of 5.

Ice Princess

Physics nerd Casey (Michelle Trachtenberg) is just what her feminist mother would want her to be – excellent in science and on her way to Harvard. Only there’s a glitch; in reality, she loves figure skating and decides to pursue that dream. Since her mother is vehemently against skating, she has to do it secretly. Eventually, of course, her mother also finds out about it and is enraged – but does she realize that Harvard may not be Casey’s dream but, in fact, hers?

Ice Princess is a typical Disney movie – nice, clean & fun although without great surprises. Still, not a bad movie at 3½ out of 5.

La Tigre E La Neve (The Tiger and the Snow)

Attilio (played by the director Roberto Benigni) is a divorced man who is desperately in love with Vittoria (Nicoletta Braschi) – the problem is that Vittoria doesn’t want to have anything to do with Attilio who is constantly following her and spying on her. When Attilio finds out that Vittoria has been injured in war-ridden Baghdad, he tries to beat all odds to get there and save her.

La Tigre E La Neve could’ve been a much better movie if Benigni would’ve been able to contain his acting a bit better – his hyperactive and fidgety style of acting goes, IMO, a bit over the top. I think the movie is a mixture of a romantic comedy, satire and drama, but the combination doesn’t always mix that well. Some scenes especially in Iraq are so obviously fake and over-the-top that it detracts from the overall credibility of the movie. It does have its surprises though, and if you tend to like Benigni’s movies, you’ll probably like this one too. In my books, however, an average 3 out of 5.

I was really close of not posting this earlier, but a recent development on the travel card development pushed it over the “publishing edge” so to say. The subject at hand is the YTV Travel Card – a wireless card that is used in public transporation systems in the Helsinki area; the old instructions can be found here. With some years of experience behind now, I think we can say that the YTV travel card has been somwhat of a disaster for the council & cities involved.

The first group of problems is partly technical and partly economical; the technology chosen was proprietary and not a standard RFID technology, which has since led the system to be incredibly expensive. Moreover, the sole supplier of the cards is stopping their manufacturing, forcing the council to a) order a whole lot of of cards to cover the need for the next few years and still b) to overhaul the entire system in a few years time to something else. The latter, while also presenting an opportunity to fix the various problems, is naturally very expensive.

The second group of problems relates to usability which is, quite frankly, terrible. It should be stated right off the bat that the usage when the card is loaded with “time” is quite easy; you just show the machine your card and off you go. Thus, usage of monthly tickets is a breeze – and the reader works even if your card is in your wallet or something. I’m personally on a “monthly” ticket, so I don’t have to deal with most of the problems I talk about here. But many people do.

Anyway, the device looks like this thing here on the right. There are some buttons, lights and a display. And lots of problems:

• The basic logic: It works so that you show your card to the machine by placing it in the middle of the buttons, thus effectively blocking out the buttons you are supposed to be pressing to choose a ticket. Oh, except for some tickets which you have to insert in a slot at the bottom of the machine.

   

• The symbols: 0, 1 and 2. Intuitively they mean nothing to people. Wouldn’t it have been better to use icons or simplified maps instead? Maybe they make sense when one is explained what they mean: 1 buys an intracity ticket, 2 buys an intercity ticket and 0 buys a tram ticket. Nope, they still don’t make sense.

   

• The tactile sensation: Sometimes the buttons need only a light touch to register the trip. Sometimes they need repeated pounding with such force that most senior citizens are incapable of pressing the button. This easily causes multiple purchases and general aggravation.

   

First the card readers in buses were in a location where the drivers couldn’t see – this caused the number of passangers without a proper ticket to rise by 30%. Then the readers were moved up front where the driver could see them – at a cost of €350,000. This kind of mishap could’ve been prevented with proper field testing in the first place.

Now the latest idea is to come up with additional buttons, intuitively called “L” and “3“. As there are now 5 buttons for a 4-button system, this will cause there to be three kinds of systems; one found in buses and trains, one in trams and one on the Suomenlinna ferries.

What do you think the “L” stands for? Could it be short for Lähi or Local? Maybe you can buy an intra-city ticket with that. Wrong. Actually, L buys you a ticket that’s good in Espoo, Vantaa, Kerava, Kirkkonummi but not in Helsinki. 3, on the other hand, buys you a ticket that’s good in all areas, including Kirkkonummi and Kerava. The validity also takes a step backwards – except for the tram ticket, a ticket used to be valid on all forms of transportation in all cities involved: trains, buses, trams, subway, even the Suomenlinna ferry. Except now with Kirkkonummi, it’s valid for trains only. With the new buttons, some simple text is also added on the buttons to explain what they mean – in Finnish and Swedish, which of course is completely useless to all foreigners who would most need the help.

After all this complaining, I’m sure a lot of people who like the system would spring forward to defend it. And sure, when it works, it works pretty okay. But unfortunately the truth is that people eventually learn to use even inconvenient systems when they “have” to; the fact that many people learn to adjust to deal with the system is not a sign that the system is well-designed.