Only slightly bent

At the Helsinki Fair Centre, there was a dangerous combination of events this weekend – a Book Fair and a Food Fair. Two of my favorite things together under one roof, so it was obvious I had to go spend a day there.

One of the most interesting places on the food side was Hackman’s show kitchen where several events took place, obviously allowing the audience to taste whatever had been made – from there I picked up a couple of good reindeer fry recipes (and some frozen raindeer). Aki Wahlman was the host and he turned out to be a relatively funny guy.

There were several tastings of all kinds of things on the food side. What was interesting to see is that most of the people cooking “real” food (of whom there were too few) didn’t miss the essential step of tasting the food before serving the visitors. On the other hand, we had these other guys like the cook wokking stuff at the Blue Dragon stand. As their staple is selling prepared sauces and spices in a bag, they apparently don’t think it’s worth tasting what you’re serving. Subsequently and unsurprisingly, their food didn’t taste that great.

By the time I made it to the book side – the bigger of the two fairs – the halls were already packed with people. Visiting all the exhibitors proved an impossible task at this point.

One problem with having a book fair in Finland is that most of the books are either in Finnish or Finnish. For some reason most of the books I’m interested in aren’t originally Finnish books and as the message always suffers in translation, I prefer the original versions. In fiction, some things just don’t translate and in non-fiction, things always get published a year or two later than the originals.

Considering the theme of things, the most dangerous areas were the ones with books on food. Amazingly, I managed to restrain myself from buying a single book. Having quite a few books on the “to-read” (and, well, “to-cook”) list helped in that respect.

All in all definately two fairs worth a visit – and surprisingly easy on the wallet. I would’ve welcomed more wider scope on the food side and more English-language books on the book side, but this wasn’t bad either.

Ignorance is bliss?

When you’re faced with a problem, who do you turn to for help? Chances are that the best advice comes from experts of the particular field that your problem is in. This is also the case with climate change and a bunch of other problems of the world.

But what good is an expert opinion when they’re consistently being ignored? Case in point: the cod stocks of the North Sea where a complete ban on cod fishing is – again – proposed for next year to allow the stock to recover above the minimum level. Considering the effect that the fish stock collapse of Georges Bank had (i.e. it may never again recover), this sounds like sound advice that should be acted on.

A ban has been proposed every year since 2001, and the advice is being ignored. Again. Why? From the news article:



The Scottish Fisherman’s Federation said “draconian cuts” to allowances would have a serious impact on the Scottish fleet.


Well no shit, of course it would. But try having your fish quota cut to zero for the foreseeable future instead of just one year. It again comes down to actually knowing what we need to do to continue sustainably but choosing to ignore it.

Call for manufacturing de-globalization

As energy (and particularly, fuel) prices rise, shipping stuff from place A to place B will become more and more expensive. Considering that in the long term this is a rather certain trend, it’s amazing that companies are still offshoring manufacturing to China or other “cheap” places, completely dismissing the rising transportation costs in the future.

So it seems inevitable that more and more manufacturing will sooner or later move (back) closer to the consumers – and there are some signs of this already happening. The trouble is that once you ramp down production of goods in one country, it can be very difficult to bring it back in even when necessary.

WWF Publishes Living Planet report

Read it. After discovering that Finland pretty much tops the list of the countries with the biggest ecological footprint, Finns have been busy finding mistakes and faults in the report – some justified, most not. While in many respects Finland is in a decent position (e.g. our biocapacity is much bigger than our footprint), it’s no reason for complacency.

Also just to see how much debt you’re incurring on our planet, calculate your own ecological footprint here.

A couple of weeks ago I was browsing aimlessly in a Barnes & Noble store when Let my people go surfing caught my attention. Granted, it was the title and the picture that first sparked my attention but just by reading the back cover it became obvious that the book is not about surfing at all. What it is, however, is a fascinating mix of an autobiography, a business book and a blueprint for corporate responsibility written by the founder of Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard.

(To those who don’t know, Patagonia is a clothing & outdoors equipment company that is known particularly for their environmental awareness – I didn’t know much about them before reading this book but now greatly admire what they’re doing)

The first section of the book covers the history of Patagonia the company, from the one-person part-time job to $230M/year enterprise it is now. The rest of the book is devoted to Patagonia’s philosophies and how they are in practise manifested – while it may sound like a corporate ad when stated like this, it’s far from it. Yvon Chouinard is the first to admit that his business is damaging the environment, but it’s a damage he would like to minimize and IMHO does a great job at it. From donating 1% of their total sales to environmental causes to using only organic cotton to subsidizing employee purchases of fuel-efficient hybrid vehicles and much more, one can only hope that they succeed in setting an example that others will follow.

Well, actually, that’s putting it wrong: we can’t just _hope_ someone else is going to take care of the environment, but we must do our own part. It’s not a SEP – this is one of those situations where it’s true that if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. Chouinard summarizes Patagonia’s philosophy as follows, and it’s one that every one of us can take on individually also:

1. Lead an examined life
2. Clean up our own act
3. Do our penance
4. Support civil democracy
5. Influence other companies

One truly sad thing is that Patagonia can do all that they are doing because they’re a privately held company. It would be very difficult in current economic atmosphere for a publicly traded company to accomplish even half of what Patagonia is doing – simply thanks to stockholder greed for short-term profits and short-sightedness. Perhaps in the future it’ll be possible for a public company to be a part of the 1% For The Planet alliance without causing a stockholder rebellion. What is remarkable, however, is that whenever Patagonia has done the right thing, it has proven to be a financial success for the company – maybe the others are just scared of trying? It’s too bad the following truth as put by David Browser hasn’t been ingrained in the minds of most companies:

There is no business to be done on a dead planet.

Even if you don’t care about how Patagonia or other companies conduct their business and what impacts they have on the environment – which, btw, you should care about – Let my people go surfing is something you should still read, if only for hopefully raising your environmental awareness on what kind of impact the production and consumption of everything has on the earth.

Then again, if you are involved in business and can impact perhaps some of your companies policies, this book offers some great suggestions and examples on where to begin – from HR policies to supplier relationships. There is a wealth of material and examples on how things impacts the environment, on the true cost of many materials and a lot of other fascinating things.

In short, “Let my people go surfing” should be mandatory reading for everyone. 5/5.

It’s often said that triple-play brings benefits to consumers by lowering the aggregate cost of the services. But is that really true? This ad here on the right is from an ongoing Time Warner Cable promotion – let’s see what’s behind it by taking it apart and compare similar offerings if purchased separately.

Here’s what the basic “starting from” $99.95/month package from TWC includes:

• TV: cable with 130 channels. Pretty much your basic cable package in the US.

• Internet: a “high-speed” connection, they say. But when you read the fine print, their definition of high-speed is a downright pathetic 768kbps/128kbps.

• Phone: a basic VoIP phone with unlimited calls to US, Canada & Puerto Rico.

If that doesn’t sound very enticing, what alternatives would one have? Here’s one option that you can get if you buy similar stuff separately from other providers – assuming, of course, that you have the luxury of choice:

• TV: comparing TV packages is a bit tricky as the channels differ and most of it’s crap anyway, but let’s take Dish Network‘s 120-channel package as a comparison here. That goes for $33.95 / month.

• Internet: there are plenty of providers out there for Internet access – let’s take AT&T as our comparison here, who offer 1.5Mbps/384kbps DSL at $19.95/month.

• Phone: there is no shortage of VoIP providers either. Vonage offers a $24.95/month package that includes unlimited calls also to some European countries, in addition to US, Canada and Puerto Rico. If you went with Sunrocket, you’d get unlimited US calls for $17/month on a 12-month contract.

The above single-picks sum up to $71 / month. That’s almost $30 less than the great “triple-play” offer, plus you get a much faster Internet connection plus you have a lot more flexibility. Now $99.95 suddenly doesn’t seem so cheap anymore, does it? Well, I’m not sure if it ever did – what’s worse, the $99/month is a promotional rate with a 12-month contract and it’ll end up costing even more later on.

I’m starting to think that the whole point of triple-play bundles is just to confuse the subscriber sufficiently so you can charge more, not less, for the same services.

Would you be willing to pay $30/month extra for a single bill for worse services? I didn’t think so. Nice to see businesses again helping people make better choices. Not.

At some points during the past years, I thought I’d never see this day. Paradoxically, many other people have assumed that I’ve seen this day a long time ago. But now it’s actually here: I have finished my Master’s Thesis in Computer Science. It has gone through all the hoops: researched, written, finished, polished, approved, printed & bound – there’s even a press release out (in Finnish only, sorry).

The title is somewhat self-explanatory: “Service-based requirements for future mobile networks” and you can download the thesis from the Helsinki University e-thesis service. In essence, it calls into question the need for future mobile networks (especially those beyond HSPA) based on service requirements; i.e. what will the services really require?

(People interested only in the ICT-stuff can stop reading here, only personal retrospections from here on)

I think the thesis reflects, to a certain extent, the fact that I don’t like to delve years in some obscurely small technological niche. While done for the Department of Computer Science, it contains elements from a few other fields also – all in all, the hundred or so reference sources contain academic journals from IEEE Communications Magazine to Journal of Business Research as well as analyst reports, blog posts and books.

Along with the thesis, a chapter that has lasted most of my adult life winds to an end: studying. I no longer (or yet, whichever) officially study anything at a university. I have nothing but good to say about the University of Helsinki and our Department of Computer Science, both have been great places.

I started at the university in 1995, but getting from there to here has been characterized by a number of detours – army for a year, living abroad for a couple of years and, most of all, work. Working full-time from my 2nd year onwards made the journey to graduation a long one, but also a uniquely rewarding one. I have been privileged to all along have one foot in academia and another in business and I dare say both domains have benefited from this arrangement quite a bit. I hope I can still maintain that mindset and the two, sometimes very different, perspectives even when I don’t officially study anything.

Of course there have been times when I’ve been cursing myself for not getting the studies done and over with sooner, but looking back now, I’m kind of glad I didn’t. It’s done now, and the time I have used for studying can now be spent on other, hopefully equally rewarding adventures. Of course, as I’m curious by nature, a lot of the time will incidentally still be spent on studying – I just won’t be getting any credits for that.

.. Brazil, or so the saying goes. Luckily there was no baggage lost this time around, but there wasn’t much of it to get lost either. I think my recent trip to New York was the first time I’ve visited another continent and spent less time on the ground than it took for the round-trip travel.

One of the reasons the traveling itself took so long was the fault of what I consider to be one of the worst airports in the world: London Heathrow. Things never work as they’re supposed to in Heathrow. It’s gotten to the point where I’m actually unnaturally positively surprised when some small thing ends up going okay there – I now always expect, and often get, the worst possible quality of service at Heathrow.

So what’s wrong with it, you may asK? Well, let’s just mention a couple of things here. First, queues. There sure is no shortage of them – the other day when transferring via “Flight Connections”, I had to queue for:

1. The inter-terminal transfer bus – because Heathrow hasn’t managed to come up with anything resembling a modern transportation system: 15 minutes.
2. Getting off the bus at the destination terminal, because other buses blocked the way: 10 minutes.
3. Queuing to the escalator: 15 mins
4. .. which lead to another queue, the purpose of which is to remind everyone about the no-liquids policy and to wait to get into another queue: 30mins
5. Queueing for the security check: 30mins

… finding out that your flight is delayed after worrying about it through all those queues: priceless.

Another day, on the way back from NYC, there had reportedly been some fog in the area. Fog. In London. Wow, who would’ve thought that’s possible?! So thanks to some morning fog, traffic was backed up. And when air traffic is backed up, it calls for circling in a holding pattern for a cool hour or two, which is not nearly as much fun as it sounds. As it seems that Heathrow is operating at the very limits of its capacity on a good day, even a slight glitch brings about chaos. Chaos that manifests itself in, among other things, the following ways:

• Hours and hours of delays in getting on the plane because the flight is delayed.

• Once on the plane (which was, again, delayed for hours) we have to wait for food as the curiously ironically named GateGourmet was apparently entirely unprepared for the plane to depart that soon. This caused us to wait for the food for another hour while sitting on the plane. The food, when it eventually did arrive, was unsurprisingly not worth the wait.

• When we start to taxi towards our runway, not only are there more than a dozen planes in the takeoff queue before us, but the air traffic controllers have decided that it’s the runway to be used for landings now, too, of which there are more than enough. Of course that translates to another hour sitting on the tarmac.

I hate Heathrow.

As I’m apparently in a bit of a complaining mood, let’s take one stab at New York, too. You know how people say it’s a city that never sleeps? Well, that’s just a load of bull. Try going to e.g. the Disney Store or the Quiksilver store at midnight – they’re closed. As are practically all the other shops. I mean if you pay for one of the most expensive retail spaces in the world, you’d think it’d be worth it to have the store open 24/7, but no.. Hours as pathetic as 10am-8pm or even 6pm are not uncommon even in the heart of Manhattan.

Having said that, New York is still a great city. And however short the visit is, it’s always thoroughly more enjoyable than, oh, say, visiting Heathrow.