You named it what?

The allergy season is thankfully waning for me personally as birch winds down its bloom. “Bloom” sounds better than it is really – a blooming birch is just ugly, contrary to many other blooming plants. Anyhow, allergy season brings with it ads for all the allergy drugs out there. Like this one, Senirex.

Senirex?! Who in their right mind names a drug Senirex? Is it just me or does it conjure up images of something senile rather than an allergy aid? The ad even looks like it’s targeted for the 90+-year-olds, down to the coloration and all.

So you can park but can you read?

All too rarely – once a year, I kid you not – our street is washed and the cars have to be moved away for that time. Despite plenty of warning, the car owners are apparently blind around where we live since as you can see, the street is full of parked cars during the parking ban.

Really, is once a year too much for you to move your cars?

Luckily they got towed away, but they didn’t get towed away far enough – the custom in Finland is just to move them to the closest available spot. Nevertheless, a hint to the car owners: the guys towing the cars weren’t exactly gentle, so if you care about your vehicle, move it yourself.

GSM is dead, long live GSM!

When we moved offices, books concerning GSM suddenly found themselves in the trash bin. Though I’m not sure if you can read anything into this largely symbolic gesture, as the books probably hadn’t been touched for years to begin with..

Anyhow, recently raised discussion of GSM’s death may be a bit premature – from this yearly update of fascinating data from TKK and the Finnish mobile operators, it can be seen that still 82% of the phones in Finland are GSM (i.e. non-3G) devices. Check out the report though, there’s plenty of other (more interesting) data points, such as:

  • 95% of the packet data traffic is to the Internet – so much for the success of operator portals.
  • Computers cause 92% of the traffic in mobile networks; perhaps the rumors of mobile broadband taking off aren’t that far off after all.
  • Total mobile network packet data traffic increased almost 11-fold in just a year. Let’s see how long that trend holds – even if it slows down a lot, we may actually be seeing 100-fold traffic increases from the 2006 levels in the not-too-distant future.