Bad English.

Language is a key part of my everyday worklife. I listen and speak to people, read and write stuff constantly. While I get to speak my own mother tongue at home with my kids, that is not the language I usually work in. Neither is Finnish, the dominant native language in my home country where I live and work, but most of my work day is communicating in English. The multicultural and international environment is great, I truly enjoy it - and don’t mind a slight misunderstanding here or there, especially while talking you can quickly double check things.

But where this becomes a bit awkward is on the official side. When documents like diplomas, titles, letters etc need to be written in English - still a foreign language to most of us, a very small percentage here are native speakers, errors are not as easy to brush off as something equally funny and cute. They are embarrassing.

The question rises, what should be the demand level for such documents then? Finland has been bilingual for years, so we do have a tradition to translate stuff - have official documents in multiple languages. We should know this already. But also the quality of the language used in the “other domestic” language has deteriorated. Does it matter? 

I think it does. It’s not that I want to police the use of language. I truly don’t mind a punctuation error or word spelled wrong, but the accumulation of these errors does worry me, because language is the way we communicate - and if we ignore the noise in this communcation, also our capability to understand each other is eventually hampered. This will start to happen at the stage when words are interpreted wrong, semantics become obfuscated or sentence structures turn their intended meaning upside down. We just need to pay attention to the language we use. Nothing more, nothing less. And ask for advice, double check, if not sure.

Blogging is so yesterday...

Well, maybe not quite that - but in a way it’s not as much part of the flow and signals that are trending now. Why is that? Well it takes a bit more to start writing an entry in a blog that just not a response to something, and even if we complain about the short size of a tweet, it actually also lowers the threshold to start writing.

Of course we love to complain that a tweet is too short for whatever we want to say, but therein lies the beaty. We can blame it, not us.

Today I read that political blogs in Finland are becoming more professional and less personal. Good news! It is relevant and essential for a democracy that a political debate is open, transparent and well documented. Our elected representatives should be expected to be able to formulate longer than one sentence opinions. Based on those views and opinions we can make our own judgements in the next elections. Campaigns are superficial, this is where the action is - in real life.

Time to do more research for a change!

This august was the tenth year I was working as a teacher in the Media Lab at the University of Art and Design Helsinki, now called Aalto University. It has been a great time and I truly enjoy the job. For the last few years I’ve been in charge of the MA in New Media programme, and while it’s been great too - the stuff I enjoy the most is experimenting, exploring and working with all these great people, brilliant students and colleagues.

The bureaucratic tasks are really not my cup of tea, even if I don’t mind doing them and naturally see the reason for such taks as well. With the exceptions of scheduling - creating calendars is like a big puzzle!

Now writing in past tense might be a bit wrong, I still do enjoy this very much and look forward to continuing the same for as long as I can - but right now I’m going to take a few months of to really focus on research.

It’s not a long time, but I hope to get my algorithm for narrative inertia one major step forward, maybe some tools and articles written along the way.

Lawnmowers?

In July it’s full vacation time here in Finland - people leave the city to go out to their summerhouses or cottages to live a simple life. Some do it less simple than others, but most important to the equation is the change to the daily urban routine.

A big part of a place for the summer is to be close to nature - maybe the sea or forest, maybe a garden - or both. For myself it’s always been self evident that I need to spend some time in the archipelago, and my current place is a small house on an island with a huge lawn. With huge I mean relatively huge, not a football field - but almost. It’s a lot of work to keep the grass short - and letting it just grow is really not an option for many reasons, one of the biggest one being the lawn becoming populated with deer-ticks.

But lawnmowers burning gasolene, making a lot of noise and taking up a huge amount of time is a challenge I want to solve. I’ve been looking at robots to do the job for quite a while - however they are not cheap and it’s hard to tell if they actually do a decent job on this challenging lawn.

This weekend I gave in, and ordered a solar powered Husqvarna. I don’t expect it to fully run on solar energy, but if it helps it’s a plus - it’s quieter, greener and automatic. What more can one wish for? As an added bonus I hope that the little fellow running around the grass will keep unwanted wild guests away too - like snakes, rodents and deer. Yes, deer, they are pretty - but carry ticks and eat all our plants.

Let’s see if the thing works. 

A "Steve Jobs" WiFi-moment...

Well, it feels slightly better to label a situation where a live performance is interrupted by a WiFi overload crash.

Extremely annoying. Could have been avoided, but not detected without proper stress testing. I was caught off guard by the limits of the technology, even after years of experience. Damn.

Apart from that the performance went really well, the backend server worked, people were engaged in the interaction and the overall feeling was good.

The learning experience once again was the weakest link will break. This time the only module without redundancy was the router, which had served me for years without a glitch. I expected a network slowdown, but not a downright crash. Repetative crashes actually. But after the first we kept rebooting it during the breaks.

That the same thing in a different scale happened about a year ago for Apple is not much comfort. They should’ve known too.