World's first "Add to my WidSets" ;o)

We just launched some new features to www.widsets.com.... and had some serious heart symptoms due to excitement doing it - I hope I will not get "after excitement heart attack" after this during the night.

Man, our guys are magnifigant wizards !! http://www.flickr.com/photos/tmsaarimaa/178464144/?#comment72157594182787503

ps. Heinx, Jorma, Tuomas - happy holidays ! Thanks for bearing us ;o) again
pss. Check out the world's first public My widget promotion in this blog ;o))
psss. lots of smileys - all of them needed
pssss. www.summeri.net widget done by Wesa Aapro from Yle and our Simo, Heinx and Antti totally rocks
psssss. writing this psssss thingy makes me run to toilet

OEF

Just invented a new term describing my "takes-place-way-too-often-nowadays" behaviour - in finnish that would be "Yksilmäistä mouhoamista" which neatly translates into One Eyed Foaming ... OEF.

Would be nice to tame my OEF down a bit without losing passionate approach to the things (or quite too often to a thing) which seem very important at the time.

Pihtipudas Rock

Pihtipudas used to have a rock festival (pretty famous for quite some time in Finland) called Saapasjalka Rock. Well, that is gone for long but our family summer cottage for 41 years now is still there and going strong. It's having it's own rock festival, but actully totally silent one. Silence totally rocks ! Noise and all sort of sounds surround us so completely that we are able to only notice it when all the noise goes away... like in Pihtipudas besides the lake Alvajärvi.
That lake also rocks visually for me - the scenery has been sort burned into my head and whenever I see it captures me and I could spend hours to just stare at it (if it would not be the bloody mosquitos which this year are big and beasty ;o) ...and well ok, I'd need few beers with me too.

Slightly different Summer Party

This year instead of going to the central Summer party place in Karaportti me and TM went to one new (to us) near-by pub in Ruoholahti. Typically I've joined everybody else to "Karaportti party center" for some good re-unions with old collegues&friends, of course free beer and some buffet food ;o) .. it's been fun, but this year WidSets kept us busy so that we missed the last bus, my stomach was full and I've already (after 14 years?) learned that I'm doing just fine (or actually even much better) without that extra 3-4 pints of beer to kick start the evening. ...
So, around 6pm TM and I headed to this pub I've read about in Ruoholahti. Btw, they supposedly have the most expensive bottle of beer in town - 46€ per bottle or so. Well, we did not have that but quite many others. Simply from beer selection point of view (not to mention that the gent serving us there was very knowledgefull on beers) I personally now rank this place to top 3 of Helsinki pubs. Nice that it's so close to us ;o)

By the way, the guys in the pub had been in gigs of quite a many of the famous bands visiting Funland:














Then we paid a short visit to Kallio - food and drinks.

Finally we joined the rest of the celebrating Nokia gang in Kaivohuone for traditional "Move 10 meters in 1 hour"-dance. Good evening all together.

well, yes - there was thought also the after session also in Eatz's terass sometimes hhmm night time.

From HS/Sanottua...

(Had to go back to the old newspaper pile and do some serious digging for this....)

In Helsingin Sanomat there is a section which summarises "had been said" from all over the world. This one was from 17th of June:

"Politicians are like baby dipers. Both needs to be changed regurarly, and exactly for the same reasons."

Sort of makes sense ;o)

6.5 tons of rock - episode II

4 evenings, some selected cursewords, still shaking hands, back expected to get into muscular cramp anytime soon but it's done ;o)

An excellent presentation....

We had an internal strategy sharing session at work. I don't know why but this time our corporate level strategy made a whole lot sense and most of all "soitteli sieluni säveliä"/mentally touched me at some level. (It's very long actully since that has happened). I have to keep this in mind when the next "low" comes to flush me ;o)
Seppo presented our service to the whole audience, and did it very well. Ice man ;o)
We also had a demo stand there - Marko and I run the stand, and had some healthy number of interested visitors with some good discussions.

Old stuff.... "En mitn kuule, On meny zoppaa gorfaan"

Bumbed into this the other day....


Mr. Tilsa's production was (and still is) my all time favorites at university... . My good friend Jaakko Oksanen (who's also a devoted Tilsa fan... and actually originally introduced Tilsa's production to me at his cosy student "luukku" in Linnanmaa campus (Hmmm those were the days ;o)) went all that trouble and got me, Taisto and Pekka an album each with Tilsa's inscribtion to us. Jaakko I seriously Digg you !

ps.Mine is based on the fact that I specifically loved this Tilsa's story:













(I had almost forgotten this but hopefully will now not forget it ... ever)

6.5 tons of rock...

We are finally building the long awaited wall into our house entrance. The only "issue" is that there's 6.5 tons of rock and they are about 30 meters away along the road and 4 meters downhill. My hands have been and still are trembling from dragging about half of them uphill during the last 2x4hours and then placing them to the wall... but it looks promising.

Edinburgh www2006

I had the privilege of visiting the www2006 conference in Edinburgh with Tero-Markus. New perspectives, new thoughts, old thoughts suddenly visible in new light, new ideas seen eventually in old light (whatever that might mean?).... of course good beer and extremely nice city. A short summary of www2006 conference in Edinburgh.

We actually developped a nice routine - we were at the conference around 9am to hear the openings. Separated to follow different threads. The did some comparisons on what we had heard and first thoughts aroused during the lunch time - had some good laughs too on some issues. At around 5pm we headed to (always a new) pub, got ourselves a pint of (mostly always different) beer, opened our laptops and wrapped the toughts and ideas together into a slideset. We also got one "briliant service idea" (yeah sure !) which indeed still was brialliant in the next morning ...and still is - let's see if something comes out of it.

I had WidSets running in my mobile all the time at the conference, and even though it's our creation I still had a childish internal "wow" when I was listening to a panel about mobile web2.0 - one of the panelists (a gentleman from Vodafone whose name I do not recall) took a picture with his N70 ... I didn't actully see him taking the picture but I noticed it from my Widsets Flickr widget which I had set to monitor tag "www2006" and our system pushed the new pic with that tag to my mobile from that same room taken about Ronald Geisler just standing on the floor. - "Wow ! this actually works as we thought it should !". Nice feeling & worth of remebering.
(This was the pic: http://www.flickr.com/photos/torgo/152491341/)
Btw, Flickr seems to now have 1,531 pics of collaborative photgraphing about that conference week - nice cross section from hundreds of individuals.

One memorable incident was that one morning when we had fire alarm at 6am in our hotel... we use the waiting time to get back in hmmm comfortably and that morning we did make it to the conference in time for 9am.

















ps. No offence meant here but there are indeed some similarities in the way that Rowley QC in Fast show and Sir Tim Berners-Lee talk

About Ring III again...

Something is really finally going to happen to the Ring III mess in capital area. This is great and the proposed solution is going to be totally sufficient and functional ... and pretty much exactly as I thought it should be done (even blogged about it ;o) so I cannot help feeling just a bit "proud" that I had just had the same plan cooking (but then again so must have many others also). Great anyway because this can be implemented quite quickly:

Blues Mäysti in NockRock...

We had our "hugely succesfull, once in 15 years" gig in Oulu with Blues Mäysti. Shit loads of fun... don't know if audience had but we surely did. It was fantastic to play together again. Thanks Pekka, Vesku, Jukkis, Kape, Aija, Taisto and Erkki !



Speaking of audience - there was really not too many. When we started to play the semi-final Finland against Czech in the Ice Hockey World Championship was on TV. Pretty much at the same time the Eurovision song contest finals (where Lordi won the thing finally for Finland) was going on - perfect timing for our 45 minutes ;o)

After our gig we spend some good 3 hours listening to other bands and enjoying our after glow. Visited a local Kebab place at around 3am ... one "slightly" drunken guy saw me carrying only a music stand and shouted "Hei - a roudie !" which at that time of the night and in that state of mind gave us a really good laughs.
Finally, at Aija's and Pekka home around 4am... and sweet happy dreams.








Next "gig" will be in Oulu again - 1st of July (2006, not 2021 as one might expect)in Teekkaritalo - we decided to use the celebration of all together five 40th birthdays (all taking place sometimes during last year). A worthy excuse to play again.

WidSets .... live

(long time no blog...) Finally today we went live with our baby www.widsets.com. The last half a year doing it has been extremely exciting and now it's going to be if possible even more exciting to see whether we get users, how many, how quickly, how satisfied they are with the service, how....

Yesterday I spend the late night hours doing my own tuned blog reader widget for this blog. I used my collegue's, Antti Tohmo's widget xml codes as starting point and after some serious trial and error ;o) got it finally ~working. I publish it after some testing on Nokia N80 phone and it is now downloabable from WidSets.com library.