Trips

Because of the project work, I've been done quite a few trips to Oulu and Rovaniemi. I should say travelling by car is not the nicest thing to do in this period of time. It was dark two weeks ago without snow. Then snow did fall and stay, but rising temperature made most of the snow melt. Road becomes extremely slippery.

We hit the road to Rovaniemi around 8 am yesterday. I was travelling together with a team member by car. She seems to be the most careful driver that I have ever known. She kept the speed at 70 km/hour all the way from Kemi to Rovaniemi. To my understanding, it takes a person to "fly" with the car, and it also takes a person to drive slowly continously. Don't get me wrong, I am glad to be on a safe trip in so awful weather and road conditions. I just assume that she was too careful. A number of cars and trucks passed us by. They had to since we were kind of in the middle of the way. :D She commented 'Safety is always No.1 piority, even that means we will arrive late!' I was kinda afraid we might get a ticket for driving too slow.

It turned out that we arrived at the meeintg just on time. Two-hour driving went 'smoothly' indeed. Two-hour sitting in car was uncomfortable though. The moment I stepped out of the car, breathed the cold air and stood on the thicker snow, I felt actually quite good.

For better or worse

End of year is approaching. That means lots of things, for example:

• Holiday season is coming;

• Our project is in its last phase of development;

• After I am done with the site and report, new page of my life should begin.

I should have a range of plans lining up. I should have made some important decisions so that my life can move on towards its direction. During the past years, I've learned when to be excited, to chill, to accept, to force and when and what to expect. There are always ups and downs and you know they will all pass or at least there'll come to a time to get pass, but at the very moment you just have to hold on to it and think this's the best or the worst of all you can face. Maybe I am just in that moment when I think things won't get any better and can't be much worse. Maybe this is all a delusion and I build it all on my own limited mind. But if I try to jump out of this time and space, and look back. I don't see really big changes have occurred. Certainly there are changes but I can't tell if they are for the better or worse. Does it even matter? Life is just sequence of events. After reaching a certain point, most of what you do is to maintain the position you are in. That position maybe is a standard, habit, values. If that position is measured by more concrete things that could mean how much you earn, how many times you go to gym, how much you weigh, how much you spend on certain things, how much you invest, how often you go on holiday, how well you keep work and personal life separtely, and whatsoever. That's all yours. You have to define it first and it takes efforts to protect it.

Ok Ok what I am trying to say here? Some part of my head must be burned out otherwise who has time to think of this nonsense?

--What do you want?
--A lot!
--Like?
--Good stuff, better stuff, better life...
--You can't be more specific?
--That's something isn't it?
--What's the plan then?
--Plan? I just focus on today, now.
--You shoud have some kind of plan! Actually different options, alternatives !
--Ok. Plan... what I want? You know what? I know what I DON'T want. That's a start, right?

What I DONT want then?

• A part-time job gives me money that's way less to cover living expences.

• A part-time job gives me money that's much less than the unemployement benefits.

• Because refusing to take the part-time, I'd stay at home. Soon I'll turn nuts and fall into depression.

• Another part-time offer comes up. I can't take it because it's not enough.

• Because there are no two part-time offers at the same time, I'll end up staying at home, for sometime, then for longer time, then for a really long time.

I've pictured the worst situation. Now what? Aim for the better? I need a big turn, with some magic.

Who said I can't turn back time

Winter time starts on today! I had my clock turned backwards one hour. I know this is silly, but every time it feels that I get one hour for free. People work hard to have more time for themselves or something else, 20 minutes or half an hour would be great, but usually that's almost impossible. Time feels little. Now I get an extra hour, what did I do then?

Ehh... let's see. I think the first thing after waking up this morning, was sitting at the table for 20 minutes and browsing a magazine. When I realized that the time just changed at night, I felt like a winner so continued browsing the magazine and local papers. I stood up, looked out the window, then did my morning routine in bathroom.

Oh there it goes, 60 minutes I got for free. BTW, Happy Halloween everyone!

This time of the year

I seem to have always bad luck around this time of the year. I'm having a bad cold. On last Saturday morning it felt a cold was coming. Yet I didin't wear enough clothes when I went on the trip to Rovaniemi. The result is I was freezing for the whole day. Except constant headache, throatache and lack of appetite, things didn't get any worse until Thursday. Yesterday was dreadful. I fell down from the bike on the way to an interview. I was all wet and when I was sitting with the interviewer, I couldn't form a one good sentence in Finnish. Head was explording and the voice sounds having severe cold. Even it's just a part-time cleaner job, I was disappointed at...... something.

As remembered, about this time of 2004 and 2002 I was struggling with the cold for at least weeks.

I lied in the interview by the way. I felt I had to. She said they're looking for a worker that wants to want for a rather long period, not that kind of employee that once finds a job in own area/study field will quit here, let's say after 2 or 3 months. I replied so -- I want to work for a longer time; it's better for the company as well as for myself; I have no plans to move to somewhere else. I lied them all. In fact I am searching for work in own field; I am not a good cleaner because I never worked as a cleaner; and I can't wait to move to somewhere else for whatever reason.

My career building is so miserable. Twists, turns, maybes, no-chance, timing, locations...... Thanks god improved Finnish helped me get some intention and into some interviews. Should feel encouraging and self-confident than ever before, but I don't. Let me blame the cold and autumn-winter weather for the pessimistic attitude. That's making thing much easier.

And then I'll send some open applications to gain some power, motives and new hopes.

Ongoing process

Thesis project takes up pretty much all my weedays for last two or three weeks. The project I was in has got into an odd state. There is nothing wrong with it. It's just its aim and the goal of my thesis have "compatibility" issues. Obviously they don't see what I am seeing and they pay little attention on site and page design issues. It's understandable since these aren't their areas. I did my best in telling the project team what I have been doing and thinking, what I am doing and what to present on next project meeting.

The design is gradually coming together. Although a short javascript code is all I plan to have in my page, it takes time if you want to take screen resolutions and multi browsers issues into account. I have IE, Firefox and Opera installed so that I can test the pages in at least these three browsers. IE gives me headache! As you know, it's not secure, it's slow. In one word-worse than many other less dominant products. After playing a bit with style sheet CSS, I more than realized that IE doesn't follow the web standards. That means you need to write fix only for IE to tackle the bug. Of course all programs have bugs, but browsers are what I am concerned now.

So yeah, my life is plain and simple. Now I need to start the writing part. Tutor insists that everyone should follow strict structure when writing thesis report. I am not gonna write a book about how I make a site even though he implied that I feel free to write 70 pages. Give a break, I am gonna be brief and bright in my writing.