Lost in France

Bonjour!

I got lost in Paris. This is my third time here in Paris and it has never happened before. My plan was to see the Sacre Coeur and then head back to our hotel. I did see the Sacre Coeur, still there, but the walk back to the hotel didn't go as expected. I was heading to the right way, but then I found myself in a really busy, crowded crossing and somehow just floated with the rest of the people to a direction I wasn't suppose to go. From one street corner to another and the next one.

Suddenly I realised I have not the slightest idea of where I am. And at that point I also realised that on that busy street I was the only white person! "Don't panic" they say in the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", but I did. Not because of the fact that I was the only white person there, but the fact that I couldn't find myself on the map. Two out of three streets were not marked on my map!

Okay, breathe in... breathe out... walk to the next corner and look at the map again. Still no clue. Breathe in... breathe out... and keep on walking. Yes, I'm on the map! And obviously walking to the opposite direction I was supposed to. Turn around and walk.

And there it was, a brasserie I remembered seeing earlier on my way to Sacre Coeur! A glass of white wine and the three-hour adventure had a happy ending.

Famous Austrians

Arnold Schwarzenegger is a good - although unexpected - start.

I'm wondering why nobody has mentioned Mozart, yet. Maybe the weather has been so good these few days that you aren't reading the blog. Maybe some of you don't read it - GASP - daily! Maybe some don't read this blog on the weekend - at all! I'm in shock!

We are on our way back to Bochum. We are sitting at the Vienna International Airport and waiting. We visited today the Sigmund Freud Museum. Now there's a famous Austrian! The museum is located in the apartment Freud lived and had his office for almost 50 years. Then he had to emigrate to London in 1938. He died a year later. When the nazis were burning his books, he just remarked "haven't we come a long way from the Middle Ages. I would have been burned then. Now they seem to be satisfied just burning my writings." If you're interested in the near history or psychology, the museum is well worth visiting.

If you're interested in more ancient history and evolution, pay a visit to the Museum of Natural History. It is amazing! I had visited it in 1990 already, but didn't have a clue how cool it really is. They even have some live animals there. They are building a vivarium with fish and tortoises and lizards and ants. We left quite quickly when Virpi noticed that the larger than normal ants were walking on the same side of the glass as we were standing! Who knows what else had escaped through the same hole!

V for Verdict

The jury has considered all appeals and has chosen the right city to be...
[start DRUMROLL]
tr-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r
[end DRUMROLL]

VIENNA!

And the hotel is indeed Hotel Kaiserhof, just like the sharp eyes of Kaj noticed. Excellent work. "Grüss Gott" to everybody from Austria.

Some explanations:
The receptionist spoke French on the telephone to a French-speaking guest, but used German in speaking to us.
Princess Elizabeth was married to Emperor Franz Josef with the magnificent beard. Her nickname was Sissi. Some of the trams in this city are old but there is also an underground with lines U1, U2, U3, U4 and U6. One has to wonder what happened to line U5? The tram stop shows the Austrian colors in the middle of it. Stefan recognized Karlskirche with the blue cupolas.

And if you still don't believe, here a few more pictures from the once imperial Austria.

The proud Austrian flag!

Imperial beer!

A new competition: name as many famous Austrians as you can!
For extra credit, which Austrian composer wrote this hilarious piece of classical music?
Ti-di-di ti-di-di ti-di-dittittii. Ti-di-di ti-di-di ti-di-dittittii...
(Tip: It was named after an Austrian Field Marshal.)

More clues

Kaj's deductions - though excellent and sharp-witted - were based on so called circumstantial evidence. That is hardly admissably in a court of law. Such evidence is too easy to plant to mean anything. What's a matchbox or a napkin? Did you notice how they were placed in the picture? Just as they would be if they were real, weren't they? A good setup aims to be exactly correct. When you think about it, wasn't the setup perhaps a little too perfect? The napkin only half-visible, the matchbox barely in view?

Here are a few more clues:

Princess Elizabeth was married to the guy with the magnificent beard until she was brutally murdered.

This city is historic, as shown by the following pictures of its traffic:
Even Helsinki doesn't have trams this old!
Is there a clue in this picture? The language is German, sure.
Who writes like this?
A huge palace, no longer used for governing.

Is the Cat out of the Bag?

Are we in Vienna?

Which church is this?

Are the traffic signs Austrian?
Who is the guy in the handsome beard? (I'm allowed to shave like that when I'm 90 years old.)

I've received a few guesses through text messages. Unfortunately neither Iceland nor Monaco (Hi, Taina and Sammy!) is correct. We aren't in Switzerland, either (Grüetzi, Tero!)
Kaj, H and FG (text message) are tending towards Vienna. Prove it!

You know that chain hotels have often similar decorations in rooms, especially bed covers. Is the link H sent evidence enough for you?

Mystery hotel

Here's me in the hotel lobby, in the as yet undisclosed and unguessed location (I'm confused about it myself, as you can see). Both Belgium and Nice are excellent guesses. The only fault is that they are wrong. Wait for more clues and guess again.


The hotel room's not too bad, is it?

Where on Earth is Miska?

I know now where I am!

Let's see if you can guess where Miska is!
Send your guess as comment by pressing the "Submit comment" button below this mail. You can write anonymously, in Finnish or whatever. Just guess. Unless you have been told, of course!

I am still in Europe. The flight was less than 2 hours from Düsseldorf. Our taxi driver was Carlos, "the king of Dominican Republic" (his words). As we arrived the receptionist was speaking French on the telephone. Where am I?

For Tuukka

Today is your nameday, have a happy one, Tuukka, my brother!
We'll send you a belated postcard from...
- Virpi, where are we sending the postcard to Tuukka from?
- From Potsdam!

Damn, that's not our destination. Potsdam had the best weather forecast for today, so Virpi took it as a placeholder for our real destination. She's clever enough not to be fooled by my sneaky attempts to find out the destination early. But I'll keep trying...

Mystery Trip begins

About half an hour to go to go. The sun is shining, the day is warming up. Here in Bochum at least, but how warm will it be in the destination? Are we flying to Alaska or Timbuktu? Yesterday, I had great difficulty in deciding what to pack, more so than normally. Virpi was also complaining. The nerve - she knows where we are going, after all!

The Mystery unravels

I have the first piece of information about the 4-day mystery trip. Virpi slipped that we are going to fly somewhere. Destination unknown, would you fly? Trust is the foundation of a good marriage, or actually any good relationship. After ten years of experience, I trust Virpi fully.

Windows-afflicted

I guess I still am and will be for some time sick. Not just sick of Windows but because of it. Let me tell you what I mean (who's to stop me, anyway?)

I write stuff and store it in different folders. Then when I think something is ready, I sent it to a couple of my friends (I think of them as friends, regardless of how ruthless the feedback is I get from them), and notice that it isn't even close yet. Sometimes I get the feedback quickly and some take more time to read and comment on my writings. I only want to edit my writing once, so I like to have all the feedback with me before making any changes to the writing. I collect the comments in files and store them on disk.

Just the other day I thought about a system, where I'd write a writing in one place, then create a folder for it with the date as folder name. That would tell me that it awaits criticism. I'd collect all the feedback in the same folder and finally edit the writing and move it somewhere more final then. I did this complicated system and then found myself thinking that moving the writings around isn't such a good idea, because now the "Open recent files..." menu will not work and it will take more time to find the writing to open.

Just today I noticed that it ISN'T SO! A Macintosh OS X can handle that! Applications don't care where the files are, they find them even if they are moved around. The fear I had came directly from dealing too many years with Windows. I guess this is a fairly new feature on a Mac, too, but I wouldn't bet that Windows Vista will ever have a working implementation of this kind of a useful feature.

---
On Wednesday, we leave for a mystery trip. I still don't know anything about it. It starts on Wednesday in Düsseldorf and ends on Sunday in Düsseldorf. During the trip, we'll celebrate my birthday and our 10th wedding anniversary. I guess I better buy some presents soon.

Hell Freezes Over

It was very stormy yesterday. At one point a plastic garden chair just spontaneously decided to skip over and slide along the whole width of our balcony. Everything, the table, the other chair and the much lighter plant pots didn't move. We were inside and heard this screeching noise and saw a white stripe move from right to left. The chair stopped just before the wooden shed door. It was one hell of a storm.

Later we noticed that Hell must indeed have frozen over, as these guys had crawled up to sing, and won the Eurovision Song Contest. The first ever win for Finland.

Road trip pictures

Wonderful flowers in Bochum. Virpi's mother on the left.
Doesn't the old church look out of place in this picture from Aachen?
Miska in Liège
Modern and ancient buildings in Aachen
On the left the Cruisler!
Excellent hotel in Maastricht, Hotel Botticelli!

Western Europe in 34 hours

On Monday, we set out for an adventure. Virpi, I and my mother-in-law packed into the blue Chrysler PT Cruiser (or Cruisler, for short). First stop was the historic city of Aachen. It is the city of Charlemagne (Charles the Great, Kaarle Suuri). We saw the sights, had lunch and continued over the border to the Netherlands. After reaching Maastricht and driving around the center for three or four times (most of the center streets are oneway streets and narrow enough that even overtaking a bicycle wasn't without challenge), I managed to park the car in the full underground car park. Yes, it was full and there were cars just queuing to get in. Somehow it worked.

The longest red light in a traffic light is in Maastricht, you can check the Guinness Book of Records. Without lying, it took more than ten minutes for the right turn to be green and then it stayed green for three cars or less. The cars driving straight over the crossing had green light three times in the same time as the right turners once.

We stayed overnight in an excellent hotel named after a famous Italian singer, Hotel Bocelli. Well, not exactly. The hotel was called Hotel Botticelli after the famous Italian painter. But it was excellent. Peaceful and right in the middle of the city. If you're ever in Maastricht, check it out.

Next morning, we decided to go to Belgium also. Liège, Lüttich or Luik is not far south from Maastricht. French, German and Dutch being the languages listed for the city name. Once again the city center took some navigating but what really impressed me was the steep hill under which the city was. After a sunny day in Liège, we returned back to Bochum with about 430 km driven in about 34 hours. A nice little road trip in three different countries.

...

On a completely different subject, we were surprised to see that Café Zürich in Bochum had closed its doors for good, apparently. It seems that Starbucks will open its doors there soon. We had no idea where Café Zürich had moved, but after extensive search and research, our vigilant traveller Kaj found it. In Barcelona, Spain! The lengths people will go to keep a café running...

Cab coincidence

Last Saturday, Marko sent me a text message from Lahti. He was there for Mother's Day. He had apparently taken a taxi. The driver was - Ville. See here. Marko was over 15 years ago on the same class as I and Ville.

Today is Marko's birthday! Have a happy one, Marko!

Fforde for Finns and video links

After finishing two out of the four Thursday Next novels by Jasper Fforde, I happened to find this website. It seems worth looking into, especially if you've read the books. For a Finnish review of the series, look here.

Don Gray kindly sent me a link to Systems Thinking. Through it I found the Presentation Zen, which featured, among other things, links to interesting videos. For a few funny ones from the White House, see President Bush with his double and Stephen Colbert roasting Bush. There's also an interview with Richard P.Feynman, the Nobel laureate physicist. See The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.

Booklet progress

Just the other day we (Virpi and I) went through all things I've written so far. I needed some structure and possibly pressure to keep going. I was happy to notice that my booklet on code inspection I call "Code Inspection Booklet" already had over 10.000 words. Although it is in draft stage, that's about one third of the planned size. One hundred pages still make a booklet, don't they?

There were some finished articles that have even gone through a round of reviews and revision. I need to find a publisher for them. Mostly I noticed having many started documents with good ideas to expand on. I notice that my problem as a writer is finishing things. That's probably the most common problem among writers, so I'm in good company. It is not the shortage of ideas or inspiration, it is lazyness, lack of time, fear of ridicule, or whatever excuse I can find that is stopping me from getting my writings published. If I were to send my articles in and be rejected, what would happen? Would I finally have proof that I'm no good? Or would it make me try and write even better because I didn't try hard enough? I guess I just need to try it and see what happens. If the articles get approved and published, am I getting off too easily? Should I feel good about myself or have I been squandering my talent for all these years I haven't been publishing anything?

At the Düsseldorf Airport I continued "The Madman's Diary" and I think tomorrow I'll try to take it even further. The initial idea is worth expanding, no matter where the story might go after that. Who needs planning anyway?

I'm going to Paris on business at the end of the month for a week and I'm taking Virpi with me. As you know Virpi works for Qualiteers and is my personal assistant, you could say. She arranges my schedule and trips and so on. Virpi happens to also be my wife. I wonder if I made a manly impression to my contact in Paris, when I wrote that I'd like a double room as I was bringing my assistant and wife with me? To me the thought of all three of us in a hotel room seems very French, for some reason.

I had some bad news from a friend today, which made me sad. Suddenly having a mother-in-law visiting for a week didn't seem like such a big deal. That's such a cliché, a bad mother-in-law. It's easy to make jokes, but I'm actually proud of my mother-in-law. Travelling all the way from K to Düsseldorf is a great achievement. Leaving K is not easy, you know. You can take a person out of K but you can't take K out of the person, unfortunately. I'll end this post with a supposedly mafia related saying

"Keep your friends close and your enemies even closer." See how easy it is?

Try it out yourself

Miska took the free ColorQuiz.com personality test! "Needs a change in his circumstances or in his rela..." Click here to read the rest of the results.

The Winner!

Virpi, you are a WINNER!
You've written the 100th post in this blog!
For this great achievement, you get to continue!
Congratulations!

Let's see who writes the 1000th post!

Thursday is full of hope

We have a saying in Finnish: "Torstai on toivoa täynnä" = "Thursday is full of hope".

And if you remember, last week I was really looking forward to having a couple of ciders on a terrace. On Thursday. I did go to a terrace and I did get a few drinks. I also spent three lovely hours listening to three engineers talking about code inspections.

Then I got my photo taken for my new passport. The photo turned out to be quite bad. If I was to decide, I would let a person looking like that leave the country, but never come back.

After that I went to a bookstore and found a book about allergies (in German). As I am quite an allergic person I started browsing it. Suddenly it hit me that there might be something about celery (Sellerie) and looked up the index: No celery (Sellerie) - only suicide thoughts (Selbstmordgedanke). I put the book away and went home.

That was my Thursday. Full of. Hope.

AdSense activated

I've activated AdSense, which means that from now on you'll see a small advert at the top of this blog. Feel free to click the adverts. The adverts come from Google's advertisement program and they are mysteriously selected based on the contents of these posts. That should finally force me to write about professional issues.

I've been enjoying the summer lately. Our balcony is perfect! I haven't had a balcony in 6 years so it is a real luxury now. It faces south, so there is enough sunshine there. If the toilet was roomy and spacious in our Witten apartment, then the balcony is our new toilet. Hmm, that didn't really come out right. Let me try again. If we kept our garden chairs in the bathroom in Witten, then you'll find the chairs on the balcony here in Bochum. That's better. Come and see. I'm sure the balcony makes a much better place for the barbecue, too.

I finished the "Flow" and am close to the end in "Lost in a Good Book". I bought the newest pocket book from Jasper Fforde called "The Big Over Easy". It's about Humpty Dumpty and it's supposed to be a "nursery crime". Knowing the Thursday Next series, sounds intriguing.

By the way, I try to vary the links that I use. Book links, for instance, don't always link to Amazon.com, so try them out and be surprised.

All you need is friends. And sometimes you don't know what you just might need.

Many years ago I studied in Fellmanni - a hotel and restaurant school in Finland. I wanted to learn how to cook, how to make nice drinks, how to serve customers, how to be a receptionist with a smile on my face, how to speak French.... And what did I learn: accounting and German (well, I guess we had some other lessons too, but who cares).

I was quite sure I won't need those two things. Never. Ever. But. My first mistake was that I wanted to move abroad. To some country where you can speak Swedish. Or English. Or French. Or Italian. So we moved to Germany. That was the second mistake. The third one was to be a part of this firm called Qualiteers.

So today I found myself sitting for three long hours next to our tax advisor. Talking about accounting and taxes. In German.

Tomorrow I'm taking a day off. Go to a terrace. Have a cider or two. And hope that there are people who have learned in some restaurant school how to bring me my cider with a smile on their faces. I wonder if they speak French....

;-)

And just in case: I had the best time ever in Fellmanni. I made some good, dear friends. And at the end, that's all you need! And yes, I'm really happy that I moved to Germany, 'cause I've made some really nice friends here too! And I'm more than happy to get to work together with my husband.

Web Site Story

The story of colors clashing on the information superhighway. Are the pastel color gang Jets going to beat the **** out of the web-safe colors of the Sharks? One day a Tony the smaller than sign meets Maria the greater than sign and nothing will be the same ever again...

Or something like that. Sorry about that. I think I'm going crazy. I found the pun in my old Nokia time notepad and wanted to use it immediately. See for yourself. But about going crazy: I was walking in downtown Bochum and had this great idea for a novel, or maybe it will turn out to be a short story, who knows. I'm calling "The Crazyman's Journal", for now. I'm pretty good at starting things. Which of course implies that I suck at finishing stuff.

Even though I know there are three stages to all actions: preparation, the task and cleaning up. I like to prepare things, that's what normally stops me right in the beginning. I prepare and prepare and then suddenly something happens and I have no time to start after all. The next time I need to prepare again.

I enjoy the cleaning up phase, too. I get to enjoy it much more rarely than the preparation phase, though.

Today, I sent an article of mine into review. Kaj and Julien get to give me their opinions on the paper called "Turning Busyness Back To Business". Let's see if any magazine will want it. If not, I'll publish it on the web site.

Today I failed again to reach Peter, who trains people in the ways of inspection, a little like me. My training is much more restricted and shorter, and I deal with code inspection specifically, while Peter's training is applicable to documents, I think. But the principles are certainly the same and we share a mentor. Tom Gilb has trained us both. I was initiated to the Mystical Order of Inspection (MOI) in 1998 in Helsinki.

Today I received the newest extension to the game of Carcassonne, it is called The Tower. Can't wait to try it out.