Finland, once again

I'm again in Finland, this must be the sixth or so trip this year...
Arrived in Helsinki after an uneventful flight on time, I guess, can't really say as I seem to have lost my watch...
Took a bus to the railway station, grabbed a sausage hamburger, jumped on the train, spent three hours on it and arrived in Jyväskylä almost on time, went to sauna and had some excellent barbeque chicken afterwards in the restaurant.

Tomorrow's a writing day, let's see what I get done.

Tuesday DayTick here, on Wednesday in Espoo. Then I fly back home to unpack, repack on Thursday and early Friday morning my trip to America starts...

Tax authorities

Something happened in the tax office and they didn't receive our VAt payment for June. They of course send a demand letter with the amount to pay plus 8,50€ as delay surcharge.
The strange thing was that before the taxes were automatically withdrawn from our bank account. Something must have happened in the tax office and for whatever reason they couldn't withdraw any money and therefore they hadn't received the tax payment in time. We knew nothing of this until the demand letter arrived.
Virpi phoned the tax office and they agreed to admit it was their mistake and said that we only need to pay the taxes and no delay surcharges. This Virpi did and we thought the matter was over and done with.

Not so. A week later a letter arrived. It said that "because you have authorized automatic withdrawals from your account we have withdrawn 17€ as delay surcharges."

How wickedly clever is that!? We will charge your account automatically for late payments, because we can! How can we be late with payment if there's a direct debit agreement in place?

Now the matter should be over and done with and we will get the double delay fee back. I guess we should insist on some 'irritant surcharge' or 'pick-pocket fee' also for even the tax authorities should keep their hands away from the money that doesn't belong to them in the first place!

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I almost can't believe that I'm, sitting at our balcony writing this. The sun is shining, and although it is a bit windy the temperature is exactly right.

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Suomennos: Verottajan virheen vuoksi ne eivät olleet saaneet kesäkuun arvonlisäverojamme. Lähettivät karhukirjeen, jossa oli myös myöhästymissakko 8,50€. Puhelinsoitto auttoi selvittämään, että suoraveloitus oli lakannut toimimasta jostain tuntemattomasta syystä. Nyt pitäisi vain maksaa verot ja unohtaa myöhästymissakko. Kaikki oli kunnossa.

Kunnes toinen kirje ilmoitti, että koska meillä nyt on suoraveloitus, olivat veroviranomaiset veloittaneet tililtämme 17€.

Nerokasta! Kuinka voimme olla maksuinemme myöhässä, jos meillä on suoraveloitus?

Nyt asian pitäisi olla kunnossa ja verotoimisto lupasi palauttaa virheellisesti ottamansa rahat. Saa nähdä.

Presentation woes

I'm meant to be working on my presentation - yes, it is still not ready - but it seems hard to finish. The obstacle is whether to follow the ordering I used in my paper, which one reviewer wanted me to change, but it was too late. The topic of the paper and presentation are the metrics collected in training sessions. The topic isn't Tick-the-Code, but it needs to be explained so that the results make any sense. In the paper I explain the method twice, first in a really condensed form and later more verbosely.
For the presentation, I talk about rules and some measurements in a very detailed manner, but I haven't presented those rules in detail by then! Can I ask the audience to suspend their disbelief and wait for the details? I need to say something like "Imagine that the following names describe black-and-white rules, which find unnecessarily complex places in source code and this is how many you'd find if you had enough code". This is all true and this is how it would go on: "CALL: 46 t/h, CHECK-IN: 82 t/h and DEAD: 45 t/h, and here are the rest 10 rules with similar figures." I have to assume that the readers have no idea of CALL, CHECK-IN or DEAD at this point in the presentation. On the other hand, the audience has the paper possibly in front of them and they could be reading the Appendix, which explains each of the rules in detail. But I don't want them to be reading, I want them to be listening!

Hmm, this is a problem, and I can see how irritating it must have been for the reviewers. The reason the paper is like that is that it has four parts: The Claim, The Evidence, A Solution and The Effect. The main point is The Evidence that is supposed to support the claim that the software source code produced contains way too much unnecessary complexity in it. The Evidence is meant to show that much of the complexity in the source code is truly unnecessary as it would be feasible to get it out with A Solution like Tick-the-Code. The last part explains how the whole development process becomes more healthy with less complexity.

Another problem is of more practical nature: I'm using Keynote on my Mac to create the presentation and there seems to be some problems in converting to PowerPoint. Some pictures get placed wherever and not where I'd like to place them. Maybe I'll have to get by without pictures or effects.

Visiting Yorkshire

Hi! It's me, Virpi - remember me? I haven't posted anything for a looooong time. Maybe it's because I haven't got anything to tell or maybe there's so much to tell that I don't know where to start. Either way, I finally decided to share at least a couple of photos with you. Photos are from my trip to Leeds and York in early September. Enjoy!

York - The River

York - The Walls

York - The Cathedral

Leeds - The Park

Leeds - The City Hall

Leeds - The Owl

Carcassonne

Voitin Antin tänään Carcassonnessa!
Jatko-osista mukana olivat kauppias, kirjuri, isomies sekä uusi kreivi. Itse asiassa juuri kreivin kaupungin oikeanlainen käyttö toi voiton, kun pystyin nappaamaan kaikki niittypisteet pelin lopussa itselleni. Vaikka Antti oli yli kierroksen edellä, kauppatavaroiden ylimäärä ja niittyjen yksinomistus riittivät voittoon. Olenpa iloinen!

Tänään oli todellinen välipäivä. Aamulehdessäkään ei ollut mitään luettavaa, tiistainen lehti oli todellinen maanantaikappale.

Conference paper titles

The Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference (PNSQC) paper titles are out. Mine is paper number 25 in this list. I'm feeling quite proud to be included in such a list. Although the paper is ready, I still need to draft the 40-minute presentation. My target is to have a rough outline ready today, add some touches on it on Wednesday and finish it by Friday. Then I can have a nice, relaxing weekend with my brothers and sister in Lahti.

The weather in Tampere has turned from summer to autumn. The leaves are mostly still green, but I'm sure that will change pretty soon. The leaves will soon turn pretty red, yellow and brown. On my freetime I've done some walking and on Saturday I was helping out a couple who were moving within Tampere. Their new house has pretty steep and long stairs leading to it. The 20-meter long stairs really explain how the loading of the stuff was so much faster than the unloading. As per an age-old Finnish custom, us movers got to stay and go to the sauna, enjoy the warm weather with a barbecue outside, and a few beers. Afterwards, I visited the Ilves nightclub and so two great newcomer bands, which apparently had won some competition or something. Man, were they loud. My ears are ringing still. One of the bands was called "Nemo" and the other one "Major Label". Good stuff, both of them. The sunny day turned into a dripping night and I spent the best part of an hour standing in the taxi queue arriving at five am at my camp site here at Lake Tohloppi.