As to Virpi's Condition

Looks like Virpi just had a spell of bad language the other week. Her condition, if you remember, was strange. She'd utter words that sounded familiar but made no sense. Luckily this only affected her Finnish. It doesn't materialize anymore in her writing it seems and her speech is back to its normal incomprehensiveness. Nothing to worry about there.

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Saw Woody Allen's "Scoop" yesterday, and enjoyed it tremendously. Subtle comedy, wordplays, and even a clear plot made the film fun to watch. It isn't a big hit here in Bochum, though. In our showing there were five people, and that included the three of us (I, Virpi and Kaj).

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Virpin kieliongelma on analysoitu. Kuten näytteestäkin ilmenee, hän kääntää kaikki samassa tavussa olevat vokaalit nurinpäin tehden samalla tekstistään hankalasti ymmärrettävää. Kielitohtorit väittelivät pitkään siitä kääntääkö Virpi vain samassa tavussa olevat eri vokaalit ('kieltää' -> 'keiltää') vai ovatko myös samat vokaalit kääntyneet ('kääntää' -> 'kääntää'). Ongelmanahan on, ettei samojen vokaalien kääntäminen näy mitenkään, mikä ei tietenkään tarkoita etteikö kääntämistä silti tapahtuisi. Lopulta lääkärit, tai Virpin kielellä 'lääkärit', päätyivät todellakin tulokseen, että kaikki kaksoisvokaalit kääntyvät.

Juurisyynä ei pidetty stressiä vaan saksan kielen numerojärjestelmää, jossa kaksinumeroiset luvut ilmaistaan yleensä sanomalla oikeanpuoleinen numero ensin, esim 'einundzwanzig' on 'yksijakaksikymmentä' eli 21 eli ventti eli black jack. Tämähän vastaa suomen kielen jo vanhentunutta numerointikäsitystä, josta ainoana jäänteenä ovat luvut 11-19. Vanhoista kirjoista löytää joskus vielä lukuja nimeltään "Luku kaksikolmatta. Erkki putoaa puusta", "Luku neljäneljättä. Erkin epäilykset heräävät" ja "Luku kolmekuudetta. Erkin kosto".

Kiitos kaikille kommentoijille sekä täällä blogissa että yksityisesti. Kaikkia palautteitanne arvostetaan suuresti.

Les Crosets

The skiing holiday was a blast! Eight days of skiing in the Swiss-French Alps can't easily be beaten. On the first day it was sunny and clear, but there wasn't enough snow, not really. I had to carry my skis down the last hundred meters or so to avoid all sand and dirt. Luckily on the second day it started snowing, which continued for three days and about 30cm snow helped the situation somewhat.

This sad excuse for a slippery slope...

Parts of the slopes were icy, especially after a full day of skiing, but towards the end of the week, winter had finally reached Switzerland. Up on the mountainside it was sometimes extremely windy and cold, but down in the valley in sunshine, it couldn't have been much more beautiful.

..turned into Alps calendar perfection.

At the end of the week, on Thursday or Friday, the weather turned clear and cold again, and I managed to catch a phenomenon called "halo". I tried to photograph it and here's the best I could do. It is a kind of rainbow, but caused by small ice crystals and it looked truly tremendous as it made a complete circle when seen from a ski lift.


There were such nice people on the trip, the organization was so perfect and the food couldn't have been any better, that I wouldn't mind traveling with Pfiff again.

Bye for a Week

Bye, bye, dear readers, for a week!

I'll be in Switzerland skiing, the snow situation permitting. The village is called Les Crosets and the area Portes du Soleil.

Here's a snowcam.

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Suomeksi: Sveitsiin käy matkani nyt. Toivottavasti siellä olisi lunta. Tuon kameran mukaan heikolta näyttää...

Mikä Virpiä viavaa?

The following Finnish text contains a description of a grammo-medical emergency. It works well as a riddle and what I'm looking is a clear definition of a condition producing such erroneous text. Unfortunately I don't think it translates at all.

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Soumeksi: Teidättekö, mikä Virpiä iokien viavaa? Hänen puheestaan ie mienaa saada mitään selvää nykiysin. Sillion tälliön puhe ja teksti on ihan selkeää, mutta tiosinaan se on tyäsin käsittämätöntä, siis iavan sekopiästä! Iaemin hän kulema on vian unohdelut kaksioskonsonantteja ja -vokaaleja kirjiotuksistaan, mutta nyt uusi ongelma on ilmantunut ja osittian korvanut vanhan.

Jos jollakin on tähän viavaan lääke, kertokaa se kommentilla tähän postiin. Jos pystiysitte edes daignosiomaan asain, niin sekin uattaisi.

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Edellä oleva teksti on lähetetty Virpi-suotimen läpi, jotta oireyhtymää olisi helpompi analysoida.

Finland in February

I'm hardly home and the arrangements for the next trip start. Finland will be the target again in February, most likely on week 7. So if you feel like you would like to have a taste of Tick-the-Code, or just iron out the training contents and you're located in Finland, contact me. I'll gladly come and visit your company in person. I could tell you more about the training, my vision and show you the robust training materials all participants get. Here are the contact details.

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Here's a couple of pictures as evidence that I was skating in the middle of Helsinki last Friday.

Some children skating in Icepark in Helsinki and my skates.

That's the tower of the Central Railway Station in the middle of Helsinki and one of my rented skates.

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Seuraavan matkan järjestely alkoikin heti kotiin palattuani. Seuraava Suomen reissu on helmikuussa viikolla 7. Nyt on hyvä aika ottaa yhteyttä ja järjestää tapaaminen tai koulutus. Tulen mielelläni kertomaan koulutuksen yksityiskohdista ja esittelemään koulutusmateriaaleja yritykseenne. Yhteystiedot täällä.

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Näin tänään hauskan kukkakedolla koristellun mainosauton. Se mainosti ostoskeskusta nimeltä Riesapark, mikä kertonee tarpeeksi. Tervemenoa Riesaan!

Ideapark and Money

The brand new Ideapark in Lempäälä, near Tampere competes proudly in the same category as the Middle-European shopping malls for the right to be called "shopping hells".

Tuula, my hostess this week, foresaw money in everybody's New Year's tin shoes, which we melted into all kinds of shapes. According to the tradition, you can interpret the forms of the molten tin in the candle light and you can see into the future. As a memento, I bought a big Money-Tree for Tuula.
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Suomeksi: Lempäälässä on nyt todellinen keskieurooppalaiseen tasoon verrattava ostoshelvetti. En kuitenkaan ostanut nojatuolia tai sohvakalustoa.

Sen sijaan hommasin Tuulalle kiitokseksi ison rahapuun, joka toimii muistona myös uuden vuoden juhlista, joissa Tuula ennusti kaikille tinasta rahaa, riippumatta tinan muodosta.

The Nicest Day

I had the nicest day today. I took the train for a couple of hours from Tampere and used the time to edit my article. I had a lunch meeting in Helsinki, which only lasted half an hour after which I made my way back to the Central Railway Station. My next meeting was delayed somewhat and I decided to go skating! Yes, in the middle of Helsinki there is an ice rink and I rented a pair of skates and off I went!

I must have been a sight in my straight trousers, long black coat, ocher scarf and black fedora. I must be featured in dozens of Russian photoalbums soon. Tourists and other travellers seemed to stop and stare as I started my one and a half hour skating shift. As I started, I was probably the only male person on ice, not counting the little boys. Later on there were others, and at one point the ice rink felt almost full.

I had a blast going around the rink as fast as I could. In a couple of near-collision situations I noticed how my body thought I was using inline skates. I needed to break quickly and I just raised the toes on my right foot in order to press the inline break to the asphalt. Of course, with real skates, nothing happens. Unless you're wearing women's skates backwards, that is. With real skates you break by turning sideways, like with slalom skis.

I didn't fall once, although it was close a couple of times. That danger kept it interesting. At first I thought I'd skate for half an hour buit I ended up sweating in 0 degrees centigrade for close to the maximum time of one and a half hours. Cool stuff!

If you're in Helsinki, check out the Icepark!

Afterwards, in Kirkkonummi/Kyrkslätt I met the nicest girl who kept hugging me and I almost missed my train. Good luck in finding L-Ruu in the future to the whole Hakkarainen family!

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Suomeksi: olen asettanut tavoitteekseni luistella kaikissa Euroopan pääkaupungeissa. Rooma ja Helsinki on nyt hoidettu.

Kirkkonummella asuu vieraanvarainen Hakkaraisen perhe, jossa on kaksi melko ujostelematonta lasta. Perheen isä, Kimmo, työskentelee Kilosoftin tuotekehitysjohtajana. Kilosoft myy ja markkinoi Tick-the-Code -koulutusta jatkossa Suomessa. Yhteistyösopimus allekirjoitettiin keskiviikkona.

Speak easy

The neighbour sings a hit song from the seventies "Mombasa" out of tune but loud enough to hear on this side of the wall. I'm sitting at the living room coffee table writing this post on my iBook, hunched much too low. I'm wondering if I shouldn't move to the kitchen table, which is a little bit too high for me. I'm staying at friends who both are not vertically challenged and their kitchen table has had to adjust to the higher than normal requirements of life in this appartment.

Today I trained 8 people, the last ones in that one company. Now the whole staff has been schooled and I need to help keep them interested. Although I believe the Tick-the-Code to be motivating and useful enough to keep going by itself, most of the times, a change - especially a change for the better - needs more help. Initiatives are too easy to crush. Cynicism and disbelief are the weapons that stop almost any improvement, much too easily.

If you ever happen to be in Tampere, check out a restaurant called Speakeasy in Siperia. It is first of all quite a maze to find, and the decor is just wonderful. Let's see if they have a website.

(hmmm, googles a while...)

Found it! http://www.speakeasy.fi/

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Suomeksi: Koulutus ja yksi tapaaminen tältä päivältä ohi. Koulutukseen liittyen seuraa tiukka palautekierros ja jälkiseuranta. Jäkiseuranta on tärkeää, jotta uudenlainen koulutettu tapa pääsee itämään organisaatiossa ja Tick-the-Code -katselmoinnin tapauksessa koodi alkaa parantua ja kiire hellittää. Sitä kautta tekijät pääsevät eroon epäolennaisuuksista ja vuosien varrella kertyneestä turhasta monimutkaisuudesta. Työstä tulee taas mukavaa.

Grumbling about feedback (unnecessary)

Third day in Finland. Yesterday I wrote, wrote, wrote and in the evening helped my webman to setup a feedback formula. The writing is for an article, which got a lot of review feedback and I have to see if I can mold an article on Tick-the-Code to fit into a scholarly journal. I have some ideas how to do it, but some of the comments from the reviewers still seem absurd. One of the comments made me think that the job of a quality assurance (QA) person is to keep himself employed, not improve quality. It was the strangest comment. If I suggest a way to improve product quality without the need of QA, how is that a bad idea, generally?

Some of the comments seemed to be misunderstood on purpose and I have a hard time accepting them. For example, my sentence "The value of inspections is well-known at least in the academic circles" got a reviewer comment "is the value of inspections only known in academic circles?" and I have to double-check that that's what it says.

Also I noticed a difference in style when writing to a scholarly journal in comparison to writing to a professional commercial magazine. The use of strong adjectives and nouns needs to be avoided in the more scientific text. At least that is what some of the reviewers are urging me not to use. Words like "frantic", "hostile", "chaos", "devastating", "catastrophically", "precious", "sacrifice", "courage" and "brave" are apparently not acceptable or appropriate for scientific text. I need to modify my style of writing quite a bit, as I tend to use strong words to imply my meaning. I take it as good exercise. Maybe the use of strong words comes from the human, so called soft approach to matters, which tends to be hard for hard-science types. Anything linked with psychology or behavior seems out of bounds when you're trying to write scientific text. However, many of the benefits of Tick-the-Code come from the soft side of the matter. The way people get to communicate more effectively, the way the negative feedback is packaged as improvement suggestions and generally the voluntary approach to the whole checking are all more or less behavior-dependent, soft issues.

One criticism, which I accept, is that Tick-the-Code is nothing new and the level I wrote the first article draft was too low. The original was targeted to the software developer, but the readers actually are more advanced quality practitioners. My idea is now to leave out most of the details of the method, explain the case study and what it means and make it clear that Tick-the-Code is an excellent way to harness the powers of the developer staff for quality. I want to say that testing is not enough, I might actually bring out the idea of spotting higher than normal likelihoods of error, which Tick-the-Code is excellent in finding. I need to say that Tick is different from all the known inspection methods, it is unique, but I'm not sure I like the name "baby-inspection" that one reviewer gave it.

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Suomeksi: Korjailin eilen artikkeliehdotustani, ja illalla rakenneltiin palautelomaketta weppimiehen kanssa. Tänään oli pari tapaamista ja huomenna pääsee tositoimiin. Kaksi ryhmää odottaa.

Älkää välittäkö yläosan narinasta. Palaute on aina hyödyllistä.

Three Kings

Three kings came singing to our door today. Girls collecting money (for children in Madagaskar) and candy (for themselves) sang about the star of Bethlehem and were absolutely adorable. We were a bit careful at Halloween but nothing happened and now this came as a complete surprise. The end of Christmas time is this weekend and I guess the Christmas tree gets to go.

I'm going, too, on Sunday to Finland for a week. A couple of training sessions and several meetings await me. I also intend to work on revising an article idea I set for a journal. It received a fair amount of feedback, and I'll have to work through it all. If there's time left, I'll start working on the feedback for chapter 5 Rules.

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Suomeksi: siskoni lähti Kanadaan opiskelemaan ja aloitti blogin, jossa kertoo mitä sitten tapahtui. Blogi on nimeltään "Kevät Kanadassa".

Kolmen kuninkaan päivän kunniaksi saksalaistyttötrion muodostama "Tiernapojat" kävi laulamassa laulun ovellamme.

Suomen matka edessä jo ylihuomenna. Melkoista haipakkaa ollut tämä vuodenvaihde. Suomalaisvieraat Tuula ja Tapani, saatiin vasta tänään koneeseen ja jo sunnuntaina nähdään taas. Sitten kun tulen Suomesta, voin rauhoittua muutaman päivän ja sitten on lähtö Sveitsiin laskettelemaan! Sitten tammikuu alkaakin olla ohi ja vuosi on jo täydessä käynnissä. Tulikohan tuohon nyt tarpeeksi "sitten"-sanoja?