A Normally Perfect Week

The week in Finland has gone quickly by. On Monday morning, I ran errands in downtown Tampere, met Ville for lunch and agreed to meet him on Thursday again for some "mule" assignment. In the afternoon, I started going through the comments for Chapter 5 of my Tick-the-Code book, couldn't quite finish but made some progress. In the evening we watched "Crash" on DVD. It is an excellent set of intertwining racism- or general mistrust-based stories. Afterwards, I watched the film "Bourne Identity" on TV. I liked it although I'm not the biggest fan of action movies normally. I liked particularly to see places in Europe I had been to, like Paris near Pont Neuf. Also the German autobahn reminded me of home.

On Tuesday I trained the sales staff at Kilosoft Oy to the secrets of Tick-the-Code: The Training and Tick-the-Code: The Method. So don't be surprised if some day, when you least expect someone calls you to tell you about improving your software development quality. Afterwards, Tapani and I went to see a sci-fi movie called "A Scanner Darkly" in a matinee. The live-action film made into an animation-style package is interesting, thought-provoking and visually exciting. The film is about drugs, police and the near future. The nervous paranoid discussion shooting off into surprising directions kept me quietly smiling to myself through the otherwise sombre tale.

On Wednesday I held two training sessions in a company about to change its name, which therefore wants to remain anonymous. In the evening we watched the extras of Extras, the first series. Be careful with the as it contains a lot of spoilers.

On Thursday morning I had a meeting with a possible new customer and there was definitely interest. The one clear obstacle was that they work with C# (C-sharp), of which I don't have any experience. I bought a book on it already, though. I'm willing to learn and adjust the rules of Tick-the-Code to better fit to C# programmers, too. Most of the rules will work already now, but the pointer rules for example probably won't. Adding a few C# rules into rules instead of the pointer rules adds nicely value in the training. In the evening Tapani, who supports Tappara, and I supporting Ilves, went to see the local icehockey match Tappara-Ilves in the Hakametsä ice-stadium. The periods were exciting and ended 2-1, 0-2 and 0-1, making Ilves the fourth-time winner this season with 5 goals to 2. The Ilves goalie saved a lot of shots as Tappara was being very aggressive but unlucky. By the way, did you know that you can buy fresh eggs directly from a farm in bar Domari? Neither did I before Thursday evening. You can also play pool there, which we did for an hour. Fun.

Friday was my Helsinki day. I jumped in a train in the morning, bought "Effective C#" near the station in Helsinki, ate lunch quickly at a McDonalds, took a taxi and drove to Pitäjänmäki. After a normal three-hour training session, I returned to the market place at the railway station and went skating for an hour at the IcePark. Then I jumped on a train and barely had the strength to walk to restaurant Natalie, where I regained all my strength with a meal containing fish, garlic, honey and other stuff, all of which was delicious. I met Riitta, Raija and Mika who all sent their hellos especially to Virpi. Mika told me stories about their trip to Thailand and I shared some Swiss skiing stories of mine.

Today I had the best "laskiaispulla" ever, thanks Tuula for baking it. Unlike the bun-review in the newspaper, which said "the filling was too sweet and there was too little of it". How inconsistent can you get? The rest of the day I spent with the Tervos and the day turned out to be normally perfect like the whole week, actually.