Update 2 to chaos monkey

I don't mind that the building manager wants to figure out this shower leak to the suite below, nor that he has to remove the contents of my closet (which back wall adjoins the bathroom) to the top of my bed to do so. I would want him to do the same for me. But it would be nice to at least receive a note about any potential unrequested surpluses of water entering or leaving my closet.

Or, I'm pleasantly surprised that Finland has the most considerate burglars in the world.

In either case, I found out that the condo board has decided that the building will be made uninhabitable for some time in around a year in order to upgrade the plumbing. The two options available were to plasticize the interior of the existing 50-year-old plumbing (the declined less expensive option), or to tear everything out and replace it (the more annoying but proper repair).

Reverse-engineered recipe: fu salad

Ingredients:
One yellow onion (non-sweet)
One orange

Instructions:
De-rind orange and slice into 5-10 mm sections
Peel onion, halve, and slice into 5-10 mm sections
Mix onion slices with orange slices

Servings:
One

Update to the chaos monkey

It's Monday p.m. and the shower has not been fixed. I noticed that the repair person continues to to wipe their tools (or the interior of the drain...) with a fairly clean towel I had the bathroom. I've removed the other towels from the bathroom and will look for new towels this week.

Between the staff gym at the university, and my other apartment, I did not take up the repair person's idea to shower in the nearby (300 m by bike) stadium.

[Tuesday p.m.: The shower has been fixed. Yay.]

Undue MESSAGE HR system

Chaos monkey has rolled:

Shower leaking unto suite underneath: disables washroom for three cycles.

Modifier: Building superintendent on a one-day vacation.

Reuse and sharing

In or at the exit to each of the major university hallways, there is an equipment recycling bin or shelf to give and take surplus appliances, furniture, office supplies, equipment, etc. Pictured above is a bin containing: A Dell 1U server of some kind (there were two the day before), some Cisco 2xxx series routers, an old Akai VCR, about 25 drive module sleds, an assortment of rails for 19-inch equipment, keyboards, indicator panels, and assorted server room cables. In sort, around $$$$ of easily portable, easily eBayable pieces are up for grabs in the one bin alone.

Other bin goodies I've noticed but not collected: Powerbook, Canon slide scanner, LaserWriters and various other printers, fax machines, telephones, lamps, most (?) of an HPLC, digital slide viewers, desktop PCs, cell phone batteries, ThinkPad modules, CodeWarrior 2, Harvard Graphics 98, boxes of unopened Nokia cell phone batteries and accessories, etc.

Stuff I've collected for immediate use: Power cables, a desk, a pair of basic routers, two keyboards, one mouse, a few VGA and USB cables, a basic set of cable adapters, a new-in-box office telephone and approximately 50' of telephone cable to secure loads to the bike. Overflowing bins of stuff that no one here wants to reuse appear to be removed approximately once per month, only to be replaced with empty bins that start to fill again the next morning. A few items and components are removed each day, as new old items are given more chances at utility. Sometimes, the components are used in-place, as masks or assists for various artistic endeavors that leave traces of paint and cuttings.

All this is from the non-technical side of the university.

In Canada, some sense about the meaning of accountability would require university staff who dispose of government-funded property to document every asset discarded in its long journey to the landfill. Wages alone would put the cost of handling and documenting each item at at least $0.25, to handle items that go to auction or surplus sales in bulk to recover $1/kg gross (less transportation and further handling costs). In Finland, accountability means that both citizens and people working on behalf of the government are trusted to use their professional and personal judgement about what to dispose of, how to sustainably gain the most value from the resources at hand, and not to abuse the available community resources. It may well be that the bins are being carted off for sale or recycling in the same manner as in Canada, but the lack of administrative overhead enables at least one half of the university's finished goods waste to be diverted toward productive and value-generating uses.

Next week, the student-run storage room of household essentials re-opens a final time this semester to collect or recover reusable items from students and staff as they leave for the summer. In the next three months, the items will be re-bundled to be given to new students arriving in the fall.

Down the hall from my office, there is an open well stocked supply closet with new, partly consumed, and used items. Desks are remarkably un-cluttered since there's no need for everyone to keep separate large local caches of anything other than daily consumables (pens, stickies, notebooks), and because down the hall there are really good staplers, hole punches, document containers, scissors, cutting tools (and all the other crappy office junk that typically frustrates users) for those relatively rare occasions when they're genuinely required.

Review: DocScanner 1.2 for Mac

Read the negative reviews and learn from them.

I gave DocScanner a try for its much touted "Curvature correction" feature, which I found out did not exist after purchasing DocScanner from the Apple App Store. In short, DocScanner is vapourware as far as its main selling point is concerned.

The image correction features are a primitive guessing game that provide no live preview of the effects of corrections applied to the image.

The OCR feature is delicate; it works on perfectly framed and lit images in ideal circumstances. In the real world, the best results are achieved when first correcting input files with Prizmo. This is no surprise since DocScanner recycles the hand-me-down Tesseract OCR component built by HP in 1985 and then inherited by UNLV and later Google.

The Help feature and documentation do not exist. "Help isn't available for DocScanner." DocScanner does not even respect (or may not be aware of) user preferences with respect to launching the default e-mail client, choosing Mail.app instead.

I will not purchase any more apps from Norfello Oy unless this situation is remedied with haste. I will also not obtain any more apps from the Apple App Store unless their quality control process improves to prevent such low quality products from reaching consumers. Enabling this product to be available for purchase reflects poorly on both the authors at Norfello, and the reviewers at Apple.

Hey Calgary, I know you don't read Finnish, but...

... it should be easy enough to spot the idea here. Also, why aren't the number of available parking spaces tweeted in a more accessible format? That information would reduce time and energy waste from a lot of pointless driving around.

Reverse engineered recepies: Baked sausage and eggs; two-colour carrot salad; rice, corn, pea, pineapple and pepper salad; bread with garlic butter

Baked sausage and eggs

Ingredients:
Sausage
Scrambled egg mix

Instructions:
Boil sausage until all oils are removed
Cube sausage
Combine with scrambled egg mix in baking pan
Bake at low heat for six minutes or until the egg mixture is firm; do not allow flavours from eggs or sausage interpenetrate


Two-colour carrot salad

Ingredients:
Carrots (orange)
Carrots of a slightly different orange
Canned peaches (imported)

Instructions:
Drain, de-juice, and cube peaches
Gratinate carrots
Gratinate other carrots
Crudely mix in a serving vessel


Bread with garlic butter

Ingredients:
Bread
Butter
Garlic

Instructions:
Remove garlic skin and cube
Warm butter until malleable
Using an ice-cream scoop, combine garlic with butter


Rice, corn, pea, pineapple, and pepper salad

Ingredients:
Cooked rice (imported)
Canned corn (imported)
Canned cooked peas (imported)
Canned pineapple pieces (imported)
Red pepper slices (imported)

Instructions:
Combine ingredients in bottom portion of a large mixing pot.

It's pretty easy for an essentially government institution to simply bring in ingredients from all around the world and then put them next to each other in the hopes that something will happen. After all, celebrity chefs routinely produce stunning examples of international food combinations in the popular media, with their great melting pots. They make it look like magic because they have a through understanding of the diverse characteristics of the materials they bring to the kitchen, and they have an idea about how the individual components can work together to become more than the sums of their parts. They are also backed by decades of local experience and knowledge, along with teams with pipelines into international knowledge pools developed through long-term trust, risk-taking, and many failed experiments.

It's much more difficult to apply some energy to the effort, and to risk burning something in the process. Agitating or adding heat to the mix to encourage the ingredients to individually share their flavours with the others, and to thereby infuse them with qualities from each other is risky since not all ingredients will have equal prominence in the final product. In any given group of ingredients, some members will inevitably simply appear to come along for the ride, but that's all they can do if not given a chance to express and succeed on their strengths.

The approach whereby foreign ingredients are simply placed next to each other, while largely ignoring the strengths of local ingredients, simply averages them into a slightly textured, but ultimately unflavourful mass that *offends* no one. But neither does presenting such spatially adjacent but un-blended imports as a homogeneous outcome *satisfy* anyone. Nothing about spatial and temporal adjacency alone inspires the public to experiment with, or to understand individually, the strengths any of the pre-mixed components. While no menu-maker can force ingredients to work together, they can provide valuable guidance about overall direction. Half cups of pineapple, or of peaches, or peas, or sausage, or scrambled eggs in proportions chosen by each individual to suit their own tastes (even if such tastes disagree with the chefs') can provide a much richer social experience, and greater local benefits than some arbitrary combination imposed from the top.

As it stands, the public willingly cover up the attempts at international co-mingling using overwhelming amounts of American Tabasco sauce, Chinese chili sauce, some kind of Russian or Baltic paprika, French mustard, German pickled items, South Asian "curry" powder, and English ketchup. Hamburger and fries comes as a stereotypical package with no distinguishing Finnish characteristics; as does the Asian chicken and vegetable stir-fry on rice. It's not clear that the local workers on the ground are even ready to import ingredients from other parts of the world.

The reasoning and processes that drive the professionals who have decided on the mechanical mixing bowl menu remain unclear to the public, which makes it very difficult for those outside the menu-making circles to understand or appreciate (or to support) such a menu. Nor is it clear what the expected outcomes of such an unfocused culinary strategy are supposed to be.

Although a small number of local diners benefited from the fusion experiments with cheese-cloth co-developed with their on-again off-again German partners for the Persian audience, the public backlash against that particular kind of collaboration suggests a broader review of domestic and international strategies and menus.

A protectionist attitude against foreign ingredients and fusion would be overreacting (since few would benefit socially or culturally from a strictly True Finnish menu). But instead of perusing a menu of importing foreign ingredients and customers wholesale as replacements for the culinary value and growth that customers expect from participating in a global ingredient supply chain, Finnish menu-makers could find ways to add value to their foods through knowledge.

Given that Finland as abundant access to many varieties of fish, reindeer, hare, ducks, berries, grains, and milk (even though some of those ingredients are linked to politically sensitive histories), there are many opportunities pair international imports with complimentary domestic strengths and assets. Yet the Finnish ingredients are rarely leveraged locally, outside the basics of bread and fermented milk, to which very little value is added for the local customers through Finnish culinary knowledge or international pairings.

Increasingly, and most tellingly, there is a fear among Gen-Xers that Finnish youth are being influenced by well-integrated menu items made locally from international ingredients. Pizzas, kebab, Subway, Chinese take out, and spots drinks are seen as gateway foods that threaten the national culinary identity. As far as I can tell, the only thread uniting Finnish cuisine are the sour, skim, and 1 per cent milk options; the obligatory trip to the salad bar (an American idea from the 1970s) at every venue that serves food; the default heart-conscious low fat, low sugar, and low salt styles of preparation; the very rich (slightly flavoured) butter spreads that apply to every bread; and the overwhelmingly sweet desserts. However, from the opposite perspective such "other" cuisines can only be dreaded in reference to some strong domestic reference.

Serve slightly chilled as a coherent salad, garnish with unsalted sunflower seed kernels to taste.

Student advocates humanist toast

Original: http://www.oulu.fi/ajankohtaista/uutiset/2011A/Humanistinmalja.html

Throughout 3 and 4 a.m. this morning...

Original Video - More videos at TinyPic

This dispute between my neighbour on the same floor and the people on the ground had been going on for an hour before I thought to try the video feature on a p/s camera for the first time. Thankfully, someone had cleaned up the pile of appliance shrapnel by the time I left for the university.

(Also, Google: If you want me to link a new YouTube account with a Google account that you claim I have with a non-Google e-mail address, do not then claim that that non-Google e-mail address does not exist when I try to reset the password on it. You know which Google account I've used to sign up because I'm trying to do video on blogger.com, a property you own which shares an authentication service with YouTube and the rest of Google. This b0rkenness is why I will use tinypic.com for personal video uploading and sharing from now on instead of YouTube.)

Reverse-engineered recipe: Baked white fish on cream of black pepper flecks

Ingredients:
White fish fillet
[Cream of black pepper flecks] (1 fleck of black pepper per cL)
Sliced almonds (unroasted)
Gratenated white cheese

Instructions:
Reduce cream of black pepper flecks to consistency of tomato paste
Layer white fish fillets up to two deep on baking pan
Pour cream of black pepper flecks onto fish fillets
Sprinkle with sliced almonds and gratenated white cheese
Bake on medium heat for 12-15 minutes, or until cheese is melted and slightly brown (do not allow any other ingredients to change or mix)

Week 2: Temporary foreign workers

A. The research proposal

As I briefly noted last week, this week would be spent writing a PhD research proposal almost from scratch, to move into a discipline that had not been my own. With much help from my supervisor to ground my research in jargon that the information systems (IS) people would understand, I completed the task over four 12-hour workdays and most of Friday. The end product was a 10-page research proposal to examine the social and political implications arising from differences between how builders and users conceive information infrastructure.

(Some readers may recalled that an MIS journal had approached me to do some work for them, and also that I declined for lack of experience in the field. It was the correct decision at the time, and after this week's experience, the decision stands.)

For the many non-academics reading, a research plan should go a little something like this:
1. Ground oneself in some field of research.
2. Identify some problem or opportunity to which one has some insight.
3. Propose to do some work that will probably yield some theoretical and/or practical goodies.

My main problem (and my usual M.O.) is that I had plenty of insights and a broad idea about the field (2) and some idea about a solution (3), but almost no knowledge of the recent ideological particulars (1). On the advice of my second supervisor (who was in Vancouver for a conference this week) we agreed on an approach to front-load buzz-words that would appeal to each of the department's diverse post-graduate academic committee members. Apparently, this method to make faculty feel included in new work through name-dropping lowers defenses against the new work we have in mind.

Among other things, writing the proposal in one week required:
-reading (M)IS papers written since the 1990s about the field (our department is redefining itself, and primarily focuses mainly on design and IS)
-reading papers in computer-supported cooperative work
-reading papers about (the lack of theory about) information infrastructures
-reading papers about all that STS stuff I had osmosed but not directly studied at my time at the University of Calgary
-reading papers about participatory design, ethnographic approaches, etc. by Scandinavian authors
-reading a couple of introductory MIS textbooks (substantially the same material as covered every month or so on /., with approximately the same lack of theoretical or thematic cohesion other than it's all computer-related)
-a dozen (decreasingly dreadful) trips to the new automated drink machine that remains in the process of being outfitted and calibrated
-six drafts of the research plan
-discovering that the department doesn't have a comprehensive post-graduate course list

It was also a challenge to fit my ideas about research into local expectations about the kinds of content required in a research plan. Instead of demonstrating through a detailed plan to implement research using the anticipated and available data sources, a researcher's competence is shown through the mastery of vague high-level categories that do not apply to any research effort in particular, along with the CV and supervisors' recommendations.

On Friday evening, upon describing what I had done that week, the Korean MIS researcher with whom I'm sharing an office compared the effort to that required to write a good conference paper, in an unrealistically compressed timeline. I could not disagree with that assessment, but only pointed out that such ass-pulls concentrated bursts of activity were not uncommon to professional or academic activities in which I've participated.

As we discussed our common research, political, and social interests over beers with the Finland vs Russia hockey game in the background (beers are five euro each for students, including taxes and tip) I had several moments in which the MIS jargon and perspectives became well connected to various IT and innovation concepts from my past. It became clear that much of my struggles earlier in the week with respect to categorizing my research methods and approaches related to differences in how Finns and/or MIS viewed the fundamental structure and order of social relationships.

These details, rather than the technical content, I would have to learn additionally in the Finnish way.


B. Extra-curricular activities

There are two waves of diners at the dining hall: The first consists of those who hate to prepare food; the second those who do not like to put down their work. As I participated in the second wave on Wednesday, I met a geologist from China who told me rather a lot about Alberta's geological formations. We compared notes about government paperwork after his arrival in the city that morning. Not surprisingly, the bureaucrats knew how to deal with international scholars from China. On our way out, we were recruited by a pocket of English-speaking international students to [an international student leadership organisation]'s events on Thursday and Friday about "Leadership" and "Project Management". Neither of us were strangers to these concepts, but we reasoned that it might be a good idea to learn about such things from the Finnish perspective. Conveniently, I already had a key for the venue ("Ape House") as that was to be my apartment building [I may have already posted about that story].

So, an Italian, a Russian, a Chinese man, a Canadian, and a couple of Finns walk into a student activity room. The first speaker on leadership draws a 2x2 grid crossing MOTIVATION and ABILITY. He highlighted the organizational importance of developing and retaining individuals with high motivation and high ability, along with methods to move members toward that direction. The speaker then introduced three kinds of individuals who *could* move group members among the categories: mangers, leaders, and coaches. In this framework, managers tell people to do things; leaders set the overall direction, while coaches help individuals overcome personal obstacles. Obviously frustrated that none of the attendees (including the Finns) chose managers as those who could enhance members' skills or motivations, the speaker proceeded to reflect on his grudges with the previous leadership of the local chapter, and how bad it is to have non-motivated but highly skilled "Party Members" (the casual social event, not the political organization) such as himself around to drag down everyone else. The organization's two attending executive members conferred among themselves for some time, and identified some (many) internal leaders who needed more management if the grid were to be followed.

At the event, I also met one of the hundreds of Masters' students, who proceeded to tell me over lunch on Friday about the many inner financial workings of the university and the department. In brief: The university receives government funding for Masters' and PhD students when they graduate (~50,000 euro each). It receives government funding for undergraduate students for as long as they take courses. Undergraduate (half-)courses cost the students approximately 150 euro each. In a bid to expand its financial base (because graduate students were not completing their programs in a timely manner), the department opened an undergraduate program a few years ago. It was also verified to me that the dining hall food operated on a system of cycles and epicycles, in which the same ingredients would occur on a weekly cycle, but be made into different shaped dishes on a monthly cycle.


C. Reverse engineered recipes

1. Carrot salad

Ingredients:
Carrots (100-150g per person)
Vesi (5 tsp)
White vinegar (1 tsp)

Instructions:
Finely shread carrots.
Mix 5 parts vesi with one part white vinegar.
Spritz the vesi and vinegar mixture on the shreadded carrots to taste.


2. Carrot and cabbage salad
Ingredients:
[Carrot salad]
Cabbage (1/4 head per person)

Instructions:
Cube a cabbage
Mix 1 part carrot salad with one part cubed cabbage


3. Carrot, cabbage, and Zucchini salad
Ingredients:
[Carrot and cabbage salad]
Zucchini
Red cabbage
Canned pineapple slices (unsugared)

Instructions:
Drain and rinse canned pineapple
Compress pineapple slices using a cheese cloth to extract remaining juice
Cube pineapple pieces
Cube Zucchini
Finely slice red cabbage
Mix 10 parts carrot and cabbage salad with 10 parts cubed zucchini and one part pineapple fibers
Garnish with red cabbage slices to taste

4. Fruit salad with bonus fibre
Ingredients:
[Carrot, cabbage, and Zucchini salad]
Canned fruit salad
Cubed cabbage

Instructions:
Drain and rinse canned fruid salad
Mix three parts canned fruit salad with one part carrot, cabbage, and Zucchini salad
Garnish with cubed cabbage pieces to taste


5. Next update:
Mail, university IT systems, Kela, taxes, banking, touristy stuff and more

Italian salad and a correction about Pizzeria Napoli

Above: Italian salad from Pizzeria Napoli. The creamy pasta component had bits of something that tasted remarkably like preserved Chinese salted whitefish.

Also, last week I had described the product served by Pizzeria Napoli 'pizza' because that was their designation. When I went back this week for their kebab pizza, it crystalized that this food item is comparable to the North American pizza in appearance only.



Unlike the North American pizza (even many fine dining wood-fired oven varieties), this treat does not drip with oil nor leave an oily aftertaste. In fact, the only sources of oil I could find came from the kebab meat (which was seasoned, unlike the kebab meat from the 'Chinese' place) and a small layer of a dry white cheese. The pizza is cooked and served on a naturally non-sticky wood surface. In the photo above, the fine layer of flour is disturbed only by the meat, vegetable, and hot pepper juices that have seeped through the very thin crust. (My supervisor calls this kind of pizza one of Finland's leading health hazards for the younger generations.)

Note to the U of C Grad lounge and almost every other pizza place: I started eating the pizza eight minutes after walking into the establishment. You /can/ make a delicious healthy fast food pizza (at less starting material cost) if you put some thought into your work.

City of Calgary budget app fail

A balanced budget is one result of good social planning, not *the* precursor to it. This much I'm sure the mayor understands.

Yet Calgarians have been asked to engage in an unconscionable activity: namely to use a financial spreadsheet which purpose is to record tactical activities and outcomes *several steps removed from previous planning and strategy*, for the purpose of planning future strategy.

Not only do spreadsheets lock in available options to fit certain ranges of pre-determined proxies for outcomes, but the budget balancing spreadsheet in present use does not even provide useful indicators of how effective current and past have been. Therefore, Calgarians must not only guess at how well previous dollars have been used, but also guess how city officials might reverse-engineer social policy from arbitrary financial figures. (There is no way for one to rationally allocate more or less funding to something if one does not know how such funding advances one's personal or community goals.)

Also completely excluded from the realm of possibility is the option to consider, add, or substitute new kinds of collaborative expenditure among departments and external partners that is less costly or delivers better results than the imposed current rigid model of how the City fails to work today. This is evident in the various community consultations in which different kinds of stakeholders were systematically discouraged to talk to each other; the city having chosen to consult with each of many stakeholders group individually without effective advertisement or publicity.

In short, unless we as citizens are enabled to collaborate with each using *planning* tools for planning based on a substantial understanding of past performance and future goals, this current budgeting activity can aspire to be nothing more than a farce.

PhD research proposal due on Friday...

My PhD research proposal is due on Friday. Entering into an adjacent field (something like sociology of information infrastructures) has been challenging, and I need to concentrate on a lot of re-imagined material. I had to miss the international Go (board game) hour. My updates may be shorter than usual.

Lunch: meat sauce

Dinner: If you made lasagna out of vegetables instead of pasta, this would be it. I also learned that smoke is a flavour conferred by the local version of allspice.

Observation: Almost all food here is whole. I can see exactly what went into each of the mains I've had.

AC: +1, with a previously counted group

Hi, Mom.

Weekend -or- I need to learn how to launch a boat

Obtained a Finnish bed for 40 euro (85 per cent discount due to chainwide bankruptcy). Worst chair in the world but sleeps like something costing four figures. Comes with a 25-year warranty.

We took the sauna up to 95 degrees; the high end of cold. It's no wonder the Finns aren't reproducing fast enough to internally sustain a population.

I've been asked to help launch a boat in the upcoming week. I don't know if I can learn nautical Finnish soon enough.


Observations:

Cigarette packages at the grocery store checkouts: 4-6 euro. They go well with the VLTs at the waiting area at the front of the store, next to the bottle recycling machines.

We want the pulp and paper mill to be up-wind during outdoor activities.

AC: +0

Somehow, even the pickled garlic lacks flavour

Friday: The above is a 1/3-pound hamburger with fries, and unrequested cheese (7 euro, university dining hall). There's appearently paprika somewhere, but I do not taste it. (Not shown: useless pickled garlic.) [I've since found out that the dark purple beverage (in the upper left) that tasted like a combination of iced tea and cranberry juice syrups with extra was probably intended to be diluted. It went well with the glass of intentionally sour milk, which I thought was regular milk when I poured it.]



Sunday: The above is a 14-inch thin crust reindeer pizza with mushrooms, cheese, onions, tomato sauce from scratch, etc. on the recommendation of a jolly Finnish couple who pride themselves on the Italian pizza and salads (5.80 euro, Pizzeria Napoli). The montage of photos on the wall suggest that I'm not the only one who thinks this may be the best pizza in this part of the world. (Not shown: Yummy Italian cabbage and sausage salad with creamy noodles and Del Monte-like fruit salad.)




AC: +1, "Excuse me, are you from China?" / "No, I'm from Canada" / "Sorry to disturb you." / "No problem. Please drop by and disturb me anytime you feel like it."

May day

May 5, 2011

My second real full day:

Arrived at the university at 7:40. Did a lap around the electronics recycling bins to look for useful cables and such, found none interesting. Parked the bike by the administration building. Grabbed a tuna wrap from the cafe for breakfast. Read about Environmental Markup Language. Had a two-hour meeting with my first supervisor to sketch out a research plan. Ninja'ed my second supervisor into a meeting for tomorrow at 10 a.m. before he leaves for CanHEIT. Worked on the research plan. Had lunch (meatloaf with "brown sauce" with beet and cottage cheese salad). Fulfilled an epic number of /r/scholar requests on reddit. Did some Calgary work. Outlined more of the research plan. Fulfilled a few more requests. Did some email. Picked up my key fob and mopier code (will use once my office has a working wired connection, everyone uses panoulu wireless) from our incarnation of Boothby. He told me about the new coffee/warm beverage machine and its various cleaning cycles. Had dinner (1/2 hamburger with fries, soured milk, and cranberry juice) at 6 p.m. Watched last week's South Park. Picked up my mail from the student residence (that I will not be living in because roommate insists on scenting with eau de bottle depot). Tried a new bike path home. Got lost in the other student housing hamlet. Stopped by the Sale (sa.le) to find out when it's open.

Observations:

eduroam here seems to only with with one of the two University of Calgary RADIUS servers (number 1). In the last two days, I've only had partially working eduroam connections (non-routable) on the number 2 server, until today when I had to authorize the use of number 1's cert.

Everyone eats really fast. Standard condiments include ketchup, dijon mustard, green Tabasco (small bottles, almost always 0.5 cm remaining), four kinds of salt, a red powder resembling paprika, and probably others I've not noticed. I'd like to introduce the idea of combining flavours (senior faculty members have told me Finnish food tends to be "bland") using something other than an XOR function...

AC: +2, cute, giggled in Finnish

University of Oulu sure clears out completely by 7 p.m.

(My supervisor, H., borrows a desk while the movers fix the furniture in her office down the hall.)

This was my first substantial day on campus. Found an office, got my office key, but not the outside door key fobs [or printer/copier codes, or network access credentials]. Had lunch with by project and PhD supervisors (barley porridge [the lunch, not the supervisors]). Was internationally related by their international relations office, more paperwork to do. Scavenged some computer cables (and a wired firewall...). Settled some banking cruft, etc. Moved a found desk into the apartment.



Potato porridge of some kind, with bean and cabbage salad (5 euro, university dining hall).

AC: +several. I've not been keeping track of uniqueness.

Library

At least one of these things is not like the others. (The Chang of something indeed.)

Culture shocks all around

1. Conservatives
I awoke at 4 a.m. local time (7 p.m. Mountain) to watch the results of the federal elections in Canada through my semi-reliable internet connection. In recent (mid-April) Finnish elections, the True Finns (ultra-right nationalist, anti-EU party) became the third partner in a coalition with center-left and center-right parties. They are still negotiating the power sharing arrangement. One of the big issues of the day is if and how to assist other EU countries to deal with their ongoing economic and national solvency distresses. Hopefully, Canada under an effective opposition (for the first time since the Conservatives were in opposition) will come to a similarly useful arrangement. Also, it's appearently a surprise that Canada elected its first Green MP.

The police station could not issue an identification card today because my length of stay was insufficient. They said that I have no further obligation to attempt to register as a resident of this city (since the social security number accomplishes that goal as well), and offered an alternative identity verification service to the bank. (They were unaware that Nordea had started to require ID cards to open credit card accounts, and offered an identity verification service/form for 16 euro in order to say that they've seen the same documents that I provided Nordea to open my bank account. I'm tempted to find another bank without such requirements, but that would mean deliberately using a less secure bank. These rules, I'm told, are a side effect of the banks wishing to avoid becoming entangled in the broader European financial badness, although everyone is aware that the two problems [low-level immigration banking and national solvency] and their scales are unrelated.)

H. was introduced to a new biometric fingerprint scanner in order to apply for a new passport at the same police station.

Guns and tasers: Gun crimes are on the rise, permits require membership in a gun club, there's an untapped market for electrocution weapons here.

2. Lunch buffet

Today I learned that standard lunch dining is a buffet style service in which there are three options: salad; salad and soup; salad, soup and meat. All of the above include the non-exclusive choice of water, tea, coffee, milk, lactose-free milk, other hot beverage, dessert, fruit, candy, etc. for 6-8 euro. The beef and pork stew with carrots and onions was exceptionally salty but tender, as was my colleagues' onion and potato soup (to the extent that it needed to be cut with cottage cheese to be ediable). The brownie/mousse dessert slice was exceptionally sweet (pictured: one quarter of the standard serving).




(We had lunch yesterday at a local church which operates a vegetarian lunch room with the same format. The Jasmine rice had the correct visual appearance, but no flavour, as was its accompanying curried something. The pickled garlic cloves saved the meal.) We pay up front, and then it's the honour system until one is full. I also learned that "licorice" in Finland is something much more subtle than the North American candy or baking ingredient.

Health of Fins: Due to the lack of genetic diversity, Fins are susceptible to high blood pressure and heart conditions (and allergies, and other medical issues). Therefore, the low sodium, healthy food, organic trend has been around for at least half a century. I explained that in Canada, immigrants and their offspring were statistically distinguishable from the general population on health measures, but that second- and third- generation immigrants are generally as un-healthy as the general population.

Salad bars: Every food vendor has a salad bar. Chocolate milk is not a popular concept. Soda pop and "energy beverages" are only popular among some of the youth.

3. Personal responsibility for insurability

Backstory: H. had picked up my apartment keys last Friday, and found the place a mess. Without my knowledge, she demanded that the apartment manager talk with the only tenant of the two beadroom apartment about cleaning. The apartment manager did so on Friday, and was assured by the tenant that the apartment would be cleaned by Monday when I would move in. We stopped by around noon, awaking the hung-over tenant, to find the apartment in a more than gently used state.

We returned to PSOAS to ask about further options. Upon telling PSOAS that my medical insurance may not cover my living in an apartment full of rotting clutter and fulminating alcohol remains, I was told that the idea of personal responsibility for maintaining my insurability is a foreign concept here. Knowingly moving into such a place would invalidate my eligibility for coverage, and also probably my sanity. I did not notice the WTF moment on the part of the PSOAS customer service representative, but H. told me after that she also needed to explain her previous experiences with the US health insurance system to convince the PSOAS representative that such customs are not abnormal in North America. There are apparently no free apartments this time of year, despite many students moving out. The apartment manager agreed to go back to the apartment to speak with the other tenant. *mumble mumble* something about difficult personal circumstances. He informs us that it is now in a livable condition. I expect to sign an agreement for an apartment in the newly renovated family buildings that opens June 1. Many such units open every month.

4. Social networks, STS, and technology incubation

While discussing barriers to institutional collaboration (privacy/funding/turf restrictions, etc.) I explained the basic contrasts between startup funding for new oil and gas juniors vs ICT/other startups in Calgary, the role of Calgary Technologies Inc. and the Petroleum Club (read some of papers co-authored with the ISRN Calgary team about this at http://people.ucalgary.ca/~bali). I asked if such contrasts have analogues in Oulu. I was told no, but that I could be a leading scholar in Finland in this area were I to pursue it. I'm cautiously flattered, on the assumption that those expressions did not lose something in the translation. On the other hand, I was also told that I'm also starting at two pay categories above most PhD students owing to my publication record. During our bureaucratic travels, I've seen at least three technology incubator buildings all larger than CTI and ARTC combined. I will have to look into this some more.

Canada-Finland relations outside of hockey:

Observations: I tried to configure Blink (http://icanblink.com, an open source soft SIP client) to work with my time-tested les.net account via panoulu to dial from a calgary number. No joy on the microphone, although I could hear the other side.

Finnish language [Nokia] cell phone: difficult to text with, especially in T9 mode. Also, in a city in which 1/3 of the population works for Nokia (of whom up to 3,000 have just been laid off), the iPhone is relatively popular.

The tax card did not arrive today in my student accommodation mailbox; I'm not disappointed.

On privacy: I'm told that some of the privacy strangeness I've observed were mistakes on the part of some university administrators who were caught up (such as listing the names and qualifications of the other candidates for the position I was offered) in the reorganization. I take this information at face value.

AC: +1 (spoke a young English, directed us to the mail boxes)


Food review: "kabab" at "Chinese Fast Food and Merikosken Grilli"




Every food vendor (except Subway) in a 200m radius offered "kabab", so naturally I walk into the only Asian fast food place I've seen, and order a meal of it. The staff of two were polite, butchering the Finnish names for their food items as much as I was, and boxed half a dozen take out meals in short order before my eat-in dish arrived three minutes later. The venue was elsewise full of dine-in customers at 8 p.m. on a Tuesday so I grabbed the only free table. A quarter pound of tasefully warm unseasoned beef-esque meat strips arrived on top of half a pound of generously MSG'ed fries from clean oil, and another quarter pound of salad parts, all lightly topped in ketchup and mustard from one-gallon pump bottles behind the counter. The portion size did not disappoint, but I expected at least one of the sauces to be something like mayo or donair sauce, or something other than ketchup and mustard. The ketchup should have at least tasted like tomato and not coloured sugar, while the mustard needed to have more sharpness than coloured honey.

The several other eat-in customers had ordered equally Chinese-based (rice/noodles/stirfry) meals and kabab-based plates, and the single bamboo plant on the window ledge had been gathered many months of dust, so this was certainly not an unpopular venue.

Perhaps I'm just spoiled by the week of well-nuanced food in Calgary prior to my departure, but I do not get the sense that the basic salt, sweet, sour, and bitter flavours are used in any way other than insignificant or overwhelming. I'd be disappointed if Hannu were the only Finn I met who understood flavours.

(Merikosken is an area of the city just north of downtown. The Chinese portion of their sign contains a dragon followed by two glyphs in different typefaces. The first glyph meaning "little" is in a caligraphic style but with an unusually elongated central down-stroke. The second glyph is in a modern sans-serif contains a seven- to nine- stroke [probably not simplified Chinese] radical I do not recognize [it's not remotely close to the glyph for "dragon"] next to a four-stroke radical mis-shapen for "sun", "moon", or "say". The Asian staff did not speak any of the Chinese dialects with which I'm even remotely familiar.)




AC: +2

My last post was from: Toivoniemi

The straight line extending along the hinge points to the nearest panoulu access point at the Raatin Liikuntakeskus (a local stadium).

Beep Beep

Beep beep? I had not heard the new cell phone make a noise before. It was a text message, thankfully in English, obtainable through button mashing on an old Nokia 1100.

English appears to be the de facto second official language, appearing more often than Swedish on government and business forms and signs. As an officially bi-lingual country, government and business services are supposed to be offered in both Finnish and Swedish. But I'm told that most workers do not speak the latter. It's part of a broader policy to participate more in the global economy and society.

Street graffiti and tagging here looks no different than that found in Calgary. They've recently discovered large stickers, but I've not yet seen silver or gold markers.

Accomplished today: obtained a social security number which was required to open a bank account, signed the first of several university contracts using social security number and bank account information, applied for KELA social security and health care using social security number, applied for a tax card using social security number and salary information from the university (2 per cent raise since I was offered the position...), and signed some student housing forms from PSOAS. Remaining for tomorrow: take passport photos, obtain an identification card from the police station, inspect the student housing unit, and whatever else.

I need to obtain an identification card from the police station to apply for a credit card with the bank. The Visa debit/credit card is said to be more useful than the MasterCard in Europe except Austria.

The Tax card office asked if I wanted to participate in the Finnish social security system; but since I would be here for more than four months, I would have to participate. They said that documentation will be mailed to me by tomorrow (Tuesday). Regular mail in Finland means overnight delivery.

The Kela processing and decision will apparently take six weeks. It would be interesting if I ended up paying taxes for social services I could not use. I learned about the distinction between the "workers' health plan" and public medical system: the former is operated by the university and has some specialists on site; the latter primary health care network asks citizens to go to an assigned local facility. Both do referrals to the university hospital for more specialists,

We also met with Lori, the head of a research institute investigating arctic sovereignty and ecology. I'm told that he "somehow" obtained a copy of my CV and has taken an interest. I thank Drs. Rob Huebert, Cooper H. Langford, Richard Davis (Center for Military and Strategic Studies, and Arctic Institute of North America) for the assorted knowledge of the Arctic that I apparently gained by osmosis.

On student housing: I've been told to move into a studio, so I applied for an internal transfer to do that. PSOAS applications are more rapidly successful when requesting an unfurnished room and a furnished one. Family apartments cost around 12 euro more per month than studios, and are not limited to families.

Observations: The city has a neat parking system where drivers are issued a manual time disc used to indicate the time at which a vehicle is parked. Some parking zones are free for 30 minutes, others for up to two hours. They trust the users to do the right thing. Also, the newer downtown public parking buildings are tied electronically to road signs on the major (incoming) roads to indicate the number of available spaces before drivers must make the decision to turn.

The version of Google Chrome I downloaded to this netbook offers spell-checking in English (US) or English (AUS).

AC: +2 (hallways)

Last post sent from: a bench by the river on a nippy afternoon

5:09 p.m., via the webcam on a netbook. (Still don't have reliable internet access.)

Cider + Sawdust + 12km bike tour + Sauna + Sparkling Wine = Pain

The local food places do not open until 11 a.m. or noon on Sundays. That works on this weekend since today is the day that the Finnish people parade their finely polished family, city, military, and farm vehicles through the streets in a tradition following an old Eastern Bloc tradition. Mobile air raid sirens accompany platoons of motorcycles, police vehicles, and regular vehicle traffic along from the big island through Kokitie to downtown.

My supervisor, H., and I rode by this parade en route to one of the yacht clubs on the interior side of the big island where Hannu's 30-ft boat is dry docked for the winter. Hannu has been a mechanic of sorts all his life and follows in a strong family maritime tradition, through which he met H. After replacing and overhauling the engine and related systems, today was the day to strip 35 years of varnish and stains from all the wood above deck. Following a nice lunch of dry breads, spreads, and non-beer marine beverages, we took to work on the wood. The port railing was easy to strip after we had all learned how not to sand down the starboard railing. (By easy, I mean "required 2 hours anyway because of the various winches and other attachments bolted through the hull that were too bothersome to first remove.") The boat would be ready to launch in a week or two.

As the afternoon closed, we biked our way to the sea side of the island to gauge the ice. We found almost none. Touring the island also provided an opportunity to investigate the city's experimental architecture neighbourhood which mingled with well lit woodland pathways. Some new apartment blocks were coming up, along with new schools and other civic facilities. Opposite the channel, an ex-harbour around 2 km from downtown Oulu was being relaimed. The region rises abour 1-2 cm pper year from the ocean, making it increasingly difficult to navigate large vessels, or to tack the smaller ones.

About the Sauna: Sparking wine before, 55 degrees C during, sparking wine after, it's a good thing. In particular, the practice of going outside to the sun room, and then to the other outside in the backyard, is new to me. It's an invigorating experience. Then we had a delicious dinner of salmon ("smells like fish") and mashed potatoes and too much ice-cream (caramel and chocolate), followed by a 4 km bike home for me.

30 minutes later, it felt like the hangover that would not end, nor be thrown up.

AC: +1

I'm on a boat