We haven’t seen the sun for weeks, so it has been quite gloomy and dark. Meaning that the black jobs have mainly been blobs of black in photographs.
P.S. This was timed to come out on Dec 1, but I managed to botch the timing so post-dated it now.
May Day (or Vappu in Finnish) is a bank holiday in Finland and traditionally a day spent at picnics, watching parades and listening to political speeches. For a long time there hasn’t been anything going on in our town with everyone going to the nearest city to experience the crowds. This year however the local businesses organized some activities in what passes for our town square (a piece of dirt in the center of town that is owned by too many different parties).
I was there showing the colors of the fire department. Luckily we managed to avoid hearing any political speeches, but we did have to endure some karaoke. Some historic cars and modern bikes came to be shown in addition to the vendors.
And one of our local characters, a Charlie Chaplin impersonator made an appearance. As he always does when a crowd gathers in town.
Over on Facebook there has been a challenge going around (at least us Finns) to document five days of your every day life and post the photographs. So below is a glimpse of my every day life: work, dogs, fire and rescue, CrossFit…
Lately I’ve encountered two excellent pieces of journalism that make me feel like there is a future visible ahead for good, in-depth journalism.
First is the GQ long form article on the wildfire that took the lives of 16 hot-shots last summer in Arizona. Even if you are not a fire-fighter, it is very much worth a read. And after seeing the damage caused by wildfires in the US and following them to see if road closures will force us to re-plan our road trip route I can respect the work that American fire fighters face in those conditions even more.
Second, a Finnish effort DocImages which produced their iPad application and the first piece of paid content for it. Read more about the effort and the first article available on the iPad in English and in Finnish. I love that I am able to choose if I am interested in enough in the new content to buy it for the price of a latte.
I am and have always been a fan of well-produced content that I can easily choose to pay for. I would have readily paid for the GQ article as well – at least if paying for it would be easy and simple. Say what you will of in-app purchases on iOS, but they do make the decision to buy something interesting quite easy to make and thus hopefully help in at least some extent on getting people to pay for content.
I have never understood why people find the change of the calendar year a good time to make resolutions. Resolutions that generally will not be kept. More and more I’ve found that my own thoughts revolve around the time spent from other epochs – be they graduations, birthdays or anniversaries. But still I try not to make resolutions for a year. I mean, it has well been shown that I can’t keep up with any 365 projects or the like ;)
It would be easy to say that the dark and gloomy autumn and early winter we had has sapped my energy. It would also be easy to say that my longing back to the Rockies after our road-trip in the US has distracted me. Whatever it is, I know that I need to get myself more organized.
Maybe it is the fact that we finally have sunlight again and the ground is white – although with much too little snow – or the fact that I am exercising more again, but I have more energy now. More energy that has to be poured into getting things done. Finishing the multiple projects I have lying around in various states of completion and remove them from dragging me down.
Let’s see how it goes…