Iced Volvo

Could you guess who happens to be the lucky owner of the car in front? And whether that person has a client meeting starting in 30 mins.

No, I don't still miss Finnish winter and the related shoveling. In fact I am off to do some wreck diving off the coast of Bali just now.

For the record, I have since these times invested into a warm parking garage and improved my quality of life immensely. 

Fiddler on the MRT

I imagine I am stating the obvious here, but easily 80 % of my fellow commuters (me among them obviously) have their necks tilted while tapping away on their smart(ish) devices. I guess that is now the new norm everywhere, but it did strike my eye when having just relocated over here. Of course you had people fiddling with their equipment in buses and metros in Helsinki, but not even close to this amount of people across all age groups. This might have changed in the past 21+ months though. Remains to be seen.

The constant fiddling is not limited to killing boredom while commuting. I have seen couples spending a romantic evening in a posh restaurant with stunning views from the 70th floor and both of them are deeply buried in their own devices. I took the liberty of noticing with certain sad happiness, that at least one of them was busy bringing more money to the Finnish mobile app phenomenon, Supercell.

While on the topic of commuting: I am not typically fond of allowing my social media existence to be used to promote any commercial products, but this time I need to give praise to Bose QC20 headphones. I just bought a new set over the last weekend to get me prepared for my next upcoming travels. I have grown so dependant on active noise cancellation headphones in planes that I was forced to replace my previous headphones (AKG NC 495) which broke during my business trip to China a month ago. I gave the Bose an acid test of ambient noises of Singapore in the morning and honestly was blown away. This is by far the most effective noise cancellation I have ever heard of. Or not heard of!? I was walking in true bubble of silence getting immersed in Portishead potpourri through Spotify and pretty much hearing nothing else. It was magically surreal to see people, buses, cars, trains, but not hearing anything but Beth Gibbons voice over trip hop beats drilling into my head. I didn't even feel the urge to fiddle my phone to pass the time.

PS. So that marketers don't have a field day on how social media affects buying behaviours, I need to state that the sound quality of these in-ear headphones is not as great as big over the ear model that I used to have. Especially the low bass sound I find is lacking. However it's the noise cancellation that is FTW.

PS2. The selection of Portishead was inspired by the fact that they had just performed live the other day in a Finnish music festival in Ilosaari. Wish I had been there.

PS3. With absolutely no relation to fiddling mobile devices, killing ambient sounds or really anything at all, I need to share the weirdest dream in a while which I just remembered by all of a sudden. My old client had drawn a donkey's head (!) as a failed rating on my exam for religion class (?!). I had refused to answer correctly because of the appallingly denominational way the questions were posed.

A blast from the past

This day goes down in history. I believe this was the first time ever that I have queued for a cashier and deposited a paper form cheque to my bank account. I am of the generation of people raised in Finland who never had to engage with check books or checking accounts. I had my first debit card when I was 15 and was later using a crude pre-internet bank over 36,6 Kbps modem connection (who remembers the infernal noise?) for all my bill payments and money transfers.

Honestly Singapore is not the worst place in terms of advances in banking. Actually there is a fierce competition between the regional and global banks to demonstrate who are seen as the most innovative and cutting edge with rolling out new services like NFC payments. I can get by using mostly my credit card including for small purchases like taxi trips. But still everyday bill payment through electronic means is not as straightforward and everywhere accepted as I have grown to expect.

Also there is some inherent weirdness and unnecessary level of complexity in the way electronic banking is set up here. I can pay a bill normally (provided that I have added a new payee) or choose to use GIRO, bank transfer, credit card, standing instruction, online cheque (!!! if I had a checking account)  or advance pay. All of these modes of payments are hidden in various parts of the navigational hierarchy of my internet bank UI. In Finland in my bills I have two pieces of information: recipients bank account and typically reference code and after that I set it to run automatically if it is a reoccurring payment. I see all transactions (past and upcoming) in one place. How hard can that be?

All your berries are belong to us

I have a had a massive misconception all throughout my life. Now that I have recently been enlightened by my wife and learned my lesson, please allow me to contribute to the shared body of knowledge in case there are others like me out there.

While I really, really enjoy the regional cuisine in SE Asia, I have been vocally of the opinion that there are few food items that indeed are objectively better in Finland (perhaps also in Sweden and other neighboring countries) than anywhere else in the world. I am obviously talking about berries here. Strawberries are much sweeter and tastier in Finland compared to their sometimes bigger and even visually more appealing foreign siblings. The same thing applies to blueberries. I just can't seem to find as good blueberries as the ones which I can pick up readily from practically any forest in Finland as per quite extensive freedom to roam.

You know nothing, koo mikko! 

The thing is that I have been comparing apples and oranges -- or more precisely comparing bland blueberries to real tasty bilberries. I have been unjustly dissing that other blue colored berry to its Nordic relative. It's actually pretty easy to make the distinction now that I know what to look for.

Thus for the record, let me apologize globally to all the berries I may have offended over time. I regret my actions deeply.