Life, the final frontier

People++

Jiivonen moved in with us today, yay. Most of the day has consisted of lots of people moving piles and piles of boxes into the house. I expect it’ll take quite a few weeks (months?) before things settle down, but it’s nice to have a fourth person in the house; now we don’t have two echoing empty rooms, but instead one occupied one and one gaming-room-to-be (at the moment acting as moving box storage).

Right now the house looks like a refugee camp more than anything else, but one of these days we’ll actually have cash to buy a… sofa! With luck, a nice one. And a comfy chair or two (sans the Inquisition). And… and… lots’o’stuff. […]

Attack of the Killer Tick

When I got out of the shower this morning and put on my clothes, I noticed my leg had a sore spot. Thinking it was some scratch, I pulled up my pant leg and found… well, a fairly harmless garden-variety tick attached and happily sucking away at my precious bodily fluids. Not quite the face-hugger from aliens, but a pesky parasite anyways.

I didn’t really remember what one was supposed to do in order to get rid of the things, the thing I knew not to do was just pull it off with my fingers. So I asked the still-sleepy Janka, and she murmured something about “tick-pincers” and “apteekki”. So off I go to the drug store and they sell something that looks like a mini-size medieval torture implement. One which works, since I got the little bloodsucker off my skin without problems. Yay!

First time I remember having a tick in ages… one of the cats had one maybe two years back, but that’s about it. They’re not that common around here, I guess. […]

Backpack revisited

Backpack is a web-based service/app run by 37signals, the same company responsible for unleashing Ruby On Rails on the world. The base/demo version is free, if you pay you get extra functionality – this seems to be a growing trend these days.

So, what is it? That’s a reasonable and simple question, but the answer is a bit more elusive. It’s something like an ultra-simplified wiki with todo (and other) list support. It provides some structure to your data (unlike a traditional wiki which is totally freeform), but doesn’t mandate a strict system or layout. It’s also extremely streamlined and simple, by design – the design idea was to only include the things people really need, and nothing else.

So we’re back to “what is it”?

It’s an sort of freeform, online personal organizer tool, a place to hang all the virtual (or physical) Post-It notes and lists that are always hanging around. It’s a place to store all the general small “stuff” and info that don’t have any proper place, and which you need to refer to often. Todo-lists. Reminder notes (Backpack provides email notifications on those). General “notes to self”. Just… stuff.

I tried it out when it first came out less than a year ago, and was mildly interested by the concept. On the other hand, my gut feel was “I could do all this myself with a wiki and some other stuff”. Which is true… except I never got around to organizing something like that, so the “I could do something like this myself” has been replaced with “well, I could, but why should I when this exists”?

At the time, Backpack was missing any sort of calendar, and that was really the deal-breaker for me – I need some sort of calendar in my organizer tool.

Well, just about a week(?) ago the bastards added a calendar to it. I tried it out, and it works – like everything in Backpack it’s ultra-simplified; there is only one view, and you can’t really configure anything. But it works, and my calendar needs are very simple. As a sneaky move, the calendar is only available in the for-pay accounts, so I was “forced” to move into the $5 per month account scheme. I don’t really mind.

So. With the addition of the calendar feature, Backpack has become a surprisingly useful tool for me. I still find it hard to describe to people exactly what the thing actually is or exactly how I use it, but… “works for me”.

While I’ve come to appreciate 37signal’s “keep it as simple as humanly possible” design method, I still think they take it a bit too far sometimes. There are a lot of things in Backpack I’d like to customize. On the other hand, I suppose everyone has their list of things, and if all were accomodated the whole app would quickly become a confusing, Microsoft-like mess. The zen-like simplicity does have a certain charm, keeping that in mind. […]

Polttarit

We had a bachelor party (“polttarit”) for a friend on Saturday, I’m the best man so I did most of the organizing – that doesn’t mean I did all the work, just that I sent a lot of emails and worried a lot about how it would turn out. Well, things went wonderfully and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, including the groom-to-be. Maybe it’s just that we’re all getting a bit older here, but this was a fairly low-alcohol event by “polttari” standards… sure, we drank quite a bit, but all things considered not all that much. I can even call it “civilized drinking” with a totally straight face.

We started off with 2 hours of paintball, run by Pro Games. A lot of fun, as paintball usually is, and as an additional bonus most of the group were first-timers. I heard a lot of “Hey, this is actually fun!” comments from people. After the paintball, with everyone sweaty, bruised and multicolored from the paint, we drove down to the seashore for a picnic. After some bubbly stuff and snack type food, the Saunaship came to fetch us from the nearby boat harbor. It was really cool, sitting in a good, wood-heated floating sauna out on the bay, with sausages sizzling on the gas grill and the sun shining down happily… and hey, I went swimming in the sea for the first time this summer, the water was really warm and nice.

After two hours of the floating sauna, the sauna captain shuttled us to a nearby (other) small-boat harbor, where we packed ourselves into yet another small boat and went to an island holiday house owned by a relative of one of the participants. Great place, and a lot bigger than I had expected. The rest of the evening involved grilled lamb, red wine and yet more sauna. At some point we decided to call it a day, and got ourselves taxis for a ride home.

Thanks to all involved, couldn’t have done it without you :) […]