everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Category: Home

  • Old School Playground

    Old School Playground

    Back when I was a lad life on the playground was a little more . . . tenuous.

    Everything in the playground was more dangerous. And they were different and unique, seemingly put together by the neighborhood handymen who in a burst of creative energy one Saturday morning emptied their garages of old tires, 2×4s, and chains and just nailed it all together.

    1000 Awesome Things

    There was little adult supervision during recess. A skinned knee or elbow taught you the limits of safe. Broken bones marked the less graceful or too-brave-for-their-own-good. Kids would devise new, often alarming, uses for the playground structures. This was time before product testing and lawsuits.

    Behold the Witch’s Hat. This was a device at my elementary school in Connecticut. The people that made this thing thought the children (imagine boys in sky blue shorts with suspenders and girls in red gingham dresses) would hang onto the bar in a neat circle and playfully skip around like merry little Dick and Janes.

    The reality was more edgy. 6th graders would offer to give the younger kids “high rides” lining up a few unsuspecting subjects and invite them to hang on to one end while they would then jam the other right up next to the pole, lifting five or more kids up off the ground. As they began to spin you around it was a thrill for the first minute or so, wind in your hair, legs dangling out from under you as you whirled round and round. Once you realized this ride wasn’t going to stop, an icy determination to hang on for dear life took over.

    Suspended a good 10 or 15 feet off the ground (which, if memory recalls, was rough asphalt), the bigger kids would spin the ring around the pole, faster and faster, while keeping you, now terrified, high up off the ground. Sweaty palms start to loose grip as your legs swing out almost horizontal from the centrifugal force.

    One by one your classmates would fly off, thrown into other playground equipment or even the fence, bodies crumple to the pavement like rag dolls. Seeing the image of the rusted device above I can still hear the screams. It was the stuff of prison yards. I survived my high ride and learned lessons about grit, determination, the frailty of life and the cruelty of mankind.

    Now everything on the playground has rounded corners and is covered in plastic. The ground is a sea of vulcanized rubber. It’s a kinder, gentler world of helicopter parents and the safety council. Maybe, as Bill Cosby says, the grown-ups were trying to bump us off.

  • Finnish Ingenuity

    Finnish Ingenuity

    We had some house guests over last night who shared some observations about the Finnish people and their incredible spirit and creativity, especially when their backs are up against the wall.

    World War II was a time of extreme struggle for the Finns who found them up against the full wrath of Stalin’s Army. Out-numbered and out-gunned, the Finnish people were left with their wits, here are a couple of highlights:

    Winter War – In 1940, the Finns faced a full-scale invasion of their homeland. As the Russian Army advanced on Finland in the winter of 1940, they ran into sub-zero temperatures and long nights of darkness. Using this to their advantage, small squads of Finnish troops would infiltrate enemy lines between larger divisions and set up machine gun lines pointing outward, towards each division. After short bursts to the left and right, the guerrilla squads would retreat and leave the two, recently alerted adjacent divisions to open fire upon each other thinking they were firing on the enemy when in fact they were firing upon the neighboring division.

    The Bombing of Helsinki – In February of 1944, Stalin ordered bombers to flatten the city in order to break the spirit of the Finnish people. In preparation for the bombing which they knew was coming, the civil defense forces laid out a grid of signal fires out on the frozen bay and surrounding islands which roughly matched the layout of Helsinki at night. When the bombers flew towards the city, the civilians doused the lights and the bombers, thinking the lights they saw out on the bay were the city, dropped a majority of their bombs harmlessly into the water, sparing most of the city.

    Don’t mess with the Finns, they’ll mess with you.

  • Sibling Rivalry 2009

    A Nokia colleague of mine here in Finland had a charming update to an age old scenario. In this scene, the older sister, who is 13, is saying she has a crush on a boy in her school. It’s a boy in her school and the younger sister is dying to know who it is.

    Younger sister creates a website which is all sparkly with animation and mood music and has an embedded form in it. Fill in the name of the person you love and this site will tell you if it’s a true match. It’s a trap of course. There’s a mailto: embedded into the Submit button. Anything typed into the box will be emailed to the younger sister’s email account.

    The younger sister is ten.

    Older sister runs across the form, can’t resist temptation and types in boy’s name and clicks on button. As soon as she does, old sis realizes what’s happening! She’s furious!

    Old sis tries to logging into Young sis’ email account to delete the email. It takes her a few tries but she gets it. It’s easy to guess. She deletes the email with her beau’s name, disaster averted!

    Old sis saunters into the living room, tells Young sis that she wasn’t fooled by her amateur prank – says that her password was easy to guess and she deleted the email anyway.

    Young sis winks back at Old sis. Says she figured that would happen. That’s why she added a .forward file to her account that forwards any email sent to her email address to another secret account she created just for that purpose.

    Hair pulling ensues!

  • Finnish Wife Carrying

    Finnish Wife Carrying

    So in the middle of all the excitement of getting settled we missed the World Wife Carrying Championship which took place (as it has for the past 14 years) in Sonkajärvi, Finland – about 500km north of Helsinki.

    Eager to see what it would take to participate next year, I came across the official site which had a bit on How to Become a Master in Wife Carrying. In typical Finnish deadpan humor, they went into all the details just so you believed they were serious until you came across lines like,

    The core of the race is made of a woman, a man and their relationship. The wife carrying and eroticism have a lot in common. Intuitive understanding of the signals sent by the partner and becoming one with the partner are essential in both of them – sometimes also whipping.

    Maybe we’ll go next year.

    Related crazy Finnish events include:

  • Finland, they do it different here

    Finland, they do it different here

    I have a feeling this is going to be a regular feature. There are many things that are different here in Finland. Here are just a few that I’ve learned about in the past few weeks.

    Speeding tickets are progressive, you pay more if you earn more. I was warned about someone who had a $1,000 speeding ticket and they were only slightly over the limit. How do the police know how much you make?

    There is a government service that allows anyone to lookup another person’s salary. The idea is that if you know what your colleagues are making (and they know that you know) that everyone will cooperate better. Of course no one bothers to look up someone’s salary, just knowing that you can does the trick.

    When you get here, you register with the local city hall and once they get your address, they let everyone know. This has the unsettling effect of you signing up for cable TV and the rep not even needing your address because (and they always wink when they say this) we know where you live. The flip side of this is that we’re in a temporary apartment right now but when we move, there’s only one place we need to tell our new address. No pesky change of address forms!

    Like Britain and Japan, there is an annual fee for TV. It’s about $250/year for one set (you pay based on the number of TV sets) and if you’re busted cheating, you pay triple.

    I can drive on my California driver’s license for the next year but if (or is it when?) I get my Finnish license, the driver’s test includes snow driving.

    Most people pay with debit cards for everything and invoices are paid with a wire transfer. This extends to individuals. I can wire money to any account, free of charge. In the US, it costs $40 to do this from one bank to another. Fiscal Portability anyone?

    The Finnish Posti is well aware of the impact of all this electronic billing on their revenues so they’ve gone ahead and offered a service which scans in any paper invoices headed your way and they will email you notification when a bill is ready. Login to your Posti account in time and you can look at a scanned copy of your invoice before it arrives.

    Recently in Oulu, a development center for Nokia up north, one of my colleagues dialed me a taxi and all he did was grunt a few times, hung up and said a cab was on it’s way. The taxi service used caller ID to identify him, then pulled up the most popular destinations he’s made when he’s booked before, and asked him which of these he is (1) at right now and, (2) going to as a destination. Smart! Like a call log for taxi destinations!

  • Goodbye Alameda

    Goodbye Alameda

    Over the past month, I have been unwinding my life in the San Francisco Bay Area and getting ready to move the family (and dog) over to Helsinki, Finland where Nokia, my employer, is headquartered.

    For the past four and half years we have been living in Alameda, an island in the East Bay, about 20 minutes from San Francisco, over the Bay Bridge. We settled here because, Izumi, spotting Alameda on a map noted it’s location in the middle of the Bay, making it most convenient to most locations.

    It took two months of intense house hunting (remember, this was 2004, the peak of the housing bubble) but we finally found a place that we could call home. We lucked out and were fortunate to find a neighborhood that we loved on a block surrounded by families with children that really bonded with our kids and grew up together over the years.

    Tyler started in kindergarden when we moved in and just finished forth grade, Julia’s  finished first grade. Edison School, where we walked our kids to school each day, is the only school that our kids really know. It’s been tough for them to imagine what their life will be like in Finland so it’s been hard for them to leave.

    Izumi too has made many friends here and as we walk the island people often wave or honk their horn, it’s that kind of place. Because English is not Izumi’s native language and she didn’t grow up here, she sometimes misses some of the cultural references people make in casual conversation but the community embraced her and Izumi really came to feel like one of the community. It’s been rough for her to uproot herself and get ready for our move and the past few days have seen a lot of teary goodbyes.

    It’s sad to leave but it also represents a new beginning, a fork in the road. We’ve had the good fortune to live in Tokyo, Princeton, and Alameda. Now we have a chance to live in Helsinki, in a semi-socialist country with a totally different climate – a place where we’ll live with a built-in sauna, the schools and hospitals are excellent, and when we arrive it will be light out until 10pm. We been given the choice to live day-to-day in Europe and add that to our life experiences. What we do with this experience and what we make of it is up to us.

    We’re leaving Alameda today but are making plans for a reunion in Europe next Summer and hope to make it back for a visit the Christmas after next. Thank you Alameda for taking us in and keep in touch!

  • Up and to the Right

    Up and to the Right

    It was windy today so we flew a kite. More photos here.

  • YouTube as a Search Engine

    My son was featured in yesterday’s Sunday New York Times in an article (At First, Funny videos. Now, a Reference Tool) about the unforeseen use of YouTube as a research tool. We all associate videos with entertainment but Tyler has taught me that with the addition of meta-data and micro-chunked content, it’s possible to use YouTube as a rich source of reference material.

    I was contacted by the reporter, who had seen a post on ReadWriteWeb about Tyler’s use of YouTube and wanted to bring the story to the New York Times’ readers.

    My father commented, “It is the inclination of succeeding generations to simplify.” Tyler is on to something. For certain things (contact juggling, macarena, or bugatti vs. fighter jet), YouTube is going to explain things to you better and quicker than plain old text search results. You can sort by not only Relevance and Date Added but also using meta-data from community actions such as Ratings and View Count. Finally, using the example from the article, if you search on platypus, embedded in the results is a pre-defined playlist of over 40 video clips all about the animal.

    Tyler was pleased to see that the article was in the “Bright Ideas” section. His comment about his pose in the photo was that after over 200 photos his head was feeling a little heavy. Strangely, the local newsstand didn’t carry the Sunday Times so we had to go to a Starbucks to get a copy for the photo above and as a keepsake.

  • Navel Gazing, 2008

    This post is for my own notes – a bunch of stats about traffic on the blog and the social networks to serve as a reference point for next year.

    top post of the year – Barack Obama’s Speechwriter is 26 consistently did well because of it’s high search results ranking. Coming up second was a short story about the origins of Led Zeppelin’s name thanks to a StumbleUpon link.

    biggest traffic day of the year – I usually bump along at around 100 visitors/day but back in September a post on “information overload” got my first top-level link on Techmeme which sent me 4x my normal traffic.

    Google Analytics 2008

    source of readership – Google organic search sent 51.72% of my traffic with “barack obama speech writer” being the leading referral phrase where everwas.com ranks 4th. The top referring site was StumbleUpon with MyBlogLog a close second.

    comment spam – i only have data back July but Akismet on WordPress has caught a ton of spam and basically removed it as an issue for me. A graph of what has been caught automatically is below – for some reason mid-November was a heavy time for me.

    Akismet 2008

    browsers – 43.99% of my readers were on IE while 43.31% were on Firefox. 1.25% were on Google Chrome.

    rss subscriptions – subscribers to my feedburner feed have held steady around 500 readers for 2008.

    FeedReader 2008

    twitter – since I started tracking my follower count in June, I’ve added 357 followers and now sit at 1,142 . I follow 343 back. Graphic below from my TweetStats profile.

    Tweet Density 2008

    friendfeed – 807 folks follow me over on friendfeed.com, I think a lot of that has to do with my being featured on Alltop’s frienderati page. I follow 435 but have to admit, can’t really keep up with it all.

    mybloglog – 1,148 people are following me on MyBlogLog. I follow 298. I am a member of 254 communities and 343 people are a member of everwas’ community page.

    top track of the year – According to my last.fm chart, Tennessee Jed by the Grateful Dead was the most popular track which is easy to understand because I must have several versions of that song in my archive. Second place track, Boomerang by Sengalese rapper Daara J is more interesting, it was the default start track on my iPod for weeks.

    top photo of the year – flickr added stats but they don’t let me filter by date. Yes you can is the all time most interesting photo from my collection and has been since I took the photo in 2005. I uploaded over 1,250 photos to flickr in 2008. The all time most popular photo is Jaws (3,256 views) which enjoys a healthy ranking in image search, as well another photo which ranks #2  for “pot lights”

    Flickr 2008

    del.icio.us – my top tag of all time is my employer up until October, yahoo I’ve used this tag 107 times. The others in descending order are, advertising (79), google (68), and socialnetworks (56).

    google reader – my most read feeds are a search for Nokia, my current employer, TechCrunch, GigaOM, ReadWriteWeb, The Boy Genius Report, and Alamedans, an aggregated feed of blogs from where I live.

    Google Reader 2008

    dopplr -my raumzeitgeist for 2008 is below. No major travels save for a trip to Helsinki and then Tokyo in November. Also spent some time in Hawaii.

    Raumzeitgeist 2008