Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Politics!

Today is a national holiday. You can tell because there are flags everywhere. I was hoping it to be a holiday that has its own bakery product, like Runeberg's day. But then I found out it's Kalevala day instead. No bakery product. Gonna have to invent my own tart of Kalevala, if I want something sweet today.

But on to today's topic. Politics! Oh baby. There's an election coming, and I thought I'd write down my thoughts about selecting who to vote. It's not easy, because I don't have strong opinions about politics (i.e. I haven't been brainwashed enough by my parents). Instead, I have vague impressions about political parties that I have gathered over the years from I-don't-know-where. There are parties that I dislike, so these are non-options for me: there are the intolerant bourgeois rednecks, the intolerant countryside rednecks, the intolerant god-worshipping rednecks and the intolerant white trash rednecks. Then there is the party with outdated ideals and no real solutions for anything, the even more outdated idealistics, and the lame, patronising party. I refuse to vote anybody belonging to these parties, even if they had competent, nice politicians as individual members. I just dislike the parties.

So I guess that leaves only one option, the Green party. I'm not so passionate about them, but that environment is a nice thing to have. And they seem to be more tolerant than the others, which I like. Then there is still the grueling task of finding a suitable candidate. A guy or a chick? I don't know. Maybe it doesn't matter. I guess I'll just find the first candidate that mentions bicycling on their website and vote for him/her. Then maybe they'll do something about the cycle path network. That's often just crap. At least I'll have someone to complain to, when I get annoyed about the cycle paths. Oh yeah, must remember to choose someone that actually has a chance to get elected.

If there were a very silly candidate, I'd sure be tempted to vote for them. Well, beside the unintentional clowns (i.e. celebrity candidates and other, well, clowns), there is this clown, but his brand of clownery doesn't quite do it for me. It's more like endless, far-fetched bullshit vaguely related to the topic at hand. I prefer deadpan comedy.

And that concludes this in-depth political analysis. Hopefully this made the selection of candidate easier for you. I do think it's important to vote for somebody, if only to prevent the pensioners from totally taking over.

Saturday, February 24, 2007

Sex!

Oh dear.

I seem to have some kind of communication-related diarrhea. This is already the second, um, spray of blog that's emerging out of me today. Ecch. Did I have to write that. Well, too late to do anything about it now.

Not sure if this is communication though; at least so far this has been purely one-way. This is more like documentation of things I've been thinking about. It should be useful to write down some thoughts every now and then, in a hope that it will be interesting, and amusing (and not regrettable) to read these myself a hundred years from now.

What was I going to say? Oh yeah, it just hit me: the internet is really useful. I mean, for example, me (and my wife, I suspect, if I dare say) would really be nuts now because of lack of communication with the outside world, if it wasn't for the internet. Even more nuts than now. And again, it's not so much the two-way communication that's important, but being in touch with things. I mean, what did parents of a small child do before the internet, while being isolated from other people? They got used to it, and then went totally mad from all the bright lights and incentives on their first night out after having the baby, I tells ya. That's why all the people 10 years older than me are totally bonkers. Oh, and even today, I hear, there are a few people who've never been to the internet. So I suppose they either are or will become nuts.

...

I seem to have painted myself in a corner now. I had some kind of a point, but then I lost it and now I can't be bothered to read what I just wrote so I might remember it again.

A downside of the internet is that it's too easy to publish. You can just write anything, claim it is the truth and then some clown will believe you, just because it looks convincing. Now look at this page! Looks kind of official, nice layout and all! And then they will probably try to hold you responsible for it.

I just keep on thinking about blogging. It's still not obvious to me that I should be writing this. I realised that there are basically three alternatives when writing a blog:

1) Do it totally anonymous, so that no-one will know that it's you. This way, if anyone you knew happened to stumble upon your blog, they would have no way of knowing that it's you writing all that opinionated crap.

2) Write under an alias, but let your friends know that it's your blog.

3) Expose your real name.

I'm not going to publicly declare who I am, just in case I want to rant about my co-workers or friends someday. And I don't want just any acquiantance or mortal enemy to google my name and find my blog. But I do think that it would be nice to have an audience, or at least be able to think that there is.

On the other hand, I somehow dislike the idea of telling friends that "here's my blog, it's about my life, read it, la-di-dah", so I've not told anyone. There are some tracks, so I guess it's just a matter of time before somebody finds this. Hi ya. So I'm kind of floating between options 1) and 2).

And by the way, if the hypothetical reader is wondering about the title of this writing, after reading all this non-sexy, quasi-web-existential musing, here is why. I do have one reader, it's my wife, from whom I couldn't keep this a secret. She told me to write about interesting things, like sex. So I will: we had it last night. It was good. Love ya!

Aztecism

My life is very disciplined these days. I go to work, I eat my lunch, I go to the lavatory. On sundays I go shopping and have buttered scones for tea. I'm a lumberjack and I'm okay, I sleep all night and work all day.

But seriously, I don't do much except go to work and stay at home with my wife and kid nowadays. That's how it is with a small child. And that's fine, I like doing ordinary things, sitting in a rocking chair, watching TV, vacuuming, changing diapers, even playing the bass. Sometimes it can be stressful, when there are tons of chores to do (and with a little kid there always are) but not enough time to do them properly. But if I'm not in too much of a hurry, I guess I can go on forever living a nine-to-five life, washing dishes at evenings, sleeping a little bit later on weekends. I kind of like routines. No, I think I like routines a lot.

I suppose that might be boring, but that's what this blog is all about. Boring and cleaning. I seem to write about cleaning a lot. I just like tidyness. I hope I get to writing about nerdy things too, sometime in the future. Yeah, I could write about my work, relational databases and programming.

But I kind of think that usually boring things are boring only superficially. I think anything is interesting, if you just concentrate to it enough, look at it close enough. Minute details of some programming environment are interesting, when you try to understand it all and think about it continuosly. Well, it might not be interesting, if it were not challenging. But on the superficial level, somebody might be bored to death e.g. if I just tried to describe what I do for living. Of course it depends on how you present it. There's a challenge, try to write about tedious things interestingly.

So, expect to read lengthy descriptions about some fluff I found in my navel the other day. And stay tuned for a comprehensive series of essays on my most favorite vacuuming techniques. That might be a good subject.