Thursday, March 27, 2008

Sunday, March 23, 2008

Friday, March 21, 2008

Early morning rain


Our dear friend, personal French teacher, poet and everything else, Aidan Convery, came over one day to record a few songs. Early morning rain by Gordon Lightfoot is the first of a series of songs I'll be posting the next few weeks.

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Snail mail again

The latest form of snail mail may not take as long as last time, but this one is slightly insulting. We have bought a bunch of stuff from Amazon. But instead of sending it by Royal Mail, which has usually taken a few days in average, they suddenly decided that UPS was the way to go. Certainly not, I would like to comment, as seen from the tracking log at UPS:

March 4th
07:34 - Received invoice details
17:06 - Cumbernauld, GB: Origin scanned upon arrival
March 5th
03:31 - Köln, DE: Scanned upon arrival
04:38 - Malmö Sturub, SW: Scanned upon arrival
05:39 - Scanned upon departure
08:46 - Norway: Import scan
08:47 - In transit
13:07 - Oslo, NO: Forwarded to destination city
March 12th
11:00 - Destination is in a remote area and deliveries are not made every day.
March 17th
09:52 - Registered at clearing agent. Now in transit.

Remote area? UPS thinks that Guovdageaidnu is in a remote area? What, because it's not in Oslo? We're only a 130 km from Alta, for crying out loud! There are planes going from Oslo to Alta every day! Though this may very well be a warning of what is going to happen in the future, when all mail will be privatized.

Every trip must be profitable. This means that there may be no regular traffic independent of the number of deliveries it brings, but rather that they wait until they have gathered enough letters and parcels to make the trip as profitable as possible. In the meanwhile, that letter to grandma' may have to wait for two years.

Then again, perhaps this is the more ecologically viable way of handling it.

Monday, March 17, 2008

Dihturnoaidi: E-mail - keep it simple, stupid!

The mere size of our e-mail boxes tend to overwhelm anyone who sees them. Recently, a friend of mine apologized for being a day behind on his introduction to an online group project, citing some 1600 e-mails in his inbox as the main reason. I can relate. My mailbox used to be this way, too. [read more...]

Friday, March 07, 2008

Suomi, oh Suomi

Seeing Finland's Eurovision entry, I suddenly feel a rush to watch the European finale in a Finnish hotel again, as we did in 2006.