Places I've been

This is a really silly idea I got from here. Funny how it is too large for twitter, doesn't go into facebook, but feels too trivial for the blog.

visited 21 states (9.33%)
Create your own visited map of The World

I would love to expand this map slightly as well, I'm not nearly traveled enough.

Muhu Fish Café (Kala Kohvik) - adorably simple and good

What is a fish café? Why create a fish café? How does a fish café work?

Regardless, as we're travelling through Noarootsi, to Haapsalu and then Saaremaa across Muhu by car, we decided to make a quick stop at the Muhu fish café.

The small old man behind the counter is apologizing for not being an experienced waiter. He has spent his life as a long-distance freight sailor but now he's retired to fishing for the café, fresh fish which his wife cooks. And of course being a slightly clumsy but very pleasant waiter.

At 250 EEK we filled our bellies with fish pie, fish soup, fish patties and pan-fried flat-fish with potatoes, a cup of herbal tea, black tea and finally some homey pancakes and make-do takeaway coffee cup. It was simple, and delicious.



The Muhu fish café is located just on the south side along road 10 across Muhu. It's well worth a stop.

(PS. Being in Estonia, of course they have free WiFi here as well)

Connecting networks across borders

Today I decided to mix the InterNations network with twitter, let's see if the seed sprouts:


The purpose of this is as obvious and simple as it is limited - to enable InterNations people to find each other on twitter, and to make InterNations a little bit more visible on twitter. Can't be all bad, can it?

InterNations is a pretty amazing network with local chapters in lots of cities around the globe, but it is facing an ongoing discussion on how to relate to existing and possibly competing networks. My spirit, coming from the Gnosjö area, is simple - be great at what you do, and be open and friendly to everyone else. Isolationism doesn't work.

Sometimes people as for my email, or my blog, or my flickr page, and I am a little confused everytime. What do you mean? Google me? Use "unclecj" as my nickname if you're lazy. I do keep some sort of list of where I have my profiles on different networks, but it is poorly updated so finding one service through the other or google are more reliable.

I am not kidding when I say that I am almost everywhere. It's great when the networks lower the threshold for people to get hooked by turning the signup the right way around for example by using cookies, allowing you to claim the account later, or using either of Google Friend Connect, Facebook Connect, Yahoo! OpenID, Windows Live ID or just OpenID. Asking someone to sign up is a huge threshold, if you manage a network you have to deal with that. Knowing this, I disregard the threshold and allow myself to create accounts everywhere, but I am not an average user...

So, to not make this a lenghty post - see you on the internets, anywhere!

(PS. If you're interested in seeing more of InterNations, it's an invite only network, but I can get you in, just drop me a line with your email address)

Laulupidu - if you really like shoving (a brief study of human herd behaviour)

This weekend I attended the traditional Estonian Song Festival. As other times when I have been at the song- or dance-festivals, it's an amazing experience, partly because of the truly adorable and beautiful traditional costumes, songs etc., but of course also because it's not every day you get to be one of 80 000 people in a crowd watching another 26 000 people in a "choir" (this has to be considered something like a "meta-choir" by then I think).

Actually, Estonians sometimes say it is the world's largest choir, which is pretty far from true. The record is roughly 100 000 in the Indian city of Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, and before that there was a 72-year-standing record of 60 000 in Wroclaw, Poland.


For a nerd who don't know much Estonian and who is easily distracted though, it easily turns into an improvised exploration of herd behaviour. Like when I figured I would go exploring for some precious šašlõkk (it took roughly an hour, I dropped half of it but at least I had fun) and it started raining. Obviously I was not the only one to get an uncomfortable panopticon feeling of "where could I escape?" when everyone else pulled on their rain-ponchos. It was even a bit funny how the american girl remarked something about "getting separated in cattle wagons like in the holocaust". Anyway, it all ended when found what seemed like a very determined person to follow in the slipstream of.

As anyone who has played OpenTTD will know, congestion avoidance is more complicated than just enabling huge throughput. The new Lauluväljak bathrooms may according to this have been a clever example of engineering, or a somewhat functional mistake, depending on how you view it - visitors in need were squeezed both in and out through a tiny door just where all sinks were, into a huge space of urinals of which more than 50% were unoccupied.

Similarly, essentially all of the lawn in the slope of the song-festival grounds was full, but still large amounts of people were squeezing themselves into the corridors between sectors, usually to end up standing along the sides (the corridors of course fit only a fraction of the people already sitting on the lawn) or slowly shoving themselves through to the other side - and it's a pretty large area to cross! Some... even had baby-strollers with them.

I can't imagine why not more is done to make this magnificent event into something more comfortable, safe and child-friendly. It's nothing a bunch of MOJO, some admittance estimates and some good guidelines couldn't fix. It pains my nerd heart. The ever-present irony of congestion is of course how throughput radically decreases when a link is overloaded.

Check out my pictures tagged laulupidu, or this excellent slideshow below of interesting public pictures tagged with laulupidu (my friend Steve also has cool pictures on Facebook - here's of the parade too):

(PS. So that patriotic Estonians won't locate and beat me up - I do not actually think crowd control is more fascinating than the Laulupidu, it just makes more sense for me to write about)

Sad and alcoholic Estonia - pictures linked to thousands of words

More sad stuff here and here

1st of May - let's make it our Estonia!

Just a minor notice to curb the emptiness gripping this blog. I simply don't have the time to blog nearly as much as I would want, and so be it. But this Friday anyway, the "Let's do it!" group "My Estonia" project is coming up - forming thousands of one-day think tanks to brainstorm great ideas in various areas for the civic development of Estonia. You don't have to believe that it will change the world, but I am anyway immensely impressed with the scale of it, wish them all the luck (because I can't participate myself) and would love to see more things like this in the world. Civic involvement really could use big jump back up in the statistics.

Also, do check out the other "Let's do it!"-projects, and their plans to take the "cleanup day" global: my del.icio.us bookmarks tagged "teemeära"

Technology in Soviet Estonia

 


It always feels a bit corny when media brings it up, but now the "cyber war" again for some reason has been mentioned both by SVT Dokument Utifrån (translated here) and PRI's The World Technology Podcast. Comments on the cyber war are usually distinctively low on substance for anyone with any significant knowledge in computer security, which is interesting - I have heard it rumored that there were significant tougher-than-scriptkiddie-activity during the attacks, others stress the lack of any proof of organized crime or Russian-funded involvement. Regardless of whether anyone knew the facts, any old-media reporting about hacking activity and cyber-crime is still stuck somewhere in the 90's, and no-one seems to have read Daemon.

Anyway, regarding SVT I just wish that Hasse Svens (baltic correspondent) would quit his blatant twisting of the situation in the baltics - most recently he thought it relevent when reporting from the financial crisis in Riga to mention that there was a bum outside the Swedbank office and that the ATM was out of order (?!). Seriously Hasse, can we try to sustain some height in the reporting please?

The WTP also had BBC's Frank Gardner (I would love to get in touch with him by the way!... or wait, he's not exactly an Estonia correspondent) speak a bit about great Estonian technology such as Skype, and how we use our cellphones to pay for parking. I should probably be happy that I'm getting blasé about such reports, but here in Eastern Europe former Soviet countries we've really had all of that for years. Maybe it's because I'm in the startup business, but you swedes should try to imagine your office letting you be efficient and save money by using Skype (including group chat, SkypeOut and conference calls), Google Apps, Dropbox, digital signatures and S/MIME encryption as well as various open source technologies. Geesh...

Final curious thing WTP mentioned was privacy concerns related to the recently released Google Latitude. Here they were so clearly representing the old thinking (the one which includes trying to hide your email address from being found on the web), whereas what I see more and more is that regular people (I.e. not the nerds) mostly want to have fun and use services without any hassle. When was the last time you heard a normal person being concerned about GMail filtering your emails for suitable adwords, Facebook 3rd party application developers data mining your contacts data or even making sure their email passwords aren't picked up by WiFi sniffers? Pretty much never.

My suggestion for a fresh attitude towards privacy issues is one of awareness, but also realizing what the general public can willingly accept. Take some care to protect your very private things, but unless you have very serious reasons, you are probably better off participating in the world where all the others go and if that turns out to be a privacy problem, just cross that creek when we get there. Anything else is simply futile and alienating yourself from the general public you are so concerned for. Also, stop worrying so much about "big brother" and open your eyes to what corporations and people around you can do with the information they have about you. Data mining and direct marketing (preferably of the type which you don't even notice and certainly isn't annoyed by) is becoming great business, mark my words.

(Update: Now that I have seen the SVT Dokument Utifrån "Nätkriget" documentary, I must say as much as I'm not surprised about the oldfashioned hacker romanticizing and complete lack of redeeming qualities in the first half of the program, I'm somewhat surprised that the second half was somewhat accurate and interesting, including an interview with an actual russian hacker-for-hire.

Still, it was obviously a reactive and post-the-fact documentary, including the inaccurate animations dumbing-down ("snuttifiera") the topic to a childish and inaccurate level. It tries to give the impression that it is a proactive and warning-about-the-future documentary, while it is actually repeating the same things said since mid 90's and barely begins to grasp the state of computer security today.

If professionals really have not learnt the lesson since Mitnick that hackers do not primarily hack where it is the hardest - finding security holes in the programs, but where it is easiest, around the people and protocols in which the programs exist, we really are done for, and they can play their silly catch-the-flag wargames best they want. Instead of spending our tax money on constructing truly agile and robust systems... )

(Update 2: Regarding Swedish media and to dumb-down ("snuttifiera") I read an excellent post by Josefin Deiving (translated here). She is a social democrat quoting a simplifying and generalizing Chomsky, but despite that I don't agree with either, this was pretty interesting )

Swedes in Estonia

This Friday evening I finally managed to catch up with the Swedes meeting every week in Hell Hunt! It's telling that I have been in Estonia for more than two years, I have heard that swedes go to Hell Hunt on some day every week, but I have just been too busy and content with my social life to bother to figure out more about them.

Actually, I tried googling and reading on the Swedish COC to figure out where and when I could find the swedes, with little luck. It amazes me how hard people make it to find some of their things! I hope the Swedes will allow me to at least somewhat enable the connections between people, a little bit like the OpenCoffee Club.

Meeting the people at Hell Hunt this Friday was so nice! It was so peculiar to hear Swedish guys ranting about soccer and just being guys with their snus and all, but it was also so good to meet genuine Swedes in Estonia. There is something about your nationality after all...

Walking helmets to become mandatory by law in Sweden?

I recently borrowed a pretty hilarious book - "I trygghetsnarkomanernas land - Sverige och det nationella paniksyndromet" ("In the land of the safetyaddicts - Sweden and the national panic disorder") by David Eberhard. You probably can tell where this is heading, but I want to make a small quote below:

"... There is also a significant tendency, as with psychiatric traditional agoraphobia, that the behaviour accellerates over time. When you have prohibited the residents to ride without seatbelt or motorcycle helmet then automatically comes the requirement for bicycle helmet and seatbelt in the back seat. Every prohibition leads to another prohibition which in turn makes the nation's citizens wonder how earlier generations could survive at all. Will there in the future be raised requirements for mandatory walking helmets? It may sound improbable, but it's sufficient that one researcher can show that you can save the lives of five or six babies per year if they use walking helmets and the law will arrive like a letter in the mail!"

Do check out the rest of my books (and our bookshelf) and another review of this book.

Valaste turned to ice again

It seems, according to EPL, that the area of the Valaste waterfall (that's in northeast Estonia) has frozen over again. The terrain there is just brilliantly engineered - "I know, let's make a creek which runs out to a couple-meter-waterfall, but by the seaside, so that there will be winds to blow the water back on land! Then it should efficiently cover the surroundings in a couple of centimeters of ice-cold wet sludge which will eventually freeze into a cool natural phenomenon a couple of days per year"

I have my pictures which got published last year here: flickr.com/photos/cjsveningsson/tags/valaste

Also, do note that since I use CC-licensing, you can download huge (near-original) versions of most my pictures, to use for background pictures or whatever you want. CC (and the freesouls project for people) is a great way to find pictures whenever you need them: flickrcc.bluemountains.net

My first time at OpenCoffee Club Tallinn

 

Not sure if this belong in this blog or the nerd blog, since it's about techie stuff in Estonia - but I visited the Open Coffee Club Tallinn today.

In Ülemiste City Mercado it's a bit out of the way, but it was so worth it. I was a bit shy before, thinking that maybe everyone would be speaking Estonian and all too serious for my sort of... freely associative thinking.

Turned out I recognized the first guy I walked into, and essentially the second one as well, we took a table for ourselves and the event took off! It was very nice, somewhat professionally rewarding and great for ideas. Actually, one guy into SEO essentially repeated one of my favorite ideas out to me, word by word :-) . Proves one of my principles of that you're not usually alone about great ideas, you must dare to check out the competition.

Some of you readers may still think Estonia is a backwards Eastern European country, but the Tallinn OpenCoffee Club, and something I saw the other day reminded me that's not the case. In Sweden I've always been reminded not to bring gadgets out in public, and you're a bit of a freak to work on the laptop in a café - in the Viru Keskus mall the other day, there were three different people sitting on the benches by the escalators with their laptops, one of which was a MacBook Pro. That's so non-Swedish.


By the way, you cool people I met there, maybe you want to follow my twitter, jaiku or other stuff online.

If you couldn't come this time, next time if you feel that some networking and cool discussions would do you better than spending that hour in the office, just come show up! Come and go whenever it suits you, and if you don't know anyone, squeeze into some conversation. Also I noticed at least two groups with English as primary language, so that was no problem either.

In Sweden we call it a "lågkonjunktur"

The theme of the blog saturday of the incurably entrepreneurial websmurfs is "lågkonjunkturen", or the recession. Myself I will offer a perspective from Estonia and hoping that it can provide some interesting insight into the otherwise so pitch black Baltic economy.

This morning I watched SVT Rapport with Hasse Svens (also here) reporting from an Estonia in crisis. They start with the story of some lunatics who abandoned their little baby (among what looked like rusty rebar in Paldiski), a story which has become a symbol of the recession, and then proceed with riding down an escalator in what looks like Monday afternoon in Gonsiori Selver (my closest proper grocery store). Yes, it's empty, but I'd assume it's because people, unlike financial analysts, have work to do during the days! I consider this so poor reporting I almost have to wear my spin goggles in order not to go completely blind.

Sure enough, I am generally financially agnostic and indeed living in quite a previleged and safe situation - but there is simply no way I can recognize the situation Svens is describing. Yes, estonian food prices have gone up quite significantly, but that's over the last several years, not because of a recession. Also yes, the real-estate market is stone dead, but it has been that for at least six months already (my girlfriend wrote an editorial about "how to make a million kroon - just not buy the apartment a year ago") and I really have little pity for Mr. Lepik who's anticipated a slowdown so poorly that his construction business is slamming itself down into bancruptcy so fast they didn't get to move into their new fancy offices. It's called risk, live with it.

Give me some solid numbers of how people and business are affected instead of spreading FUD, and I may agree that the average guy should start to worry. It's not unlikely Swedbank are losing huge money in the Baltics when previously lucrative risks start to pop, but this is normal and as far as I can see, we are still surviving.

Estonia is still a good as place as ever to be, people are still optimistic and the fishing waters are good. Everywhere I am hearing that a recession is the right time to start a business. May estonians never become as learned helpless as too many swedes are. Unlike swedes in the scene in "Songs from the second floor" (download it here and subtitles here, but I need to delay it -8 seconds), estonians have no trouble getting up from the floor and onto the stool!

"We have sacrificed the bloom of youth, is there possibly anything more we could do now?"

"No, there surely isn't"

What to do when you're in Gothenburg

A friend called me today and asked for where to go in Göteborg. Well, except of course Universeum, I couldn't think of any great things you shouldn't miss, but I just threw together a small Google Map to give an overview:

View Larger Map

There is also of course the map of sushi places in Göteborg, but curiously I can of course not embed it in the blog.

Goodbye to us-and-them prejudice

When botanizing in the great videos of TED.com, I came across an interesting one with Swedish Hans Rosling of gapminder.org. Among many other things, he says:

"I have shown that Swedish top students know statistically significantly less about the world than the chimpanzees [do]" - Hans Rosling, 2006

Go ahead and click the link, or see below for his dense and pretty brief lecture:



Rosling's project gapminder.com is (among other things?) an easily usable frontend to a wealth of databases for laymen to be able to present existing census data in very rich ways. Just as an example, I tried to find some parameters who say something about the development in the nordic countries including Estonia - I chose the density of cellphones and computers per hundred people:




It was really quite tricky to find any parameters which would tell something interesting on just a national level, even more so anything significant in which Estonia "beats" the nordic countries which maybe was a little surprise to me, but anyway, I made a little interpretation of these two graphs.

Firstly - there clearly are computers in Estonia, it should be a little wake-up-call for any colonially minded westeners who are sneering at Estonia, Kazachstan or any of the other post-soviet countries. Once the opening is there, some development goes very fast and indeed few Estonians may have had videogames as kids, but once they started getting computers and cellphones, they cought up fast and are on par with the rest of the western world when it comes to cellphones, and have caught up with at least Finland when it comes to computers.

The second conclusion I make from this data is that cheaper consumer products reach penetration faster than more expensive such. This is true not only for cellphones vs computers, but many other things in society as well - I have at least a hunch of that the more costly the more inertia an issue has, and people renovate the inside of their apartments before they get together and cough up the money to clean up the facade. It makes a lot of difference in the impression of the interested bystander.

I know my reasoning is simple and generalizing, but maybe you have an opinion of your own you'd like to share with us?

R.E.M. in Tallinn - tag your pictures and take part in the crowd

This Thursday we went to the R.E.M. concert in Tallinn (see also Ängelmedhorn, navelfluff, DN.se and Kulturbloggen), a really great event. The girlfriend is undecisive about whether sound quality at Saku Suurhall was actually much better than usual this time, or if it is that she knew all the lyrics by heart so could sit around even though sound was crap. I made sure to get a fitting T-shirt from the support band We are scientists which made a quite decent warm-up act. This time I didn't make money from my last.fm participation though. :-)


One fun thing with the event (except for the nice music and the fancy stage line of course) was that they on TV screens encouraged visitors to "tag your flickr pictures with #remestonia and they will show up at tour.remhq.com". Not that very many seem to have followed their suggestion, but in a place like London with a bigger audience and a few more nerds even recording video, it creates an amazing base for letting the crowd document events and mash it all up in a spectacular video later. Just think of putting craptastic cell phone videos through a photosynth of sorts, use the professionally recorded sound and replay the event from a hundred angles at once. People, please, start your tagging! Together, at any event, tag, share, and mashup!

Let's end this post with the beautiful song Man on the Moon about the sad clown Andy Kaufman:

Gnosjö-spirit now also for digital nomads

Me and Christian et al have been posting some about digital nomads. Today I realized my tiny old home village Gnosjö will be one of the first in Sweden to free of charge provide WiFi coverage to it's residents. Respect for Gnosjö I say!

As is common with smaller places in the countryside, you sometimes get the feeling that progress is running slowly, but I've actually noticed such a modern thing as that the head of the municipality Lars-Åke Magnusson sporadically writes a blog at blogg.gnosjo.eu. Also there are some connections between Gnosjö and Estonia, such as that the husband of my cousin (I know I got that mixed up when I ran into them once!) works for IMA Norscan which have an office in Tallinn and Estonian Windrox seems to have some work in Gnosjö.

It may appear strange that I am writing about "Gnosjö spirit", but I don't come from just any old village - Gnosjö is legendary in Sweden for it's age-old spirit of cooperation and industriousness, achieving excellent integration and record-low unemployement. Christian writes more about that here.

What swedes talk about - the death of gender

Today I've had a look at Swedish social bookmarking/blog monitoring sites pusha and knuff.se, swedish sites similar to digg and reddit. There's also of course Estonian blog.tr.ee which I've checked out but couldn't be bothered to make my way around due to the language barrier (wow, that logo is really similar to that of livejournal). Actually I'd want some sort of aggregate social bookmark tool to put by the blog posts, but I don't like AddThis since it only has del.icio.us which I actually use, but not the Swedish sites. Any suggestions?

So what are swedes discussing the most avidly right now? Well, obviously that the women Jessica Zandén and Cecilia Gyllenhammar are crying "Equality is suffocating us! Give us back the real man!".

Ever since swedish weight-lifter Lennart "Hoa-Hoa" Dahlgren posed for the male parental-leave-ad, Swedish gender has been a very advanced topic. Actually, at least already in the 40's Karin Boye chipped a piece of the Swedish gender façade, and since then the illusion of those roles has been falling to pieces.

Personally, I respect the opinions of those debaters, they miss the classic man, that's fine. However, I definitely do not agree with their opinion that there are no men and that essentially everyone are as opressed by feminism as they feel. Many of us are actually feeling less opressed and more liberated with the absence of accepted gender roles, that we can be whatever person we actually want without squeezing ourselves into some badly fitting gender costume. With the debating and images which have been popular over the years though, agreed some are probably a bit confused in their self-image, but the current debade is just reactionary and silly.


(Update: Zandén and Gyllenhammar had a short spot at Janne Josefsson's SVT Debatt. Josefsson is as usual extremely tough and clueless, the debate starters made a bit more sense in person, but if they wanted to bring light back to the combination of sex, machismo and violence, they could have done it infinitely better. And they could have been sober when they write the article)

Yesterday Tallinn, today Gori, tomorrow... ?

The other day, SVT Rapport showed some pictures which really strongly affected me. When discussing the war in Georgia, they showed pictures from the "liberation" of Tallinn or sometime later when Soviet tanks were rolling on the streets of Tallinn. In a street I know, a couple of hundred meters from my home, along Pronski street, by the crossing of Liivalaia and Tartu Mantee, where Stockmann is today to be precise.


Let's not forget that until Russia invaded Georgia, except for the problems of armed conflicts with rebels in South-Ossetia and Abkhazia, Georgia was a civilized and democratic place with friends and connections throughout Europe. Heck, my favorite restaurant is the Georgian "Embassy" in Tartu, Georgians have struggled and achieved independence from the Soviets like the Estonians did and now they are pleading to the international community to help them maintain their freedom from opression in their own homes and cities!

Regardless of what the Russian regime claims, it should be beyond clear to any westener that the Neo-Soviet Putin is protecting the South-Ossetian and Abkhazian Russian citizens almost exactly like Hitler protected the Czech Sudet Germans. We don't want Russia to come protect anyone here...

PS. We don't however, mind being protected by the space robots :-)

(Update: It seems those particular pictures were from the 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt (that's good reading by the way, as is that of Estonian SSR) in which tanks rolled into every capital in the union to gain control over TV towers and similar. In Estonia they were stopped by unarmed masses by the Tallinna teletorn since fortunately, international media were already present to prevent a massacre)

Sommar i P1 is nearing it's end, with Mia and Klara, the dynamic bitterness duo

Today two of my favourite comedians were on the Sommar in P1 program, Mia Skäringer and Klara Zimmergren - the geniuses behind the old show Roll On. No one can beat them at really squeezing the bitter juice out of life, serving it to you with a remotely polite smile while clearing their teeth of some remaining snus with the tounge.

Not everyone, actually probably quite few, enjoy the humor of Mia and Klara and Roll On, but I love it and sometimes go back to listening to it - that and Riskradion. It's so Swedish.


Anyway, I just figured I should mention that the list of mp3's of the shows, with all music still included, was just updated. Enjoy!

(Update: To know which is which of Klara and Mia - Klara is the older and blonde, Mia is the younger, (visibly) tatooed and dark-haired, and she has a blog! Wohoo! *subscribe*)

(Update 2: Also, don't miss the excellent TV-series version of Roll On simply called Mia och Klara)

múm at Leigo Järvemuusika

This Saturday we watched múm and Villu Veski at Leigo Järvemuusika. múm is an Icelandic psychedelic ambient band much like Sigur Rós and Villu Veski is an Estonian jazz saxophone player.

Some of our friends have objected to Leigo Järvemuusika as an environmentally hostile jippo which treats their workers like crap - and sure enough I found it somewhat revolting that they seemed to be pouring and pouring gasoline onto those smoking piles of straw, but at least I can hope it was organic fuel.

Regardless, the experience as such was absolutely magical - múm was very nice and when Villu Veski was playing in front of a lake entirely covered in floating candles, the lights in the open night and finally the chinese lanterns sailing away like rapidly circulating stars, while I was holding baby in my arms... it was very very good.

I took some pictures of the whole thing and of course last.fm tagged them on flickr. That way they show up to everyone browsing the last.fm event. Enjoy, and do it yourself the next time you're at an event!


Just for fun, I recorded some of the concert (beware, very noisy sound!):