Tampere

I'm in Finland, in the beautiful city of Tampere. I'm here for work purposes and most of my days here have been in meetings so I haven't had the opportunity of touring it around. On the geeky side, Tampere's airport code is 'tmp' so this is the only official "temporal airport" that I know of (if you don't get it you're not geek enough).
The weather around here is very cold and it seems that winter is already "ad portas" in Scandinavia. The very good thing around here is the fact that finns love saunas and there are saunas everywhere, it is some sort of "basic right" for every finn.
Today I'm going to have my first "tour of the city" since I'm going to meet my friend Philippe who just arrived from vacations in Belgium.

Snorkeling and reality

Today I went with some friends to Gressholmen, one of the islands right outside Oslo. It was a very nice day and I had the chance to do some snorkeling. I'm surprised that the ocean floor around the island here is very beatiful, I wasn't expecting much and I got this very beatiful scenery with starfishes, crabs and other sort of fishes. I look forward to go back again and do some more snorkeling, although next time I'll get myself a wet suite since the water was a little bit cold and I couldn't stay too long there.
When I returned home I received an email from my friend Catalina. She's a very dear friend of mine who lives in Chile and she always has a way to explain things to me so I understand them. Her email was very direct, as most of her emails are, but it was so illuminating. I asked her opinion about some things and she's right on target, I wish I could just listen to her and follow her advice but knowing me as good as I know myself.....

You have to love your mom

I'm sure that any men can tell more than one story where the main character is his mom. I know I am, and I know that for most men remembering those moments where your mom stopped you from saying hello to that special hot girl because something was wrong with the way you shirt was or those times when you were forced to say hello to somebody you didn't want to and you were forced to let some lady to grab your cheeks and tell you something like: "He looks the same as his father" it is one of those memories you don't know if you should laugh or cry.
I already have plenty of such stories, however my mom (as every other mom), never stops surprising me. I just received an email from one of her friend asking me to help her to switch to Linux. Yes, my mom has been using Linux for the past 7 years or so and she has always been happy with it. She writes emails, she writes presentations using Open Office and she even chats with her friends using Kopete and the MSN plugin. And it has been so successful her experience that now one of her friends wants to switch to Linux. I have two problems with this:
1. I read the "Pringao howto" (search for it). Even if I hadn't I've helped many people to switch to Linux and it is a pretty time consuming task since all the time you get people asking you to do something they were doing with that little shareware program only available for Windows they found somewhere.
2. I live at the other end of the planet so there is not much I can do in case of disaster.
For now I'll just send some questions to that person and ask her about her plans about that computer to try to find out if my helping her switching to Linux it's a good idea or not.

Music

I thought that after Mike Patton's "Mr Bungle" there was not much to invent in music, but of course I was wrong. Today with some friends we went to a small pub located in Grunerloekka in Oslo called "Sound of mu" and there were two bands playing. The first one was called "Red April" and was a mixture between Bjork, Roger Waters and Alanis Morrisette. They were good but nothing out the norm. However the second "band" (it is actually a one man show), it was incredibly. It's called "Captain Credible" and it was the weirdest mix of music, electronic gadgets and strange lyrics ever... Honestly it totally blew me off, I have no words to describe it you have too see it yourself. In case you want to know more just follow this link.

Back at.... home?

And the time came, and I returner back to Norway. Or should I say home? I feel a strange feeling when I realize that Norway is becoming my home, so far I tried to think always as Chile being home and any other destination being a temporary stop, but now I feel that Norway is home and that I only went to Chile as vacations... It is difficult to explain it and since I've already lived in two other countries I should be used to consider home another country and not the country where I was born.... Could it be that Norway is getting into my veins? Time will tell.... BTW, I still haven't recovered from jet lag and I still wake up around 4 o'clock in the mornings, hopefully that will disappear this week.
Yesterday I went fishing for the first time since I came to Norway. I didn't catch anything but it was a wonderful day, I'm amazed of the beauty of nature just a few kilometers outside Oslo. It is even simpler than that, I just took a bus with a friend and we had to walk three kilometers from the bus stop, it doesn't get easier than that.... Probably next weekend I'll go camping to that lake, since it was really beautiful. Let's see if I get luckier this time and I catch something ;-)

Chile

This is my fourth day in Chile. I'm here on vacations and I've enjoyed every moment. The first day I ate fish and shellfish, and I ate so much that my dad asked me if I was in prison and I was recently released or if I was eating normally in Norway. I explained to him that in Norway you don't eat that much, there is no real variety in foods and that we chileans do not know how lucky we are of having all this food available, in this quantities and so tasty .... :-) This is truly the land of plenty.
Overall, I'm pleasantly surprised with my country, it has been more than two years and my country has advanced quite a lot, however there are still some things to be improved. It really looks like a developed country up to the point when you have to cross to one of the "shanty towns". There are not many of those and you can tell that the goverment is making great efforts for improving the life of that people. If you look around, you see mainly new cars, everybody looks well fed and wearing nice clothes, there are only a few that are not having a good life. I hope this goverment and the next one can finally make that final jump and eradicate this last signs of poverty and suffering.

Sometimes

The brain is a funny thing, it goes around looking for explanations until it finds a way to explain what it does not understand. This can be verified by reading a text with some orthographic errors and some misspellings, the brain will match each misspelling with something that makes sense to each particular phrase. This can be really helpful if everything goes well and the matches are correct, but if the matches are wrong then the thing gets way more interesting. Why all this? Well, because our brains also do the same thing regarding our feelings, since those cannot be understood it tries to match them to something it can handle and logical explanations appear where they do not belong.
Because there are situations when we are confronted with things we do not expect, or we do not know how to handle, this explaining mechanism in our brains triggers and starts finding explanations for things that should not be explained. Sometimes we have the answer right in front of us but we deny it and let our brain elaborate very complicated theories about things happenning around us. My brain has been trying to explain an event that happened to me yesterday evening in a bar, for which the answer is very simple yet my brain has refused to accept and in the meanwhile it has come with the most incredible answers. The good thing is that it is finally accepting the answer, so probably next week it will stop spinning and move forward.