This and That

I haven't blogged anything in months and figured that now might be a good time to get around that. Here it goes:

Free Software

While I occasionally upgrade the packaging of the software I maintain at Debian to keep up with best practices, my activity downsizing goes on. Simply put: I never had any ambition to become a Debian Developer. My involvement has always remained pragmatic and mostly from the perspective of packaging software that I found useful. Even then, my motivation for doing that keeps on dwindling into nothingness, because key pieces of software keep on breaking, whenever someone upstream decides to reinvent the wheel.

For instance, GNOME no longer works at all on Geode chipsets and it barely works on Nouveau chipsets. This happened as soon as GNOME 3.14 was uploaded into unstable, right before the freeze started. Then again, I wouldn't jump to a conclusion that GNOME itself might be at fault, since Plymouth also stopped working on the same two video platforms at the same time. For all we know, this could be caused by some changes in the X.Org server code. Bugs were filed, additional information was provided, but no fix has taken place.

Given how Geode and Nouveau represent 80% of my hardware investment (my Intel laptop being the sole exception), it essentially means that the upcoming Debian "stable" is useless for me. Now try and remain motivated, even just as a mere Free Software end-user. At this point, I'm done.

Politics

Finland is holding national elections this April. I still have no idea who I'll vote for this time. The guy I voted for last time has become a career politician with an inflated ego and zero connection to the average Finn's aspirations and worries. Meanwhile, two friends are standing as candidates: one who is a razor-sharp fact finder and who is a proven pragmatic decision-maker, but whose values are slightly off with mine, and one whose actions come straight from the heart but whose concept of today's Finnish reality leaves a lot to be desired.

National Defence

There's been a lot of recent articles about how former hardware and locations of the Finnish defence forces and border guards have been sold, often for peanuts, to Russian interests. In some cases, we're only talking about buildings formerly used for on-site staff accommodations. In other cases, former patrol boats and navy harbours changed hands. Now, to top it all, it appears that our north-western neighbour, Norway, has sold a former submarine base to German investors who, in turn, leased it to – you guessed it – Russian interests.

Looking at Russian actions in Ukraine, I cannot help but feel great concern that strategic locations are falling into potentially dangerous hands. Just seeing the picture of a former navy harbour with a handful of patrol boats on standby, right on the Finnish coastline, half-way between Helsinki and Turku, was a sobering experience. While the whole idea of shooting at people – even invading armies – gives me the creeps, at this point, I cannot help but start pondering whether defending this country might in fact be an occupation worth training for.

Employment

It has now been 6 years since I held my last dayjob. Since then, the only thing I've found is an unpaid training in the national bureaucracy. I've also freelanced as an actor and model, but that barely brought me pocket change, if even that. Seeing my face on posters advertising a movie I participated in last year was indeed nice, getting some media attention in connection to that too, but it hasn't lead to additional gigs. As far as I can tell, this was just my Warholian 15 minutes of fame.

However, there's a larger issue at stake. Newspapers recently published an employment statistics map for Nordic countries and the truth couldn't be more bleak: while Norway and Sweden's employment figures are nearly spotless for almost every province, those of Finland are – save for a couple of mildly successful provinces – outright catastrophic. Given this and despite feeling relatively happy living in Finland and having developed a will to defend this country from an eventual Russian assault, I've come to the conclusion that I would be better off going West, with a strong preference for Norway.

Now, the main question is, doing what? 6 years later, I have strong doubts that I would be remotely considered for any high-tech job. Besides, come to think of it, I wouldn't want any new office job. Off the top of my head, my idea of a cool job that would allow me to stay physically fit would be working as a tourist guide in Lapland. However, if Norway is anything like Finland, someone probably needs a dozen of permits of all sorts (first aid certification, C or even D class driving license, college degree in tourism, etc.) that I cannot afford. What then?

On pohjantähden alla, Tää koti mulla mainen, Mä elämästä laulan...

My girlfriend and I were out picking up a cake at the bakery last week, when my phone rang:

• Hello, I'm calling about your application. I just spent the last hour discussing your case with my boss and there's just one thing that bothers us: do you ever intend on paying your residual taxes?
• I received those payment slips right after I became unemployed and, as you know, living off unemployment benefits in this country's most expensive city doesn't exactly leave anyone with money to spare...
• Say no more! Moving to the capital for this job was a real shocker. The rents are so bloody expensive here! Anyhow, do you intend on taking care of those residual taxes as soon as you get a job?
• Yup, just like I said in my application.
• Alright, then I guess that everything is in order. We can start processing your application today. We obviously cannot make any promise about how long that's gonna take, but I would think that the decision should come fairly soon.
• Wow! That's excellent news! Thanks again for your help!
• You're welcome, sir. Have a nice day!

Without knowing, at that moment, I had just become a citizen of the country in which I have been living for the past 12 years. It was only yesterday, upon receiving the decision in the mail and looking at the date on the certificate that I realized that, when I got the phone call, the decision had already been made and the bureaucracy was only looking for reassurances that I fully intend upon acquitting my civic obligations as soon as humanely possible.

To say that reading the decision was a highly emotional moment is an understatement. Trying to explain the intensity of this moment to my girlfriend, I compared it to the day when a teenager reaches adulthood. This instant brought a similar feeling: suddenly, the whole EU opens its doors to me and I'm free to decide how to best use the opportunities it offers.

What next?

For now, completing this government training to become a bureaucrat. Funnily enough, becoming a citizen resolved the whole issue of background checks, which also suddenly triples the number of possible venues for the on-job part of the training. In my case, it looks like I'll be spending the next few months at the Ministry of Employment and Entrepreneurship, working on EU projects that fund R&D efforts and export sales ventures in each member state.

After that, I'm not sure.

On one hand, I'd like to apply for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' KAVAKU recruitment program for future diplomats. On the other hand, that ministry is extremely picky about whom it accepts and it's not particularly known for favoring naturalized individuals. This being said, our current Minister recently published rather ambitious plans to completely reform the Ministry by bringing in seasoned professionals from the private sector who could efficiently promote Finnish know-how and products abroad, rather than hiring more of the same Public Administration graduates, so, who knows? Maybe the time is right for someone like me to join the ranks of the Finnish diplomacy?

An other option that I'm considering is to permanently move to Estonia. When my last job there ended, I was left with the feeling that I could have accomplished a lot more, if only I were in a legal position to move there, rather than commute a couple of times a week. Beyond the pioneering work that myself and my diplomat friends at the Estonian embassy did in Turkey, there was a demand for us to perform the same magic in other countries of interest to Estonia. Unfortunately, not being in a position to be on-site and no longer having a job that paid for me to be there often enough meant that I had to pass on that opportunity. Now, seeing how one of my friends recently left the diplomacy and is open to new challenges, I'm wondering if now might be a good time to resume our operation and prepare our next campaign?

Wow... So much to think about, now that a whole continent opened its doors to me. Hienoa! Olen suomalainen.

Life after Etch

This week, following the announce of the freeze, I upgraded most of my home cluster to Etch. The upgrade went surprisingly smoothly, although I had a bit of a scare when the kernel upgrade pulled in a bunch of dependencies that resulted in the forced removal of all previous kernels. This minor scare asides, kudos to everyone who made this new Debian release possible!

My only disappointment about Etch is that we're stuck with Firefox 1.5.0.7 instead of 2.0.1 or Iceweasel. Then again, speaking of Iceweasel: Forget it! Breakages it introduces have been marked as pending or patched for a number of weeks and yet there's still no updated package. At this rate, better wait until Etch r1 or Lenny to introduce it, rather than release Etch with a browser fork that has not undergone several months of thorough testing!

This got me thinking about life after Etch, or more specifically, about what I'm gonna do with the packages I maintain. The Dunc Tank debacle and similar other unfortunate events that overtook Debian this year have prompted me to reevaluate my motivation. Another unrelated issue is, I've been working in software development for more than 10 years and my guts are telling me that it's time to move on so, while my computers will still run on Debian or Ubuntu, I don't intend on doing any more development per-se.

Thus, I have already taken the initiative of soliciting co-maintainers for most of my packages. The Debian GNOME team agreed to be added for Planner, which is nice given the sheer number of bugs that are regularly found against this package. CUPS-PDF, Gaim-IRChelper and NumlockX haven't seen a meaningful bug in ages and can be rebuilt using bin-NMU magic, so they're pretty much taken care of. This leaves the issue of the Estonian and Russian dictionaries (plus a large patch in my personal repository that would upgrade Aigars' Latvian dictionary to generate the Aspell wordlist from his MySpell wordlist) open. For these, native speakers that develop for Debian or Ubuntu would be welcome to join me.

What next? I have a couple of interesting offers, one on the Business side of computer hardware manufacturing in Estonia and another one as the manager of a western company's Latvian office. The tricky part in either case would be the immigration process: despite close to 9 years of living right here in Europe, I am still perceived as foreign labor whose hiring must be thoroughly justified (in the case of Estonia, I even need to request an explicit exemption to the immigration quotas), whereas if I had been granted EC Long-Term Resident status or Finnish citizenship, I could just sign the contract and notify the local authorities of my change of address. Instead, 9 years later, I'm stuck at the passport control queues for non-EU citizens with its disgustingly suspicious border guards. Sigh!

Thus, while I indeed have shares in Linutop (yes, we are finally shipping - stay tuned for details) that might eventually turn into gold, I also have close to zero motivation left in my personal life, because lingering European bureaucrazy prevents my talent from reaching its customers - turning all my attempts at having a career into a neverending series of bitter disappointments. Is it any wonder that I'm so adamant about getting out of the Rat Race to return to more gratifying creative activities like composing and photography, then?

Post Scriptum

Actually, there is a second disappointment about Etch: we are stuck with Evince 0.4.0, at a time where upstream just released 0.7.0 with strong recommendations that everyone upgrade to that. Heck, even Ubuntu has 0.6.0 already. I find the Evince situation way more annoying than the Firefox one, because, from a user's perspective, Evince 0.4.0 fails to display several PDF documents that more recent releases handle just fine.

Clean Slate

There are moments in life when I keep on noticing that, no matter how much I try to keep up with whatever I missed while something else momentarily required my undivided attention, there simply is no way I can catch up. That's when a painful and yet eminently elegant solution imposes itself: discard and start on a clean slate.

Today was such a day.

Back a few months ago, when Deviant Art was crawling because of its outdated and blatantly inadequate infrastructure, I had to give up trying to keep up with the latest creations from my favorite Deviants. Recently, having heard that the infrastructure had been overhauled, I went back to have a look. Low and behold, nearly 6000 Deviant Watch notifications were waiting in my inbox! After spending a couple of days trying to catch up, reality dawned onto me: there's simply no way in hell that I can possibly skim through so many images. So, I used DA's nifty tool to delete all Deviant Watch notifications at once. There. Empty. No more deviation to review and therefore no endless white night ahead. Ah! Now, that wasn't so difficult, was it?

Granted, this wasn't so catastrophic. At worst, I missed a couple of truly remarkable works. Anyhow, those Deviants are gonna create yet more magnificent work, so I can rest safely knowing that the best of DA is yet to come. However, there have been other circumstances where the clean slate approach felt infinitely more painful:

Last year, the server which hosted my homepage and mailbox went belly up. Because the friends who own the server had more urgent matters to attend to, resuscitation had to wait for a couple of months. During that time, mail kept on piling up on their delivery host. By the time the server was back online, more than 7000 messages suddenly flooded my inbox. Again, same procedure: first spending nearly a week trying to skim through the From and Subject lines of the index, to attempt locating potentially important messages that needed an urgent though obviously belated response, only to realize that I simply could not make enough time to go through it all. The scary part is that I had been expecting various important messages during the blackout e.g. feedback from job interviews, certification test questions to answer within a specific time, etc. Still, someone can only stay awake for so many days before loosing focus, so I had to make the cruel decision to empty the inbox. Gulp! There. Gone. No more sleepless nights. Cross your fingers and hope you didn't miss any message of crucial importance...

There are yet more circumstances I can think of where the decision of starting on a clean slate imposed itself, despite the fear of perhaps missing out on something cool or important, or of giving up too soon despite clear signs of a dead-end coming. Eight years ago, my decision to relocate to a distant country that offered better career opportunities and a healthier lifestyle was one of those circumstances. What I'm carefully planning over the next few months is an equally important, though noticeably less dramatic step.

Still, I cannot help but wonder if I'm making the right choice?

Starting on a clean slate offers the obvious advantage of getting rid of dead weight. This is clearly a liberating sensation. However, it simultaneously requires letting go of elements that, despite their obsolescence or shortcomings, each contributed something useful at one point or another, which is very painful, because all those elements represent personal or monetary investments that often span several years. Think of retiring your very first computer, leaving your companion of many years or abandoning your homeland. Each element represents a lifetime of blood, sweat and tears, through shared learning experiences, through joy and pain. At the same time as you realize that it is now time to turn the page, you cannot help but remember the good times and yet wonder if you gave up too soon.

They call this perpetual state of reminiscence, growing pains. Ah! That explains it, I guess...

PS: I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the friends who used to host my homepage and mailbox, as well as the one who currently does. I might not often mention it, but rest assured that it's genuinely appreciated. I'd also like to apologize to all the Deviants whose great artwork I missed during the last few months and to anyone whose message got lost in the clean slate that followed the server crash last year.

Retour sur ma semaine à Paris

In a nutshell: I'm extremely tempted to dump Finland and move to France.

6nergies

This business networking evening was simply amazing. How about a discussion on the phonetic niceties of Northern versus Central and Southern Vietnamese accents, as a conversation starter? How about another one, on ethnic versus national identities, as the icing on the cake leading towards a business card exchange? Lovely, isn't it? So was the girl...

Xin cám ơn, ông Mai!

I however had the nasty surprise of realizing that I no longer speak French to a native level, when Alain did my video profile. Oh, the hesitations...

Saaks mie puhuu suomee siinä videoesittelyzzä? Eiköha? Hä?

The Food

From Italian pizza to Japanese street noodles ― you name it, they have the real thing, cooked by expats. No way in hell you'll ever find that quality in Helsinki, especially not for that cheap!

The Book Heaven

France gave the world this wonderful language book collection called Assimil and the FNAC had them all... minus Le Lithuanien sans peine, whose publication appears forever delayed. Still, as Антон recently found out, they even offer material in languages other than French.

Combien vous gagez que le duc de Novgorod-la-Grande aura réussi à assimiler la langue de Molière avant Debconf7?

The People

Courteous, smily and easy-going; the exact opposite of the average Finn. What more can I say?

The Crossroad

Of course, resetting the citizenship counter to zero is not exactly my idea of fun, but then again I have a strong feeling that my 8-year venture into Finnish society has pretty much come to a full circle, so...

Y'a-tu quelqu'un dans la région parisienne qui cherche un commercial avec une forte expérience de la gestion de produits basés sur du logiciel libre et de l'exportation vers la Scandinavie et les pays baltes? En bonus: leçons de joual [en] [fr] gratis, tabarnak!

The Paradox

Visiting the South Karelia on the Senate Square event and feeling homesick for my adoptive hometown of Lappeenranta, as I kept on running into familiar faces who are still thankful after all these years that I dared become fluent in what they speak out East (which differs tremendously from normalized Finnish).

Isn't life ironic, sometimes?

Existential politics

Those who read French and who are interested in pondering issues where existential philosophy and politics intersect might find this article on my other blog stimulating.

Standing in the Shadows of Birthday

From a great album that was the inspiration for this blog entry's title:

I'll be searching everywhere
Just to find someone to care.

Yes, again... *sigh* Давай!

New Blogation

Elver convinced me to start blogging again. This time, instead of bothering with setting up my own blog engine, I decided to go back and try Blogger again.

Hacking the CSS template to match my regular website took even less time than I expected. Elver took the opportunity to ask his pal X-G for a second opinion on the current template. The result is what you see.

Here I go again, blogging in excess. A new blogation.