Straigth from bed to the textile markets

• Straigth from bed to the textile markets. Terrible, I have shopping angst. Or phobia. Anyway, I managed (with much patient support from Sirkku) to buy some nice textiles, from which I hope someone can sew some jackets and trousers.
• Then lunch at Ajisen Ramen, where the quality of the food seems to be constant or high. Fried rice with some eel (my absolute favourite) and some sea fish. No beer, I try to teetotal for a few weeks now, which is utterly pointless. One week OK now. I feel like having a beer, but I try not to.
• The week was quite exhausting and I had not had enough sleep. Thus I slept for 4 hours in the afternoon. This is my normal Saturday-routine.
• After naps, I tried to do something useful, but found myself just surfing the net. The Friday's accident (23 dead when a bus and a truck smash into each other) has raised a lot of discussion in Finland. We have never had such an accident before, which is fortunate. In some other parts of the world, notably India, such mishaps are quite common, unfortunately.
• Pakistan claims to have had some terrorists surrounded, but let's wait and see. The Pakistan government is quite a terrorist government itself. But as we know, there are good and bad terrorists and the fashions are changing always. Anyway, killing anyone (innocent and guilty) is wrong - Christians would call it a sin, for me it is sufficient to say that it is wrong.
• Weather is still not too good: some 10C, light rain, overcast. No exercise today.
• No real dinner - no exercise = one meal a day suffices.
• It is going to be quite busy, even hectic, spring for me. Lots of travelling, many friends coming over from Finland and I going there and whatever.
  • I do not have that many days in the HZ office left. I start to feel that I and Maunu have achieved something in 1.5 years, that the team is going to be a good one and that we have learned a lot of inter-cultural and distributed system archictecting andthat we have even made some if not innovations then at least novel methods for working in such an environment. And it has been really fun to be in China. And expatriating to China prevented me from leaving Nokia, so I assume Nokia should be quite satisfied with what I have done here.
• I have started to read Italo Calvino's "Hermit in Paris", especially "American diaries 1959-1960". What skill he has in writing. If I had such a skill, I could write "Chinese diarie 2003-2004", but since I do not have, I must just be happy with this diaryand those scattered notes in the Forum. Anyway, I do recommend reading Calvino for everyone - if one could read it in Italian, it would be even better.

Alun perin julkaistu koosteessa "Diaries 2003 Q1".