Mane

Our claim on Eternity, part 2 In a place holy to me, where thoughts flow freely, mind is in peace, and new ideas come to me, that is: sitting on the third balcony of the southern reading room of the library of the University of Helsinki, I read of the history of philosophy in Finland. G.H. von Wright wrote: The only thing that is immortal is what Man has done, with his emotion and love, to enrich his surroundings. These deeds never die. I have spent countless hours, days, months, on this chair, looking out of the window at the large trees, at the main building of my alma mater. I always feel so good here. Maybe I will later return to Finland, get some funding for some reseach, and can spend my days here. It would be a good way to get old and wiser. Great Finnish food Italian prime minister Mr. Berlusconi should visit Heipan Herkkulounas (delicious lunch place of Heippa) in Kallio. I just had the most delicious lunch there with S . I had fried small whitefish (muikku) with mashed...

The first flight this year Last year I had 44 flights (but 45 take-offs and landings as the airliner broke down midair after taking off in Belem). This year I have just stayed put in Boston (and in New York). Anyway, flying was just as painful as earlier, or actually a bit more. They do not serve any free alcohol in Iceland Air. No beer, no sleep. Back in Finland, I was and still is a bit tired. First impressions in Helsinki Sunny, warm, green, quite, spacious. Lost of drunken people of all ages roaming the streets. Buses are expensive; it is very quiet inside the bus. Cars are even smaller than I remembered, only a few SUV. Good. Price of gasoline is 1.27 euros per liter ($6.1/gallon). TV-shows seems as stupid as ever, but I cannot compare with USA, since I do not have TV there. Well, too tired to write. Alun perin julkaistu kuukausikoosteessa "Blogs from July to September 2005".

At the Logan airport I did not had to remove my sandals. So, a very clever criminal could fill in the soles with Semtex. That would be a nasty trick and not that hard thing to do, either. One can also bring in large bottles of beer. Who knows whether there is beer in them? Is that visible in the X-ray. I am paranoid. But I do not know, why my laptop had to go in its own basket through the X-ray? The restaurant next to the security checking (before it) serves good food. It is very slow, though, since the waiters have to spend most of their time using the fancy cash-terminal with a nice touchscreen. More time with that than with the customers. Muda rules! Of course, there is no free WiFi here. It would be too good. TA or not TA - a temporary problem Professor John Sternman was (or maybe he still is) looking for TAs for his coming System Dynamics-course in the fall. Since I was recommended by Jim Lyneis (who taught the course in the summer), I went and talked to professor Sterman. ...

SDM@MIT open house on Wednesday SDM arranged an open house meeting for prospective students. I like those meetings. It is nice to meet next years students, discuss with them, answer their questions. And having free food and beer, well, I do not mind. So, first Pat Hale gave a good overview of the program, then industry co-director John Grace told, why he thinks SDM is such a good fit for the needs of industry. It is also fascinating how much more careful some people are than I was when applying to SDM. I just saw the program mentioned in the MBA-book by the Economist, then checked the website, and decided to apply and come here if accepted. The program was and still is exactly what was looking for: a good mix of technical courses and management courses. And hey, it is MIT, my long time dream. I had so long dreamed of studying in MIT and once I realized I have a good opportunity, I did not hesitate a minute. And also, I think that one cannot really plan one's life, one must jus...

MIT is not lean MIT prides itself of being the vanguard of lean development. But when it comes to MIT itself, the bureaucracy is just incredible. Today, I took my I-20 (some form which every alien must carry when abroad) to the international students office (ISO), because it must be signed. I was ready to wait for a few minutes for someone to sign it. How naive can I be? It takes 2 days to sign the form! It is just incredible. Let's do some calculations. According to Little's law the queue length is equal to throughput times cycle time. So, cycle time is 2 day or 16 hours of working time. I assume that even when doing other tasks, even the slowest official can sign on average, say, 20 forms every hours. So, they must have a constant queue of 16*20 = 320 forms to sign. Well, it may be true. Except that the pile, on which my form was put, was very thin. Sightseeing by bicycle I have always wanted to see the center of Newton, MA. Somehow, it fascinates me, it sounds so excoti...

War, genocide, etc A new film has come out about the events in Rwanda some ten years ago. The film is based on Romeo Dallaire's book Shake hand with the devil . The film's website tells more about the story. Surprisingly, Dallaire's book is one of the books we are reading for the course Ethics, Literature, and Authority in the fall. You may also read a review of the film in the Guardian Weekly. Wal-Mart hit by the rising price of oil Both revenue and profit of Wal-Mart are now lower than forecasted. They say that the price of oil is hitting them. I think I wrote about this earlier: when the gas gets more expensive, Wal-Mart is not the cheapest place to shop anymore. At some point, even Americans start to calculate how much a trip to a far way Wal-Mart costs (say, one owns a SUV with 10 miles / gallon mileage. Wal-Mart is 20 miles away. 40 miles means 4 gallons of gas. At $4/gallon, that would be $16 dollars, which is not insignificant price to pay for going to shopp...

Google has no work for me I applied for a job in Google. They asked me to send my transcripts. It took them about 3 weeks to come up with the following: "We received your resume and would like to thank you for your interest in Google. After carefully reviewing your experience and qualifications, we have determined that we do not have a position available which is a strong match at this time." "Thanks again for considering Google. We wish you well in your endeavors and hope you might consider us again in the future." And they could not even address it to me. Just copy-paste from somewhere. Is that how much I am worth? Or any applicant, for that matter. Job search continues. It seems to be hard if I cannot even get through the first step and get into a interview. Let's see. I think I really have to get into a PhD-program. It may well turn out that I am an outcast, not really good for any corporate positions. Hmm..., I think it is time to have a toast to Goo...

MIT-pages updated My MIT-pages were totally out of date. I updated them a bit. If you are interesting in what I have been studying, my MIT-pages is a good place to start. Books arranged I was about to go cycling, but a furious thunderstorm scared me too badly. It takes just two lightning strokes within 500 meters to convince me of the wisdom to seek some safe, and dry, place. Since I could not go out, I decided to come back, have some beer, and arrange my books. I used a program called Globalbooks for finding the bibliographic information of each book. The program is good in finding the information, but very bad in producing neat output. And I am right now too lazy to hack a script to make it neater. Therefore, the list of books is rather plain. But better than no list at all. The list contains 78 books. RSS-feed improved I hacked some more. Now the RSS-feed is valid RSS. It also contains the first 6 lines of each entry. Great, eh? Lost civil liberties-mug. "Pour in a...

RSS-feed installed I hacked a simple RSS-feed to my blog. Now, I am modern. Great. The URL is http://www.iki.fi/mane/rss.xml Is this not quite an important thing? You can also use the link above. At this point, the RSS-feed has just the topics. Use your browser to get the contents. The feed gets updated every half an hour. Dreaming of a good job Getting older is good. One gets to know oneself better every year, one realizes what ones really wants to do, in what kind of tasks one is good, happy, and productive. And in what kind of tasks one is not happy and not productive; one can be good, but it does not help much if one cannot muster any motivation. So, I have realized, that being an consultant in some larger consulting company would not make me happy. And in general, I really need to be able to attach quite much importance to the things I do. I just cannot just do something for money, not even if the amount of money would be large. It just does not happen. And I cannot handle...

Cycling Finally, I was able to muster up enough time, energy, and soberness to have a nice cycling trip to the southern suburbs. I took the Tremont Street all the way to the Jamaica Pond and then back by the Willow Pond. There are pleasant parks to cycle in here in Boston. Suburban streets are OK too, but there are just too many poorly coordinated traffic lights there. So, I either end up standing still for long times or ignoring the lights. Both are bad choices. So, finding parks is essential. The other option, at least during late evenings, it to go to the industrial areas. There are no traffic lights there and after 6 pm it is quite peaceful and safe to cycle there. I like industrial areas a lot, they are the best places for recreational cycling. Check some bicycle information . For example, use the calculator to see how much you can save by not having a car. Or, check how you can move your fridge with a bicycle. Not that I am that tempted to do so - well, I do not even own a fri...

Not for yellow-beer-drinking wimps! Now, I have really found a great beer. It even comes with a very suitable attitude for me. The name of the beer is Arrogant Bastard . The beer has a fantastic taste, enough alcohol to make instant impact on the lucky ones, who know where to buy the beer. Well, read the truth from the site and envy me. I am drinking it right now. Go figure! Or, check the animation . This is how you (I) will end up looking after too many bottles of Arrogant Bastard. Clearly, not for wimps! Arrogance warning on... This blog is not for wimps or sissies. Or anyone drinking yellow-beer. If you are such a loser, go away to do some sissy things. Oil is getting priceless Oil is getting more and more expensive. See the news. Read the leader of the Economist . I think Economist may be right. Shortage of refinery capacity is one factor, successful speculation plays roles. But the fact is, that demand is larger than supply, and supply is more likely to get smaller still. D...

Stillleben in Boston Nothing much is happening. On Monday, we had the final exam on accounting. I did manage to study 5 hours for it. The exam was just as irritating as exams always are. So, I just did whatever I could figure out right away (less than 1 minute thinking time for each question), wrote down my answers and left the building when 25% of the exam time was still left. I definitely did not check my answers, since I just cannot do that without walking around, strecthing a little etc. And such things are not possible in exams. So, I leave the checking to those, who get paid for checking my work. I did the same in the mid-term exam; I got 74 out of 100, which is more than enough for my ambition in any course requiring exams. Later on Monday, we (I, Kumar, Ashok) spent some time discussing system dynamics even though we actually finished the assinment last week. No change to the write-up resulted. Dinner in the Cambridge Mall, than back home. The next day was terrible: I could n...

Nice weekend No interviews, but very fun even without. On Friday evening, I tried to study in the SDM-office, but all I could do was to read some not study related material. Later, I went with Dave to a party, which was organized by Sam 's friends, musicians. Nice party, live music of many types, lots of beer (though we brought our own), huge crowd. Back home at midnight, then hacking this and that until early hours. On Saturday, sleeping late, then walking and having lunch with Kumar and his cousin, Subu , from San Francisco. Subu told that there are many biotech companies in the Bay-area and that they may desperately need me. I just need to contact them. Then, lunch at Pho Pasteur, after which I took off to Bill 's 30-year birthday party somewhere in the southern Boston. I got lost, but fortunately T-mobile works that far too. A nice party this one, too. We just idled, looking for the patterns of the situation, after which I got autistic, or just tire. Came back home, ent...

What is wrong with me? I have now applied for several job. I have got two answers requesting more information. Then nothing, total silence. Is it really so, that my 7 years of experience in Nokia, my international experience in Finland, China, and USA, and my very successful studies in MIT are not worth a single interview? Or is it so, that the market for system architects is so small, that the likelihood of someone needing another one is vanishingly small, not to say minuscule. Or am I doing something wrong? Should I post not-funny pictures in my homepage? Should I just limit my blogging to the courses I am taking, the bars I am visiting (none), and other insignificant topics? Are the employers so timid, that my blog is able to scare them away? Is that not against the "equal opportunity"-ideology, which makes up the small print of every job advertisement? Should I just forget the whole thing, start up my own consulting company, or start to drive bus? Or should I start real...

Good news I took again a long T-ride, while celebrating my re-found freedom from homework assignments. I was very glad and relieved to note, that the terrorist threat, which was so acute on last Sunday, has now disappeared. There are no more public announcement blasting off in the T. So, I think, "now, more than ever, it is important to be alert, and inform the police or MBTA of all suspicious behavior" does not hold, the terrorists have left the town thanks to the vigilance of the traveling public. Or, could it just be that the MBTA finally understood that the announcements had nothing to do with security. Or, maybe someone's incentives are full now, no more need to enhance security this year anymore. Be that as it may, I am very glad that the announcements have been cancelled. Systems engineering and ships Today, I had just one lecture. It was on systems engineering, especially on ship building. Of course, as it was presented by some military guy, it was mostly abo...

Homework done - summer semester almost over Thanks to Marat, Kumar , and Ashok , all our homework (systems engineering, system dynamic, and operations management) are ready, done, and over now. Great. Our efficiency is formidable. The only thing remaining is the accounting exam, for which I plan to read 8 hours on Sunday. After that, I will have completed 138 units of graduate level courses, which is 6 more than MIT normally requires for 2 master's degrees. In the fall, I may take some 40 more in addition to my thesis (24), so the total of the year will become around 200 or more. So, it seems that MIT is not such a though place to study after all, since to do all this I have not even sacrificed that many weekends, none in the summer actually. But MIT is a good place, for the first time in my life I am not acutely bored most of the time for the lack of things to do. Maybe I need to stay in MIT for few more years, this is so much fun, almost awesome, as they say here. Daily crono...

Rampant militarism I just wonder how Americans, who are well educated and enlightened people, tolerate such a waste of their money, time, and other resources on preparation of and actual killing of other human beings. Today, in the Systems Engineering class, we heard a lecture how MITRE (which is part of the government, but pretends not to be) helps the rest of the government in this worthless task. It was so boring, that I almost walked out of the class, especially since most of the lecture was not about systems engineering but these killing preparations. No change I have noticed no change after my birthday. Everything is as it was. I do not feel weaker nor stronger. I am as happy as I was before. Well, a bit happier since I got the book. Maybe we should have giftdays every month, just to celebrate the existence of our loved ones. I cannot figure out any better reason for celebration (well, if all countries would slash their killing budget by 90%, that would be even better). Funn...