Personal
Do you care?
For some reason caring is often seen as a bad thing. Those who appear not to care are considered as cool. People who care keep getting told not to care so much or get scoffed at when they voice or show how much they care. It would be better for them and apparently less scary for the others if they didn't care. Not caring needs not to be seen as a cool and great thing. It needs to be seen as something a lazy person would do. Not caring, you see, is much easier than caring. It's easier for your heart, it's easier for your mind. Unless of course you are a caring person and have to make an effor...
How to fix accidental swiping between pages on OS X Mavericks
I just got myself a new Macbook Pro and with it I finally went on using the also new OS X Mavericks. In case you are asking why I hadn't upgraded the old Macbook to Mavericks, the answer is simple: The old one is so old and slow and it was the only computer I had, so I didn't want to accidentally mess it up. Nevertheless things are looking mostly good with Mavericks. Mostly. One new thing is swiping between pages, with which you can go back and forth on websites just by swiping to left or right on the trackpad. That is pretty cool, right? Cool, but I was constantly accidentally swiping bet...
Cut yourself some slack
I spent the most of the day sleeping. I had caught this cold and was freezing, tired, my head was pounding and muscles aching. However when I finally got up from the bed I felt bad about sleeping through the day. Felt bad? I was ill and needed that sleep, yet I did feel bad about it. And it was Saturday! Does this ever happen to you? You were so tired you slept more than you think you "should". Or perhaps you were supposed to work and instead you spent time relaxing, maybe meditating even. And then, due to not constantly being productive, you felt bad about it. Nowadays busy is good. If...
Whispering relaxation with ASMR
On a video young woman is outdoors, brushing her hair wearing rubber gloves. In time to time she whispers or talks in a low soothing voice to the camera, to the viewer of the video. She brushes her hair slowly or runs her rubber glove covered hands through the hair and makes sure the camera captures the voices. I'm hypnotized, relaxed and feeling this tingling starting from my scalp and running down my back and through my arms. When my friend Nina first wrote about these ASMR videos (in Finnish) I thought it sounded nuts. For her these videos didn't work and because of my own skepticism I...
Life as viewed by a short person
I'm short. Just a tad over one and a half meter, that's about 5 feet. When I hear tall people complaining about being tall I want to punch them in face. If I wasn't too short to be able to do that, that is. Tall people look so grand and awesome to me. Like some fantastic fairytale creatures. How I wish I had long legs! Being a shorty isn't always a total misery, but it comes with interesting side effects. When I was a teen the mean kids called me (amongst other things) a fire extinguisher. It wasn't meant to be a cute pet name, trust me. I also learned to hate all the group sports, w...
Living in a small home
When Toni and I moved in our 24 m^2 apartment lots of people were ready to tell us it's too small. They were laughing for the idea that two people would fit in a small place like this. Some offered their great ideas on how we could get a bigger home: "Surely you can come up with this and this amount of money in month for an apartment of this and this size." To which I offered my annoyment. Housing situation is terrible in Helsinki, the capital city of Finland and where we live. Young people being homeless is a growing problem and getting a rental apartment is harder and harder. Especially...
Memories of boosting my brain with Tetris
I got my first computer when I was 13. It was a birthday present, a used PC. It came with Intel386, Windows 3.11 and even a modem. I never got to use the modem, back then Internet at home was something really rare and at countryside almost non-existent. This was 1994, you see. I loved that thing. I felt safe when the fans begun their song and the monitor made that funny sound of being fired up. One of the main things I did with it was writing stuff such as poems, diary, school work, beginnings of multiple novels, short stories and more. Oh, I had a printer too. It was pretty neat. But I...