Summer vacation '11 in Finland

Summer vacation '11 in Finland, a set on Flickr.

Last full day of our summer vacation is coming to an end. It's been wonderful to have the almost stereotypical Finnish domestic summer vacation.

The pictures are from my parents' place in Kerava, a rental summer cottage in Hauho, Parola Tank Museum, Häme Castle, Hämeenlinna Artillery Museum, Finnish Aviation Museum, Sääksi lake beach and from around urban Helsinki. The pics can also be viewed as a slide show.

The military theme with the museum visits is because of our son has reached the "weapons age" - things that don't go "bang" are just not very interesting at the moment :-).

Now it's time to fly back to India for the final quarter of the expat assignment. It seems one needs to spend time away to truly appreciate the things one has at home...

A day at the races

A day at the races, a set on Flickr.

The Overseas Women's Club organized a charity event at the Bangalore Turf Club. What a great day! The theme was to dress posh for the box section, eat and drink there, bet on the fine horses and generally have a good time with like minded people. For me, also take a lot of pics of something I've never seen with my own eyes - or through my own lenses - before.

The drinking bit probably had a somewhat negative impact on the picture taking aspect, but some of them turned out OK anyway thanks to having the camera on continuous shooting mode all day. I also got quite excited about the betting, which was a surprise - but a fun one. I also won some money in a couple of races, which meant I ended up just shy of break even.

My expectations going in were pretty low. In Finland they organize trotting horse races, which are almost as exciting as drying paint whenever they show highlights on the TV - which is often.

So, this was an activity I never would've done on my own, but if there's another opportunity later in life I'm definitely game for another day at the races.

Malaysia / Kuala Lumpur

Right after a vacation we took another. This time we went to Kuala Lumpur for an extended weekend trip timed around Malaysian Grand Prix in Sepang. It was my first GP viewed live since the 2000 Montreal GP. In KL we visited Chinatown, Petronas Twin Towers, various shopping malls, a big walk-in aviary, a beautiful but scorching hot orchid park and took the hop-on, hop-off tour around around the sights. There were many more things to see, but there was limited time with 3 days spent on viewing fast cars scream by.

In Sepang I roamed around the various grand stands during the Friday practice and then on Saturday and Sunday we watched the qualifying and the race with the whole family. We were in grand stand F which gives a fantastic view of the complex of fast corners 5-8 as well as the straights and the hairpin between them. You can follow about half a lap from your seat, which is pretty amazing. The challenge with F is logistics - it's time-consuming to get there and even more difficult to get back. We took the KLIA Transit train on all 3 days and on Saturday going back to KL was a disaster with the airport to circuit shuttle buses stuck in traffic. Took over 4 hours to get back to the hotel...

Anyway a great race, a great track and a great city. Much recommended!

Island paradise pictured

We spent 5 days in Maldives and the only negative I can think of this vacation is that it's over. Best holiday destination I've been to, ever. I'll be adding more pics to the same set later when I have time. Click here for a full screen version of the slide set.

How to like a Symbian^3 smartphone?

I have a Nokia N8 and while some aspects of it are awasome out of the box, some others are downright poor. I think I can say this now even though I work for Nokia as our CEO has basically said the same thing in public.

Most of the frustrating bits have to do with the built-in applications in N8. Luckily there is a pretty good offering of 3rd party apps as well as innovative Nokia ones that have, at least for me, turned the thumb firmly towards the sky. So here's my advice on what to get to whoever wants to live life to the fullest (heh) with N8, C7, E7 etc.:

Social networks: get Gravity. Gravity is an awesome native Symbian application for all kinds of social networking needs. I use it for Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader and flickr image uploads. The version of Gravity on Ovi Store is great, but that's just the starting point. Jan Ole Suhr (@janole) releases frequent updates that have made the great into fantastic since I bought the 1st version. The gret thing is, one can follow @janole in Gravity and get 1st hand info about what he's developing next as well as where to download the latest and the greatest.

Music: I live in India now so this will not help the natives, but Spotify has transformed music for me. Admittedly the Symbian client is awkward at best, but the overall service experience is so good that it almost doesn't matter at all. I would especially wish for better support for headset controls and such.

Browsing: in all the N8 reviews the biggest downside complained about has been the browser. Yes, it's slow and the zooming doesn't really work like it should. After the release of Opera Mini 6.0 this is a moot point now as there's a fantastic browser now available. In India the proxy browsing is fantastic as 3G was just launched and coverage is spotty at best. With Opera Mini GPRS is enough for fast browsing of full-fledged desktop sites.

Profile management: I am one of those people who forget to put the phone on silent when going to bed or entering a meeting and leave it silent for the rest of the day once the meeting is over. Now it doesn't matter anymore as the beta-available Situations does all that automatically. If you tried the first version and got tired of restarting it, try the latest one. It's much better and does what it promises.

Outdoors: Whenever I do any kind of sports outdoors (except swimming), I use Sports Tracker. Sadly they don't ship the heart rate monitor to India so I need to pick one up when I am next time in Finland. Even without it this is a fantastic app-slash-service and I've used it from day 1 when it was a small science project in Nokia. They just announced that they're coming out with iPhone and Android versions too - good for them!

Gaming: there's plenty of good, even great games in Ovi Store. The latest Angry Birds is coming to Symbian with only a few weeks delay :-). Sky Force Reloaded is great too, but I go long back with that game so it's probably just me.

E-mail: here the built-in mail app has developed into a really usable tool. I use it for Gmail and Outlook access and have no major complaints. If I sometimes need the full Gmail UI, I use the iPhone version with Opera Mini.

Maps: in most parts of the world Ovi Maps is great, but not here in India. Here addresses don't really matter or make sense and everything works with points of interest. The PoI database on Google Maps Mobile is a lot better so that works better here.

Bubbles: you don't you need Bubbles before you try Bubbles. I couldn't use my phone without Bubbles anymore.

Consumer complaint power and the Internet, or "Don't get mad, get even... and then some"

So it's probably obvious by now that I'm a little more than slightly pissed off at DishTV for delivering me a service some 3 weeks later than promised and then cutting me off from it less than 1 hour after finally getting it. Oh, yes, and for constantly promising to fix it without actually doing so. That too.

I can complain all I want to the care personnel, but those people are just earning a pittance listening to people yelling at them so I'm not too hard on them - I can't help but laugh when they again promise me what their workflow system tells them to promise - I'd bet knowing full well that the problem will still be there tomorrow.

Blogs like this are actually suprisingly effective for getting back at companies who treat their customers like crap. Consider this post of mine from 2008. Google Analytics tells me that 908 separate people have viewed the rant 1059 times since I posted it. If I managed to convince even 50% of those people to buy something else the companies I complained about lost over 25k€ / $35k in sales, some 150 times more than I lost buying their crappy products. And counting. People find the post through google searches and it still gets a steady 30-50 pageviews per month - I've cut my losses a long time ago, but they aren't done with theirs.

Cricket looks fantastic on DishTV TruHD - NOT...

So I have this problem with our bricked DishTV set-top-box. DishTV customer care has a standard promise of 24-hour service restoration, but it's based on, well, apparently nothing more than a hope and prayer. The care center personnel do a pretty good imitation of being surprised that no technician has showed up with a laptop to revive the bricked device, but I have a hard time believing I am the only one with this experience.

The funny part is, today is the quarter final match of the cricket world cup with India playing Australia. I had actually thought that I might watch this as the DishTV installation came with the cricket WC package included. I've never watched a game and thought this would be a good opportunity to start and maybe understand the rules even. For me the fact that I'll miss this is not really a biggie, but imagine if I was Indian and could not watch the big game in my spanking new HD super duper package? I'd be suicidal.

Well they told me, again, that with 100% certainty a technician will come within 24 hours. I'm not holding my breath...