NL37 - Before and after

Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #37, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.

Previous editions can be found here. You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Threads.

Finland celebrated its 107th Independence Day on Friday.

Happy Independence Day to those who celebrate!

May Finland continue to be all that it is today and more.

Winter arrived in Finland. By winter, I mean snow.

There was snow in Helsinki, a couple of weeks back when we had landed. But then it got warmer, and the snow went away. It snowed these past couple of days.

Here's a before and after of the road I walk on, on my way to the office.

Sini-tarra is a wonderful sticky clay like thing. We used it to stick all the Ikea frames on the wall.

We bought the Yllevad frames for Ikea and were considering getting some sort of adhesive hooks to hang them on. Prerna talked to our neighbour and she told us about sini-tarra. She had some, so she showed us how to use it.

I went and picked some from Suomalainen Kirjakauppa in Iso Omena. Lo-and-behold! We had our photo-wall ready!

/five things to share

1. An 83-year-old short story by Borges portends a bleak future for the internet

In his 3,000-word story, the writer imagines a world consisting of an enormous and possibly infinite number of hexagonal rooms. The bookshelves in each room hold uniform volumes that must, its inhabitants intuit, contain every possible permutation of letters in their alphabet.

2. I don't know how to build software and you don't either

In my experience, you only start to see long-term consequences at the three-to-five-year mark at a company. That gives you at most four different perspectives into how software development gets done at different places (for instance, you might see a doomed monolith-to-microservices refactor at one workplace, and a more successful one at the next workplace). I don’t think four data points is enough.

3. Intel removed Pat Gelsinger. Why?

If Intel is falling apart, this isn’t just a business story. The United States government has called it a national security story, too. Intel isn’t just the world’s former leading maker of computer chips; it’s one of the last companies to both design and manufacture them itself instead of outsourcing the latter part to Asia.

4. Seth - Who owns your words?

Take a moment to think about whether you mean what you just said or perhaps are simply cheering for your team. If they’re not your words, you still might be responsible for uttering them.

5. ISS will be decommissioned in 20230.

Sometime in 2030, astronauts will pack up their belongings, turn out the lights, and depart the International Space Station (ISS) for the last time. The trajectory of this grand old structure will be adjusted, putting it further into the path of Earth’s atmosphere over the next year, and then a specially designed deorbit vehicle attached to the station will perform one long reentry burn, pushing the station down into the atmosphere.

Sad. Just sad.

If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄

Until next week.