The other day, I interviewed a Swedish idea guy about innovation. He was all energy, all passion, all ideas. And a lot of quotes by famous people.
This is one he threw at me:
The greater danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.
“Michelangelo said it,” he added.
Michelangelo would have made a great coach.
I just heard that February is a non-flying month for many. Apparently, there’s a group called the Feb Four, that promotes February as a non-flying month for moral, environmental, religious, and financial reasons. I must say that that was news to me. I’d never heard of the Feb Four before, but there are so many of these groups these days.
Anyway, I realized that if that’s the case, you haven’t seen Scanorama, the SAS in-flight magazine that I completely own in February, with the Henrik Lundqvist profile, and my usual Web & Tech stuff.
Being your Web friend, I had to do something. And this is what I decided:
Here’s the link to the Henrik Lundqvist story that I posted earlier. My February Tech column from Scanorama behind the “Continued” link.
Thank you for all your emails and comments regarding my liveblogging day on Thursday. It was a lot of fun to do so I’ll do it again in about two weeks. However, here are some answers to the questions you sent my way.
Why did you do it?
At first it was really just a test to see what that does to the traffic. But once I hit the road and started to write and update the blog, it became a way to record the trip for future generations. In 50 years, that entry – this entry – may be used as an example in a classroom somewhere, to show how people communicated in the old days, and what Helsinki looked and feeled like back in circa 2010. Thirdly, it was a way to send secret, coded messages to my wife stuck in her cubicle somewhere.
Looking out the window, I see a man changing snow tyres to his car. About time. We got 20 cm of snow this morning.
This is the same guy who two years ago came home in the middle of night, and parked his car on a big rock next to his/our house. The car only had three wheels at that point. And no, he’s not changing snow tyres to that car, he traded it for another one. And that to another one. And that one to another one. And then once more.
So, what does this man do for a living?
That’s right. He’s a truck driver.
He’s a pro.
How do you spot a farm boy in the city? His every seventh step is longer (to avoid the ditches). That’s an old Finnish urban joke – not that Finns really can boast with an all too urban state of mind.
Inspired by the previous post, I bought a newspaper yesterday, and walked into the Coffeehouse By George at Odenplan, got myself a cappuccino, and sat down to read the paper.
Drove down to my local sushi bar a couple of blocks away and… well, it was raining and it's closer to 700 meters to the place and… anyway, I drove down, and saw a police car with the sirens on coming towards me. It's not something we see every day around here, so I got kind of curious.
I read somewhere – I think it was Malcolm Gladwell that wrote it, either in New Yorker or his blog – about the benefits of being a public writer, i.e. doing his writing in a public place. Like a café.
Like me, right now.
And hey, he’s onto something. There is something to be said about the image of a public writer. The creative type, the intelligent one, the thinker. Here I am!
A couple of days ago, I was sitting in the backyard, reading David Remnick’s “Reporting“, when a man walked by me. Well, he didn’t just walk by me, I don’t think I would have noticed him had that been the case.
I noticed him because his dog stopped, and decided to take a dump on our lawn.
No, seriously. The dog retreated into a kangaroo position, pulled his ears back, and just … let … it … rip.
Meanwhile,