One of the things we bought was a new work desk for me and as everyone knows those things come in really small boxes and offer plenty of mental and physical challenges before one has the actual piece of furniture in existence. As I was trying to decipher the instructions and assemble a drawer for the desk I underestimated my strength and apparently overestimated my understanding of the drawing and managed to break couple of special thightening screws.

In order to get replacement parts I headed to Ikea website and noticed a real-time chat possibility there. Clicking on the link I got a new window with a chat session with Reetta from Ikea. I explained my worries and she asked a few questions and promised to send me instructions for getting the parts.

Reetta was a bit slow in answering to me (probably handling several customers simultaneously) but otherwise I was very positively surpised with the customer support experience. Didn't need to email them and wait a day for an answer or even to pick up the phone.

All in all nice to see a chat option used nicely in handling customer support. Now I'm just hoping the Ikea pulls through on the experience and Reetta sends the instructions to my email as she promised. :)

The downside is that Spotify is pretty popular so it can be hard to get an invite. I got mine a while back through spotify.rejected.se. They invites to distribute every day. It might help to try your luck after midnight or in the morning as I'm sure the invites run out every day.

Another option is to go straight for the Premium account which costs you 10 euros a month. I'm currently on the Premium plan as I wanted to get rid of the interruptions during my work days and wanted to try out the mobile version that just recently came out for S60 as well. Note that the mobile version won't work with the free account.

Looks like Apple will get into streaming music as well so don't know what will happen to their business in the future but they have a well working product I'm willing to pay for at least. 120 euros a year might sound much for people used to totally free music but I thought that cutting out the interruptions when I need to concentrate is well worth the money. The funny downside is that since I don't see or hear the ads any longer it's harder to keep up with new Finnish music and to monitor the trends in advertising in the service.

So if you for instance listen to music to block out the background noise while you work and would like to have some variation to your own music collection or radio stations I can warmly recommend Spotify. The mobile version is interesting as well but I listen to podcasts or my iPod on the go mostly so not critical for me.

P.S. As a Premium member I get 2 invites a month for the free version so if you know me and want one, let me know. There's a small queue of people already lined up so don't expect to get the invite right away. :)

I'm leaving Nokia - Like all big companies in this economic downturn Nokia is trying to save money. First it was travel, purchases and project budgets but when those weren't enough it was time for personnel reductions. My work with social media and ways of working wasn't really one of the core functions of the Human Resources (HR) department and probably didn't seem that important in a time of crisis so I was one of the "lucky ones" when the cuts came. Nokia is still doing well and wants to keep its personnel happy so they are offering a pretty good voluntary resignation package which I also took.

I worked for Nokia for altogether 8 years and it has been my only employer after graduation so it feels strange to leave the company. I've worked for a long time in the Nokia Research Center and then moved a couple of years back to HR. I was involved in a lot of very different initiatives and projects during my time at Nokia and my work role changed on the way from a research engineer designing and implementing things to being an expert in social software and media and looking after that area (unofficially). I guess I should write another blog entry about my career as there are just way too many things to list here. ;)

It was a shock to hear the news and to start thinking about what to do next - in retrospect I think it would have been good to do the thinking already earlier. :) Luckily my expertise is on a growing area and I was able to find a new job even before my Nokia contract ended. I'll be working as a consultant for a small Helsinki-based social media consulting company called Dicole (www.dicole.com) helping Finnish companies to use social media internally and externally. Dicole is the kind of firm I wished I had established myself and I'm really looking forward to working there. I've been doing consulting within Nokia for a couple of years already but I'm sure being a real consultant is different so it's a great learning opportunity for me as well. I'll start in my new job at the end of this month and will write about it more once I have some experience.

I'll try to blog more actively here from now on and also get involved in the social media and Web2.0 scene here in Finland. Even with the depression there seems to be exciting things happening in that space. I think we're living in interesting times both in the good and the bad. ;)

My life changed couple of weeks ago as our Christmas present arrived. My son was born in end of November (about a week before the due time). He really was a big boy, weighing 4630g and being 54cm tall at birth. Both the baby and the mother are doing really well.

Buying an apartment together and getting married seem like small things now in comparison to this (I guess since it's been a while they don't seem so bad any more either). This really is for life as once you have a child that is a lifelong commitment. It's hard trying to get my head around this change in our family, now a family of 3.

We've been trying to get the routines sorted out. It's amazing how much time taking care of someone so little takes. You really can't take care of more than two things in a day. :) He sleeps really well (normally 6 hours in row during the night) but the sleep deprivation keeps piling up on us parents. Still considering I've been sleeping really well as Sanna takes care of the baby during nights (I can't really feed it, can I? ;).

If you want to see more pictures of our little one (no he doesn't get a name until mid of January) have a look this picture gallery of boy Lakkala.

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But on to the topic of the post. Facebook is experience a boom here in Finland. Everyone seems to be joining this social networking site and it's being talked about in the television and newspapers. I actually joined it already a while ago but I haven't really used it much so I'm still a newbie.

One thing I discovered just now are the Causes. You can join a cause you want to support and invite others to join one as well. I've already joined and recruited a couple of people to Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Creative Commons (CC), and Change A Million Light Bulbs. EFF fights for our rights in the digital world, CC offers a new way to handle your digital copyrights and the last one tries to save the world by getting people to use energy saving lamps.

Just recently we changed most of the lamps in our home to the energy saving ones. They come on pretty slowly so I've mixed them them with light bulbs in some lamps (one traditional + several energy saving lamps). That way you know the light was switched on and you get some light instantly. Changing the lamps also saves you money because they last a lot longer and consume less electricity. For a good explanation of the benefits see this New Light Bulbs Plain English video by the Common Craft people.

I haven't had yet time to listen to their full album but I've liked the songs I've heard already previously. At least "I talk to myself" rocks nicely, has nice melody and catching tunes. So I can recommend checking this out, you can listen to the songs for free online and even if you end up buying the album bit over 6 euros really isn't too bad.

Arto has recorded the album at his home studio and I have to say it sounds really professional. If you need to use a studio in Tampere area you can book some studio time too.

Pland has also appeared in some podcast via the Podsafe music network (e.g. I talk to myself). I might have had something to do with this. :) Basically the idea is that artist can give podcasters permission to play their songs in podcasts and get new listeners that way. The network also makes it possible to sell your songs online if you wish.

I'm also receiving trackback spam though those won't show up in the blog getting notifications about them to my email is irritating. I don't even know about any method to fight that annoyance. I guess being a blogger isn't very easy, at least if your hosting your own blog.

P.S. This post has been written with Windows Live Writer. That's an excellent piece of software that makes writing blog posts much easier. It's pretty much like using Word instead of a web form.

Bands and artists basically have to reinvent them for every record because producing exactly same kind of music record after record would be boring but this also means risking the things that made the music work on their previous record. Sometimes things go wrong and the second (n-th) album flops or things can go the other way as well, a band can find the thing that makes them a success.

Hopefully things go well for Von Hertzen Brothers and My Chemical Romance whose latest records were great (check them out!)...

P.S. Sweatmaster will release their next album in March or something. Definitely a must-buy for me.

Okay, enough chit-chat and metablogging and on to the topic. Don't you find it creepy that someone's actually planning his own funeral and advertising the whole thing to everyone all the time? Because this is what's happening with the rock radio channel Radio City in Finland. Their broadcasting license ends and they have to stop their channel. Now they're organizing a goodbye party and the listeners can vote on the last song to be played on the channel and so on.

I'm gonna miss the channel (good music) and I don't quite understand how something like this can happen. In Finland the radio frequences are governed by the goverment and they decide who can have and what kind of channels. Radio City in my knowledge was doing well financially so SBS Radio would have wanted to continue but can't because they don't have a license. So the goverment is actually deciding how the radio landscape in Finland looks like. The officials are really patronizing here so I shouldn't be surprised but still this makes me sad.

I listen to a lot of radio in the car while I'm driving and at home when I'm working remotely and Radio City was one of my two radio channels so this affects me quite a lot. Perhaps I have to listen more music from my iPod but that's just not the same thing. By the way bying a radio with line in and hooking up your iPod to it via an audio cable is really nice way of listening to music. Headphones are pretty restricting (if you don't need them because of coworkers) and dealing with CDs is a pain so iPod+radio works nicely. Now I just have to get myself one of those radio transmitters for my iPod so I can listen to my own records easily in the car as well.

My previous blog entries were about the fire next door to our apartment in Ikuri and now I got to witness yet another fire. This took place on a smallish island in Näsijärvi lake near Murole. The weather has been very hot here in Finland for quite some time already so forest fires are pretty common place now. This fire probably started from a camp fire used to grill some sausages or something. The fire consumed about half hectare of undergrowth before it was stopped by the firefighters.

We were attending my wife's sister's kid's 2 year birthday party when couple of the persons present got a call about the fire. They are members of the local volunteer fire brigade (Vapaapalokunta (VPK) in finnish). An automated system calls the volunteers when there's a fire in their area. We decided to have quick look at what's going on so we took the boat to the island not too far from the hosts' house. There were already some firemen at the scene and some more arrived just as we got there. The fire didn't seem to big either so we decided to head back for the mainland. As we started back we then noticed some more flames on the other side of the island and decided to land and help the firemen.

So the volunteer firemen in our small group grabbed a hose and started to put down the fire with the others. The fire wasn't too big so stopping it didn't take too long but they had to really water down the ground which took a while. I wasn't equipped to help out so I just helped move the hoses a bit and took some photos of the event. You can now find the pictures in Flickr in the Forest Fire set.

It's pretty rare to find an album where all the songs rock but PotF's first album "Signs of Life" is one of these exceptions. They will be releasing their second album "Carnival of Rust" 12th of April so a week from now. I'm gonna get that disc to myself as soon as it comes out. Meanwhile you can listen to some samples on the band's webpage.

Make yourself a t-shirt folding machine, all-tribes shows you how (play the first video).

How about voting for your favourite in the Google Idol competition. Do you go for "Pomme & Kelly" or the "The Back Dormitory Boys", vote now!