End of an Era
So, this is the first time I’m unemployed since 1997. This time it’s just two days, though, since on Monday I’ll be starting on a completely new job. For me this is the end of an era. On the year 2000 I started writing game reviews and other stuff for a big computer magazine on a part time basis and on one fateful day in 2001 I set off to be a full time freelance writer, which lead into me founding my own one man company for the job a couple of years later. So, for the better part of a decade I’ve been working in media full time, quite often 150% of the time since I’ve had a dayjob and done journalism on the side. 18 hour work days haven’t been that uncommon, while at the same time handling all kind of other assorted crap life has thrown my way.
This spring I decided that enough is enough. I’m pretty sure that during these years I’ve pretty much seen what gaming, computer and technology media has to offer in Finland. I’ve also reached the conclusion that I can’t recommend working as a full time freelance journalist for anybody. At least nobody who’s as diligent a workaholic as I am.
Leaving the Media
So, what does this change mean in practice? Earlier in the spring I stopped accepting assignments from my clients and started handing them over to other freelancers and winding down the company. Now the company is shelved and I’m just waiting for my MacPro leasing to run out on July, after which I can officially close down the whole thing. No more dealing with the company taxes, paperwork & bureaucracy, stressing over deadlines, shuttling test hardware back and forth, keeping up with 4-6 high volume e-mail accounts daily or pestering people who really don’t seem to want to get interviewed.
Yesterday was also my last day working for the gaming TV program I’ve been producing for two years. A lot of that time was very interesting, although very hectic, high pressure and high responsibility stuff. I can’t say that as a working place it would have been even remotely ideal, but it was a nice gig to do for a while. It was fun to travel around the world in press events arranged by the game companies, learning how to film and to edit video and sound was both interesting and useful, and generally it felt good to get to use my strengths – ie. organizational ability, social skills and stress tolerance – right up to the max.
But enough is enough. So, I’m out of the media field, probably for good (Oh my good, it’s like the whining of a million obnoxious nerds and fanboys had suddenly been silenced in my inbox!). Never say never and all that, but I don’t think I’ll find such a well paying client that I’ll get back on the horse and start hammering out hardware tests or other technical stuff for a good, good while.
The Future
What next? Well, when I made the decision, I sent several applications here and there, the main aim being the post of an associate producer in a Finnish game company Remedy. I made it to the last stage of the process, where it was only me and one other guy left. In the last moment he got chosen over me because he had previous experience in game production. Considering that I really don’t, I can’t say that the end result was that bad.
My other choice, where I’ll be starting on Monday, is something completely different. The next half a year I’ll be spending in the Finnish National library, where I’ll be working on the master database that links to most other library databases in Finland. I have this weird feeling that the pace of the work and the stress levels will be rather different compared to what I’ve got used to, plus I’m really looking forward to a straightforward coding work with academic flavour. It’s much like the stuff which I did at the turn of the millennium when I was a project researcher in the department of linguistics. The project will probably end by the end of the year, and after that… well, there’s something completely different in my sights.
So, this is an end of an era for me. The amount of free time I’m looking at is staggering, compared to what it used to be. I predict a lot of gaming, diving, geocaching, meeting friends and other assorted fun for the summer. Now I’ll just have to get rid of this goddamn flu, which has kept me indoors through most of the week and especially this very beautiful and sunny Saturday.
Right, I’m off to see if some old school Sam & Max will help with the recovery enough for a barbeque trip tomorrow!
Company Sailing Trip
Our company’s spring picnic was a bit different this year. Quite often generic company fun days seem to be just about going to a restaurant to grab a steak and two to twelve beers, but this time we went for a few hour sailing trip on the sea in front of Helsinki.
I wasn’t feeling too well during the day and couldn’t tell if it was allergy or an incoming flu. Late in the afternoon I was feeling so shitty I was ready to skip the whole thing and started off for home. Getting out of the hot and stuffy work room into fresh and cool air and grabbing some medication made me feel well enough to grab a cab and arrive at the pier in the last moment before the boat left.
Before this I’ve been on and piloted only small and mid-size motored boats and a catamaran, so it was my first time on a sailing boat. Getting into a good wind where the boat tilted enough for one side to be pretty much on level with the waves was really fun. Everybody had a chance to try their hand in piloting the boat, but I had started to feel too feverish and achy to trust myself on the helm, so I settled on watching the beautiful seascape and wondering, if we were going past any familiar diving sites.
More pictures in Flickr, once again.
Tough Work Week & Child Abuse Conference
This week was a pretty hard on both at the office and after that with all the freelance work. When I got rid of the day’s job, I was mostly good for watching a couple of episodes of Shield and falling asleep with my dinner in my mouth.
Thursday was an especially interesting, but hardly a pleasant day. I spent it in a conference arranged by Save the Children Finland. The topic of the conference was There Is No Child Pornography – It’s Child Sexual Abuse and it was mainly about the problems internet and new technology. I was there to write an article about it in the society’s magazine.
I had been a bit surprised to get the job, since I’ve been speaking publicly against the DNS-based filtering system that has been implemented in Finland. I’m not against a filtering system in general, but in here the implementation is really half-assed. It was meant to be used against sites, which are hosted in countries, where there’s no legal way to shut the sites down. Instead we got a secret list of web pages, which was pretty easy to snoop out. It ended up containing loads of pages in Netherlands and US, some pages with no objectionable content at all and in a pretty famous way a page that was criticizing the filtering techniques. Not to mention the fact that there doesn’t seem to be any kind of official appeals system for the sites that got to the list accidentally.
In any case, there were several speakers from Britain, USA and Denmark – some of them worked for non-governmental organizations, some of them for Interpol and so on. What made the conference interesting was the behind the scenes glimpse to how you could track people using clues left in the photos and the case studies of how offenders got caught. I’m not going to go to specifics here, but the sleuthwork required to track the offenders and the victims is really quite amazing. The case photos, obviously, were less than comfortable to see. For understandable reasons filming and recording was completely forbidden during the conference.
I of course brought up the issue with the filtering systems and it resulted in a very interesting, calm and informed conversation during and after the presentations, which was a welcome change after the emotional pro/con-hysteria in Finnish public discussion and the net. The system Internet Watch Foundation uses in UK seems to be far more sensible than the DNS-based things used in Scandinavia. They don’t block entire domains, but individual pages, plus there is an appeals process. Additionally, according to their representative, with whom I had a nice chat in between the presentations, they are under quite a lot of scrutiny and accountable for what they do.
From the man in Interpol I heard specifics on how the serious offenders hide their sites, which sounded pretty damn technically savvy. Well, now I have comments from two professionals, who told me that the filtering lists are trivial to circumvent and they don’t hinder serious pedophiles in the least (which earned me some stinking looks from the audience). According to them the lists might be an effective deterrent that skims the scum off the top, so to speak – practically they scare away people, who have tendencies towards kids. Apparently there are studies which show the effectiveness of these kinds of deterrents in other areas of net crime, but I haven’t yet received the research data I asked for. I’m very interested to see it, though – I’m sick and tired of hearing “by doing this knee-jerk reactionary thing, the society giving a clear signal about X”, which usually means “we are doing something symbolic, ineffective and ill-advised so that we feel we are doing something”. Now, some hard facts about the effectiveness of these things, thank you.
Well, the conference certainly gave food for thought. I’ve previously been volunteering in Finland’s Red Cross’ Youth Safe Houses in Helsinki and Tampere, but after the conference I sent an application for a volunteer work in Save the Children. I hope they’ll find some use for my skillset.
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Näin tehtiin Iron Sky – eli kuinka lakkasin olemasta huolissani ja opin rakastamaan internetiä
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