This evening at 18:00 I left the office and went by bike from Pitajamäki to Töölö, where I live. During that ride my holidays started. Two weeks in Finland, no plans, no too big tasks, besides reworking my part of this for the second edition.

On Wednesday I was in Bonn. It was my first visit there and as it was work related I did not see too much. I arrived there already Tuesday evening, but the hotel was too far from city center to go for a walk.

Is this a sunset over Bonn or a power plant blowing up?

During Wednesday lunch break we took a walk along the Rhine, the sun was up and 30 degress Celcius were hanging around in the park. I saw the bulding in which the members of parliament once worked (Abgeordnetenhaus - der lange Lulatsch) and also the exciting tower of Deutsche Bundespost - both on the other side of the river.

At least I made it at some point in my life to the capital of the country that I have lived in 20 years.

In Helsinki the summer has settled to stay for a while. The whole week was sunny, temperatures up to 20 degrees Celcius and the forecast looks similar. Soon it will be midsummer, the longest day. Now it is 22:22 (10:22 pm) and over the roof of the neighbour building hangs a light blue sky with a growing moon on it.

Finlandiatalo from across Töölönlahti
Picutre taken at 03:30 in the morning

My neighbours have to listen to the song "Deiche" of Kettcar - a powerful rock song with good German lyrics. The right thing to start vacation.

I bought the Nokia LD-1W GPS receiver a while ago, in order to keep track of my cycle trips. The device itself is pretty easy, it receives GPS data and cannot store them itself. So one needs to connect a mobile phone via Bluetooth to it and on that phone needs to be an application running that is able to receive the GPS data.

Trip done today by bike through Helsinki
Recorded with PowerNavigation 2
Visualization by gpsvisualizer.com

I am not really interested in a navigation system, i.e. in a software that shows me how i get from A to B. Although that would be nice to have, it is too complex and is also very expensive. All I want is to see where I went and how fast I was.

The whole business of keeping track and putting the routes finally on maps is everything else but trivial and I am already several days hanging over the devices and different PC applications to get something out of it.

There are several applications for the phone type I have, that can connect to a GPS receiver. Of all of them I first thought AFTrack as useful, as it can store the track (i.e. the route that is drive/cycled/walked) in the IGC format, which is a standardized format. Yes, AFTrack can do that, but most of the time it suddenly stoped when I moved. So it looks perfectly working for a while and then - sssssddd - disappears. Thank you, that is not useful.

Some days ago I found now PowerNavigation 2 - this tool is keeping track reliably. So this is now running on my Series60 mobile.

Next step is to get the route on maps. There is no easy way for that. Some programs allow scanning of maps and calibrating them to the latitudes / longitudes that are drawn on it. The OziExplorer is such a program, it really works fine, but the scanning of maps is a nightmare. I tried it and it all works fine as long as I have only one piece of a map. But usually I want a whole map scanned and as my scanner is not big enough I need to break down the map into pieces (tiles). I tried to combine these scanned tiles to a big map on the PC - I used several graphics programs and also specialized programs for this purpose. It simply does not work, most likely I am too stupid.

But there is a nice online tool, the GPS visualizer. It has basic maps, which seem to be made from satellite photographs. These maps do not contain any city names or whatsoever legend, but still they give a basic backround for the covered distance.

Trip (by car) from Quebec to Montreal

This all seems to be a science on its own. If somebody here knows more about such tools or how to use them more efficiently, I would be happy to read about it.

Greetings from Quebec City, Canada, where I arrived yesterday evening and will stay until Friday evening.

The flight yesterday was very relaxing - no hurries, no troubles, just go to Vantaa airport, check in, fly to Munich, change the gate, fly to Montreal. I took a car and went from Montreal to Quebeck city in something around three hours. The street was straight, the music good, the night fell gently and what was visible from the land gave the eye enough room to let loose any wrong thought into the far distance.

Note: This is still (somehow) Canada...

...but certainly not a typcial Northern American City

Today I have one of these inbetween days. The meeting starts tomorrow, the working day ended in Europe when I opend my eyes. Looking down from the 20th floor, where my room is located, on the world showed me that everything here is golden in the sunlight. There seemed to be also enough wind to move the flags in an adequate way for taking pictures of them.

The Parliament

After a long breakfast I took a walk into the old city and sat down at the promenade that follows the river Saint Laurent. An couple was singing jazz songs, the guy played the saxophone, people were walking. I started wondering whether my mind got severly damaged at some point, as the last weeks had so many nice days, but then decided that such illusions arise from the beginning of the summer time. Knowing that everything was fine with my mind helped me to walk the promenade further down.

The Promenade and View from it

There are certain questions that come to my mind. One is, why do people work. I know there are some smart answers to this question - they better exist - but I just forgot them while strolling around through the park here. Our ancestors worked for tens of thousands of years. On days like these it seems time for a big break - just some two hundred years of leaning back and forgetting about the skin cancer that one can get from sun rays and all the other things that extend our lives until we all feel miserable and fall off the tree. Let's just rot in the sun.

Local Artists

Time did not move forward. The sund stood for several hours at its highest point and only the pages of the book, that I currently read, turned over the minutes.

People are talking French here in a way as the Americans talk English. I do not speak French at all, but the language sounds different here than in France.

There is more to come - but don't hope for anything reasonable.