The thaw has started. It has snowed for a couple of weeks now during the night the temperature rose above freezing. It is up to about 3 degrees now. I have been waiting on it for a while now, but I knew it had started when I woke up this morning to a loud THUMP from outside and then heard the sound of dripping water.

Snow is generally great fun unless you get a sodding great dump of it all at once. Snow at -5 deg and below is really nice, like pure white feathers everywhere, but from -2 to +4 it is thick, wet and heavy and definately not nice. Especially when you have no choice but to move it :-(. On the other hand, wet snow makes good snow balls, dry snow doesn’t!

So this, for your entertainment, is the flip side of Finnish winters…

First the snow all turns to icey slush and starts to slide off the roof…

And eventually it drops off (hopefully not when you are under it). Of course the snow-plough just has to come past and throw the crappy brown stuff down the driveway. And then you have to clean it all up so you can get out of the house.

And then what do you do with it all? You stick it around the side of the house of course!

Well, what can I say. Nothing really. Not much happening at all. Apart from snow, snow, and more snow.

Well, there was the car I guess. Someone drove into the back of it before Christmas and their insurance paid for it to get fixed last week. Only we picked it up on Friday and after keeping it all week they missed a bit. Grrrrr. It goes back there again tomorrow probably for another week. We do get a rental car, but we are supposed to pay 4% of the cost of that. Double grrrrr.

Anyway, last Saturday it was actually fine for a few hours around lunch time, so I took a few pictures. These are the result.

So now I can invite you to take a spin (literally) around our front and back yard.

You will need Apple Quicktime to play these. And in case you haven’t seen a Quicktime VR clip before, just click in the image and drag your mouse around to change the view. Ctrl and Shift zoom in and out. I had to keep the file size down, so zooming won’t get you much.

No sooner had I mentioned the lack of winter last time and it was back again. Typical. And it has just kept snowing for the last week. Lots of clearing the snow from the driveway, sometimes up to twice a day! :-(.

But it does have its up sides, such as going on walks when it is like this…

Mid January and it is +5 degrees C and raining. Normally it should be -5 to -15 and snowing. The grass is still green and plants and trees are starting to bud in some places.

I guess there are still a couple of months available for normal winter to return, but in the mean time there are lots of confused plants and animals around.

A few weeks and the new ADSL connection is working fine. It was connected a week or so after the last posting and came with its own share of hair pulling (why does the good stuff never come easy?).

We picked up a modem a week before the connection went live and I didn’t think much about it until the night before the promised installation date. Thats when I noticed that the modem comes with the wrong phone jack for our house. Finnish houses usually use a 3 pin plug, not unlike a power plug, for the phone jack. Unfortunately our house is fully wired up with RJ-45 (Ethernet connectors) for all phone and network sockets.

The modem itself also came with a connector cable with RJ-11 connectors at both ends (one for the modem end, one to connect the plug too). So that brought a few hours of searching on-line for an adapter for RJ-45 to RJ-11. That produced no results either. The next day the connection was due to go live as well and after more searching at work I discovered by accident that RJ-11 is actually a “sub-set” of the RJ-45 connector and that you can plug the RJ-11 into a RJ-45 socket! Grrrrrrrr.

A text message soon arrived saying that the connection was going. So after work I tried plugging the modem into the phone plug next to the computer. No go… Stopped and thought about it for a while and tried again. Still no go :-(. Went to the technical room (sounds better in Finnish) and checked out our switch board. Our whole house is wired to this panel. As it turns out, we have no separate phone or Ethernet sockets, they all terminate at the one rack, so actually any socket can be wired for either purpose, it is just a matter of patching the terminating socket to either the phone board or a hub/router. How cool is that! And even more coolness… We have our very own 19 inch rack :-). And for a double bonus the cabling is all Cat 6. 1 Gigabit Ethernet here we come 🙂

Anyway, back to the subject at hand. After pondering over the wiring specifications of RJ-45 and RJ-11 sockets it occurs to me that the RJ-11 (and the phone system) are only use two wires, and lo and behold, the plug and the phone socket were wired differently! A sweaty couple of minutes yanking wires out of the board and pushing them back in (is it possible to fry the phone system with a modem!?!?) had nearly instant results with the modem… lights blinking all over the place!

Two weeks since moving and no broadband internet connection. Just as well there hasn’t actually been any spare time in which to miss it!

But anyway, the internet is such a useful thing these days, in fact it would be nearly impossible to survive without it here. It is our only way to pay bills without visiting a bank or using one of the bill payment ATMs. And with being out in the countryside now that is a bit difficult.

To the rescue then, is the trusty GSM cellphone, in my case a N-Gage. Although we are in a bit of a dead patch for my current operator it is enough to get GPRS (packet data) connection from one place in the house, which unfortunately is several metres from the computer, but wireless helps again, since I can use Bluetooth to create the link from the PC to the phone!

It might be slow, but it works!

Moving day tomorrow and our new house is outside the area of the cable TV network that currently supplies our broadband connection (somewhere around 3-8 Mbit/s depending on the time of day and what way the wind is blowing).That means having to move to ADSL instead.

Just ordered a 1Mbit/s connection for 47 € a month, which is almost what we are paying now. But the worst part is the slow rollout time. It could be up to six weeks and since there is not phone line either it means up to six weeks without a working Internet connection at home (oh, the humanity!). No TV antenna either at the moment, so the DVD collection might get a workout, either that or we can catch up on the back log of videod TV programs. Either way, stay tuned and find out what happens next…

Summer is long gone, if you could have called it that. But anyway, it is that time of year again when the birds are heading south and the trees are turning brown.

The farmers are also harvesting the last of the hay and grain, and plowing their fields for winter.

This could have also been titled “blink and you miss it”. I’m pretty sure we had summer a couple of weeks ago. Or at least it seems like it anyway. Since June it has done nothing but rain and not much above 20. But beginning about two weeks ago it hit mid to high twenties, which was nice. What wasn’t so nice is that our apartment hits thirty at the same time :-(. Luckily (or not) it has dropped back to 20 again.

And yes, that 29.3 is inside, in our living room…

It has just passed midsummer in the northern hemisphere, which is also the shortest night – if you can call it night here. Even in central and southern Finland the night never really gets dark, even though we are well south of the Arctic circle. It makes for sleepless nights and early mornings if you don’t have nice thick curtains.

Midnight at midsummer, central Finland.