Helsingin Sanomien uutisoinnin mukaan Soini oli kertonut Postmodernin taiteen paheksunnan olleen vaalikikka.

“Se oli tietoinen provo. Tiedettiin, että rääkäisy tulee”, sanoi perussuomalaisten puheenjohtaja Timo Soini.

“Kysymys ei ollut siitä hetkeäkään, saako postmodernia tekotaidetta olla ja onko se hyvää vai huonoa. Ei sillä ole mitään merkitystä: toiset tykkää ja toiset ei.”

Aikoinaan vaaliohjelman tullessa julki perustin sille vastalauseena Postmodernin tekotaiteen ystävät -Facebook-ryhmän. Se saavutti suuren viraalin suosion ja edelleen sillä on 17 729 tykkääjää.

Jos Soinia on uskominen, hän trollasi todistetusti meitä 17 729 ihmistä. Tämä lienee Suomen historian suurin trollaus, koska trollaukset yleensä suoritetaan keskustelupalstoilla, ei valtamediassa.

Keitä Soini trollasi?

Kaivoin esille Facebookin tarjoamat tilastot ryhmästä.

Postmodernin tekotaiteen ystävät (1.2.2011-1.7.2011)

Mielenkiintoista huomata miten ilmiön leviäminen Facebookissa tapahtuu vain muutamassa päivässä. Toisen piikin sai arvatenkin aikaan Perussuomalaisten vaalivoitto.

Postmodernin tekotaiteen ystävien maantieteellinen sijainti ja kieli

Huvittana yksityiskohtana Facebookin piraattienglannin käyttäjät olivat paremmin edustettuina kuin esimerkiksi saksan kielen käyttäjät. Piraattienglannin opetus kouluihin?

Postmodernin tekotaiteen ystävien sukupuoli ja ikä

Lienee aika hyvin linjassa presidentin vaaleissa Pekka Haaviston kannattajien demografian kanssa. 5% vaje sukupuolissa selittynee ihmisillä, jotka eivät ole merkinneet sukupuoltaan Facebookiin.

Postmodernin tekotaiteen ystävien aktiivisuus (1.2.2011-1.7.2011)

Timo Soinin trollaus puhutti parhaimmillaan 30 000 ihmistä, 10 000 päivittäin.

Kaikki jäänee odottamaan mielenkiinnolla Timo Soinin trollauksen haastajaa presidentinvaaleissa. Esimerkiksi Sauli Niinistöllä olisi reilulla etumatkallaan varaa pieneen valtakunnan tason pilailuun.

We are always looking to improve our working methods and thus we were inspecting Skype a bit this morning. It seems Skype has done a tremendous job in improving the software but not so tremendous job in promoting the new features. Furthermore one downside is that Skype interface seems to vary between OS X, Windows 7 and Windows Vista.

How to divide colleagues, customers and friends?

Groups. The answer is groups.

The contacts view in the OS X interface that has SC5 group filter on

When you have people split into groups, you can filter contacts based on them. For example if you have a lot of friends in Skype, it’s quite handy to have a group for colleagues.

Adding a contact to a group

I guess no explanation needed. Note that the interface varies greatly between Skype’s different operating system versions. However the same functionality exists.

Casual chat groups without interfering with the urgent instant messaging

So far we have used IRC for casual chatting in our company. You know, posting links, joking around etc. It’s a bit cumbersome to have an entirely different software for that purpose. With a little inspection however we found a way to make Skype chat pretty suitable for this as well.

Favourite conversations and notification settings

First of all you can favorite conversations. This makes them appear neatly on the top of your conversation list always. However this only seemed to be available in OS X interface. You can use “Set topic” to title a conversation, for example above we have named our conversation “SC5″. And last but definitely not the least, you can define notification settings for a conversation. In Windows interfaces this was found on the top bar of Skype under “Conversation” tab.

Notification settings popup

This is the handy part. You can disable a conversation notifications. However on OS X, I had to always check the “Mark unread messages as read immediately” box to prevent Skype for adding that red “(1)” symbol in my dock when someone talks.

To make it clear, this is important for you to be able to still use Skype for instant messaging for urgent issues with notifications. Without this feature, your casual chat would spam you with notifications and thus you couldn’t differentiate between casual messages and urgent messages from coworkers.

This just in: last night my blog started receiving a lot of spam, which is of course sad as I might have to put comments under approval. But the interesting part here is that this spam links back to bing.com(!). Is Microsoft becoming desperate? Or is someone trying to make them look bad?

Here’s a sample:

Author : Emmly (IP: 213.88.120.194 , static-213-88-120-194.chebnet.ru)

E-mail : terese@ncsmc.org.au

URL    : http://www.bing.com/

Whois  : http://whois.arin.net/rest/ip/213.88.120.194

Comment: That’s a mold-breaker. Great tihnkign!

And here’s a screenshot of all the spam from WP admin tool:

Spam linking to bing.com

In any event the challenge of remembering an abundant amount of things could be quite easily solved in a high tech way nowadays. As a matter of fact Wikipedia, Google, translations services etc have pretty much done it already. Where they fail is that it’s spread over multiple services and still mostly convenient only over a PC (or Mac) with an internet connection.

The solution to this would be a mobile app called “General knowledge”. The app would have a user interface similar to Google: a text field for entering a word with automatic suggestions as you type. However when you submit your word, you would get:

• translations of the word (similar to Sanakirja.org, translating from any language to any)
• Wikipedia definition (or a summary of it, expand on click)
• Google results and perhaps Google maps results, Google image results
• Google “did you mean” suggestions
• Google hit counts vs “did you mean” suggestion

And hopefully as much of this also offline. This would fulfill the quite common need for checking “what was this word” or “what IS this word”. Or “is this a word” when playing scrabble…

Optionally this could also be done as an online service to be used with PCs. At least I do the above described word checking quite often while browsing. For example while writing this blog post I double-checked a couple of words from an online dictionary and actually Googled whether  ”common knowledge” or “general knowledge” is more commonly used. If I could do this checking in one convenient service, heck, that would be nice.

I just heard from various reliable sources that almost all of the minor shareholders of Rovio sold their stock last week. They cashed a sum between 50ke and 200ke each. The minor shareholders were people who have got stock options at some point during the long history of Rovio.

I find this as a quite positive sign on the general regarding the Finnish game industry. At least there’s now one case where stock options didn’t end up as toilet paper. Though I have to add that I heard things didn’t go too smooth before the cash out.

There could be a site like “best parts of youtube videos .com” which would provide a top list of best video parts. No more 2min wait for something to happen but instead see only the actual beef. The site would also provide per video features for “watch best parts”, “watch least watched parts”, and “watch most disliked”.

The crowd-sourced video editing would also be ideal for big chunks of raw video material needing to be edited. It’s quite common to have 2 hours of raw video from holidays, skiing trips or such. Most of the time people don’t have time or skills to video edit it and the videos end up collecting dust, never to be watched again.

With the crowd-source editing individuals of the party could browse through the raw material and “like” the interesting parts. The result could act as a basis for manual video editing or even as the final holiday video. “Choose all parts with 5+ likes with 10s offset” and suddenly you have the interesting 5min extracted.

In my case ideas were originally mostly artwork’ish: “hey no one has never thought about making a blue banana”. Lately it has been more towards business ideas and online solutions… yeah it’s a bit sad trend.

But anyway somehow I get satisfaction from good ideas and elaborating them. Also I believe the best creative works need collaboration of multiple persons. Thus I decided to start posting my ideas here in my blog. Most probably you’ll find them mostly utter crap. But I think it’s an important part of creativity process. Blurt out both good and bad ideas and the person hearing them might come up with the actual golden idea.

Sooner or later when I have the next spare 15min I’ll start posting and I hope at least some of the ideas lead to a dialog.

* Excluding spam, I’m not a subscriber of any newsletter and I have disabled all e-mail notifications such as from Facebook.

This brought up again one of my favorite subjects, the personal process of handling e-mails. How do I handle the load without missing e-mails nor burning out? I think people don’t often give this as much thought as they should.

I’ll present here my current process for handling e-mails with the pros and cons I see in applying it.

The Taskbox model

I’ll call my process for handling e-mails the Taskbox model. It refers to the fact that Inbox is regarded as a personal task list filled by other people. It means every e-mail in your Inbox is a pending task. In other words, if your Inbox has 10 e-mails, you have 10 pending tasks.

These are the three steps in the process

The process consists of three steps, previewing, taking action and archiving. Let’s go through these steps one at a time.

Preview

When new e-mails arrive, you preview them. Previewing means glancing at them quickly. When you preview an e-mail your aim is to understand what kind of actions are required from you, how urgent they are and then decide whether you should immediately take action or postpone. Most often e-mails are postponed.

Unread e-mails get a new definition here. The unread tag on an e-mail indicates that it has not been previewed yet.

I think this is quite natural behavior. When you have received a bunch of e-mails, you have an urge to first glance through all of them.

Take action

Taking action means here simply handling an e-mail. You read it through, you reply if required, you take some actions if asked for and so on. After you have taken all actions required by an e-mail, you archive it. Note that you can execute e-mails in parts. When someone asks me to deliver something, I often reply “Ok, I’ll look into it and get back to you on monday”. In such a case, the task is not fully completed yet and the e-mail stays in my Inbox until I deliver everything on monday.

Archive

Archiving in this process means closing a task. Open tasks are in Inbox, closed are not. I use a mailbox folder called “archive” where I move e-mails to archive them. If you want to categorize your e-mails, you could move them to different mailbox folders. The point just is that you get them out of your Inbox. How do you move e-mails? I usually just drag if using my laptop.

Example scenario

A carpet pick up scenario according to the Taskbox model

Let’s say I receive an e-mail from my dry cleaner. When I receive it, I preview it, and it turns out to be a notification that my carpet is ready for pick-up. I don’t rate fetching my carpet urgent or high priority. However I reply them “Thanks for the notification!”. As the e-mail still requires action from me, I leave the e-mail in my Inbox.

After work I decide to pick the carpet up on they way home. As a result, all actions required by the e-mail have been taken and I move the e-mail to my archive folder.

Pros and cons

So why is this Task box model so handy?

• simple and easy to pick-up
• you never miss a single e-mail again
• no time spent in noting down tasks elsewhere
• allows you glancing at e-mails without the fear of forgetting them
• e-mails are easily postponed – by doing nothing

And what are the shortcomings?

• as glancing is allowed and so easy, it easily encourages you to interrupt your work all the time
  • this has been a big problem for me, at the moment my process for avoiding this is taking e-mails offline for certain periods of day
• on bad days Inbox filling up faster than you process can be stressing
• if you are swamping with high priority issues, your processing order is quite arbitrary
• some lowest priority e-mails will can stay in your sight for months
• it does not allow following up sent emails
  • for example if I request something from someone and that someone forgets it (apparently he’s not using this e-mail processing technic), would be handy to have it as a pending sent e-mail

Summary

I feel every office worker who spends time every day on e-mails should give thought to his or her personal e-mail handling process. I presented here the Taskbox model I use where you treat Inbox as a task list. An e-mail in the Inbox equals to a pending task.

As a disclamer, the model has not been invented by me, someone presented it to me a few years back and ever since it has been evolving slightly in my use.

I hope this gives inspiration to some people. I also hope I could have discussions on the matter to help to improve my personal process.

The newsletter has just been released and can be found here: PDF (my article page 28-29), HTML (with less pictures)