Thursday, November 10

 

 

This morning I woke up to discover that no snow had fallen since I last shovelled. I stayed in bed till 7:30, got up and had breakfast, and then left the house.

Tommi, one of our neighbours, stopped after I had walked a hundred metres or so, and offered me a lift to the metro station. We chatted all the way to Sörnäinen. He works for a company combatting cybersecurity threats to large companies. We had an interesting conversation.

I spent the morning, working on solutions to some of the problems students gave me yesterday, and then decided to go and get some orange juice.

The snowploughs have been busy in the square outside the Arabia shopping mall. The snow forms a neat mountain, and I pretend that the amount of snow surprises me. It doesn’t, if only because I know how much I have cleared away from our drive this week. I watch a few morning drinkers standing uncomfortably in the snowy cold sipping their ciders and smoking.

The afternoon will have fewer students than yesterday, and this will work well for everyone. I will have more time to spend with each student and they will have more time to work out new questions to throw at me. By the end one student will have moved her project on considerably by getting to grips with the way she can substitute one menu for another entirely different one using media queries. A second student will have solved some tricky logo and image problems and will leave knowing much more than she arrived knowing.

At 16:30 I will arrive at Pixelache for a short board meeting and a longer members’ meeting. Both will do exactly what they should do and take less time than they could do.