Friday, December 9

 

 

Yesterday I got a polite letter from the Kone Foundation telling me they had had a record number of applicants this year and could therefore not offer me any funding for Convivial Mechanics. I woke in the night thinking about this. I decided that the events, the websites and the book must now take precedence. I need to get these well underway to gain the credibility to gather funding.

Irma left first this morning because she has a breakfast meeting somewhere in Espoo. I got up when she left, fed Sunshine, got ready, locked him in Naa’s room, turned on the alarm, and left.

I race down the stairs at Itäkeskus because I can hearing a metro arriving. I leap on at the front and find myself in the new all-in-one metro, which means I can walk right down it. I have just missed the main rush hour so I can see right down its full length. I notice how all the lights form a nice receding pattern. I also notice a woman opposite looking at me as I take a photograph. I do not bother to explain I have no interest in her at all: I merely want to capture the destination boards lighting in unison for posterity.

At Arcada I will have a skype call with Jutta and a real life talk with Liisa. We will all agree that we will go to the Arcada party together next week. I will notice that we have made no plans in terms of the Structuring Information course that begins in January, possibly because we don’t need to. I will decide to call a meeting with Andrej and Jutta on Monday to check that we have not overlooked anything.

I will spend most of the rest of the day trying to build a working server at Linode, and this time I will succeed. I will decide to switch from the default choice of Debian 8, and instead use Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. By now I find the instructions very familiar and I will force myself to go through them once more, carefully step-by-step. By 15:30 I will have three working Wordpress installations running on a working server.

I will feel overjoyed. I had not believed that this would work and I had therefore filled my diary for next week with contingency plans. Now I have more time to write the kind of book proposal that Routledge might get excited about.