Monday, September 21

I got the bike out of the shed, where I had put it before we went to Liverpool, and cycled to Puotila. It was definitely autumn.

I spent the morning catching up. I enrolled some students into Lynda. I re-enrolled some students who hadn’t noticed their welcome email until it had expired. I answered some student inquiries. I had a discussion with Jutta. I started the process of getting phpStorm on the computers in the online media studio. I emailed John about the amount of people who have registered for Living Chatter on Friday. Not enough to make it viable so far.

At 13:15 I sat down in a team meeting and at 15:10 I stood up again because it had ended. Afterwards I prepared this week’s Mobile Apps sessions.

Somewhere in all of this I had a brief online text chat with Naa, who has had her first day working outside the house today.

Now I am walking to Kalasatama to get the metro to fetch my bike. The road is blocked one one side and empty on the other. Everyone is leaving town at the end of the day for their homes in the countryside or the suburbs. I am looking at Helsinki rush hour.

When I get home it will be drizzling, but not enough to put me off cycling. I will try to get the modem working but although it is connecting with my iPad and phone it is not connecting to the internet. In the end, once Irma is home, we will decide to go to Elisa to ask what is going on. We will be surprised.

Our modem is over six years old, but that is not the surprise. We will be offered wireless internet for 1€ a month less. It is three times faster, works over 250 metres instead of 15, allows 32 devices to be connected instead of 4, and we can take the modem with us to the summer house or anywhere else in Finland where Elisa’s network reaches.

We say yes, get it, take it home, and it connects in a couple of minutes. I will use the Fing app on my iPad to ping it and it is at least three times faster than the old modem.

Ah, the modern world…