Tallinn, Epilogue

First, I'd like to apologise for my absence, the previous month has been a whirlwind of activity and drama. My father passed away and the experience wrecked me far more than my emotionless facade would care to admit, I didn't feel I had it in me to make a proper commentary on what was happening here.

It's been a long time, much has changed, much has remained the same. Little went entirely to plan, but at the end I consider the experiment a success, were it within my power I would choose to remain here. Unfortunately I must take my leave, at least for now, due to a mistake I made in underestimating the amount of time it wold take to process the 2 year residency permit. A tip for anyone considering the experience for themselves, start it as soon as you arrive, if you organise it up front and decide it isn't for you, at least you will have the option when the time comes. Health insurance alone has taken on the order of a month to get sorted, and is a prerequisite for the application process.

I've had a few e-mails from people requesting useful resources in planning their trip, finding a place to stay, etc. I can say that I find the best airfares using tripeedo.com, if you're looking for accommodation you'll want to start here, but if you're specifically looking for short term accommodation for periods under one year, there is this. For furniture I found the best range / price at Mööblimaja Tallinn, for computer hardware / accessories your best bet is Ordi but generally speaking Tallinn prices for high tech equipment run higher than their UK/US/AU counterparts, so you might want to stock up on whatever you can before you get here. There's no ebay here but the closest similar site is this.

Other advice I can offer; if you're not a plain old Java or C# .net oriented coder, you might want to line up something to keep you going while you're over here. It has been my observation that the local work is heavily focused on outsourced projects which are without much variation firmly in the realm of "enterprisey" (read: old) technologies. I think this wouldn't be much of an issue for most people, but if you're fussy and insist on more modern languages (read: ruby / python / groovy / scala / clojure / erlang / anything of this genotype) you might want to organise something remote, I was unable to do so in the time I was here and mostly lived off work I had already organised from back home, all the time getting a ton of offers while over here from back in Sydney.

I was warned firmly about this little aspect of life here by Estonian natives but I didn't take it to heart as much as I think they hoped I would, and I still don't think I'm comfortable doing so. However, I would feel remiss if I did not pass on this advice especially with my experience directly confirming it; Be very careful with overly friendly, attractive, seductive but somewhat klutzy Russian women.

Although I didn't run at the first sign of this as I was warned, and to some degree I fell for the long con I was subjected to, when I finally caught said subject red handed attempting to steal from me she refused to leave my apartment and would not do so until I had called the police (at which point she collapsed in tears, when I showed no further sympathy stormed out the door in a huff claiming I was "not normal", my friends let me know at this point they could have told her that to begin with and saved her a few days effort, thanks guys). It's a long story, and perhaps I'll go there some day, but for now suffice to say this is a reiteration of the warning you'll get if you bring up the subject with the natives.

And for the record, no, I didn't end up losing anything at all to this particular episode, I wasn't prepared to be a bigot on the recommendations of others, but at the same time I never let my guard down and was very suspicious due to said recommendations and my observations. This quite literally saved my backside, I advise you to be likewise.

Last of all, my place is going back on the market when my current rental period expires on the 10th of May, I know that this is somewhat close to the target period for at least one of my readers so if you're looking for a nice place in the heart of Tallinn, let me know and perhaps you can take this one over. I'm sure it would make the landlord happy, and my experiences with him and his daughter have been nothing but excellent.

I'll return in the future, and next time I know what I'll be looking out for to stay here permanently, as that's definitely what I want to do after this experience.

Many thanks for your time and I wish you best of luck in your adventures, fellow traveler.

Tallinn, End of Week 2.

Day 1: Old Town

Rob returns from Munich and reacts with surprise that I haven't already flocked straight for the tourist center of Tallinn; Old Town. This was due to the fact that I assumed like most tourist destinations, Old Town would hold very little of interest, he manages to convince me however that in this particular instance, I might be wrong.

Old town is a small, liver shaped slice out of the heart of Tallinn proper, completely encapsulated by a thick medieval wall, complete with ramparts and murder holes. Due to the absence of heavy bombing / artillery attacks during World War 2, the original structure of the medieval town is pretty much entirely intact around the outside.

My first glimpse of it through the misty Tallinn evening air, the city street leading up to the ancient gates adorned with ice sculptures of a swan and a dolphin make it look not altogether unlike something out of a Disney movie, The space inside the walls is a peculiar hybrid of modern and ancient, I see the first McDonalds since arriving in Tallinn just inside the gates, followed by a strip club and several boutique outlets that appear to be posterchildren for conspicuous consumption.

As we get a little closer to the center though this fades away to some fairly impressive architecture, a massive old tavern /restaurant complete with lit braziers and gothic font signs, amongst other buildings which look like the designs are something straight out of the fifteenth century. Dead center of the Old Town houses a wide open square adorned with all manner of fusion between the ancient and the new, the town hall complete with hard black iron shackles bolted to it's brick, various small cafes and restaurants, The oldest operational apothecary in Europe, established back in 1488, which now doubles as a museum, and lavish looking hotels.

We're heading toward a small restaurant called Kompressor located not far from where Rob used to live, when something makes him break into a chuckle as he tries to explain it. Apparently for some reason, someone here thought it'd be a good idea to have a bar, the theme of which is that it only plays music by Depeche Mode, in a textbook example of Estonian deadpan it is named simply "DM BAAR".

I don't quite know what to make of this yet but I think this may be emblematic of a wider theme I'm seeing here more frequently, if someone wishes to do something here, they don't tend to overthink it, they just do it. I can picture two Estonians sitting around a table having a conversation that went something like this;

"Would it be awesome if we owned a bar?"

"Bars are for posers"

"Yes but what if it was a bar that was not for posers, what if it was a bar that was *special*"

"That just sounds like more posing"

"What if it was self-consciously poser in a retro fashion?"

"Why Ülo, whatever could you mean?"

"Well, what if we only played Depeche Mode, for example?"

But, I digress.

As we sit in Kompressor and eat our very tasty pancakes, I get my first experience of a native drink called "Kali". Apparently it is made from fermented black bread and 0.5% alcoholic, however aside from the aftertaste, you would be extremely hard pressed to not think it was Coca-Cola.

Rob is telling me about the staff here being infamously rude, his example being that when he came here previously with a large group of friends and attempted to put two tables togther, the staff had given him a scolding in Estonian somewhat akin to what you'd expect from a mother addressing her teenagers.

"Excuse me, is this your apartment? No? Then why are you moving our furniture? It is very expensive you know, maybe next time you should ask for permission before you decide to take it upon yourself to rearrange the furniture."

The idea of it confuses me, all the more when from what I can see the staff seem perfectly ordinary and courteous, but then again, we didn't try to rearrange their furniture.

At the table next to us sitting around and chatting avidly amongst one another but entirely in a world of their own are nine similar looking Estonian blonde women, Rob uses them as an illustrative mechanism to point out how groups tend to be insular in this society; they go out to interact with each other, not their environment. I'm not entirely sure if none of them could speak English or none of them cared, but indeed, they were entirely oblivious to their surroundings and were intently focused only on the conversation amongst themselves.

We finish up at Kompressor and wander the streets of Old Town, I hear tales of the room in the inn where the devil was having a party, thrice boarded up when subsequent owners doubted the truth of the original rumor. Passing the old KGB building on Pikk, a large and I must grudgingly admit, beautiful church.

Exiting old town and coming upon a monument to a recent maritime disaster where M/S Estonia sunk betweeen Helsinki and Tallinn, 852 souls with her. Rob comments that in a population of 1.3 million, it was rare that noone knew at least someone from this group. It's an interesting statistic.

Rob was recently contacted by a complete stranger to me who had stumbled across this article and asked him if he knew who I was. This inspired me to check the analytics here and see just how many people were reading, it's a lot bigger number than I had imagined. I suppose it was only a matter of time before the general population tired of having their economies outsourced by large corporates to their economic advantage and decided that they wanted some of the spoils for themselves. How many of the people that have read this touch other people and will spread the ideas in some way? Time will tell.

When we finally arrive at Rob's place it's pretty late and I have to get home and finish off some work, but Triin has cooked up some wild boar and I get my first taste since I had wondered as an eight year old reading Asterix comics exactly what it would actually taste like. Pork, pretty much, that should come as no surprise but I'm so accustomed to being surprised by everything now something actually being predictable bears special mention at this point.

Day 2: Sushi, Toy dogs and Theological covers for gluttony.

Having made contact with a reader of this blog and being told that today is actually some kind of religious festival, the name of which unsurprisingly escapes me at this point, I cleave to the important part of the information, there are special, tasty buns that you get on this day and your excuse for eating them is that the church said it's ok.

I head out to the nearby streets with an appetite for irony buns and run across a tiny little dog intent on alerting his master to my presence, the current temperature is approaching -10C and I would have thought that such an animal wouldn't be a practical pet in this environment, but apparently I have much to learn about the survivability of extreme cold.

I come across a sushi parlour not a block and a half from my apartment and stop in to try some, it's extremely good, and this has been a pattern at all the sushi places I have tried over here so far, they also deliver sushi to you, which is absolutely unheard of back home. I get a card and resolve that at the earliest practical opportunity I will definitely be making use of this. Apparently there's another sushi parlour in Tallinn that has a specific theme to it, I lack suitable language to describe just what I'm talking about here, so I'll just give the link and be done with it. This is not a fabrication, I assure you, that place really exists.

Of course, they also deliver. Perhaps that's just normal here?

On the way home I stop by the bakery and get my ecumenically approved pastry treat with icing, I don't feel any more holy consuming it, and when I mentioned a religious festival to the establishment owner she looked at me like I might look at a door-to-door evangelical on a saturday morning at my front door, but when she figured out I just wanted a special bun she was quick to provide the goods. It was basically a finger bun in a different form factor, and tasted as such.

Back home to hack on oracle website I've been working on.

Day 3: Foreign exchange meetup

I come out in the morning for my daily stroll and with a little dismay note that I can actually mostly see the ground, it appears the snow has withdrawn a little, at least for the meantime. It makes walking quite a bit easier but at the same time it's something of a trap, as the snow melts it leaves patches of ice here and there which look much like normal snow, but have none of the traction properties one would expect from them. I learn to look out especially for the gaps between somewhat snowy and not snowy at all areas, and although my feet simultaneously lose the ground multiple times mercifully I am able to retain my "never fall over" winning streak.

Later on in the day I head out for a meeting I was invited to by Luiz and Daniel from Aqris, it's a collection of visitors from foreign lands, a significant amount of which appear to be exchange students. Walking to the venue, Vapiano in Solaris Keskus, I catch sight of what I later learn is the Estonian Opera, quite a beautiful building, all doric columns and grand windows and carvings.

Ice is everywhere and I don't well grasp how it is that the snow is actually melting, because to my senses, it appears that the temperature is actually decreasing. I see strange things such as large stainless steel columns with what looks like a spontaneous gush of water that just started pouring from the ceiling and flowed out onto the surrounding tiles before freezing solid. I'd love to know how such formations actually come to pass but can't muster the imagination to formulate a hypothesis through the -15C cold.

At Vapiano, meet a bunch of new people, it seems to be a very common theme that men end up in Estonia because they fall in love with Estonian women. I meet two people who fit this description on this particular night, I meet a guy who teaches foreigners Estonian, a visitor from northern Italy on her way home, a procurement manager for an Estonian bank regales me with tales of the hardware appetites of my fellow software engineers and the kind of criteria she uses to assess if their requests have merit.

Lastly I meet a girl who migrated from Cypress and studies law, she explains to me the basic premises of Estonian law, it seems a lot less complicated than it's common law based counterparts, I'd heard similar things before on this same subject, it seems that the civil law system used in much of Scandinavia is more based on actual legislation disregarding the importance of precedence as opposed to common law where precedence is accorded much more weight. It turns out that the biggest difference this person had noted between Estonia and her home country was a reduced focus on the superficial, so it looks like I'm not alone in this observation.

Day 4: Auto trouble

Rob calls up the next day to ask me to assist in shoveling his car out of the snow, we take a walk over to the first place he lived when he arrived in Tallinn, his wife's mother's apartment and proceed to dig the modern little vw out from beneath two solid feet of snow. I ended up discovering that for me personally the best way to get rid of snow was some combination of punching it into a well packed paste and then peeling it off and discarding it, it feels good to get out and be physically active again after so much time coding, after a few hours the task is done.

We head up to Triin's mother's apartment and settle in for dinner, my first experience with kefir, a strange drink not native to Estonia but widely popular, my current best explanation for it would be a thinner version of sour cream, intended for drinking. Needless to say the taste of raw kefir does not much appeal, but with a couple of teaspoons of sugar it starts to taste less like sour cream and more like vanilla yoghurt, which is much more tolerable. Apparently people here often mix it with kama, which is a grainy / cereal like mixture that when mixed with kefir ends up tasting not unlike what you'd imagine thin sour cream mixed with a large amount of bread crumbs might taste like.

Also on the menu is potato and pork, the potato here is actually yellow, Estonians appear surprised when I tell them the potato back in Australia is white, I have no idea why the difference in colour, but Estonian potato definitely tastes a whole lot better, as does the pork, it makes up for the unaugmented kefir / kama mix and then some.

On the walk back we go via Kaubmaja and I notice a 98,000 kroon 750 ml bottle of Cognac. I wonder how long it has been sitting there, and how long it will be sitting there in future. More to the point, what the point of such an object is at all here? Bored Russian oil magnates on holiday perhaps? Who knows. Hennessey, what is your business plan, please?

Day 5: Aqris super early pancakes

Arrive 6:50 am at the front door of the Aqris office, hitch a ride through the front door with a sympathetic native as the event is not due to begin till 7:15. 25 minutes early starts to matter a fair bit though when you're -15C. Looking around at the office I notice that the equipment they use is much the same as dev houses in Sydney use, it's interesting to come to a place with a radically different economy and budget and see what it has in common with someplace that does not have to be as stringent with their costs, it becomes apparent what is really useful and what is just gloss.

Pancakes are delicious, I talk to Hegle, a freelance usability expert and catch up with Daniel and Luiz, take photos out the back window of the trains coming and going, talk a little technology with Urgo and depart before I interfere with the workday for the rest of the team.

Day 6: Tartu

Andrei contacted me after reading my first post here and invited me to come see Tartu that following weekend, I took him up on the offer and head out for the bus stop, the whole thawing thing that I was worried about turns out to be a complete phantom. Snow has started falling more heavily than ever and the temperature has dropped to -17C. It is at this point that I realise the term "blistering cold" is less poetic license and more descriptive of reality than I had originally assumed.

That said, I still love it. Sometimes it makes me just want to sprint headlong into the howling snow and feel it cut deeper into me, when I get home and sit back and relax, feeling the chill seep out of my body and the blood flow returning to normal is one of the most pleasant things I have ever felt.

Perhaps another thirty years and I'll see things differently, but for now, I could not hope for better.

The bus ride from Tallinn to Tartu takes 2:45, there is free wifi on the bus, the surreal feeling of barreling along a deserted highway, fields blanketed with snow and fir tree forests in the distance, the edges blurred by snowdrift, wind whipping tiny zephyrs of white confetti across the entire scene whilst hacking away in a bus seat on my code is something that will not soon leave my memory.

After meeting up with Andrei he takes me on a full tour of Tartu, the larger part of the city proper is one big university, various faculties scattered all over the place, it's a much less hectic pace than back in Tallinn, a total population of approximately a hundred thousand

There are long tree lined footpaths, sculptures and statues are plentiful, there is even an ice sculpture of a tiger in the main town square directly next to another bronze of a pair of kissing students. The entire aura of the place is not dissimilar to what I have seen of Boston in movies, with the caveat that I have not actually visited anywhere in the states myself. Back home the closest thing that springs to mind is what I imagine a single huge usyd campus might look like.

In the central square of Tartu, Andrei tells me about an event not that long ago where a couple were filmed in flagrante delicto on the arch of a bridge at one end of the square across a river, the photos appeared in tabloid newspapers across the world. The local students were so amused by the event that they affixed a bed to the arch not long after in tribute. No word if anyone ever figured out who the culprits were, but Vana Tallinn made a conspicuous feature in the corners of the infamous photos.

Later on we go on a short tour of the surrounding area, first stop what is locally referred to as the nuclear cucumber plant. Apparently the power station for Tartu has enough waste heat and excess capacity that the locals were unsure what to do with it, not wanting to simply waste it however, they decided they'd establish a set of greenhouses complete with vegetables feeding off the waste heat / electricity from the station. It gets it's name from the eerie green glow it casts into the night sky of Tartu, although it is not in fact a nuclear power plant at all.

We also go to see the houses of the richest people in Tartu, for the amazing sums of 3-4 million kroons (approximately 300 / 400k AUD) these places look much like stately plantation households or English countryside manors. Another eye opening comparison, what counts for a fairly remote neighbourhood in the Sydney suburbs, say Minchinbury, a quick search of domain.com.au shows the upper end of properties starting around the 400k mark and going up from there. Andrei tells me that you can buy a totally decent good quality apartment in Tartu for around 70k AUD.

Stay or Go?

Still wanting to stay.

Disappointments

My disappointment is only kind of a disappointment; it's the kind of weakness that you say to a job interviewer when they ask you what is your weakness, one that interpreted correctly is actually a strength, but you spin it so you seem to have a heaping helping of humility and this particular hurdle is surmounted. EMT didn't call me when they fixed my phone.

They did however, fix my phone.

Positives

I'm beginning to feel quite attached to the mental state of the Estonian psyche. It would not be unfair to say that I came here fundamentally to be a hermit, although it would be simplifying far more than is sensible. But I find myself becoming one of those annoying, people loving humans. I empathise with the things people tell me here, I do not find myself surprised by their petty concerns; they do not seem to have any.

Tallinn, End of Week 1.

Explanation

For a while now for various reasons I have been dissatisfied with Sydney, Australia as a place to live. I'm well aware that a large majority of people already lose me there. Hang on, Sydney? Sunshine? Beaches? Beautiful, friendly people? Laid back inhabitants who would as soon look at you as buy you a beer? What's not to like?

When I tell them instead I'm moving to Tallinn, Estonia I get a few different kinds of responses. More often than not the response is confusion, being a country of barely 1.3 million people, the vast majority of people simply don't actually know that it exists. When a person is familiar with the place however, they're equally confused, but for different reasons; Why would you want to move to a cold, bleak ex-soviet backwater peopled primarily by dour faced reserved ice queens where the typical annual salary does not break a third of that in your home country? The most interesting response to me has been people that are familiar with both Tallinn and myself, quickly it'll be something like;

"Ahh, yes, I think you'll love it there"

With greater or lesser cautioning to figure out that I really know what I'm in for beforehand.

I've lived in Sydney for most of my thirty years of life, I'm intimately familiar with the culture and the personalities that it tends to generate, the political situation, the typical business attitudes that prevail, and every last little drawback it is probably possible to be aware of.

Internationally speaking, Sydney has an excellent reputation. The reasons I've already gone over and also what I believe to be an extensive focus upon a thin veneer of gloss gives Sydney an appearance that particularly shines at first glance. Most people would rather bleed than be rude to your face there, the laid back attitude is not just hype, but I've come to believe over time that it's mostly apathy dressed up as nonchalance.

Sydney has a very superficial / sales focused structure that is very much about appearances, I read a newspaper article a while ago commenting on hordes of gym toned bodies in their expensive clothing and cars sitting on some inefficient road somewhere barely breaking 10km/h on the daily commute to and from an office where they could mostly sit the day and look pretty / engage in watercooler babble in exchange for their paycheques. What you achieve is not so important than how you go about achieving it and how you look whilst achieving it.

It's a harsh sentence, and to be fair like everything else, it's not entirely true, I have loved Sydney much of my life, there are most certainly upsides to being focused as such, and if my impression of the vast gamut of humanity is anything to go by, I do indeed think that most people would be ecstatically happy with such an environment. I however have always been something of a stranger there, and as such have always been searching for a place that fit a hacker's soul.

Enter Tallinn.

If Sydney is a culture of gloss, Tallinn as I see it is a culture of substance, there is a social acceptance and focus that actually accomplishing things is much more important than how one appears whilst accomplishing them, women who by Sydney standards would be considered extremely glamorously attractive and might not ever have to do more professionally than being an executive assistant or some other low impact surface focused job I have seen at meetups entirely focused on the finer points of software development. Not only this, but they were engaged and interested and asking questions just like everyone else, and noone seemed to think that this was out of the ordinary at all.

On that exact same subject, technology is not something to be quickly glossed over and a huge episode made of the sales process after the fact, even from my brief professional interactions here, it is apparent that the product actually matters.

People here are not necessarily cloistered so much as they respect your privacy, I have had to ask a fair few general knowledge questions since arriving and had nothing but polite responses all around, but at the same time I have tried to adjust to some extremely poor situations based around my initial misunderstandings about the way things work here, my utter helplessness being quite obvious to anyone passing me by. However, critically; no one took it upon themselves to intrude upon me, helpfully or otherwise.

Critically for me at least, it is also one of the least religious places in the world. I strongly believe that religion and respect for religion breeds ignorance and mental decrepitude, Estonia is a good petri dish for testing this theory.

The cost of living is much lower and the quality of accommodation is much higher, I am currently living in a modern apartment with all amenities, internet, cable television, dead center of the city for the low sum of $530 AUD per month. The same setup without internet or cable television in Sydney would run easily north of five times that much. The quality of the internet connection is such that it could simply not be had in Sydney for any consumer accessible price, I have completely unlimited net on a DSL2 link for $40 AUD per month, the cable television package came entirely for free.

It's currently -9C, and outside my window I can see snow falling. This may petrify some but for me it's perfect. I cannot stand heat; I do not tan, I go straight from snow white to beet red, and walking even short distances in Sydney temperatures results in very uncomfortable body temperatures and exhaustion. I have been in Tallin now for five days, every single one of these days I have walked at least three km, with absolutely none of the ill effects I am accustomed to from such activity.

Although I've not had to deal with this particular aspect of life yet, it was a prime reason for my relocation, taxes here run a flat 18%, whereas in Sydney they very quickly graduate to the maximum 47.5% Once again an extremely large difference.

So, now that I've explained the reasons for my decision, this will be the first in a series of posts with regards to my experiences living in Tallinn, the series will be at least twelve episodes long, as that's the time I have booked my return tickets to Sydney and must decide if the experiment was a success or a failure, and if I stay or return to Sydney.

Day 1: Arrival

First step, organising the apartment, I had already corresponded extensively with the agent in advance in Sydney with the plan being to instantly settle into my new apartment as soon as I arrived, amusingly the first thing I did when I entered was try to pay my landlord and the real estate agent for the apartment, as after thirty hours in flight I wanted nothing more than to sleep for a year.

The reaction to my insistence at thrusting cash toward them was both amusing and educational, the real estate agent insisted on actually showing all the parts of the property, as if we had not already made the deal in advance, the landlord wanted to sit me down and draw out the exact itemised details of my account and draw attention to the neatly stacked pile of instruction manuals for all the appliances that came with the apartment. It was clear that they had a very set idea of how this should go down and my desire for sleep would not intrude upon that.

After having been subjected to the lengthy introductory process and signing the appropriate forms in duplicate, getting extensive lessons on how to turn the key in the front door and monitor my water and electricity usage, Rob, a friend of mine who had initially proposed Tallinn as a potential destination that addressed all my pain points with Sydney who has lived here for some time insisted that we go to the local shopping complex in order to sort out essentials, as my luggage had been lost in Paris on the flight over from Sydney, so I had little more than the clothes on my back.

Rob and his wife Triin dragged me half asleep to the local supermarket and we setup a prepaid mobile phone account for me, $25 AUD for 2gb prepaid 3g internet. This sounded like a really good deal at the time through my sleep induced haze, and to be fair it actually was. The problems only manifested when it stopped working the next day and I was introduced to the soviet "Rule is rule" mentality posessed of EMT Estonia's employees. But that's for tomorrow.

I grabbed a few more essentials and headed home, collapsing onto my bed after thanking Rob and Triin for their asisstance. I woke early the next morning and wandered the city from 3am to 7am, photographing everything that caught my eye, of which there were many things.

Day 2: Orientation

As I mentioned before my luggage had been lost in Paris on the way over so I was left with trying to sort out the washing machine, I've never been a particularly domestic person, but due to the fact that my landlord had so kindly provided me with exhaustive manuals for every single appliance in the abode, my hopes were high.

Unfortunately it quickly became apparent just how unfounded that optimism was, as I am not able to read either Russian or Estonian, which were the only two languages for most of the appliances in the apartment. Hell, I'm a technical person, I can figure this out, right? An hour later, I gave up and called the landlord, two minutes later his explanation had me going and my washing machine woes were sorted.

I felt just a touch of sympathy at this point for people who maybe couldn't figure out a user interaction I'd designed into some software.

I got a call from the airport sounding happy to tell me that my luggage had left Paris, but his tone immediately shifted into a concerned note when he mentioend that it had somehow managed to be held up in Stockholm and would be delayed another six hours, and I could expect it about 10pm that evening. As I already had clean clothes at this stage I was no longer too concerned, but this is a good cautionary tale for making sure that one's luggage is extremely well marked at all times I suppose.

First time grocery shopping, the first thing I notice is how much less expensive food is here than back in Sydney, I got 1.5kg worth of Salmon for under $20AUD, my entire shopping trip cost less than $100AUD and should cover me for the next week and a half at least. I am duly impressed with how economical their food arrangements are, but a little concerned that it might prove to be unpalatable at such a price.

This turns out to be completely unfounded as I can say without a shred of doubt that the quality of the food here leaves store bought economical food in Sydney for dead, the milk, fruit juice, meat, bread all taste extremely flavourful, I don't know what they put in this stuff but I hope they keep doing it.

My first brush with the unwillingness of the locals to intrude upon ones obviously bad choices ensues post my first shopping trip, here you buy bags yourself and load the groceries you purchase into those bags rather than the Sydney way where the groceries are bagged appropriately by the checkout staff as you check items out individually.

I wasn't sure exactly what to do here, but I made a critical assumption which turned out to be very wrong; Surely if I am doing the wrong thing, the checkout staff member will simply stop me and tell me what I'm doing wrong. That being my safety net I proceeded to just load the groceries into the bag, trying to do obvious stuff like keep the eggs and bread on top. It became quickly apparent that there was no way in hell that all these groceries were to fit in a single bag so I asked for some more.

I had noticed the staff member surreptitiously stealing glances at my activities, but no facial expression changes and certainly no vocalisations were actually made and so I assumed that everything was ok. After she had handed me another bag to fill up, I managed to fit everything into the bags and set off back home. I think I got about a hundred meters before the plastic started to tear, and the remaining three hundred meters home I had to stop every fifty meters to dig my fingers into knotted remnants of plastic that remained of the top part of the bags.

Fortunately the bottoms held and the content did not spill, mission accomplished, lesson learned, do not assume that anyone will tell you you're doing the wrong thing here. Payoff was the aforementioned cheap and excellent dinner, Salmon, mushrooms and egg in white wine.

Day 3: Work

I set up my workstation and proceed to get into my grails coding projects, this day proceeded as well as expected and largely uneventfully with the exception that I now realise just how much I had taken my previous setup for granted, my performance is extremely reduced by not having the ability to work with two monitors at once and I'll need to sort this out as soon as it's possible to afford another monitor, it looks like my options for this are much the same as back in Sydney, 230$ for a 1920x1080 21" monitor.

So, not *everything* is cheaper here. The rest of the month working on a single monitor is going to teach me to make sure I never have to deal with this particular situation again.

Day 4: Agile Estonia conference

Oliver from Aqris who I had contacted via the grails firms directory when I had decided to make my trip out here had invited me to a conference on agile software development methodologies, this was the first indication I had that my suspicions about fitting in here better than back home would come to fruition, the talks focused entirely on implementation details and justification, one of them actually made a heartfelt call to employing the scientific method in the pursuit of software development especially and is one of the best presentations I had seen in some time.

I made a few new contacts amongst the attendees of the conference and left happy. I walked out onto the nearest main road and waited for a cab to come by hoping to flag it down on the way, however this didn't happen and after about a half hour I was beginning to think that perhaps it wouldn't. I stopped a person and asked what the story was and they informed me that if I wanted a cab I'd need to call one, This was unfortunate as because of the aforementioned failure on the EMT service, I was unable to do so.

I walked another two hours following whatever I thought was interesting, snapping happy shots of multifoot long razor sharp icicles hanging from warehouses, snow decked pineleaf windowsills and an extremely pale ghost grey cat with no collar and piercing arctic blue eyes. I came upon a tram track heading in the same direction as I wanted to go and took the first tram out, 2.50$ later I was back 50 meters from home.

Stay or Go?

So far, definitely want to stay.

Disappoinments

EMT mobile for cutting me off a day after purchasing their prepaid plan, twice acknowledging via service calls that the disconnection was a mistake and ensuring me that it would be rectified within the next day, and twice failing to do so.

Positives

Everything else, even the episode with the groceries was a concrete example of just how much freedom I had to do as I pleased without the interference of anyone else, even if perhaps it was in a way that didn't turn out as well as it could have. The quality of the food has been the most obvious unanticipated advantage however, I am living more healthy than I have in as long as I can remember just because healthy food tastes plenty good enough that I have no desire to eat otherwise. I don't shy away from physical activity anymore as well, as I know it will feel good and I will see interesting things, the health benefits overall even in just this small window have been very eye opening and in a way that I hadn't foreseen.

MacMillan; Subsidising the old with the new since 2010

I spent the earliest part of my life in a pastoral village with a single road and a population well below a hundred. Originally it was formed in the early 1880s when the railway was constructed. My father sometimes talks of the days when rail travel across the country was par for the course with what sounds to my ears something like a mix between nostalgia and mourning.

I never really understood why that is, the railroads were simply superceded by more efficient forms of passenger transporation which made the idea of supporting a commuter transport network to such a backwater as Ben Bullen completely irrational. There's still an urban rail network supporting the far more densely populated Sydney basin, however no operating commuter stations like Ben Bullen exist any longer, despite the nostalgia of older generations.

People tend to have difficulty making a full critical analysis of the thing that they value in a given experience, a long trip on a train to an exciting, distant destination may have a propensity to infuse in a person some of the emotion that came with the journey onto the form of transportation itself, despite the fact that under examination, the two are very clearly separate.

Even (especially?) businesspeople have a habit of misunderstanding the nature of the market that they find themselves in, illustrated well by the decline of the commuter rail network industry serving small ports of call like Ben Bullen. People didn't want to catch trains, they wanted to get somewhere. The more immersed a person is in the implementation and details of their craft, the easier it is to get distracted or confused about the utility of what they're providing.

It takes a special kind of self awareness to step back and disassemble the entire intricate edifice, critically analysing as one proceeds. The kinds of companies that can do this today we label disruptors, and the kinds of companies that can't are scared to death of them. Like the railway corporations of the previous generation who thought they were selling train fares when they were really selling transportation, today's big publishers think they're selling sheafs of bound paper containing the printed word when they're really selling media.

"I'm not the bad guy, you're the bad guy, so ner!"

It doesn't make good press to be seen as a Luddite standing in the way of progress, so rather than outright opposing the inevitable advance of technology, those whose best interests have been served by hindering it prefer to work sideways. They cast themselves as the knight errant valiantly stemming the tide of the money grubbing "other" so that they might support the human capital invested so heavily in their little version of the status quo. It is not relevant whether they are conscious of this and it is a cynical tactic or if they truly believe it. From a strategic perspective; the end result is the same.

Shall we iterate the battles, and the epitaphs?

Blacksmiths;
Trade lobbyists for farriers petitioned in support of laws mandating separate roads for horse drawn vehicles and automobiles, attempting to stifle the burgeoning auto industry and squeeze a little more gold out of their dying trade. In the meantime other parts of the trade adapted and started making tires.

Music & Movie Industry;
Lawsuits, price fixing, payola, lobbying, red scare style propaganda pushing on the perils of copyright infringement, needing to be dragged kicking and screaming into the new world by a dispruptor, you get the idea.

News Industry;
A little closer to the mark, instead of proceeding through excessively litigious channels, rattling the sabre constantly about walling off their precious content whilst actually doing very little. It might be a tiny little bit less obvious what they were doing if they just actually said "Make us an offer, please, we're lost.". Disruptor in question completely misses the point and tells them all about robots.txt, hilarity ensues.

Book Industry;
Seeking to subsidise the printing press with the commercial advantage of eBook publication by not acknowledging the enormous economic disparity between the two distribution methods in their pricing. Someone could potentially sue me if I just out and out call it price fixing and/or tying, so I won't do that.

Conclusion

Amazon is not my favourite company, they are somewhat ham-fisted, as both the MacMillan, and the previous episode shows, but at the end of the day, they do tend to figure out the right path or the closest thing that is available to them given a paucity of options from the real culprit in this particular instance.

The one silver lining to the entire affair is that the illustrious alumni discussed above looks to be exactly the kind of place for a company like MacMillan to end up.

I like the idea of that.

The iPad; Crazy like a fox.

A while ago now, I took the opportunity to go to a trade show and witness the way that end users interact with software. In this particular instance, I use the term "end user" quite loosely, as I am fairly sure the target audience in question has quite a bit of technical sophistry over the general end user populace. Nonetheless I found the experience extremely enlightening and I couldn't recommend doing so more heavily to anyone that has any pretensions toward designing and implementing software applications for other people.

I had been on the inside on this particular project and intimately familiar with the design and thinking through of the finished product, I had thoroughly absorbed all the questions that a first time user might ask so deeply that I forgot that they were not as obvious as the colour of the sky. But that is not the way people interact with new software at all, they do not experiment, they do not guess, when confronted with the unfamiliar they simply balk and adopt a puzzled facial expression.

They definitely don't buy it.

In the early days of my experiences with computers I had interacted primarily with them through the command line, when graphical user interfaces became the common interaction paradigm I had thought;

"Surely nothing could be easier than this"

I know a lot better now.

It's no secret that end users do not understand, but what the builders who target these people fail to realise is that they have no desire to understand. We have progressively trained our audience to expect that the market will conform to their inadequacies and cater to their handicaps;

Can't remember the command line switches?

We'll create a bunch of fields for you to enter in all the variables.

Can't remember what to put in the fields?

We'll give you all the possible options in a dropdown.

Don't want to scroll through all those options?

We'll give you an autocompleting text field.

Can't even spell a part of the word right?

We'll make it autocorrecting.

It's too bland and you can't focus?

We'll polish it so hard everything will be drop shadowed and glossed and replete with rollovers.

Can't remember how it works?

We'll tooltip every square pixel.

Can't be bothered to read the tooltips?

We'll research redoing the entire interface just so you don't have to think. Then write books telling other people how to do the same kind of thing, blatantly naming these books with titles like "Don't make me think"

Builders exist at the whim of people who, like Alexander's Bucephalus simply fear their shadow. A vanishingly small percentage of people are aware of this fundamental fact of the nature of our target audience, but the only way to tame this audience is to be aware of their pain points. They don't care about your spec, they care about getting done what the spec is aimed at getting done.

The ultimate user interface is a big, obvious, easy to press button that says "Do what I mean".

Apple thinks different.

Apple focuses on the destination, not the journey. It is not relevant in the design of an apple product such as the iPad how much memory the system has, or what frequency the processor runs at, it is only relevant that it can do what it is designed to do. In the case of the iPad, this means that it will play movies, read books, listen to music, and run applications that Apple has either expressly designed for the device, or had the advantage of explicitly approving beforehand as fit for purpose.

They don't "Fight Fair".

The evolution of musket warfare follows an illustrative trail; originally devised as an upgrade for massed pike wielding infantry formations, the tactics adopted for musket warfare were designed to maximise the benefits and minimise the drawbacks of the new technology. Massed formations slowly advancing toward one another toward the end of the era firing volley shots rather than targeting the enemy directly with the intent to break the line. A rate of approximately three shots per minute was the height of the technological mastery of the smoothbore musket.

Problem was, while some armies were building their skills in this narrow field, others were working on alternatives like rifling, breech loading, etc. Not very sportsmanlike when your side is only able to fire three volleys in exchange for your enemies twelve due to the enormously increased range of rifled over smoothbore muskets, but sportsmanlike doesn't win wars.

You think learning to use a mouse is no big deal? That guy in the suit who picks it up and tries to talk to it, that's your target audience. One would do well to remember that in this game. I may listen to the iPad's press video and roll my eyes at the "You can just reach out and *touch* it" marketing speak, but if my experience is anything to go by, that will speak to the target audience and they'll like what they hear. They won't mount an elegant defense about why it's a step forward in the evolution of human computer interfaces and anyone who says different is wrong; they'll just hand their money over, and from there, it's just a matter of time till the market figures it out.

They might win.

The iPhone has proven to be a tremendous success, there is a propensity amongst the technological priesthood to believe that this is in spite of it's flaws, but I have come to believe that it is largely because of them.

Is there a virus for the iPhone? Indeed, there is a virus for the iPhone, but it only affects jailbroken devices, the closest thing to an absolute dealbreaker in the device for the technological priesthood is the very thing that stops it afflicting the target audience with that which they fear the most in all other areas of computing.

Are there problems with disparate hardware or operating system versions / libraries within the iPhone ecosystem? Once again, the answer is no; precisely because of what is perceived to be it's achilles heel amongst it's competitors.

How about that piracy epidemic? Are App Store vendors feeling the heat? You get the idea.

Conclusion

Yes Comic Book Guy; I know you don't want an iPad and you think it's lame. Frankly, I don't want one either and I hope in spite of all of the above, it's a miserable failure. But I believe that the only way that this will happen is if the target audience has a genuinely better option from their perspective, not ours. If there is a choice between having to think about technology or having everything handed to them on a platter, I can think of no feature list comparison that is going to overcome the basic propensity for the target audience to discard the alternatives that require it to think.

Apple is offering decision free computing, and it's the only game in town for this purpose.