Thursday, November 15

It was pouring with rain this morning as I left on my own.

I was supposed to spend the day working on part two of my thesis but it never happened. I got plagued by network and computer problems, and spent most of the day offline, and unable to save anything. I restarted numerous times, and then decided to create a Truecrypt vault to demonstrate to a class in Period 3. This tuened out to be another mistake as the idea that the application would create the file in five minutes turned out to be wrong by several hours.

I spent a lot of the day reading, which was not a waste of time, but not what I intended. Just before I left I restarted the laptop again and it insited on spending thirty five minutes processing twelve “important” updates. I then suspected that their background downloading had been a major contributor to my day’s lack of productive activity.

I am now at Itäkeskus outside Stockmann waiting to meet the family. I am looking at the metal pillars which have water dribbling down them continuously as a kind of indoor art.

The photographs we had taken for last year’s Indian visa are apparently two centimeters too narrow for this year’s forms and are therefore unacceptable. We have to spend 70€ on new photographs, and Irma has to take another morning off to deliver them again.

After this Naa will go to Kamppi and the rest of us wil go to Prisma where grumpiness will be approach we adopt. I will spend much of the evening revising linear equations in order to help Naa prepare for her maths test over the weekend.