Tuesday, February 25

Hermanninrantantie, 17:50
Last night I fell asleep having an imaginary conversation with Auo. We we joking about something, and then I was saying goodnight to her. I went to sleep simultaneously smiling and aware of how much I miss her.
In the early morning I woke up thinking, for the first time in a couple of weeks, about how much (if any) I could hold myself responsible for her death: how much I could, or should, have spotted what was wrong earlier than I did, and the extent (if any) to which that would have made a crucial difference. By the time I woke up I had decided (once more) that I had little to nothing to blame myself for. I was still depressed when I got up though.
I spent the morning beginning block two of the XML Foundations course. We began looking at schema, and I was glad that this was one course that hardly changed from year to year. I was glad to be able to stand there explaining something using last year’s examples, with no nasty surprises. The afternoon disappeared in a two hour online chat with HostMonster’s help desk. Maija and come to tell me that she could not log into the site she was working on. Tests soon showed that I couldn’t either. Transatlantic mayhem followed. By 17:00 the ftp account was working again, the problem having been “escalated” twice during the time that four technicians took turns in typing at me.
Now I am walking to Pixelache. The sun is setting and the gas station looks like a movie set.
I will spend the evening in a Piknik, discussing the changing role of media art in Finland and our strategies to deal with it. Probably without even realising it, Andrew, Antti and Mikko will manage to boost my spirits enormously, during a discussion that pingpongs round the room. In the end I will leave feeling cheered; and feeling as though interesting opportunities may indeed be coming over the horizon.
I will go to sleep as soon as my head hits the pillow.