Chris Kelly from the Huffington Post has some interesting stuff regarding John McCain. Martin Wisckol from the Orange County Register managed to interview John McCain with some questions sent in by voters, but there is one that stands out.

WISCKOL: When was the last time you pumped your own gas and how much did it cost? 


McCAIN: Oh, I don’t remember. Now there’s Secret Service protection. But I’ve done it for many, many years. I don’t recall and frankly, I don’t see how it matters. I’ve had hundreds and hundreds of town hall meetings, many as short a time ago as yesterday. I communicate with the people and they communicate with me very effectively.

Touché - no further questions.

Yeah, you probably guessed it - I’m an Obama supporter.

Update (@ 2.46pm): The ride came to a sudden end in Kuortti, just after 1h 45 minutes. As we accelerated from the gas station, my chain decided to let loose and break into 2 parts. Luckily I was all right and all that happened was some cosmetic damage to the rear as well as to the pinion. I managed to talk the insurance people over in moving the bike to Herttoniemi, where the good guys of House of Bikes will repair it in a few weeks time. Tough luck, happy to be ok and looking forwards to the rematch sometime in August. Thanks to everyone for the comments, no matter what the channel - appreciate them!

Above you will be able to see our route in live action. The location is updated every 2 minutes by Nokia Sports tracker and you will need to refresh the page in order to see the change. However, you can also refer to the schedule below to find out where I am riding with my friend. I previously wrote about the route here. It still is the same and it is opened up below in more detail. We’ve done quite a bit of planning so we know exactly when we should be where.

Location / distance to previous point / Time of day
Savonlinna / 0 km / 5.00
Kuortti / 159 km / 7.05
Vantaa / 158,6 km / 9.10
Toijala / 131,6 km / 10.44
Tampere / 31 km / 11.08
Pori / 118,3 km / 12.41
Vaasa / 191,9 km / 15.12
Kalajoki / 186,4 km / 17.39
Oulu / 127,8 km / 19.20
Vaala / 86,4 km / 20.28
Sukeva / 107 km / 21.52
Vuorela / 109,4 km / 23.18
Joensuu / 134,4 km / 0.54 (Sunday)
Tolosenmäki / 50,7 km / 1.34
Savonlinna / 85,4 km / 2.41

In total 1678,2 kilometers in just under 22 hours… or so we hope. The average speed for the duration of the ride is calculated to be about 76 kilometres per hour.

Update from Kuortti: game over. My chains broke, so I’m stuck solving the issue with my insurance company.

View Larger Map

Next weekend, I will be riding 1000 miles (if the weather permits) with a friend to apply for membership into the Iron Butt Association of Finland. I wrote about the event earlier and ever since it’s been tingling me to go for it. 1000 miles is about 1609 kilometres, but the route above is about 1678 kilometres, just to be on the safe side.

I will be posting the route to my blog hopefully in live mode through Nokia Sports Tracker, courtesy of Nokia. I will be testing the N82 in motorcycle conditions for a few months to see how the GPS actually performs when put into field conditions. More on the live streaming later this week. You’ll also be able to follow my whereabouts through my facebook profile.

We were talking today about a certain company at a client meeting with a colleague when he said that ultimately their business is customer service - keep the systems working and customers happy. Some how that got rolling around in my head until I got home and realised, all companies - no matter the business - should see theirselves in the customer service business.

All companies who are doing business look to improve the condition of their customer, whether B2C or B2B, in the end. Right?

In the middle, they might be creating a product or a service that might make the lives of the customer better. However, in the end, if you go further - the company is engaging in customer service. If you think of business this way, you really shouldn’t be selling but constantly looking to help new people.

If you think of running a business from this point of view - you really start to see how you should be operating, whether online or offline. Also, some functions of your company are really undervalued, such as customer service. I’d even go as far to say that if you think of any less than this of your business for your customers - you are underestimating them.

(Photo via Flickr: The Department CC-licensed)

I’ve been battling with a problem (one must put issues in relative perspective with all the tragedies in China and Myanmar atm) in the recent days. As some may know, I’m doing a motorcycle trip through Europe in July. I want to be able to track my whereabouts and shoot some video and then post it online to share the experience of trip to the extent its possible. However, as I’m thinking about the trip I’m not sure if I should be posting the video online immediately as I shoot it, without any editing, or wait until I get back from the trip to post it all online edited and streamlined.

I know it’s like reality TV, if I post the videos online from all over Europe, but is there really any value in immediacy compared to posting the stuff online later?

I talked to a few of my friends today on the possible development directions of my website. The reason behind this is that I usually find myself way too busy to write a blog post that takes more than 15 mins (and if I do find time, I do it at Arctic Startup). When I have about 20 seconds of free time I usually blast a status update with Moodblast to various services such as Twitter, Facebook and Jaiku. On top of that there are services that collect my various behavioral attributes that I’ve taken to share with my friends, such as Goodreads books, last.fm music, etc.

Now why in earth should I have a blog that I update so seldom and leave the other services’ value to the sidebar for the visitor when I could create a website that focuses on me and what I’m up to on the services mentioned above (and a lot more)? What I’m talking about is basically a website that aggregates all my activity from various web services into one place, being my website, and make that data useful in a totally new way. Furthermore, the visitors themselves could determine what service they would want to visit and learn more about.

This service would be something of a lifestream aggregator - a single website that aggregates all the activities into one place and lets the services themselves take care of the stuff they’re best at. I’ve already got some ideas for this so if I find any spare time during the next month and a half I’ll try and make a run for it :)

View Larger Map

Above is the first draft of my coming summer’s motorcycling trip. I’m planning to do a 2 week (approx.) trip through Europe. The total lenght of this trip is about 5200km and it starts and ends in Rostock.

The southernmost tip of the trip is a few hundred kilometres below Barcelona. I’m planning to go down through Switzerland, visit Spain and ride through Andorra up through France to champagne country’s Reims, through Luxembourg to Amsterdam. From Amsterdam I’ll be riding through back to Rostock. I might have to do some cutting out as 2 weeks is a relatively tight schedule for a 5200km trip (almost 400km a day).

I just made an observation how development of online applications and the wide use of fast internet services has made some attributes of an e-mail obsolete.

Gmail doesn’t have it visible anymore, but most desktop applications do - do you know what attribute of an e-mail message I’m talking about?

Size.

On desktop computers, it’s become obsolete - in mobile devices it still matters. For a while. When certain metrics are becoming diminishingly unnecessary, you should consider them as unnecessary to begin with. Measuring them is of no value to the end user and therefore you shouldn’t harass the user with the information.

Mikseri.net, a very succesful Finnish website to promote new artists and unknown talents has sprung many amateurs into the music industry in a way they could have only dreamt of. See it as the open source “Idols“. However, there’s something very wrong with the site and their logic how they function. They don’t promote CC-licensing at all.

Artists should naturally have a chance to license their music through CC-licenses and thus help spread the music. At the moment the only alternative (after a little detective work) for artists to license their music is the regular copyright law. If you try to grow your business and help the artists, let the music play! I mean they’re already doing it with embeddable music players. Where’s the logic in that?

Mikseri.net - you guys should meet Creative Commons and truly blow your business. You’re artificially limiting your business, because you’re stuck to the old ways of doing things. Innovate, live long and prosper!

You can now subscribe to my podcast through iTunes. I got added to the podcast directory today. Click here to get taken to the page immediately (requires iTunes of course).

Here’s a short how to subscribe to my podcast:
1) You can click here and click the subscribe button and the podcast will get automatically added to your podcast subscriptions. Why is this good? You’ll get notified automatically when a new show is online and it will be downloaded to you library.

2) You can subscribe to the feed by going to the Advanced menu and choosing subscribe to podcast from there. Once there, enter this URL to the window: http://feeds.feedburner.com/AnttiVilpponenPodcast