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.

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.

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.

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)

What a surprise I had waiting. Paulo Coelho is currently active in 17 social media websites, how about that for a 60-year old?

You can’t really say that social media has helped him sell millions of books, then again it probably doesn’t hurt all that much either.

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?

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 :)

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).

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.

Anyone else come across anything similar or is it just me?