The Butt Ugly Weblog

Station identification

I'm stealing this meme shamelessly from Charlie. Sometimes it really is good to stop for a station identification.

The Butt Ugly Weblog

Hi ho folks! This is the personal weblog of Janne Jalkanen. By day, I am a Program Manager at Nokia, and I work in the Near Field Communications (NFC) area. I do sometimes write about NFC in this blog, so you should know that my viewpoint is tainted by what I do and know about the matter. Don't expect any confidential or super-ziikrit stuff here, though - I've been around the block enough. Besides, many of my colleagues are also reading this, and would probably - no, hopefully - notify me if I screw up. Please do not send me any ideas about what Nokia should or should not do - this is my personal blog after all.

By night, I am an open source programmer, leading the JSPWiki effort. The project is one of the oldest wiki engines around (about 7 years now), and existed well before the Wikipedia hype curve. It's got about 130,000 lines of code, and a core developer team of around three-to-five people. We've been currently adopted into the Apache Incubation process, and hopefully can graduate during sometime this year. I also have some other things brewing up, and maybe you will hear about them later on. Even this blog runs on JSPWiki (but as you can see, I am no graphic designer).

At home, I live with a wonderful wife, and five mice. Of which you won't see much in this blog, though. I did propose to my wife on my blog, though. Which was interesting - especially since we ended up as front page news in the Finnish IT press for one morning.

As a geek, I write a lot to this blog about computers, and life in the digital void. Or, maybe not so much about computers - I'm not that interested in them as things - but really about how they are changing what we are and can do. I do often rant about copyright and DRM, but I am fairly midstream and try to be realistic. However, you can expect rants on quite a few different subjects on this blog, or if I'm really busy/tired, then just links to interesting articles. I do also use this as an external memory for my brain.

If you see articles written in Finnish, they are typically just commentary on the Finnish blogosphere, or some other deeply Finnish thing, where it's more important to reach a different kind of audience than what normally hangs here. I don't write often enough to warrant a real Finnish -language blog, and, well, frankly, a lot about this blog is also about online presence management and personal brand. I know it sounds really bad, but... there you go. I've said it. I can't claim that this is a very well -managed brand, but at least it's something. Maybe it will get me a great job one day, maybe it won't. At least it got me married, so it can't be that bad. (And by the way, when I was trying online dating, pointing them to this page was a really great way to check if our sense of humour matched. You wouldn't believe how weirded out some people get over it.)

Obviously, nothing I say here should be constituted as the official opinion of Nokia on anything - all opinions expressed here are mine and mine only. Any comments on the entries to this blog belong to their writers, in both good and bad (that is, if you write something stupid, you are responsible for your words). I do not edit nor moderate comments, except to correct obvious wikimarkup typos; or to remove spam. This is an extension of my living room, and over these few years I've been blocking, I'm glad to say I haven't had to throw anyone out yet (I've had to ask people to leave though, once or twice). You, my dear readers, are a smart and friendly bunch. Thank you.

Well, this is me (or a part of me anyway), and you're reading the Butt Ugly Weblog. It's off to 2008!

By the way, I changed by TagLine just today, and I hope to remember to update it more often than once a year. If you can figure out what it means, please let me know. I invented it very early Wednesday morning listening to a pipe or something go "ping" every Random(2,5) seconds.

(Note to self: isn't it kinda loser-ish or worrying to put your "work self" as the first, most definining thing about yourself? Or am I just being overly analytical?)