E-lections
October 14, 2009 
Today is the last day of local goverment pre-election. The “real” election day is on Sunday when you have to go to your residential area and vote on paper.
During pre-election days voters can make their choice in different ways. One is the old paper vote, but you don’t have to visit your local election point. I don’t want to talk about that.
The other option is to vote via Internet with your ID-card. This option has been present for couple of other elections as well (for example in June 2009 for the EU elections). Last time we had some 58.000 e-voters. Come on! We are the E-country, E-stonia and only 58.000 of us used the easiest way??? For the local elections this autumn citizens have taken initiative and call upon all people who own ID (we do have passports as well) to vote in Internet. Our goal is to get at least 100.000 voters. E-voting ends tonight 8pm and at the moment the number is 91.000. That is fantastic!
For me e-voting is simple as you need your ID, ID-card reader (funny, it’s so cheap here, about 6 euros, but in UK they all cost much much more) and ID passwords. Luckily I already have the reader as I need it for other operations (e-banking, virtual reports for projects etc). For me, using ID-card in Internet is kind of a new thing though I knew of it beforehand. But, in Estonia there’s already another, much innovative way of doing business. Mobile-id, mobile signatures and such. Last night I heard a story where recently some kind of ministers of EU were singing some contract in Estonia and when couple of European ones proudly used ID-card signing then our representative took out his iPhone and signed it via mobile… Jeez! This e-country thing is cool but how far do we go??
I thought about the fact that everything is now online, in virtual databases. My own paper calendar is stagnant as I use Google Calendar and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do or go when I’m not using my laptop (yes, I’m stagnant in terms of technology… I should have iPhone and do it via mobile). My memory is getting lazier – I used to remember most of my timetable couple of years ago but not anymore. It’s that damned technology and virtuality. There’s so much socializing & information channels but no communication. Real communication! We need to go back, honestly! Damn that innovative e-country which I love 
Hello world!
October 13, 2009 
So one morning I woke up in my flat I share with a dear friend of mine and froze. Actually I was a bit frozen already. It was cold – teeth-shattering, bone-chilling cold. It was 13th of October 2009, 7:30 am.
Last morning it snowed for the first time this month (it wasn’t a proper snowfall, just kind of icy and slushy). I don’t know what was the temperature, as we Estonians do not need thermometers. It’s either summer, bad skiing* weather or cold.
So I got up, pulled some warmer clothes (e.g my fleece, woolly socks, hat, scarf, mittens and a coat) on and ventured outside. It was actually warmer out than in and luckily it was already lighter so I could find my storage of chopped wood (mine doesn’t look as neat as on the picture, so if you want to come and store them properly, feel free to contact me in the comment section). You have to have piles and piles of proper dry wood stored before the cold comes and we were prepared.
I climbed the stairs back up to the sec… no, first floor**, dropped the woods on the floor and kneeled to make fire (we also have discovere matches so no need to try that old stick-trick…). Our flat is heated with two stoves (ahi in Estonian). One’s tinier and you can cook some food on it as well – that’s the kitchen stove. We do not heat it just yet as we have two tiny problems – there are two holes in the wall that is also the wall of our bathroom (it gets a bit dangerous and stinky there with the fire on).
The principal stove is big and between our two rooms so it cleverly heats both rooms at the same time. It’s not real hard to start the fire but it took me more than an hour and it still died out. Frustrated and cold I went and slept on it and saw a weird dream of cold rooms and unwanted visitors. That got me going – I tackled my problem and Lo! after 10 minutes of building a structure of paper-matches-wood it burned. Burn, baby, burn!!
Mind you I didn’t get warm that quickly. While the wood is burning the valve has to be open for the smoke to get out. After everything’s burned (depending on a stove it takes more than an hour) I closed the valve and the door. The rooms should be nicely warm in an hour, too but I think we have to do Operation Heatwave once tonight as well. During winter it’s necessary to heat the stove every day… Lucky we have only two stoves
So that was the start of this blog (I was waiting for the fire to burn and pondered on a fact that in Edinburgh all I had to do was to cranck up the radiator… But then again, nothing to write about that!) Life’s jolly (and sometimes freezing) here, up in North so Hello World, we are here and alive!
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*skiing – another good thing to talk about later on this blog.
**difference between floor systems and couple of funny stories I have… coming up soon!
***I’ll talk about ahi again in the topic of sauna 
