Normal service will be resumed ...

First, an apology. It has been a month or so since my last post and I can only plead a lack of time. The last few weeks have been among the busiest of my time in Nokia, but hopefully things will ease up now, as we have publicly announced the plans to create a new mobile software platform and it was the planning for that announcement which was dominating my life since the start of the year.

The announcement was made at Mobile World Congress, one of the largest events in the mobile communications calendar, in Barcelona, which gave me a chance to escape the Helsinki snow and sub zero temperatures for a while.

After that, I flew home for a few days to the UK for some time with the family and the chance to pick up a new (well, new to me) car which we had bought a couple of weekends earlier. This is our second Land Rover Discovery; the first, named Disco Dan, has been fantastically useful for dealing with the large volume of garden rubbish which needs transporting from the house, as well as getting us through the unusual snow and ice during this British winter, when the advantages of a 4x4 were very easy to appreciate. The new one is 10 years younger, built in 2003 and has been named Brian (because the last three letters of his registration are ENO). The differences in 10 years are quite noticeable and he is rather more posh than Dan, most importantly for my darling wife, he has a decent heater and heated seats! We collected him from Milford on Sea, which had the added bonus of having a cream tea in the Needles Eye cafe, which had the view across to the Isle of Wight and the Needles rocks which you can see above.

It was also good while I was home to see how the latest addtions to the family are settling in. The new kittens, Darcy and Willoughby, are developing their characters (most notably along the "little b*gger" dimension) and are getting on well with Zippy, seen on the left in this phot curled up with Darcy (they are both Burmese, Zippy is a lilac and Darcy a brown).

The last week has been spent catching up on work, clearing the email backlog and booking flights home for the first half of the year. I'm hoping to have lots of visitors in Helsinki this year, including my godmother and also our friends from Sweden. And next week, I am hoping to meet up for a beer with my godson, who is in Finland for a few months, studying at Tampere university. Now it's time to get some life back in my work/life balance!