Had a one week trip to Saaremaa in the summer. Here is some family album pictures for ya:
The place is great: silent small island with a lot of places to see. Rented a cottage with a sauna in the northern part but in a weeks time we had to skip a lot of potential nice places to go. Here’s a handful of picks:
Whoa. Time passes by with wings and turbines. We’re moving to Kirkkonummi. Or actually moved already. Have been temporarily living at my parents and at my sister & her family. Today we’re planning to finally move to live full-time in our new apartment(!). \o/
I’ve been photoing a lot, done mainly 3d graphics at job. Had one vacation week to renovate the house and handle all kinds of stuff connected to moving. And today I’m supposed to switch for a 3 week vacation. Hopefully I’m not renovating for most of the time. =) Would reeeeaaaaally like to get my workstation built up at the new house and some freetime-art done too as Assembly 2009 is closing in. I’ve been literally living on trash food and energy drinks for a while now as the moving and such get me stressed and busy so the vacation is very welcome.
Another topic I’d like to point out is that to my knowledge doing creative work mainly alone is not effective. Why? – Simply because doing things alone does not give you the opportunity really to mirror your thoughts and develop them. Designing and developing for example a 3d model or environment is a process where you take paths and choose one to go further, then towards the end the path gets more narrow and you need to find another paths or create new ones to continue. This is an iterative process where you eventually have to dismiss the path you started with when you find better ones and iterate back and forth with some of them. When you have a partner to work with, you get double or even more paths you found yourself in the first place. But in return you probably give more paths for the workmate too. That means loosely that there’s four times more design power instead of one. That of course means that you need to have communication going on non-formally about what you’re doing but I’ve experienced that million times. It could be tight working group or even just a lunchtime discussion that opens up the whole scenario again. As long as the team size is small and works well together – the add to workforce by person is exponential. Small team because the communication starts to lack when it grows bigger.
I’m talking this from my professional experience. I’ve been working now alone for one and a half years. It’s really no good. I start to remember why I really, really liked having a very talkative and creative workmates. At the moment I’m really stressed and tight on inspiration and ideas. When I get stuck on a problem, I really have no people to have a lunchtime-chat about it, or one that would say “have you tested X and Y?” and where I could say: “Yeah I’ve done X but Y might work if I add A and B” – “B? oh.. yeah. it could be done with Z”. And so on… It all comes down to a non-formal discussion of different approaches, iterating and the paths. There’s probably people that are good on iterating paths by themselves but I can’t determine if I’m one of them. All I know is that I really need some real artistic feedback on what I’m doing to keep the flow going. I really need the privacy and peace when I develop the thing I’m working for but for the design side I always need feedback to find paths. But when I get a even a single person to work with that syncs well – I’m on fire. I’ve been talking about the topic with several people from very different work environments and professions intensively for dozens of times and found out that most people I know are like that. People need other people to get the real drive.
In plans:
Finally got the holiday photos from my family trip edited. I added them in to my kuvat.fi gallery. Direct link would be:
http://random.kuvat.fi/kuvat/Trips/Tenerife2009/
The trip itself was quite pleasing. It was my first time in Tenerife or any of the islands around. The weather in January wasn’t really that great comparing to some other times of the year but I’m not really that keen of laying on the beaches anyway. There was couple of very nice sunny days in that week and we used them well (excluding the day our daughter had 40C fever).
Key points in the trip would of course be the volcano and the zoo. They were really nice experiences but what I really and probably most like is just to walk around streets and see people, buildings and everything in midst of them. I think seeing something you haven’t really seen before or for a long time is always refreshing itself and it gives me inspiration despite the fact what it really is. And what I really liked in there was the diversity of things inside that island. Especially the diversity of nature in the island when moving from an altitude to an another.
Teide