Procrastination eating me alive

The fear of not producing as good as anticipated springs up to mind every Sunday night after browsing the truly endless online world for thousands of different products and services. Whether it's an online magazine, an organic t-shirt or financial advice, it seems that everything has already been done.

This is the point where I realize that my brain has been on hibernation mode for the whole day. As ignorant and irresponsible as it sounds I apparently left my thumping, thinking and creating part in bed this morning. Reflecting on my mistake let me take this opportunity to not only pull the little fellow from between the linen and screw it back into its righteous place but also open your eyes to something slightly disturbing.

Procrastination. At the moment I've got a text document waiting for a creative burst to appear from nowhere, I've got mind-soothing music pouring into my ears and I've got 10 browser windows open. Yes, there's Facebook, there's Twitter, also a few newspaper's sites, Gmail, a few other mails and Youtube. Although half of the tabs are articles that are related to my paper, I still find it hard to focus on them. Really hard.

Why? Because lip syncing Keenan Cahill and Winning Charlie Sheen as well as Mashable and TBWA keeps updating their Twitter accounts. Because I haven't seen enough of this video on Youtube. Because I have to find out what my friends have been up to this weekend on Facebook. Because I keep checking my e-mails all the time. Because I'm a victim of heavy procrastination and I seem to have a hard time getting back on track.

I've learned about numerous social media campaigns, ideas on how to implement similar ones for other companies, analyzed on a shallow level real effects on these campaigns as well. But I'm not proceeding with what should be the most important of all.

Then I stumbled upon iProcrastinate and thought, hmm... I can do this without any apps. So can you. Pull your head out of your ass and motivate yourself. I did it through an epiphany; When this is done, there's one less thing to do and plenty of open doors to enter.

EighthInch Scrambler V3 - the making of

How do you build a bike in a 20-something square meter apartment? Easy, I'll show you and tell a bit what I've done, how you can do it yourself and why a unique bike is always more fun than one from the store.

After waiting for the delivery from CyclingCloseOuts for one month I finally got to pick up a Scrambler V3 frame from the customs. Having chosen the Raw finish I found out that the frame has quite a few rust spots that are pushing through the clear coat already fresh from the box. The clean steel still looks rad and that was what I was going for this time; a colorless super bike (except the flag of France).

The frame comes with a sturdy fork, a seatpost, a cheap no-name headset and Eighthinch decals. Tools used - A Biltema bike tool kit and some special tools.

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How to assemble a threadless headset

In case somebody wants to know how to assemble a threadless headset, Zinn Cycles shows how:



Original Link

All of the tools used in this particular video are interchangeable with the products of your fantasies, but I'm telling you; life gets easier with the proper tools.

Tomorrow (hopefully) I'll have a ready bike rolling around Helsinki.

Build a bike - Cut the handlebar

As some of you might know, I'm building myself a new bike. A fixed gear bike. Because this blog exists I'd like to share with you some tips and tricks that I've taught myself over the past 4 builds.

First off, you don't need a fancy 50€ handle bar, unless you're a hipster and like your handlebar in an anodized color. My budget can't handle this, therefore I went shopping to Biltema and got myself a Sport handle bar for 6,99€ (a riser). It's 580mm (58cm) wide and has a diameter of 25,4mm. WIDE AS HELL some of you might say. Not to worry about. I can't maneuver a bike between cars with this wide a handlebar either. So let's cut it!

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the Point of View Semiotic project

Ever heard of semiotics? Brought to us by Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce.

I hereby present 34 pictures to you spanning 2009-2011 and numerous countries. The pictures are signified and the captions are signifiers. What if the caption would say something different or nothing at all? It might be just another picture among millions of other pictures.

All of the photos seems to be quick snapshots of my life of how I observe my surroundings, still they all have a broader context and story behind them. You might ask yourself; "What is happening?", "What has happened?" and "What is going to happen?", but will you? Give it a try. Analyze. Comment. Please.

4th of July party Hollywood Bowl, USA 2010

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flying freedolf t-shirt #2

I had the privilege of designing another birthday present. Printing by Jaakko @ El Perro Bizarro once again! The victim is a blonde who allegedly keeps saying memorable things. So the design consists of her quotes. As far as I've heard, Mari was happy with the result. Makes me happy to hear :) Illustrator doodling:

Feel like having a beer?

 

The Sound of Silence

When Simon & Garfunkel produces the words "Hello darkness, my old friend, I've come to talk with you again", I take a pause in my glorious existence and reflect just a tiny little bit.

Silence is a projection of acceptance and/or disbelief depending on your culture and how you were raised. Silence is also either a handicap or a conscious protest. Spoken words without a meaning and written letters without a thought doesn't necessarily signify silence in their physicality. Still, empty words are as good as synonyms with silence. Then these written letters might as well be silence. But are they? I think not.

The song; The Sound of Silence has undoubtedly a deeper socio-critic message in it, than the result of my reflection, which is as follows: A time-out has to go. I got bored.

Finland witnessed a dramatic election yesterday. Almost 30% of the Finnish population chose to represent themselves, meaning being silent and not voting. All of a sudden we have a nationalist party; the True Finns (PerusSuomalaiset, PS) as one of the three big players going from 5 seats to 39 in our 200 seat parliament. After getting almost a fifth of all the votes PS started their partying and my Facebook feed started to fill up with devastation and plans of emigration. Why? Because PS vows for the following points (among other things):

• No to EU (No to Euro).
• No to immigrants.
• No to aborts (a personal note from the leader Timo Soini).
• No to "mandatory Swedish" in schools.

We'll have to wait and see what the following 4 years brings us. Hopefully nothing extreme. Unless we're all silent and let us, without resistence to fall back to being an introvert country the rest of the world knows us as.

Nonetheless, unless it's unintentional, being a handicap, silence is a sign of growing stupidity and negligence. Therefore I won't be silent anymore. I did vote, I will talk, I will write and I won't call useless time-outs anymore.

I'm calling a time-out!

Just to let you know.
No updates.
No nothing.
For a while.
I'm going to break this time-out eventually anyway.

I was about to change the written language to Finnish in order to express myself better, but because Google Analytics tells me that 39 different nationalities have visited this blog, I'll keep posting stuff in English.

Although.. I don't think you're here because of my writings. You're probably just hoping that I'll post nude pictures of myself. Sorry guys, not going to happen. More photography about to appear when the game continues though.

In the waiting, do something extraordinarily normal to your loved ones. Be nice to them. Cook for them. Keep them close. Make sure they know you care about them. Whatever you do, be yourself.

In-joy my absence, because it's going to be a while.

Until next time!

What's on your mind?

My train of thought has disappeared into an endless sea of extravagant dreams of baby owls.

Therefore I give you 11 Benjamin Franklin's and an art piece.

In-joy!