As my office is where my laptop is, none of this work is particularly tied to a physical location. And as much of the work is communicating, I end up spending quite a lot of time traveling between meetings and conferences.

For this my previous home town of Helsinki, Finland wasn't quite ideal. From an European perspective, Finland is an island. And so I've accumulated airmiles instead of being able to travel more comfortably (and productively) on the European railway network.

I've previously dabbled with living in other locations like Istanbul and Saint Petersburg, but this time I hope the move will be more permanent: in the beginning of this month we packed our stuff, got rid of the Helsinki flat and hopped on a plane to Berlin.

The modern world makes this easy: my whole library fits on a Kindle and music collection on Spotify, version control and testing happens in the cloud, and banking and invoices are on the web. And thanks to EU there is minimal red tape in setting yourself up anywhere in Europe.

My current setup is such: I'm traveling with about two weeks' worth of clothes, my trusty work laptop, and tablet with an amazing 18 hour battery life. Accommodation happens in furnished, short-term rental apartments, and Internet comes from an old N900 serving as a WiFi access point via prepaid 3G.

While Berlin has excellent co-working spaces, I'm currently sharing office with Content Control, the local Midgard shop. Though at the time of writing my office is temporarily relocated to the nearby Hasenheide park where there is a nice sunny spring day.

I'm still planning on popping into Helsinki every now and then. With Air Berlin, the travel cost and distance is almost the same as if I lived in the Finnish city of Tampere (yeah, VR is expensive). Once the snows there melt, I'll also ride my motorcycle over.

If things work out, I may be eventually able to say: ich bin ein Berliner. This city is quite amazing - the amount of cultural activities and hacker meetups probably beats any other place in Europe right now. If you're around, ping me!

And if Berlin doesn't work, then there are lots of other interesting places for a working nomad...

• Google already knows everything I do, so sharing stuff there feels less risky
• The UI is pretty and a lot less bloated than Facebook's
• Messages and comments can be edited, saving from unnecessary typos and having to post quick clarifications separately
• Circles are a great way to organize your contacts, and I like the fact that they avoid the loaded friend term
• You can export all your data, so you have a way out if you need one
• Group videochats are also a promising concept

• Facebook already has a crazy critical mass. We'll see whether the non-geeks convert to Plus or not
• There is no integration to third-party services like Flickr, and there is no API
• Content is not language tagged and filtered, like on Qaiku. Google could probably do even better here, doing automatic language recognition and translation

The best laid plans

The initial plans were made at a Starbucks on New York's JFK airport while waiting for a flight to Atlanta, but their realisation had to wait until I finished my military service on the latter half of 2000. When I got rid of the bazookas and uniforms, we registered the company, wrote some business plans and started looking for seed money to get our business started. We were quite young then, and it was interesting to run around Helsinki talking to investors.

How did these plans look like? Our initial idea was to get into the fashionable SaaS (or ASP, as it was known then) business by building collaboration tools on top of Midgard. The first product was a document store intended for the construction industry. With this system all plans and other documents related to a building project could be easily stored and accessed. This is how we described ourselves:

Nemein Solutions is the leading provider of Open Source Midgard software for mobile collaboration and information management.

But as plans go, this had to soon change due to the IT bubble being burst. To quote von Moltke:

No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy's main strength

In spring 2001 IT bubble burst, and we suddenly found ourselves sitting in the office with all our projects being abruptly frozen. Around the same time our seed investor got embroiled in some large-scale customs lawsuit, and so not much help was to be expected from them. This meant we couldn't continue with our original plans, and instead had to start generating cash flow, quickly. Luckily Midgard was (and is!) a quite capable web framework, and so we had the option of going into the CMS business.

Nadmin Studio

Midgard's user interfaces back then were not very appealing, and so our first task was to go shopping for the CMS UI. There were two good options available: Nadmin Studio from Hong Kong Linux Center, a web based CMS and small business networking tool running on top of Midgard, and a Windows-based Midgard editing tool from DataFlow. As we were much more of a Linux shop, we went with Nadmin. It was quite a cool system, a customized Red Hat Linux install that set up not only Midgard and the web user interface, but also things like LDAP and IMAP servers talking directly with the Midgard database. And it had a quite nice WYSIWYG editor for people writing content on the web pages. We quickly became their reseller for Finland. Yes, back then you could get Midgard in a box (and even CD):

Having settled the tool question the next issue was finding clients. We took a list of hundred largest companies in Finland and basically called each of them, proposing a demo. We also approached several "new media companies" in order to see if they wanted a technical partner. Around these times our CEO Petri Kuusela also figured that we'd be a lot more convincing consultants in sweaters instead of Hugo Boss suits, and so the look of the company changed.

Through these efforts we were able to get some of our first and longest-term customers, including this one:

HELSINKI, Jun 12th 2001 -- Nemein Solutions helps Everscreen Mediateam, a Finnish multimedia company implement the Nemein.net Content Manager product to power Motiva's web services. Everscreen's and Nemein's cooperation provides Motiva with up-to-date and easy to use web sites.

Around this time we moved from the small four-desk office in central Helsinki to a much bigger place in Haukilahti, Espoo. My time was mostly spent motorcycling from one demo to another, as our two sales guys kept me so busy that on most days I didn't have time for a lunch break, and much less for actually writing code. The cash flow generated there helped to keep things running, but as usual, possibilities for product development suffered. This is called the Consulting Trap:

...Once the consultancy money rolls in, it is hard to give up. Like an addiction.

I spent years thinking just six more months, then I'm going to quit and work on my µISV project.

Nemein.Net

Consulting isn't such a bad business to be in. As long as the things you do produce value for customers it can be lucrative and interesting. But still the idea of having actual products was kept alive, and a bit later we built Nemein.Net, a project management tool for consulting companies. We changed the business model a bit, instead of providing hosted services we leased some industrial-grade servers to our clients with the software pre-installed. A cluster of engineering companies bought that, and as far as I know some of them still run it. Datex-Ohmeda was another customer, but they were later bought by General Electic.

"For our project work it is very important to reduce management overhead and enable real-time tracking of project status. The Nemein.Net Projects suite provides a good match for these criteria," says Bror-Eric Granfelt, R&D Manager at Datex-Ohmeda.

Free Software company

In 2004 we open sourced the Nemein.Net suite, now renamed to OpenPSA. This was done as part of the 5th anniversary celebrations of the Midgard project. By this time Nadmin Studio had also been GPLd and renamed to Aegir CMS. So suddenly we were a pure Free Software company. We quickly started adopting MidCOM, the emerging MVC framework for Midgard and PHP. MidCOM was produced initially by the German ISP Linksystem Muenchen, but very soon Nemein was the primary contributor.

The company structure changed, and we decided that instead of having a traditional office with desktop computers, it'd be better to be more location independent and work where our customers were. So we got a small office from the Innopoli business park mostly to facilitate Rambo, and the rest of our people were moving around. Once a week we had a coordination lunch meeting in Restaurant Mount Everest to keep the group spirit going. Some of that tradition has stayed.

Around this time we also started the switch on our workstations from HP's Linux laptops to MacBooks. This wasn't really a conscious strategy, but instead mandated by my laptop breaking a day or two before a training trip to South Africa. Back then Linux on laptops was still a quite cumbersome setup, and I needed a Unix machine where our software would run, quick. Later on I've returned to running Linux on my own machines, but most of the company still works on OS X.

The Finnish Centre for Open Source Solutions (COSS) was formed in 2003, and we soon joined up. A forming network of free software companies in Finland was good for both publicity and getting new projects. OpenPSA gained a boost there:

Collaboration with Nemein went well. Right from the beginning they were able to state their views clearly and backed by facts. We immediately understood how OpenPSA works, what customizations would be needed, and how much they would cost. Unfortunately we cannot say the same of all other solution providers, says doctor Ville Ojanen.

Dreams of networked business

Another interesting opportunity that came from the COSS network was the EU-funded Digital Business Ecosystems project. The project fit quite well in my view of the need for enabling cooperation between small companies in Europe, this time through having business systems talk to each other over a peer-to-peer network.

To realise this dream we connected our OpenPSA system into the ecosystem, enabling companies to fluidly share tasks, workflows and hour reports over the network. Unfortunately not much came out of that. A bit later the maintenance of the OpenPSA project was switched over to Content Control from Germany.

A later iteration of similar ideas was Ajatus, an experimental project to build a "personal CRM".

"Companies that don't realize their markets are now networked person-to-person, getting smarter as a result and deeply joined in conversation are missing their best opportunity." - The Cluetrain Manifesto, these 18.

Remember a time when you needed to share a document with a business partner, colleague or a customer? The CRM should make this easy without requiring complex IT integration setups or the disconnectivity of emailing files.

Getting into position

Several Nemein people have been active motorcycle travelers. As all our projects were more or less visible on the web, this brough the question of location sharing into the picture. For the Death Monkey project in 2006 we built a set of location-aware features that enabled us to visualize the location of each participant on a map, and easily calculate distances to Gibraltar.

At that time using maps on the web was also growing, and so we stepped into the emerging business of neogeography. Over the years we've evangelized the usage of location information on Linux desktops, built weather-aware clothes catalogues, facilitated publishing open data of campus maps and made it easier to catch a tram. This is still one of the areas online that I find most interesting.

Growth and mobility

Over the years Nemein's business has been growing at a steady pace. Now we have a nice small office in the Hietalahti area of Helsinki, and serve quite a bunch of interesting, large Finnish customers in the CMS space. A major milestone for the company was achieving AAA credit rating back in 2007:

Ignited by Apple's iPhone launch, the mobile ecosystem has been a very interesting area to operate in. To be part of it, we built the community infrastructure for Maemo, Nokia's emerging mobile Linux platform, and also got involved in the MeeGo project. But now in the age of burning platforms the future of that business is in question.

The Midgard way

The Midgard content repository and web framework have been a constant core part of our business for the whole history of the company. Everything we've built has been running on top of it. Has this been a wise choice? In the course of ten years, the web landscape has changed quite a bit. While Midgard itself has stayed current through constant development and refinement, hundreds and hundreds of competing systems have risen up, some of them becoming very popular compared to us. And yet we have stayed the course.

Midgard, especially in the latest iterations, is an excellent tool for running information-rich systems. It has a very nice user interface and an elegant web development framework. These are tools that I feel have lots of possibilities still ahead of them. Some of the design decisions done in the early days of the project, like integrated support for multi-site hosting, and for multilingual content, are things that now power some of our most important customer deployments

But at the same time I've learned that especially for smaller open source projects like us, the monolithic "all or nothing" approach is not very healthy. Frameworks keep us apart, while libraries allow us to share our code and experiences. This is resulting to collaboration with other projects on many levels, from a shared PHP ecosystem managed through the Apache Software Foundation, to common tools for decoupling the Content Management experience. Linked Data also plays a large role here.

To wrap it up

Ten years as an entrepreneur is a long path. Financially it may not have been as rewarding as we initially thought it would be, but experience-wise it has been astonishing. I've been part of building many challenging business-critical systems, learnt a lot of things, and given talks in dozens of conferences all around the world. It is hard to see as varied and interesting possibilities in regular employment.

Thanks to the whole current Nemein team, and the people who've been here before for all the awesome work done over these years. You rock!

Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it.

So, where do I keep my stuff?

• Code: GitHub or various version control systems used by upstream projects
• Presentations: Ubuntu One for raw files, and SlideShare for the published ones
• Other documents: company's BaseCamp intranet
• Photos: Flickr for the good ones
• Music: who needs files for this when there is Spotify?
• Contacts, Emails and Calendaring: company's Google Apps account
• Browser settings: Firefox Sync
• Notes: Ubuntu One Tomboy sync

Now, with everything in the cloud, the decision whether to hand over my personal information is almost entirely out of my hands. And unless, as happened with Twitter, the company storing my data decides to fight for openness on my behalf, there’s every possibility that I won’t even hear about the request until it’s too late. That’s just not how things should work in a free society.

Of course, it remains statistically unlikely that I’m going to be the subject of a subpoena any time soon. I’m hardly an enemy of the state. But then again, until recently, neither were many of the supporters of Wikileaks. Who’s to say that an innocuous organisation I give support to today won’t suddenly become highly controversial tomorrow?

This is me on MeeGo:

Thanks, Texrat!

My original KLM flight on April 17th was cancelled, and as the best offer from the airline was to get me home on 27th I made some quick decisions while still on the San Francisco airport. As it was certain that there would be some days of delay, New York felt like the best place to wait for the dust to settle.

After a failed attempt to get across the Atlantic on an Indian airline, my current plan is to fly tonight to Moscow with Aeroflot, and then hopefully to continue to Helsinki from there, either by plane or train.

In the meanwhile, thanks to Gregor and Google for graciously providing me with office space while I'm stuck here!

As an afterthought: if such disruptions in flying would continue, that would be a huge boost for high-speed rail, fast ocean liners and telepresence. And that might not be such a bad thing for the future of mankind.

The new version looks quite nice and fresh. Notice the privacy information on the right-hand side, which is relevant as Qaiku allows channels and profiles that are private or invitation-only:

Technically the new version is also remarkable as it is the first major website to run fully on top of the legacy-free Midgard2 platform. So yes, every entry you see there is a GObject. And D-Bus signals fly when you post.

On to the challenge, then

To highlight Qaiku's threading, conversational nature I started a new "On my travels, I have" thread for sharing your most extraordinary travel experiences. This is not on Twitter or Buzz as with Qaiku it is so easy to keep the conversation together and accessible for the future as well.

To contribute, sign up on Qaiku, go to the thread and add your experiences as a comment. If you have a link or picture to include, you can also do so. My first entry was:

seen ice descend from the heavens and provide us with cold beer on a hot day in Lesotho

Will be interesting to see what comes out of this :-)

Mystery books have been received by many prominent Qaiku members before. They are beautifully handcrafted notebooks personalized for the recipient, often containing hints about Qaiku involvement, like having the inner covers made in printed version of that user's profile background. There is no information about the sender or the reason for making them. All are sent from random Turku post offices.

My copy of the mystery book is a mobile notebook, a bit in Moleskine-like style. The inner covers have a map of Europe from 1810, fitting my interest in history and geography spot-on. The book came with a pen, and had been sent from Turku 10 at 12:02 yesterday.

Several Qaiku members have posted pictures of their books on Flickr with tag "mysteerikirja", and there is a Qaiku channel about it. It remains to be seen whether the books are some viral marketing campaign, or have been made by some individual with Amélie-like tendencies. Anyway, quite a delightful surprise!

"Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy," he wrote. "Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text." For my own part, I now find it challenging to sit still on my sofa through the length of a feature film. The urge to, for example, jump up and check the IMDB filmography of a supporting actor is well-nigh irresistible, and once I'm at the computer, why not check e-mail? Most of the time, I'll wind up pausing the DVD player before the end of the movie and telling myself I'll watch the rest tomorrow.

Exactly the same symptoms I'm having. This is the reason I've written some of my best code while offline at the countryside or on a road trip, and why it was so relaxing to be without a phone for a week recently.

How to solve the issue of constant distractions? Maybe we'll need to be sometimes offline. And even while connected, we need attention profiling and better user interfaces. Something for the developers of the future free desktop to consider.

Confession: I must've switched browser tabs a dozen time while reading the Salon article. Concentration indeed...

Technorati Tags: attention

...indeed I do. Next Monday is the Universal Towel Day. Therefore:

How about Babylon 5?

Technorati Tags: montypython, wolframalpha

While the hs.fi site is in Finnish, the interview video is in English.

Technorati Tags: video, usb

The wave of attention, as shown by Google Analytics fits Morgan Stanley's media coverage graph reasonably well:

First the story was picked up by Digg, then gadget sites Gizmodo and Engadget. Second attention peak came from Slashdot and Boing Boing, and after that there was the long tail of mainstream media followed by smaller local newspapers and websites:

A week after the post Jerry was visiting our office to do integration testing for a project and the media circus was running at its hottest. His phone, and even mine were ringing quite often, with interview requests ranging from Indian radio stations to Channel 4 News and Reuters. Will be interesting to see how much longer the attention stays on when the story hits the TV networks next week.

Never underestimate what a single blog post can initiate!

The first step is to register to ping.fm, a service that can post your microblogs to a large number of different social web services:

After registering, add the credentials to whatever sites you want ping.fm to post to:

Then go back to Qaiku and get the Atom feed address of your posts:

...and sign up with your OpenID account to Twitterfeed, and add your feed address and ping.fm credentials:

After this, your Qaikus should start appearing in the other microblogs. This way, my friends on Twitter, Identi.ca and Facebook can easily follow what I'm up to!

Technorati Tags: jaiku, twitterfeed, qaiku, twitter

Jerry's real prosthetic USB finger storage:

The story behind this is that Jerry had a motorcycle accident last May and lost a finger. When the doctor working on the artificial finger heard he is a hacker, the immediate suggestion was to embed a USB "finger drive" to the design. Now he carries a Billix Linux distribution and the Freddy Got Fingered movie as part of his hand.

Yanko Design's concept via Gizmodo.

Technorati Tags: cyborg, usb

But to be honest, Twitter and its clones like Identi.ca do not do that so well. Ease of posting, and good external tools might be there, but what lacks is the possibility to have real conversations. That is where Jaiku has been shining: the original posts follow the traditional microblogging concept of conversation starters being limited to the SMS-like 140 characters. But responses to those are not limited similarly, allowing thoughtful commentary to be written.

That is something that simply doesn't happen on Twitter: thoughtful discussion. The poor threading model, and lack of differentiation between conversation starters and comments simply means everybody ends up shouting on top of each other.

Brightkite, a location-aware microblogging service almost gets there. It differentiates conversation starters and comments from each other, and adds quite cool location-aware features on top of that. Suddenly I can follow conversations happening in the same neighborhood, or in the same city! But the problem is that they have made posting a little bit too cumbersome, and they make following and finding conversations quite difficult.

Instead of these services, Jaiku has been the place where the interesting stuff has been happening. But lately there has been too little development, and too much the failbird happening for it to remain a viable platform. And so the Finnish web community has been actively looking for an alternative. I think Qaiku, released today, could be it.

So, what is cool about Qaiku?

• Multilingual support: I can microblog in Finnish and English, and my international friends don't need to be bothered with a language they don't understand
• Private channels: our company can have a private channel where to handle actual workstreaming without leaking confidential information
• Favoriting and sharing: You can easily save interesting conversations to be accessed later, or share them in other services like del.icio.us or Facebook
• An evolving platform: Jaiku stagnated after Google bought them. With Qaiku there is a dynamic company, a cool platform and many interesting ideas that will hopefully make the service evolve into interesting directions

Sidenote: if microblogs are all about conversations, why doesn't my blog provide a commenting feature? To quote Alex Payne:

The main reason I don’t allow comments is that I want to inspire debate. I think people do their best writing when they’re forced to defend their ideas on their own turf. It’s one thing to leave a comment on someone else’s blog, but quite another to put your argument in front of your own readers. It forces a level of consideration that, without fail, results in a higher quality exchange of ideas.

With the same idea, instead of the comments happening on my site, I hope you will either react via your own blog, or by communicating using a microblogging service. If you link to me, I'll do my best to read it and respond :-)

So, if you want to discuss this post, you'll find me on Qaiku, Jaiku, Twitter and Brightkite. This post on Qaiku preferred, but I will watch couple of days for replies on the other services too.

Technorati Tags: brightkite, jaiku, microblogging, qaiku, twitter

With these early Fords, the customer choice was limited to having your car "in any color as long as it is black". And judging how since then cars have diversified to come in so many different forms, specialities and colors, this thinking must be flawed, no?

As Tim O'Reilly pointed out, JP Rangaswami's blog talks about enhancing the consumer experience in markets that are already out there and are mature. In less established fields, the lone inventor must still press on:

In a talk I attended many years ago, Joseph Campbell said that the Knights of the Round Table were the archetypal myth of Western civilization, the idea that each of us, alone, must go off into the deepest, darkest part of the forest, populated by monsters, on a quest to make the world a better place.

An interesting comparison with Ford at another, still quite immature and emerging field is Apple. Apple provides a full range of computers from servers to mobile phones and in most cases seeks to control the experience through the whole way. The devices are beautifully designed and work well as long as you use them as intended, and not for anything else.

This is a big contrast to the rest of the computing world, where everything comes with a bewildering number of choices. And these choices rarely work so well with each other. And so Apple is able to utilize their singular vision and attention to detail to make very good business.

In the free software world, the same distinction has traditionally been between the GNOME and KDE projects. GNOME has focused on a controlled environment with strong usability and accessibility, while KDE has been about the freedom to tinker and configure.

At some point users will want to manifest their personality or a tribal identity through how they set up their computers. But at the moment I believe we still need more the working systems that we can use, don't have to spend too much time configuring, and that let us focus on whatever we want to accomplish.

This is what originally drove me from my HP Linux laptop to an iBook four years ago. When I ran Linux I found myself constantly tweaking settings and installing new interesting applications that were supposed to improve my life. With Mac, once some basic necessities had been set up, I have very rarely touched any settings.

Now the iPhone experience has got me to feel the downsides of Apple's total control, and I'm again looking over the fence to see if free software is greener on the other side. While with Linux I would have full control of my environment, the whole synchronized release business keep things fresh enough. Given that a new GNOME desktop and a new Ubuntu would be out in just a few months, I should be able to fight the urge to start upgrading bits and pieces on my own, ruining productivity and potentially breaking my work environment.

If SubEthaEdit wasn't locking me to OS X, I would definitely be trying this out.

As an afterthought

All this talk of Ford got me to think a little about the car problem. Cars make cities unlivable and pollute the world, but at the same time they let people accomplish and experience things that they couldn't without personal transport.

Now the conventional thinking seems to be that what the world needs is more energy efficient, cleaner cars. But to my point of view, that is quite close to what Ford said:

If I'd asked people what they wanted, they'd have said "faster horses"

So how about solving the problem in some other way? Segways tried and failed to make mobility more even more personal and less space-requiring - but not very appealing in chilly Helsinki weather. But how about making the world require less mobility in the first place? Maybe World of Warcraft, Skype and Second Life - the field of telepresence - are better answers to the car problem than Prius or Tesla.

Technorati Tags: apple, gnome, innovation, iphone, ubuntu, segway, subethaedit, tesla

1. Started my first "real job" as a site building in an ad agency
2. Moved out of the commune
3. We were running already the first production Midgard site
4. Was in process of handing Harmaasudet over. By spring 1999 I would be out

Five years ago, 2003

1. Did my first motorcycle trip to Russia
2. Co-organized a very nice conference in the Harvard university
3. The relationship started in 1998 ended
4. Had been running my own business for two years, and it was finally cash-positive

Three years ago, 2005

1. Learned to fly
2. Spent the summer holiday on a Viking ship in Russia
3. Visited Rome, Brazil and the cave city of Vardzia for the first time
4. Had a cat

Year ago, 2007

1. Released my first mobile application
2. Changed homes and motorcycles
3. Got robbed twice, for a total of about 15,000 EUR
4. The company got an AAA credit rating

This year so far

1. Got black belt in Haedong Kumdo, a Korean sword art
2. Moved partially to Istanbul, and then didn't
3. Saw Midgard2 finally become a reality
4. Did not motorcycle or fly almost at all, but traveled quite a lot

Yesterday

1. Recovered from the Midgard Gathering
2. Returned the rented white tie suit
3. Did some customer support duty

Today

1. Upgraded some Midgard servers to Ragnaroek, with varying degrees of success
2. Got my local development environment back up-and-running
3. Missed two after-work meetings

Tomorrow

1. Will go to Haedong Kumdo after a long break
2. Wear my black christmas hat for the first time this season
3. Do some calendar digging for missing hour reports

Next year, 2009

1. Get out of debt caused by the disasters of 2007
2. Get back into the motorcycle adventurer mode
3. Learn to sail on modern boats

Via Tiuku.

Distance also magnifies the impact of negative feelings like longing and suspicion; according to one study, intercity lovers are more likely to be depressed

What next? I don't know, maybe focus on some core competencies...

I remember seeing somebody's blog change its background image according to weather outside, showing sunny or rainy scenery. Maybe I should follow similar idea, changing color scheme and avatar automatically based on location and temperature?

As out there was beautiful autumn weather, and I needed to go somewhere to air my thoughts, I decided to hunt down today's geohash of the Helsinki region. To do so, I fired up the Geohashing iPhone application, and let it count me the coordinates. As it happens, the spot was in the end of a gravel forest road between Renko and Hämeenlinna.

Calculating the route with iPhone's map software to be 108km, I put on some warmer clothes and jumped on my bike, heading leisurely north on smaller side roads. I had a lunch stop at Roosa, and then made my way to the destination.

The moose hunting season has just started and some gunshots could be heard in the woods. This worried me a bit, especially as the road's sign had some bullet holes, but the locals I passed on the gravel roads seemed friendly enough.

While Google Maps didn't show it, the spot was actually easier to reach, as it was just some ten meters from a small gravel road. I took the necessary picture proof, had a chocolate bar, and then headed back.

This was my first geohash. Definitely a fun way to experience your surroundings spiced up with some randomness!