Weekends in the winter: swimming, ice skating, movies, and reading
I would like to describe what I am doing on weekends in Helsinki. Life in a city is certainly different from the life in a smaller town or a countryside. One of the challenges of this life is to do outdoors activities or at least some kind of sports to stay in shape.
This is why I start my weekend from attending a swimming pool, or in fact a Roman bath at Yrjonkatu. The definition of start of the day is quite relative because I am going there typically at 2PM. Earlier during the morning I am reading magazines mostly Communications of ACM or listening to radio. Not so long ago I have discovered Radio Freedom which features prominent journalists such as Vladimir Kara-Murza as well as lots of independent analysts. They often express interesting opinions. One thing that I have noticed is their use of references to literature or books that they have read recently. They are trying to apply the lessons learned from those books to modern life. This definitely characterizes this radio as that of intellectuals.
Anyway, in the swimming pool I am practicing fsreestyle wimming. I am swimming 500-1,000 meters depending on further plans. As of now, I can swim arbitrary long distances but not very fast, pretty much as fast as I could do it in breast stroke. However, the idea of swimming freestyle is to swim faster. But my body is experiencing tough resistance of water I am basically making my way through it. Instead I guess I need to flow through it, integrate with the water. But that takes lots of practice. Anyway, I have bought a 10-time ticket that allows me to get to any swimming pool in Helsinki for 36 Euros.
Then after the swimming pool I spend a few hours reading. For example, last weekend I was reading Economist magazine which I like quite a lot. I have bought another issue because of the funny cover image. There was a special report on social networks. Its main points are:
- MySpace was most visited social network until last year Facebook attracted more visitors. This is because MySpace was focusing on music and movies, whereas Facebook built a platform for content sharing. As broadband Internet spread through the world people got more interested in their own content.
- Twitter is very different from other social networks because it is like a broadcasting framework, not content sharing. The latter always assumes a certain degree of privacy, for example only your friends can see your pictures. In Twitter everybody can subscribe to your tweets.
- So far social networks have been barely profitable because advertisers don’t think that people will click on ads placed on social networks. This is because people are concentrated on their or their friends’ content, not on ads. But the special report argues that people trust their friends’ recommendations most, thus an ad saying that your friend has bought product X will likely influence your decision.
- Many smaller enterprises are using Twitter to advertise themselves. For example one bakery was tweeting upcoming donut sales and soon got over 50,000 followers. Another example is using Facebook as a game distribution platform. A classical Cafe World game has attracted over 10 million players in just a week. This is because of Facebook’s status updates. When your friend says that (s)he has become a Pizza Tycoon you think you should also become one. The network effect takes over. Gaming industry has never seen such growth rates before.
- People are increasingly using mobile devices to access social networks. Most of these devices are GPS-enabled. This opens another avenue for advertisers: location-aware ads.
On Sunday I am going to a lake to skate. I am preparing for a ice-skating marathon which will take place in the end of February in Kuopio. It is a funny thing which I will definitely describe in another post if I take part in it. The idea is that you have to skate as much as 200 km! But of course there are smaller distances such as 100km, 50km, 25km, and 12km. I will try to skate 25km. Because I am using traditional skates, not speed-skating type of gear my speed is not that great. A speed skater can maintain a 30km/h speed during the whole 200km race. Last weekend I skated 15km on a lake at Munkkiniemi and my speed was less than 10km/h.
Last but not least, I got used to going to movies. There is a gorgeous movie theater near my home in Tennispalatsi. I have bought a group ticket that gives access to 5 movies, each priced at 8.5 Euros. This is quite a big discount, as a single 3D movie is priced at 13 Euros. So far I have watched Avatar 3D, Up in the Air, and Sherlock Holmes. All are gorgeous movies.