An American's Guide to Washing Dishes in a Finnish Home

When you're in a Finnish home, don't shove every dirty dish into the dishwasher and switch it on. Apparently, many Finnish homes have old dishes, and many old dishes have glazes that will be removed by heat and chemical reaction with dishwasher soap. If there is one phrase you never want to hear, that phrase would be "Oh no! This was my great-grandmother's plate, and now it's ruined!"  You will lose friendships over this.

Full disclosure, I did not ruin anyone's great-grandmother's plate. I did, however, remove the polish from someone's decades-old ice-cream scoop. But there have been great-grandmother's plates rescued from my dishwasher.

I have tried to ban in my household the use of dishes that cannot be washed in the dishwasher.  They are to be used only on special occasions, like when we have completely run out of other clean dishes.

What we have here, I believe, is an example of culture clash, and in broad strokes, I'm tempted to claim that Americans appreciate old things only to the extent that they are convenient. Old, inconvenient things will be banished to the attic or a museum.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, or a criticism, just an observations.  Finns seem to, generally speaking, not only appreciate old things, but use them in every-day life.

At least, in my circles.

Update: 10.10.2018

After some consultation, I have discovered that there are many Americans who keep and use old things, and many Finns who do not. I have not really yet discerned a specific difference between who does what and why. While many American Southerners do keep and use old things, others do not. While many urban people of either Finnish or American nationality do not, many do.

Anyway, be careful when washing unknown dishes! You could lose a friend!

BMapp update

Well, the Burning Man Map App is coming along nicely. It's at the stage where I'm willing to show it to a UX designer to get some tips.  I've also moved it to another host, served from here.

There is still a list of things that needs to be done, but I think it's really getting there!

https://garbage-collector-acronyms-27351.netlify.com/

Update and partial FAQ

These is a FAQ for the questions that I frequently imagine that I am being asked.  As you will see, my internal interlocutor can sound a bit judgey.

What's going on with BMapp?

I am continuing to work on BMapp apace.  I'm keeping it on a private git repo at Bitbucket for now.  I may open-source it at some point, but there's something irrationally nice about its being a private solo project*.  I've committed to Inferno, Redux and Rx.  I'm looking at redux-observables, since it's using two libraries I'm already using.

What's up with all the Bookmarks lately?

Well, there is not really a public social bookmarking application anymore, since the demise of del.icio.us.  When I find or build one, I'll move all of those to it.  There are a lot more in my chrome bookmarks.  If I added them all, it would look even more like spam.

What's up with using Blogger?  I think my grandad used Blogger once. All the cool kids use ${some_other_thing} or roll their own.

Rolling my own or moving it is in some distant future plan, a bit like my social bookmarking plans or the open-source social media plan. I started this blog waaay back nigh on 10 years now to keep track of a specific collaboration, almost immediately abandoned it, and rebooted it when I felt the need to have a public notebook.  It is quite limited, but so far I have not bumped up hard against those limitations. It does the job. The risks are that it will be sunsetted by the notoriously fickle Google.  Or that webstandards will leave it far behind.  (Does it even have any full time staff?)


* "Rather than its being a public solo project?  A publicly ignored solo project?  A project that's so stunningly fun that someone will fork it and do something more interesting?" asks my internally judgmental interlocutor. "Don't worry about any of that.  Open source it!  Do it!  Do it! YOLO!" he shouts.

Bookmark: Font and Font fallbacks

Various resources dealing with fonts on websites.

Front End Center — Crafting Webfont Fallbacks (YouTube)
A Comprehensive Guide to Font Loading Strategies
fontfaceobserver: Webfont loading js library
Font style matcher + github
CSS Font Stack
Quick Tip: How to Consistently Render Typefaces Cross-browser (video)
Type Rendering Mix (library referenced in preceding video)

Bookmark: Offline-only content

I may consider doing something like this for the BMapp: Offline-only content.

https://chris.bolin.co/offline/

Bookmark: The Jupyter Notebook

The Jupyter Notebook is an open-source web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and explanatory text. Uses include: data cleaning and transformation, numerical simulation, statistical modeling, machine learning and much more.

http://jupyter.org/

Bookmark: Web Workers

Web Workers makes it possible to run a script operation in background thread separate from the main execution thread of a web application. The advantage of this is that laborious processing can be performed in a separate thread, allowing the main (usually the UI) thread to run without being blocked/slowed down.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Workers_API