As you get older, your Facebook feed gets older too. I’ve seen the difference in my own feed over the past year as more and more wedding posts and photos have appeared on my screen. Last night in a birthday party we were discussing the next step in this process when a friend of mine mentioned he doesn’t like Facebook anymore because it’s full of baby pictures. Thankfully I found a cure for this problem!

unbaby.me is a Chrome extension that replaces your Facebook feed’s baby photos with what they call “awesome stuff”. If you’d rather see photos of sports cars, dogs and bacon on your feed, unbaby.me is a must for you.

This led me to think what else annoys me online. Ads, obviously. Now wouldn’t it be cool if you could replace your ads with  ads of awesomeness? I could easily name a few companies whose ads I would rather see than all those “hit 3 vikings to win a prize” ads flying around my screen.

It’s been a while I’ve worked as a freelancer and one of the great benefits of doing it is that you can usually choose where to work from. This freedom is great but it also takes some time to get used to it and to find the ways to work that suite you the best.

Home

People always envy you when you mention working from home but for me at least it proved out to be a rather demanding task in the beginning. Getting into a full working mode took some effort as there were so many distractions available. As I figured out a proper working routine it all became easier. The Oatmeal web comic has made a hilarious strip about pros and cons of working from home.

Pros

• Free
• No commuting
• Less interruptions
• You’re working from home.. What else do you want?

Cons

• Distractions
• No social interaction

Tips

• Have a separate room or at least a table for working
• Get into the working mode right away

Cafes

I’ve also spent a lot of time in local cafes. I like the life and noise on the background even though they can be a bit distracting as well. It sometimes feels a bit awkward to spend a large portion of your day in a cafe and some places are more used to it than others. You feel neglected to order stuff from the cafe and in the end it can prove out to be very expensive.

Pros

• Easy to order beverages and food
• Easy to meet new people
• Life on the background can enhance your concentration (doesn’t work for everyone)

Cons

• Noise
• Internet – depending on the place
• Finding a good spot
• Can become as expensive as a co-working space after 5 cafe lattes

Tips

• Make sure to choose cafes with a reliable connection, nothing is more annoying than losing the connection in the middle of the day and having to switch places because of that
• Choose a nice seat

Co-working spacess

For the past few months I’ve been working in a big co-working space. A great thing I didn’t realize about co-working spaces before was how strong the communities can grow. There are numerous weekly events, breakfasts and meetings where freelancers and start-ups can pitch their ideas and services. There is also an active physical job board where a starting freelancer can easily find his first jobs and contacts in a new city.

Pros

• Office environment
• Community
• All the perks of a real office taken care for you (printers, meeting rooms)
• Usually an awesome Internet connection
• Jobs
• Finding help is easy
• There are usually many different pricing programs available

Cons

• Costs
• Little privacy
• Distractions
• Finding the right co-working space can take some time

Tips

• Try out several places before settling for a longer contract

I finally found the time to participate in a game jam monthly organized in Berlin. I pitched a last minute theme idea “Euro2012 fan simulator” as I thought there should be a theme about the on-going tournament. I managed to pair up with Giles from Friendly Monster Games (fans of billiard games should check out his Snooker and Pool games for Android) who liked the theme as well and even though it got trashed in the theme voting we decided to go for it.

Our game idea was to create a Risk-typed game based on the Euro 2012 tournaments fans. We divided the host countries Poland and Ukraine into a 48-hexagon map. The gameplay was  inspired by the awesome Flash game DiceWars with an interesting twist; every few rounds a match between two countries takes place. The match results are greatly influenced by the amount of fans the teams have but underdogs still stand a chance. The winner of the match gets all the remaining fans of the opponent, thus reducing the amount of players automatically. This also (hopefully) creates interesting gameplay as sometimes it’s better to save the fans instead of attacking.

Screenshot of our game

For developing we used libgdx, a game development framework that automatically builds on Android, HTML5 and Desktop. We designed the game on 720p but didn’t have time to test it on other than desktop. The current version is a “massive  multiplayer offline game” which was also one of the theme suggestions but to take this game one step forward would require a simple AI for the opponents.

The event featured around 15 game hobbyists and game developers. The organizers even created this Youtube -video where our game is featured from 1.47. It was great to meet some like-minded people and I’ll try to join the event more often from now on.

This summer I’m finally getting to play in the World University Chess Championships after being turned down last time I applied. In 2010 the tournament was organized in Switzerland and to be fair, my level at the time wouldn’t have left me that big of a chance for points. As the player list from 2010 shows, I would’ve been fighting against a free round.

The tournament is organized once every two years and this years it’s held in Guimaraes, Portugal on 19.-26.8. I’m really looking forward to see the player list on the website since it would be great to know someone from the games beforehand – maybe I’ll try to contact the German players since I’m the only one going from Finland. Anyhow I’m sure the tournament will be a great experience and probably my last chance to play on University level. After a long break from Youth tournaments I’m actually really excited to go on a chess trip again.

Other than that I’ve kept my summer plans quite open. I’ve been wanting to play a blitz marathon for ages and there’s one held in Berlin this August. I’ve also promised to play another season for SF Berlin, hopefully with better team results this time! I’ve also been planning to start training more again now that I finally brought my kit from Finland – if only I would find the motivation for it :)

I accompanied my friend to a massive job fair called Connecticum 2012 in order to get a better understanding on all the companies around Berlin and Brandenburg. The fair had a fairly large number of IT companies but most of the companies were larger corporations like car companies (we are talking about Germany after all). I was also offered some nice free stuff like Bavarian beer (alcohol free obviously) and other free drinks. The event was aimed at students or near-graduates and it was kind of funny to see large companies fail in their booth presentations.

One of the more interesting contacts I made was with a company called Bally Wulff Games who have been making mostly payout machines since 1950.. Yes you heard me right, for over 60 years! They even had a cool slot machine at the booth for people to try. It was interesting to chat with one of their developers about their processes since it was like different world for me. Most of their work is scripting on their own platforms and most of the time is spent on governments having to test each machine thoroughly before being able to ship it.

Totally unrelated I found an awesome new sport. I didn’t even get to catch a word with them since I saw it just before leaving but these guys were basically playing table tennis with a volleyball only using their heads. The picture below is horrible (I might have to update my phone soon just to get better photos!) but let’s just say the game was so fast paced! I definitely have to look this up somewhere.

I also had a fun moment at the Lidl stand when I asked about their “Mobile specialist” position. Apparently the job was to teach old Lidl executives how to use smartphones! Talk about a dream job.

Spotify organized a developers event at Ahoy Berlin’s co-working space. Several guys from Spotify Berlin and also Spotify Stockholm had turned out to host this event. The event started with Spotify people playing a funny promotion video of their brand new iPad app that has been. After that the evening was divided into 3 lectures held simultaneously in 2 places.

I was mostly interested in the Spotify apps that were actually quite new to me since I haven’t been using Spotify lately. There were some great ideas on the market but clearly a lot of room for innovation and I’m curious to see what the time brings. It was also interesting to talk about their APIs, especially the C API libspotify which you can use to make iPhone apps as well. I asked later on about a possible Android version and the answer was ‘soon’. You can find more information on developing for Spotify here.

Overall it was a very nice event with great possibility to connect with Spotify Berlin. After moving to Germany I had to stop using Spotify as it hadn’t been launched here yet but after being inspired this evening I had to resubscribe!

Craigslist has posted a job opening for Senior UI / Usability / Front End Engineers. Could this mean they are finally going to redesign themselves? Craigslist, started in 1996 by Craig Newmark, has served it purpose well. During the 15 years of it’s existence it currently has over 50 million users in US only and gathers more than 30 billion page views per month. Although mostly used in US I’ve found it working in European locations well, often as an English posting board. As sort of an ugly duckling of the current web generation, Craigslist has kept it’s layout almost the same since the beginning. The last major change happened in 2010 which was so minimal I didn’t even realize it myself.

Now how to redesign a web service which has a layout from the 90′s and still such a massive user base? The job post requests for:
- highly-optimized web interaction design;
- HTML, CSS, javascript, jquery, ajax;
- perl & other scripting languages;
- Apache, mod_perl;
- C, C++;
- cross-browser development and troubleshooting;
- current UI libraries and frameworks;
- large scale, big traffic, high performance websites;
- website security, cross-site scripting & other vulnerabilities;
- API design and maintenance;
- mobile app design, supporting mobile platforms;
- integrated mapping technologies; and
- expert troubleshooting skills.

Cross-browser development? Mobile app design? It really sounds like Craigslist is taking a massive leap forwards. The question however is how to redesign it so that it remains as simple to use as it is today.

Talking about job posts, A Finnish SEO company from Oulu caught the attention of Finnish media by posting a job opening for an assistant job. The post itself was rather broad and what especially rose eyebrows was the line “Driving license is mandatory since the management is rarely sober enough to drive”. Way to go protecting the Finnish stereotypes!

I participated in Berlin M-klasse tournament. At first I wasn’t accepted since I didn’t qualify but after explaining my low German rating (for some weird reason they have calculated me a German rating from the results of a tournament played in 2008) they ended up accepting me in. What I didn’t realize was that it wasn’t simply a tournament one can join just like that since most of the players in the M-group qualified for the tournament from some other tournament. I was ranked 8./18 and after a dubious run of games ended up finishing 8th as well.

Round 1: Felix Nötzel 2091 (0) 0-1 Rauno Järvinen 2182 (0)

I was under some pressure in a Scandinavian game but after the dust settled I had a slightly better pawn position. In the end I managed to take control of e-line with my rook after some simple tactics the game was over. During the game I thought I was slightly better throughout the game but computer disagreed with me.

Round 2: Rauno Järvinen 2182 (1) 0-1 IM René Stern 2502 (1)

Failing in opening preparations made me go into very unknown waters and not surprisingly I was in deep troubles very quickly. The game was sadly over before it had began.

Round 3: Fabian Jahnz 2245 (1½) ½-½ Rauno Järvinen 2182 (1)

One of the weirdest games I’ve ever played. I plundered in the opening again and decided to sacrifice a pawn for some attack. In the end this attack never resulted in anything except for both of us using most of our game time. After some pieces were exchanged I was still down the pawn and Fabian was ready to begin his attack. I found a decent combination in my time troubles and ended up getting the pawn back and going into a favorable Knight endgame. After a weird knight move made on his last second I made a massive mistake exchanging the knights even though any other move would’ve probably won the game for me. The result would’ve been Fabian’s victory but he let my king approach his last pawns and the resulted queen end game seems to be a draw. Not the best game for either of us..

Round 4: Rauno Järvinen 2182 (1½) 0-1 Ingo Stark 2184 (1)

Another extremely badly played opening with white. The game following was me trying to pick even a half a point from the remains of my position but it didn’t quite work out. A rather depressing result as this meant me having 1.5/5 which was far from the original goals.

Round 5: Martin Gebigke 2180 (1½) 0-1 Rauno Järvinen 2182 (1½)

After a mistake and a pawn sacrifice in the opening I tried to form some kind of an attack that didn’t really result in anything. Martin used a lot of time and in the end I won the game on time on move 38 where after 40 moves he’d received 30 minutes extra time. It was especially embarrassing since we also got 30 seconds per every move – he made his move on the very last second. To my defense I have to point out that according to the computer I was already in a winning position after some mistakes made by both sides.

Round 6: Rauno Järvinen 2182 (2½) 1-0 Aron Moritz 2104 (2½)

A first game where I felt I was in control from the beginning. Aron mixed ideas from 2 different defenses against the English opening and I used this time to get control over the board. The resulting attack on the king side seemed to halt at one point but I managed to find a sacrifice needed to blow out the whole position in my favor.

Rauno Järvinen - Aron Moritz

The final round paired me up with grandmaster Kalinitschew. I decided to go all-in in the opening which probably was the right choice. There were some chances in my attacks but they dried out pretty easily as Sergey defended with superior experience.

The end result 3.5/7 was still off my target but at least my rating went up by around 10 points. Hopefully I’m able to play the same tournament next year with better results. The openings I played this time were horrifying and it gave me some motivation (once again) to work on them. Hopefully this time I manage to use some time on this. Fernando Offermann from SF Berlin ended up with 3.5 points after a great start.

More photos and information can be found from the unofficial tournament site

My first season in Oberliga Nordost came to an end this Sunday as we faced Weisse Dame in our last match. I played the season in SF Berlin 1903′s second team as on boards 7-8. I started out the season great but the last 3 rounds went extremely badly as I hit a bit of a slump.

Dr. Robert Plato 2004 (elo:-) Rauno Järvinen 0:1
Rauno Järvinen – Ralf Rennoch 2088 (elo: 2162)  1:0
Andreas Jahnke (elo:2035) -  Rauno Järvinen 0:1
Rauno Järvinen – Dirk Maxion 2159 (elo:2223) 1:0
Markus Dyballa 2191 (elo: 2267) – Rauno Järvinen 1/2:1/2
Rauno Järvinen – Patrick Ewald 1850 (elo: 1980) 1:0
Dr. Hans-Joachim Grottke(2239) – Rauno Järvinen 1:0
Rauno Järvinen – Richard Valet (2012) 0:1
Alexander Kysucan – Rauno Järvinen 1/2:1/2

And here are the final results of the season. Apparently we got relegated from the North-East division last season. A few stupid defeats left us with 5th place. You can find the full table here.

(Position, Team name, team points, individual points)
1. SC Kreuzberg 18 51,0
2. SV Glückauf Rüdersdorf 14 46,0
3. TSG Neuruppin 11 41,0
4. Empor Potsdam 11 39,5
5. SF Berlin 1903 II 10 42,5
6. SK König Tegel 1949 II 8 32,5
7. Greifswalder SV 6 30,0
8. SC Friesen Lichtenberg 6 28,0
9. SC Weisse Dame 5 28,5
10. BSC Rehberge 1945 1 21,0

Some of my team mates

I participated in North Germany’s team blitz championships which for myself was a rather catastrophic day. I was really excited about the tournament since Finland team blitz championships are a huge event with over 200 teams participating and it’s always a great event to meet all your chess buddies. The tournament was played out quite similarly to our tournaments back in Finland except that the teams were ranked according to team points (2 for a win, 1 for a tie and 0 for losing) instead of individual player points. This also made teams shout out their results after their individual game was over to inform their team mates. This made the competition way more tactical as you knew the score during your game. It was also good German practice!

Usually performing well in blitz I managed to gather only 10.5 points out of 23 on board 3. My team luckily performed way better and we ended up getting the 4th place in a competition we should’ve actually won. We even won the tournament winners 3.5-5 during one of the last rounds. Find full results here. My team SF Berlin 1903 consisted of us 4:

IM Ilja Schneider 21
GM Rainer Polzin 17
Rauno Järvinen 10½
Stefan Brettschneider 17½

Me, Ilja and Stefan