Claudio Saavedra

csaavedra@gnome.org

Go forward in time to November 2014.

Mon 2014/Oct/20
  • Together with GNOME 3.14, we have released Web 3.14. Michael Catanzaro, who has been doing an internship at Igalia for the last few months, wrote an excellent blog post describing the features of this new release. Go and read his blog to find out what we've been doing while we wait for his new blog to be sindicated to Planet GNOME.

  • I've started doing two exciting things lately. The first one is Ashtanga yoga. I had been wanting to try yoga for a long time now, as swimming and running have been pretty good for me but at the same time have made my muscles pretty stiff. Yoga seemed like the obvious choice, so after much tought and hesitation I started visiting the local Ashtanga Yoga school. After a month I'm starting to get somewhere (i.e. my toes) and I'm pretty much addicted to it.

    The second thing is that I started playing the keyboards yesterday. I used to toy around with keyboards when I was a kid but I never really learned anything meaningful, so when I saw an ad for a second-hand WK-1200, I couldn't resist and got it. After an evening of practice I already got the feel of Cohen's Samson in New Orleans and the first 16 bars of Verdi's Va, pensiero, but I'm still horribly bad at playing with both hands.

Thu 2014/Oct/16

My first memories of Meritähti are from that first weekend, in late August 2008, when I had just arrived in Helsinki to spend what was supposed to be only a couple of months doing GTK+ and Hildon work for Nokia. Lucas, who was still in Finland at the time, had recommended that I check the program for the Night of the Arts, an evening that serves as the closing of the summer season in the Helsinki region and consists of several dozens of street stages set up all over with all kind of performances. It sounded interesting, and I was looking forward to check the evening vibe out.

I was at the Ruoholahti office that Friday, when Kimmo came over to my desk to invite me to join his mates for dinner. Having the Night of the Arts in mind, I suggested we grab some food downtown before finding an interesting act somewhere, to which he replied emphatically "No! We first go to Meritähti to eat, a place nearby — it's our Friday tradition here." Surprised at the tenacity of his objection and being the new kid in town, I obliged. I can't remember now who else joined us in that summer evening before we headed to the Night of the Arts, probably Jörgen, Marius, and others, but that would be the first of many more to come in the future.

I started taking part of that tradition and I always thought, somehow, that those Meritähti evenings would continue for a long time. Because even after the whole Hildon team was dismantled, even after many of the people in our gang left Nokia and others moved on to work on the now also defunct MeeGo, we still met in Meritähti once in a while for food, a couple of beers, and good laughs. Even after Nokia closed down the Ruoholahti NRC, even after everyone I knew had left the company, even after the company was sold out, and even after half the people we knew had left the country, we still met there for a good old super-special.

But those evenings were not bound to be eternal, and like most good things in life, they are coming to an end. Meritähti is closing in the next weeks, and the handful of renegades who stuck in Helsinki will have to find a new place where to spend our evenings together. László, the friendly Hungarian who ran the place with his family, is moving on to less stressful endeavors. Keeping a bar is too much work, he told us, and everyone has the right to one day say enough. One would want to do or say something to change his mind, but what right do we have? We should instead be glad that the place was there for us and that we had the chance to enjoy uncountable evenings under the starfish lamps that gave the place its name. If we're feeling melancholic, we will always have Kaurismäki's Lights in the dusk and that glorious scene involving a dog in the cold, to remember one of those many times when conflict would ensue whenever a careless dog-owner would stop for a pint in the winter.

Long live Meritähti, long live László, and köszönöm!

Go backwards in time to September 2014.

Wed 2014/Oct/15 12:14:30 +0300