There seem to be all kinds of opinions about security. Some say that Windows systems will be hardened by the viruses and exploits, so Windows security will be (in the end) the best there is. Others point out to the danger of monoculture, which means that Windows is a huge risk. And still other say that the relative number of viruses and exploits is directly related to market share, thus effectively saying that all systems are similarly weak in security. But my daily experiences of Mac OS X have been positive so far.

The problems which I have had have been mostly my own fault - deleting a file accidentally, or trying to fix something which was not broken. For example, yesterday my ADSL broadband connection at home stopped working, so finally I even rebooted my iBook, to no avail. But then I learned that the ADSL connection was at fault. Two hours later the connection was again working.

But perhaps I trust Mac OS X too much - install software which may be spyware or contain trojans, etc. I do have Norton Antivirus at work and Virex at home, are running the built-in firewall, etc. - so I'm not completely without protection, but is this enough?

And I can say something quite unpolite, like "Have Americans tortured more prisoners lately?" On the other hand, I have not met many pro-Bush Americans, so perhaps this would be a polite way to start a discussion. Most Americans in fact tend to be of the type "I'm sorry our president is an idiot."

We don't have a culture of smalltalk in Finland. We really like to go straight to the point and forget about the chitchat. And if there is nothing important to say, we are silent. I think this may be uncomfortable to foreigners in Finland.

So, today I'll attend a two-day course on meetings and negotiations. It has been a long time since last attending such a course. Being a participant on a course, not a teacher, is a welcome change.

This year I have taught parallel programming with MPI and Fortran 90/95 programming. The MPI course was lecture in English, which was rather successful, I believe. These courses have been nice refreshers for me, but I have not really learned much new while teaching. When you have lectured a course half a dozen or a dozen times, the topic tends to lose some of the attraction.

So, to refresh my skills, I have attended recently several courses, such as learning presentation skills, training for media in a tv studio, programming with Python, and now learning English negotiation skills. It is nice to be able to learn something new every now and then.