ego

In this ever-changing section I'll offer you a brief look into my life. It's not going to be anything too deep. Just a few sentences sewn together.

Past, present

At the very beginning I was born in Varkaus in 1976. I had a relatively happy childhood (with an older sister Susanna and a younger brother Tuomas) apart from the fact that my father was working abroad in Iraq, Saudi-Arabia and Soviet Union until the end of the 1980s. After which he decided to choose drinking as his primary job/hobby. But I had many friends with whom I shared most of my time, playing in a mock-up band (you know, a backing tape and tennis racquet guitars), football, board games, watching movies etc.

At school I was an average student until 5th grade when I managed to crank up my GPA. When I was younger I couldn't carry a tune, which resulted to somewhat embarrasing musical performances at school. Then I found my singing voice - weak, nasal whining with a two-octave, no, one-and-a-half-octave range. The grade for music went immediately from mediocre to good. I was really useless at art and found out at a very early stage that I wouldn't be a carpenter. Instead I exceled in English and was very good at math and Finnish. Naturally later on I managed to even out the roughest edges: practise sometimes makes reasonable results. At the end of the high school my art class teacher thought I was a grade A student because I displayed a genuine interest towards art, ie. I kept my mouth shut. When it comes to drawing, anything beyond stick figures is out of the question.

In 2001 - long overdue and after various, sometimes dark phases in my life (Susanna passing away in July 2000 and my father soon after that) - I found a girl that I managed to hold on to. And suddenly there I was in Jyväskylä studying business information technology to become Bachelor of business administration (almost there). Studying English at a university was my primary goal, but I never got that far even though I tried four times.

Music, Movies, Books as art and/or entertainment

I feel this is the road that seems more and more winding year after year. Right now I think I'm seeing the half-way signpost somewhere in the distance. That is, I try and tend to look at music, movies and books more as art rather than plain entertaiment. I'm willing to watch a three-hour art movie without whining and maybe even enjoy it - and have enjoyed more often than not. This doesn't necessarily mean I'm able to give a striking analysis of what I've just seen. Maybe some day.

Music... I used to listen Kiss, W.A.S.P., Twisted Sister and Iron Maiden when I was a kid. And now Bob Dylan, Beatles, Tom Waits, R.E.M. and Radiohead. Regression or progression, that's a matter of taste. I think sometimes a great tune makes up for the lack of meaning/goofy lyrics but you can have both a good tune and great lyrics. I don't really hate any kind of music (and hell, "Aces High" is still pretty good) but I've drawn my line. Still, my record collection consists of pretty standard stuff, at least to a degree. No party music anyway.

When I was about 20 I started to play guitar actively, inspired by the tunes of R.E.M. and Pink Floyd. In 1997 me and a couple of friends of mine started a band called Superverted, which can still be considered active, though in hibernation since we haven't played together for a year now. Superverted sounds like a post-grungey pop/rock band. Being a guitarist/back-up vocalist is my role - the word "guitarist" used in a broadest sense possible.

And books. I can read. I like reading. Somehow it just takes way too long for me to finish a book. Probably because my concentration breaks up too easily - I'll just put the blame on the computer and late nights spent at it. My favorite book so far is "Naked Lunch" by William S. Burroughs. Harsh narration and the blackest humour works for me.

Pages on the Internet

I've lost count on how many times these pages have been remade. It's been just over two years since I designed the first Orbinski-pages (the Orbinski-name came up in a family research, no relation) so there's been development. First HTML, then CSS, a little PHP. Later on XHTML, XML and XSLT, which for some reason helped me understand better PHP and other programming languages, my Achilles' heel up to that point. I have to emphasize the word "understand", I'm not a programmer. But I'll try my best. As always.

Personality - ask others

I took a free personality test at similarminds.com. Truth and nothing but the truth, of course. The test yielded following results:

Stability results were medium which suggests you are moderately relaxed, calm, secure, and optimistic.
Orderliness results were moderately low which suggests you are, at times, overly flexible, improvised, and fun seeking at the expense of reliability, work ethic, and long term accomplishment.
Extraversion results were low which suggests you are very reclusive, quiet, unassertive, and secretive.

Trait snapshot: does not make friends easily, secretive, introverted, reclusive, observer, dislikes leadership, somewhat socially awkward, does not like to stand out, dislikes large parties, values solitude, solitary, avoidant, ambivalent about fitting in, not dominant, unassertive, suspicious, prudent, unadventurous, worrying, weird, intellectual, frequently second guesses self.

Ha! Talk about negativity.