Looking forward

Snowfall, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

No, this photo is not from today. It was taken a week ago, and almost all of that snow has since melted away. But I can always dream of a white Christmas, can't I?

This posting is a bit off-topic about photography, but I hope you don't mind. I have a hard time keeping the "photography" compartment and other parts of my life separate just now. And I'll return to photography at the end of the posting.

Why I selected this photo is that it shows a bright mood, just like I'm feeling today. And that mood has mostly to do with things at work.

We have been working hard to get our company is such a position that we can get leverage both on the national and international level. I'm not talking about Nokia-level operations here - there are only 180 of us - but instead of more modest targets in a quite specialized market.

We have been getting new customers for our services at a growth rate of 15-20 percent per year, but there has been always a bit of an uncertainty about this for us.

Now it seems that those things - big, ambitious targets - we have been discussing with our customers and partners, may become reality. This means a big scaling up of our services, and all the difficulties involved in that, but I'm feeling good despite (or because of) the challenges.

All the work needed to make this possible has been hard during the year, and this may be one reason for my interest in photography. It has been balancing the demands at work, providing a concrete thing in contrast to the abstractions needed to discuss things at the upper management level. (The Dilbert portrayal of things may not be far off the mark in the sense of separate realities of experts and management.)

Thanks to photography I may have stayed sane during this year. Not a small thing. And besides, photography is fun.