Welcome random visitor!

My name is Sami Matilainen and this website is about me, my art, and whatever various things that interest me. I guess some people would call that a “blog” for short. I assume since you managed to get to this particular page on my blog that you want to learn something about me. You stalker.

This is me standing in front of the old Nintendo headquarters in Kyoto, Japan.

So who am I? Well, first of all I am just an ordinary geeky guy who likes video games and tech stuff and gadgets. I’m a die hard Nintendo and Apple fan and I grew up with the NES and Mac OS 7.

My interest in games in particular made me choose a career in IT and I am a MSc in Computer Science. However, I am not your stereotypical hacker in the sense that even though I am a big geek who puts a lot of faith in technology I am also very much a humanist. I believe in people. This is why I specialize in Human Computer Interaction (HCI). HCI is a research field which emphasizes the fact that ultimately any computer system will be used by or affect real users, people. Thus it makes sense that computer systems ultimately should be designed from the users perspective, to be as usable as possible. Interestingly enough, Nintendo and Apple are two companies which have come very far in this line of thinking.

However, looking at this site as a whole one could draw the conclusion that my geeky side is maybe not my most dominant one. I have always enjoyed painting and story telling, and just about any means of artistic expression. In a sense this ties very well with the fact that I am a man-child who has not quite ever grown up. It was Picasso who said that “All children are artists, the problem is staying a child as one grows older”. I think my biggest assets are in fact my wild imagination and curiosity.

To give you a more geeky view of my personality, the below chart illustrates my personality as described by “the big five” personality model. link1 link2

I used a test designed with Gerard Sauciers 40 Big Five Personality Markers. As with everything that comes from the field of psychology, the above chart is meaningless without an understanding of the broader picture, but it does encode my personality rather eloquently into an easy to understand visual representation. I’m not too happy about my score in extraversion, but I keep working on that. :P

Diving in Pulau Tioman, Malaysia.

I do have other interests than art, people, science and computers though. One of my major hobbies right now is fitness and I am constantly finding new interesting ways to perspire. My lifestyle used to be rather sedentary and I developed a very low self esteem because of that. But this changed when I discovered running. Today I do a lot of group training (Body Pump, Power Step, Spinning, you know that sort of stuff) and occasionally I lift some weights as well. Even though at first this was a means to get healthier, to loose pounds and to improve my physical appearance, my primary motivation today seems to be that it just is so damn fun. I never drag myself to the gym, it’s rather the opposite, I have a hard time staying away from there on my rest days. The fact that I have lost one quarter of my body weight all the while gaining lots of strength and stamina simply by “having fun”, is just a bonus. Another bonus is that I can today enjoy other activities such as diving or hiking with more confidence and endurance.

Me standing on the Great Wall of China, somewhere between Jingshangling and Badaling.

Another major factor in my life is traveling. Something which I have not had the opportunity to do much of in the past but which I hope to a lot more of in the future. My last trip took me to Asia and that was indeed the adventure of my lifetime. There is something fundamentally life-altering and character-building about adventuring into unknown territory out of pure curiosity.

Well, I guess I could ramble on, but I think that pretty much sums me up, I am a geeky artistic people-loving man-child. :) If you have any questions to ask me you may email me at sam [at] samimatilainen [dot] com.

/Sam