Givewawa results part 1: Robert Rijken

Konichiwa! Robert please email me your address. I've had a hard time making my decision, I must have read through all the comments 4-5 times and being swayed by many of you. Short reasoning : aviation, family, Japan. Thanks to all again for touching me with your stories. More to come ...

Update: 27-Dec-2014

The above was written on my Jolla while waiting in the ticket line of Miraikan -- National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation. I didn't promise to justify my choice of the givewawa result, but I thought I'd do it anyway, since I did give it a lot of thought (even until now) and hopefully some of you are interested as well.

1. Japanese Birdman contest: when Robert mentioned this it sparked my interest. I've always been fascinated by aviation and flight, and enjoy flying whenever I can - only as a passenger so far. I'm one of those weirdos that prefer a turbulent flight to an uneventful one. Anyway his comment prompted me to look up details of the contest and trying to figure out how/where I could participate. Although it wasn't just about aligning with my personal interest, but more importantly the rallying of people in the community to make something - which seemed impossible given the time and scale - happen. As Robert said it's like what we're doing in the Jolla community :) I hope to see the followup of Team Holland in Japan Birdman someday!

2. Family: during my Japan trip, my dad had a health incident and was briefly in the ER. Things turned out fine in the end, but such events can shift your perspective. It brought to mind Robert's comment of wanting to gift the Jolla to his daughter, which reminded me of my dad getting me my first SLR, a Minolta 3xi, in 1991; and a Sound Blaster 16 with a CD-R drive in 1993 (a pretty expensive package at that time); among other stuff. However it's not the cost of the gifts that makes them memorable, but what it brought to my life - learning about photography and optics, messing around with and upgrading my own computers - and how it shaped my interests and career. I think the Jolla will make a meaningful gift to a family member / loved one (which many of you expressed as your intention), and especially so from a parent to a child.

3. Innovation: I listed Japan as the third reason above, but that's a bit misleading. It wasn't the fact that I was in vacationing there which made me decide to give the Jolla to someone in Japan, even if the savings on shipping was nice icing on the cake. (I did bring the Jolla with me on the trip because I expected the shipping cost from Japan to anywhere in the world to be cheaper than shipping from Finland due to the battery restrictions.) In my impression, Japan spearheads technological innovations. I was expecting to be wow-ed by all kinds of stuff on this trip. In reality, while there were many cool and interesting stuff, I failed to see anything truly mind-blowing especially from recent years. Shinkansen (bullet train) is 50 years old. ASIMO, the humanoid robot, turned 14 this year. How about all the amazing transformer-type Japanese phones? Seemingly the iPhone drones have wiped them out. Did I not look hard enough? Was I looking at the wrong places? We need to inject some unlike-ness into Japan! When we went gadget shopping, I saw that more than half the cute/fun accessories were for the iPhone. That almost made me cry. I ended up with a lens and some accessories for my Canon EOS M - at least they are still on track with camera/optics stuff.

ASIMO demo at the Miraikan, taken with my new 22mm f/2 STM pancake lens

So that concludes the Givewawa results part 1. Why "part 1"? Um, ah... stay tuned ;)