To Blog Or Not To Blog - To Blog!

OK, this one closes...

2010-04-29T10:50:00.003+02:00

Blogger is dropping it's FTP publishing - so I either have to jump through some hoops to fix that or do something else completely.

As this place has been somewhat dormant *idly brushes away some cobwebs*, since I had this idea from the very beginning that this blog was a temporary practice zone and since I do have some ideas up in the back of my brain to do the writing and photo blog I have dreamt of for a while anyway ...

*phew

I'll close up shop here.

Someday a new shop will open :)

Now I know I'm in Japan

2009-09-07T05:42:00.001+02:00

...found this wee gem on the room table:

Somewhere above the skies

2009-09-07T05:41:00.001+02:00

...the sunset is fantastic!

(and, btw, the view is from the business class loo onboard SK983 CPH-NRT :)

When it rain, it pours!

2009-07-10T18:43:00.001+02:00

We got "a bit" of rain (and hail for that matter):

View into the front garden

The gutters on the house couldn't cope -

I hadn't check the rain measurement thingy for the effects of recent showers - but I believe we could have received 20 mm or more in 10-15 minutes. There was a river down the driveway which gave us a temporary pond in the back garden

Oh dear!

Just a wee connectivity check

2009-07-06T13:59:00.001+02:00

We'll be returning you to the normal (abysmally seldom) programming
shortly...

In the meantime, here's a picture of how Blå Sommer looked 5 years ago -
looking forward to getting this year's picture and pointing "we were
there!"

(See attached file: BlåSommer2004.jpg)

Posted via email from Ole's posterous

A summer and autumn of music

2009-06-16T11:24:00.001+02:00

July 5 - Katrine Madsen & Joakim Milder w/ strings

July 9 - Sinne Eeg

Sept 24 - Diana Krall

Oct 8 - Fleetwood Mac

Hmmmm. Looking forward to it already :)

Hopefully not an exercise in futility

2009-06-12T10:16:00.001+02:00

Mail posted to Flying Blue Customer Services 2009.06.12 10:15:

I have never yet been able to purchase an upgrade to business using miles.

Reasons given has been various -

- your class of ticket does not allow an upgrade

- being referred by phone to request at the desk in the airport

- being told at the airport that I should have made the request by phone

- being told "on international flights they generally do not do mileage upgrades to business class"

On NW36, DTW-AMS June 10, I was told that no more seats were available for mileage upgrades. On the flight, 6A seemed only occupied by a bunch of pillows and newspapers. If the seat was available, why do Flying Blue policies keep me from buying an upgrade?

I believed that frequent flyer programmes should increase frequent flyers' loyalty to the airline(s) in the programme. Shouldn't benefits promised in the programme actually be available?

When flying SAS, regardless of ticket class, generally I get one of two answers: "Sorry, business class is full" (fair answer) or the seat is mine and miles are taken from my account.

With this difference in customer service, I kindly ask why you believe that a frequent flyer with more than 100,000 miles in his account should continue feel loyal to Flying Blue?

I will post the text of this Email on my weblog as well as on the FlyerTalk website. I will of course also post any replies I receive from you.

Yours sincerely,

Ole Madsen; 2021 xxx xxx

Note: I originally had a more eloquent text containing more detailed examples but the Flying Blue Email form (which seems to be the only way of writing to Flying Blue) only allows 1,500 characters.

Teenagers socialising

2009-05-29T11:19:00.003+02:00

So, now apparently the next wave of Queen Victorianisms are hitting the USA. Teenagers at schools all over the country are being hit with bans on hugging and any kind of "public display of affection". There's even an acronym for that, PDAs.

Here's a picture from a scouting summercamp of ours from two years ago - it's been deliberately chosen to scare the s**t out of American school leader:

They do that, you know, all by themselves. Whenever there's a break, they just huddle together in a bunch, girls and boys alike, any one usually touching no less than one other, often two or more.

All innocent, all about creating and confirming friendships. And you know what? When something happens that affect the group or one of them, they stand together like nothing you've ever seen. Helping, supporting, backing up. Because they know each other, trust each other, feel so comfortable about being together with each other.

I'm not even going to start the "they can have guns in your society but noyt hug?" discussion. But this is balarney. Get real!

Playing British Bulldog

2009-05-24T19:22:00.001+02:00

Less than useful Public Address messages

2009-05-10T00:18:00.001+02:00

The Stansted Express train that I am sitting in while writing this has a wee problem with its PA system. The message to the passengers at all stations was:

"Now approaching..."

Well, at least we know we were getting somewhere :)

Apple tree in full splendour

2009-05-10T00:17:00.001+02:00

Inspired - or at least reminded - by the splendour of growth and flowering at Kew Gardens today, here is our own home spring wonder, the Belle de Boskop (if that is the correct spelling) apple tree in our back garden:

Makes me wonder if we're getting tree-tilting amouns of apples once more...

Evening sky

2009-04-21T21:55:00.001+02:00

Yesterday, we were shown this breathtaking sunset from the living room windows (those are upstairs...) -

I had some difficulty in framing it - ideally, I should have been floating in air some 5-10 meters to the left of the house. And reaching out the window as far as I could reach, I did find it difficult to focus where I wanted exactly to get the light right.

So I confess having tweaked the image a bit - cropped and added an adjustment layer in Photoshop. But I swear to Bob that the colours are bang on my recollection of them!

(oh - and while I was at it, I removed a very irritating TV arial... ;)

Spring Photos

2009-04-20T16:42:00.001+02:00

Spring and Easter co-arrived

2009-04-12T14:51:00.001+02:00

Well, as these flowers are called "Easter lillies" in Danish... The sight of them against the blue of the front door just was nice in the sunshine yesterday :)

The ants are part of another story ;)

Feeling at home

2009-04-03T03:14:00.002+02:00

Today, I went two hundred kilometers and back.
To and from a place which is 10.365 kilometers or 6441 miles away from home.

This evening, I realised what it was I felt.
I felt at home.

At home?

I've always thought of home as a place. Somewhere you can mark with an 'X' on the map. Somewhere special. Real. With a dimension of geographical presence.

I've also heard the version that 'Home is where I lay my head'. Or my hat, for that matter.

Home is both more and less than those things. Less than a specific place in space. More than a feeling.

Home is a state of mind.
And that particular state of mind can be reached in probably a handful of ways.

My very near ones, my loved ones, can induce it in a wink of an eye. Yes, here I belong, with you, us. That is home.

Books can do it. I'm so much always home in a book that it is such a disappointment when I dive into one and find out that, no, in this one, I'm not. But generally, I enter the book's universe and I'm at home. Magic of books, that is.

Nature does it to me. A steep slope of a mountain, the lush greenness of a spring forest, the moon or a clear star shining to me from a dark night's sky, a sudden buffeting of strong winds on a steep sidewalk in Brazil. I'm at home in nature.

Friends, friends really can do it, too. And music can do it. Like both did today. On a long road where I had no business feeling at home.

Yet I did. Very much so.

And oh, how I feel lucky for it.

- - - - - - - - -

Here is the start of this - rapidly jotted down at the corner terrace table at the Catedral do Chopp in Campinas, Brazil:

...at some point, the waiter's pen stopped working. And given that he didn't speak English and I surely don't speak Portuguese and that I had literally stolen it out of his breast pocket, I chose not to try to get another pen...

Borrowed lyrics for "Waiting for Dawn"

2009-02-03T21:37:00.002+01:00

Sinne Eeg, Danish jazz singer (and a wonderful one, too) has this song on her album of the same name:

Waiting for dawn

You must be asleep by now
Must be asleep by now
I wonder how long
I've played this song

The candle burned out long ago
You must be asleep by now
I wonder what you're dreaming now
I'm picturing you
beyond the blue

Just a while before I'll let you go
There's a long long way
From this dark lonely evening
To the morning light in China
gently kissing your eye
There's a long long way
There's a long long way
I'm wondering how far a
morning kiss can fly

I should be asleep by now
I should be asleep by now
I'm drinking this wine
- both yours and mine
while searching for you in the sky

There should be a moon by now
should have lit up the sky by now
I wonder if you
will think of me too
when the night returns will you cry?

There's a long long way
From this dark lonely evening
To the morning light in China
gently kissing your eye
There's a long long way
There's a long long way

I hope Sinne Eeg will forgive me for posting it here - otherwise I'll drop it, surely. But I wanted to post it for Teuchter to read and maybe share with her husband who is indeed in China.

(see Sinne Eeg's website for samples of her lovely music)

Light on a rose

2009-01-30T15:24:00.001+01:00

I like the light on this one:

Don't know if it transfers well to the small size used here. But there's a soft, velvety feel to it in full monitor size. Quite happy with my new camera :)

And sometimes I bloody well know!

2009-01-25T18:55:00.001+01:00

Refers to this one.

Today, 6 was 9 did the trick. "Drop dead beautiful". Yeah.

Travel-ling pictures

2009-01-21T16:15:00.001+01:00

That is, pictures while travelling - a couple of out-of-airplane-window ones and a rather surrealistic one from the Copenhagen Metro...

Alps

Windmill farm outside Copenhagen

The bridge from Copenhagen to Malmö. Yes, it is finished - but the last bit's a tunnel...

Hurling into the tunnel. Magrathea anyone? ;)

First difficult shot

2009-01-14T08:17:00.001+01:00

Typical me.

Just got a camera - and I have to shoot the first picture in low light through a window...

Not unhappy with it, though - the stabilising in the camera surely made it much better than what the old camera would have shaken it into... :)

Presentation planning

2009-01-08T16:11:00.001+01:00

Just as this has been discussed lately – here’s the current status of my next major presentation, a two-hour training presentation week after next:

(lousy quality again, I know – blame Nokia ;)

Please note: No software involved yet – I’ll be refining this a little more before I fire up PowerPoint.

All references in the following are to presentation styles presented in this summary article.

Once I do, the slides – I hope – will be made in a mix of -

assertion-evidence slides (for sure)

Presentaion Zen slides (should be able to pull these off at least for section headings)

a little Lessig 2.0 to start off with when I present myself (a requirement of the format and the style is chosen as I’m having mid afternoon, some time after lunch, with a bunch of listeners with jetlag – in other words, some wake-up effect is in order)

and, maybe if I can make it work and it flows well with the rest, a comic character in style with the “Brain Rules” frog.

Erm. When looking at it, it seems like some kind of shopping list… I might stick to it or decide that it’s over the top as I get near D-Day.

Sofas

2009-01-03T19:53:00.001+01:00

...then imagine them in off-white fabric rather than black leather.

Getting quicker to Christmas

2008-12-16T18:19:00.001+01:00

Just get yourself a candle with the wick off-center:

OK, you have to cut the non-melting part with a knife now and then and live with the kids yelling that it's cheating... ;)

Testing new blogging tool

2008-12-15T21:54:00.001+01:00

Found a link to Zoundry Raven - a quite possible contender to be my next favourite blogging tool :)

Taking it for a spin over the next few ~~days~~ weeks - or however long it takes with my current blogging frequency..

Looks good, though.

No pictures in this one - let's keep it simple from the start (and yet he adds tags - go figure).

Well worn dancing shoes

2008-12-15T13:22:00.001+01:00

It's probably a good thing that my phone camera is not very good - these shoes look even worse in real life…

Dusty, stepped on, looks very very tired. Roughly like myself after the company Christmas do on Friday. But a h**l of a party it was!