Lars Pind

BBC: “Scientists are keen to understand the change in temperatures over the continent as the region holds enough water in its ice to raise sea levels by 60 metres.” Holy smokes! 60 metres is a lot. That’s almost all of Denmark!

My friend Mark Aufflick found this excellent round-up of the good and the bad guys of the 30 years of Apple history. Entertaining and educational indeed. I for one always thought Raskin and Tog were heroes, but it’s good to get my world-view corrected.

Yesterday’s Daily Show had an excellent reportage on Denmark by correspondent Jason Jones, who had actually been to Denmark to do interviews with Anders Morgenthaler, Michael Wulff, and Jan Gintberg. I wonder to what extent they’re playing along, and to what extent they’re being manipulated. Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

You can catch the episode on the US iTunes Music Store, or via torrent. Part two in the series should be tomorrow.

Jeg har i dag meldt mig ind i Det Radikale Venstre. Siden jeg fik stemmeret, har jeg ellers stemt Venstre, ud fra en forestilling om at det var den bedste måde at dreje samfundet over i en mere liberal retning. Men det er gået op for mig, at det ikke kommer til at ske, og at vi er for uenige om for meget.

Muhammedkrisen var ikke overraskende mit tipping point. De toner, der kom fra de Radikale (og Uffe Ellemann-Jensen, for øvrigt) var fornuftige, mens det der kommer ud af regeringen og specielt DF får mine tæer til at krummes.

I dag tog jeg mig sammen og læste de Radikales program på deres hjemmeside, og fandt mig selv enig i det meste—skat, integration, konkurrence, og andet.

Jeg anser mig selv for liberal, men bryder mig ikke om den leflen for storkapitalen, som den ikke-ekstreme højrefløj traditionelt har for vane. Men for noget tid siden læste jeg op på “Radical Middle” og “Third Way”, og fandt det tiltalende. De Radikale ser ud til at ligge meget solidt i den lejr.

Det der piner mig ved de radikale er imidlertid deres lidt for tætte forhold til socialdemokraterne. Socialdemokratiet står for alt hvad jeg ikke kan udstå ved den danske samfundsindretning, så det ville være svært at bære. Men i den nuværende politiske situation ser jeg ikke noget andet sted at gå hen med min stemme, og så kan man jo som medlem påvirke lidt indefra, hvis man ellers vil ofre tiden på det.

Books and various forms of alcohol (beer, wine, sake) seems to be the dominant theme in this year’s birthday presents. Not sure what to make of that, but I do enjoy both. Thanks, everyone! ;->

I’ve long wanted an MP3 player that would let me slow down the music without changing pitch, easily fast forward and backward, loop a particular section, as well as change pitch—in other words, all the things you need when transcribing music from recordings. Well, it wasn’t until today that it dawned on me that I shouldn’t look for a hardware device, but a piece of software. I was still stuck in the mental model of my old Sony Professional Walkman without realizing it.

So I went on a hunt for software to match my spec, and found two: Amazing Slow Downer, and Transcribe!. They both fit the bill, but they’re also both fairly expensive ($45) compared with most of the shareware I buy (typically $15-$25), and they feature pretty clunky, un-attractive interfaces.

The ASD has very detailed control over speed, which I guess you really don’t need, whereas Transcribe! just offers half and 25%. But ASD also lets you set the loop boundaries with input boxes, which I find superior to the detailed mouse maneuvering required with Transcribe!

But the big thing that Transcribe! has going for it is the graph that shows you the music visually, making it easier to navigate the song. And I guess the on-screen keyboard can be really useful if you want to do some quick work without moving over to the piano. So I guess Transcribe! has the edge.

But why the ugly interface? I find that fascinating, and a turn-off at the same time. On the Mac, I’m spoiled, with great-looking user interfaces. What’s up with that?

Of course, since I’m not given an alternative, I’ll just have to live with it. But it’s interesting, if not surprising, how once you move out of the mainstream, the software options are less polished and more expensive.

UPDATE: Ok, this totally kicks ass. You can highlight a section of up to one second, and it’ll break it down, so you can see which notes are being played, aligned with the on-screen keyboard. It’s beautiful, and makes it a gazillion times easier to decode complex chords. Exciting stuff. See the bottom half of this screenshot.

Evan pointed to this old piece about sleep habits: Get up at a fixed time every morning and don’t go to sleep until you’re tired.

This fits my own experience pretty well. I’ve found that I wake up more well rested when I’ve had less sleep than I’d like to, but also, subsequently, that my sleep needs vary a lot more than I thought. And not going to bed until I’m so tired I have no trouble falling asleep has been a relief—no more lying awake in bed trying to sleep.

The breakthrough for me came when our daughter started waking us up at around the same time each morning. There’s simply no negotiating with a baby that’s awake and ready to seize the day.

I recall David naming three reasons for leaving Denmark: Taxes, taxes, and taxes.

Well, it’s that time of year again: I just received my tax statement for last year, and I keep getting shell-shocked each year as I’m reminded of the marginal tax level around here.

For those of you unfamiliar with the numbers, I pay 61.5% tax on every additional dollar (kr) I make. That’s $385 to spend for every $1,000 I make. Another way to put it is that to buy that $5 beer at a bar, I have earn $13 pretax. And I’m not even accounting for the 25% sales tax which makes the $5 beer cost $6.50 (kr40).

Sure, I’m in the top bracket. Along with everyone else making more than $51.770 per year, or $4,314 per month.

Makes you want to follow David :)

I’m in the process of getting a “digital signature” for communicating with the tax authorities here in Denmark. It’s my fourth attempt, the other times I’ve failed, and the failed to get back to it before the deadline expired. Sigh.

Here are the 21 easy steps to digital identity bliss. Those come after the first 5 or so that you go through to order the pin code in the first place.

It sounds like they might have had an Enterprise Astronaut or two design this thing. Intuition tells me there’s got to be a simpler way. I’m no security expert, but how about just snail mailing people a pin that they’ll use for password? If you lose it, order a new one. Combine it with some good intrusion or abuse detection, and that just might be secure enough?

Thanks to great work by Fraser Speirs, author of FlickrExport, the upcoming 1.3.3 release will work with 23. I know, because I’ve tried it: This photo was uploaded using FlickrExport. Fraser’s own post is here.

If you can’t wait till the release, you can build it yourself (see the last comment for help with configuration).

Once you have the release, all you need to do is:

defaults write com.connectedflow.flickrexport FlickrHost www.23hq.com

You can do this after installing, but before launching iPhoto, and you can do it as yourself, don’t need to be admin.

Thanks, Fraser!

UPDATE: 1.3.3 is out.

Wow, $20 for an SSL certificate. Sounds like a bargain compared to Verisign’s $349 price tag. Looks like I’ll be going to Pelle for my certs.

When will I see an option to backup to S3 in my favorite backup software? Seems like an obvious option for network backup .

You gotta love this: The Gawker Stalker lets you report on and keep track of all the latest celebrity sightings in New York. What a great idea. Now we just need to be able to send in photos via our cameraphones and get them geotagged automatically.

Caro er blevet interviewet fordi hun har købt brænde - i Volvoen. Vi hader de her ligegyldige indslag hvor man skal høre hvad ligegyldige almindelige mennesker mener om ligegyldige ting - og nu er Caro åbenbart blevet offer. Enjoy!

PS! Det kan være hun bliver klippet fra fordi hun ikke kunne tage det alvorligt.

OPDATERING: Jeps, hun var på. Først Martin, og nu Caro - jeg er omgivet af TV-kendisser ”;>”

Martin de Thurah, whom I mentioned as my inspiration to make every project matter, just won the award for best music video at this year’s Danish Music Awards for the video for “Human” by Carpark North. Congratulations!

My friend and photographer Anders Hviid now has a photo stream at 23. I’m looking forward to seeing his stuff. Check out his photos over at hviidphotography.dk—quite sharp, I think.

I just came across Vision, a theme designer that Tobias Lütke, Justin Palmer, and friends, have built for Shopify, so you can just download the package, design your templates, and produce a Zip package ready to use with Shopify, their coming product. That is a really good way of solving the problem of making it easy for designers to design templates.

This is definitely something we could use with PublicSquare. We, too, want to let our customers create their own themes, share themes, and we want to make it easy for them to do so. It would be nice if the core of this stuff was open.

We spent the weekend at Ravlunda Bränneri, a Bed & Breakfast in Österlen, the east coast of the souther tip of Sweden. The place is owned and run by a friend’s mom, and she’d invited 15 friends to spend the weekend with her there. What a fantastic idea! So unusual to have a mom with rooms and kitchen to host and feed so many people. And may I add, she’s a great cook!

Anyway, just wanted to say that if you’re around that area, you should seriously consider staying there. You won’t regret it.

I have some thoughts sparked by the debate over the Mohammad cartoons.

1. We only have ourselves to blame for the mess we’re in. Our problems take root in 4 decades of failed immigration policy, and we the electorate are alone responsible for bringing us here. Blaming the immigrants will not help solve the problems, as they are not the cause.

2. I have experienced the difficulties of coming here up close, through my employment of an American, a Latin American, and a Swede. Two are jews, one is vegetarian, non-drinker and non-smoker, one spent 10 hours a week learning Danish (and it wasn’t the swede). Denmark is a really tough country to come to.

   The language is exceedingly difficult to learn, not least because we speak it so fast, make no effort to be helpful and understanding towards learners, and frown upon people who don’t get our vowels exactly right as being stupid and inferior. Besides, everybody already have all the friends they need, and when there’s something social going on, you’re effectively shut out if you don’t speak the language, and if that wasn’t enough there can be no accommodation to people who don’t drink, eat meat, or who get sick from the smoke. Tough luck. To say that we’re not a welcoming place is a gross understatement.

3. You can’t make people integrate well by force and declaration. Presenting immigrants with letters like this (linked from the Danish Immigration Service, via Sean) will only add insult to injury and alienate our immigrants. (There’s been recent talk about yet another document in the same vein.) You can only achieve real integration by motivating people, by offering an upside, and by offering basic dignity and respect. You can force superficial compliance, you can get people to sign documents, but you cannot make them mean it or want it. Anybody with children or employees should know this.

4. We need to bring back political correctness. When Troels Lund Poulsen had the final word in the DR debate in Thorvaldsen’s Museum about a month ago, he talked about the need for understanding from “both Danes and Muslims”. Muslims are danes, too, for crying out loud! We need to sanitize our language until we no longer make basic mistakes like this. Generalizations like “them” and “us” are also compounding the problem, not solving it. And when you let the language slide, it distorts your perception of the world, to the extent that you start believing the generalizations. We need to establish some ground rules for how we talk about the problems and enforce them (not through law, but through convention), and our understanding will gradually become more nuanced, not less.

Technorati Tags: denmark, mohammadcartoons, integration, immigration, politics

This photo was on the packaging for a baby bouncer. Flora actually liked it, but the baby on that photo just looks scared to death. And the image quality is terrible. I wonder why they couldn’t at least find a baby that looked like he was having fun with it. Weird.

Christina has a few issues with Basecamp. Number six … I agree with all of them, though I’m a geek so I seem to put up with it more.