Lars Pind

Watched Fucking Åmål tonight, nine years after the initial release. Brilliant movie. And only an hour and a half. What’s the deal with making movies so long. It’s great. If you get a chance, watch it. Not too much depression, just enough to set you up to really appreciate the finale.

It’s the second time I ate at Cafe Zeleste in Nyhavn in Copenhagen, and it’s the second time I’ve had to ask to have the bill corrected. Last time, which is probably 4 years back, we’d had several tap beers, but not quite as many as they claimed. This time, it was the dessert where they’d randomly added 10 kroner to the price, plus a dessert wine, where they’d put in the 115 one, when the waitress had claimed to give me the 75 kroner one.

All in all, they tried to charge me 223 kroner instead of 173, a 29% surcharge. Absurd to experience this two times out of two at the same place.

My advice? Stay away, or at least check the bill very carefully. Get the menu and compare each item.

You may look like a fool doing it, but if you don’t, you will be the fool.

I’m well underway with my free coaching guinea pigs. 7 clients have signed up so far, on 3 continents (US, Europe, Australia), 8 full sessions have been completed, and the feedback has been outstanding.

“It was fantastic!” writes one.

“I think it’s going to be more valuable than I imagined” writes another.

“A fab experience” writes a third (freely translated from “en fed oplevelse”).

I’ve helped two people with their novels so far. What are the odds of that?

I’ve also gotten the call from a client who had taken specific action at work, based on our conversation, and it had been a really good experience. That’s a nice call to get.

It’s humbling and deeply satisfying to get permission to touch people’s lives in such a deep way. Thanks for giving me that permission and for playing along.

Now that I’m well underway with my training to become a coach, I wanted to give a brief summary of what it is, to take some of the mystery out of it.

The process has six simple steps. They’re not set in stone, but generally tend to work well in that order.

Step 1 is about finding the want. What do you want to work on in this session? But we don’t take the first answer at face value. Instead, we go deeper.

The client may say “I want to get a new job”. Then you ask “what will a new job give you?”. The answer may be “more money”. “What will more money give you?”. You keep going until you get quite deep, and then let the client decide which of these things he or she would most like to work on today. This can often lead to a significant shortcut.

The trick here is that people don’t go very deep on their own. They think they want a job because they want more money, but they never really thought about what they need these money for. This is one of the reasons coaching is so effective, that the brain doesn’t go down this path unless specifically asked to do so.

Step 2 is about finding out what prevents you from getting your want. We keep asking for more reasons. Again, most people stop at the first one or two reasons not to do something, and leave it that. We ask until we have them all.

Step 3 is about motivation. What happens if you don’t get past your preventions and never get what you wanted? Who would you be if you did get past your preventions and get what you want?

Step 4 is where the action is. That’s where we look at each prevention and get to the bottom of it. You say it’ll cost money? How much money? It’ll be painful? How much pain? For how long?

Often, there will be preventions that are founded in some deep beliefs. Perhaps you believe that you have to be perfect? These kinds of limiting beliefs will often be broken simply by exposing them in their entirety. If not, there are other ways to break them.

Sometimes a prevention is real, and just needs to be worked around.

The bottom line here is, again, that by ourselves, we don’t get to the bottom of what prevents us from getting what we want, so we just don’t know. By getting honest and specific about it, we can make a conscious choice: Given the consequences, do we still want it?

Step 5 is where we look at how we can move forward given the new understanding. Perhaps there are new habits that need to be established, books that would be good to read. This can go many ways.

And in step 6, we wrap up and usually agree on what to work on till next time.

Coaching works really well because our brain has blind spots:

• It doesn’t get specific about things like the end goal, the root causes, etc.
• It doesn’t get precise about how much time or money or pain.
• It doesn’t see its own beliefs

When you have a belief, you tend to really believe that it’s true, that is, it’s true for all people, not just for you. So true that you don’t notice it. A coach can help you see that.

There’s obviously a lot more to it than the above, but I wanted to explain a little bit of the nuts and bolts of it, so you can start picturing how it works, and how it might help you.

And if you’re reading this, and you’d like to try coaching, you can be my guinea pig. I’ll coach you in person or over Skype, for free.

I’ve already gotten a handful of successful sessions under my belt, and the clients have told me it was a very good experience for them. It’s time to expand the circle now.

So just let me know, and we can arrange something. You don’t need to prepare, other than think about what you want, and we’ll take it from there.

UPDATE: Read about Morten Just’s experience with his first coaching session (in Danish).

The 12 bottles of olive oil that I ordered from Siena arrived today, whole and unscathed and on time. Looking good.

Back eons ago, when I was still in high school, we used to listen to an album by a Danish pianist and composer named Lars Brogård. The album was called “Danmark suiten”, the Denmark suite.

I don’t recall any details about it, but I do recall that I liked it a lot. It was a very melodic form of jazz, all Lars Brogård’s own compositions, and I seem to recall that he never published any other albums, nor have I heard of him playing one any other album. And I seem to recall he didn’t even do this piano thing full-time.

By the way, could it be this Lars Brogård?

I found it on bibliotek.dk, but I really want it in electronic form.

Does anyone else know this album, or the pianist/composer?

I found some links and figure out how to get photos to show up on my computer screen immediately after taking them. Apparently, it’s called “tethered”, and it requires a USB cable between the camera and the computer, and some special software. I also had to change a setting called “Communication” on my Canon 350D to “PC connection” from the default “Print/PTP”. It’s on the last settings tab.

Then I downloaded Capture One PRO, which, at EUR 499 is way overpriced for the task. Capture One PRO can connect to the camera, show the current aperture, timer, and EV settings, and there’s even a “Capture” button that will make the camera shoot a frame and in just a few seconds it shows up on the laptop.

Then there’s a tutorial for how to automatically get the photos from Capture One PRO and into Aperture to work with them there.

It worked light a charm last night, but this morning I had some communication errors between Capture One PRO and the camera. I haven’t had a chance to work it out yet.

There’s also some software from Canon that can apparently do pieces of this puzzle, but I haven’t been able to figure that out yet, either.

I’ve had an unexpected setback, which is that our internet connection at home is down. I’m writing this on a connection through my cell phone.

I’m really glad I applied as a photographer at iStock, and I’m even more thrilled I got rejected. Why? Because the rejection mail included a link to this article on how to do a custom white balance, which I just followed, and I took the photo on the right, which I never would’ve been able to without understanding custom white balance.

And it’s not hard at all, it’s just that I didn’t know what that setting was for. And now I do. Now I know how they take those photos with the very very white background. Easy as pie.

Taking that photo, though, reminded me of something. I once saw a photographer on TV who had his camera on a tripod next to his Mac, and whenever he’d taken a new photo, it would instantly show up on his Mac’s screen, so he could see if all the details were just right, before moving on.

What does such a setup require? I’d really like to have something like that, and I imagine it can’t be that expensive. I think it would make the feedback loop so much faster that I’d learn a lot faster from my failures.

Does anyone here know how to do that?

The New York Times published 101 great 10-minute recipes in short form a few weeks back, which I found thanks to my friend Mark Hurst. And now there’s even 10 more, this time reader-contributed.

I’ve printed the first 101 ones and keep it on top of my refrigerator for easy reference. And I’ve already cooked a couple of meals from it.

The cool thing is that the form that the recipes are written in inspires me to improvise more in my cooking. I’ll mix and match from the reicpes, or I’ll add a side dish, or I’ll think of something else that I can prepare similarly to the recipe.

It’s really a neat collection. Thanks to Mark for pointing it out.

Someone asked me about user-contributed localizations, where you ask your users to translate your software or other writing for you, as opposed to hiring a professional agency.

Here’s my response. Feel free to add or refresh my memory on the work we did with OpenACS.

My experience has been that user-contributed translations work exceedingly well.

In my experience, the issues are not so much around quality per se, as around differences of opinion on what’s the best way to translate something. In those cases, if you can invite people to draw attention to them, and then just resolve those. For resolution, you can look to how wikipedia resolves disputes, you can vote, or you can let someone specially trusted get the say.

Sometimes users can even be better translators than professionel translators, because they’re more intimately familiar with the domain.

The user-contributed localization project I’m most familiar with, because I was running it at one time, is http://translate.openacs.org/. It’s now not so active, but it was at one point, and we got a lot translated fast, and judged by the languages I do understand and feedback from others, it was of good quality.

One thing we did do was allow anyone to localize anything on their own install of the software, by turning on a “translation mode”, which would throw in a little dot next to each translatable text, which you could then translate on the spot, and see the new translation in place.

You could then exchange your local translations with others, including the central translation server, though that was not fully automated.

Another lesson was on reuse of strings. I remember there were issues where you’d translate a string in one place, and then the same string was used in another place, where you wanted a different translation. I can’t think of an example right now, but that’s something to watch out for. Too many identical strings is tedious to translate, but if you have too little granularity, you have a recipe for disputes. Again, it may be something that can be resolved on the fly as people point out that what’s the same in English is not the same in, say, Croatian.

Other examples are Shopify, which I believe also lets you make your own private translation if you’re unhappy with the one others did, and the translation of Joel Spolsky’s articles, and the 37signals “Getting Real” book.

Here’s a neat trick I picked up from Fast Food My Way by Jacques Pepin (an awesome cookbook, by the way).

Whenever I have some leftover white bread that’s getting old, just chop it up (ff it’s still relatively fresh, I’ll take the crust, too), mix it with some fresh rosemary (I always have fresh rosemary—it’ll last essentially forever if you water it, if you plant it in the garden it can grow really big), dried thyme, salt, pepper, and a good splash of olive oil. And then just put it in the oven at 200 C for about 10-15 minutes.

Let it cool, put it in a plastic bag, and you have some delicious bread crumbs that you can use as croutons for salad, beat up with a rolling pin to make it more fine grained and roll your fish or meat in it, serve over pasta dishes, and whatnot. And the best part is it’ll keep for 2 weeks in the fridge, so your bread really gets a long and rich after-life.

It’s smells and tastes great.

When we were in Italy in June, we stopped by the Consorzio Agrario Siena (photo) supermarket in Siena. I’m not sure why I keep doing that, it’s mostly just torture to look at all that great food that you can’t get at home, and you can’t really buy, because it won’t keep till you’re home, and what you really want to do is go shop and then cook a delicious meal for all your friends, but they’re all 1,600 kms away.

Alas, we went, and one thing we bought home was a small 500ml bottle of local Siena olive oil.

That olive oil was simply the best olive oil, I’ve ever owned, period. It’s great for cooking, awesome in pesto, terrific in salads, you name it.

And it turns out that you can buy it online, and they’ll even ship it to Denmark. So I went ahead and ordered a box of 12 bottles, for the neat price of just under DKK 100 per bottle, including shipping. But I think it’s well worth it.

In my local supermarket, Kvickly, which admittedly doesn’t have a whole lot going for it, other than it’s very near my home, sells an Il Fornaio-branded olive oil at exactly the same price, but it’s a complete waste of money.

If you’re nearby, you’re welcome to come by and try it when it has arrived, and you can also buy a bottle if you like it. If it spreads, we can get even more the next time and maybe save on the shipping.

So my application to become a photographer for iStock was rejected. To be honest, I wasn’t surprised. When I looked through my photos to pick something to submit, a good part had people on them that I couldn’t or wouldn’t ask to sign a model release, another part were of small fun situations that didn’t really constitute stock material, and the rest were just plain not very good. That’s not counting the private photos. So I struggled to find even 3 from the past 6 months worth submitting.

But I did get some constructive criticism, and I know I have tons to learn.

I want to try and shoot some photos that are targeted at iStock, rather than just submitting photos I’ve taken anyway.

I also want to go through my earlier archives and dig out the best shots.

One thing I did last week was get a decent photo printer and start printing photos and hang them at the wall. It was my friend, Anders Hviid who suggested this, saying how important it is to look at your own pictures.

And it turns out to be really awesome. It’s also humbling, because the shots that I thought were so great at the time turn out to be really boring sometimes. But there are also shots that turn out to have a surprising draw to them. Most of all, it’s fun to see your own stuff on the wall, it’s fun that it’s so cheap and easy you can make frequent changes, and you can have your pictures up on the wall just minutes after it happened.

I wasn’t really aware of the differences behind the S and the L in the Canon lens nomenclature, but thanks to Rasmus for pointing it out, and thanks to Wikipedia for all the gory details. Here’s where you can read up on it all:

• The EF mount is what all modern Canon cameras use
• The L-series lenses are described in the same article, but further down
• The EF-S series has its own page, because it’s a separate mount: You can use EF lenses on the EF-S-compatible cameras (the small chip bodies like the 350D and 400D), but you can’t use the EF-S lenses on the full-frame bodies like the 5D and 1D.

There’s also descriptions of the individual lenses in question:

• 24-70mm L, which is a great L-series lens
• 16-35mm L, which is a really expensive L-series lens
• 17-40mm L, which is a more affordable L-series lens
• 17-55mm EF-S, which is a decent all-round lens

Fredmiranda.com also have some good reviews:

• 24-70mm L
• 16-35mm L
• 17-40mm L
• 17-55mm EF-S

I can’t find one for the 17-55mm one.

For the record, I ended up getting the 17-55mm to take along when I travel and only want to carry one lens. Usually what I want to do is capture special moments and glimpses, and I’m okay with trading some quality for convenience. But I’m going to take Rasmus’ advice and keep the 24-70mm lens. It’s too good to let go of.

Some of my latest photos are taken with the 17-55mm.

Weird. There’s a 10-day food festival going on in Copenhagen, starting August 24, for the third consecutive year, and I hadn’t heard about it.

Copenhagen Cooking looks like it’s going to be interesting. The Danish dining scene has definitely changed a lot in the past few years. Hooray for that.

Are you aware of any life coaching software? That is, software that either partially replaces a life coach, supports working with a coach. If so, link it up.

Stocks aren’t something to be tracked on a daily basis, but it’s nice to keep an eye on things to see where they’re headed, and spot some opportunities to replenish your holdings.

What sites do you use to keep track?

Just a quick note to say that comments are working again, after being on-off broken since the relaunch on Mephisto a week ago. Thanks to Tongue and Groove for the fix.

Where are you at? Where would you like to be? What’s working for you? What’s not working?

The other day I read Steve Pavlina’s post Quality and Contribution, about how if you know how to contribute $10,000 worth of value in 10 minutes, or an hour, or whatever the number may be, then paying $10,000 rather than $1,000 for o hotel room might be well worth it. You get the idea.

A few months back, I posted a quote about Steven Spielberg and has ability to go around all day creatively enhancing things around him using his brainpower.

Putting the two together, it’s fantastic when you have that experience of using your brainpower in a way that contributes massively in a short amount of time. And I had just such an experience on Monday morning.

I’ve become involved in a project, called Børn i Byen, led by my wife, Caroline Meldgaard, a developer, Gert, and a designer, Mette. My role is to be an advisor/mentor on everything – business, marketing, strategy, development, design, and process.

In all the software projects I’ve done so far, I’ve been a developer. But I’m not on this one, and it turns out to suit me perfectly.

Being in a consulting role, while still being on the inside, part of the team (and part of the equity), allows me to apply perspective, and I can just draw on all of my experience with designing, building, and marketing software, and with building businesses in a completely natural way.

On Monday, I was actually mostly checking my email, catching up after the weekend, as Caroline and Gert were discussing various things. Every once in a while, they’d get stuck, and throw the ball over to me. I’d ask questions and offer suggestions, and in just a few minutes, a decision had been made, and we were all smiling.

It happened a number of times. One of the times, an issue about a feature that we had originally planned for some time after launch, but that our market has kept telling us really is essential, was brought up again. Gert and I had employed the 37signals doctrine of making features work really hard to get implemented, but at some point you just have to hand it to the feature, that it really really needs to be there.

So we knew that, but we hadn’t figured out the impact yet. When it was brought up yet again, I took us out to the whiteboard in the kitchen, and in ten minutes flat, we had the interface sketches and datamodel done, so we could go straight to prioritization and scheduling, and move on.

It was such a gratifying experience to step in and contribute exactly what I had to contribute and what was needed.

I’m not sure how to further build on this experience, other than to be aware of oppourtinities to get in similar situations in the future. But it sure feels like a step in the right direction. Thank you!