Archive for August, 2003

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Still work­ing at the Uni­ver­sity of Copen­hagen I’ve run into a bit of trou­ble. The com­puter I’m using is locked so I’m not able to install cer­tain pro­grams etc. I can’t even install the oth­er­wise hor­ri­ble RealPlayer. Which nor­mally would make good sense in the kind of office I’m using, but kinda sucks when you know what you’re doing alright. And then this: Super­model Kate Moss becomes a pole dancer in the video for The White Stripes’ new sin­gle ‘I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself’ – a cover of the clas­sic made famous by Dusty Spring­field. See, that’s three things I like a lot. And you guessed it; it’s only avail­able for RealPlayer… Damn.

Indy­Media: Wake Up! Wake Up! It’s Yer Chips With Every­thing. A Tesco in Cam­bridge (UK) has had to with­draw a trial plac­ing RFID tags in Gillette razor blades after mas­sive protests. While going full big brother at their trial, tak­ing snap­shots of every­one reach­ing for a pack of razor blades, under­stand­ably scar­ing peo­ple, this case raises the impor­tant dis­cus­sion where exactly to put tags, prod­uct or pack­ag­ing. Cus­tomiza­tion and 1-to-1 com­mu­ni­ca­tion require some sort of iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, per­sonal or not–the chal­lenge here is to limit the pos­si­bil­ity of being mon­i­tored with­out con­sent and being tar­geted by all sorts of happy sales peo­ple. I’m get­ting enough spam as is, no need to take this into the pub­lic space, mak­ing my cell­phone go crazy as soon as I enter a super­mar­ket, pass by the new model of the car I’m dri­ving or walk by a brothel wear­ing my ‘Slut’-shirt. RFID has huge poten­tial, let’s make an effort to use this for the com­mon good and not let this be con­trolled by the next gen­er­a­tion spammers.

Our sad gov­ern­ment does its best to “nor­mal­ize” Chris­tia­nia (read: shut down) which, I might add, is a hor­ri­ble idea. A protest march is being held on the 30th of August and while I’ve been rant­ing about the lack of fresh­ness in just doing another march before, I strongly sup­port the project; with a gov­ern­ment indif­fer­ent to debat­ing, you might as well show your sup­port by show­ing up, hope­fully with thou­sands of oth­ers. Please don’t allow this to turn into an issue of being pro or con on drugs–it’s NOT what this is about.

Good to see Cory giv­ing this some cov­er­age, by the way. Yeah!

Well, here I am, doing a lit­tle group­ware sup­port gig at the Uni­ver­sity of Copen­hagen, Insti­tute of Dan­ish lan­guage and lit­ter­a­ture. It’s all part of a major scheme meant to facil­i­tate bet­ter inter­ac­tion around and dur­ing courses; my job is to assist the teach­ing staff in using the soft­ware. So I’ll be at my new lit­tle office for the next cou­ple of weeks, curi­ous to whether the pres­ence of a sup­porter will have any effect on if this thing will lift off or not. Any­way, it’s a bril­liant idea (actu­ally, it’s just what should be expected, but still–things aren’t going too fast here in Uni-land all the time, so a small round of applause is appro­pri­ate I guess…) and I first thought of blog­ging the whole expe­ri­ence as a log of the first steps of adapt­ing new tech­nol­ogy in major institutions–and for the obvi­ous enter­tain­ment value bound to fol­low jobs of this nature. But the thing is, it might just be a rather bad idea. I haven’t got any idea if I’ll be busy or not, and I’m not going to do a “noth­ing hap­pened today” piece every­day about how bored I am. So I think I’ll just do a wrapup at the end, let­ting you know how it all went.

For now, I’m pretty much set­tled in, decent browsers and news read­ers installed (though it’s pretty damn hard being allowed to do any­thing with­out admin priv­i­leges on the machine I’ve been given due to its place­ment in the net­work), bad ass drum’n’bass in my head­phones, canned bev­er­ages, cof­fee on its way… I think I’ll just enjoy being good ol’ fash­ioned employed for a while…

Update: Things are cook­ing, lots of peo­ple sign­ing up, learn­ing how to use the system.

Just stum­bled upon the Urban75 ezine sport­ing loads of UK/London stuff. Pic­tures from Brix­ton always put a smile on my face…

Mez­zoblue on an all to famil­iar sub­ject: RSI and Dis­com­fort. A bit of a clas­sic, unfortunately…it seems tightly con­nected with our mis­sion to save the world from the (dis)comfort of our offices. Remem­ber to excer­cise, take a walk, change posi­tion once in a while. We’re all hav­ing fun here, but it’s not worth it if we’re being to hard on our bod­ies at the same time. I rec­om­mend going out for lunch a lot more. It’s not really some­thing we do too much in Den­mark. Take a good break, meet up with some nice peo­ple, take a walk after a good meal. Tips from Mez­zoblue include:

Avoid sit­ting for pro­longed peri­ods of time, as this causes pos­tural strain.
Take fre­quent breaks to stand up and stretch.
Place both feet flat on the floor when sit­ting.
Avoid cross­ing your legs — this habit can lead to an imbal­ance in the pelvis.
Sit back on the chair. It is very impor­tant that you give your back the proper sup­port.
Adjust your chair so that your knee is slightly higher than your hip. If your chair is not adjustable you will need a footrest.
Don’t sit in a chair that is too large, too high or too low.
Avoid lean­ing for­ward with your back arched. Work toward not being a slouch. 

Copen­hagen based sound engi­neers and DIY entre­peneurs Kom­po­nent are tear­ing a jeep apart this week­end at LAB, Vester­bro­gade. DJs and beers, bar­be­cue and car parts — the jeep will be reassem­bled with WiFi, MP3 plaer and other good­ies. Live web­cam pic­tures at the site.

Ommer.dk bringer dig: Crack.dk — din guide til alt brunt… Og en særde­les værdig konkur­rent til sit forbillede.

My mail server has been act­ing funny since 10 AM this morn­ing. I get some of my mail here and there, but still miss quite a bit. If you have sent me some­thing today, please try again, pos­si­bly using an alter­nate email address. Thanks.