Casper on Life

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

2004-12-24T12:45:18Z

Let me tell you a bit about my christmas. My parents has been divorced since I was a small kid, so for as long as I can remember I've actually enjoyed two christmas eves: One on the 23th and one on the 24th. Every other year I spend the "real" christmas eve with my fathers family and vica versa. This generally add up to a lot presents, so I don't complain!

My christmas is usually a traditional danish one. It's very focused around the dinner, which in my families consists of both duck and roast pork. I've never been a big fan of roast pork, so I stick to the duck most of the time. Next to the meat we have cooked potatoes and red cabbage, and sometimes also caramel potatoes or spinach, but that's not my taste either - and then of course lots of gravy!

Is it just my family where people always has to argue about whether to go around the christmas three and sing songs, or to completely skip it or go directly to the presents? Well, in my opinion it's a vital part of christmas eve, and although most of us probably feel a bit stupid holding hands with a relative we only see twice a year and singing we can only remember the first verse of, it's still not real christmas without it.

New years eve is always a cold affairn here in Denmark, so as I've mentioned earlier I am happy that I will be spending that particular evening on a cozy warm island outside the coast of Africa. Looking forward to that indeed.

Have a nice christmas!

Two weeks later ...

2004-11-30T21:29:51Z

I got my laptop back from repair and thought that everything was good for a couple of days. Wrong! It started freezing up, rebooting or boot insanely slow, so I thought I better format it and reinstall Windows. Oh well, it also booted during Windows XP setup, so I figured there was probably something wrong with the hardware. At first I thought the hard disk hard started dying, but then I noticed that my laptop was sometimes convinced that I only got 32 mb of ram (and XP runs extremely slow at 32 mb ram!), so I finally figured that the ram was probably defect.

Now the laptop is back for repair, and as usual I have no idea about when it will be back, and how they will try to charge me for it after wards, even though it is still covered by warranty.

Except for the usual laptop frustrations things are going pretty well; I'm starting to get the hang of working as a consultant, and since today is pay day I've also seen the first fruits of my increased work effort - and I like it :)

Tomorrow December kicks in, and when it comes to christmas it seems like surprisingly many people actually don't like christmas very much. Maybe it's because they don't like their families, but I mean; there is still the gifts and the food! Just after christmas I'm going with the girlfriend, her parents and sisters to the Portuguese island of Madeira to celebrate, hopefully, a fantastic new years eve.

Laptop frustrations

2004-11-14T16:09:42Z

It's been while since I've posted, but I've got a few excuses for that. Three to be exact.

First of all; my laptop has been out of order, and I use my laptop for everything. It's been terrible not be able to use it, and it has been 14 days that way now. The initial was that my power cable seemingly broke, so the laptop didn't get any power. It then took almost two weeks to get a new power cable, but when it finally arrived, I realised that it was actually the socket that had a loose connection. So for a few happy hours this friday I had my laptop running with power and everything. Then it suddenly shut down, and I haven't been able to turn it on ever since. I even have to wait untill tomorrow before I can send it to repair, as someone has to get their ass to work and assign and RMA-number to me, that I can put in the box with the laptop. So it will probably be at least a week more without my laptop *sigh*

Second; I've been spending almost every hour awake on a school assignment. In groups of four, we have been writing a report with objectoriented analysis and design of an IT system, with usability tests and a running prototype written in Java. So it's been tough, but we ended up delievering 84 pages.

Third; I have to admit something: I'm not entirely faithful to this page. There is ... this is hard for me to say ... but there is another weblog in my life. And it's in Danish ... it's nothing personal, I mean; I've really enjoyed writing this weblog, and if you still wants this relationship to continue, there is no law against writing in two weblogs at the same time. But it is of course always hard to share your time, attention and ideas between two weblogs ...I will probably steal some ideas from my articles here and use them on the other weblog, but there will also be new subjects; I'm writing a little a unit testing at the moment, and there will probably also come something about source control.

You want to now the name and address of my other weblog? Well, it's not entirely mine. It that company I've become a part of; Kraftvaerk, we have a weblog on our website. It's instead of posting news, a weblog seems a bit more humane. You can find the weblog here:
http://www.kraftvaerk.net/

Americans controlled by fear

2004-11-03T19:24:20Z

So it happened. Just like I was afraid of, the Americans let their decision on who should be King of the World be controlled by fear instead of common sense. George W. Bush, a man whose favorite hobbies are war far away and corruption at home got four more years to make World War 3 inevitable.

I understand the Americans. I’m not sure if I myself would have the guts to put my immediate fear behind me, and vote for a man who could represent a long term solution to terror. Bush wants war because he himself and his family and friends makes loads of money from it, but you all now that, so why do I even bother to repeat it. It doesn’t seem to matter to most Americans anyway.

When I was a kid I had a dream about moving to USA. It seemed liked the country where everything was possible. Now I have realised that what most Americans calls patriotism, are really just selfishness. It’s sad to live in a country that aspires so much to USA, and I understand why many people around the world doesn’t like USA and the Western world. We are all Bush’es.

Learning Linux

2004-10-31T13:25:22Z

At my home, christmas has already started. My girlfriend put the first christmas cd on on October 29th. If she had as much time as I have, our small apartment would probably already be wound up with all her christmas decorations. As of now, I just hope I can keep it at bay until the middle of November at least.

As for the headline of this entry; "Learning Linux", it's related to a new subject in school; "Operating Systems". It has required us all to install Linux on our computers so we can mess with operation system by writing C applications, and so I have been tossed into the foreign and strange world of Linux.

Lucky for me, I've been using computers long enough to have a solid experience with DOS, so the console concept is not completely new to me. Besides the command line, there is also several GUI's to choose from, and I have installed Mandrake Linux with KDE. I'm running it on Virtual PC since I wasn't really up to letting Linux getting it own partition, and I also like the concept of just having Linux in a sandbox in my good old Windows XP.

Recruiting programmers

2004-10-24T10:49:21Z

One of my favorite job functions in my nearly 5 years at the Danish portal site Jubii was the one as recruiter. There was no common HR department at Jubii, so the departments had to hire people themselves, and once I started acting as a lead programmer, my boss at the time also thought I should hire the people I was going to be working closely with. In the beginning we were both together at the job interviews, but soon we decided to split up, so that the applicant had to “get past me” in order to get the final job interview with my boss.

It was not easy to get past me, and I am going to tell you why. To me, a job interview with a programmer isn’t just going through the resume and talking about this and that. The applicant has to be more than a nice guy with an IT-related education and some business experience; he also has to prove that he thinks like a programmer, so I created a series of small tests the applicant had to go through during the job interview – I will get back to them.

I am fascinated by the significance of the first-hand impression at a job interview. I would like to be able to say that I didn’t judge the applicants by the very first glimpse I got of them, but I have to admit that it was unavoidable not to do it. The first-hand impression always gave the applicant a slightly better or a slightly worse starting point – it’s impossible to stay neutral. I can’t really control what I look for in a first-hand impression, but I think it comes down to this:

Does the applicant look like someone I could have as a friend?
Is the applicant wearing the expected “working clothes”? (A programmer doesn’t wear a suit in my mind, but rather relaxed jeans and a t-shirt with a funny logo.)
Is the applicant nervous or relaxed?

It’s extremely unfair to judge applicants by questions like these, so my point with this is; that if you are recruiting someone, you should be aware of what you are looking for in the first-hand impression, and then try to control it.

Back to the tests. Most of the test I “created” are actually stolen directly from Joel Spolsky’s excellent article; The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing, and the whole structure and focus of my job interviews was also heavily inspired by that article, so I can’t encourage you enough to read it. For the job description “ASP and ASP.NET programmer” I chose to use the following tests:

Programming on paper: Reverse a string.
Questions about object orientated programming
The design question
The impossible question
The LEGO assignment

I won’t dig to deep into the first two tests, other than saying that it’s actually rather hard to find a programming assignment that can be solved in 10 minutes using nothing but pen and paper, and it’s even harder to think of a small assignment that will show if the applicant understands object orientated programming. Try it.

Both the design question and the impossible question are explained in Joel’s article, so I won’t do it here, but just give some examples. My favourite design question is this:
“The first skyscraper in Copenhagen is being built for renting out as office space, and you are the designer of the elevators of this 50 floor building. How will you design the elevators?” Remember that the primary focus of the design question is out-of-the-box thinking.
My favourite impossible question is this: “How many litres of milk did the Danish population drink last year?” I’ve got answers all the way down from a couple of million litres up to several billion litres, but the important thing is that I have no clue about what the real answer is. The impossible question is all about watching the process of the applicant reaching his answer.

The LEGO assignment is my own invention. Joel has his mantra that a programmer should “be smart, and get things done”, and I think that’s a great guideline for hiring programmers. However, I wanted to be able to test the “get things done” part, and the LEGO assignment is my attempt to do this. The applicant gets a huge box of mixed LEGO bricks, and then he gets three minutes to solve the assignment: “Build a transport vehicle that has to the following characteristics:

It must work on land, in water and in air.
There must be seats for at least four persons
It must have a parabolic antenna
It must have front lights, rear lights and warning lights
It must be blue”

Three minutes is of course not enough to build anything that actually looks real, but it is indeed possible to incorporate all the characteristics if you make a couple of compromises and prioritizations. And that’s were the real benefit of this assignment comes in; the talk about the vehicle and the decisions of the applicant after the three minutes has passed.

Zoolandish

2004-10-21T08:23:13Z

I was at the Copenhagen Zoo last week, and I of course had to try out my new "digital camera", that is; my phone. SonyEricsson claims that the K700i model, which I am the proud owner of, is both a phone and camera. Well, all I can say is; that it's not both, and it's a good phone... but nevertheless, I'll post a couple of pictures from Zoo right here:

When browsing through the fifty-something pictures I took that day in Zoo, I realised something: Digital zoom on the K700i doesn't make any sense. The max resolution of the camera is 640x480, and the phone also has 4 x digital zoom. However, when you take pictures in 640x480, you cannot zoom at all. If you move down to the resulution 320x240, which most of the pictures above is taken in, you have 2 x digital zoom. Only if you move down to stamp-size; 160x120, you have 4 x digital zoom.

I took a picture of the ice bears above first in 640x480, of course with no zoom, since it not possible in that resolution. I then thought to myself: "Aha! Now I want a closeup of the bears, so I'll goto 320x240 and zoom in!" So I did, and the result was the picture above. If you compare the large picture without zoom with the small picture using zoom, you realize that digital zoom doesn't make any sense! Try it.

A visit from Jutland

2004-10-14T19:57:57Z

Denmark is a quite small country, but we do have different provinces divided by water. In fact Sealand, where Copenhagen (including me) is located, is just an island, like most of Denmark. However, the biggest province in Denmark - Jutland - is connected to the mainland, to Germany.

My girlfriend are from Jutland, in fact; she's just moved over here to Copenhagen a couple of months ago. I guess that's my fault. This weekend we have her family on visit here in our small apartment. We've snatched a picture of them with my brand new and super cool Sony Ericsson K700i:

What’s new?

2004-10-12T20:35:59Z

It’s been a while since my last entry in this web log. I can’t really claim that I’ve been more busy than usual, because I haven’t. I also can’t claim that I haven’t known what to write about; because I have a whole list of subjects I would like to dive into in this web log. So there are really no excuses other than that I haven’t felt inspired to write. Or something like that. Good thing I’m not aiming to be a journalist. I can hear professional writers fume: “Inspired to write! Ha!”. Anyway, today’s subject is not really on any particular issue, I would like to tell about a few things that has happened in my life.

Let’s take the most exciting news first: I’ve got a new job. (Quick brush-up for newcomers: I’ve worked as programmer at Jubii for close to 5 years, and I’m also studying full time). I can now officially call myself it-consultant - whatever that means. My employer is a Danish start-up called Kraftvaerk, and I’m supposed to do .NET programming for Kraftvaerk’s clients 15 hours a week. Looks like my first client will be – surprise surprise – good old Jubii. I would like to explain more about the firm and the job, but the truth is that I really don’t much yet. I’m starting at Kraftvaerk at November 1st, and I don’t really have a clue about how it’s going to be, as I haven’t worked as a consultant before. All I know right now is that my colleagues at Kraftvaerk seems to be both nice and skilled people.

In other news; I’ve bought a new mobile phone. The old one was not bad, not bad at all, but it at some point it just got too bad functioning, especially when it didn’t receive the sms’es people sent to me. So I’ve bought a SonyEricsson K700i – and no, it’s not because they have been advertising like hell in Denmark the last couple of months, I don’t give a shit about their “phone meets camera” catch phrase. It’s more that … it’s just a really nice phone. In many ways it’s similar to my girlfriend: Nice surface and finish, fantastic user interface, a great personality and able to place itself right among the top models of the market. Well, they also both has to recharge every night, but I can live that in both a phone and a girl.

Firefox is a better browser

2004-09-28T13:40:40Z

When I started using the internet, Netscape Navigator (I’m writing this in Word to get spelling- and grammar-checking, and I think it’s rather large of Microsoft that “Netscape” is included in the standard spelling dictionary) was the hot thing. Netscape 3.0 had just been released, and everyone who was anything in web industry rambled on about the fantastic this features of the browser. And it really was a great browser at the time, no doubt about that.

Meanwhile, Microsoft had been sleeping in the class, and hadn’t really come up to speed with the whole “internet-thing”. They’d only just realized that they would a need browser at a tremendous speed to compete with Netscape, so they had released Internet Explorer 1 and 2 during the past year, and those browsers where really bad. I mean really bad.

Shortly after Netscape’s release of Navigator 3.0 in 1996, Microsoft released their third version of Internet Explorer. IE 3.0 was not better than Netscape 3.0, but it was the first to support cascading style sheets (CSS), a very new and advanced standard on how to define the design and look of webpages. IE 3.0 came bundled with Windows 95, so it gained a fair amount of users although it wasn’t superior to Netscape 3.0.

Then Netscape 4.0 and Internet Explorer 4.0 were released within a few months in 1997. BAM! The browser wars were on, and the rest is history. Internet Explorer 4.0 was a far better browser than Netscape 4.0, which suffered from a lot of bugs, and IE 4 had the most comprehensive support for CSS and Dynamic HTML ever seen. As a 15 year old geek, I was immediately fascinated by the power of IE 4 – I even went into some of the DLL-files to snatch out DHTML-snippets I could use in my own code.

Microsoft improved Internet Explorer further with 5.0, 5.5 and 6.0, and since there was an IE integrated into all versions of Windows 98, IE was had soon won the browser war. Today, virtually everyone is using Internet Explorer, even though no new releases have been made for the past three years. But now it’s time to switch again. Just like IE 4 was a far better browser than Netscape, Mozilla Firefox is a far better browser than IE 6. However, Firefox does not come bundled with Windows, so everyone will have to make the hard decision of switching browser by them selves. Let me make that decision easy for you.

The three most important features of the Firefox browser to me, is tabbed browsing, ad blocking and the Google search field. You have probably already installed Google bar in your Internet Explorer, so you already have the ad blocking and the search field. But you don’t have tabbed browsing. Tabbed browsing is great! My favorite example for the benefits of tabbed browsing is looking through Google search results: You perform a search (using the integrated Google search field, of course) and then you simply click the links on the search result page that looks interesting, while holding down your Ctrl-key. This will make each link open in a new tab, while focus stays on the tab with the search results. This way, you can have plenty of pages loading in other tabs, while you continue to browse through the search result, or start looking the first pages in the other tabs, that has loaded by now. “I can achieve the same thing by holding the Shift-key down and opening new windows in IE” you might say. Believe me, it’s not the same thing. New windows steals focus, and you can’t see if they are still loading, and the clutter up the process bar for no reason. Tabbed browsing is much better.

Another great thing about Firefox is the extensions, the download manager and the themes. Everyone can write extensions to Firefox, and the best ones are published on the official Firefox extension website. A very simple, but also very much needed extension when switching from IE to Firefox is IEView, which allows you to open any page that displays strangely in Firefox (and some of those written very specifically for IE does) in IE just by right clicking and selecting that option from the context menu. For web developers, the extension Web Developer is an essential tool when developing new web pages, and if you like to use LiveJournal for your weblog; Deepest Sender is the perfect extension – I’ve never posted a weblog entry through the LiveJournal webpage – I’ve used Deepest Sender every single time!

The download manager in Firefox is far better than IE’s, but that’s not too hard to achieve. It can also be extended, so downloads for instance is showed in the status bar of Firefox, instead of using a separate window. Themes, the look of the browser, or skinning if you prefer that expression, are not very important to me, but also here the support for themes in Firefox is far better than the one of IE. I can recommend the theme Noia 2.0 eXtreme.

Still not convinced? Then take a look at the article 10 Reasons to use Firefox – or why not try Firefox for a week? Give it a chance – your browser experience will be greatly enhanced! Remove all your shortcuts to Internet Explorer so it gets really hard to start IE up, put a link to Firefox in your quick launch bar, and make Firefox your default browser – then you are ready for the one week Firefox challenge! Happy browsing!

Download Mozilla Firefox

(Link broken? Try this instead. )

Missing the a cappella

2004-09-20T17:53:13Z

What’s so good about singing? The sheer pleasure of letting out loud sounds in a cultural acceptable way? I think it’s about more than that.

How often do you sing alone? In the shower, perhaps? (But how many people do that in real anyway, isn’t that just something they do in old comedy movies?) When your favorite hit track is played in the radio? I think singing has a lot do with sharing a relationship with a common group of people. I think it’s about social activity and adjustment.

Traditionally, people have always been singing in the churches. (I think – I’m no expert, you could probably tell me that they never sing in the churches of Qatar or something.) So is singing close connected with religion and spiritual activity? I think not. People have stopped attending church, but they still sing at every celebration, birthday and party. Even people, who can’t sing and hate doing it, are occasionally forced into doing it, simply because the social pattern dictates it.

I’ve always loved to sing. My song teacher in primary school discovered my talent, and let me sing “Twist and Shout” in the fourth grade in front of the whole school. In high school I joined the choir and learned how to sing for real, and it was also in high school I found three musical soul mates, with whom I formed an a cappella quartet called “Ramses 4”. Later I also appeared in a singing contest on Danish national television, but it didn’t end up with a record deal … ;)

We started rehearsing a few hours every week, and in a couple of months we worked up a nice little repertoire of a cappella songs and a great popularity on the high school. We also started giving converts at weddings and birthdays, and we even recorded five of our favorite songs on a cd. There is a feeling that emerges when four people just starts singing in harmony without any musical aid, and that feeling is part of what I miss today.

It’s not that Ramses 4 has ceased to exist; we haven’t split up in anger or anything. The problem is that it is not very often all of us are located in the same city – or even in the same country. The singing is just part of what I miss, because the social factor plays a great deal in Ramses 4 also – we really enjoy spending time together.

I hope we will start singing again some day, meanwhile I keep my voice at pace in the choir of the Copenhagen Business School, and I’ve also created a homepage for them: http://www.choir.cbs.dk/ (I’m not very good at design).

Oh, and don’t forget to visit the homepage of Ramses 4: http://www.ramses4.dk/

System architecture is like sex

2004-09-09T15:03:21Z

System architecture is like sex: You think everyone else is doing it a lot more, and you think everyone else is much better at it.

I’ve worked for a large Danish web portal called Jubii for quite some time. I’ve been there part-time, I’ve been there full-time, and now I’m part-time again because of my studies. All the time I’ve been employed in the department responsible for developing and maintaining Jubii Chat, Europes most popular chat site.

Over the years I’ve been involved in several rewrites of the chat site, as well as building separate systems from the bottom, like ad serving and managing software as well as a completely different site unrelated to the chat. So I know when you are supposed to do some good system architecture. That’s before you start coding. But up until the project I’m working on right now, it has never been that way. No analysis or use cases. No UML charts or flow charts. A sufficient database design if we were lucky.

I’m not trying to point fingers at any of my colleagues, because that was just the spirit of the department back then. Documentation was a waste of time. Planning was something you only did because management required it. System architecture was about the database scheme, and we didn’t even draw it with boxes and relations and everything. We just listed the tables and their attributes, and that was the database scheme, happy programming!

We of course knew that more structured approaches to software projects existed, and I was personally completely sure that everyone else did it by the book. All the other internet companies and software developers definitely had everything analysed, planned, designed and documented before they even wrote a line of code! They probably even had procedures for testing and releasing the software when the coding was finished!

I’m quite sure Microsoft does it. So everyone says, at least. My guess is that CSC and KMD (the two most dominant players on the Danish public sector software market) does it. But I am starting to realize that most of the internet and software business is just as bad as us when it comes to system architecture – or software engineering, to be wider. The stories I hear from the other students about their software companies are no better then my own.

It would be a pity if everyone only had sex once a year, and then had really bad and unsatisfying sex. It is a pity that so relatively few – or so it seems – manages software projects the way it should be done, but luckily that’s all my education is about – managing software projects in a good way – so I’m going to do what I can to improve the situation.

If only I had the time

2004-09-07T16:25:05Z

I have lots of good subjects for articles I'd like to post on my weblog, including:

Recruting programmers
The temptations of .NET
System architecture is like sex
The spirit of Roskilde

- and much more. However, school has started for real now, so I just need to read, read, read. Maybe I'll have some time tomorrow for writing an article ... I wish!

Just one more thing: I mentioned Joel On Software previously in this weblog, and Joel has just today published an article about usability (or not just that):
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/NotJustUsability.html

The nice thing is; Joel is mentioning several usabilty design principles in this article that I have just learned of this very morning! It's kind-of nice when your teacher uses the same words as your favorite software guru ;)

The whole world should have a vote

2004-09-03T09:14:26Z

Not a long time ago, I watched a BBC documentary about American Mormons. The parents in many Mormon societies of Utah sent their youngsters to Mormon schools in Germany – they called it their Mission. Schools where the young Mormons where not only taught the Bible (Mormon style) and had to learn German (I’ve tried it, believe me; it’s no fun), but also sent out them out as missionaries in the German society. These people believe in their heart that they have found the truth, and they believe that the rest of us can be saved and go to Heaven, if only we see the light and become a Mormon. They just want the best for us.

Like the rest of the world, the Danish media follow the election for the American presidency close, and every time I hear Bush open his mouth, and hear that he is equal to John Kerry in the public opinion studies, I get the urge to go USA and try to convince everyone to vote for the democratic candidate. Just like the Mormons believe they have the religious truth, I believe I know the truth about right and wrong in politics, and I want the American people to wake up, see the light and understand that the only sensible thing to do when electing the most powerful man in the world, is to vote Democratic!

How can I be so sure? Well, let me tell you about the parties in Danish politics: (The groups of people who share political opinions, not the drinking contests they have in the basement of Christiansburg) You can roughly divide them into left, middle and right wing, where the right wing is the most liberal/conservative parties, and the left wing is the most socialist parties. (Don’t confuse socialism with communism, there is a big difference.) The interesting part is; that if you take the two large right wing parties in Denmark and look at their visions and opinions, you will discover that they have a lot of similarities to the liberal way of thinking of the American Democrats. This doesn’t apply to the left wing parties; however, there is no doubt that politics of the Democrats are much closer to them also, than the one of the Republicans.

My point is: Almost everyone in Denmark prefers a Democratic president of the USA over a Republican. The politics of the Republicans are just too far away from our way thinking, no matter what party you vote for in Danish politics. I know this also applies to the other Scandinavian countries, and I also think that most of rest of Europe fit into my thesis. We basically just think different and have different values than the Americans voting Republican.

The American president really is the most powerful man in the world, history shows this over and over; and this is why I think the whole world should a vote in the upcoming election. I know the election is of course very focused on the domestic politics of the USA, but it is also very focused on the security of the USA, and this influences the entire world. I want to be let in on the election of the man who can just pick of the phone and drag Denmark into a war when it fits him. But I don’t get that vote, only the Americans have the power to change the reality.

This is my appeal to the American people: Do the world a favour, vote for John Kerry!

Anti virus - update

2004-08-31T07:20:10Z

Last week I wrote about AVG; a free anti virus program that I was going to use instead of eTrust. Meanwhile, however, I've found the link I've been looking for; Microsofts deal with eTrust, offering 1 years of eTrust protection for zero bananas. So I think I'm going to go with that.

Get one years free eTrust anti virus protection here (Microsoft pays the bill 8-) )

How was school?

2004-08-30T10:15:33Z

Tomorrow (or possibly today, since it’s 9:20 pm right now, and I’m sitting in a train between Jutland and Copenhagen, and this entry probably won’t be posted until tomorrow) is my first day of school after the longest (I don’t mean this in a bad way at all) summer vacation I’ve ever had, and that has inspired me to reflect a bit over my first year of my education. I finished high school in 2001, and after two Sabbath years (I’m not sure if this works in English, but most of my very limited crowd of readers are Danish anyway, and they will understand it) where I worked full time as a programmer, I entered Copenhagen Business School in one of their many combination educations; business administration and computer science. I was very close to choose the full time computer science education at Copenhagen University, which gives you a much greater competence if you know you want to work as a high level programmer; so now is also the time to reflect upon my final choice of education.

Two of my colleagues entered computer science last year, and a good friend of mine started in 2002, so it seemed like a natural choice to pick that education. However, I’ve always wanted to start my own business in the IT industry, so I thought some business administration would come in handy. After my first year, I still think I made the right choice. When it comes to computer science, I can’t say that everything has been new to me this first year – much of the education focus on teaching the students object oriented programming, something I’d already learned by simply doing it at my work. However, the subject of databases was of great benefit to me, as was learning how to test my software in a structured and thorough manner.

Then there is of course the business administration part. On my first year, this has consisted of three ingredients: Hardcore, mathematical business administration, macro (society/state) economics and the fun one: Organization. I don’t think I’ll ever have sit behind my desk being the manager of a canned ham (also known as spam) factory and actually use the price optimization algorithms I’ve learned, and as for macro economics – well, let’s just say it was really boring, and I’m glad I’m through it. However, organization has been a great subject. We’ve been taught a number of modern theories about how to understand and manage and organization, and this is something I can use directly when I start my own company some day. This year we continue with “IT philosophy” and “IT leadership”, and based on last year I’m really looking forward to this. It’s much more fun learning something, if you can actually imagine yourself using what you are learning for something in a real work situation, and with my two full time years as a programmer, I’ve been able to pass a lot of what I’ve learned in computer science and organization over to my work, thus making it real, instead of just being something abstract in a book.

In a way, I think this is the key to enjoy learning in general.

Total War!

2004-08-27T21:01:32Z

I often bump into an old friend of mine on ICQ ("ICQ, what's ICQ?" you might say. Well, it's a lot like MSN, just much cooler since ICQ was here first. Not before IRC, though, but it was the first instant messaging client. I think. Anyway, I use Trillian so I can be online at ICQ, MSN, IRC and other stuff with the same client, and that's cool!), and recently, when I've asked what he has been doing, the answer has been: "I'm playing Medieval: Total War."

Since I was in one of mine "not-playing-computer-periods" at the time, I thought it sounded a bit boring spending all your time on a game that sounded like so many other games - but I was wrong, so wrong!

I took over to my old friends place, and he showed me the game. Or actually, he let me play it, while telling me what to do, which is a much better strategy if want to let someone in on a game. The game is a perfect mix of Risk, Civilization and "pick-your-favorite-real-time-strategy-game". The goal of the game is to conquer the entire Earth by invading other players (controlled by the computer) provinces.

There is a lot of building and tweaking taxes and some poilitics in the game, but what makes this game so fantastic is the real-time battles that occurs when you are invading or defending a province. Imagine your 500 troops against the computers 2000 troops on a 3D battefield. You can see every single soldier, archer and horse on the field, but you control your units in groups of 20, 60 or 100, depending on type.

On the battlefield, everything comes down to tactics and timing. The key to victory is to split up the enemy, flank him, surprise him with ambushes and above all; kill his general. The moral of your men is crucial, and if you take the moral out of your enemy, you suddenly have his 2000 men running away in panic from your 500.

It's winning those impossible victories that is the funniest element in the game, since it shows that a good strategy can overcome anything. It's a perfekt two-player game, since both can take great joy in discussing the tactics when the battle is pause (I forgot to mention it, but you can pause the game at any time during a battle and check out eveything, and you do that a lot!), and to actually control the mouse is less important. We played the game two days in a row, 10-12 hours pr. day. Yes, it's that good.

I'm looking forward to trying the next game in the series; Rome: Total War :)

Run for your life

2004-08-25T08:21:06Z

Do you know those annoying types, who seize any opportunity to talk about how long they run every morning, evening or weekend? Don’t you just hate them?

Well, I’m one of them. I run 5 kilometres most mornings, at least when I doesn’t have to be at school at 8 am. I started out at my second year in high school, because I was afraid to grow so fat I would never get a girlfriend. Of course I didn’t say that when people asked me – I just replied something about getting in good shape, but I think it was obvious that it was because of the opposite sex I did it anyway.

It didn’t help me to get a girlfriend, though, that was not until I went through laser surgery and quit the glasses. But today’s entry is not about how to get a girlfriend, I am not the right person to give advice on that account – it’s about running.

I still run most mornings, and that is plain and simple because I believe it is life extending. It’s common knowledge that healthy food and exercise is the only certain way to live long and prosper, and although I’m trying to avoid fat foods and staying away from candy, sodas and all the other good things in life, I know I only have a certain bet with exercise.

The strange thing is; I am also starting to like it. Or kind of. Sometimes I still hate it, like I did in the beginning, but actually seems to be a good way of starting the day, believe it or not. I don’t run with a radio or anything – I have so damn much rhythm that I wouldn’t be able to help running in the same pace as the music – so there is plenty of time to think about important stuff. Most of the time I just fantasize about killing the dogs I pass though, but that’s nice too.

It couldn’t really be anything else than running. I’ve always been hopeless with a ball, and when it comes to sports, I’ve never really been a man of competition. Running doesn’t require any skill, you can do it by yourself any time anywhere, and the only tools you need are a pair of good running shoes. Okay, lately I’ve also been playing some hockey with some old friends from high school, but that’s mostly fun because of our complete lack of rules, and because you basically just run around with a stick, chasing a small ball.

Anti virus

2004-08-24T20:16:20Z

By recommendation from a friend, and because my current subscription with eTrust is about to expire, I'm trying out the free anti virus program AVG.

I am a bit skeptical, though. How can a free anti virus program be as good as one I pay for? eTrust, McAfee, Norton and all the others must be able to develop much better protection when they get paid, right?

Well, my friend claims that AVG is as good as anything else. I hope he is right, since free anti virus is really appealing to my penny-pinching approach to life. I'll let you know if I get virus ;)

What's for dinner?

2004-08-23T14:20:13Z

The big question used to be: "Mom, what's for dinner?" and then "Aaww, I don't like that!" and then "When I get big and move into my own place, I'm going to have Snickers for dinner every night!".

But now I've got big and moved into my own place, and how tempting it might be, I'm not having Snickers for dinner every night. It would much easier if I had, but the problem is; I am also trying to live kind-of healthy without overdoing it, so Snickers is unfortunately out of the question.

So today the big question is: "Casper, what's for dinner?" and I reply "Geez, Casper, I don't know, ask you your girlfriend" and she says "I don't know, maybe something with pasta, but we also had that yesterday, so we have to think of something."

When I was a child, I never knew it would be so hard to actually get idea of what to cook for dinner. I knew it probaly required some skill and practise to actually cook it, but it seemed like it was always decided without any doubt what the meal of the night was.

My girlfriend and I (I'll have to ask her sometime if it okay to use her name in my weblog, but then again, if anyone who doesn't know me in real life should come by this site, they wouldn't know who I was talking about, so maybe I'll just continue calling her "my girlfriend") created a list of meals we both like, that we can manage to cook, and are not too unhealthy (not all of them, at least), but we haven't really used it much yet. It's like I look at the list, and then think: "Naah, I want to try something new".

This is the list, roughly (very!) translated form Danish:

Pasta salad
Chicken filets
Spaghetti bolognese
Rye bread with stuff on
Pizza snails
Pizza
Hamburger steaks
Filled pancakes
Pasta with egg and cheese
Minced meat roll wrapped in bacon
Rice with chicken in sweet-sour sauce
Rice based royal table
Club sandwich
Landing bread
Mashed potatoes with bacon and sausages

Today, I'm not going for any of this, however. I want to make tzatziki, because I love garlic (and so does my girlfriend - phew!), and there is too little garlic in that list above. But what goes well with tzatziki, except for the obvious lamb, which my girlfriend does not appreciate, and the almost as obvious Greek hamburger steak, which I tried the last time I wanted to make tzatziki, with limited success.

Perhaps I should just forget about meat, and then do the damn tzatziki, some chopped and fried potatoes, and some garlic bread. That could be nice - and somehow very meatless.

Let's see how it ends ...

Sundays

2004-08-22T09:52:31Z

It's sunday. I was writing a long text about sundays. But it was crap.So I deleted it.

BUMP!

Life is good

2004-08-20T15:58:09Z

Life is good. It's weekend and my girlfriend is finally returning from Jutland after a full week. I'm going to cook her a nice dinner and then ... never mind, it's not that kind of weblog.

Life is good. I'm a happy new user of www.spamgourmet.com, a site that provides an unlimited number of disposable, autogenerated email-adresses. It works like this:

I create an account at spamgourmet with the name "rspace".
I trust spamgourmet enough to actually let them have my real email address.
I have to register at evilspammer.com for some reason, so I provide the email-address "evilspammer.3.rspace@spamgourmet.com" for that site.
That email-address can now recieve three emails, which will be forwarded to my real email address, and after that, the emails sent from evilspammer.com starts bouncing.
So I get my autogenerated password / validate email address mail from evilspammer.com, and maybe two spam mails. Then it's over - no spam!

Enjoy :o)

The best link

2004-08-19T22:33:36Z

If I could share only one single link with you, it would this one:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/

This guy is intelligent, funny and damn good with words. But I guess it gets kind of boring if you are not a programmer. No, I didn't say that. It's just plain good, that site! Go read now!

Just talked to my girlfriend on the phone

2004-08-19T22:13:38Z

- and that sure helped on my mood :)

I just moved in with her in a small apartment, but she's been away this week for a seminar in another part of the country. Damn, I've been missing her - luckily, I've had friends and work to distract me, but the evenings can still be lonely.

Tomorrow she's coming back, and that will probably distract me so much, that I won't write in this weblog for months, then suddenly realise it's still there, and then post something again.

Nice prospects, huh? ;)

First post!

2004-08-19T21:19:35Z

I wonder if there are going to be any other posts than this. It's not the first I've tried to start a weblog, but this time I'm using the Deepest Sender plugin for Mozilla Firefox, which allows me to write entries simply by pressing Ctrl + /, so I hope the easy access will motivate me.

It starts as things usually do. I'm bored, installing plugins for Mozilla, and suddenly I discover LiveJournal. So for a while, I'm not bored anymore ;)

This weblog will not be on any specific issue - at least, that's not the plan right now. However, I've always had a thing for writing - or so people tell me - so as of now, the primary purpose with this weblog is to enhance my skills with writing and English.

I live in Copenhagen, Denmark. For those of you that - like my self - didn't pay too much attention in the geography classes, Denmark is an indenpendent country, part of Scandinavia and Europe, and connected to Germany at the south border.

Denmark is a typical western country, known for it's pretty girls and high taxes - but I'd prefer that any day over lower taxes and ugly girls *cough-England-cough*

Let's see if any more posts are coming up in this weblog ...