In the past weeks, while recovering from my 8 day eating frenzy, I have managed to do abit of everything. I have coded a simple templated website together with my businesspartner Jens, I have installed and played around with Linux Mandrake Operating System, completely wiping windows from my harddrive in the process, and I have gotten a job.
Or at least I am in the process of getting one.
I think I just got really tired of not doing much in the way of work, of not making any money, and of constantly spending my dfays trying to sell my service to a market in crisis. So when Pinkfloor came along, offering me a job as their CTO, in charge of out sourcing development of websites and mobile games etc., I decided to go for it. At the very least it’s fun to fell the adrenalin of actually having a job that needs to get done. We’ll see how it works out over time.

Vienna

Just returned from my 8 days in Vienna. Grandma’s 80th, a bit of a party and a family reunion, with family from 4 countries in 2 continents.
The short version of my stay in Vienna is the culinary gtour: What I ate and where I ate it.

The tour begins on a friday afternoon onboard the SAS run MacDonnell Douglas MD-87 from Copenhagen to Vienna. I ate some obscure, cold nudels with chicken, and drank a small can of Austrian Ottakringer beer.
Safely arrived in Vienna the real culinary journey begins, friday night at Plachutta in the Wollzeile. A restaurant known for it’s cooked veal dishes and soups, and conveniently located just around the corner from my grandparents place in the Dominikanerbastei.
I had the house speciality, starting of with a clear soup with nudels, followed by 3 select cuts of veal, accompanued by potato rösti and spinach.

Saturday morning,in the Cafe Prückel, a portion of Bacon and Eggs and a cup of coffee started me off on that days excess calory intake.
Saturday lunch, in a busy cafe and “konditorei” in the Kärtner strasse with just a small bowl of frittaten soup, was followed by a small sandwich at the airport cafe while waiting for my brother Miki to arrive from Mexico.
That same evening at the Do&Co in the Haas Haus, right on the central Stefansplatz, I started of wih 4 excellent Nigiri (Sushi), followed by an equally excellent Thai Phuket Satay. For desert I helped my self to a trio of cheeses. A great Roquefort Papillon, a creamy Chevre de Cabray, and a fine Reblochon

Sunday morning, back at the Cafe Prückel, I bravely limited myself to a melange and some breadrolls with chese.
For Lunch, after visiting, for probably the last time before it’s sold, my grandparents lakeside summerhouse in Neufeld a.d. Leitha, we stopped of in Baden, to go to yet another branch of Do&Co, next to the Austria Casino Baden. Here I feasted on a wonderful pumpkin cream soup, followed a simple leaf salad with roquefort dresing.
Exhausted after a long day, on Sunday night we popped in to the Cafe Europe on Kartnerstrasse, for another fritattensuppe, followed by reasonable well made lamm chops.

Monday morning, once again found us at the local Cafe Prückel for Ham & Eggs with coffee.
At lunch, before getting ready for the big monday night party, we went back to Plachutta, the soup and cooked veal restaurant, were I opted for the speciality again, only substituting fritatten for nudles in the soup, and a low-fat shouldr cut, for the 3 selct cut of my last visit.
The night of the celebration. Monday night, at the Hotel City-Central across the Danube Canal from the ciy center, we celebrated the 80th birthday which brought us all to Vienna. Since the food consisted of, not 1 but 3 large, and rather delicate kosher buffets, I can’t even begin to list all the things I had, but amongst the delicacies were gefillte fish, tahina and chocolate covered strawberries.

Tuesday morning, back at the Café Prückel for Bacon & Eggs with Coffee.
Lunch at the local inn, Pfudl started with another Frittaten Soup, followed by a veal Cordon Bleu.
Tuesday night we went for a quick snack at the local italian (Da Casa), and I chose the delectable Caprese Classico (Tomato and Mozarella salad) followed Linguine con Salmone (Paste with Salmon).

Wednesday was by far the least exorbitant of this culinary tour-de-force.
Breakfast at my grandparents house, a simple breakfast of bread and cheese and sausage with black tea.
Lunch at the Café Prückel was simply a couple of frankfurters, a breadroll, and plenty of mustard and horse-radish.
After going to see the sweet and lovely french film, “Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain”, I poped into a local cafe with my brother Miki, where I had chickenbreast with a mushroom cream sauce and fine nudels.

Thursday was healthy breakfast day, with a nice bowl of cereals eaten at home, followed by a Melange coffee across the road at Aida.
Lunch at the turkish inspired lunch restaurant, Kervansaray started with a great Pumpkin Cream Soup, and continued with an excellent Döner Kebab and ended with a turksih coffee and Baklava.
For dinner I met up with my friend from GeekCorps Ghana Trip, Jason at a spanish bar called El Pulpo, near the Schwedenplatz. The food wasn’t up to standard, since the Paella de la casa (seafood paella) was a little on the dull side, but it was a decent wholesome meal nevertheless.

Friday brought another cheese and bread home breafast, and a return to the by now, well-known Café Prückel for lunch. A gulaschsoup was followed by the single worst dish I had during my stay in Vienna, a Bauernomelette (Farmers omelet) which was a basic omelet, topped with a pile of frozen peas, carrot pieces and potato-cubes, cooked almost to imperfection by the poor excuse for a chef.
Dinner was my last night in vienna, and to celebrate, the remains of my family went to the very nice, and comfortable Italian restaurant Grotta Azzura where I had a very, very good beef carpaccio, Ravioli with delicious mushroom sauce and fillings, and some wonderfully “light” profiteroles with chocolate sauce.

That basically ended a culinary week in in Vienna, since saturday saw a much less exciting finis to the week, with another serving of bread and cheese at my grandparents house, followed again by one of theose small yet practically inedible airplane selections. This time consisting of ice-cold rice with chicken and a satay sauce that would have been wonderful if it had been heated for jsut a few seconds in the microwave. As it was it was quite frnkly horrible, and therefore exactly met my expectations for in-flight lunch.

I’m off to Austria now, for a full week. It’s my grandmothers birthday, so the whole family is going to visit my grandparents in Vienna…. So no more words from me until I get back in about a weeks time.

Hi there,
I’m sitting at my desk working on a seminar/speech I’m giving tomorrow at my old university study programme, DØK.
It’s an evening seminar about the Digital Divide and technology as a means of improving the quality of life in the developing world.
Based in part on my experiences with GeekCorps in Ghana, and in part on what I’ve been reading, studying, arguing with people before and especially after that excellent project.

Well, preparing for this particular seminar is harder than I thought. I have lot’s of experience speaking at conferences, giving presentations, and generally listening to myself talk. This time however, I have no idea how many people will be there, what their additudes might be, and wether or not they really care about these issues. Also, I suddenly realize how appalingly little I actually know about these issues. My education is in IT and Economy, my proffessional experience is as a project manager, programmer, technical something-or-other and middle manager. That is until I mysteriously dissapeared to Ghana for 3 months. Apart from that stay, a 2 week training period before that, and my general interest in travelling, reading, and knowing-it-all, I really don’t have a clue.

But I do know that these are issues that mean a lot more to me than most of what I’ve worked with so far. And I do spend a considerable amount of time at the moment, reading up o these issues, thinking about the applicability of projects like GeekCorps, and discussing many of these things with other interested people. It get’s me somewhere.

Well, as part of my seminar tomorrow, I’ve decided to make a subsection of this site at http://digdiv.krag.org/.
Here I’ll keep a link section pointing to other organisations in the field, put up soem documents for download, and maybe even write a little about my perspective. But don’t expect too much. It’s hard enough for me to keep this page updated, without having to worry about other things. I’ll try!

This picture showed up on the film-section of Denmarks largest Search Engine and Portal, Jubii:

http://film.jubii.dk/rh/imperial.asp?pic=7

What is it that makes the Digital Divide such a compelling challenge?
Apart from the fact that it nicely mixes my interest in global economics, international development and human rights, with my geeky tendencies towards internet related things?
I guess it’s the search for that revolutionary, ground-breaking quality of the Internet.
I remember my days at University. Coinciding with the emergence of the WWW, those were the days when I first considered the potential of a free, open non-centralized network. The educational possibilites, the political changes and the general liberalisation of information. I seem to remember a time when I believed the Internet would really make a difference. Profoundly.

Then came the great commercialization. The realization that most of what the Internet was used for, were simple, if elegant extensions of the market-place. Advertising, E-commerce, increased efficiencies of global corporations etc.
Admittedly, with personal publishing, peer2peer networking and the potential for someone small to create something big, there were more profound changes. Just not the ones I was looking for.

But I still have my faith in the technology. And I’ve projected that faith onto an area where I still feel I can make a difference without having to do ground-breaking research into some new optical fiber or quantum switch technology.
And I’ve slowly come to realize that every time we educate another computer science major, develop a more efficient B2B marketplace, or decide to feed more funds into research, we are increasing the gap between us and them. I’m not sure that that really matters by itself. I mean, the developing world should hardly be measuring it’s progress by that of the developed world. It should be measuring it in terms of quality of life, infant mortality, life expectancy, political stability, human rights violations, and the satisfaction of the local population etc. Real world facts that say something about real world circumstances. Not compared to the US or Denmark, but compared to that same country 10 years earlier. “re we improving?” is probably a better question than “Are we as good as the US?”.

Many of those quality of life issues are a question of starvation caused by freaks of nature, climactic changes, pollution, or bad infrastructure. As long as there are no roads leading to large parts of Africa, there is no way to distribute food efficiently, making anything but subsistence farming an unviable proposition. Fly in food, build roads, build water and electrical utilities, aid the immediate concerns, don’t worry about access to the internet. Bill Gates reminds us that the poor can’t eat computers, and while they are starving, they probably don’t need to be able to download the latest Lord of the Rings Trailer. He is right.

But that’s only part of the picture. In the layer between the rich, developed, growth-focused western countries, and the poverty-stricken, war-ridden, draught-struck lottery losers, there are many countries with the politial stability, the popular will, and the potential to improve. Burdenned by huge debt, unfriendly climates, or merely by generations of colonial exploitation and under-developed education systems and infrastructure, they have the will, but not really the tools to succeed.

In that part of the world, one of the main problems is the lack of proper, widely-used education systems. The same education that paved the way for the incredible improvements in western living conditions over the past 2-300 years. The same education that is the main reason for the extreme overweight in research and patents developed and used in the western world, and the same education that secures our democracy.

Can the Internet helpthe developing world reach that level of education?

San sent me a few pictures of our little camp in front of the Poggenpohl kitchen store. They can be seen here.

So, spent the night on a Copenhagen pavement, at about 9 degrees Centigrade.
Arrived monday afternoon at around 1600, and spent the evening with my friends Pan, Jonas and Jens as well as Jon (a friend of a friend).
It wasn’t as bad as we expected. I brought our 2 cinema chairs with us, and they were extremely comfy. We played Overthrown (some obscure card-game, with a rulebook with the size and comprehensibility of “The Silmarillion”). I won.
Lot’s of visitors. Amongst them Kim (replacing Jens for a few hours) and bringing with him loads of piping hot home-made Lasagne (Insert appropriate superlatives), and San, my friend of Copenhagen Post fame.
We played Cranium, a simple, yet fun game mixing TP, Pictionary, a crossword puzzle, and humming karaoke. I should have won (with Kim).
It rained a little. We crept under the overhanf. It stopped raining.
We went to sleep, dressed in enormous amounts of sweaters, sleeping-bags and blankets. While the wind in my face was slightly chilly, in general I was very warm and comfortable.

We woke up, and more people dropped by with rolls and cheese (Lars), Danish Pastries (Signe) and piping coffee and home-baked croissants (Big Brother).

We were number 68-72 in the queue. At max. 8 tickets a person in a 1100 seater theatre, that meant decent tickets. And we got them. So while we are now looking forward to the 19th December at 01:00, last night was enjoyable in itself. We don’t often get to spend time, relaxing, playing games and talking together. Especially not with Lasagne delivery of that quality.

Thanks to everyone who took part and brought us good things to eat.
And thanks also to the guys that made sure the queue was kept orderly and no line-skipping chaos broke out.

A great week in Barcelona and Perpignan with Signe. Drank wine, espresso and beer. Ate great food. put on at least one kilo. Had fun. Walked outside in a t-shirt in the evening.
Now I’m back still looking for work, but slightly more desparate as time goes by.

Tonight, I camp out in front of Copenhagen movie theater Imperial. According to this site, there are already 53 people lining up for tickets, in a queue that started last thursday, and ends tomorrow morning.
I hope we’ll be in time to get tickets. I’m meeting my frineds in there at 4 this afternoon. Hopefully early enough to be before all the working people, althouigh there’s probably be about 70-80 people in front of us in the line.

It’ll be fun.

Mostly spending my time looking for consultancy gigs for myself and my business partner in Mostly Harmless.
At the moment my main contract with MobileThink in Århus has more or less come to a conclusion, and there are no paying projects on the horizon.

So the time I’m not spending looking for contract work, is spent working on a number of private projects.
The most time consuming of these, both involve the Digital Divide in some way.

After my trip to Ghana this past winter with GeekCorps, I’ve been thinking, scheming and planning how to get to work more with those issues. That’s where my heart lies (at least for now). I’m still working on a project proposal for a non-profit project together with a former colleague of mine. We’re planning to look into redesigning and recombining existing technology to make it more suitable for developing world applications. Part of that project involves builing a web-site that allows people working with connectivity and Internet in the developing world can exchange ideas, review products, ask questions and identify problem areas. You know. Input for us “thinkers”….

I’m also looking into what it would take to go back to university and do some research/graduate studies on digital divide issues, Internet technology in the developing world and other interesting stuff. There really isn’t anything going on in academia back here in Denmark, so my research, and considerations are mostly about the possibility of going to the US to study for a year or two. The Digital Nations program at MIT/Harvard is the center of my attention. But it’s incredibly difficult to get a clear picture of what it would take, what it would cost, and if it’s even within the realm of possibilites in terms of admission, financing, and personal sacrifice.
So that takes a fair bit of my time as well.

On saturday, I’m off to Barcelona, Spain and Perpignan, France for 5 days, with my girlfriend. She has a few meetings in Perpignan, and I had some frequent flyer miles from back when I was still employed. And we never did get to have any vacation together this summer. So even though I’m not making any money at the moment, it’ll be nice to get away for a few days, to a hopefully friendlier climate, and one of my absolute favourite cities in Europe (Barcelona).

Oh, and the basketball season has started, and although my slightly flawed knee (torn and inadequately repaired anterior cruciate ligament), sometimes complains, it’s so good to play again. Especially since we’ve won the first 2 games of our season. And I’ve started working out at the local fitness center. Mostly to get in shape, and strengthen that knee. It feels good to move that body, that feels older than it did a few years ago. Is that strange?