Year: 2007

  • Star Wars inspired hand-held vacuum cleaner

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    While scouting for something to make the removal of leftover bread crumbs from fundamentally useless irish bread more efficient I encountered this laser-gun looking device. Vacuum cleaning might have been fun had I been in possession of one of these when I was little. Nowadays I am more uncertain as to whether this is the…

  • Please do not place cash in this box

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    As exotic problems go, my horizon was significantly broadened after a recent visit to Laoise County Hall. By the entrance door there is a postbox with the following warning on it: ‘Don’t put money in this box’. The thought of doing so never occured to me in the first place, but if people would want…

  • The 2007 incarnation of the call centre

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    In a scruffy-looking alley, more suitable for red-light activities than high-tech communication services, colleague Jostein Fondenes found the beautifully spartan (and on the occasion closed) hole-in-the-wall ‘OKIN Internet & Call Centre’. While this establishment may not be a cornerstone of the Laoise economy it brought warm feelings to old time, call centre enthusiast Jostein (photo).

  • The slow death of the public pay-phone

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    One would think, with the massive uptake of mobile technologies, that the public pay-phone would already have been made extinct in 2007. Why isn’t that so? I believe that one of the major contributing factors is the prepaid phone card industry. This industry largely targets people who wants to call long distance and can’t or…

  • Forklaringa ligg truleg oppstraums

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    Her om dagen kunne ein i Sogn Avis lese denne fascinerande historia om ein stramtluktande foss med misfarga vatn. Grannane vil ikkje spekulere i årsaka, men heller lære seg å leve med stoda slik den er.

  • Google search: 8 470 hates, 543 loves Facebook

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    Having spent the better part of the evening debating with my good friend Anders A Fitje on the topic of Facebook, I decided to round off the evening posting a small observation on my web page blog. I conducted two searches on the internet, one for ‘i love facebook’ and another for ‘i hate facebook’.…

  • Why twelve point Times New Roman isn't always a good idea

    I am currently sitting in the very back of a conference room with about 170 attendees. Up front is a good speaker, except for the fact that he uses slides with a ridiculously small font. Why do people write so much anyway? There is no call for all this insane amount of writing on a…

  • An alternative to minding your diet

    I have come up a (theoretical) alternative to dieting. It should be fool-proof and builds on the fact that the pleasure of eating is mainly about substance and taste. Once food is swallowed it is purely of nutritional value. The concept would be to intercept the food after it leaves the mouth but before it…

  • My first mobile-Internet-enabled camera

    Back in 1999 my “mobile computing platform” consisted of a Palm Pilot with a grayscale screen and a larger-than-life Nokia mobile phone with an onboard modem. These were communicating via an infrared link. As I was about to go on holiday one summer I found that it was possible to get a camera adapter to…

  • Why I do not trust FaceBook (and its relatives)!

    The last few weeks FaceBook has spread like a wild fire througout Norway. The major newspapers have started to pick up on the trend and having read their many articles to the praise of FaceBook, I feel like reflecting a little. Back in 1999/2000 a social networking site called eCircles was on the rise. A…