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  • Ireland: The rain it raineth every day

    Visiting Laoise County CouncilDuring a recent trip to Ireland, me and colleagues Heather, Ivar Petter, Jostein, and Rune visited several key actors on the Irish ICT scene within public sector services, e-government and EU R&D projects. The Irish economy has been booming over the past few years and it was well worth the effort to see what they have been up to in terms of exploiting this fortunate situation within the said sectors.

    The title of this post, unfittingly enough, is not Irish. It is a passage from Shakespeares’ play “Twelfth night”, but describes in a most effective manner the weather conditions during our stay.

    But when I came, alas, to wive, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, By swaggering could I never thrive, For the rain it raineth every day.

  • 8 000 rpm clothes drier

    The Clothes DrierI spotted the ‘Clothes Drier’ at an electric appliance store the other day. This aptly named machine aspires to dry your clothes in a more efficient way, but I wouldn’t throw away my tumble-drier just yet.

    The Clothes Drier consists of a vertical cylinder mounted on a tripod with an electrical oven about fifty centimeters above the floor. On top of the cylinder there are several horizontal arms for clothes hangers extending from the cylinder. The cylinder above the oven rotates.

    The air stream caused by the rotation combined with the heat from the oven below speeds up the drying process.

    Powerful 8000 rpm motorWhile this may well work, I am considerably more worried by the label on the package saying ‘powerful 8 000 rpm motor’.

    Sounds like lift-off, a fire accident and a severe test of your insurance company’s waiver policy all in one. Almost like a Kinder surprise.

  • Star Wars inspired hand-held vacuum cleaner

    Laser gun or hoover?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 ultimate solution to vacuuming!

  • Please do not place cash in this box

    Please, no money here…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 to put money in my post box I wouldn’t stop them. On the contrary, I would encourage them to do so as often as they like!

    The reason for the exotic warning is the way certain taxes are paid in Ireland. Instead of receiving an invoice in the mail e.g. motorists have to show up at a counter in the county hall to pay car tax on their own initiative!

  • The 2007 incarnation of the call centre

    Old-time call centre general, Jostein FondenesIn 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

    Past glory at Copenhagen AirportOne 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 won’t pay the local network carriers’ sky high fares for international calls.

    I guess this is why pay phones seems to have a magical attraction to what is popularly referred to as ‘foreign nationals’. A term as racist as any if you ask me!

  • Forklaringa ligg truleg oppstraums

    Utklipp frå Sogn Avis

    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

    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’. Below you’ll find the results.

    • Results 1 – 10 of about 543 for “i love facebook”
    • Results 1 – 10 of about 8,470 for “i hate facebook”

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

    Why twelve point Times New Roman isn't always a good ideaI 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 slide. Give me an illustration please, don’t kill me with tiny words!

  • An alternative to minding your diet

    vacuumcleaner.jpgI 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 arrives where it is digested. Ideas to the same effect, such as vomiting after eating is uncomfortable and impractical. The method I propose however, would be plug-and-play.

    The method requires slight customization of the human organism, which is quite doable. I envisage a discrete, neutral looking socket mounted on a persons throat. To this socket it is possible to connect a suction device, in principle much like a vacuum cleaner only silent and small. The mechanism, when powered on, will be activated once the person swallows food and will remove all matter before it reaches the stomach. This way substances like sugar, salt, fat and their relatives will never be metabolized.

    Another alternative to minding your diet, the one I am currently pursuing, is simply not to. This does however have the side effect that I eat a lot.