OpenLife

Increasing the gross happiness of the nation: the new political agenda. Forget about traditional left-right wing politics which is so much old school. The pursuit of happiness on a micro or macro level totally transcends traditional political barriers.

Happiness = S + C + V

Immediate inspiration: The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom and ChangeSurfer podcast.

Technorati Tags:
Happiness

Chocolate is healthy, if you buy the good dark stuff. I eat maybe between 50-100 grams every day. Here’s just what I bought this Saturday

Valrhona - Le Noir Extra Amer 85%
Valrhona Cao Grande Noir 70%
Summerbird So’ Dark 67%
Summer Bird Oh, So’ Dark 75%
Økoladen Økologisk Mørk Chokolade 72%
Vivani Feine Bitter GrünTee 70%
Vivani Feine Bitter Orange 70%

Do you have any other good suggestions with respect to chocolate products?

Technorati Tags:
Chocolate

Vilhelm (to the left) is now 6,5 years old and Jens is almost 3 months old.

Great post by Matt Asay on the honesty of open source in a business perspective.

24 Hours of Unstoppable Freshness!: “That was the promise my Ban deodorant made to me today. It lied.

Consumer products often lie to us, or stretch the truth (also known as lying). We buy this toothbrush because it will give us ‘brighter, whiter teeth,’ drink this drink because it will give us energy, or whatever.

One of the things I love about open source software is that it is lie-proof. I can say what I want about the product, hyping its benefits and obscuring its failings to convince you to use it. But at the end of the day, you can download it and immediately know if I’m lying.

To be frank, this can be frustrating. With proprietary software, you buy before you try. You write the check based on media, references, and a salesperson’s word that her product is as close to divinity as you’ll get on this earth. You rarely get to actually use the software in any meaningful way. It therefore matters a great deal how persuasive the salesperson is, and not nearly as much how good the software is.

Which is why the industry is rife with stories of enterprises buying software and then paying multiples over the purchase price to actually make the software work.

For open source companies, the software really does sell itself…to a point. That’s not to say that good salespeople aren’t important. They are. But they fill a different role in open source. They’re more about helping to demonstrate how to maximize value with the software, and less about how to maximize their commission from a bloated license price.

To the extent, then, that an open source salesperson exaggerates the benefits of her software, she hurts her company because open source companies only get paid for delivering constant value/service. If the customer never manages to get the exaggerated promise to materialize, their support contract will last the first year and then the customer will invest in other software. No lock-in beyond customer service.

Open source is a more honest way of doing business. It keeps you honest and customers happy. They get what they pay for, not empty hype. When you’re selling it, you sometimes wish they’d shorten the sales cycle even further by buying a little hype upfront, but I’m happy to trade a little instant person gratification for long-term customer satisfaction.”

(Via AC/OS.)

Technorati Tags:
mattasay,
opensource

I am interviewed in an article by Mads Allingstrup in the 18 August 2006 of Danish newspaper Ingeniøren about the the future of The Danish Data Protection Agency.

Dowload the article (in Danish) here: http://suse.groenbaek.net/files/ingenioeren_18-08-2006.pdf

Technorati Tags:
Ingenioeren,
MadsAllingstrup,
Dataprotection

Prøv lige at hør denne samtale med en ung fodboldspiller og en ung kvindelige sportsjournalist:

Interview med Nicklas Bendtner

Er der nogen der kan forestille sig en mere hjernedød konversation?

Technorati Tags:
soccer,
nicklasbendtner

Jeanne and I (Jens is with us and Vilhelm is spending the weekend with Jeanne’s mother) are in Jutland this weekend for friends’ wedding.

We decided to arrive a little bit in advance and booked a room at Noerre Vissing Inn nearby Skanderborg which is close to Aarhus (the second largest Danish city).

Noerre Vissing Kro is a great bargain at about 700 DKK for a double room with breakfast. The room are nothing special. But the food is excellent and the hosts are really nice people. Enjoy one of the evening menus and you’ll get food as good as in any Copenhagen high-class restaurant. And the breakfast was great too. Good quality and nothing of the prefabricated and mass produced stuff the serve you at big hotels.

Technorati Tags:
noerrevissingkro,
food

Summer is the best time for reading stuff that you never would get around to read during the normal busy weeks. Here is my summer reading list:

Peter Adolphsen: Machine
Knud Romer: Den som blinker dør
Martin Hall: Den sidste romantiker
J. M. Gaines: Evening in the Palace of Reason (Bach and Frederick the Great)
Erik Bjerager: Gud bevare Danmark

This summer we are spending at Langeland, Bornholm and the south of Sweden.

So far, the weather has been exceptional. I cannot remember when I last such a warm and beautiful summer in Denmark. All sunshine, temperatures constantly between 25 and 30 C, long mild evenings.

When the summer is like this, I cannot think of a better place to be than in Scandinavia. But it is a gamble. This year I feel sorry for those of our friends who have booked vacations in the south of Europe in order to secure nice weather. They are sweating their pants of. However, next summer it might be the exact opposite.

An observation from the Danish summer resorts like Langeland and Bornholm. It is so homogeneous in the sense that everybody here are native Scandinavian which means Danish, Swedish, Norwegian or Germans from the north. All the kids are fair skinned, blonde and blue eyed. Of course, not all. But you don’t see any of the big city immigrants here. No girls here with head scarf. This is, how it must have been to live in Denmark 20-30 years ago, or maybe today in the Danish country side outside the larger cities.