When I took a course in cross-cultural communication this spring we discussed the difference in behaviour between cultures. In that context some Swedish people told that Western people are better in ”thinking outside of the box”, which seems to be less usual in China. We thought that “thinking outside the box” might be the competitive advantage of the Western world in the global competition with East Asia. To me it was never really clear what was meant by this, until now.
Fredrik Härén is a famous Swedish lecturer who happens to live in China. I think that this made him think outside of the box.
I highly recommended this lecture series (in Swedish):
We are on Holiday in Europe. We were in Germany were we drove very fast. Then we arrived in Luxembourg to see the royal family in Vianden and now we are in France. There is little time and a lot to see.
Here are some first impressions
Today we are going to explore the atlantic coast in La Rochelle!
Finally I got Vista at my work. It is unbelievable, what a big change after Windows 2000. Everything works so nice, smooth , fast and the fonts look very crisp. Currently I am a test pilot for Vista at work. There is a chance that I might have to migrate back to Windows 2000, that means 10 years back in time…
At home I ran XP but tried Vista last year. I had the usual trouble with unstable drivers, so I gave up. But now we are one year and one service pack further. So I tried it again. So far, so good. No crashes yet!
One of the nicest things of Vista are of course the gadgets. I already planned to make one as soon as I had Vista installed.
My first attempt is simple gadget for Blocket, the e-bay of Sweden. It sits nice on the sidebar next to the weather gadget from Microsoft.
The current version of the gadget shows advertisements of Blekinge only. I still need to add a settings page and other nice eye-candy
Technically speaking, it was so much fun to play with Javascript, CSS and HTML. I also had a good reason to play with the current toolset for coding and painting. I used Paint.NET for the pictures, Notepad++ for text editing and Visual Studio 2008 and NetBeans for coding Javascript and designing CSS.
I found Visual Studio 2008 a better Javascript editor than NetBeans 6.1. NetBeans was a little better on CSS. But both tools are way better than Eclipse in web editing! Eclipse feels so 2006!
Before I went to Shanghai I bought a new camera, the Pentax Optio L20.
It was the smallest camera I could find at that moment. It even had a very nice price. The quality is also good, much better than the previous digital cameras I owned. So far so good. But at touristical places a lot of people can be seen with professional cameras. My camera is smaller than a packet of cigarettes, so it is easy to carry. People must have a reason to have such clumsy cameras and spend more money, isn’t it?
The quality of such a small-sized camera is simply not as nice as the more professional cameras. This can especially be seen in the details. Examples of nice, sharp and crisp pictures can be found at Piotrs picture album. Compare the sharpness of his picture with my picture and you know what I mean.
So a big camera can lead to very nice quality! But a large Nikon cannot be hidden in your pocket. An alternative might be the camera my dad is using. This camera is a little larger and I saw some very nice pictures taken by it. But the lense cannot be changed, which is its largest drawback.
The local electronics shops have all those cameras like Nikon, Olympus, Sony and Canon. I understand now that it is important to choose the “right” brand. Lenses of one manufacturer do not fit on cameras of another manufacturer.
So this is not an easy choice.
I am an amateur and certainly not professional. I do not want to bother with all details of photography to make some pictures. But I would like to make some nicer pictures than I can with the small camera. This was my conclusion yesterday.
But today I read the news about the new E-420 camera from Olympus! They promote it as a compact camera with exchangeable lenses. They even focus on usability, that means fool proof. I will really check out this camera and cannot wait until I can locally get it.
The only problem with Olympus of course is their expensive and weird memory cards.
Otherwise it looks like the camera is targetted to me: point_and_shoot++.
At the last day of my stay in Shanghai I walked through the neighbourhood towards my daily random restaurant. Just around the corner I saw a very interesting traditional celibration; the Chinese Lantern Festival.
So I started to film this with my mobile phone. But instead of filming myself I started to be filmed by the Chinese! They also asked me to join the celibration. I gladly did since it was lot of fun, a little scary though….
The results of filming contains a part filmed by me (poor quality) and a part by Shanghai TV station (professional quality):
“A commodity is anything for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitativedifferentiation across a given market”
I think that there are many blogs out there. Much nice blogs and much rubbish too! I will do an attempt to start my blogging from today. The reason is that I like to show where I was and what I did the last nine months.
The ambition level is not to make the qualitative differentiation. If it happens it can be seen as a unforcees spin-off effect.
So I wanted to get a blog. That can be done in several ways. I choose the techie way: I installed Wordpress. This is the most popular blog engine available. I started tweaking right away, of course. So I downloaded a theme, modified it, changed some PHP files. It took me the whole Saturday morning and the result was mediocre. Was I victim of the not invented here syndrome? I think so. Most of the themes available have too many bells, whistles, windows and crazy colours. What I wanted is something simple, since less is more. I tried to choose some good colours by studying the colour theory…. I tried to integrate a picture into that theme…. The good news is that a lot of hours were waisted, gone forever.
But during lunch my wife laughed about my ideas for blog. She saw my theme and thought it was aweful. To make it even worse, she says that she can do the same thing with MSN Spaces. No geek things are required and it looks better. That was a tough message to swallow. It seams that the MSN Spaces is a handier way to start a blog.
I was devastated but not defeated yet. I threw away my theme, searched a little more and finally found the misty-look theme made by Sadish Bala. It is simple contains nice soft colours and could be installed in 2 minutes. Adjusting the heading picture took only 30 minutes. Thanks to Sadish and my wife I was up and running in no time. I also found out that Wordpress has many nice usability features such as drag and drop into the browser. I do not need to change any PHP files to drastically change the layout. We did not have Drag and Drop in the browser when I was young!
By the way; the picture “Zukunfst statt Globalisierung” was taken in November 2007 during our short visit to Wildeshausen, Germany. Translated to English it means “future instead of globalisation”. That’s nice food for thought.
Before I went to Shanghai I bought a new camera, the 
So a big camera can lead to very nice quality! But a large Nikon cannot be hidden in your pocket. An alternative might be the camera my dad is using. This camera is a little larger and I saw some very nice pictures taken by it. But the lense cannot be changed, which is its largest drawback.
But during lunch my wife laughed about my ideas for blog. She saw my theme and thought it was aweful. To make it even worse, she says that she can do the same thing with