In 2005 I started tracking the amount of spam I get at my personal e-mail address. I got 42,000 pieces of spam that year, and 56,519 this year. On average, that’s 4625 every month, 1067 every week, 152 every day, or 6.3 every hour. On average I got one piece of spam every 9.4 minutes.
On my first trip to Copenhagen, I learned that the trains have motion detectors that trigger the interior doors to open. These detectors don’t work very well, and so it helps to wave your hand in front of them. This is a common sight, but only on the regional train line (which I take to work). The “S” trains, however, don’t have motion detectors, but I didn’t know that.
Taking pictures in Copenhagen during winter is challenging. Everything is sort of grey, there isn’t much light, and the days are very short. But I saw some winter photographs of Denmark recently and realized that you can solve the first problem by shooting in black-n-white. I took these today in Christianshavn and Kongens Nytorv. There are more here.
I took these from my condo in Seattle last summer. The colors are, I admit, a bit exaggerated. I cheated, but in the same way that professional nature photographers cheat — by using Fujifilm Velvia slide film. At any rate, I’m pleased with them, although these scans really don’t do justice to the actual slides.
This is kind of strange. Apparently Denmark is the happiest country on earth. And apparently Microsoft is the best place to work in Denmark. I’d better be really careful about any complaining I do.
This is a sort of public service commercial (topless women alert!) that the Danish government created to generate awareness of speeding. Pretty clever, as they just released it on the net and let people distribute it, so they spent no money on ad space.
I just got back from a week in Seattle. The first time I went back I was sort of disappointed at how un-profound the experience was. I guess I hadn’t been away for long enough. This time I was less disappointed.
My neighborhood is the Pike/Pine corridor between downtown and Broadway. Downtown is stunning, and the corridor has a variety of restaurants, bars, and shops. Broadway is a hip freak-show. It wasn’t like any of this surprised me, but I’d forgotten the extent to which these things are true. This despite the fact that I’ve only been gone for nine months.
It struck me that it would be so easy to live there. I know the language, for one thing, but also prices are reasonable (for everything other than property, that is).
But it also felt cheap. The buildings are flimsy, and although the diversity is nice, there are so many people that are trying so desperately not to be normal that you have to wonder if they have anything else going for them. Seattle has no shortage of really androgynous people. I try to be open-minded, but this is something I find hard to take.
Traffic continues to be terrible, and, of course, no real progress on mass-transit has been made. The drivers were more aggressive than I remember them. Inevitably it seems that drivers of luxury vehicles are the worst offenders, but that’s true in Denmark as well.
I was also conscious of a little extra stress on my part due to the fact that Seattle — and any place on the West coast of the US for that matter — could at any minute suffer a devastating earthquake. There’s something really nice about living in a place where that’s not true — a place where you don’t have to think about securing book-cases to walls or having emergency supplies on hand.
I’ve tried, really tried to understand the logic of Bush supporters. It isn’t easy, but I do have friends that support Bush, and we’ve talked about it. Unfortunately I’m still at a loss, so all I can do is catalog the things I don’t understand. I know that the tide has turned (dramatically) but that is mostly due to the war in Iraq. There are so many other things that should bother them about this administration as well. Here’s my list of things I still don’t understand:
In Denmark you cannot name your children anything you want. Well, you can, but the government will reject the birth paperwork if the name is too exotic or silly.
(more…)
Apparently a Russian shipping company went out of business or something, while a ship, The Alexa, was out at sea. The crew ran out of supplies and fuel in Iceland, but someone there gave them enough supplies to get back to Europe. They made it to the channel between Denmark and Sweden, put out the anchor, and abandoned ship. That was on July 13th, and it’s been there ever since. The Danish government has put a lien on the ship to insure that the shipping company pay the crew before they can reclaim the ship. General consensus is that it’ll be a twelve to eighteen months before the ship gets hauled off, but a recent storm moved the ship about 800 meters! (That’s half a mile!)
It’s a huge ship, which looms quite impressively even at a good distance.