Bjørn Stabell 白熊

Eric Clapton is all thumbs after all:

Stevie Ray Vaughan, not as good as you thought:

This video is from our ExoSocial event at Nanshan Ski Village just outside Beijing today. It shows what the few people that went to the top were up to (most people stayed on the green slopes). Fun to see programmers, PMs, and sysadms basking in the snow.

(APOLOGIES: I’ve decided against making the video public, so the video below will not work unless I share the video with you; just tell me your youtube account and I’ll share it with you.)

This was my first edit using the new iMovie. It’s a very rough cut

I’ve been having so much fun listening to songs and watching music videos by Jonathan Coluton, an ex-software developer gone Internet music artist, or “Internet star”. He originally made headlines with his “Thing a Week” project in which he would make and publish a song every week. Merlin Mann has a good interview with Jonathan where he discusses what the process was like.

Want to hear and see his stuff? (more…)

My good friend Glyn sent me this link:

Although I’m guilty of my share of broken-and-painfully-hard-to-understand Chinese, and there’s plenty of Chinglish around in Beijing, this HDD installation instruction manual is in a league of its own.

This post shows how name components, which one is sorted on, and which one is normally used, vary around the world. The Chinese section is a bit weak as it doesn’t mention common titles such as 老毛 and 小毛, and the common use of nicknames, often by doubling given name characters like 东东, but the author gets his point across. Maybe it’s time to just use a full name field, and perhaps a field for an alias or preferred shorter name?

Enough is enough.

Say no to Microsoft OOXML becoming an ISO standard by signing this petition.

ODF is a completely free and perfectly viable format for such information. Despite Microsoft attempts at stating otherwise, it has already been proven to be able to store any information MS Office needs to store; there’s not even any reason for OOXML to exist. It’s such an obvious attempt at confusing the public; let’s show we’re not confused.

This is just awesomely creative:

I September blir det 10 år siden jeg satte beina i Beijing, Kina. Det har skjedd så mye her sammenlignet med hjemme i Norge at det føles nesten som 50 år har gått forbi. Interessen for å komme hit har også vokst mye, og jeg får en del forespørsler fra andre som vil komme hit, så jeg tenkte å lage en liten side angående emnet.

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I’ve added two new photo sets on flickr:

• Ken and I visiting Ken Ronny, Torgrim, and Tobias in Tromsø, Norway
• me visiting my family in Havøysund, Alta, and Oslo

Sipping a US$ 13 beer I cannot help but feel Norwegian again, even if the beer is a Kilkenny.

There are of course many contrasts between Norway, my home country, and Beijing, where I spent the last 8 years of my life.

Norway is very rich in natural resources—espically in oil, which has seen some growth recently—has a small population, and a “Robin Hood” social democracy.

The entire population is one big affluent middle class; nobody’s rich, nobody’s poor. With overtime pay the cleaning staff of my school made more money than the head of education in my county, even if they were both working about the same number of hours. This is perhaps as close to the communist ideal as you can find in a materialistic world, making Norway the 2^nd highest GDP per capita in the world, and the 1^st in terms of human development accoring to the UN.

And when the oil prices crash? Well, Norway’s saving its money in a petroleum fund, currently at US$ 245 billion.

This lack of income disparity has one very apparent effect: services become very expensive. Combined with a weak dollar and yen it’s perhaps no wonder Oslo surpassed Tokyo as the most expensive city in the world.  Swedes are taking over a lot of the service jobs as they know the language, the pay is better, and the working hours less than back home; as much as 2 hours less per day for, e.g., nurses.

Here’s a quick a dirty chart of the costs of some items in Norway and Beijing, all converted to US$ for easy comparison:

Huge taxes on gas and cars combined with high wages explains the big difference in cab fares. Kilkenny is an import in both countries, and only the service is really different, meaning less difference overall; electronics are even closer in price. Installing a stone wall involves a lot of service: some digging, transportation, installation, and cleanup, thus the big price difference; there’s certainly no lack of raw material (stone) in Norway.

So if you want to see what it’s like when the world is completely flat—when globalization has had its way and equalized all wage disparities—head to Norway. Be sure to bring enough plastic money, though.