Kim Bach . Org

Episode i Lufthaven i morges efterlod mig i choktilstand.

Jeg ville hjælpe en pyskisk syg, der havde prøvet af få hjælp længe, til bussen, det tog lang tid. 25 m fra busstoppestedet kommer en flok hjemmeværnswannabees rendede med walkietalkies, og vel også våben, og fører manden væk, 10 mand til at fcuke mit 45 minutters socialarbejde op, sikkert til politiet.

Himmelråbende amatører, få dog ansat nogle social-arbejdere.

Hvor mange fjolser har man ansat i Lufthavnen, til at lege røvere og soldater, og København skal være vært for, hvor mange, om en måned?

Manden ville for HELVEDE bare hjem til sin hund i Dragør.

Da jeg så går væk overhører jeg en samtale om at han OGSÅ havde generet dem. Jeg råbte efter dem at de får FOR meget i løn!!!

Jeg er RASENDE!!!!

Jeg skal tilføje at jeg rapporterede episoden til lufthavnens information, hvis civile personale, i øvrigt opførte sig eksemplarisk, empatisk og yderst korrekt og professionelt – de troede sørme jeg var fra politiet.

nå ja, også sendt til Kristeligt Dagblads Debat.mail

WOW! I’m honored! October 30th is my Birthday, and now it’s also the title of an XKCD Comic! AND Back to the Future is on my shortlist of favourite flicks!

ps. A Doc Brown costume? Nice idea!

pps. Thank you to #mixpack and the #lastfriday possé for making my 47th Birthday one of the best Birthdays EVAH. Special mention to @HelloCopenhagen for the inspiration in selecting the venue!

I promissed you a 24 hours of radio-silence, well that didn’t quite happen, but the level of tweeting was at a sustainable level.

So what exactly is the sweet spot, where tweeting isn’t an addiction, it turns out that Jyri Engeström of Jaiku-fame gave the answer during his Keynote Speech at Reboot 9 in 2007.

Jyri said that Microblogging (eg. tweeting) is a tool that you can use to discipline your writing/creativity, here’s Jyri’s three steps to how to become a more productive blogger:

1 microblogpost (Jaiku/Tweet/Whatever) an hour
1 photo a day (Flickr/23/Picassa/Whatever)
1 blogpost a week (Preferably from your own domain)

I’ve decided to try to follow Jyri’s “method” – again – I really, really want to become more than an amateur!

Related blogposts

• Kim Bach . Org: A-synchronous “swimming”: How I stopped worrying, and learned how to love “presence”
• Æbletræet: Jaiku (in Danish)

ps. Since I received my Kindle I’ve begun reading again, this, too, is an old resolve of mine. Now where do I get hold of some of Kierkegaard’s writings in a format that my Kindle will serve me ?

Still happy about my twitter selfhelp tool that Rasmus wrote, but hvordan synes jeg så selv det går? If the aim was to cut down on my tweeting, it’s not going well, the habit is under control, and I’m not just, mindlessly sharing, RTing etc. like I did on Saturday.

I’ve been focusing my tweeting, today the topics were #spc09 the SharePoint Conference 09 in Las Vegas, and it was wonderful to latch on the energy of that hastag, and #Kindle since I have one sitting right next to me right now.

Today will be different, there WILL be a 24 hour radiosilence starting no…ahem soon , see you on the other side.

Kim “Cold Twurkey” Bach

There’s too much going on on twitter for me stop engaging in the conversation, I recommend that you unfollow me if you’re on a low bandwidth device, you can befriend me on Facebook instead.

Yeah I grabbed the cool URL! http://www.facebook.com/kim.bach

Kind regards

Kim “Twinehouse” Bach

ps. My Amazon Kindle is waiting for me at the DHL Warehouse, it arrived yesterday, but it’s one expensive little number, an extra $150 in customs. OUCH!

OK, I need your advise.

An attractive, rather thrashed, woman walks up to me asking for directions to a bar, I find it using my tech-wizardry, she MUST have known where it was, she claimed that she had lived in that street, I wished her a pleasant night, and we went our seperate ways.

I now see that there were several other doors I could have choosen:

1. Showed her the way
2. Asked if I could join her
3. Suggested that we went somewhere else

Did I choose the right door, in post-cog I think that I should have tried door number 3, I was high on culture from last nights Kulturnat event, and there are several places that are better suited for spirtual encounters than Wessels Kro.

ps. I think that I should have, at least, tried door number 1, it would have let to the possibility of choosing the other two. Hey I might finally be getting the rules if this game, it is a very strange game, and I thought the only way to win is by not playing http://www.kimbach.org/2009/06/28/game-theory/

pps. Suggesting that you go “somewhere else”, is much like saying you want to “park the car” – I should have picked door #1.

Cross posted to facebook: http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=153324064892

March the 24th 2009 is Ada Lovelace Day, the brainchild of Suw Charman-Anderson. Suw pledged to write a blog-post about a woman in tech that she admired, if at least 1,000 would make the same pledge, and since I’ve admired and been fascinated by Ada Lovelace since childhood, and especially after I read the wonderful book The Difference Engine, so I embraced the project, but at the same time I knew that it would be difficult for me to find just a woman in tech that I admire, that is because the list is long, and I’m happy to say that it’s actually getting longer.

In the end it turned out to be quite simple to name one single woman in “tech” that I admire, a woman that I’ve admired for 2,5 years since I met her at the wonderful BlogForum 2 – an initiative that we really need to revive – and almost did at Copenhagen Twitterfestival.

Since 2006 the woman I have in mind has become quite the celebrity, due to her uncompromising and relentless pursuit of the truth in the murky waters of the Danish tech-business, and this year she’s the natural selection, she’s the woman behind the mainstream breakthrough of the blog-media in Denmark, she is – of course – Bizzen/Toften: the journalist and blogger par excellence Dorte Toft.

Love/hate relationship with “tech”
I have a love/hate relationship with my field, the field known as “tech”. Tech is definitely one of the places where change is happening today, and I feel blessed that I’m involved in bringing this change.

But “Tech” is a field that is riddled by paradox. On one hand it’s crawling with greedy snake-oil salesmen, on the other it’s home to the most revolutionary, idealistic and altruistic people ever as well as some of the most wonderful concepts that humankind has ever come up with.

The problem with the snake-oil salesmen, is that, until now, they’ve pretty much got away with cheating their customers, the authorities, the business community and worst, their employees, and a lot of the snake-oil has been sold under the heading that Denmark is number one in tech.

It’s been a constant embarrassment to me, and I actually left the business four years ago, and it took me two years of “repenting” before I felt that could return to “tech”, and today I’m luckily to be employed by a tech-company that doesn’t carry any snake-oil.

Emperor’s new clothes
I’m just going to, briefly, mention the fact that Dorte Toft was the woman that noticed that Stein Bagger and IT Factory didn’t wear any clothes, thus exposing one of the biggest scams the Danish tech-sector has seen to date, but thank you Dorte for exposing these people, so that we can be protected against these predators and making it possible to feel proud about working in “tech” again.

Feminism isn’t “low-status”
What I’d rather celebrate today is that Dorte Toft is a self-proclaimed feminist, even though it’s – in her own words – a field that is “low-status”, and her labour of love “Nærmest Lykkelig I Nørdland” (”Almost happy in Geekland” – something got lost in translation sorry about that), where Dorte Toft has been writing and writing and writing about the benefits young women would have if the choose to join the so-called “though” fields, technology and science, a very noble cause.

I noticed that Dorte Toft also wrote a blog-post in observation of Ada Lovelace Day today. In this blog-post Dorte is pledging to return to “Nærmest Lykkelig I Nørdland”, I’m so, so happy to hear that, Dorte Toft has been toiling away, trying to ease young women into the fields of tech and science, and her work deserves so much more attention than the perpetual Stein Bagger saga.

To all the wonderful women that I’ve worked with, am working with and will work with in the future, thank you so, so much for putting up with us, we need you, and remember how far you’ve come.

When I mentioned to my father how much I loved having female managers, he simply said that he could never ever imagine have a female manager, I was appalled.

Women, “tech” is too important to be left to men
Women please don’t stop now, so that next time I’m in a position where I’m hiring tech-staff, I hope that I’ll receive applications from women. Looking at the number of students at the IT University in Copenhagen I’m quite optimistic that that would be the case.

DORTE TOFT: Please go work on “Nærmest Lykkelig I Nørdland”, I’m waiting for it, unlike the book about “Banditterne i habitterne” (”The Bandits In Suits”) – and remember feminism isn’t “low-status”!

YOUNG WOMEN: We really, really need you in the tech-sector. Tech is far too important to leave to us men, and listen to, and get inspired by Dorte Toft!

Celebrating the Enchantress of Numbers
I’ll close this post with these wonderful quotes.

We may see aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves
Lady Ada Lovelace

Forget this world and all its troubles and if possible its multitudinous Charlatans – everything in short but the Enchantress of Numbers
Charles Babagge, inventor of the Analytical and Difference engines

Notes
If you want to learn more about the fascinating life of Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, by many considered the inventor of programming languages, I’d strongly recommend “The Bride of Science: Romance, Reason, and Byron’s Daughter“, “Zeroes and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture” and “The Difference Engine“.

I’m also building a “shrine” to Ada Lovelace on Algorim.dk, a result of “mellemrumssingulariteten” which was inspired by a young woman I know, this woman is, BTW., working in the purest field of them all

Yesterday the 15th of February 2009, marked the fifth year of me being a blogger. Technically I’ve had an Internet presence since 1999, but it’s the moment when I started using the service “blogger”, I count as the beginning of my “career” as a blogger.

My first real blogpost was a short “review” of the KRAFTWERK! concert in K.B. Hallen in 2004, which was fantastic:

Mass for the deities of techno

KRAFTWERK! – much better than expected – revelation that they’re such a live act – the bass made the doors flap. Bow to the funky devils aus Deutschland. Seems that I miss my techno

I think I was quite uncertain as to what to write in that entry, I knew I had no readers, and it is documented in the later entries that I had some doubts as to how wise it was to engage in publishing to the Internet.

Even though I started blogging in 2004, it wasn’t until autumn 2005 I really started blogging under the http://www.kimbach.org handle. With real blogging, I’m referring to fact that I transcended the diary format.

Looking back I’m pretty satisfied with my blog, and it’s great to have this assisted memory, it’s like a locker of fragments.

One sobering fact is that the biggest drivers of traffic to my blog remains the article about the 5002 error in iTunes and the article that contains a photo of chalk art by Julian Beever, which is heavily copied and hotlinked.

I’m most proud of some of my articles about technology where I’m blasting the monopolies, especially this one:

Net Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi

I’m also very satisfied with the concert reviews I’ve published, especially these:

Review: Woman power – Beyoncé gave the “Green Light” and other “coincidences”
Review: Natacha Atlas Acoustic Ensemle – The “real” Madonna was in Copenhagen

My blogpost about the Ungdomshus summed up my feelings about it:

Automonotoni – ‘Ungeren’ er en idé

911 is another important topic, and I feel like that event really has been the inspiration behind much of the activities I’m engaged in today. My favourite article concerning 911 is this one:

The Church doesn’t have Wi-Fi

Originally the topic of my blog was technology, but I can see from the tag-cloud, that the technology tag is shrinking, and the “kim bach” tag is growing, kimbach.org is increasingly about me, which is the way I want it to be.

In the colophon I’ve also summarised my personal goals:

Become:

Better at writing – so I can write a novel or maybe become a journalist

Better at reading – so I can have the patience to read Kierkegaard

Better at photography – so I dare to publish a photography book

Better at teaching – so I can help the kids in Mjølnerparken and elsewhere even more

To sum up: I work towards being able to make a living doing some, or all, of these things.

Since 2004 I’ve actually worked professionally as a teacher, and the only field I haven’t made progress in, is reading, so that will be a focus point in the future. I think some of my articles shows some journalistic merit, but I doubt that I’ll ever be able to make a living from it. I think I’ve become a better photographer, again I’m probably not going to be able to make a living from photography.

Stop googling yourself…

If you googled “kim bach” in june 2005, you had to browse to page 25, now I’m a bit easier to locate due to all the noise I’ve been making over the past five years. The result is that I’ve made lots of new friends in real life, had tremendous fun, organised events, been an activist. All in all: being active in the blog-community has changed my life, and helped me reach my personal goals so:

Thank you all, and sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not done making noise!

The image that accompanies this article is from the wonderful comic Joy of Tech, it’s copyright Nitrozac & Snaggy, I’m hoping that the use here falls under “fair use”. Please support Joy of Tech by buying merchandise from their website.

BarCamp Copenhagen 8.2 on the 22nd of November 2008 is over, THANK YOU SO MUCH for being such a great crowd.

BTW! We’re trying to build a community site at barcamp.dk, so check back often for updates

Pre-camp game
I’m a 3 time veteran of BarCamp Copenhagen, and this time I had multiple roles, primary Henriette challenged me to host a pre-camp game, and this article is focusing on how that unfolded.

My roles were these:

• Co-organiser
• Co-host
• Host of pre-camp warm-up – hmm, it was freezing wasn’t it – event
• Co-sponsor through Nabz.dk – reseller of the Nabaztag
• Speaker (accept my sincere apologies for that disaster of a session, but I did learn some important Xcode/Interface Builder tricks)
• Webmaster at barcamp.dk

Phew! I think that’s about it, no wait, I also found time to be a participant!

“Un-conference”
For those of you not familiar with the concept, BarCamp Copenhagen is part of the world-wide phenomenon BarCamp, and can best be described as a conference with a twist, a so-called un-conference.

I’ll try to illustrate the differences between a conference and BarCamp below.

Conference

• The list of speakers usually is announced and scheduled
• Active participation is neither required nor the norm
• Speakers are invited and often payed
• Attendees usually pay a fee

BarCamp (un-conference)

• The list of speakers and the schedule is made up just before the camp starts
• The audience is expected to participate actively
• Speakers are volunteering, and access is only limited by the number of presentation slots

Technological treasure hunt, huh?
My major contribution to BarCamp Copenhagen 8.2 was being organiser of the pre-camp warm up.

As mentioned, the task of organising a pre-camp warm-up was given to me by Henriette Weber, she had envisioned a “technological treasure hunt”, and I immediately jumped at the chance, but what to do?

Technology and treasure hunt, we’ll that should be something with GPS, isn’t that something you can assume that people have these days?

After looking into what existed in the market, and even considering if we should try to build our own, I was sort of stuck for at while.

I suspect that Henriette was getting a bit worried, so she sent Mark Wubben to the rescue, and that was great! Mark is probably the coolest guy I’ve ever met, and it’s hard to believe that he’s only 22. Mark is destined for greatness, and I’m humbled by his presence!

I quickly started down an avenue of sending the participants out to research the history of the neighbourhood where the event was to take place, but Mark, in diplomatic terms, told me that that sounded too boring, I instantly agreed, it did sound like a school project didn’t it? I guess my short career as a school teacher had a bad influence on my creativity .

Brainstorm
On October 28th I met with Mark, and he made a couple of important points.

• The game must not be boring
• The game should be “hackable”
• The game should be directed using SMS by the game master

We had a great brainstorming session, and immediately we were turning in the direction of spies, conspiricies etc. Mostly because I instantly made the connection to November 22nd and the mother of all conspiracy theories, since November 22nd is the day of the JFK assassination.

So what we came up with was the concept of a spy-game where you were supposed to find an assassin, take a picture and return with it to the headquarter.

The assassin would be meeting with a contact at an undisclosed location, I thought of Nørrebroparken because it has a “grassy knoll” .

The participitants would be divided into teams, and then sent around in the area looking for codes that, when found, should be relayed to HQ, resulting in another hint about the whereabouts of the assassin.

Planning
On the 8th of November Mark Wubben and I met to investigate the area, and we found several places that would be suitable for waypoints, we decided that Nørrebroparken would be too far away, since we only had two hours for the game, and wanted 5 hints/waypoints.

I didn’t really work too much on the detalis of the game, after the 8th, but when the 22nd of November approached, I suddenly decided that we needed a website to support the game, and what you can whip together in two shakes of a rats tail using Drupal is just amazing, I had a full community site with full geolocation support up and running in a few hours.

Calls for participation
Approx. one week prior to the event, we issued an e-mail with a call for participation, and people were asked to sign-up for the pre-camp event, this was before I had configured the website, so I received a possitive answer from a few people.

Teaser
On the eve of the event, I then sent out this e-mail to the people that had responded to the call for participation:

Dear Agent,

You’ve been selected as a prospect to lead a team at BarCamp Copenhagen.

You will be given a mission that requires that you operate as a field agent from 10am to 11:59am.

Any technology you bring can potentially help you, but you’ll need, at least a camera and a cellphone.

There will be a briefing at 10am on November 22nd @Lygten 16.

Until then you can get updates at the barcamp.dk site, so check back frequently. http://barcamp.dk/content/barcamp-copenhagen-intelligence-agency

If you choose to accept the mission I’ll need your cell-phone number.

Kind regards
Kim Bach aka. K.ox
BCCIA Director

I received commitment from 4 people, I picked them as team-leaders, so that we would have four teams, and now I started building the website, having specific locations geocoded on the website helped me produce nice maps, so all I needed was to finalise the plot.

In the week leading to the event I had enlisted two of my friends to act as agents, and one of them is an experienced role-player so she helped me debug the game, she suggested that I should get rid of the good/bad distinction, and focus on making it much more confusing what was good and bad.

We met the night before BarCamp and decided that the mission should be for the teams to located the whereabouts of an agent, deliver documents, that they should document the handover of the documents, and return to base. What they weren’t aware of was that there was a second agent operating, and that he should steal the documents and disappear.

Hackable game
As mentioned, Mark Wubben tought me the importance of the game being “hackable”, this means that you should be able to bend the rules, so what I came up with was this:

• Information about the waypoints would be made available on the website once the teams had departed
• It would be possible to guess the access-codes, and get the hints faster. I choose these numbers for the 5 codes that should be gathered: 13-21-34-55-89 – does that ring a bell? Not? Well it’s the 5 two digit Fibonacci numbers
• You could get help if you asked for it

The plot
I ended up with a plot where the participants were sent out to locate field agent Szeba, they would be guided by hints that were given to them once they had gone to a waypoint and located the access code and sent it by SMS to HQ

The mission was to hand over some documents to the agent, and return with proof that the documents were delivered to the agent, and return to HQ.

The twist
What the participants didn’t know, was that I had also enlisted another agent, Petrus. The idea was that the agent would steal the documents once they were delivered to agent Szeba.

Game-on
On the eve of the evening I met with agents Szeba and Petrus (aka. Signe and Kim, thank you for helping me, you guys rock).

We went over the plan.

Szeba would be at Nørrebro Station at 11:30 waiting for the documents, Petrus would be lurking, wait for the next train, steal the documents and jump on the train just before it left.

We were ready for the game – mu-ha-ha-ha – it will be GREAT!

Stay tuned for the part two of this where you’ll be told how the game actually unfolded.

The picture that accompanies this article was taken by Karin Høgh, it’s copyright Karin Høgh and she has allowed me to use it here. The picture shows one of my bags!

Yesterday, the 14th of October 2008, Apple had an event titled “The spotlight turns to notebooks”, where they unveiled a refresh of the MacBook Pro, a new version of the MacBook in aluminium and a new Cinema Display.

Clever spin
All of these announcements were already confirmed and leaked days before the event, Apple can’t or won’t, contain the leaks, and the new strategy seems to be to use the leaks to drive the hype.

Remembering how secretive Apple events used to be, I sort of, expected Steve Jobs to pull something out of the sleeves of his turtleneck, “one more thing”, but he didn’t, or did he?

One more “thing”
One notable thing about the event was that Steve shared the stage to such a high degree. This is a trend that has been going for some time, especially when it comes to events that focus on the Mac, it’s a bit like Steve isn’t that passionate about computers.

Luckily others are, and at this event Jonathan “Jony” Ive shined – and I’m not referring to the reflections from his shaved head.

It was simply a thrill to see this low-key, soft-spoken, man talk about the manufacturing process involved in producing the new MacBooks, the attention to detail, the months spend refining the new trackpad etc. etc.

Over the years, speculation as to who might take over the position as CEO of Apple after Steve Jobs, has been growing, and my first reaction was that I’d love to see Ive in that position, he’d be a natural.

But really that would be such a shame, so I’m convinced that Ive will stay in his current position, and there’s many more iconic designs hidden in that shiny bald head of his.

So watch the video where Ive talks us through the manufacturing process of the new MacBooks, it’s simply breathtaking.

Risky strategy?
The MacBooks themselves? To me they ooze quality. Apple has obviously decided that they will not address the current trend towards cheap notebooks, aka. netbooks, when asked Steve called it a “developing market”.

The strategy is risky, it defies the market, but I welcome it, and it will only mean that Apple will grow it’s market share in terms of revenue, instead of units moved. With these new notebooks, there’s no doubt that Apple owns the high-end market, and that’s where it’s the most fun, and profitable, to be.

The old MacBook product line has been plagued by quality problems, hopefully the new MacBooks addresses this, I’ll bet that this is the case, these are, to me, the first true Intel based notebooks, designed from the ground up for the Intel chips.

I’m tempted by Ive’s new industrial sculpture

The picture of Jonathan “Jony” Ive, that accompanies this article, is a frame from the video issued by Apple for the launch of the MacBook Aluminium, it’s Copyright Apple Inc. I hope that my use here is considered “Fair Use”.

Currently the video is available on the Apple Website here, it’s likely to be moved, and it’s a good guess that it’s already on YouTube. The video is produced much like a documentary, really professional marketing on Apple’s part.