Misc

This is what Poul is working on at Lego :-).

That’s soooo cool. I wish it was me working on that.

It’s been underway for some time, but now I can make it official: I quit my job.

I’ve been called stupid because I quit my well-paying job right in the midst of a financial crisis, where jobs are scarce and as a graduate from 2009 (the lost generation) I should count my blessings for just having a job. On the other hand I have had a lot of people congratulate me for daring to go on this adventure – and there is an adventure underway.

I did not quit to end my current job (but of course that is a side effect), I quit to start a new phase of my life – a travelling phase. November 1. 2010 I’m going to leave Denmark to go travelling Asia with my husband. Not much is planned yet except the departure date, so if you know a place that we just have to see, please let us know in the comments of this blog.

We are hesitant to put an end date to this adventure, but just to be able to tell people something, we have said that this adventure will take a year. This could of course turn out to be 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, 2 years or whatever…

The last few months we have started to prepare this trip by giving notice to leave our rented apartment (we had to give a 3 months notice), I have quit my job, I have been going to doctors to make sure my nose will be fixed before we leave (it’s broken – long story), we put all our money in a travel fund and I have been researching places to go and sights to see.

I have arranged with my father that we can stay at his place from the date that we have to leave the apartment and until we leave the country, and our parents are going to store our furniture, while we are gone.

Along the way I will try to get some freelance work, either as a coder (I would love to do some Android, web or Java/C#-work), a photographer (learning something new every day) or as a blogger but if that doesn’t work out, I will start writing some e-books or tutorials and find some funding through advertising. I have also sold how-to videos before and if my nose get fixed I will consider making more.

Just writing this I get butterflies in my stomach – I can’t wait to start this adventure!

Bangkok by night - photo taken by Poul Foged

So much has happened this week, and I would love to share it with you, but I have to wait for it to be completely official.

Soon…

While you wait, you can check out my favorite link from this week: Couchio. Great page design with interesting content. CouchDB is one of my favorite topics to read about right now – CouchDB and Android… I’m using CouchDB for a few homebrewed programming projects and in my opinion CouchDB is the best thing since sliced bread…

As a geek I love going META – and a TED talk about TED talks is a hit with me.

Sebastian Wernicke analyzed TED talks and concludes that when you deliver one you should talk about how “french coffee spreads happiness in your brain” because that is the top words from the most popular talks. He also concludes that if you want to make a bad TED talk the top 5 words you should mention are:

1. So
2. Oxygen
3. Aircraft
4. Project
5. Girls

Considering how popular a topic number five is in other places of the Internet that is quite funny. Other unpopular words include “computer”, “feet” and “design” (and I conclude from that, that you shouldn’t be giving TED talks about how you designed a creative way to control computers with your feet)… et cetera, et cetera…

Watch the video:

I wonder if these facts are transferable to any kind of talk – like maybe a thesis defense?

My previous post about the Lego Turing Machine could (for some) be a contender for the title of “The most useless machine ever built in Lego”, but it is certainly a step up from this useless but entertaining machine: A machine that turns itself off.

Useless but cute. How do people even think up these things?

>”Honey, you’re my treasure.”
>”No, the Lego is the treasure. Dad – We’re Lego rich!”

Combining TED talks and Lego is a winning formula. This guy is really Lego-geeky – I love his story:

I recently found a youtube clip that combines three things I really like: RSA talks (TED-style talks), RSA Animate and Superfreakonomics. I am currently reading the Superfreakonomics book and I have just read the Freakonomics book with great pleasure.

Even though this is not the best RSA video, I can still recommend using 10 minutes of you life and watch this video:

My favorite RSA Animate video is in the same category – about incentives and motivation:

Great presentation style – don’t you think? The visuals really help getting the message across.