Michael Carøe Andersen

Category: Blogging

  • Quick trip to Denmark

    Quick trip to Denmark

    A couple of weekends ago Ann and I went on a short trip to Denmark to make a round to friends and family. Apart from the old folk we went on baby patrol and visited a cousin of mine who just had a little Astrid and a couple of high school friends who had Frederik. We also went up to visit my sister who is expecting a family expansion in June.

    With my sister, Mogens and Magnus we went for a drive in the beautiful forests south of Ã…rhus. We got to see the lovely early summer of Denmark when the beech trees are the brightest green and the birds are chirping and building nests.

    We went to The Deer Park and came across a heard of deers that were more than happy to taste our apples. I don’t think I’ve seen anywhere else where deer is so tame that they will eat from your hands. But here they were and we had a flock of deers interested in us.

    Making friends
    Ann with the Odders


    On the way back to London our flight was slightly delayed and as I was trying to find a chair in the departure hall I stumbled into a blogger. I have been reading Tina – omme i London since I decided to move to London so it was great finally meeting her. She brings her camera everywhere and following her blog was a great way for me to experience London before moving here. She does a great job of showing the lovely colorful side of the city. I love meeting bloggers that I’m reading and it was great putting a face and a voice to Tina 🙂

  • The Top London Travel Blogs

    The travel agency LastMinute.com has started publishing a monthly top 50 list of travel and lifestyle blogs in London/UK. To kick that off they organized an event they called Oh You Lucky Bloggers at Planet Hollywood. It’s not like Ann or I has made it into the list but it’s always fun to get out and meet other bloggers. The event was great, mingling with the cool crowd of London blogosphere.

    LastMinute.com: Oh You Lucky Bloggers!

    I’m not sure how the list is compiled but there are some really cool blogs on it – go have a look yourself.

    There is a couple of my favorite London blogs that hasn’t made the list so I figured I’d give them props here:

    • IanVisits – Ian is constantly on top of what’s going on under and over ground in London events.
    • London Cyclist – Andreas is really busy creating resources for the biking crowd in London
    • Ghost signs – Not exclusively a London site but very interesting nonetheless with old painted signs on house.
    • From The Upper Deck – Another quirky blog where Przemek drives around on the double deckers of London and takes pictures out the window as London life goes by below him.
    • Georgian London – excitingly writings about life in London in the 18th century
    • Scandinaivian Kitchen – for everything homely on London

  • Bloggers passing through and the story of the lost rugby tickets

    A couple of weeks ago David from Malta was at a conference in London and with phones running out of credit and communication through his wife back home we managed to meet up in central London one evening. David is a thoughtful guy – as you can tell from his blog – and I always enjoy talking to him about politics, life and anything in between.

    The week after we had another blogger passing through. This time it was Karen from Wisconsin. She had to leave Prague prematurely due to visa issues but was heading back to try again. On the way back to Prague she was making her way through Europe and London was the first stop. We had some entertaining days with Karen who was excited to be here. Here she is at Covent Garden with a Jack Sparrow look-a-like (and smell-a-like).

    Karen and Jack Sparrow

    This weekend we again should thank a blogger for the entertainment. At the Blogger Meetup in February there had been a competition for rugby tickets and although we didn’t win (Ann got really close). However Peter – one of the winners – wasn’t going to use his tickets and gave them to Ann. I was soo excited about the chance to see a rugby game and had been looking forward to it for weeks. But yesterday as we were starting to get ready to get out the door we couldn’t find the tickets… We looked everywhere and got the room cleared out but the tickets didn’t appear.

    I grumped about the lost tickets for a couple of hours but luckily enough we had an alternative event to go to. Instead we went to The Barbican for a show called the The Manganiyar Seduction where a group of 43 folk musicians from Muslim region of India was sitting in boxes as they played. A very impressive show as you can see in the clip below – but still a poor replacement for a rugby match.

    Anyways big thanks to Peter Marshall for the rugby tickets, that was a nice gesture. He blogs about photography at Re:Photo and writes about the many protests and walks he photographs in My London Diary. Peter has been walking around London taking pictures since the 70s and has some really interesting stories and observations.

  • How to pour an ale

    One of the things I love about being here in UK is the hand pumped beers or cask ales as they are also called. These are unfiltered and unpasteurised beer that are not drawn from the kegs or containers by carbon dioxide but instead by hand pump or gravity. In UK you just have to look for the Cask Marque sign and you know the pub serves some good, traditional cask ale.

    Greene King IPA Revolution

    If you go to the north of England you will get your pint like the one on the left, smooth and creamy. If you ask for a pint in the south you will get one like the one on the right, clean and crisp. The two pints shown are the same beer but poured in two different ways that produces slight differences in taste. There is more of an explanation here.

    Thursday Ann and I went to the February edition of London Bloggers Meetup. The meeting was sponsored by Greene King brewery who wanted to show of their new beer engine that could produce both Northern and Southern style pints. The head brewer John Bexon was there with another guy to tell about the beers and explained how to taste a beer.

    Greene King IPA Cask Revolution

    I enjoyed speaking to other bloggers and having a night out. The beer was very good I enjoyed both versions – and it was free which makes it even better. We had a great evening where we got away with goody bags filled with interesting beers from the brewery and tickets for a rugby game but more on that some other time.

  • 10 years of Gelle.dk!

    I really feel old when i realize that something I thought happened recently happened 10 years ago. This is one of them.

    10 years ago it was getting close to the Christmas break. I had finished high school six month earlier to work at a photo development lab to make some money. Previously I had made a website together with my dad for a couple of years but now I wanted my own domain so I could have my own website and email without having to use hotmail or any of the other free email services of that day.

    In high school I had acquired the peculiar nickname Gelle among my friends and since it was short and I couldn’t think of anything else I picked that. Not that I really like the word – it looks and sound a bit like gele but I got it now, it’s fairly unique and it’s my username on most websites if I can get it.

    The first thing I was really using the site for (except for a page of quotes about beers) was to write about the preparations before, and keep friends and family update during, a trip to USA for 3 month in 2000.

    Travelogue from my trip to US in 2000

    I have lost the actual updates I wrote during the trip and only the shell of the site is left.

    The first front page from 1999 is again lost in history. After I came back from US in summer of 2000 I started university in Aalborg and this became my for next couple of years. A collection of links to small websites I’d made for myself and friends.

    Gelle.dk back in February 2001

    In 2005 I was heading to US again, this time for an internship in Ann Arbor so I created the blog you are reading in April 2005 and started blogging in Danish about my upcoming trip.

    Blogging Gelle in 2005

    Blogging became a habit with about a post a week which I try to keep up. About a year and a half later I was back in Denmark and switched over to blogging in English.

    The design of the blog has changed slightly every now while the tone of the blog has stayed more or less the same throughout the past 4 and a half years, I think. I have blogged a lot about place I have gone, things I have done and very little about my company, thoughts and reflections. And I think it will stay that way.

    Who knows what will happen in the next decade but for some reason I doubt we’ll still be using domain names and URLs to find each other. If we do you’ll maybe find a strange 40-year-old(!) behind gelle.dk rambling about and taking pictures of whatever he comes across in his days.

    Happy birthday gelle.dk 🙂

  • Bloggers in London and Twitterers in West Hampstead

    When I move to a new city I try to find local bloggers – and this time round people on Twitter – as a way to explore my new hometown.

    In Copenhagen I joined a bloggers dinner and learned about BarCamp through bloggers and in Prague I made a couple of Danish friends that I found through their blogs. I also met Empty Nested Karen and Minnesotan Al in Prague.

    I’m trying to do the same in London but in London everything is so much bigger which is both good and bad. Good because you can find literally everything and all sorts of people, groups and activities. Bad because it easily becomes overwhelming and places and people are far apart. Nevertheless I’ve embarked on the London blogosphere and twittersphere.

    Ann and I went to the Christmas gathering of a group called London Bloggers Meetup (#LBM) that organizes a monthly event for people who blog to meetup and chat.

    London Blogger Meetup 003

    The group was started two years ago by Andy and has gone from having a handful participants to having upwards of 100 now with the events getting booked out days or weeks before they take place. Here Andy is presenting one of the nights three speakers.

    London Blogger Meetup Presentation

    First speaker was a security expert from Symantec (who sponsored the bar tab), then followed one of the girls of Domestic Sluttery (they brought cookies!) talked about tips for bloggers and last was Arvind talking about Kiva – a microfinance project.

    A great night and I got round to speak to a couple of bloggers like Jorgen, The Undercover Recruiter and Too Geeky Chris (and a couple I forgot, ups).

    A few weeks later I went to West Hampstead a neighborhood 30 min walk away from here. There is an active and growing online community in West Hampstead that mainly engage on Twitter. Jonathan is the man behind the blog West Hampstead Life and he is also very active on Twitter where he has been the anchorman for a lot of events. I went to a meetup called a #WHampGather at Alice House a very cool pub/restaurant.

    The Alice House

    There were loads of people who turned up for the event, our corner was completely packed and the group was very divers. Again I met a lot of interesting people and had a good evening.

    Crowded backroom at the #WHampGather

    At both events there were prizes and gifts so from the bloggers meetup I came away with a copy of Symantics new anti virus program and the day after I won a lampshade and from the twitter event I won a cool Dot To Date calendar.

  • Living as a Dane in Czech Republic

    This blog post is part of World Blog Surf Day – where 24 bloggers not living in their native country around the world writes about the experience of living in a different country. At the end of my post you will find a link to the next blog in the circle.

    Prague Castle in the sunset

    I have been living in Prague since the summer of 2007 when Femi and I decided to move here for a period while growing our company. The initial plan of staying for 6 months has so far turned out to last for 22 months. 

    Prague has a big (huge?) expat community of people from all over the world but Europe and US in particular. Whatever brought these people here in the first place most start out from scratch with building a social circle so it’s been easy for me to make new friends.

    As a Dane I’m use to communicating in English whenever I’m not dealing with Danes because Danish is a terrible language to learn and we’re a small nation. When I came here in the first place I had little intention of learning the Czech language because of my short stay and because it sounded as complex as Danish to grasp. As I realized that my stay would last more than 6 months I started thinking and talking about taking Czech lessons – but it stayed that way. There was too little incentive, too many other interesting things to do and I was too lazy.

    The Czechs are usually not that good at English unless they have a degree or have been abroad.  So with almost all my friends being foreigners and no language to communicate with regular Czech’s it feels to me like I live in this parallel society of Prague. In this parallel are we that work in companies where the language is English, our friends are English and the media we follow are English.

    I have realized that whenever I return to Prague from being abroad (usually from counties where I speak the language) the first think that strikes me that I am back in my parallel world of not speaking the local language.

    But apart from my inability to speak the lingo I am having a very good time in Prague, there are still plenty of reasons why this is a great place to live and why we’ve stayed here for this long. 
    The city itself has a great atmosphere, I can still spend a whole day looking up at the marvelous buildings that are everywhere in Prague. Danes sometimes ask me about how dangerous it is in Prague and I must say that it is very safe – there are not the knives/guns problems of Copenhagen or the drunken crowds of London. 
    The prices for food and beer are very reasonable compared to most places in Europe, it still puts a smile on my face when I can go to for a meal in a restaurant and have a beer or two and a meal for less than 6 Euros.
    I’ve got lots of good friends who I have the time and opportunity to see several times a week and plenty of place to go to do stuff be it sports or other activities or clubs, pubs or concerts. 

    One of the topics that has come up quite often in conversations over the last couple of months is that a lot of my friends in Prague are starting to move elsewhere. 
    For many people like me Prague is a place of transit, a place to enjoy life and the good times before moving on. 
    I doubt that many of the people I hang out with today will be in Prague in a year. In a way it’s sad to think about but on the other hand it’s a nice reminder to enjoy the people and the place every day – it’s not going to last forever.

    Some people go to Prague for a couple of months, some for a couple of years. The next blogger in the World Blog Surf Day moved to Prague from USA to be with her Czech husband and start a new life in The Old World. I wish Sher the very best of luck in her adventure and hope you, the reader, will read Sher’s Living as an American in the Czech Republic and the others stories.


    Have a nice Saturday! 

  • Restoring blog posts

    So first step in resurrecting my blog is done. With the help of Hermann and Tomas I have managed to salvage 230 blog posts from Google and Yahoo Cache using a script called Warrick from some of the researchers at Old Dominion University.

    I now have the posts as flat html files and need to parse them to get them back into the blog system that might take a while. But if you are just here for what’s new with me everything is back to cool 🙂

  • Oh sh*t, continued

    I’m usually fairly good at keeping backups of my data. But as I looked through my various vaults I realized that I had numbers of copies of the files for my weblog but I didn’t have any copy of the data. My laptop died in December and I think I might have had a copy there.

    So my second attempt at getting back my deleted blog posts was to get my web hosting company Mondo (formerly known as DHT) to recover the database from the previous day. I was naive enough to think that this would be a courtesy action and a fairly simple operation to perform. I was wrong.

    Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 22:41 from mondo support:

    Dear Michael Carøe Andersen

    Thank you for sending your support request regarding: Rollback of the database on gelle.dk. Your request has been assigned the case id:  227037

    A technician will take a look at your case and will get back to you as soon as possible. You are welcome to include any other questions/comments when you reply to this mail. Any new information will then automatically be added to your case.

    Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 08:30 from support mondo (my translation):

    It is possible but it will be at a rate of 150 Euros plus VAT per hour.

    Reality strikes and I see that this might cost me some dough.

    Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 12:04 from me (my translation):

    Hmm ok. I will consider that.

    How long time would you think it takes to dig out a database dump from march 10th and uploading it?

    Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 12:08 from support dht (my translation):

    Well that depends on how big your database are, so it is hard to say. Do you know approximately how big it is?

    Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 12:23 from me (my translation):

    The database is gelledk on server2 with 113 tables and a size of about 5mb before compression.

    I’m getting impatient and again thinking that it can’t be that big a deal. So I keep fishing for an estimate.

    Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 16:49 from me (my translation):

    Can you give an estimate of how long you would think it would take to roll back the database gelledk on server2 to the state of 9th (or 10th of March before 9pm)?

    The database is gelledk on server2 with 113 tables and a size of about 5mb before compression.

    I would think it would be easiest to take the whole database and just recreate it. But if it has to be more specific it is these four tables I would like to have rolled back:

    blogging_gelle_postmeta
    blogging_gelle_posts
    blogging_gelle_term_relationships
    blogging_gelle_term_taxonomy.

    It feel’s like ages and I’m getting a bit desperate and want to get something started in terms of a recovery. I’m still thinking it will take 15 min.

    Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 13:04 from me (my translation):

    Hello again,

    It does not seem like You want to provide an estimate of how long it will take (or how long You will be invoicing me) to recreate the database.

    Let me flip it over and say that if you can do it in half an hour then please start. If you expect it to be more I will probably have to do it manually, but please give me a response.

    Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 13:29 from support mondo (my translation):

    I am afraid we cannot make a backup of a single webhotel on the server where you are hosted. If we have to make a backup we need to recreate the whole server and that would amount to an enourmous bill.

    Ok, they could have told me that before. I’m not going to throw hundreds of Euros after this project (at least not yet). So this halted the idea of a quick solution with the help of my host.

    Next up is to try and team up with some hard core perl coding friends and see if we can restore the posts from Google and Yahoo’s caches.

    Lesson learned: Review your backup routines.

  • Oh sh*t!

    It seems like I have just deleted all but eight posts on my blog. GRRRRRRR