Michael Carøe Andersen

Category: Living in Copenhagen

  • Moving on

    So Ive been flat mate and business owner with Femi for 8 months. To tell the truth I wasnt sure we would make it for more than 6 months before wed run out of money. Luckily that has not been the case. Were still in business and doing well for the time being.

    We have to leave the flat we are subletting in Copenhagen in about two weeks and weve just signed the contract for our next place – in Prague.

    I ended up in Copenhagen by chance, started a company as a crazy idea turned real and now Im moving to Prague because I can. Im loving it and I cant wait to get set up in Prague.

    Copenhagen is a great city and even though Ive seen a lot of it over the past couple of months I will probably return.


  • Amager Bike Ride – Videoblogging Week 2007

    So here is my submission number dos for a week of videoblogging. I must admit I am falling behind schedule – but hey I finally get around to do some blogging.

    This video is fresh of the camera. Sunday afternoon I went for a bike ride around the southern end of Amager. A place I have never been before – even though I have lived in this part of Copenhagen for close to four months. Well, Sunday I didn’t have any plans, no hangovers and the sun was out! So I grabbed my bike and went south.

    I came across a couple of very interesting places that was really very cosy in that Sunday-kind-of-way.

    • First of there is the Flyer’s Grill (DK) which is a grill bar with a perfect view of runway 22 at Copenhagen Airport. I learnt about the place from a fellow Danish videoblogger a year ago but it wasn’t until this day I checked it out. Pretty cool and definitely a place to bring the nephew next time he is in town.
    • Dragør is an old fishing port built in old Danish style with narrow cobblestone-covered streets only allowed for people on foot, bike and – I guess – horseback.
    • After this I really came into ‘the stick’. Out here is Kongelunden – The King’s Meadow – a paradise for birds and wild life. I’m not good at bird spotting but I saw a lot of different birds (some had long legs, others had long beaks, some could sing and others could quack). This is also one of the few places in Copenhagen area where you can see a sunset over water.
    • Finally on the return to civilization I came by the new borough called Ørestad. They have this crazy triangular house that you get dizzy from looking at for to long.

    Enough jabbing – go watch the video (and comment):

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0cpQLU_iNk&ab_channel=MichaelCar%C3%B8eFenech-Andersen

    (Almost) a whole video shot from my bike. I went to the sothern part of the island of Amager in the nice spring weather. The places I went are about 10-15 km from downtown Copenhagen.

    Technorati Tag: , vlogging,videodk

     

  • Mi casa es su casa

    Last weekend two guys from Madrid stopped by our place for a couple of days. I didnt know them and they didnt know me but they found me on the website Hospitality Club (HC) where travellers can find free accommodation. Ive been a member of the site for two years but so far I hadnt used it myself and wasnt home when people wanted to stay at my place. This time it worked out – and it was a blast.

    The cool thing about HC (and other sites like CouchSurfing) is that everybody gets something and it doesnt cost anything – social software at its best. When I travelled to America in 2000 I tried to use Servas – an off-line predecessor of HC started in 1949 – to find some people to stay with in US. The idea was great but in practicality too cumbersome for me. With HC its fairly easy and relatively safe to meet local people and get cheap accommodation.

    Nacho and Alfredo are studying aerospace engineering and architecture and they had found some cheap flights to Malmö. So they had a few days to visit Copenhagen. They brought along some Mahou Negra cerveza (thanks!) and local red wine and then they cooked a traditional Spanish omlet. Here they are in action:

    Spanish cooking

    They stayed with us from Saturday till Monday so we went to a private party Saturday night and to Sunday Reggae at Rub A Dub (thanks for that idea, Alice).

    Reggae Sunday

    Nachos and Alfredo invited us to a party at their apartment the 16th so now we just need to find cheap tickets to Madrid

  • Christmas videos

    Pollas asked Danish bloggers to send in a video for a Vlog Christmas Calendar in the good spirit of Christmas. I sent in a video and it is hiding behind number 11th. Click here to see the Calendar. In the video Julia and my roommate Femi try some Danish Christmas food.

    The video was made when Julia came to visit last week. Her traineeship in Frankfurt was over and she was on a last stint through Europe before going back to US.
    It is always great to have visitors and we covered a fair amount of the touristy Copenhagen with Julia.

    A Garde in front of the Queen's Palace

    Looking for material for my video contribution I went through my unedited videos and came across some clips I made last year when I drove to Wisconsin for Christmas. So here is a newly cut video. My camera died on the way over so this video has a somewhat abrupt ending halfway through Chicago:

    And finally there is the Christmas video I made in Danish from Ann Arbor last year. I will try and make something similar this year from Copenhagen.

    Merry Christmas!

  • Copenhagen Ambiance

    This post was written for the international people on the IAESTE Weekly mailing list to tell about Mikael Simpson and Trentemøllers concert at Ungdomshuset December 5th. I figured I might as well post it here so I could include pictures and videos.

    As winter sneaks up on us and the sun becomes the friend we see too seldom and too short, the Danes get into a darker, melancholic state of mind for a couple of months until spring finally greets us again. Here is my suggestion of how to embrace yourself for the gloomy winter with some cool Danish music in the middle of Copenhagen history in the making.

    Ungdomshuset – Home of the rebels
    Ungdomshuset (transl. The Youth House) has been a vibrant institution in Copenhagen for 20-something years but it might be over within the next couple of weeks.
    ungdomshuset
    Photo by emo.ware

    The history of Ungdomshuset goes back to when it was build by the labour movement in 1897 as a cultural house for the workers of the community. It has been the base of several demonstrations and other events organized by the labour movement in the first half of the 20th century. The place was more or less abandoned in the 1950ies until BZere (transl. squatters) moved in in early 1980.
    In 2000 a Christian sect bought the house from the municipality with the use of a front company and since then there has been a legal struggle to evict the young people using the house. It might all end December 14th (or some day close to that) were the authorities will probably use force to get people evicted.

    Read more at Wikipedia, about the house or about the trials (More extensive sources in Danish: 1 2 3 4 5)

    So take this opportunity to get inside Ungdomshuset December 5th where a couple of the most hip Danish artists are showing their support for the house. See what Copenhagen is also like and meet some interesting people with Mohawks and piercings all over their face – and dont worry they wont eat you, most of them are vegetarians.

    Mikael Simpson – The One and Lonely
    Mikael Simpson
    Photo by Stig Nygaard

    Mikael Simpson is a Copenhagen-based artists that catches the restless night spirit of Copenhagen. He makes all his music in his apartment on Nørrebro and here is his latest video that shows you what goes on in his apartment:

    He just won the P3 Guld award which is Danish National Radios finest award (backed with a 100,000 kr cheque).

    Electric Wonderboy
    Trentmøller is a Copenhagen musician/DJ with remixes for Pet Shop Boys, Moby and Röeyksopp to his name. Trentmøller recently released the laid back solo album The Last Resort that has been getting a lot of praise. Here is a performance from last weekend:

    Hope to see you there – Mikael Simpson and Trentemøller

  • One At All – Danish contributor

    I got invited to join a blog called One At All – Project to write about Denmark.

    One single person from each country.
    The most different cultures on planet
    talking about everything.

    So far Ive written about places you should know in Denmark and words you should know in Danish. Feel free to correct me, comment or elaborate if I have missed anything.

    I love the idea of this project! It is always interesting to see your culture in the perspective of other peoples lives. This project is a great way to share and celebrate our differences.

    Oh, and please support this one:

    Update: Later on I’ve written The most important fact in my country’s history and The one thing my country doesn’t have is….

  • Arb Design Photos

    Several people have told us that they want to see some photos on the Arb Design website – and we are now ready to comply :) Together with Søren Sunnyboy Sohl we went out to the streets of Copenhagen and shot a lot of rounds. We started out at Danish Design Center and continued past the parliament through The Royal Library Gardens and ended up by The Black Diamond.

    At the turntable

    Show us some teeth

    Femi and Michael

    Femi and Michael

    Corner of The Black Diamond

    Arb Design guys

    We had a lot of fun running around and posing for these photos, See more photos from the session here.


  • Agile planning tool on Rails

    We have recently been working with Ruby on Rails and started Digital Planning Board a small pilot project to see what we could build with the Rails framework while building an application we could use for our project planning. We have been working with Ruby on Rails since we went to see David Black in Malmø and it has been a great experience so far and we will probably use it for a couple of our future projects.

    The Digital Planning Board is basically an online edition of the analog originator that we used for planning at Menlo Innovations:

    Analog planning board

    The result became this online application:

    The Digital Planning Board

    The Digital Planning Board has a few rules it works by. It is for planning one week iterations using these basic rules:

    • Blocks represent a task
    • A lane represent a person or a team.
    • The size of a block displays the estimated time to complete the task.

    The colors indicate the status of the card:

    • Not Started
    • In Progress
    • Complete
    • Blocked

    Tasks can be moved around freely but adding a task to a lane will push the subsequent tasks further down the list.

    Further development
    Since this is just a side project I am not sure how much further we are going to develop it but based on some of the feedback we have received so far here is a couple of things we could implement:

    • Update board state real time so changes made by others show up on other collaborators views(without doing a browser refresh)
    • Current time indicator (some kind of way to show how far in the week we are now)
    • Hover on a task would show all the details
    • The equivalent of sticky notes could be added to show additional information and draw more attention
    • Faster editing of task details (right now you have to open a card and click edit)
    • Find a way to preserve the cards history. In real life you can cross out things or scribble additional info.

    Read more about our planning board or feel free to try it out [update 27/06/07: Sorry the prototype is not live anymore] and please let us know if you have any feedback :)

    Yesterday we spend the afternoon hanging out with Copenhagen Ruby Brigade at the office of Capteco for a hacker workshop. It was a nice laid back afternoon and the first time I met these guys but definitely not the last time I join the Brigade for some geeking.

    IMG_0016.JPG


  • Sunday in Malmö

    For the first time ever I went to Malmö this Sunday. It looks like a really cool city with a lot of interesting architecture, so Im definitely going back to check that out another day. The reason for this trip was that David Black, author of Ruby for Rails was in town. David was giving an eight hours workshop on the Ruby on Rails framework – and since Femi and I were in the process of starting a side project in Rails this was just what we were looking for. The seminar was held by the up and coming Polar Rose who are working on a very interesting project about facial recognition. Mikkel from Polar Rose gave me a demonstration of the magic they can do and for a flickr fan like me Im really looking forward to their beta.

    The seminar was a crash course for me since I had only had very limited experience with Ruby on Rails so very educational and informative day – this is something that I will have to use more. – Thanks to David and Polar Rose for putting this together :)

    Today Femi and I are on the road again this time its a hitchhiking trip to Aalborg. We will spend most of the week up there so if you are in Aalborg let us know and well see if we can meet up.

    Update: After trying for two hours to get a ride we gave up hitchhiking and went with train, delays and everything.

  • Working online and off site in an Agile environment

    Femi and I recently finished a three week gig for Menlo Innovations. We left Ann Arbor about three months ago so it has been great fun and an interesting experience working with them again. We were working with the same team we did back then. But instead of sitting right next to them we were now 4,000 miles away and the only thing connecting us was Skype.

    Menlo developer team
    The Menlo development team at the pair programming pods

    Since we knew the processes it was not difficult getting into the rhythm again but there was still a couple of things that made the experience very different from being there in flesh.

    First of all our kitchen is not close to being as interesting as Menlos and we do not have a coffee shop next door providing java for the Java.

    Snackbar
    This is Menlos kitchen – Im not showing ours

    Another thing that we could not really participate in was the daily stand up meeting. We tried doing it over Skype conference phones but it just isnt the same experience. Every day at 10 AM the dart board on the wall makes a noise, everybody stands up in a circle, and pass a viking helmet or another toy around telling about the activities you have planed for the day and any problems you might have. It sounds weird – I know – but once you get used to it and the many other seemingly crazy things Menlo do they make a lot of sense. They got this plenitude of practices that supports cross-company communication, collaboration, standards, project management and development.

    Standup meeting at Menlo
    Richard the CEO has the token at the daily stand up meeting

    But apart from not being immersed into this crazy, loud and yet very productive environment it was a lot of fun being back on the team – pair programming from our small flat in Copenhagen. The amount of team communication was not nearly as high as when we sat next to our peers and Skype isnt perfect but it still worked out pretty good.

    Femi and Michael ready to start on the a Menlo project
    Femi and me working in Copenhagen on the first job as company owners

    This will not be the last time we have worked for Menlo but since we ended this current gig we asked for a quote for our website and Richard the CEO wrote us a nice piece.

    As you probably have figured by now I am a big believer of the way that Menlo do things. And for right now I cannot quite stop talking about the experience of working there. I ran into Alexander of Positive Sharing at a Copenhagen Bloggerdinner and talked to him about what a cool place to work is, I of course started speaking of Menlo. Yesterday he made a post about Menlos Extreme Interviewing which I had the fortune to be a part of during my stay.

    Alexander does a good job of describing the way the extreme interview works so Im just refering to him and the original white paper. Id just like to add my two cents as this was the first time in my life I was a job interviewer. First of all it didnt feel like an interview at all – but being an observer of the exercises really gave me a chance to see the dynamics when two people work together. Some people just click, most people are polite and attentive, some are controlling and a few are obnoxious. Watching others was a great way of becoming aware of my own behaviors.

    Menlo Extreme Interview
    After we had 20-something through the interview the Menlo team sat down and evaluated each interviewee