Michael Carøe Andersen

Tag: femi

  • Getting lost in Prague

    With six months in Prague we got a luxury in that we don’t need to stomp around town and cover all the attraction in a weekend or a week. So we’ve purposely just jumped on the trams and metros and gotten ourselves ‘lost’.

    Strahov Stadium

    The first day we ended up by – what we later learned was – the Strahov Stadium. It looked quite big but it wasn’t until I got home and looked at it on a satellite image that I understood the size of this place. It was build to host parades and huge gymnastic shows and the stands would allegedly hold 250,000 people.
    Here you see it to the right of Stadion Evzena Rosickeho which is a ‘regular’ stadium that holds nearly 20,000.

    Strahov Stadium.

    Another day we ended up by a walled park. When we looked through the gate we saw this boulevard through the forest.

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    It took forever to walk to the other end but when we finally got up there we were met by this star shaped building.

    The Star Royal Summer Palace (Letohradek Hvezda)

    It is The Star Royal Summer Palace but it is closed for another few weeks so I’ll have to come back another time. Once again there were a lot more background and history to be found online. It is build with a great attention to symbolism and so it was build in 1555 as a hexagram.

  • 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!

  • 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.


  • Aalborg Inspiration

    About a week ago Femi and I went on a road trip to Aalborg in the other end of Denmark (250 miles away). Aalborg is my college town and there is a lot of interesting things going on up there. Being set in Copenhagen it is easy to overlook or forget the things that go on other places.

    Some of the people we met during the days in Aalborg were the CommunicateIT boys that have set up a thriving IT business in short time, the two wizkids Martin and Torben starting up there own thing and Andreas Haugstrup a Danish vlogger pioneer :) and organizer of VlogEurope. We ended up spending almost a day each place talking about setting up businesses and geeking about. I hope we have an excuse soon again to go up and play again

    We also toured some of the departments and met up with Jan Stage and Ivan Aaen of Dept. of Computer Science. We had a very interesting discussion with Ivan about the paradigm of agile software development. The Software Innovation Research Lab they are setting up sounds like a really interesting project about how to facilitate continual innovation in a software project, and hopefully they will set up a blog so we can follow along in their experiences. At E-Learning Lab we ran into Thomas Ryberg who is doing the last stint on his Ph.D. on young peoples use of technology.
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    We spend an afternoon at the VR Media Lab that has some very neat 3D facilities. For the first time I had a chance to try out the 3D cave. This was an amazing experience I especially enjoyed the 3D drawing program where I could draw all the way around myself or draw an object and walk around it. Peter had arranged for our tour and we all had a blast. There is a lot of potential in 3D imagery but there are still a lot of difficulties in getting this technology out of the academic setting and in to entertainment – but maybe Peter is a man for changing that

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  • 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.

  • From talk to action – an idea becomes real

    Most of the decisions that have defined my life up until now have had their beginning in the small hours after a good night out – and this is no exception. My one year internship in Ann Arbor, Michigan was coming to an end and it had been a most amazing year – a very interesting job, lots of cool friends and lots of greats experiences. One night on the way home from the bars I walked with a fellow intern and we were talking about the ever-more threatening return to The Real Lifeâ„¢. Both of us graduated from our academic programs just before coming to the States so on our imminent return home we would be looking for jobs and settling down and all that stuff.

    As we were walking home that fateful night the discussion turned to how sad it would be to get into the everyday life after this incredible year we had just experienced. And then my friend said – “we should start our own company together, do stuff we want to do and use all the great things we’ve learned here”. The talk got intense and we had a lot of crazy ideas (as only drunk friends on the way home from the bars can have). We promised each other that we had to try to start our own company – if we failed then to hell with it – we are still young. No matter what it will be a great experience.

    Five months later my friend Femi packed one bag and flew from Belfast, Northern Ireland – his home town – to Copenhagen, Denmark were I am living now. Our company Arb Design was made official September 1st. Sometimes I have to pinch myself, sometimes I wake up and think “what am I doing?!” and I’m not sure we fully understand what we set in motion here – but trust me we are having a lot of fun :)

    Stay tuned for more on the story of the life as an entrepreneur.

  • Man – Oh yeah!

    Got up at three this morning and went to Parken the national football stadium here in Copenhagen. The reason was to get tickets for the Championship League game between FCK (Football Club Copenhagen) and Manchester United.

    There were already a lot of people when we got there but there was nothing else to do than sit down and wait – and wait. Here is a picture from when the sun came up.

    The waiting line to get a ticket for FCK - Manchester United game

    They started selling the tickets at 10 and we finally got to the booth around 12. And low and behold the guys are going to the ball game :)

    Femi with the tickets - yay!