Sundhed er dårligt, skattestop er godt
21 April 2009 | Politics | No Comments
Her i midten af april 2009, efter vi har skiftet vores tidligere statsminister Anders Fogh Rasmussen ud, og vi generelt burde se lempelser af f.eks. skattestoppet - markerer landets sundhedsminister sig igen med fantastisk indsigt og forståelse for de danske borgere… Sundhedsminister Jakob Axel Nielsen(K) har både skudt forslaget om afgiftsforøgelse på sukker (dvs. sodavand og chokolade) og forøgelsen af tobaksafgiften i sænk. Sundhedskommisionen, en regeringsudpeget kommision af eksperter, foreslår ellers at disse tiltag vil forøge den danske folkesundhed væsentligt. En sundhed der i forvejen er presset af for voldsomt et alkoholindtag. Med Europas højeste gennemsnitsforbrug per borger af alkohol og Europas lempeligste tobakspolitik hvad angår det offentlige rum - har Danmark taget beslutningen om at det frievalg - det liberale valg - er den eneste løsning ud af en helbredskrise. Det er ikke regeringens egen rolle at lovgive sig ud af en sundhedskultur der er skabt af - og vedligeholdes af - kommercielle interesser.
Med en tidligere sundhedsminister som statsminister, så burde der være plads til en mere ambitiøs sundhedspolitik. Hvad med at få afskaffet rygning i det offentlige rum helt? Hæv samtidig tobaksafgiften og sukkerafgiften. Det kunne være at de så berømte køer på hospitalerne måske ikke indtræffer i denne valgperiode, men herregud, så må I bare slå på at det var VKO der hev en bedre folkesundhed i land, når VKO igen sidder i oppositionen.
Piratebay exclusive interview to the world ofc it’s online ^^
17 April 2009 | Politics | No Comments
This is the video exclusive interview with one of the PirateBay owners just after having gotten the verdict regarding the trail. Even they each got sentenced 1 year in jail (which is really odd in regards to swedish law) and having to repay approx. 18 million danish kroner they are confident and will continue with the trail.
Even though the trail is done - both parties would have protested it and taken it to higher court. Anyway, here is the Bambuser video feed.
New world vs. old world business-model
17 April 2009 | Internet perspective | No Comments
It’s been on the lips of the internet for the past month. It’s on the lips of all media these very hours. It’s important in so many way to most of us, even though most ordinary citizens don’t even realise it.
It is our generation’s own revolution - albeit a digital revolution, it’s still a revolution. I am not going to delve into the discoussion of why The Pirate Bay is not an illegallity or not, because it is besides the point. People will use it and other services just like it, and instead the companies should wake up and forego the protectionist stance, because it is one they will never win… there I said it, its been said before and it is irrevocably true. Get into this millenia and do what companies like Apple are doing with iTunes (even though the program and the service is crappy, they at least got the mindset to understand).
So lets keep it simple with this video below, so that you might get it visually too:-)
Simon som Kommunikationsansvarlig for World Climate Community?
17 March 2009 | Uncategorized | 34 Comments
Som du sikkert ved så er der COP15 i København i år og det er en vigtig begivenhed der skal ud over stepperne til det brede og glade Danmark, men i særdeleshed også rundt til resten af verden.
Hvis du synes at jeg, Simon Kaastrup-Olsen, er den rette person til, at:
- stå for event-koordinering
- skabe online-awareness på social-media platforme (så som facebook)
- håndtere web 2.0 teknologier til nettet
- bruge mit personlige og arbejdsrelatede netværk til at hjælpe miljøet
- skrive, koordinere og begejstre folk for miljøet
Så gør mig den tjeneste, at skrive i kommentarfeltet nedenfor hvorfor du synes jeg er anbefalelsesværdig, eller hvis du er doven, så kan du nøjes med I DO samt dit fulde navn og jeg vil være dig meget taknemmelig!
Men, kun såfremt du mener at du kan stå indefor det!
På forhånd tak,
Simon
ps: brug “Comments” feltet til at skrive en anbefaling
iPhone 3G problems, anyone else?
27 February 2009 | Uncategorized | 5 Comments
I have had my iPhone since august 2008, and I am happy. I am actually crazy about the thing. Like my friend Brian once said when he got his first Mac, “Once you go Mac, you can’t go back”. I hated him for saying it the dullard. But now… the iphone 3g, wow.
But but but but … I have an IPhone volume ringer problem. It automatically self-adjusts the volume to go either max volume or min volume - occasionally… Either I can’t hear a thing, or I get my ears blown off.
Problem description:
1. I listen to music - and the audio levels go bonanza all the way up high. I jerk out my earplugs to avoid inner ear damage.
2. I try to remedy the problem by turning down. My iphone slowly turns down the volume(all the time while it tries to counter my action) while I hold the button down. As soon as I let go, it spikes all the way to max volume again.
3. The same goes for when I am in conversation and all other audio related matters.
4. The little bugger that it is, it may also decide to do the same in reverse - it also decideds to turn it down minimum automatically - leaving conversation dead in the water, and music a non-existent pleasure.
Solutions I have tried:
- I have tried rebooting the OS,
- I have installed the software upgrades. Nothing works.
- The button doesn’t look broken and most of the time (80% or so) the phone works fine. Sometimes it just goes crazy! (Software crazy, not hardware fault crazy).
Challenges of the problem:
If the phone was physically broken, then it would occur more often, not as random as now, and it would occur when I fiddled with volume, not when I started to play music.
Info on my phone:
My iphone is a 3G, it is both jailbroken and YellowSn0w’ed, but it was not always like this, and the problem persisted even back then.
The darned situation:
I am from Denmark, Europe, but got the upgrade from an american friend = I don’t want to send it back.
Now for the million dollar question:
Any solutions? App (from cydia, Installer) or even App store - which might render the physical button inoperate?
You know what really pisses me off:
That’s a rhetoric question, but rather a statement. Apple’s own support site is absolutely bonkers! There is no help at all and the search function is crippled. Even using google to search, I get zero help files for this. I have found quite a few posts with this particular problem, but on a paid site - 10 $ a month. Quite a few there, imagine all those with the same problem, but unwilling to pay 10 bucks just to be able to post there.
ffs Apple, and to think I was considering buying a Macbook Pro
How to market Enterprise Architecture?
10 September 2007 | Perspective | No Comments
In this day and age everybody knows what competitive advantage is. Everybody, or most everybody, are trying to achieve it with varying results. Some through research and development, basically extending or optimizing their area of business and yet others do it differently by branching out.
For the past seven months I have been employed with QualiWare ApS. which is a Copenhagen based, Danish process management house and tool vendor of such consultancy efforts; doing both implementation, development and consultation on process optimization.
Through my stay with as a Sales Engineer it was my job to support every aspect of the organization, or so it would seem, but this allowed me to get around and try out many roles. It actually took senior management some time to figure out how I was to perform my job, and where to apply my skills. Since I am an outspoken person and somewhat charming, albeit that is a biased and personal conclusion, I was to join the QW face which customers, distributors, conference attendees and competitors alike, saw when they would come face-to-face with the Qualiware corporation. As part of sales I was to see customers and explain them the use of the product, but being an somewhat tech-savy, a title I earned due to my background from the IT-University of Copenhagen, I was also to install the product, meaning make it work in their networked environment.
So the first few months I spent my time getting accustomed to working in a business that is practically able to sell its product to any imaginable and impossible company that is out there, and trying to phantom why it is that the business areas is still so incredibly small and not public at all! My work made me realize that nobody, I literally mean nobody, outside of the business itself, knows anything about processes. That it is hard to explain to grandfather or your mother is understandable, but explaining the nature of what defines a work process to second in charge at TDC, CFO Hans Munk, was also difficult. He eventually got what I meant by processes, but he never came to fully appreciate the strategic strength having an overview of processes in your organization - especially one as big as TDC - could mean to him and TDC. And when it comes down to it, I realize that is must be a question of faith for the EA or business process reengineer! –“Do you have a gut feeling that tells you Enterprise Architecture is the way to bring your business into the new millennium?” Some people do, but many of those people are rather geeky, sorry but it is true and have a hard time explaining it in layman’s terms!
At a conference in Chicago earlier this year, “Chicaco Brainstorm”, hosted by BPMInstitute.org and SOAInstitute.org the keynote speaker asked the room whether they were “IT people” or “Business people” and had them raise their hand if they were either business or an IT person, and finally progressed to the logical closing question -“or are you both?”. I had put up my hand at both IT and Business, and so had so many other people and when the third question landed, I thought -“phew, thank god, I fit in”. But in the course of my four days in Chicago I got to understand that actually none of these people are business people! I mean some of them looked business-like, but nobody talked business-talk, they all talked either IT-talk or process-talk. If somebody mentioned the word “management” they most often referred to the “management of processes”. Not the management of people or corporate economics.
Where am I going with all this? Well in this direction: Everybody in the business today are talking about how valuable EA, BPM, ITIL, LEAN and what not are for businesses world-wide. How they can optimize to make money, save money, generate value through coordinated processes, and how good it is that transparency can prevail and create innovative products that are not hindered by classic management methods of the nineteen eighties.
At the conference the customers there looking for solutions to their problems were all IT people. They asked IT questions to IT guys, who had an IT product or IT consultant role that could solve “just that problem”. None of the attendees were only just managers, or chief executive officers or even chief financial officers. Actually there were none of the classic companies from way back when it was modern to be Xerox, Sony, Superbrugsen, Walmart, KFC or other classic companies that are all tied in with production, logistics and automation: Companies that really could reap the benefits of being business process optimized, because their value-chain is deep vertically, horizontally and global offshoring and outsourcing are essential for a company competing in a flat world!
What I am saying is that the people that are populating the business process industry today are IT guys talking to IT people all with a Computer Science degree, but no academic organizational perspective other than systems development, who then go home to their respective organizations and try to explain all this to their CEO, CFO or board of directors, all with a solid understanding of the organization. That is if they are even allowed access to these restricted senior management areas - which it would indicate is not the case. The problem for the EA and its methodology peers, is that people really don’t understand what a process is today! Sure some people do, but the places where strategic decisions are made, processes are a byproduct of whatever senior management seeks to optimize, remove, improve, rebuild, retake or shut down. And the problem for the industry is that the IT people out there are well versed in the lingo of Michael Porter, Edith Penrose, Henry Mintzberg and Schumpeter, nor are they good at presentations with board rooms filled with people in red and blue ties in white collar shirts and suffixes on their business card with “Mr(.s). MBA.
In the words of a one of the greatest teachers of our time –“you must unlearn what you have learned” and start the hiring of students of social sciences and the humanities for business processes to be fully appreciated as a complex size, that can do without the technical aspects applied to it today. That’s what we have tools for.
Så er den konsulentfest slut… :-(
1 May 2007 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments
I en nylig rapport om den danske stats køb af konsulentydelser fra april 2007 står der følgende:
“Alle ministerområder skal fra dne 1. januar 2007 indsende oplysninger om deres køb til Finansministeriet. Formålet hermed er, at FM fremover skal kunne følge op på anvendelsen af de nye fællesstatslige indkøbsaftaler og forberede udbud af nye fælles aftaler. [...] Det er Rigsrevisionens vurdering, at ministeriernes fremtidige rapportering til Finansministeriet fordelt på indkøbskategorier vil give myndighederne et godt grundlag fro at skabe et samlet overblik over deres køb af konsulentydelser samt kunne forbedre deres grundlag for fremtidige strategiske beslutninger på området.”
Så er den konsulentfest vist afsluttet. I rapporten anslås det iøvrigt at der fra 2005-2006(april), at staten har købt for 3,14 milliarder kroner ydelser. Det slås dog fast i rapporten at dét tal er en grov vurdering, da man reelt ikke har haft en måde at styre, måle eller kontrollere det på. Indtil nu.
Hele beretningen kan hentes her
Thesis down the drain, up the well!
4 March 2007 | Uncategorized | No Comments
Well thesis writing sure does take its time… anyway somebody cleverer than myself once said “don’t 
change horses mid-stream” and this person might very well be right, but then I proclaim “exception that proves the rule” thank you very much! Thomas Watts and myself have settled in for the remainder of our master studies at the IT University of Copenhagen and I must say that discussions are already flowing “som skidt fra en spædekalv” (can’t be bothered to translate, the Danish version is better!) So new thesis subject along side a new thesis buddy! So anybody that follow me in the offline world will not see me from Friday to Monday because my life remains dedicated to thesis writing. God save the queen!
Punk N’ Porn @ home!
25 November 2006 | Uncategorized | No Comments
Thank you all for a unforgettable evening, I mean you sure did make a mess, but it was worth it! The webcam that we installed for the party this time not only streamed you having fun, but also took pictures of it. Thus, we made a stop-motion video of the development. It starts at 17.00 o’clock until 07.00. It is real cool! See you all again New Years eve!
Thesis, my beginning to reach the end
3 October 2006 | Thesis, University | 1 Comment
My thesis has started, or should I say the process around the thesis has started. No actual pages have been produced yet, and we, my thesis buddy Peter Falkenberg and I, are still awaiting acceptance from SKAT the Danish Ministry of Taxation. But we have gotten replies and acceptance from both the Danish Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries and two Enterprise Architecture Tool vendors, Qualiware and Telelogic.
So our contact list is okay, but we need that final case to relate it all, and this is really killing our schedule at the moment. So for the time being we are reading interesting books about IT Governance by Weill and Ross and their newly published Enterprise Architecture As Strategy.
A thesis about EA tools? I don’t know if that is going to fly, but the decision has been made (and you cannot undo a thing like that you know!) and we are pushing forward. Peter and I actually got ourselves an Espresso maker today and plant in our office! Big things, I will bring yet another plant tomorrow and some posters. Peter’s daughter has also made some drawings for the empty walls too!