Author Archives: mihtjel

Danish Design in Batman: The Dark Knight

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The latest Batman movie, The Dark Knight, includes quite a few instances of Danish design. Having moved to a new flat recently, and not actually having bought all my lamps yet, I am quite attentive to nice lamps I see around town when shopping and such. And lo, there were some in The Dark Knight as well:

AJ Gulv

Arne Jacobsen floor lamp

Arne Jacobsen floor lamp

The Arne Jacobsen floor lamp was designed in 1957 for the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen. Bruce Wayne has a number of them in black in his Gotham City penthouse apartment.

PH 4½/3½ (or one like it)

PH glass shade lamp

PH 4½/3½ lamp

The Poul Henningsen glass shade lamps were designed in the middle of the 1920’es, and based on a logarithmic spiral. The mayor of Gotham City has one in his office in the movie.

Apart from that, one of my friends noticed a Danish designed Kirk telephone in it as well, Bang & Olufsen are getting more business because one of their stereos was featured in it, and I’m certain more of the furniture was Danish designed as well. I like this trend.

Sigfreds Kaffebar: Good coffee in Ã…rhus

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Writing a post like this in English might seem a little strange – but at least it will be readable for foreigners who may want to visit Ã…rhus: I’ve found a nice place for coffee in Ã…rhus. It’s Sigfreds Kaffebar.

For anyone who knows Ã…rhus, it probably shouldn’t come as a big surprise. Sigfreds is known as a place of good coffee, and even though we have the Starbucks-style Baresso around here as well, producing somewhat consistent quality coffee, Sigfreds is just a different league – and a wholly different atmosphere. It’s a lot more cosy and café-like. Unfortunately, I don’t have a picture to place here, but I think I’ll be going back tomorrow and might get one.

I had a cortado, basicly a double espresso with about the same amount of steamed milk in it, for 32 kroner. It doesn’t come with any accessories, apart from an optional glass of water, but it didn’t need any: The taste was great. Freshly ground beans, and judging by the videos on the website and the behaviour of the barista, a very keen attention to hygeine and cleanliness. Thoroughly recommended.

Chocolate coated pineapple rings

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I’ve come up with a plan. A masterly plan, to leave me independent of the chocolate store near where I work: I am going to make my own chocolate coated pineapple rings.

The first attempt is in my fridge now to cool down – some might say that choosing a day with my kitchen at 30-some degrees celsius as the day to test out my idea wasn’t smart, and I’m inclined to agree – tempering chocolate, when the ambient temperature is higher than the level you’re trying to cool to isn’t easy.

Not giving up that easily, I decided to follow David Lebovitz’s instructions for tempering chocolate, albeit not with quite the care I might do in the future. Looking in my fridge now, it seems I didn’t succeed – partly due to my thermometer being too slow, and partly due to not having the patience to wait for the temperature to go down. I’ll have to do a bit more work on this in the future.

The biggest problem was probably the unexpected viscosity of the chocolate: Pouring it in a way to coat the pineapple rings was far from as easy as I’d thought. Perhaps that’s a problem with temperature, but it seemed that the chocolate I was using didn’t really want to be poured, as much as it wanted to sit in a thick, smooth but unmoving mass. I’ve looked a bit at some websites about additives in chocolate, and I think the answer may be trying out adding some lecithin, a soy or egg yolk extract used as an emulsifier to make chocolate pourable. Perhaps making an improvised mould for the rings would make things a little easier

Pineapple rings are rather wet when direct from the tin, which also created a bit of a problem. I was prepared better for this, though, and patted them dry with some kitchen paper – perhaps other methods might be employed with more success.

There’s no pictures this time, since I didn’t really expect to succeed, but when the weather cools down I’ll try again for a slightly more serious attempt. I’ll be sure to add some tasting notes later, though, when I can’t hold myself back any further.

Edit: The results

I’ve just tasted one of the pineapple rings I made earlier, and I have a few observations. First of all, the chocolate wasn’t tempered at all. In fact, it melted almost seconds after being removed from the fridge, so I guess I’ll have to eat them all myself 😉

Secondly, the insides were too wet. I had suspected this, and come my next try, I’ll have to figure a way to dry it out. I suspect the ones used by professionals might be soaked in a light syrup, to make it a bit more candy-like. Might try that out.

Thirdly, and most importantly, the taste: I liked it. I am still very fond of the combination of pineapple and chocolate, and with just a bit of practice I’m sure I’d be able to cure some of my addiction to the local chocolate shop.

The greens have arrived!

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I’ve signed up to receive a box of vegetables from a Danish company called Aarstiderne every other week. Today was the first delivery, and I was quite excited to get home and see what was in it:

Fruits and vegetables from Aarstiderne.com

The contents are all organic, and even though they’re trucked around, Denmark is a small enough country that a lot of it counts as “local”, anyway. The box I got contained:

  • Emmerys malt rye bread
  • Voelkel grape juice
  • Vivani milk chocolate with almonds
  • Babyleaves – of some leaf vegetable of unknown origin as of yet 😉
  • 5 tomatoes
  • 5 plums
  • 7 apples
  • 10-or-so carrots (one gone already, yum!)
  • a box of grapes
  • a bunch of (5) leeks (edit: these are supposed to be spring onions. They’re bigger than the ones I’m used to…)
  • a head of broccoli
  • a cucumber
  • a courgette

Costs me 223kr, which is about £24 or €30.

Now I have to figure out what to use all that stuff for.

All work and no play…

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Last week, I started working at my new job (which is the same as the old one, but full time) at DAIMI. At the same time, moving has been going on, and I’m almost done now, only really needing to bring along a few things to put in the store room, as well as my electric piano, which I’m going to bring today.

Working full time and moving as well has taken up almost all of my time, which is why I haven’t posted much here. I’ve started cooking a lot more, and I’m really enjoying having my own kitchen and a separate living room and bedroom. So expect some news about food in not too long.

PHP is taking up a lot of my time at work, I’m trying out Zend Studio which seems to be really nice, albeit quite expensive. I may have to try out PDT to see if it’ll do the same sort of things. More about this later as well.

Lastly, if you haven’t seen them yet, you should take a look at the photos I’ve taken of my new place: The first ones taken when I was about to move in, the next ones when I got my dining table and curtains in place, and the latest with my new sofa and sort of living room arrangement.

Moving!

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I’ve moved, and gotten my blog back up after I accidentally knocked it over. Pictures from the new flat are available at my gallery.

As soon as I get the last stuff moved – Monday or so I hope – I’ll take some pictures of the flat with furniture in it. I still need to get my bed, though, and because of an error on the part of the furniture supplier, that won’t be coming until the 16th. Ick. Luckily, one of my friends let me borrow his folding bed, which will have to do for those two weeks.

Memopal: Avoid!

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The recent post I made about Mozy received a few comments, concerned with a piece of software called Memopal. Akismet identified one of them as spam, but the other one got through. Looked pretty much like a regular comment:

I’ve read on Wikipedia about remote backup and I tried some services, but the only one I bought is Memopal.

Memopal offers a search engine online that helps me find archived documents in few seconds. Some Competitors have a search engine too but it’s very slow and usually it is not online.
Memopal is online storage, online backup and file sharing services into one product.

Memopal saves all versions of my documents. Moreover I have two computers, desktop ad laptop, and I can install Memopal on both buying only one license. It’s great!

But googling it, it’s completely identical to something posted elsewhere, namely here, at the end of last week.

The other comment was more of the same, and had been posted in a bunch of different places by a character name of “michelle79”.

Memopal: Don’t post spam comments. It’s really bad publicity, and makes you seem like scammers and cheats. I certainly wouldn’t want to buy any license from you, if that’s the sort of marketing strategies you employ.

Mozy: Privacy an illusion?

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One of my friends, Søren, posted a post yesterday about the backup-system Mozy, that he had been using for his mac. Apparently, the software is just great, but this isn’t what concerns him.

Looking at the Mozy privacy statement, they have the regular reassuring bit:

We will not sell or market the email addresses or other collected personal information of registered Users to third parties.

We will not view the files that you backup using the Service.

We may view your file system information (file extensions, sizes etc. but not your file contents) to provide technical support.

That’s all fine. The part that worries Søren is this:

Mozy, Inc. may disclose Personal Data, including the data you back up with the Service, with or without notice (a) if required by a subpoena or other judicial or administrative order, (b) where required by law, or (c) at our sole discretion, where we deem it necessary to protect the safety of any individual or the general public or to prevent violation of our User Agreement or the rights of Mozy, Inc. or any third party.

I told Sozen to get more help and perhaps some elucidation on the above statement, and gave him the helpdesk numbers of companies provide IT services for Mozy. We got to know the following. Mozy’s privacy statement would of course have no effect over the requirements of the law – while it may still worry people outside the US, it’s not really something that can be a surprise to anyone. The strange bit comes at (c). Mozy may disregard the privacy closes at their sole discretion. Basically, they’ve written up these nice privacy statements, but may choose to ignore them if they so wish.

Come on now – you can’t be serious? Apparently, according to someone who seems to be an employee, they are. The post doesn’t mention the last of the three clauses, though, but merely the cases of administrative order – which neither Søren nor I are trying to contest. Since when have Mozy become the protectors of the public, though?

Søren wrote a reply post, which I think you should read. I will be keeping an eye on this case, as I think it’s quite interesting to see if Mozy can come up with any explanation for wanting to give themselves the power to start protecting the public from their users.

Update: Søren also posted a comparison of various privacy policies. Good read as well.

Panoramic picture

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I found a nice place a couple of days ago, that I really wanted to share with all of you. Unfortunately, the view there isn’t easy to catch with just a single photo, but I’ve tried my best anyway. I wanted to upload it directly using WordPress, but that doesn’t seem to like the idea of a 26775×1588 pixel picture. Anyway, by a bit of hackery:

A scenery near Vorre, Denmark

Don’t be shy, click the image. The tiny thumbnail doesn’t do it much justice.