Danske kirkebøger
Jeg opdagede i går, at alle de danske kirkebøger fra før ca. 1910 (og nogle af de lidt nyere) er scannet ind og er frit tilgængelige.
Det gør det jo en del nemmere at lave sit stamtræ, når man bare kan bladre i kirkebøgerne på sin computer i Skotland uden at skulle en tur til Landsarkivet i Viborg.
Som et eksempel er her fødselsregistreringen for min morfars farfar, Jens Nielsen Skipper fra Mols (klik på det for en større udgave):
Man lærer en del af det. Jeg troede for eksempel, at Skipper var et øgenavn, men manden hed det jo officielt (men gav det ikke videre til sin søn, Jens Marius Nielsen).
Is there an optimal way to read both busy and quiet feeds?
RSS feeds are a great way to read news and blog postings.
However, I have a problem with RSS feed readers (aggregators).
Some of them create one folder per feed, which is great for the fairly quiet feeds that you want to read all of, such as personal blogs.
Others simply list the most recent items from all feeds, which is great for news sources, but not so good for quiet blogs.
In other words, the aggregators I know tend to work well if your feeds have a similar level of activity, but if you put in a few news sources that bring you dozens of updates per hour and add some personal blogs that are updated a couple of times a week, the latter tend to be drowned out.
I’m starting to think one should simply use two separate readers, one for the news and one for the blogs.
However, in theory a combined reader should be possible, by adding more prominence to items from quiet feeds, but only showing the most recent items from the busy ones.
Can anybody recommend such a program?
Where can I buy 10 ml of rhubarb essence outwith Denmark?
The kids and I have a secret plan (actually it’s so secret that they don’t know of it yet!) to make boiled sweets (“bolsjer” in Danish) ourselves.
However, whereas it’s easy enough to get hold of sugar and other essential ingredients in the UK, finding suitable flavourings and colorants seems to be almost impossible unless I’m willing to buy them by the bucketload (500g seems to be the absolute minimum).
A few oils (peppermint, orange etc.) are available, but they seem to be mainly intended for aromatherapy, rather than for cooking.
However, Denmark seems to be full of places selling everything you need. For instance, Urtegaarden sells almost any flavouring you can dream of – pineapple, Bailey’s, cream, kiwi, cranberry, apple and many, many more. All of them in small bottles at reasonable prices.
Of course I can just order them in Denmark, but given the collapse in the value of the pound, I’d much rather find a local shop.
Do British people just never make their own sweets?
Make movies without leaving your computer!
I found a new website today called Xtra Normal.
It lets you make movies like this, and it’s quick and easy:
Exchange rates
© 2009 by Prof. Werner Antweiler, University of British Columbia, Vancouver BC, Canada.
I was therefore very pleased when I discovered this site, which plots the movements of currencies within a user-defined time interval graphically.
To demonstrate, I asked it to plot the movements against the pound of five currencies (the US dollar, the euro, the Swiss franc, the Japanese yen and the Kiwi dollar) since the beginning of 1999 (when the euro was introduced).
For most of that time, the pound wasn’t obviously falling – when some currencies went up, others went down.
However, since mid-2007 (that is, since Gordon Brown became prime minister and Northern Rock got into trouble) the pound has been falling compared to all the currencies in this chart.
More about metric time
I’ve blogged about metric time in the past, but it’s nice to see that I’m not alone.
There are many more details about metric time in this guide than I managed to squeeze into my old blog posting, so it’s well worth a read.
Be aware, though, that he’s only advocating metric units to replace hours, minutes and seconds, while I’m in favour of replacing weeks, months and years as well.
Best of all, he has a page with JavaScript clocks that you are allowed to adapt for your own purposes, so I’ve modified one to show the complete day and time decimally – have a look at the top of the right-hand sidebar.
It feels so much more tangible when you can see the metric seconds ticking away, doesn’t it?
Buying phones
As part of setting up our company, we decided to get two new mobile phones on a business contract.
The natural place for me to buy anything that can be delivered to your house is the Internet, so of course I surfed the websites of the different operators.
I found a decent deal, but there were a few small issues with it, so reluctantly I called their sales team.
They promptly offered me a completely different (and cheaper) deal from what I had seen online.
When I mentioned it to Marcel, he found it completely natural. According to him, there are just so many deals they can’t possibly list them all on their website, and you have to talk to them to get what you need.
I’m really shocked, though. I believe the best deals should always be available online, given that this saves sales rep salaries.
Surely it’s easy enough to design a system that allows you to enter your precise circumstances and be offered deals that suit you, without needing to list all the other deals on offer.
What’s up with them? Are they just weird because they sell phones, or are lots of companies like that?
Bird’s Eye
I just discovered the other day, that Multimap have added a wonderful Bird’s Eye view to their maps.
It basically means the photos are taken from an angle, rather than directly above – see the examples next to this.
I find this much easier to recognise and understand, but of course it means some objects are invisible because they’re obscured by other objects.
Our house looks pretty much as it did when we bought it in the summer of 2007, and our car is not there.
On the other hand, there’s a car that looks a lot like ours in two places: In front of our old flat in Rose Street, and in front of Phyllis’s parents’ house.
Funny how it makes Scotland look like a sunny place, by the way.