It has come to my attention that the name “baseman” – in the form of a nickname for me – has 10 year anniversary this year. It’s a long story, why I got that name – let me just say that it has absolutely nothing to do with baseball or any kind of sport. Also it took a couple of years before I bought the internet domain baseman.dk (I wanted my own domain name, and that was my second idea – the first idea was already taken by somebody else).

The green leaves are turning brown
They have to leave their twigs
And fall – into the wind
Autumn is coming

The last couple of weeks, I have seen some of China. In very short time, I have been to most of the main tourist attractions there. It was some very interesting days, with some surprises:

• In spite of all the bureaucracy, the airports are much quicker to get through than the one in Copenhagen – though that one is considered to be one of the best in Europe.
• There are a lot of cars in China. I think most of the 9 million bicycles in Beijing, Katie sings about, has been exchanged with cars.
• The people don’t spit like they did before – at least not in the larger cities.
• China may not be a democracy, but within limits they are allowed to think and say what they want.

China is fantastic, and the Chinese people (at least the few millions I saw on my trip) are fantastic – and the trip was fantastic.

There are still a lot of very poor people, but it seems to get a little better each day. And though the press in the rest of the world often comments on environmental issues, I could mention other countries with an even more problematic attitude. Not that they don’t have a potential problem. But at least they are not totally ignorant of the fact that things so easily can go from bad to worse if they cut the branch they are sitting on.

On my small trip, I saw Beijing, Tian’anmen Square (the largest square in the world), the former palace of the emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties (The Forbidden City), The Great Wall (offcourse!), the Summer Palace, Temple of Heaven, The Ming Tombs, the old capital city: Xi’an, the Terracotta Army (and one of the men who found it), a show as they could be seen in the Tang dynasty, a few days on the Yangtze River (the Changjiang River), the amazing Three Gorges Dam Project (the largest water conservancy project ever undertaken by human being), Wushan, the ghost city at Fengdu, Chongqing (one of the hottest places in China) and Shanghai with the tall buildings and futuristic city light.

I wouldn’t mind seeing more of China. But next time I would try to spend more time each place.

I’ve just returned from a trip to China.
I’m too tired to write about it now, but there may come some words about the trip later. 🙂

This note from The Land Down Under made me think about national identity. Not in the way we think about other people, but how we see ourselves.
Now we are all aware of the world surrounding us, but I think that not so long ago, people living in small countries like – say – Denmark were more aware of other countries and more likely to travel, than people living in countries large enough to be their own continent.
Throughout history, Danes have been travelling. It was a Dane who discovered Greenland – and America (long after the Inuit and the Native Americans discovered the places first offcourse).
But have we become so fine travellers that we tend to loose our origin? Do we need a song like this one to remind us, who we are, so we’re able to find our way back – home?
I do see the contradiction: me talking about Danish identity, and writing about it in English. But this isn’t about Danish identity – it’s about having a place (geographical or at least as a state of mind) you belong to.

Copenhagen, few days ago.

Living with Windows Vista is easy – if you don’t combine it with iTunes / iPod.

Here are some hints to make it work:

1) If iTunes are very slow when you ad new stuff, and maybe even make your computer freeze:
This could happen if the motherboard in your computer is from Intel and has a “raid controller” on it.
Solution: get the latest raid controller driver from intel.com.

2) If you get a message every time you attach your iPod to your computer, saying that Vista would very much like to scan it to fix some problems:
There’s probably nothing wrong with your iPod – it’s just Vista being stupid.
Run this command (in a command prompt or in start):
chkdsk e: /f
(with “e” being the drive letter for your iPod). (Thanks to Rocketman for this hint).

Sorry about the lack of news from me lately.
Part of the time, I’ve been too busy at work; part of the time it’s been too warm to sit in front of the computer; and all of the time, I had great difficulties figuring out what to write about.

This is the second – and hopefully final – part of The Tale of a Broken Computer.

In the first episode (The Computer Comedy, part I) we heard about me sending a new computer back to the computer store, because of a minor defect. On the way it was damaged by the postman.

Confused? You won’t be after this episode! (Or maybe you will)

The computer store had to sent the computer to Post Danmark (the Danish postal service), for them to check if they would pay for the damage. – They wouldn’t! Not because they couldn’t see that the computer had been damaged, but because the computer store hadn’t discovered the damage in time!

The computer was returned to the store, and I got the sad news. This could easily mean that I had to pay for the repair. I told the store what I thought about that – and they told me that they could offer to repair the computer for free, so I “only” had to pay for spare parts. Not a wonderful deal.

Then I got a new message from the computer store: it turned out that the computer had been damaged even more, while it was sent to Post Danmark for examination. This time however, the computer store discovered the damage in time, and – surprise! – the postal company accepted to pay! Not the total cost of a new computer, but still enough so I didn’t have to pay anything, because of the computer stores offer to pay the wage.

Yesterday the computer was ready – and I decided to pick it up myself instead of having them to send it to me. I didn’t have the courage to let the Danish postal service have another turn with it.