Okay, actually I do not like traffic lights, except in those cases when they help me drive forward by stopping crossing traffic. The headline is from a Monty Python song.

On a Blog-surf, I found this place talking about the (figurative) traffic lights we meet on our way in life. About the times we are forced to wait for e.g. a computer to get ready before we can continue our work.

It made me think of the development I have gone through. Not so long ago I was very, very impatient. Both with me and – especially – with anything out of my control that I felt were holding me back. Most of the computer equipment I have thrown away (sometimes literally) hasn’t been defect, but have made the sin of making me wait!

The same with the real traffic lights: a nuisance when I was in good time, a real pain in the backseat when I wasn’t in good time. I have the idea that it all took a turn on a small trip to Nice in France. It’s a city with heavy traffic – more than I’m used to, where I live. But still: though drivers sat there in long tailbacks without a chance to get anywhere soon, they just sat patiently and waited. They even had strength enough to help motorists coming from side ways out in front of them.
Afterwards I have tried to practice the same way in traffic and have realized two things: it doesn’t make the drive take longer – and I’m much more relaxed.

I also try the same relaxed living when I meet the figurative traffic lights; sometimes with success, but just as often with increased blood pressure. I’m still able to kick my computer, if it’s using all the energy on something else than me, me, me. But I’m working on it – and slowly, day by day, I hopefully get to be a much more balanced person. 🙂

Have you tried twitter?
  Don’t know what it is?

Don’t know why anyone would use twitter? Me neither. 🙂

Click here for a real-time geographic visualization of posts to twitter.

Yesterday the ship Vaedderen returned from a 258 days scientific expedition round the world (The Galathea Expedition, the largest nautical research expedition to leave Denmark in 50 years): Copenhagen, Torshavn, Nuuk, Azorean Islands, Accra, Cape Town, Broome, Perth, Sydney, Gizo, Christchurch, Valparaiso, Antofagasta, Galapagos, US Virgin Islands, Boston – and then home.
To celebrate the expedition, one of the breweries in Denmark made a special beer (Broeckhouse Galathea 6%), brewed partly on rye and not just barley malt like a normal beer.

The ship returned with a lot of new scientific results and has been a good chance for several different scientific directions to join forces.
That is all very great, but for me – the most important result was that fantastic beer. 😛

Announcement from the Royal House:

On Saturday April 21, 2007 at 16.02 pm Her Royal Highness Crown Princess Mary gave birth to a healthy daughter at Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen (Copenhagen University Hospital).

  Weight: 3350 grs., length: 50 cm.
  Mother and baby are doing fine.

His Royal Highness Crown Prince Frederik was present at Rigshospitalet all the time.

[More info at Danish Royal Watchers]

Not always, but a little too often, this blog seems very slow. Either by making you wait too long before the page shows up. Or worse: You receive a “Page Cannot Be Displayed” error message.

I can see there is a problem, but how do you see it? Did you have to wait for this page to show up? If you are one of my precious returning visitors: do you sometimes receive an error message instead of this blog? Or is everything just fabulous?

Your comments will hopefully show me the next step in direction of a more stable blog.

I remember one time, that I thought if you had to be allergic to any kind of pollen, it should be bamboo. Because they only flower once every 100 years or so (and then they die). But guess what? Bamboo is a sort of grass. And guess who is allergic to grass pollen?
Oh well, I’m not that affected by it at the moment. And for the next hundred years, when the bamboo has done what it came to do, I’ll just have to put up with ordinary grass pollen. 😉

I pinched this idea from the fantastic Practically Perfect, who shamelessly stole it from Living For Disco, who got tagged with a meme by Our Man in Granada

– So here it is: My five reasons to write a blog. Why do it?

1. I don’t think I have ever written a diary. I have often kept small journals of quotations etc., and on my latest trip, I kept a travel diary. But an actual diary? Never. Therefore my blog might not look like an ordinary diary but more like a scrapbook.
For a long time, I had a secret affection towards the world of blogs, and did read a lot of them. On the other hand, I had decided not to make my own blog. Mostly because I live a boring life, had nothing to write about and didn’t know how to begin a blog. One day an old friend / work colleague, Anders, lured me into a blog-abuse by telling me about WordPress. I told him, I wasn’t interested – few minutes later, I tried to install the program anyway – and then I got hooked. The rest is history.

2. Being the boring person that I am, living the boring life that I do, it’s a challenge to maintain a blog. But in a way, that’s exactly why I do it: in some respect it forces me to stay focused on the world around me, almost like a photographer, to constantly seek out new tings to portray.

3. My native language is Danish. For most people Danish is something they eat – for me it’s the language I’ve been speaking all my life. Right from the start, I decided to write my blog in English. Both as a way to practice writing English, and in the frail hope that my words would get out to a broader audience. The downside of it is that I often write in short sentences about stuff I could say so much about. I can read and speak English, but it takes me a long time to write it. I do hope that you’re able to read it and understand what I try to say in spite of grammatical errs!

4. I sincerely want to contribute to the internet. I have got so many stories and so much knowledge from the net and I do hope that I – to some extent – can give a little back. That goes for both “ordinary” webpages (which I’ve mostly written in Danish) and this blog, where I spend most of my web-writing time these days.

5. I really like to be a part of the large blogging community! I love reading about other people’s lives, their hopes and dreams, their ideas. And I would love to know that other people read my blog and use whatever they can of it in their own life, or just read it as pure entertainment. And I love the comments from people finding things here worth commenting.

I thought it would be difficult to find five reasons for writing a blog – but it wasn’t. Just like it isn’t difficult to find subjects to write about in my blog. All though I’m not an interesting person with an interesting life, that hasn’t stopped me from keeping a blog.

Feel free to snatch the idea of giving five reasons why you keep a blog.

So, that’s why I blog. Why do you read?