leoland

Two days ago Steve Jobs unveiled the brand new iPhone in his keynote at WWDC.  The iPhone is now subsidized by AT&T which means the 8gb iPhone will be $199 (within reach for a student like me) and the 16gb will be $299 with a 24 month contract.  It looks a little more sexy too.  It can be bought in either black or white.  I prefer the black, of course.  The iPhone will be released on July 11, ten days after I get back to the U.S. from Denmark.  I’ll need a cell phone when I get back and have also wanted to get an iPod for a while.  All the features (including Assisted-GPS) just make this a worth-while buy, especially if you need a phone as well.
A few of the improvements over the new model:

• 300 hours of standby, 8-10 hours of 2G talk, 5 hours of 3G talk, 7 hours of video and 24 hours of audio
• A-GPS (technically it’s better than a straight GPS because it uses cell phone towers to assist in tracking when the satellite signals are not strong enough, which is useful if you’re in large cities or are in a building) Assisted GPS also tends to respond faster than the conventional method.
• Of course 3G network speeds…and here comes my biggest gripe:  Why in the world is AT&T’s 3G network so skimpy.  It’s only covering the big cities and some smaller ones.  Of course, I just happen to be in the middle of a bunch of cities that get 3G.  Hopefully the U.S. eventually catches up to Europe (haha, I know it’s never going to happen) and finally works hard at getting 3G to most populated areas.

With the app store coming soon, it’s going to be really fun to see what applications get created for the iPhone. All in all though, I think this phone is a spankin’ good deal and I’ll probably indulge in one once July 11 comes around.

Mario and I were walking through town, on our way to catch a movie and he eyed a poster mentioning something about an Air Show.  Now, for us this is a big deal.  We both love Airplanes and Helicopters.  When we got back home, our trip was planned in a matter of days.  We headed up to Karup on Sunday morning, leaving around 7:00, which is pretty early for a Sunday but I can say I have absolutely no regrets :).
When we got there, we were some of the first people to get there but there was still a huge line to get on to the military base.  Security was quite impressive, and tighter than expected.  It seemed like all of the soldiers that were based there were on duty.
Well, getting down to the actual air show and displays, it was amazing.  It’s been quite a few years since I’ve been to an air show and I think I’ll start keeping on top of them more when I get back to the U.S.

Click on any picture to make it bigger. (you can use your mouse or keyboard arrows to go through the pictures, to get out just push esc on your keyboard, click your mouse outside of the LightBox, or just click on “close”)

…to see the pictures in higher resolution or to see the ones that didn’t make it to the gallery click here

Well guys, I know it’s been a long journey.  I’ve been switching blogging platforms left and right and feel like I’ve finally found my favorite.  I started off using Blogspot, then they became Blogger.  After a while I started using iWeb but found it to be lacking much power and many features that I appreciated so I switched back to Blogger.  I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time, but I’ve finally done it.  I’ve finally switched to the infamous WordPress, a blogging platform that will now reside on my own server so I have more control over all elements of my blog.  It’s going to take me a while to tweak everything so it looks and works the way I want it too, but bear with me.  I finally feel at home with this software and don’t foresee any changes in the near future (<3yrs).

First of all, let me say that I absolutely abhor drinking alcoholic beverages. I do not have a difficult time tolerating other people’s drinking habits but when it comes to me, there’s no way I’d ever drink. Alcohol companies do have ludicrous amounts of money. Where do they put all this money? The develop impressive commercials and other various forms of promotion. Here in Denmark, one of the most popular brands of beer is Carlsberg. They used to only make alcoholic drinks but they now have a sport-soda drink. I’ve been in the theater (last movie: the new Indiana Jones, great movie) a few times since I’ve been here and the commercials for this new drink never cease to crack me up. I just had to post one of the funnier ones. Take a look, quite entertaining. (since the new beverage is being marketed towards sporty people, these commercials have a nice football (soccer) spin to them)

viral commercial

I had been waiting for this for a long time! My bro came and visited for six days.
We had a really good time. Everyone could tell we were brothers because we share some mutual craziness and fun-loving. I’ll keep it short. Among other things…we went scooter riding around the beach, visited Legoland, went to a football match in Århus, and participated in various other activities that are not to be mentioned.
Here are some pictures and a video from the week:

We had a break (a long weekend) here where all the kids had to go home so no one had to be at the school to supervise them. Crista was having her birthday and had already planned in advance for this trip.
It would kind of be her “birthday present” from us.
On Thursday we headed to the train station in the morning and took the railways all the way down to Hamburg HBF.We entertained ourselves/each other with our Macs on the train. I’ve never played so much “Quinn” (a free multiplayer tetris game).

Once we got off the train we headed straight to get the car that we had rented. We were supposed to get a little 1-series BMW but got a brand new Audi A3 TurboDiesel instead. We didn’t complain. (I realize that i focus on cars more than most people would…but that’s just me so bear with me). I was quite impressed with the car, it did fairly well in all categories. The A3 is a decent low-end hatchback.

We stayed in Hamburg for a few days and just looked around, shopped, took night pictures, and had fun (appropriate fun, of course). I really like Hamburg. The people are very well off there so it’s nice to see all these upscale apartments and performance cars. It’s not like Zürich but it’s closer to it than anywhere in Denmark. Ah, how I love countries that don’t tax their citizens an arm and a leg just to get leather, or automatic windows. Anyway, enough of the car talk for now.

On Saturday, we left early in the morning, got in the car and started making our way down to Hannover. We were looking for a place that Vanessa’s dad was supposedly held during World War II. We couldn’t find the place and none of the locals knew anything about it so we just looked around the city for a little while.

I instantly fell in love with Hannover. It’s a beautiful city and reminds me a little of where I grew up in Switzerland. The roads were fun to drive on too.

A little later in the day we headed down to Dresden to a place called “Little Saxon Switzerland.” It’s called that because the beauty in that area makes you feel like you’re actually there in Switzerland.
Before I go any further, though, I must tell you about something that happened on the trip. First of all, this is extremely embarrassing, although it could have happened to anyone and it sure does seem to happen to many people.

Now that I’ve sufficiently justified my stupidity I will go on with the story. The car we were driving was a Diesel, and I put premium petrol in it. The labels on all the other tanks screwed me up. The car ran well at first (for the first 5 minutes) and i then noticed a serious loss in power and I was topping out at around 160kph which was definitely not normal since we were cruising at 220-240kph the whole day. We kept on driving and eventually got to your exit and started turning off on the downhill slope when the car suddenly just died. We were still technically on the highway so it was quite a disconcerting experience. Then, the miracles started happening. I had just popped the hood, because I still hadn’t thought of what I had done wrong, and out of nowhere comes this silver Audi. It just happened to be a service vehicle from the local Audi dealership in town. The driver had friends in the car but he still stopped, even though it was his day off and no one was working. He did what, for some reason, I didn’t think of doing and smelled the gas cap. To my dismay it smelled like gasoline. Luckily, the circa 4km road down into town was all downhill.

Then he called a tow truck and the car was towed to the dealer in downtown Dresden. He was doing all of this on his day off and was extremely nice and helpful. He even called an agent in to work to see if I could recuperate the money from Sixt Rentals somehow but to no avail. The tank had to be drained, as well as the pump and the lines. The filter got changed and amazingly, the car just started again with no hiccups. I thank the Lord that nothing else happened to the car. Putting gas in a diesel car can turn out pretty ugly. I did have to pay a couple hundred euros, and that hurt my pocketbook, but it could have been so worse, especially at a dealership. I was extremely satisfied with the people that helped me out and I didn’t mind waiting inside the dealership with all these beautiful cars around me.

We finally got to Dresden, a beautiful little town and also spent some time in Saxon Switzerland.  When we got done with that area, we headed to Berlin through the night and got there around 23:00.  We got in for a showing of Iron Man at the IMAX theater. After the movie we had to head home, man was it a long trip. On Sunday, we had to head back.

All in all, it was a great trip! I miss Germany already.

Too see all the pictures I’ve uploaded from this trip Click Here

We were at the Porsche factory in Leipzig and ran into a little trouble with the local Porsche security guards. Watch the vid for more…
This all happened on our trip through Germany. I’ll write more about that trip soon.

Lene Fligor, the lady that I helped move on Friday, has this awesome dog that I’ve fallen in love with. I don’t know what it is, but he’s awesome and very loving

Eating a Wopper

…so we decided to go to Hamburg! It’s a 3-hour drive and we got down there around 22:00 or so. We wandered around the city for a while and then ate at a restaurant right on the lake in the middle of Hamburg. Then we drove back up home, and got there around 3 in the morning.

Pictaaaas

Fall break is going on over here so there are only a few people here. It’s me, Mario, David Faering (a student who’s flight doesn’t leave until Monday) and Leboy (or Leroy).
We were all bored on Saturday so we just suddenly decided to go up to the most northern part of Denmark; Skagen (pronounced Skane). Anyway, we got in the van and got there in about 2 and a half hours. Here are some pics. Beware…we had fun with them

And btw, I’m heading over to Hamburg, Germany tonight. I’ll let you guys know how it is/was.

PS: and Photo Cred goes to Mario Vasquez, it was his Camera