The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Category: Silly

Wallow in silliness here

  • Tagged

    Mike Wagner of Own Your Brand tagged me for the 4-meme that’s going around. Seems more contagious than bird flu :o) So here goes – trivia about me:

    Four jobs I’ve had

    1. Clueless part-time sales guy at Bilka electronics (a supermarket)
    2. Programmer for Bang&Olufsen. Was there 6 months, never got to program a single line of code
    3. Co-founder and consultant at Enterprise Systems
    4. CHO (Chief Happiness Officer)

    The last two were almost too much fun to qualify as work. They were more in the nature of play

    Four movies I could watch over and over

    1. The Matrix (coolest movie)
    2. Love actually (happiest movie)
    3. Koyaanisqatsi (most beautiful movie)
    4. Life of Brian (funniest movie)

    In fact, it’s best never to quote Monty Python around me – I may be difficult to stop, once I get started :o) Dead parrot, anyone?

    Four places I have lived

    1. Tunis, Tunisia
    2. Las Palmas, Spain
    3. Odense, Denmark
    4. Copenhagen, Denmark

    Four TV shows I love to watch

    1. Battlestar Galactica
    2. Lost
    3. The Daily Show
    4. The Simpsons

    Though our TV is in the closet most of the time and usually only comes out for important national soccer games. You can follow all of these shows on bittorrent.

    Battlestar Galactica is especially good. The season finale last week showed why: Great writing, great characters, great dialogue, and you never know what’s coming next. Lost is almost as good, and more addicitve than crack.

    Four places I have been on holiday

    1. Florida
    2. Cedar Point
    3. Phillipines
    4. Paris

    What can I say, I’m an adrenaline junkie, and roller-coasters are a great way to get that rush.

    Four websites I visit daily

    1. Creating passionate users
    2. Tveskov.com
    3. Google (duh!)
    4. digg.com

    Four of my favorite foods

    1. Spaghetti Bolognese (or simply “bolo” at our place)
    2. Sushi
    3. Burgers from Five Guys
    4. Kellog’s Frosties

    Four places I would rather be right now

    1. Snowboarding in the alps (and a week from now I will be)
    2. London. Cooool city.
    3. Tokyo. Never been there – really, really want to.
    4. Beijing. Never been there – really, really want to.

    Though I gotta say I’m also pretty happy right here, right now :o)

    And four bloggers I am tagging

    Patricia Hansen of Patricia OnLine, if she’ll accept, because she is such a wonderful person. And girlfriend.

    Stephen Shapiro of Goal-free living, if he’ll accept, because I enjoyed meeting him in DC and get a real kick out of the whole goal-free approach.

    Bernie deKoven of Bernie’s FunLog, if he’ll accept, because I truly admire his deep knowledge and practice of play.

    Solveig Haugland of openoffice.blogs.com, if she’ll accept, because I admire her style, her writing and her dedication to open source.

  • Snappiest comeback ever

    Bert Bigelow tells the story of the snappiest comeback ever:

    On Wednesday, March 1st, 2006, in Annapolis at a hearing on the proposed Constitutional Amendment to prohibit gay marriage, Jamie Raskin, professor of law at AU, was requested to testify.

    At the end of his testimony, Republican Senator Nancy Jacobs said: “Mr. Raskin, my Bible says marriage is only between a man and a woman. What do you have to say about that?”

    Raskin replied: “Senator, when you took your oath of office, you placed your hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. You did not place your hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible.”

    The room erupted into applause.

    Via Pharyngula.

  • Simpsons

    Check out this remake of The Simpsons intro with live actors instead of cartoons. Hilarious!

  • Colbert cartoons insults Danes

    Last night, american TV-pundit Stephen Colbert on his show The Colbert Report attempted to “fix” the growing controversy over the Muhammed cartoons by insulting Denmark with his own scribblings.

    In two cartoons, which he drew himself, he managed to offend such major Danish icons as Hamlet, Hans Christian Andersen and Queen Margrethe. To top it off, he even went after Lars von Trier. We Danes cannot let this pass. Colbert admits to being afraid of muslim retaliation – let’s show him that Danes are not to be trifled with either.

    You can see the segment here – but be warned, it is strong stuff. (5MB, 1 min, wmv).

    I hereby declare a special Danish Fatwah over Stephen Colbert, to be removed only after he apologizes unreservedly to all of Denmark.

    Sign your name in the comments, to support our protest! If you have any ideas for specific Danish penalties we might threaten Colbert with, please add those also. Maybe we can exploit his irrational fear of bears.


    (Image taken from Madsenblog who also spotted these horrible slurs).

  • Boobies

    Boobies are nice.

  • Ping-pong matrix style

    This video is really, really funny!

    It also shows how conditioned we’ve become to Matrix-style slow-motion, bullet-time, 3D-rotation effects.

  • Joke of the week

    Jon Stewart on The Daily Show on the latest Osama Bin Laden tape:

    Bin Laden has released his 19th message; it’s only a matter of time before he starts podcasting.

    Followed by this delightful little screenshot:

  • Google gets silly

    It’s nice to know, that there’s still time to goof around at Google:

    Not long ago, I walked by the desk of software engineer JJ Furman, and saw that he had made an interesting addition to his desk: a large blob of Silly Putty, about the size of a grapefruit. Intrigued, I asked how he’d gotten so much of the stuff. The answer? A bulk order directly from the manufacturer! Of course.

    I knew then that I wanted some, and it dawned on me that I probably wasn’t the only one. So I set out to place a really, really big bulk order. An email went out to cohorts. Their orders came in. Three weeks later, I had an eighth of a ton of Silly Putty delivered to my desk.

    I honestly believe that this is a sign of a healthy company, when employees have the creativity, freedom and time to do stuff like that.

    Of course, this begs the question: What happens if you drop a 25 kg. ball of silly putty from a height of 20 meters. MAN, I love the internet :o)

  • Quote

    I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

    – Douglas Adams

  • The goat problem

    The first time I heard of the goat problem, a deceptively simple exercise, I flat out refused to believe the solution. A friend and I had been just about to go to a bar, but that plan had to be cancelled in favour of spending 3 hours to prove it to me. See how well you do:

    Imagine a TV game show where the winner chooses between 3 doors. Between one door is a car, between each of the other two doors there’s a goat.

    The contestant chooses one door, and the host then opens another door behind which there is a goat. This is always possible since there are two goats and one car.

    The host will now give the contestant the option of sticking with the door she has already chosen or switching to the one door still unopened. What should the contestant do? There are of course three possible answers:
    1: The contestant should stick to the first choice
    2: The contestant should switch
    3: It doesn’t matter

    What do you think? The answer can be found here and it WILL surprise you. I LOVE it when things get counter-intuitive.

    A warning though: Bringing this riddle up may cause aggravation. I have seen people flat out refuse to acknowledge the solution and get very frustrated in the process.

    UPDATE: Tveskov pointed me to this online version of let’s make a deal, which let’s you try out the game for yourself and keeps track of the stats for you. From the site:

    Despite a very clear explanation of this paradox, most students have a difficulty understanding the problem. It is very difficult to conquer the strong intuition which most students have in this case. As a challenge to students who don’t believe the explanation, an instructor may ask the students to actually play the game a number of times by switching and by not switching and to keep track of the relative frequency of wins with each strategy.

    The goats have been replaced by donkeys, but don’t let that confuse you.