The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

  • Standup magic

    Last night was “culture night” in Copenhagen, meaning all the shops and museums were open ’till late and there was lots of music, events, sports and other fun stuff going on.

    Patricia and I went to see a film consultant talk about “What are movies” illustrated by some of his favourite scenes, including:
    * The balloon dance and the barber scene from “The Dictator”
    * The opera scene from “Pretty Woman”
    * The opening scene from “Atlantic City” where Susan Sarandon rubs lemon juice over herself
    * A scene from “The Last Tycoon” with a VERY young Robert de Niro

    And then we saw Rune Klan perform his unique brand of standup magic, and I nearly laughed my head of. Apart from being an extremely good stage magician, he has a wonderful hyperactive, happy and extremely funny act. This is a guy who knows great magic, but can turn it to his own use.

  • Being excluded hurts – literally

    An article on CNN, reports on a UCLA study that shows that when people feel rejected or let out, this activates the same center in the brains as physical pain.

    “The ACC is the same part of the brain that has been found to be associated with the unpleasantness of physical pain, the part of pain that really bothers us. There’s something about exclusion from others that is perceived as being as harmful to our survival as something that can physically hurt us, and our body automatically knows this.”

    Interesting. This points to one reason why it’s so important for people to be a part of a group, to feel that we belong. Read the article here.

  • Interesting weblog

    I notice that Bigger Picture’s weblog now has contributions from both Liselotte Strøyberg and Finn Kollerup in addition to Ole’s. That’s certainly worth reading (in danish). You might start with Finn’s defense of “annoyingly creative” people. Well stated!

  • Physical activity increases office productivity

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    Felcher and Sons increased their productivity by 46% when they put a linebacker in their offices.

    Extremely funny!

  • Pirates of the Caribbean

    I’ll be the first to admit, that when I heard a while ago that Disney were planning to make a movie based on one of their Disney World rides, my first thought was “MAN, that’s going to suck.” I would like to announce that I was way wrong: Pirates of the Carribbean: The curse of the black pearl is an excellent movie! Not only is this one of the best action movies of the year, with all the necessary ingredients (lots of action, excellent special effects and a few laughs along the way), it also has that special something that really catches me: An intelligent script, and excellent dialogue.

    And then there’s Johnny Depp. I promise you, you’ve never seen a pirate like him. Every scene that he’s in is interesting just because you can never quite figure him out – and because he’s wildly entertaining. Johnny Depp is one of the finest actors in Hollywood right now, and his performance takes this movie to a whole new level.

  • Bionic office

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    Does the way your office look affect the way you feel at work? Of course it does, and Joel Spolsky knows this and has gone all the way in designing an office that is beautiful and functional.

  • Photo blog

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    I don’t want to be the only kid on the block without a photo blog, so here’s mine. The newest couple of images are in the sidebar. It’ll be interesting to see what I can use this for. Just having a phone with a camera in it has already made me take a lot more pictures, as witnessed by this recent post.

  • Road graffiti

    Poetic, urban and beautiful: Copenhagen autumn road graffiti.
    (more…)

  • The cult of the NDA

    Frozen North has an excellent piece which argues that a certain level of openness (as opposed to total secrecy) can actually be healthy for startups.

    This is right up my alley: I believe that openness and generosity (in many forms) is one of the ways to become happy at work – and to succeed!

  • Heaven, I’m in heaven

    I’m in book heaven: It seems that all my favourite authors have new books out right now. I just finished Chuck Palahniuks new book Diary, Douglas Couplands Hey Nostradamus! is waiting for me and, wonder of wonders, I walked into a bookstore today and they had Neal Stephensons new book Quicksilver which is a kind of prequel to Cryptonomicon. I’m 50 pages into it already, and it looks excellent – and best of all: There’s still 900 pages to go!

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