Brian Zhang Larsen’s Blog

I have read the following some years ago, and recently I fell over it again in the book i have mentioned earlier, “information rules”. Here they write about collective switching costs, illustrated by an example of the QUERTY keyboard.

According to many reports, early promoters of the Type Writer brand of machine in the 1870′s intentionally picked this awkward configuration to slow down typists and thus reduce the incidence of jamming, to which their machines were prone….. Querty also allowed salesmen to impress customers by typing their brand name, Type Writer, rapidly, using keys only from the top row.

I don’t know whether this is true or not, but it is an interesting theory nonetheless. By the way, I remember some month ago I misspelled the word in an email to a coworker. Now how can anyone misspell qwerty?

I think this should be a list of Danish products, which should be boycottet by the Arabian countries due to the unfortunate Mohammad drawings. But can anyone tell me why Kinder is on the list? isn’t that German. And can you even say “no for Denmark” which is the name of the domain?

What will the schools kids do without sun top?.. please notice the advertisement “Rich in vitamin C”, even though it is supposed to be a list of banned products. Awful refreshing, and yet forbidden…

Today I was out shopping with my girlfriend in the so called China-town here in Copenhagen. It has its name because of the many small Chinese convenient stores there, but it doesn’t look like the traditional “china towns” we see in the (other) big cities around the world. The picture shows the catch of a normal grocery shopping trip. Unfortunately they didn’t have my favorite food, 3 boxed bolognese pizzas for 20kr anywhere. Instead i found something else; The Chinese equivalent of one of the wonders of the world, FLAN. It is the bag in the lower left corner that contains the divine treat. The English translation says something about “almond soybean cheese” and when I saw that I just had to buy it. That description, combined with the picture on the package made me drewl like a spastic puppy… well not exactly, but I just had to buy this interesting version of the dessert of the wealthy: flan.

By the way, the new temporary top banner is because of the Chinese New Year this Saturday. We will now enter the year of the dog. I myself am a sheep, which of course is a symbol of strength, wisdom and courage. What are you?

I just uploaded the first version of my image cropper for wordpress. it works as a plugin and is easy to install. With this you can upload and crop images, and thereby choose only the part of an image you want to show. I have made a page for the project here.

I was a bit dissapointed about the way wordpress handlet images, so i decided to implement this cropper. It is very simple, but has the functionality i need at the moment.

I was just looking in Shapiro and Varians “information rules” and found this rather amusing quote about network effect and positive feedback:

The familiar if sad tale of Apple Computer illustrates this crucial concept. Apple has suffered of late because positive feedback has fueled the competing system offered by Microsoft and Intel. As wintel’s share of the personal computer grew, users found the Wintel system more and more attractive. Success begat more success, which is the essence of positive feedback. With Apple’s share continuing to decline, many computer users now worry that the Apple Macintosh will shortly become the sony beta of computers, orphaned and doomed to a slow death as support from softwarte producers gradually fades away….. falilure breads failure, this too is the essence of positive feedback.

I guess they were wrong about the slow death at least. The book is from 1998 by the way.