Brian Zhang Larsen’s Blog

I was just browsing the Finnair site, to see which flight alliance they where part of, when I found their Finnair Plus membership application form. That form actually provides you the ability to choose your Nobility status. This is the greatest feature I have seen on a form in a while. The only thing that held me back was that it is optional. I really don’t want to mess with the commoners, and also because there is no title of “sovereign ruler of the underworld”.

Actually the nobility choices possible has become more of common European middle names than actual noble titles, but I still hope this feature will spread.

I have just make a small video about our summer holyday destinations. We are going around in China, from south to north, and east to west.Well.. more or less. It is made by combining waypoints in google earth, and recording it with screen capturing software. It is much cheaper, than with the optional video maker addon for google earth pro, which costs $400 + $200.

The final destinations are not completely set yet, but I guess It will be very close to this. I will probably follow up on this some time. We have bought the tickets, and booked hotel for the first couple of stops, from Hong Kong to Sanya. The rest are still a little fuzzy.

Or not. Whoever wins the Eurovision song contest tonight, will still fade in the spotlight compared to the Finnish contribution, Lordi.

This is not only my opinion, but by comparing search results on google for the last month, it is clear that the northern org like creatures have received some attention, at least in the searches.

The above is a google trend comparison of Lordi, and the two highest seated contributions, as estimated by various betting sites. Although I must admit that the actual music sucks, Lordi is a cool new turn to the lame, old fashioned, and more and more eastern European inspired show for people who speak and sing horrible English. But the fact that the music sucks, doesn’t seem to matter, as it apparently is a requirement for entry to the contest. I would have loved to see some orgs performing some real metal, like meshuggas “war” or something similar, to the eurovision “who got the most friends among bordering countries” contest. But maybe next year….

My First so called HDR image. It is done by combining several shots with different exposures. It is just another excuse for playing with my new Panasonic FX01 camera, which is great by the way. You can learn more about HDR here.

I have been looking for this one for a while. And then i found EQO. EQO is a small program that you install on your mobile phone, and let you call others though skype.

It works by calling up both you and the person you are calling. That means that you yourself actually receive a call, when calling another person. And when calling another PSTN or mobile phone (Skypeout), you pay for both connections. That could be rather expensive, given the Skype price pr. minute is € 0,20 for mobile phones here in Denmark. I tested it by calling a friend and ended up paying € 0,80 for just over one minute (apparently it rounds up). But if you use it to call a phone in china (like my girlfriend often does), where the prices are only € 0,017 pr. minute, it really pays off, even though you pay for both calls. I don’t know if it could turn out to be cheaper if the call went directly from you phone using tcp/ip and thereby saving you from at least one of the Skypeout charges. It depends on the amount of data necessary to make a phone call, and the price of the data rate at your operator.
I am not sure about the amount of data transferred for using the program in general, but that could be and important factor too, unless you have flat rate on you mobile phone.

But a really ugly thing about EQO is this I found the FAQ section:

Can I still use EQO when my computer is OFF?
No. You need to have your computer ON and both the EQO and Skype™ program need to be running on your computer.

Why?? That really sucks! And it is not available for mac, so i cant just have it running on my multi purpose server. But the graphical layout is pretty cool as though.

Apparently there is another client called iSkoot out there, which also makes you do Skypeout calls from your mobile. Haven’t tried it though. What I really need is a Skype client in Java ME.