All the cake you can carry

Today is annual eat-all-the-cake-you-can-eat-or-carry in the cantina.
The concept is straightforward: 62 cakes. 20 kroner. One plate.

Obviously we have a strong tradition of commemorating this day. This year was no exception. (Actually, this year the concept celebrates its 10th anniversary).

Here are some visual impressions from the feast by way of Toke.

Alert and agile young developers going for the cake. Note how Thomas has taken the lead.

62 cakes and 1 billion people.

Cantina boss wondering whether Jeppe has violated the rules by putting an entire cake on his plate…It later turned out that he hadn’t.

And the winner in the “most obscene number of cakes which I know I can’t eat anyway but hey its free” category: Thomas

Drowsiness.

Who manhandled the whipper?

Yesterday the coffee machine started displaying the very self-explaining error message “Whipper XX overload”.

Self-explaining error message

Nobody really knows what this means but since the machine still seems capable of pouring mediocre coffee there is no panic yet. So the bottom line is that we still got coffee but somebody has manhandled the whipper to an extent that caused overload. We will let the service guy/girl sort out the rest.

Learning how to comminicate and cooprate in teams

Yesterday we all went to get a brush-up on how to communicate and make better teams. Actually, it was not only us, but the whole it department totaling to 42 bodies. The man to guide us was Ejnar, a former school teacher turned consultant. He also volunteers as a handball coach and was actually able to shout louder than anyone I’ve ever met. He was actually a very nice and down-to-earth fella.

The day involved identifying what good communication and teamwork is all about and eventually trying to work out areas where we could improve – both as a whole department and as individual groups. Ejnar employed an Open Space approach. It allows one to extract common themes from seemingly disparate, chaotic data. It worked nicely.

The highlights of the day were Ejnar spontaneously bear-hugging Mads – who is notoriously shy of physical human contact – and the discovery that the chicken-disguised-in-tomato-sauce served for lunch was partly raw.

Afterwards, we all went to eat and drink at Bryggeriet. We had a nice roast and several good beers. Especially the the Christmas Brew (yes, still available) and Dark Ale was great – the latter with nice notes of liquorice.

The day in photos (thanks to Toke)
Unfortunately, we have no photos of Mads being hugged…

A little team building before lunch

Lunch…

Doing the Open Space job.

The consultant’s suitcase(s).

Me talking. Please note the subtle Acer logo from the projector.

Free beer and dinner. Nice.

Check

Yesterday our fearless leader Hans returned from a 2 day ‘prevent negative stress’ course. In what appeared to be sudden inspiration he shouted out:  “Checking off prevents negative stress”.

In a otherwise very quite day at the office this  statement inevitably triggered some curiosity. So the story is:

Scientific research shows that the level of endorphins in the brain increase when we check off things. And it has to be the actual physical checking. Doing a mental check does not have the same positive effect.

Being a conscientious employee I immediately decided to follow his advice and started ticking all the small tasks during the day.

And by the end of the day I was sitting with a handful of post it notes, most of them full of tasks, that was checked. And I actually felt pretty good. A day that otherwise easily could have ended with the feeling of not getting any important work done, instead ended with the feeling of actually taking a lot of small but  important steps toward finishing some major tasks.

Write blog post.

Mucking out the office

Our bosses – in their divine wisdom and all – decided that last Friday was to be big muck-out-the-office day.

Some of us thought that it really wasn’t necessary, but they insisted. However, it turned out to be a good idea. About eight desktop computers, three or four flat screens, an uncountable number of keyboards in different flavours, mice and other pointing devices (with and without cords), t-shirts, books, and extreme amounts of packaging and paper, were discovered. Apparently, all this was just sitting in corners, under tables, on shelves, without any one really noticing any longer.

Some shots from the day (by Toke)

Lazy sun. Can’t you just feel the dust?

Doing the actual cleaning took almost all day.

Recovered bottles

Recovered desktop boxes.

Final result. Nice, but where is the creative spirit? It looks a bit like an average office in a governmental institution.

Summa Ubiquity Command

Some time ago I played around with a new Firefox extension called Ubiquity. It is a graphical keyboard user interface allowing the user to easily execute various commands without cluttering up the interface with buttons.

I have created a summa command on top of our OpenSearch interface. In many ways it is similar to the iGoogle gadget I mentioned in a previous blog post. One of the key differences is of course that a Ubiquity command is present as a feature of the Firefox browser whereas an iGoogle gadget is only available on your iGoogle page.

Some screenshots of the command in action.

To try it out you first need to install the Ubiquity Firefox extension. After having restarted Firefox go to the Summa Command’s github page. There you will be presented with a message allowing you to subscribe to the command. As Ubiquity considers all sources to untrusted you will have to acknowledge a security warning message before actually being able to install the command (read here for more details).

Using your new command should now be as simple as pressing the Ubiquity hotkey and entering summa followed by your query. Read the Ubiquity Tutorial for more information.

Further details are available at the Sandbox page in our Wiki.