Torbens blog

I’m observing a few items on eBay these days, mostly out of curiosity. It’s remarkable how ignorant and counterproductive most people are concerning eBay.

This post is dedicated to explaining a few simple and proven principles that will help buyers to win at lower prices, and help sellers achieve better prices for their auctions. Of course these two sides are in competition against each other, but that’s just the way the market works.

It’s a fact of life that you can only win a game if you know the rules. The same is true for any marketplace: Understanding the market always helps you, regardless whether you want to buy or sell. If everybody followed these rules, then every product would be sold at exactly the value it’s worth. But because many people don’t know these rules, there is a profit to be made: better traders get better prices!

Take advantage of the fact that the majority of eBay users (buyers and sellers!) don’t know these principles. Continue reading this story »

Enough is enough. This article in Wired is but one in a sea of cries against Facebook, and they’ve all got a very good point: Facebook is actively undermining the privacy of the users, but we users should be able to control what information gets published about us or not.

So I’m preparing to leave Facebook, and I’ll make sure to delete all my information in there in an attempt to protect my privacy. I’m going to focus on my own homepage and blog instead, so that people who really want to follow me can still do so.

Incidentally, here’s an article on Lifehacker describing what you could do, if you agree on the above.

I’m now well into the training, so I thought I’d post a little update with some of my observations. Most importantly, my training is coming along well and I am going to complete it. I feel great about this! However, I had my first setback yesterday. Continue reading this story »

I’ve started on a training program to improve my back muscles. I stumbled upon the website one hundred push ups which offers an exercise plan that caught my interest. The idea is to follow a six-week training regime that means I am going to do push ups every other day.

Every training day, the number of required push ups is increased ruthlessly: First day, as many push ups in a row as I can (I managed ten). Second training day required 25 push ups (with strategic breaks), and let me tell you that was hard! Third training day:  42. And so on…

By the end of the training regime, I should be able to do one hundred push ups without breaks!

I’m curious to see how I’ll do. If I survive, I’m going to do two hundred sit-ups next. And then I “just” need to keep that going. It’ll be good for my back.

“Commuting demography” is a brand-new branch of observatory philosophical science. I just made it up.

I just noticed that the kind of people riding the regional trains are very different from those that I see in the subway. My subjective classification is that the regional commuters are nicer folks. Continue reading this story »

I am having significantly more time to read during the commute to and from work these days. I have nearly an hour of train time each way, and I can make good use of that. Today I read an article with a very interesting sentence:

If you’re trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse to be lazy, the other one is probably right. – Paul Graham

Hit that link and read for a few hours. There are a lot of goodies (and oddities) in the articles.

I’m also dreaming of having a very small laptop (which are now called netbooks) to use on the commute so that I can surf and blog while on the road. It turns out to be difficult or expensive or both. The good netbooks are too big, the smaller ones have too short battery life, and the really nice ones run some special Linux-based operating system that doesn’t support my HSDPA USB modem, meaning no Internet connertion. And they are all still rather expensive. At the moment I’m hanging on to my Psion but as I’ve written earlier, this is a relationship that can’t last forever.

If someone feels like giving me a free Asus Eee 901 I’d be happy to accept it.

Last week our friends Renate and Jürgen invited us to join them on a mountain hike. The weather forecast was mediocre but we packed some rain gear and came along. It turned out to be a sunny day and we had a great hike. We also came across a big natural cave which we explored with lamps and cameras. See the rest of the photos in the gallery!

I have updated the photo gallery:

There are new photos from our recent trips to Copenhagen and Linz, and camping in Schönbühel.

I have too much stuff online, so I am trimming down my website.

My homepage and all the old pages will be removed, and I will no longer maintain the rather big wiki website I used to host. Several other areas that have not been maintained for ages and that have no visitors will also go away. I will also no longer post on http://blog.g-b.dk, so if you are subscribed to a feed from there, make sure you update your feed reader to http://torben.g-b.dk instead.

What remains is just this new site, containing a blog and a gallery. The blog might contain everyday stories and thoughts, as well as pointers to new additions to the photo gallery. Hopefully this approach will be more useful to people who care about me and my life.

I flew a model helicopter this weekend! Markus, a friend from work, is very much into this hobby (which is rather expensive if you make mistakes) and he meets regularly with fellow model pilots. In the past few weeks we’ve met a few times and trained on the simulator: model software running on a computer, with a USB interface that plugs into the R/C controller. He immediately recognized my natural talent (his words, not mine!) as I started on the simulator, and after less than 2 hours sim training I was ready for real air. That was this weekend. Continue reading this story »