It’s All About Me

A quote from a surprised foreign friend, who visited Sweden for the first time this weekend.

As I was explaining the concept of midsummer to my South African colleagues a few days ago, I found myself staring in disbelief at a few video clips from YouTube. The clips showed hundreds of Swedish men and women jumping around a maypole, pretending to be little frogs.

Hundreds of sober and mentally sane men and women, pretending to be little frogs, making loud frog noises.

“What’s up with that”, they asked. “Why do you pretend to be little frogs”?

I have absolutely no clue why. Do we look like little frogs?

Swedish men

Little frog

(Emailed to me from a friend, who took the wrong turn with his motorcycle)

Doing a startup is like playing Super Mario Bros. There are big rocks, living mushrooms, and evil dragons in your way and you have to jump, run, and swim to get pass them. But if you do succeed, there’s a pretty princess waiting for you…

So the video below is good inspiration - this guy is good.

I’ve always been fascinated by apes and monkeys, without quite understanding why. The opening chapter of Jared Diamonds book “The Third Chimpanzee” presents one explanation.

According to him, and according to other studies, there are good reasons to put the chimpanzee in the human family tree. Scientists claim that the chimp is more closely related to humans than they are to the gorillas, and should be put in the same genus as us.

According to an National Geographic article about the same subject, “studies indicate that humans and chimps are between 95 and 98.5 percent genetically identical”, and “researchers argue that humans and chimp lineages evolutionarily diverged from one another between five and six million years ago”.

I know this is an explosive subject, and I’m not enough of an expert to really say what’s fact and what’s fiction. (Gareth probably could though, since he’s a trained zoologist).

But when I study photos of chimpanzees, and my own cousin living in here London, I clearly see similarities.

Since I was my birthday yesterday, I decided to do an experiment. I wanted to figure out what type of media that I’m actually using to communicate with friends and family, and started to count the greetings I received (thanks to all!).

This is how the greetings were distributed (n=67):

- Skype message: 52%

- Facebook: 20%

- Email: 9%

- In person: 7%

- SMS: 6%

- Phone call: 4%

- MSN: 1%

- Offline cards: 1%

Conclusion: Skype is still the heart and hub of my communication, but Facebook is growing in importance. Offline cards is more or less dead. Going to be interesting to see how this evolves over the coming years.

This error message is quite funny - seems like my local bus company might lack some perspective.

It seems like in the world of investment banking, MySpace is still ahead of Facebook. My friends over in the city can without a problem spend hours on Facebook, throwing cakes and poking each other. But MySpace is a big no-no. This is the message they get:

“Under the current BankName Information Technology Risk standards,
http://www.myspace.com/ is considered to be in one of the following
categories: Dating/Social .

BankName does not allow access by default to “Dating/Social” websites
on the Internet.”

Come on, bankers! Noone cares about MySpace anymore anyway.

Our offices are in this building. Feels like a piece of Moscow in Putney.

Up until Friday we have a nice view of the river, but now we’ve moved behind the big billboard for Sky.

But who cares - we’re having fun

When I was a younger man, I used to play the guitar in lots of different bands in Sweden. Jazz, rock, punk, reggae, you name it, I played it. And I loved it - getting together with a group of people, rehearsing, the show, all of it.

Today I don’t have the time or burning passion to get involved in a band regularly, but I would like to experience this again, even if it was just for a week or two. Strangely enough, there don’t seem to be much on offer for people like me. There are surf camps, golf camps, tennis camps, sailing camps, etc. But there are no music camps, at least not for people over 25 who don’t play the cello. At least I can’t find anything, using google.

I think there’s an opportunity to create a rock’n roll / jazz / blues camp for adults who want to play in a band. The concept would be the following:
- 20-25 people, all playing different instruments, get together for a week in a nice location (Barbados! New York! Barcelona!)
- Professional musicians as coaches and teachers
- Change band members everyday, so you get to play with everyone in the camp
- Each band rehears 2 hour during the day, and then perform 2 songs in front of the rest of the members each evening.
- All the equipment (amps, mics, sound system, percussion) will be sorted by the camp operator
- It’s all about having fun, playing together, and improving. But it’s not for beginners - you need to be able to play along other people.

I’m not sure there’s any aspiring muscians reading this blog (I’m not sure there’s anyone reading this blog) but it would be fun to get some feedback. I’ll keep googling.