Bo Henriksens's Weblog

Photography and football

bohenriksen77 — Tue, 05 May 2009 18:08:08 +0000

I finally had some time to go to a football game and take som pictures. So equipped with my EOS 40D I went and saw the USG Cougars vs. Copenhagen Towers II. Even though the Cougars lost it was a success for me, because I got some decent photos and thats the first step to improving my technique. The photos can be found in my photo gallery.

I have also aquired a Canon 50mm F1.4 lens, and look forward to go shooting portraits with that one.

Thats all for now.

Google Analytics Qualified Individual

bohenriksen77 — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 14:21:07 +0000

Being a big fan of web analytics, and very interested in how these numbers can be used to improve many aspects of your websites performance, it gives me great pleasure to announce that I have now completed and passed the Google Analytics IQ test. Therefore I am now allowed to call myself a Google Analytics Qualified Individual!

Photography – Equipment and Improvement

bohenriksen77 — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 12:16:39 +0000

About two months ago, I finally purchased a digital SLR. I have been wanting one for the last 5 years, and now I had the time and money.

I chose to buy the Canon EOS 40D with the 17-85mm kit lens. I chose the 40D, because it dropped a little in price with the release of the EOS 50D, I think the 40D is adequate in functionallity to my skill level and last, it has a high framerate in continueos shooting, and I would like to do sports photography.

Over these past months I have taken a lot of photos, to improve by the learning by doing method. While kit lens is adequate for outdoor scenary photos and actually pretty good in outdoor sports photos, it doesn’t cut the job for me when it comes to full or close-up portraits indoors. Another reason for this is that I only have the built in flash to use with it. This has become a problem for me, because where I originally thought I would do a lot of outdoor photography and only a limited amount of portraits, I have now found out, that i also like doing portraits, both indoor and outdoor.

So on my xmas wishlist I have an external flash, a f/1.4 50mm lens and some books on portrait photography. So if you have any ideas on good portrait techniques, books or anything other, please write.

If you want to see some of my sports photography, I took some decent photos of Copenhagen Cougars flag football team that are on the Copenhagen Cougars website.

Windmills or Windbreaks?

bohenriksen77 — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 13:59:55 +0000

When the winds of change are blowing, there are to kinds of people. People building windbreaks and people building windmills, which kind are you?

We’ve been asking that to a lot of clients lately. Because a lot of people are apparently building windbreaks instead of windmills. Some of our clients have contacted us, because the want to cancel their SEO agreement. The reason they want to cancel the agreement: ‘We all need to save money in these times of financial crisis.’ Then my next question is, are you stopping all your marketing efforts? I haven’t heard a single ‘yes’ to that question yet. So I begin to dig a bit deeper, trying to find the reason to why the cut their SEO efforts before any other online or offline marketing effort. The most common reason I’ve met, is that our clients doesn’t really understand what SEO is, and what it does for them. The second most common reason is that our clients doesn’t really understand the reports we’ve been giving them, so they really can’t see the value of it.

So we’ve startet improving our reporting, to really emphasize the value of our SEO solutions. Then we’ve begun educating our clients more in what SEO actually is. And last but not least, we’ve launched a service called Cross Optimisation where we focus on balancing your SEO and SEM investments to achieve optimal return. We’ve been able to reduce the AdWords investment with up to 50% for some of our clients while maintaining the same or higher return.

So my point here is, when then winds of change are blowing, build windmills. In marketing look at the ROI of your different efforts before stopping them. And if there is an area where you can’t see you ROI ask you instead of just cancelling it.

Other than that: Keep the money rolling, the financial crisis is just something we imagine.

Consistency – Nope, haven’t got it

bohenriksen77 — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 14:07:34 +0000

When I first started this blog, back in the summer, I had the intention of posting at least once a week, maybe more. I thougth that it would be pretty easy to blog about my personal projects, my training, SEO and all the stuff I do besides that. Now, I have learned that it’s not that easy. When I am working or training I doen’t have the time for blogging, and then when I have the time for blogging, and say to myself, now you have to blog, the only result is a writers blog.

So when I have postet something here, it is often a result of sitting in front of my pc, thinking about something, and then having the epiphany, that I have to blog about it.

This post is actualle a result of seeing another blog, and thinking ‘why is it that I never seem to succeed in blogging’. So instead of being dissapointed that I haven’t been able to blog more, I have decided to be happy that I’ve just been to busy doing fun stuff, to blog about it.

So in the future I wont try to blog at any given rate, I’ll just blog when the ideas for a blog post pops up in my head, and I am in front of my pc at the same time.

Game Nostalgia – A hard game

bohenriksen77 — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 15:04:28 +0000

I recently started get rid of old software that I know I wouldn’t use any more. In this software closet clean out, I came across some of my old favourite games, like ‘Day of The Tentacle’, ‘Secret of Monkey Island’ and ‘Full Throttle’. Upon the recovery of these old point and click adventure games I got an instant feeling of nostalgia and need to play the games again. Unfortunately I only have the old DOS-versions of the game, and I haven’t been able to find a decent DOS-emulater, that lets me play those games on WinXP, so somebody PLEASE HELP ME!

Besides the games mentioned above I had a lot of other Lucas Arts Entertainments adventure games, like ‘The Dig’, ‘Sam And Max’ and many more, but I was stupid enough to sell a lot them about 10 years ago. Now I really really really want to play them again, so where can I buy them?

So to sum up: Please help me find places to buy old Lucas Arts adventure games, and help me get my computer to play them.

Risklatter – A Danish dessert tradition

bohenriksen77 — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 12:45:54 +0000

Every year, when the leaves start leaving the trees, the temperature is falling and the days are getting shorter, people like to curl up under blankets, with cups of hot chokolade. Around this time of year, people (at least in scandinavia) start eating more heavy wintery food, one example of this is Danish Rice Porridge (recipe at the bottom of this page).

So where am I going with this. Well from the leftovers of rice porridge, you can actually make two different very good desserts. One is a tradition rice pudding, which you can find lots of recipes for. The other is ‘Risklatter’ I haven’t found any existing english term for this, but it roughly translates to Rice Lumps. These are a pure Danish tradition, so I would recommend giving them a try. I’ve tried to translate the recipe the best I could. here you can find the original risklatter recipe in danish.

So go make a big portion of rice porridge, and use the leftover to make risklatter. This is a cheap and delicious meal, and the risklatter is a perfect dessert for soup.

Risklatter:

400 g cold Rice porridge
2 tbsp sugar
4 tbsp flour
½ tbsp vanilla
2 eggs
30 g melted margarine

Mix the ingredients, and fry lumps of 1/4 inch thickness on a pan. Make the lumps 3 to 4 inches in diameter.

Danish Rice Porridge:

3 cups of milk (skim or regular)
1 cup of pearl rice.
1/2 tsp salt (optional)
sugar and cinnamon mixed together (some supermakets have it in their spice section)
butter

Pearl rice is short and plumb compared to regular long rice. Long rice will not work well in this dish, as they cannot soak up as much moisture.

Use a thick bottomed pot, if you have one. Rub a stick of butter against the bottom, which will prevent the rice from sticking to it.

Pour the milk in and bring it to a slow boil. Pour the rice in, while stirring, and turn the heat down. Cover and let simmer for about 50 minutes. Add salt if desired.

Serve on plates. On each serving, place a small piece of butter in the center of the porridge and sprinkle some of the sugar-and-cinnamon on top.

FORE!

bohenriksen77 — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 09:26:13 +0000

After lots of practicing in Tiger Woods PGA 2008 on the Wii last week, I had to test my real game yesterday. But fortunate as I am, our streak of real good weather ended yesterday morning, so it was chilly and very windy on the course. Besides that I got stuck in traffic on my way to the golf course, so we tee’d up rigth away with no warm up on the range.

Well, enough with the excuses, compared to the last couple of games, I played a terrible round yesterday, I used 6 shots more on nine holes. Every single shot from the tee or fairway was either sliced big time, or hit high on the ball, so it was short and flat. But after the round I still managed to be satisfied, because it would have been a lot worse if it wasn’t for my shortgame and putting. I have made some huge improvements in those parts of the game, which allowed me a lot of rescues. So when I get within the range of a PW or closer to the green, I am very confident, and with that part of my game working so well, I is only a question of hours on the driving range before my handicap starts dropping big time.

Unfortunately my conclusion must be, that the Wii hasn’t really improved my game, and I will look for another simulator, to help me improve my game during winter.

Wii – I’m improving my game

bohenriksen77 — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:12:05 +0000

I play golf, I’m lousy at it, but I play golf. The main reason to why I haven’t really improved, a least I think so, is that I only play 3-5 times a year. The last couple of years I have played to a handicap around 48, which I’m not entirely satisfied with.

But in november 2007 we got a Nintendo Wii at work, so people can play in their lunchbreak and after work. I have played a lot of golf on the Wii, and on the Wii like in real life, I have a really bad slice. So game after game on the Wii, during the winter, I have tried to correct this slice, and I have succeded. So a little month a go, when I was out playing my first real game of golf this year, to my big surprice, I did in real life as I did on the Wii, and my slice was almost gone. Now I have played a couple of more games, and each time to a handicap around 40 and almost without slicing. With this in mind, I have played a lot of Golf on the Wii for the last week, to prepare for the next game of real golf, which will be on sunday. This time I have focused on controlling my swing speed, to be more persistent. Hopefully It pays off.

I just thought I would share this mini epiphany of mine, and I will report on the result of the next game.

Keyword strategies part I – the Mom test

bohenriksen77 — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 12:57:30 +0000

This is vacation week in Denmark, meaning that less than half of our company is at work, and the rest of us are strugling with the heat, we doen’t have A/C and rigth now there is about 86 degrees in the offices. So I thougth this migth be a good time for rambling about keyword strategies and how to pick good keywords in terms of SEO.

This first talk on keyword strategies, will be a very simple approach to getting started, which I’ve chosen to call the mom test. The principle behnd this way to find a good set af keywords to begin with, is to have someone without a deep knowledge, technical insigth or understanding of your products, services or business to help you, for example your mom. The reason for doing it this way, is that people with a good knowledge of the product, or people working with it every day, tend to be blind to the way their clients search. One example of this could be a computer parts webstore optimizing keywords for specific harddrives like ‘Hitachi CinemaStar 7K500 320GB’ because they always know what they want for themselves, but they migth have bigger success if they optimize keywords like ‘Cheap Hitachi harddrives’ or ‘Reliable harddisks’.

They point is, that even though you know every bit and piece of your business, you migth not know the how your users search for your products or services, so ask people who doesn’t know your business what they would search for, if they were to aquire your products or services.

End of part I, I’ll be back soon with part II.