Posted by Jerry on July 17th, 2005 — Posted in Travel
Four days in Copenhagen!
After four plane changes and about 30 hours travelling Canberra-Sydney-Bangkok-London-Copenhagen
I arrived in Copenhagen at 0830am. The sun was well and truly high in the sky and I looked forward to pacing out the city and attempting to stay awake until evening in order to reset my body clock. The first minor glitch was the failure of my baggage to arrive from Heathrow – I filled out the form and was assured it would arrive in the afternoon – they just didn’t say which afternoon! I didn’t know then that I would have to wait some 40 hours for my luggage to arrive from London, but luckily I had a change of clothes in my carry-on bag. So no real drama.
The 71 Nyhavn (new harbour – built in 1750) hotel is a converted warehouse, originally built in 1804. The solid timber beams criss-cross the lobby and span low across the room. The building has had a varied history, having been a hospital and later, a women’s prison, before being converted in 1998 into a hotel. The rooms are comfortable, if compact, and the bathroom is an exercise in boutique chic. Okay, so you couldn’t swing the proverbial cat in it, but who spends much time in the room when there is so much to see in this delightful city. A quick shower (which soaked the entire bathroom/toilet) and change and I’m ready to face the day.
Everywhere I looked it seemed that most of the buildings had been built in the 1780’s and were still very much in use. All were painted in bright colours and the place looked like a postcard.
First stop was an ATM machine just up the street on Kongens Nytorv (square) on the corner of Bredegade and Nyhavn – select the English option, insert card and pin – the usual stuff. The machine promptly spat out the card as though it caused a bad taste. Bugger! At least I had a little Australian money, so I went to a currency exchange and got some kroner. As I walked back, I thought I might just try the ATM at the bank over the road – and it worked! Phew! I had visions of trying to live very cheaply, or at least of having to pay large amounts for conversions. But all is good. Time to celebrate with some coffee at one of the hundreds of street cafes in the Nyhavn district (pronounced new-houn).
It’s easy to order coffee, for two reasons, first it is called ‘kafe’ and pronounced very similar to the English, and secondly just about everyone speaks English as well as I can. I was greeted with a shortened “Hej” (pronounced “Hi” but with a glottal stop straight after so it’s a cut-off sound) and as soon as I responded in kind the waitress switched to English… I think the Danes must be more protective of their language than the French – and that is saying something!
And so for a wander up the cobbled street to the main Kongens Nytorv square, and, following the map – I had an idea to check out the National Museum – I crossed a couple of canal bridges and passed in front of the Parliament buildings on Vindebrogade – more spectacular baroque facades and the strangest spire covered with intertwined animals on the roof, before crossing another bridge onto Frederiksholms canal street and walking right around the museum the wrong way until I found the entrance – only to be informed by a sign that it was closed on Mondays. *Sigh*.
So I followed Frederiksholms until it came out on Nytorv – a different square, where some market stalls were set up, and then onto the pedestrian streets that comprise the main shopping area. I found a bookshop (book=’bog’) and found a Danish language course for my daughter.
Back to Nyhavn for some coffee and a chicken salad, and whiled away part of the afternoon taking in the ambience of an unfamiliar country. I checked back with the hotel – still no bag – then an hour’s doze in the afternoon, before heading back out for dinner and some great jazz music. I found that this week coincided with the famous Copenhagen Jazz Festival – what luck!
The Danes must be a sober lot – at AUS$10 for a pint of the local brew – but who could wish for better ambience. From the depths of Canberra Winter to midsummer in Copenhagen, sipping a pint of Tuborg by the Nyhavn canal.
At mid evening the sun hangs demurely in a perfect blue sky, while the row of picture-box eighteenth century buildings form a perfect backdrop. Even after the band had packed up there was plenty of light to wander the quietened streets and photograph those eccentric architectural details that are part of the magic of this place. In fact the street lights come on at about 10.30pm and the sun rises again at about 2.30am so there is plenty of daylight!
And so to sleep.
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Posted by Jerry on June 27th, 2005 — Posted in Music
The Queens Birthday weekend saw about 15,000 people descend on the small coastal town of Portarlington in Victoria, Australia. The band Full Circle performed with Will-o’-the-Wisp fire circus which provided a spectacular series of three main line shows during the Festival. The band was fully integrated into the show – our wireless gear enabling great freedom of movement among the fire twirlers – including fire sweeping under the fiddler’s feet, and musicians being incorporated into human pyramids…
and some great interactions with the fire performers – how about this as a way to keep the coastal chill out of the air!
Members of Wisp also performed on stilts and delighted the festival crowds throughout the weekend.
The music sessions were great, and there were some excellent workshops, including the fiddle workshop by talented Irish fiddler John Carty – it was great to get some insights into his approach to playing. The best workshop I attended was that run by the Fiddle Chicks – hands-on seven/eight timings and playing chords and counter melodies – one of the best learning experiences I’ve had for a long time.
Three solid days of music and singing saw me return home with sore finger tips and a hoarse voice – and a …er…. burning desire to get back there again next year! Many thanks to Eve Everard and her talented fire circus troupe Will-O’-the-Wisp!
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on June 26th, 2005 — Posted in New media
Darknet by JD Lasica is a remarkable publishing experiment in open source editing – put together with public comments from a wiki, the excerpts from the book show this to be a book worth buying and having on the shelves of everyone interested in the growing divide between old media ways of thinking and new medai ways of thinking. The book raises fascinating isues about the nature of copyright in the digital age, and the question of when does personal creativity overstep the boundaries into piracy.
In short, JD Lasica has put the clutrain manifesto into practice to great effect…
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on May 15th, 2005 — Posted in Woodwork
After assembling the table top I trimmed the top to width on the table saw and noted in the process that some of the eucalyptus boards, although strong along their length, are weak across the width. So a small design change – I added two ‘outrigger’ support rails to attach to the table frame so that the top would be supported right across.
I then positioned the top upside-down and inverted the frame so that I could add the brackets that would hold the top to the frame. make sure the hole for the screw holding the table top is a slot rather than a round hole to allow for expansion of the timber.
I then righted the table and radiused the corners using a polishing tin to draw the curves, and cut them out with a hand-held jigsaw. The radiuses were cleaned up with sandpaper.
The top was given a good sanding down to 1200 grit and finished with shellac and then waxed and given a final wipe with an oil polish. And here it is – a garden table from old pallets!
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on May 15th, 2005 — Posted in Woodwork
Simple garden table
With the timber from the old gum tree that was partly burnt during the Canberra bushfires outside the front of our house now nearly ready for use, I thought I’d better start thinking about table structures. One thing we don’t have is a garden table, so armed with a pile of pallets left over from all the rebuilding in the district I set to work to design and build a simple garden table from recycled timber.
After removing the usable boards from about three pallets I had enough pieces for a top about 900mm x 800mm – perfect for a small garden table. I removed the nails from two of the better thick supporting timbers from the pallet and gave all the timbers a quick once-over through the thicknesser to see what sort of timber I had. The main uprights and most of the thin boards were redgum, while there were also some thin boards of a pale eucalypt, possibly ribbon gum. I also had about four metres of thin pine stock that I thought I might use for the frame skirting.
I ripped the thick timbers down the middle with the Mk3 triton saw bench using a GMC saw, so I had four pieces that I squared off and thicknessed smooth. I then cut the legs to length at about 700mm.
Now most table designs use a mortice-and-tenon joint to connect the skirting pieces to the legs. But I thought I’d try something different. After cutting the skirting to length I set them up with the legs in the cheapo dovetail jig with a view to building a frame that would use sliding dovetails instead of the traditional mortice and tenon joints. This would give me a strong structure with a rapid construction time. The result wasn’t as neat as it might have been, but it was certainly functional.
The next challenge was the table top. I wanted to practice making a table top that could also be used indoors, so this would involve edge jointing the timbers. Here I used the triton router table with a ryobi half-inch router and a straight cutter. This gave a surprisingly good and true edge to the timbers – and without the high cost (and extra space) of a dedicated planer/jointer.
Then using the biscuit jointer on the triton router table (yes you can cut biscuit slots along a long edge by simply removing the end stop) I cut four biscuit slots for each join and glued the pieces up in threes and clamped them, setting them aside to dry.
Once dry, the three panels of three boards would each still fit through the thicknesser, so I leveled each of the panels and brought them all to the same thickness ready for the final glue-up. By now the three panels were a bit unwieldy for the biscuit jointer so I doweled the boards together and glued them and clamped them ready for final trimming and finishing tomorrow. All in all, not a bad day’s work! I should have the table finished tomorrow with luck 🙂
Cheers
Jerry
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