A couple of weekends ago Ann and I went on a short trip to Denmark to make a round to friends and family. Apart from the old folk we went on baby patrol and visited a cousin of mine who just had a little Astrid and a couple of high school friends who had Frederik. We also went up to visit my sister who is expecting a family expansion in June.

With my sister, Mogens and Magnus we went for a drive in the beautiful forests south of Århus. We got to see the lovely early summer of Denmark when the beech trees are the brightest green and the birds are chirping and building nests.

We went to The Deer Park and came across a heard of deers that were more than happy to taste our apples. I don’t think I’ve seen anywhere else where deer is so tame that they will eat from your hands. But here they were and we had a flock of deers interested in us.

On the way back to London our flight was slightly delayed and as I was trying to find a chair in the departure hall I stumbled into a blogger. I have been reading Tina – omme i London since I decided to move to London so it was great finally meeting her. She brings her camera everywhere and following her blog was a great way for me to experience London before moving here. She does a great job of showing the lovely colorful side of the city. I love meeting bloggers that I’m reading and it was great putting a face and a voice to Tina :)

I’m not sure how the list is compiled but there are some really cool blogs on it – go have a look yourself.

There is a couple of my favorite London blogs that hasn’t made the list so I figured I’d give them props here:

• IanVisits – Ian is constantly on top of what’s going on under and over ground in London events.
• London Cyclist – Andreas is really busy creating resources for the biking crowd in London
• Ghost signs – Not exclusively a London site but very interesting nonetheless with old painted signs on house.
• From The Upper Deck – Another quirky blog where Przemek drives around on the double deckers of London and takes pictures out the window as London life goes by below him.
• Georgian London – excitingly writings about life in London in the 18th century
• Scandinaivian Kitchen – for everything homely on London

The week after we had another blogger passing through. This time it was Karen from Wisconsin. She had to leave Prague prematurely due to visa issues but was heading back to try again. On the way back to Prague she was making her way through Europe and London was the first stop. We had some entertaining days with Karen who was excited to be here. Here she is at Covent Garden with a Jack Sparrow look-a-like (and smell-a-like).

This weekend we again should thank a blogger for the entertainment. At the Blogger Meetup in February there had been a competition for rugby tickets and although we didn’t win (Ann got really close). However Peter – one of the winners – wasn’t going to use his tickets and gave them to Ann. I was soo excited about the chance to see a rugby game and had been looking forward to it for weeks. But yesterday as we were starting to get ready to get out the door we couldn’t find the tickets… We looked everywhere and got the room cleared out but the tickets didn’t appear.

I grumped about the lost tickets for a couple of hours but luckily enough we had an alternative event to go to. Instead we went to The Barbican for a show called the The Manganiyar Seduction where a group of 43 folk musicians from Muslim region of India was sitting in boxes as they played. A very impressive show as you can see in the clip below – but still a poor replacement for a rugby match.

Anyways big thanks to Peter Marshall for the rugby tickets, that was a nice gesture. He blogs about photography at Re:Photo and writes about the many protests and walks he photographs in My London Diary. Peter has been walking around London taking pictures since the 70s and has some really interesting stories and observations.

If you go to the north of England you will get your pint like the one on the left, smooth and creamy. If you ask for a pint in the south you will get one like the one on the right, clean and crisp. The two pints shown are the same beer but poured in two different ways that produces slight differences in taste. There is more of an explanation here.

Thursday Ann and I went to the February edition of London Bloggers Meetup. The meeting was sponsored by Greene King brewery who wanted to show of their new beer engine that could produce both Northern and Southern style pints. The head brewer John Bexon was there with another guy to tell about the beers and explained how to taste a beer.

I enjoyed speaking to other bloggers and having a night out. The beer was very good I enjoyed both versions – and it was free which makes it even better. We had a great evening where we got away with goody bags filled with interesting beers from the brewery and tickets for a rugby game but more on that some other time.

10 years ago it was getting close to the Christmas break. I had finished high school six month earlier to work at a photo development lab to make some money. Previously I had made a website together with my dad for a couple of years but now I wanted my own domain so I could have my own website and email without having to use hotmail or any of the other free email services of that day.

In high school I had acquired the peculiar nickname Gelle among my friends and since it was short and I couldn’t think of anything else I picked that. Not that I really like the word – it looks and sound a bit like gele but I got it now, it’s fairly unique and it’s my username on most websites if I can get it.

The first thing I was really using the site for (except for a page of quotes about beers) was to write about the preparations before, and keep friends and family update during, a trip to USA for 3 month in 2000.

I have lost the actual updates I wrote during the trip and only the shell of the site is left.

The first front page from 1999 is again lost in history. After I came back from US in summer of 2000 I started university in Aalborg and this became my for next couple of years. A collection of links to small websites I’d made for myself and friends.

In 2005 I was heading to US again, this time for an internship in Ann Arbor so I created the blog you are reading in April 2005 and started blogging in Danish about my upcoming trip.

Blogging became a habit with about a post a week which I try to keep up. About a year and a half later I was back in Denmark and switched over to blogging in English.

The design of the blog has changed slightly every now while the tone of the blog has stayed more or less the same throughout the past 4 and a half years, I think. I have blogged a lot about place I have gone, things I have done and very little about my company, thoughts and reflections. And I think it will stay that way.

Who knows what will happen in the next decade but for some reason I doubt we’ll still be using domain names and URLs to find each other. If we do you’ll maybe find a strange 40-year-old(!) behind gelle.dk rambling about and taking pictures of whatever he comes across in his days.

Happy birthday gelle.dk :)

In Copenhagen I joined a bloggers dinner and learned about BarCamp through bloggers and in Prague I made a couple of Danish friends that I found through their blogs. I also met Empty Nested Karen and Minnesotan Al in Prague.

I’m trying to do the same in London but in London everything is so much bigger which is both good and bad. Good because you can find literally everything and all sorts of people, groups and activities. Bad because it easily becomes overwhelming and places and people are far apart. Nevertheless I’ve embarked on the London blogosphere and twittersphere.

Ann and I went to the Christmas gathering of a group called London Bloggers Meetup (#LBM) that organizes a monthly event for people who blog to meetup and chat.

The group was started two years ago by Andy and has gone from having a handful participants to having upwards of 100 now with the events getting booked out days or weeks before they take place. Here Andy is presenting one of the nights three speakers.

First speaker was a security expert from Symantec (who sponsored the bar tab), then followed one of the girls of Domestic Sluttery (they brought cookies!) talked about tips for bloggers and last was Arvind talking about Kiva – a microfinance project.

A great night and I got round to speak to a couple of bloggers like Jorgen, The Undercover Recruiter and Too Geeky Chris (and a couple I forgot, ups).

A few weeks later I went to West Hampstead a neighborhood 30 min walk away from here. There is an active and growing online community in West Hampstead that mainly engage on Twitter. Jonathan is the man behind the blog West Hampstead Life and he is also very active on Twitter where he has been the anchorman for a lot of events. I went to a meetup called a #WHampGather at Alice House a very cool pub/restaurant.

There were loads of people who turned up for the event, our corner was completely packed and the group was very divers. Again I met a lot of interesting people and had a good evening.

At both events there were prizes and gifts so from the bloggers meetup I came away with a copy of Symantics new anti virus program and the day after I won a lampshade and from the twitter event I won a cool Dot To Date calendar.

I now have the posts as flat html files and need to parse them to get them back into the blog system that might take a while. But if you are just here for what’s new with me everything is back to cool :)

So my second attempt at getting back my deleted blog posts was to get my web hosting company Mondo (formerly known as DHT) to recover the database from the previous day. I was naive enough to think that this would be a courtesy action and a fairly simple operation to perform. I was wrong.

Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 22:41 from mondo support:

Dear Michael Carøe Andersen

Thank you for sending your support request regarding: Rollback of the database on gelle.dk. Your request has been assigned the case id:  227037

A technician will take a look at your case and will get back to you as soon as possible. You are welcome to include any other questions/comments when you reply to this mail. Any new information will then automatically be added to your case.

Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 08:30 from support mondo (my translation):

It is possible but it will be at a rate of 150 Euros plus VAT per hour.

Reality strikes and I see that this might cost me some dough.

Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 12:04 from me (my translation):

Hmm ok. I will consider that.

How long time would you think it takes to dig out a database dump from march 10th and uploading it?

Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 12:08 from support dht (my translation):

Well that depends on how big your database are, so it is hard to say. Do you know approximately how big it is?

Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 12:23 from me (my translation):

The database is gelledk on server2 with 113 tables and a size of about 5mb before compression.

I’m getting impatient and again thinking that it can’t be that big a deal. So I keep fishing for an estimate.

Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 16:49 from me (my translation):

Can you give an estimate of how long you would think it would take to roll back the database gelledk on server2 to the state of 9th (or 10th of March before 9pm)?

The database is gelledk on server2 with 113 tables and a size of about 5mb before compression.

I would think it would be easiest to take the whole database and just recreate it. But if it has to be more specific it is these four tables I would like to have rolled back:

blogging_gelle_postmeta
blogging_gelle_posts
blogging_gelle_term_relationships
blogging_gelle_term_taxonomy.

It feel’s like ages and I’m getting a bit desperate and want to get something started in terms of a recovery. I’m still thinking it will take 15 min.

Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 13:04 from me (my translation):

Hello again,

It does not seem like You want to provide an estimate of how long it will take (or how long You will be invoicing me) to recreate the database.

Let me flip it over and say that if you can do it in half an hour then please start. If you expect it to be more I will probably have to do it manually, but please give me a response.

Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 13:29 from support mondo (my translation):

I am afraid we cannot make a backup of a single webhotel on the server where you are hosted. If we have to make a backup we need to recreate the whole server and that would amount to an enourmous bill.

Ok, they could have told me that before. I’m not going to throw hundreds of Euros after this project (at least not yet). So this halted the idea of a quick solution with the help of my host.

Next up is to try and team up with some hard core perl coding friends and see if we can restore the posts from Google and Yahoo’s caches.

Lesson learned: Review your backup routines.