My new toy

"The best camera you can buy is the camera you
carry with you." — Per Nilsson.

Readers of my blog might have noticed that I've had a few more original photos and a video (gasp! The technology these days) on here lately.

That's because I  bought a new camera with Viktorija to replace the old one, which was packing it in after five years of good service.

After a bit of research and a bit more of bothering people I know who should know about cameras and such, I decided that this or its slightly better upgrade would be the best options.

This camera is cheap, light, small and has 12 megapixels (ignore the lying photo) and 5x optical zoom. For almost all intents and purposes, this camera is good enough. Sure it doesn't have a detachable lens or special features or an excellent processor, but for 750 kr (€85 or AU$115) it is the best buy I could have hoped for. It was actually the cheapest camera with a Lithium-Ion battery, but it received better reviews that more expensive cameras with similar features on various websites that I scoured.

After around a decade of digital cameras, more or less all of them are all right for facebook photos and making short videos of strange things you see while travelling. I had been considering buying a Canon G12 (around 6-7 more expensive), which is the bridge between point-and-shoots and DSLRs, but I knew that I would always be afraid to take it out of the house lest it get stolen or broken or scratched or whatnot.

As my friend Per Nilsson said, "The best camera you can buy is the camera you carry with you." If you are too afraid to carry the damned thing, why have it at all? It also conveniently follows the advice of my French lecturer in my Journalism bachelor (who used to be a war correspondent, if you're interested) who said the best advice he could ever give is to always carry a camera with you. As a freelancer, you never know when you are going to see a car crash involving a drunk politician and some school children crossing the street or something like that. You always want to be able to take a photo and sell it. On a less sinister note you could also take photos of your friends at parties and not worry about the camera being stepped on.

Mousse is yummy

After seeing one of my friends back home making mousse and gloating about how nice it looked, I thought I'd see how easy it was to make. So I made it. The photo is my own sloppy first attempt at making the mousse. Below is the recipe I used for it. I also added melted white chocolate on top for the decoration.


Jenny's chocolate mousse
Serves six

Ingredients:
320g (12oz) strong dark eating chocolate
30g (1oz) unsalted butter
6 eggs
pinch of salt

Method:
Separate the eggs, placing the whites into a roomy bowl.

Break the chocolate into small pieces and put them in another roomy bowl set over a pan with a centimetre of barely simmering water. Add the butter and allow both to gently melt. Stir occasionally.

In the meantime, add a pinch of salt to the egg whites and whisk to the soft peak (floppy) stage. In a separate bowl, break up the yolks.

When the chocolate and butter have melted and have been allowed to cool for a couple of minutes stir in the yolks.

Cut and fold in the whites in three batches until seamlessly combined. Pour into ramekins and refrigerate for a couple of hours to set.

You can get more tips on the website where I found it originally.

Functional Drink...WTF?

Does it look like medicine, a sports drink,
energy drink, drain cleaner......?
You deicde.

"This isn't natural at all... Just chemicals... Bullshit," Anton said as we both tasted the drink with the flavour 'Gold Berries.' I have to agree with him. A chemical cocktail something between the taste of original Gatorade, vitamin C tablets and a rotten mandarin is the only way I can describe it. I have a foul sour taste in my mouth as I write.

These drinks were given out at the jobs fair held by Lundaekonomerna, my faculty's student body. There were multiple energy drinks and health products to take as samples along side evil investment banking firms and IKEA (note: no free furniture) that were looking for trainees.

This drink has tried to differentiate itself as some sort of healthy option among the energy drinks product category, which most people (I understand) think is by definition unhealthy. We've all read the stories about the Jaegerbomb heart attacks and about the hospitalized kids after drinking 13 Red Bulls.

Kickup wants to be different of course: the white bottle, which I think is incredibly ugly and off-putting, is reminiscent of a medicine bottle (psychology: "Its good for you!") and it also has a list of the different vitamins it has on the back — all 13 of them. If you don't know what they are or what the hell they do, don't worry, Daddy (this company) will take care of you (psychology: "You are doomed without us.").

The thing that got my attention with this product is not that it is an energy drink or that it has vitamin supplements or that it is in an opaque bottle, but that it's called "Functional Drink." What exactly does that mean anyway? Perhaps it signifies that unless you drink this, you just don't function properly? Or perhaps it insinuates that other beverages serve no function.

For example:
Water? Forget about it, it is dirty and horrible from the tap!
Beer? It dehydrates you and makes you sleepy!
Tea? For poofters, come on, be a man!
Coffee? Actually in Sweden coffee is untouchable; the drink of champions. Let's not talk about it.

I guess the best thing about this drink for me is the 1 kr I will get when I take it to the recycling station :D

It aint all beer and roses

Making beer at home using household equipment is fraught with danger. Bacteria that wants to destroy your batch of sparkling beer lurks around every corner. The only way to fight it: douse it in shit loads of chlorine.

Normally I am militant about the way I sterilize my brewing equipment, leaving it to soak with chlorine solution as well as giving it a bit of a wash down with a rag. This time, when I was making a Thomas Coopers Special Edition Pilsner kit, which I picked up in Malmo, I didn't take a good look at the brewing spoon I was using.

Normally I use a metal spoon, but I've been conscious that I could scratch the inside of the barrel and therefore start a bacteria trap. So, I used my friend Brandon's spoon to mix the wort because it had a rubber head.

However, it was my caution that proved to be my downfall: the spoon had a metal handle and where the rubber met the metal, it was coming apart and obviously some nasties were living in there. The result of this was that the whole batch was contaminated and ended up being completely ruined.

See the video for the end result after bottle conditioning (about six weeks).

For lazy people

The creator of this lovely batch of
Tinginys. Yum yum yum. Take one...

Tinginys (Lazy bones)


This is a fridge cake, meaning that you mix everything then put it in the fridge for a few hours to make it set. It's called "lazy" because its stupidly easy to make. This should not be consumed by anyone watching their weight carefully. Ever.

Ingredients (exact amounts aren't crucial):
200g butter (82% fat, ie real butter. This is important: no margarine)
1 can (~150 - 200 mL) sweetened, condensed milk
2 or 3 heap tablespoons of cocoa
300g plain biscuits
Tbsp of nuts and/or raisins?

Method:
Break biscuits into small fingernail-size pieces, avoiding crumbs and crushed biscuits. Melt butter in saucepan. Add cocoa and stir in until well combined. Add sweetened, condensed milk. Combine liquid with biscuits and mix. Insert into a clean plastic bag and compress, removing bubbles from mix. Form a shape (flat disc or a roll or ...?). Insert into fridge and chill for four hours. Remove from bag, cut into pieces and eat (one).

Target customer: More money than sense

There are two interesting pricing strategies for us in the entrepreneurship class at university: one is cost-plus (the cost of production plus some sort of fixed margin. This is used for commodities and in industries that have high competition and little variation in quality). Then there is value based pricing (the perceived value to the user is taken into account, regardless of the actual price of production).

Value based pricing is particularly interesting in when it comes to marketing and sales of items that hold little value in themselves. What happens when there are too many players in the market or when some product becomes too generic is that people invent new values and attach them to their product by marketing.

I added the red arrows. Click to enlarge
 to see the difference in price.

A nice example of this is Moleskin notebooks. In essence, they are bound paper with or without lines. Some of them have other features like calendars. It is the added value that you pay for when you buy this little book for $40. Other notebooks of the same size cost $2. So what do you get, since you paid $38 more than the other guy? One would expect better binding. A nice cover perhaps? The rest is in your head: exclusivity ("look at me poor man, I'm fucking rich!"), luxury ("I'm worth it") and a few other things.

Usually people can't justify a rise in price unless there is some discernible change in quality. I mean we aren't complete fools right? We aren't going to pay more just to think that we are somehow cooler than the rest... right? Wrong.

Iittala is a brand from Finland that has taken it in its stride that all consumers are foolish enough and they are going to make them pay a fee to prove it. The company makes candle holders for tea lights, as well as various other home wares.

I admit that their goods are somewhat stylish and nice, but I really laugh about their pricing strategy because it has been so damned successful for them. In Sweden, almost every house that I've been to has at least one of these. Even the house we rent has two of them.

I added the red arrows. Click to enlarge
 to see the difference in price.

I've added some photos here to exemplify my point about their pricing strategy. Just so you know, there is no difference in size or weight or quality between the different colours. There is simply a new colour. Really. Take a look at the prices. At the time of writing, 100 SEK = €11.49 = AU$15.44.

Evidently this price strategy works because people go to each other's houses and look at the decorations and think to themselves "Oh I don't have the red colour in my Iittala candle holders" then they go home and nag their partner until they give in and fork out hundreds, if not thousands of kronor on these pieces of coloured glass.

If anyone cares to (dis)agree with this, feel free to comment, but more importantly, give me more examples of this please!

Vox populi: heard in class

Our new lecturer Ragnar is a favourite amongst the students. He makes people feel comfortable and more often than not he is laughing about something. The following was heard in class (sources will be protected!)

"You can't just say 'anyhow' in any sentence!!"

"He looks like Santa Claus. He has a beard and smiles a lot. I can imagine him with kids on his knee, giving them presents hehe."

If other funny things are heard in class feel free to put them in the comments :)