OSL - a disgusting airport

On Monday I travelled to Germany via Oslo Airport Gardermoen (OSL). Early in the morning I had some time to waste before my flight, so I walked around window shopping. One of the shops there is an electronics shop, and just outside the shop someone had been sick and vomitted on the floor. The weird thing was that nothing was done about the vomit on the floor except putting up a barely readable note to warn people passing by (the footstool came later).

From the angle I approached the store I nearly didn't see the notice, and I saw at least one other person loosing their footing on the wet floor. As far as I could see the person managed to stay on her feet, but ruining her clothes and possible physical injury was close. So why wasn't any attempt done to dry up the vomit from the floor.

I approached some staff at another shop nearby, and they told me they had offered the staff at the electronics shop to call the cleaning department. But this offer was rejected. When I expressed my concern to them, they made the call anyway. But nothing happend. From the first time I consulted my clock the first time to the last time I was within range of the vomit, more than 20 minutes passed without anything happening.

I like to think that if I were working in the electronics shop I would have started drying up myself - wouldn't any responsible person do that? I would claim that both the guys at the electronics shop and the resources responsible for keeping the airport clean have demonstrated that they should find something else to do.

The Rise of the East

I have just attended Norwegian Institute of International Affairs' seminar on "The Rise of the East". My prime reason was to see Hans Rosling, the father of entertaining statistics, sharing his insight.

Of course, the overall topic of how Norway and rising populations in Asia can interact was interesting as well.

My work with traceability brought me to south east Asia in 2007-2008, but the later financial downturn made TraceTracker pull out from that market. Now there are signs that things are picking up again.

Part of the topic for today's seminar was the population growth, where, according to Hans Rosling's analysis, the "old world" will be left with 1.5 of the projected 10 billion people. In such a context, the need for traceability on food products may become a neccessity - we can no longer throw away food to be on the safe side when food scares occur. Instead we must use traceability to know exactly what is affected, so that surgical recalls can be performed.

Sarajevo this evening

Look at this picture. It shows one of the many cemeteries after the siege of Sarajevo. Seeing how the cemeteries have replaced parks and sports facilities in the urban landscape is a testament to the suffering of Sarajevo.

But we humans don't change. We may think we are civilized and that law and order rules. We are so wrong! The idea that a group of people can claim land where others live still lives on. The German ideas of lebensraum and übermensch have been inherited by disgusting regimes in Asia Minor, the Holy Land, former Yugoslavia, and so on. A common factor seems to be that some old story justifies sionists', serbs and others claim to land that is inhabited by others. If they were in their right, then native americans could claim the Americas, the sami people could claim Scandinavia, and Scandinavians could claim the Hunnic empire. But that wouldn't make the world a better place, would it. So why does the international community allow this mentality to live on?

Applications of EPICS in food supply chain management

I'm presenting at the workshop Applications of EPICS in food supply chain management in Oslo 16. November. This workshop is based around the work done by SINTEF Fisheries and Aquaculture, Matis and TraceTracker (where I work) in the eTrace project. I hope to see you there if you are interested in the use of EPCIS for applications like traceability, sustainability, logistics optimization and supply chain management!

TraceTracker Data Uploader and the 5 step model

Earlier this week I had a customer in central Europe wanting a canned version of a product demonstration I just gave them. Well, the raw material proved too large to be distributed in email, so I ran it through Windows Movie Maker before uploading it to my YouTube account. I guess I should have used the TraceTracker account, but I forgot. Anyway, according to rumors it was a great success.

If you need a manual way to upload traceability information to the Global Traceability Network you can take a look yourself here.

Even smaller

Did you read about the juvenile lizard? Well, during this year's autumn break we found an even smaller one, see picture.

We were four dads and six boys in the mountains west of Eggedal. We rented a nice cabin with all modern facilities, including a sauna. During the days we went walking in the mountains and the nearby Trillemarka nature reserve. On one of our tripe we found the small lizard in the photo. I have not seen such a small specimen before. Although we had nice weather, it was cold. I would have thought such a creature should have entered hibernation much earlier. But no, some of the boys used their young eyes and discovered it. How lucky we were!

Salami and tomato on lego

This year's topic for First Lego League is "food factor". This means that the participants shall study food quality issues, find ways to improve it, build lego robots to solve tasks etc. And my youngest kid has drafted me to help his team!

The different tasks in the challenge have not been distributed among the participants yet, but it feels like an adventure. At home we started by locating his brother's Lego Mindstorm set, so that we can practice at home. I even took some parts and build myself a salami and tomato on lego. What a treat!

Part of the challenge is to find some candidate food products for further study. I had hoped to find some fish products that carry information about the catch, the vessel and so on, but that proved more difficult than expected. I found one processed product from Domstein, but it contained too many ingredients compared to the limit in the challenge.

It remains to be seen where the project develops, but I hope for a memorable learning experience for the kids.