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About me.
Let’s start at the beginning, that is usually a pretty good place to begin. I have always been curious for as long as I can remember, sometimes to my parent’s dismay. I was fascinated by how things worked, and I have always had the need to tinker with things and take them apart to see how they work. My father had a small workshop down in the basement, with a little lathe, and a lot of tools, where he fixed stuff if it was damaged or broken not only for ourselves (80 percent of the time it was me who had broken something) but also for friends, family and for our neighbors. He would fix all things from washing machines to bicycles, It was great.
I had the impression that my father could make anything, and he had a phrase sentence “let’s see if we can’t figure something out” that stuck with me, and that feeling of we don’t know until we have tried, and his way of solving a problem in four steps also stuck with me. First, understand what the thing that doesn´t work does. Second, understand why this thing doesn’t work. Third, understand why this thing was designed the way it was, (are there any limitations on shape, size, and weight). Fourth, understand what kind of material the broken part is made of and why?
My father read a lot and had a broad knowledge of a lot of things, including politics, economics, history, physics, and chemistry. I tried to follow along when he explained things to me, but sometimes I did not understand why it was so, then my father tried to explain it or show me differently in something I could relate to.
I clearly remember one time my father told me about physics, he was helping a friend who had a busty water line, because it wasn’t buried deep enough in the ground and the frost got into the pipe and made the water expand and caused the buried pipe to burst. I was seven years old at that time, and remember I was thinking what could have hit the water line underground and asked my father how the water line burst in the ground. He explained to me when water freezes, its molecules get arranged in a crystalline structure, thereby attaining a defined shape, and that crystalline structure is less dense, and since there are gaps between individual molecules in the structure, the overall volume increases, and water expands. My father clearly saw that I didn’t understand, so he took me down to the workshop, filled a piece of copper pipe with water, caped off both ends, and put it in the freezer in a bigger open plastic container (that last part I missed), and surely the next day the pipe had burst. Then I thought what more changes if I freeze it? The next day I wanted to make my own test. I put all sorts of things in the freezer; a balloon, cutlery, water, milk, one of my father’s beers, a screwdriver, and an adjustable wrench, (I was sure that my father wouldn’t miss these if they broke), a book, one of my dad’s smoking pipes, some of my sister’s clothing (of course I wouldn´t like my own to get burst), some gasoline for our lawn mower, an empty vinegar plastic bottle (I didn’t like the smell so I tightened the lid), and a plastic marmalade jar filled with lemonade. The next day the freezer was a mess, and now I know why my dad put the pipe in a plastic container. At the bottom of the freezer, there was one big lump of ice in different colors. Man did I get in trouble with my parents, they didn’t think that my experiment was particularly smart.
So what did I learn? My parents did NOT like that I made that experiment! And I thought that freezing was amazing because It could not only expand but also reduce things, make my sister´s clothes stiff, make my father’s tools rusty, and some plastics get brittle. I love taking stuff apart and figuring out how things work.
My grandpa was part of the Danish resistance in the Second World War when Germany occupied Denmark. He has told me how the Danish resistance communicated with England and how coded messages were sent both on the radio and in the newspaper like, a such and such hat was found on tram line number 8, which was the first time I heard of encryption, he also told me that it was possible to build a radio yourself. Now that really piqued my interest, so I went to the library and borrowed three books on how to build a crystal radio, and I build a radio myself, using a lot of cobber wire that had a red coating on that I wrapped around an empty plastic lemonade bottle. To change the frequency I figured out that it was basically like the accelerator on my dad’s Scalextric slot car, by having a metal piece moving up and down on a wrapped coil.
One of the most interesting things my dad and I made was a steam engine from scratch, which was one of the longest projects that “we” made, and I was in charge of second measuring and test fitting and I also made some bars on the lathe with my dad supervising me.
One of my first inventions, I created when I was thirteen, and I remember cycling the 15 km out to the Inventor´s Office, which today is called the Danish Technological Institute, to turn in the invention, and without me knowing of it, the Danish Technological Institute gave an interview on a radio program on the Danish national radiostation P3 about young inventors, where my invention was used as an example. It subsequently generated a lot of interest from some companies who were interested in my invention, but for me, the fun part of making and producing the invention was over, and at that time I was not particularly interested in any commercialization, why nothing more came out of it. Although I still have the document from when I handed in the invention signed by the Inventor´s Office as a memory. Already then I really liked the challenge of seeing a problem and trying to come up with a solution.
My first computer was a Commodore 64, and getting that computer and playing computer games introduced me to game engines itself which were a combination of BASIC and 6502 Assembly. This got me hooked, it started something new for me, and was the beginning of my technical computer journey. After some time I read about the Amiga 500 in a computer magazine at the local library, and this really piqued my interest and made me think of how I could save up some money. I got a job delivering groceries, saved all my money, and bought the brand new Amiga 500, and to my parent’s dismay, I immediately disassembled it and soldered on some wire and an on/off switch. I remember having spent a lot of time at the local library researching how to loop a program, which came to really good use when I played games on my Amiga 500. I got curious and wondered if it was possible to make alterations to a game and what would happen to the games I played. At that point, I wasn´t particularly skilled at playing computer games but quickly figured out how to get more lives in the games by altering the code which made it a whole lot easier to complete the games. Later on, I found out that this was my first introduction to software and hardware hacking, but at that time it was just a means to complete my computer games.
I had a childhood friend whose sister had a disability in the form of a lack of fine motor skills. She liked to use a computer, but could not move and click the mouse herself and was helped to do so by her mother or father. I felt sorry for her and really wanted to see if I could help her and also saw it as a great challenge to try to build a mouse that she would be able to use herself and to tackle the challenge I used my 4 steps method.
I had narrowed the problem down to; too small, too sensitive, and you have to have full use of your fingers. So I disassembled the mouse to figure out how it worked, and the solution was that I just had to build a bigger and less sensitive mouse where you shouldn´t use your fingers to push the buttons.
After some weeks, I had build a prototype using the old internals as the circuit board from an old mouse, some wires, some LEGO Technic, (I used Lego because it’s quick and easy to create prototypes and there is a very small error tolerance and fluctuations in Lego) some Meccano parts, two Laser diodes, two light-sensitive receivers, two relays and a lot of glue.
So I build a trackball in Lego (a big upside-down mouse) where the ball was up instead of down, and I remember one of the tricky things was attaching and aligning the light emitter and the light emitter wheel to the Lego axel, and then I adjusted the sensitivity by using bigger Lego wheels on the axels, and for the ball, I used a Wooden Petanque ball. I tackled the mouse button problem by building four small boxes out of Lego, two boxes with laser diodes, and two boxes with light-sensitive receivers and a relay inside. My idea was to send a beam of light from the box with the laser to the other box with the light receiver and when the light was broken it would send an impulse to the relay. My problem was that the mouse did not deliver enough power to drive the new “buttons” and I had to add an external power source, I knew I had an old power supply lying somewhere from one of my other projects, and when I tested it and it worked, and I remember the wonderful “click” the relay made.
When I graduated in 10th grade, I moved away from home to Sweden to go to high school to personally challenge myself. I believed that if I could manage to graduate high school in another country, I would learn a lot about myself, the economy, and commitments, and a lot about cultural differences, despite Danish and Swedish being quite similar, culturally we are different, and this invoked my interest in cultural differences and got me to dive into emotional intelligence.
I early find out that humor gives the brain a surprise reaction, which gives it a quick break, thereby releasing stress and giving new energy which got me interested in how the brain works. The human limbic system at the center of the brain – which is handled by the amygdala and hippocampus and processes our most basic emotions, motivation, learning, hunger, and fear – is also triggered when we see or hear something funny.
As a teenager, I was a boy scout leader, which was the first time I tried leadership and where I could see how my approach to communication really makes a difference, how a little empathy can help you lead, how to motivate others by guiding them to visualize the goal and make it our goal and not just mine. As a result, one of the best things was, to give them praise in front of their parents when they got picked up. I started using the phrase “our group” to create a team spirit and it was interesting to see how they one by one started using the phrase themselves. My early exposure to expectations from our troop, their parents, and the leader of our boy scout group, was new to me. Now I was hooked on leadership too.
Later on, I got a job at an <<ISP>> as a system administrator and this was the first time I got paid for doing Risk-Management and having responsibility for IT-Security. After that, I spent a lot of time figuring out why I found IT-Security Research so fascinating, and to understand this I had to accept some less flattering things about myself e.g. that I wanted to be better than others in what I did, and that I liked the feeling of being a part of that exclusive group with a broad knowledge of something that few people knew of. I found that my drive was divided into three phases; exploring, understanding and acceptance, and these phases still benefit me today and have led me to dive into behavior patterns; how and why we react as we do and how our feelings have an impact on our patterns, and which centers of the brain that gets activated. I quickly understood that understanding cybersecurity is a lot “easier” than understanding myself, it is basically the same framework used to understand myself as I use in IT-Security Research; exploring, reacting, and figuring out why this something occurred and what the impact was, and why things do as they do. When you take on a new field of study it demands a lot of time and hard work as it requires a lot of researching, studying, and commitment, just to have a basic understanding of the field of interest.
As a kid, I remember the first time I took a flight, a natural question occurred about how an airplane flies without flapping its wings like a bird, and I went to the school library to read more about this, but I could not find anything about airplane wings, only more general information of different types of planes and facts about size, speed, cost and carrying capacity. Again, I went to the only person I knew who could help me understand and explain it to me; my dad! As I predicted, the first thing he asked me was about my own research on the problem, and what answers I had found on my own, and when I told him that the school library didn’t have the answers I was looking for, his response was that if I really wanted an answer, I had to put some work in it, and also told me, that if I haven´t found the answers maybe I haven´t researched at the right library. He didn’t just want to give me the answers but expected me to make an effort to solve the problem myself, and funny enough, it didn’t help to remind him of his own words “work smarter, not harder” (my mother on the other hand, found my argument quite amusing).
After my father’s urging to put more work into the research and search for answers in another library, I, therefore over the next couple of months went to several public libraries within biking distance, where I took out some books with some illustrations of airplanes, and wings and discovered, among other things, that the British George Cayley founded aerodynamics as a science in the late 17th century. I learned about basic aerodynamics such as the shape of the wing and wing tip and how it works, how the shape of the wing generates the way the wind moves around the wing, and that the slow-moving air generates more pressure under the wing and at the same time creates lift and how the fast-moving air creates less pressure over the wing.
As a reward for my commitment to the subject, my father bought me a model glider so that I could see how aerodynamics worked. So what did I learn? Firstly technical knowledge about aerodynamics, secondly not all arguments work on my dad, thirdly sometimes the gift of hard work is more than just knowledge. An important lesson my father taught me over the years was that it was important to be able to do my own research to find the answers I was looking for so that I wasn´t dependent on him, and somehow he smoothly navigated this lesson by giving me fewer answers the older I got and instead expected me to put more work in the research myself. I later found out that my father’s way of pushing me to investigate things on my own was to develop my curiosity and my independent problem-solving approach, but to a large extent, it also developed a problem-finding approach, which I certainly also have benefitted from later in my work with IT-Security research.