In the last few months of the year, I was able to convince one of my co-workers to use delicious for his bookmarks. Until then, when we wanted to inform the other about an important or interesting link, we sent an email, saying something like “Look at this” and added the link in the actual mail. This had the drawback that we most often didn’t visit the linked website because we forgot about the mail at some time and that we thought that there is no need to keep the link somewhere, because it’s already in our postbox (thanks to Xobni we were even able to find the links again).
Delicious really eased the thing and made it possible for us to quickly inform the other about new maritime products or interesting news, keeping the bookmark in a well-defined place at the same time. And now comes the interesting question: What should we do with documents from within our company? Of course there is the possibility to also store local paths within delicious (and make them private, so nobody else can see them), but the interface is of course not made for this (copying paths around is really not the thing I want to do).
Additionally, what about meta-information we want to store. Descriptions, comments and guidelines which have no place in a normal document, because they are either updated on a regular basis, should be accessible for everybody within our company and/or where maintaining a word document is not really appropriate and useful. Yeah, I know, the best thing would be a Wiki, and we actually have one within our company. But unfortunately it’s a Sharepoint wiki, which sucks completely. For sure, it integrates into our IT infrastructure just fine, but editing and maintaining your pages is horrible. Everybody can format their text as they like (I haven’t seen two pages with the same font, text size or color), attachment handling is even worse (scrolling through dozens of pages to get to your directory – fun!) and once you’ve pasted a linked to your page, you cannot edit the location, you can only delete it and define a new one.
Our current solution is to maintain an offsite-wiki which works for us pretty fine but has the disadvantage that it’s not integrated into our IT infrastructure, so for example users need to be added manually.
What’s your company’s solution to this problem? Where and how to you maintain information, bookmarks and documents? Is your company even aware of the fact, that it looses traction and money with non-existing information and knowledge management?
Blogging was apparently not the most important thing for me in the last year. Amazing four posts in 2008 and hardly any visitors to this site (except some people looking for Time Machine notifications with Growl – thanks for that!).
New year is just around the corner and traditionally it’s now the time to make resolutions for the new year. Well, here is one of mine: I will write more blog posts in 2009 and make this place a more vivid one. Part of this “initiative” will be some information about my current job and what I do (as far as I’m allowed to tell you about), some geekish – I recently got an iPhone and started developing Cocoa applications – and not so geekish things – purchasing a sewing machine and constructing some small furniture are other resolutions for 2010.
So, the first step into the right direction was changing my old blog theme (Tarski) to something new (Grid Focus by Derek Punsalan), spicing it up with some Flickr and delicious badges, and, of course, adding some fancy social media icons. I also updated Wordpress to the newest version and noticed that installing plugins and themes is now a lot easier than it was last year, thanks to the plugin and theme directory. No need to ftp’ or ssh’ to your server, just click and install. Nice.
But then I turned on the radio and Sunny Side Up was on, and everything was fine again. (I noticed only later that Sunny Side Up is part of the program on Sundays and Holidays).
A short list of things I accomplished in 2008
- Take more photos
No. In fact I think I took even less photos than in 2007. But I’m looking forward to spring and some holidays!
- Launch at least the two projects I’m working on
No, although I invested some time into some pretty cool thing, it never went live. But I will restart it in 2009.
- Spend a few days at the seaside with my girlfriend
No, space for improvements.
- Get my degree
Yes, with distinction.
- Spend a weekend in at least one European capital
Only one capital and no weekend, but I’ve been to Madrid, Hamburg and Bergen.
- Move to Vienna
Yes.
- Go to the theatre, at least
once twice
No, not a single time. Shame on me.
- Go running, two times a week minimum
Went running quite often during the summer (4 to 5 times a week) but only once a week or two since I’m living in Vienna.
- Get a job (in the web industry)
Not in the web industry, but a cool job.
- Plant herbs
Not until now but will do it tomorrow.
- Do a painting together with my girlfriend
There are still three days left, right?
- Contribute to some Open Source projects
If two lame bugfixes count, then yes.
- Learn another programming language
Got pretty fluent in Python, yes.
- Learn Cocoa
No.
- Find a flat without a pre-installed kitchen
No, the kitchen was pre-installed, but is nevertheless quite cool.
- Learn Swedish again
No.
- Spend more time cooking and baking
Yes, your own flat really helps!
- Watch ARTE more often (or quit my subscription)
No, but I won’t quit my subscription.
So I ordered that 24 inch Samsung monitor a few weeks ago. Amazon said that they shipped it but never arrived here. I called the Austrian Post, which is the contractor for Amazon here in Austria. A lady told me that the monitor was received at my place last Thursday.
Well, the only problem is that I wasn’t at home last Thursday because I was on a business trip in Hamburg. After some calls to Amazon and the Post it was pretty clear to me that they gave the parcel to some stranger and I will most likely never see it again (they even told me that it’s not the job of the Austrian Post to look for parcels they did not deliver to the correct address because they simple refuse to admit that I did not get the monitor).
The whole thing is now at Amazon again, they’ve sent me a new monitor which is at the post office right now and which I will pick up tomorrow (just to make sure that it’s really there, I wanted to check the Tracking & Tracing status of the parcel and I got this nice looking error message at the right: “The creator of this fault did not specify a regionreason”).
So, I’m finally back from my business trip to Madrid (actually I returned to Vienna Friday in the morning, but I was too tired to blog).
All in all it was a quite, let’s say, interesting journey. We had our first near-death experience on our way to the airport in Vienna when our driver nod off. Arrived in Madrid a few hours later, with a stopover in Munich.
The hotel in Madrid was dreadful, but we quickly made it to the next Tapas bar. Meeting with our customer the next morning, next crazy taxi driver, but I guess we were just not relaxed enough to cross the street just before the truck. On our way to Barajas after the meeting our taxi driver, guess what, was sleepy again. So talking with him about god and the world – quite a challenge because our Spanish is non existing, as is his English.
Our flight was quite late because of some fog in Munich, so we didn’t get our connection flight to Vienna and instead rented a Mini Cooper to get home. Awesome car! Arrived in Vienna at about 3.30 a.m. and took me two days to catch up on lost sleep of the last few days.
I finally managed to take a week off and I declare the following week as the week where I will do things which I love (thank you, Mr Roosevelt for the following quote):
Happiness is not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Another link which emphasizes the above quote comes from one of the Github founders, Chris Wanstrath, who gave a keynote at Ruby Hoedown. Time to look at my github account again and devote some hours to some projects (anyone in need of a OpenStreetMap -> Shape-File converter?).
Zach Klein wrote a few days ago a story about his flaws. He said that when he was asked about them in college, he couldn’t name them.
I can’t name them either.
But I’m working on it, even if I actually don’t want to. Today I discovered one of them.
I’m impatient. I guess I’ve always been. When I was still a kid, not too young anymore, I knew where my mum hid my christmas presents. I did have a look at some of them, not all, but some. That didn’t annul the joy when I actually got them, because I know what was lying under the christmas tree (again, not all of them, I didn’t unpack them or so).
I was also one of the guys who where quite unhappy when it came to the mid of summer because I knew school was still not going to start for a long time. And I guess I’m a doer. I was never one of those guys who was passive at school, who waited for other students to say something or to act. I wanted to show what I can do and I did.
Now I’m no longer a student, but an employee. And it makes me quite nervous to see what our competition did while we were talking about what we might can do. I wanna build things, I wanna do something, I wanna make progress, actively.
I guess that’s also one of my flaws in my personal life (well, no, I do know that it is a flaw). I can’t wait for things to happen, I need them to happen, I want to influence them and just can’t wait for it). Why do I write all that? Well, because I guess things are changing here. And I can only wait and see. Which makes me uncomfortable and pretty much puzzled.
I just wanted to register an .at domain and couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw the price: €72.00 for the first year. That would make about 10 (!!!) .com domains registered with Dreamhost.com.
Can anybody tell me what justifies the price on nic.at?
My iPod mini’s battery is running quite low on power, just holds for a day or two. In addition, its disk is clicking and it takes me two or three tries to get it to play the song I wanna listen to.
So yesterday I purchased a replacement, a silver iPod nano, 4gb. It has the perfect size for me and enough space to hold the most recent music. Perfect. And even better are the new headphones, which are smaller than the ones I had until now (Sennheiser and original Apple headphones) which makes them much more comfortable.
