Today was full of good little things. I got two pair of shoes from the shoemaker. They had been pretty worn down - one of them just had to cope with three weeks powerwalking from interview to interview on the dusty streets of Shanghai and Beijing. This guy did magic on my shoes - and he gave me some shoe polish, so that they now look like new. You got to love good looking leather shoes. I was once told you can tell a men by how his shoes look… I guess there is something to it.
While the US is going crazy over the iPhone, I am enjoying some good music on my oldschool iPod. Song of the day: Kelly Clarkson, Beautiful Disaster [Live]. Boy, this song has to be enjoyed loud.
This afternoon, I joined Felix and his son at a Kindergarten reunion / grill party. Boy. That is a different world - people with children. Don’t get me wrong, I love children, I have two younger siblings, I once even did an internship in a Kindergarten during my school days myself. Still - it is a very different world. Three hours of that: I left well fed and with the feeling that I still have time before I join full time :-).
To round the day off, we walked by a university building - in it we saw applicants that were just doing a group discussion - a situation that I was in five years ago. Fond memories. On the panel sat my marketing professor - a smile, a mutual nod… that made my day.
Archive for June, 2007
Today I am a bit on the unstructured side, so I could not settle on one thing to talk about.
You might have noticed the last.fm - widget on the right side: It tells you what I have been listening to lately. I do like this, as music is definitely something that tells a lot about a person. So, if you want to guess what mood I am in right now, look there.
This blog post, by the way, is written through ScribeFire, the relaunched version of Performancing. It is a plugin for Firefox, and it does work better for me than the blogging engine of Flock… but mainly because I am working with a number of plugins in Firefox that I don’t have in Flock, and because Flock is just slower right now that Firefox is.
By the way, there is perfect proof for the fact that blogs are improving the quality of life: On the podcast of the Economist, they play some beautiful music in the beginning and in the end. Of course, they do not say where it is from. In comes the blogosphere: Tim Jervis asked them and provided the answer for the rest of us. Just great.
One little pleasure that I re-discovered lately: Keeping people on their toes by letting them guess something… right now my girlfriend has to guess what kind of furniture I got for our new apartment 
First I wanted to make a “ten great books everybody should read” post, but I find that to be boring. Until I end up doing it, of course. So instead, this is simply a list of the books that are on my “to-do-list” - meaning that I have started them, but did not finish yet. Obviously, I am a very multi-tasking reader.
- blink - the power of thinking without thinking: Malcolm Gladwell A book about intuition - very interesting to see these little moments when you know something without realizing it examined and explained.
- beraten & verkauft. Mc Kinsey & Co. - der große Bluff der Unternehmensberater: Thomas Leif As I am going to be a consultant from November on, I thought it might be interesting to see what people have to say about the industry. The book has some good parts in it, provides some overview over the industry in Germany - but for the largest part, it is not put together too well.
- Maktub: Paulo Coelho Paulo Coelho is one of my favourite writers. This is a book of poems, and I actually have it in the original spanish edition, so I take my time with it.
- Getting to Yes. Negotiating an agreement without giving in: The Secret to Successful Negotiation: Fisher / Ury / Patton This was recommended by a professor who teaches entrepreneurship. I once had a very interesting seminar with a Harvard guy who teaches and studies negotiation during a conference in Shanghai - he recommended it, too. There must be something to it!
- Getting Things Done. The Art of Stress-Free Productivity: David Allen GTD has been my organizational approach for some time now, and I am continuously working to implement more and more of GTD into my life. Thus, the book is a constant on my desk. Since I got into the alpha-test of OmniFocus, my enthusiasm for GTD is at an all-time high.
- Rede. Die Macht des gesprochenen Wortes: Dale Carnegie I have discovered Dale Carnegie through “How to win friends and influence people” almost ten years ago. It has influenced me a lot, and gave me reference to measure other “motivational literature” by. (Most current writers just lack the long-term orientation). While strolling through the library yesterday I found this book that seems to be out of print now about public speaking. Looking forward to that one!
This day has become better from the moment I woke up. Unfortunately, it was a really crappy day when I woke up: Storm, rain, cold, and just in time to get to university to meet with Julia and to get to work.
Since, though, it has improved tremendously: We finished our categories, we got them approved by our supervisor, I had food (important!) and diet coke (more important!), the sun came out for a while, I got what I wanted at the supermarket (surprise for my girl), a little child smiled at me, I finally mailed out some stuff that was due (Brandi - books are on the way in a big yellow box!) and now, at 8pm, we are still at work, but begun coding the text - and it is sorta fun, because there is a visible response whenever you code a piece of text (it gets a coloured line beside the text passage you marked based on what code it is), and it seems to make sense. Not bad at all!
Over the last week, I had been busy transcribing the interviews we had done in China for our diploma thesis - half of them, as Julia was busy as well. The most boring and tedious task I have ever performed on the computer. But now that I am done, I can crank up the music again, yippieh!
By the way, what is the perfect way to conveniently blog from OSX? I tried MarsEdit a few times now, and it seems so clunky… no fun at all! Now I am trying the Flock-blog-engine another try. Like the flickr-integration… Flock seems to be on the way to 0.9 - hope they get some visible momentum back. No doubt they are hard at work, but Flock was SO much hotter in 2005, when they barely cranked out a working build… talk about premature excitement. I wish they got back on the beta-hype-train.
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