Hi people. Just a small notion: I won’t blog a lot as long as I’m employed, so if you wanna keep informed with what happens here, use the RSS feed with a RSS Reader.

Since I’m going to work by bike and need between 15-20 minutes, I begun listening to podcasts on the way. I like tech stuff and software development stuff - so if you like that I’ll give you some hints here. The podcasts I listen to usually go between 1 and 2 hours.

Software Engineering Radio | The Podcast for Professional Software Developers: A nice english podcast (from the accent I think everyone can guess that these guys are germans after all) about software engineering in general. Mostly interviews, nicely prepared, no queer stuff, interesting interviewees. My favourite podcast at the moment. Gets updated all two weeks.

Z! - Zeitgeist, Entwicklung, Technik - der Technik Podcast: A german podcast from two guys about tech-news that I like a lot - updated about every two weeks. Decent and well structured usually. I prefer this one to the next…

Bits und so: … which is another german podcast about techie news. Nevertheless I listen to both of these, to keep myself informed and listen to different views on the things that go on in our binary world. This podcasts most of the time sports about 4 people, so even if they’re pretty good organised sometimes it’s quite a mess. Another negative factor is a lot of commercial stuff in there and a focus on the Apple side of software - but its entertaining and the “picks” where tools get recommended is nice.

.NET Rocks!: As fresh .NET newbie I tried out this english podcast and was pleasantly surprised with its quality. Its fun, updated once to twice a week and usually sports a lot of .NET - tech and interviews with .NETters.

Die Drei Vogonen: I only tried this german podcast once so far, so this is more of a honorable mention. When I looked on the duration of over 6 hours, I was appalled a bit, but took the test nevertheless. First, it was only 3 hours long, then the whole show began anew - to technical issues on this one. Then the guys were more relaxed, also talking about personal stuff like where they went for vacation … and it was also pretty unorganised, despite a well structured layout with picks (same as in Bitsundso), short news (that are too short compared to some beekeeping-hobby-tales) and “deep thoughts” where a certain topic gets highlighted (but in the case of GPG the speakers just didn’t have a clue what they were talking about). So preparation minus, organisation minus, nice ambience plus. As time is limited (in fact the most limited resource in our short lives), I’ll ignore this one till the others have no more stuff for me.

I also tried the chaosradio, but I didn’t like the style and attitude of this one. Oh, and I need to try out TentacleprOn by tante soon.

(This is kindof a double post, as I’ve not posted real stuff for some time)

Its very impressive how our life shapes with all the little things we learn. And its all those little things we change in our lives that makes everything a whole new experience. You think I’m on drugs? Nope, I ain’t!

The most time of my life, I’ve been a logical person who had difficulties in understanding human nature and human behaviour. As a logical person, I advocated that no man should ever lie in no situation, and the world would be a better place. Teachers laughted, schoolmates laughted, some tried to persuade me that this just isn’t true. I only trusted upon my logical view of things and nobody could change my perception. Guess what? The human race would be long eradicated by a nuclear war if no man could lie.

These were the times when I trusted my own beliefs most, even when people told me something else. It was a very long stage of my life, but I finally made the next level: trying to understand, why people have another opinion, “try out” for some time if this opinion works for me and then accepting or rejecting that opinion/position/view.

For example: I have always had long hair and split ends. Guess that I didn’t understand that I need to use conditioner to make that go away. My opinion was: chemical stuff can’t help my health or the health of my hair. And I was wrong. When I began using conditioner, the split ends were getting better.

So many things just seem like utter nonsense when you see how people behave sometimes. Like watching casting shows in TV. Like smoking. Like going drinking and dancing in a discotheque. Like making music. I even thought listening to music was a strange behaviour when I was about 14 years old. But after some time, you try things out, and some work for you while others don’t. I began liking music and going out to parties for example, but I never liked smoking even if I tried. Well and then after some time, you even try to understand women - a hopeless attempt, some men might think - but even there you can make progress if you really try to understand their point of view.

What I changed this year

Its just that I have a little bit of free time for the first time in about one year - therefore I’m writing this post. And I’m reflecting on what I changed this very year. Change is usually something people don’t like, because their instincts tell them that change is dangerous and that they should just keep everything as it is, because it won’t get worse that way - that is good for survival, the instinct implies. This instinct is called fear. A small interlude from Dune:

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

If you understand that you can choose what you want to change, if you conquer this instinct, you’ll recognize that every change that you do is a positive change in the end. Otherwise you wouldn’t have accepted it … or you just undo it and change back.

And I changed a lot of little things this year. My dear. I hope you my dear reader can reflect the changes you went through this year too. If you want, you should also make a small blog post about what happend this year in your life, because I’d really like to read that. I came to the point where I can say that I love changes - and hearing about them. So this year:

• I began my diploma thesis on 01.01.2009 and over the course of the year, I needed to unclutter my life to be able to get it done. Some would call this lifehacking. I just stopped playing computer games. Boom. 30% more time. I stopped organizing my week and began organizing my day. Boom. 100% more things got done. I began struturing my online information-digestion through feeds and twitter. Boom. Learning stuff while keeping yourself informed in the shortest time possible. All impressive changes, and needed ones, if you want to use time more effectively.
• I found a job at the local software company Abelssoft. My salary is fine and didn’t need a car to get to work - again a lot of money saved. My colleagues are very nice and I like working with them - and I also like the work itself, which is a very important matter in being happy, I believe. I also just learned a new programming language (C# .NET) and Abelssoft paid a certificate that measures this skill. Thanks again! You can follow @Abelssoft on Twitter, and this is the website (german verison here).
• I bought a flat with my girlfriend. A big one. In the times of economic crisis and a drop in (bank) interests, it seemed the smartest thing from a economic perspective. But if you think about the non-economic perspective, its a way more binding statement towards my girlfriend, than a marriage would be. And I’m very happy about my decision. Believe me, the flat is completely new, big and I feel superb when I’m there.
• I left the church. That means approximately +400€ per year. Nice. I never really believes in god anyways, and if I did, I don’t think Jesus would love me more if I paid the church’s fees.
• Now for some more little things which changed in my information-digestion: Feedly. After learning what feeds are and how to use them via the Firefox-addon Brief, I just switched to Google Reader to be able to synchronize my feeds (and mainly let those that I have already read not show up anymore) with my iPhone feed-reader. Now that I use Google Reader which in my opinion has a cluttered and unintuitive interface, I found the Feedly-firefox plugin, that lets my feeds look like a newspaper. Hooray, the times of dead paper are gone - and with this kind of interface, maybe I can teach my girlfriend to use feeds someday too.
• I began listening to podcasts on the bike. Used music before, but riding bike is pretty boring, and I more like listening to music while I’m cleaning up or doing the dishes or something. Fould the following podcasts (both german) to be very interesting: Z and Bitsundso.
• Another small thing that impact my personal life more than I would have ever imagined: the iPhone. I learned how to use this device as personal organizer (respectively main calendar), ToDo-list, shopping list, feedreader, client for all social networks I use (Twitter, Facebook, Xing, StudiVZ), TV-guide, online-banking-client (damn, I can do bank transfers everywhere with this thing!), (video) camera, instant messenger, radio, podcast-player, music player, navigation-device, pdf-document-reader, voice recorder, gaming device (did you know we have Command and Conquer, Duke Nukem, Need for Speed and many more really good things?), weather information service, eBay-client (which works better and more intuitive than the actual ebay-website), wireless USB-stick, translator, YouTube-client and even TV-reciever (okay, I don’t get too many channels with it). And I can use it as telephone too. You wouldn’t believe it! In one tiny device. All very usable. Thats definitely an upgrade for my personal management.

So I hope your lives got some upgrades too, I’m very pleased with mine this year. For the next year, I’ll have a small list of goals that I want to get done (and that I just entered in my ToDo’s goals section):

• Try getting more professional at my job.
• Buy some stuff, so the new flat isn’t all that empty.
• Write some more blog posts.
• Main point: I’ll try meeting more friends - I kinda lost sight of them this year and definitely have to change that. But from now on, I’ll have at least my weekends free to tackle that.
• Play more pen and paper role-playing-games. I miss that, was always fun.
• Go on vacation with my girl.
• Get a private server-machine running 24/7. Needs to be low-energy-comsuming and not too expensive. And needs to be silent.
• Set up a new blog. This wordpress thingy here is too slow, the design isn’t what I want now, and I plain hate PHP. Whats your pick for another blogging platform?
• Buy a playstation 3 - the Wii has too many bad games, I want more good stuff. And a blueray player too.
• Pay back the money my parents borrowed me.
• Upgrade iPhone when there’s time. If you’ll jailbreak, its more time investment, so you gotta plan wisely.

Feel free to answer with your own changes from this year or your plans for next year. Expect to hear more from me more regularly, like every week. Or something like that. Over and out for this week.

Image by koalazymonkey via Flickr

So after about two weeks of using GTD-life-enhancement with “ToDo” on iPhone, Toodledo as online-synch I have some basic thoughts wheher this helped me. You can find the last post about this here: Why using ToDo-Lists and GTD?.

GTD only > 2 minutes

The first (logical rule) I came across is: never put something you can do in under 2 minutes on a ToDo-list. Do it instantly! This helps resolving loops like “Put the other item on the ToDo-list”, so I guess the rule was made by a computer scientist ;-p … no really: if something is done quickly, just do it!

GTD vs. Calendar

First it has to be noted that GTD has some paralells with using a calendar. You’ll put appointments with people (like go to the doctor, have an interview with, etc.) and recurring appointments (like a weekly meeting with your colleagues) in a calendar, as you got one certain point in time when you have to do that. GTD is more about listing the stuff, that has no exact point in time when it has to be done. I’ll put there items I need to to at work and stuff that needs to be done at home.

Context

Context is the situation you’re in when you need a certain part of your ToDo-list. I don’t need my work-list at home and I don’t need my home-list at work. This is what contexts try to solve. In the GTD-programs I use, you can set a context to each item. On ToDo for iPhone setting your actual situation to a context lets the app hide all other todo-items. Contexts get automatically set on todo-items if you have set that certain context. On Firefox I need to set everything by hand, but its pretty easy. Use contexts, they mean the world.

The contexts I use are work and home. I also use another context thats called “boring-time”. When there’s nothing to do at home (or soon in the christmas-holidays), I look in that list. I put topics for blogposts to write, books I’d like to read and private projects and stuff like that in the boring-time-context. I didn’t solve one of those since I use GTD, seems I got too much other stuff to do :-/

Hotlist

You can set a “due date” (and time) on each todo item. This is the time when you should have solved a todo or the last point in time when you should begin working on the todo. You can also define a priority (like none, low, medium or high). When you then look at your “hotlist” (or “Focus”-list as its called in the ToDo-app), only the more important stuff and the stuff with a near due date gets shown, at least in the iPhone program its also filtered by the actual context that is set. This helps seeing the important stuff through the other clutter.

The due date has another important meaning. As its the time when you should start the ToDo if you didn’t do it before, you get a message (that looks like an SMS) in the iPhone app.

Problems I didn’t solve so far

I tried making a short list of items I need to do in the morning. Why? Hmm. I tend to walk around in the morning, not knowing what to do first. Sometimes I forget my umbrella and get cauht by rain. Therefore a small list would be nice. There is an option to let items recurr (any timespan, every day for example; I use this for getting the trash out every two weeks), but I didn’t like to see all the stupid items like “do breakfast” in the list. Maybe this can be solved with the iPhone ToDo’s “Projects”. Those can be used to set sub-items, but it gets synched to the Toodledo Service as single items, so I’m not sure if it works that good (tried it once, “inTheMorning”-project with subitems, set to recurr every day, but the subitems didn’t resurr somehow, so I sat the and got an empty project recurring in the morning).

Then Outlook 2003 made problems. I used another thrid party-app linked on toodledo to sync the ToDos with outlook 2003. Sadly, Outlook realizes its data gets changed and ask the user (me) for permission. This wouldn’t suck if you could allow it forever, but you can’t. Outlook just doesn’t support it, so you have to click “okay” every ten minutes, when the third party app tries to sync. Stupid outlook. Didn’t try it with a newer version so far. Outlook seems like a crappy ToDo-solution anyways, as you got no chance to define contexts (at least in 2003).

When I have more insights, I’ll let you know! So far, get stuff done! ;-)

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First things I wanna put straight:

• I sometimes have issues keeping track of what I’m supposed to do, when to do it and in which order.
• Sometimes I heard about GTD on twitter or in blogposts, but when I tried to read into it I thought that I don’t really feel like learning another complicated system for stuff that I can solve with small slips of paper.
• I always wanted to use my iPhone for ToDo-lists, as I use it for everything else in organisation: contacts, calendar … so why not todo-lists?
• I feel that I can be doing things faster if I used some kind of organised approach to my todo-listings, therefore I just thought: why not try out another fancy internet-solution? And synch it with an iPhone-app, so I always have my lists at hand?

Thats exactly what I’ve done. After all, these apps and internet solutions build on the same GTD-principles, and therefore learning GTD seems to be important for programmers of those tools, but not for the end user like me. But of course the solution to my problem wasn’t only to download some software, as you’ll have to think about what software solutions you use and for which set of tasks this works. After all, many things like appointments fall into the realm of calendars; and many “small tasks” should not be set on a todo-list at all, as those tasks are too small (”check todo list”; checking this item is superflous) or too large (”be happy”; falls into the realm of so called goals). Then some software has limitations about what you can do with your todo list (like outlook). So everything need to be planned a bit, so you get a solution you can use.t

And this is the main issue. Usability. I need a system that can remind me what I have to do for the day and that doesn’t take loads of time to configure. So far I can’t make a clear statement, but I see some issues and problems here and there - while other parts of my solution seem to work perfectly. I’ll tell you in my next post if the solution I try is usable or if its utter nonsense to try to use online & mobile applications to get yourself remebered and organised.

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I just got inspired for this article here, where Aditya Mukherjee talks about how and why he blogs.I want to talk about that and about why I read blogs - as this is something many people here in germany don’t understand or just don’t want to do.

Aditya Mukherjee tries to get better, develop his way of writing and wants to present his ideas to the world. He tries to keep track of his personal progress. These also motivate me to blog. I’d also give people I know the possibility to read my ideas even when we don’t have real-life contact, as this makes people keep connected. And keeping connected is important to everyone of us. Its not the meaningless facebook-friendship, but the possibility to read, what the other person’s up to. Thats also why I’d love to see more people I know blogging or at least using Twitter. They might think I don’t care about them, but the point is that nobody likes to ask everyday “Hey, whats up in your life?” - and given that you have more than one or two persons you know, its better to have a push- instead of a pull-mechanism to get their updates. When something is important to a friend, I’d like to know it. If he put it on twitter, I get that update. If he even writes a longer blogpost, I still can decide if I’d like to read that thought of if its not important to me.

And writing blogposts isn’t a big deal wither. Okay, it takes some time, and at the moment I can’t find much time to do that either, as I just finished studying and will begin working in a software company tomorrow - and just bought a flat with my girlfriend (well and you have no idea how much time it takes to pick the tiles, the lamination, every bit of the kitchen and get all the bureaucracy done). But writing helps me to order my thoughts and to improve my english. And perhaps someone I happy to hear from me again. You never know.

Same with reading blogposts. I began subscribing to a small number of XML-feeds (from blogs of people I know), but learned some other great blog, that I like to read. Some of them are technical, some are philosophical, some are both. Lately, I posted a blog-link to someone who might have been interested in it, about a management technique that is used in his work and what often goes wrong with it. The response I got was “I don’t have time to read blogs - and this stuff in blogs is all pure theory and has nothing to do with the real world work. And by the way, everyone can read blogs.”

This somehow stroke me. Someone who doesn’t read blogs tells me that everyone can do it. Well, I agree that everyone can read, but reading blogs with content that is about your profession or about stuff you care about is important information for your life. And of course you can’t do that if you don’t take time for it. Some people read the newspaper to know what happens in the world - and they take their time to do that. Some read professional magazines - and also take their time to do that. So whats wrong about reading blogs?

Well, I guess the problem is, that its not really commonplace in Germany to do that. People here are always 4 years behind compared to the trends in the USA - and blogs in Germany are often thought of as homepages where people show off the newest funny stuff they found on youtube. If you’re really picking the good quality stuff, you get much more personalized information than you’d find in any newspaper or professional magazine. The writers are not professional all the time, but who cares? Iknow my posts are not too well thought-out too, but hell where’s the problem? You can skip every blog entry as you could flip a page in the newspaper.

Now back to “everyone can read blogs”: indeed. But not everyone can be patient enough to read blogs, to find blogs that delivers good content and to digest that information in a ways that helps you in your everyday life - or work. Its the same with books. Everyone can read them - but that doesn’t mean everyone takes time to do so. Hell, perhaps it would be better to read books, but if you’re into computers you’ll soon realize that the world changes too fast for books to be cutting-edge.

Well, nevermind. Just a lifesign from someone who doesn’t find much time to blog at this time.

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Image via Wikipedia

Yesterday I heard about someone (I won’t name) who tries to make money from blogging. Therefore he uses a completely different approach than just to start writing about somthing he cares much about or is very familliar with. No, its just a bunch of different blogs, specialised to certain up-to-date themes that you don’t necessary need to know much about, but that hit the vibe.

The idea in this is to place blogs on the web that satisfy a certain niche, that may get big soon, or are underrepresented in the web. Just pick a nice, suiting theme for a blogging-system of your choice and put some general pages up … get your info from WikiPedia, Google and other blogs. Get yourself some specific feeds on the topic. Keep posting news from the sector or random thoughts you come across in that topic. Crosslink the blogs and use the multitudes of web-directories for all blogs that you set up. Use a Twitter-Plugin and a follower-unfollow-script to gain followers. Watch the stats. The higher the stats, the more effort is to be put into the blog. Try to get advertisment for good blogs or use services like Trigami or AdSense to generate money.

Don’t be fooled: Using this method, you sure can make money on the web through blogging, BUT its a full time job and it will take a couple of months or maybe even years to get something out of it. If I could write good content in a well-written manner with a speed of 10 posts in two hours I’d for sure be a money-blogger … but I can’t. And I don’t think its the golden money source, as you’d need a lot of time to build up PageRank, reputation and readers using this method - especially if you’re not really apt with the topic you’re writing about.

Personally, I don’t gain much from watching such a blog and it won’t land in my feedreader. The Admarkets is flooded anyways, and I wouldn’t advise anyone to go down this route. If you really want to make a blog, then for chrissakes write about something you care about or just write about yourself and your experiences.

And one final note: Too many people on Twitter and in different blogs scream into the world how to make money with blogs and “online-marketing” - as too many computerkids out there dream about money from doing basically nothing - and I hate it. Its only blogged about to draw pageviews onto their sites, and as you’re reading this, you also might be a victim of the blogging-to-money-lie. Good content surely don’t come from nowhere. You need to be a very good writer to do this. And even if you have good content and if you can keep up the good work for a very long time that it will take for your word to spread, can you be sure that you’ll love to do it for a living? Can you be sure that its enough money compared to a random job? Do you feel challenged by this?

A second final note: Yes everyone can open blogs this way. We’ve got a lot of good CMS that make it possible. Don’t you think the commercial market will die out even more with even more people doing this sort of “work”? Did you hear about AdBlock Plus? Roughly half of your visitors won’t even see your ads.

A third, but final note: I got a lot of feeds from people who really blog good stuff. I love good blogs and good content, and I really think this is worth good money. But I also believe that this money isn’t earned because it was the purpose of this blog to make money but because the writer is just talented or has a lot to talk about. So please give up on the “get-rich-blogging-lie”. Thanks for listening.

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Very small introduction to twitter: Twitter is a broadcast service, and everyone who follows you can read your updates. You follow people who you think twitter about interesting stuff, whose tweets amuse you or who post interesting links. If you use an @username, you are referring to someone on twitter, but still everyone can read this update. Look at the following problematic screenshot from @the_gman, this is also a nice example how to design a twitter ppearance… but thats not the point here:

Here you can see a successful twitterer (in terms of followers) broadcast private messages all the day. This makes him have an incredible number of updates, but it seems that he didn’t understand the @username-command.

Again, the @username is only to be used if you want to refer to somebody, but only if you want to world to read that update too. If you tweet “Nice blogpost by @ithoughts_de, go and read it everyone http://tinyurl/somechars”, you tell the world about my nice blogpost and that you recommend it. If you tweet “@AustinPrime You’re welcome”, you tell all of your 14,150 followers … guess what? Nothing! You spam their timeline! Listen @the_gman and all other spammers out there: I’m following you because you sometimes have interesting stuff to say or you tweet interesting links. But I’m not following you to read your public conversations, and I guess no one does that.

Image via Wikipedia

Twitter has a feature thats specific for you. This is called direct messages. You can tweet “d AustinPrime You’re welcome”, and AustinPrime will read your answer and maybe reply. This is a email or IM-like feature, and it should be used MUCH MORE to make twitter useful. In fact @guykawasaki used to twitter his direct messages via @username for a week or so and I thought about unfollowing him for cluttering my timeline.

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