sascha-kiefer.de

In a lecture by Jan Borchers, I stumbled over a short part about active reading. This reminded me to be a bit more careful when reading technical literature. Because if you just read them like a novel, you won’t remind only little things. You read it and think by yourself “Yes, I understand that”. But a couple of weeks later, you probably won’t remember anything. So how can that be avoided? Remember the following tips:

Highlight 1-2 Key Points per Page or Chapter

Always read with a marker. Rethink what you just read and highlight the key points you just learned (not more, because if you highlight everything, it’s the same like highlighting nothing at all).

When I decided to join the team last September I started with a fitness test (actually this test was disconnected from the decision, it was just a coincident of good timing). However, this test had horrible results. Since then I tried to regularly do something for my fitness and my health. With the tour at the door, it’s a good time to look where I am.

Since last September, I spent 5 days, 23 hours, 4 minutes and 21 seconds doing sport. In this time I burned 102.172 kcal. They divide into the following

• 2 days, 8 hours in the gym working out

After all the bathroom renovation and wedding stress I can now slowly looking forward to “the next big thing”. The Tour de Bous, which will start next Tuesday.

It’s a bicycle tour starting in Bous (thus the name) with different destinations every year. The participants are 8 iron man. Trained the whole year just for this event. Sweating blood and tears to get their bodies fit and strengthened. Living a live of renouncement. Only having one goal, one vision, one battle to win. The battle of men and the wild. It’s only us and the road (and sometimes some hotel rooms and for some members spring mounted seat posts – but that’s a different story). Anyway, I got carried away…

As some of you might know, we’re currently renovating our bathroom. Working with craftsmen is a very special experience, at least here in Germany. But besides of that fact, I had an interesting situation the other day. I witnessed a pattern which felt very familiar and this made me think.

Time recording. An issue most people working on project base face (and even those not working on different projects). For me, its not different. I work on various projects with various tasks on one day. It’s not unusual to record 4-8 activities for different projects a day. Latest at the end of each month, I have to record my times to my employer (in order to calculate projects, control costs, bonus…).

As some of you might already know, I need some #Silverlight Knowledge for a new job role from January on. As usual, I start learning a new technology by starting a little project in order to have sth. to work on.

I had a very interesting and inspiring discussion with @luislanz the other day about what you would like to do and what you end up doing in the end in your life.
That reminded me of an experiment I heard about a couple of weeks back. It was about money. Different people where asked: “Imagine there is a bank. That bank is willing to pay you 86.000$ each and every day until the rest of your live. What would you do with the money?”.

Before you go on reading: Ask yourself what would you do with such a gift?

On Wednesday this week I was at a Sabaton, a swedish power metal band, concert in the Garage in Saarbrücken. The opening band was Alestorm, a pirate metal band from Scotland.
The Garage is a rather small concert hall. I would say there were about 300 people joining the show. Usually only “not so famous” bands play in such small locations. But the cool thing about this kind of artists is: Normally they love what they are doing and they have a good time on stage. That combined with being pretty close to the stage is an amazing feeling – experiencing the passion every single band member puts into his “job”.

The Problem
I organize all my Contacts and Appointments in Outlook on my company PC. I think it’s too much work maintaining 2 places of data (one for private stuff and one for work related stuff). Appointments work pretty fine, since you can mark them as private (so nobody sees your private appointments when you share a calendar) and contacts are not shared anyway. I can synchronize both to my iPad and iPhone directly with iTunes, so I’m pretty OK.