Talk about wasting time

Damn, I hate it when I waste time. Especially when I waste time I really should have spent doing something else as I'm running out of time anyway.

Why this rant? Well, I just spent the past 4 hours preparing (or rather trying to prepare) my OLPC XO for FUDCon Brno 2008 where I'm heading tomorrow to meet up some of the OLPC / SugarLabs folks. As part of the ongoing efforts of closer collaborations between the OLPC / Sugar and Fedora community I wanted to setup an SD card with Fedora 9 as explained by the fabolous dsd from OLPC. Additionally I wanted to prepare another SD card with Xubuntu to showcase that other, non-Fedora operating systems, can also run well on the XO.

Now, two evenings into this project I'm literally close to tears. I've made every possible mistake and run into every imaginable issue along the way and have gotten nowhere. Network issues, corrupted downloads, not realizing that my card-readers aren't SDHC compatible,... you name it, I've seen it all.

So I've finally decided to let it go and spend the rest of the evening on something useful (e.g. finishing my possible presentation at FUDCon on Saturday) before grabbing some badly needed sleep. Tomorrow shall be a better day, and if it ain't then at least I'll be able to distract myself from my sorrows with good Czech beer, Czech food and great company! :-)

Update:

Look Ma, even my XO hates me!

Morning disappointments

There's few things in life which are as disappointing as grabbing breakfast on the way to work only to to arrive there and find out that things aren't quite as you ordered them. Where are my pickles? And the mayonnaise is missing too? Oh come on, and the bread is also a different kind then what I ordered? Damn.

Talk about a bad start into a day!

Officially sick

So turns out that the cold is really kicking my ass and after a visit to my doctor I'm now officially sick for the rest of the week. Having said that I do hope to be able to get back to work on Thursday or Friday at the latest.

While sitting in the doctor's waiting room today I thought about two things:

(a) I can't remember the last time that I was really sick enough to stay in bed all day long. I'm not talking about just being tired or exhausted for a day but really feeling ill... It's certainly been a while and I have to say I didn't miss it.

(b) Doctor's waiting rooms really haven't changed a bit in the past 10 or 15 years. Already as a child a couple of things struck me being characteristic of these rooms. It all starts with the very moment you open the door to one because regardless of which doctor you go to it's always the same mixture of mothers with their children, elderly people and maybe 10% "regular folks". The rooms also all look the same. There's the tiny table covered with remains of children's toys surrounded by the tiny chairs. Next you have at least two small tables covered with magazines to entertain you while you wait. And of course all of these magazines have to be seriously outdated and exactly the kind of magazines you never even glance at in the book store. I'm not expecting to find Wired or FHM in there but are all patients seriously only interested in the worst weekly magazines that Austria has to offer? But in the end you always dig into the magazines anyway because the only alternative would be to listen to aforementioned mothers or elderly people exchange the latest health tips or town gossip. Of course you could also look at all the fascinating health information covering the walls. Or, if you're feeling really masochistic, you could decide to watch the enormous clock on the wall (another standard feature of every waiting room) while you waste your minutes away. Because that's another thing I don't understand, why on earth isn't it possible to have an appointment and actually see the doc on time (+/- 15 minutes of course)? In order to get a slip of paper confirming that I'm sick (which I need for work) I spoke to the doc for 3 minutes but spent 85 minutes in the waiting room.

Anyway, 'nuff ranted already, now I'm back and home and waiting for my delicious vegetable soup to be done cooking in 25min or so, then I'll prepare myself some tea and spend the rest of the evening reading before I fall asleep.

Cold: 1 Christoph: 0

So turns out the reason why I slept so much over the weekend wasn't just to relax but mainly because my body was going for a narrow escape from a cold. Looking at the score board above you can see who won...

I didn't feel too well on Saturday evening and worse on Sunday morning. Not bad enough to cancel my coffee-meeting but I did skip the Michael Clayton show. Today when getting up I felt quite crappy but since that's my default mood every morning I didn't really realize how exhausted I was until I got to work. After half-a-day's work (which was surprinsingly productive I might add) I decided to call it a day since I was getting worse by the minute.

Now, after an afternoon spent sleeping, I don't feel any better, actually a tad worse. So now I'm off to watch a movie or, God forbid, some actual TV before I head back to bed... Ah, and yes, the title of today's to-do post-it will have to be renamed from Monday to Tuesday.

Surgeon General's Warning

Shopping at your local supermarket makes you smile like an idiot!

(from a flyer of a large supermarket chain here in Austria)

6 hours stuck in JFK. Thanks to Delta Air Lines.

And the rant continues...

As predicted yesterday I missed my connection from JFK to Boston. When I arrived here this morning after a really crappy flight I learned that all morning flights to Boston were booked out so I've only got a confirmed seat for 12:55 p.m. - 6 hours after I was originally supposed to leave JFK!

Of course I got a stand-by ticket for the flight at 8:25 a.m., but that one was full. Now I'm on another stand-by ticket for 9:55 a.m. but I'd say my chances are slimmer than slim. Not even sure whether I should bother with the subsequent stand-bys, I might as well just grab two hours of sleep and be done with it.

Anyway, since one is supposed to take away something from each experience here are my lessons learned for the future:

• Don't fly Delta Air Lines. Never.
• Book non-stop flights even if it costs a little more. Always.
• Skip the plane and take the train. Whenever possible.

By the way, thanks to the awesome T-Mobile hotspot here it has only taken me about 20 minutes and 8 tries to get connected. Yeah!

P.S. Is 9:30 a.m. (EST) too early to drink beer? I mean, it's a Saturday after all and it's almost 4 p.m. in Austria, right?

Thank you Delta Air Lines

Remember, there used to be a time when flying was an efficient and convenient way to get from point A to point B. Well, not anymore. These days flying is just a pain in the rear.

Example: At this moment I'm stuck here at SFO with more than an hour delay already. Plus when I arrived at the airport I learned that my flight from New York to Boston (nope, no direct flight for me tonight) was overbooked. Well, now that I'm very likely going to miss it that doesn't seem to be an issue anymore.

The overall result is going to be that I won't be in Boston by 8:30 a.m. tomorrow, my layover at JFK isn't going to be a convenient 45 minutes and I will be very irritated and exhausted by the time I finally get to my destination. Ahhhh, the beauty of traveling. Thank you Delta Air Lines!

As least my friend Samuel (Adams) is here with me during these dark and difficult hours...

By the way, in case you're wondering: No there's no free WiFi here at SFO, I got a 24h T-Mobile pass for $9.99. I figure if I'll be stuck here for some time and also at JFK for an hour or two I might as well treat myself with some connectivity.

What a day...

Read my lips: Transcribing sucks!

In my case it's a one hour telephone-interview that I had yesterday. While the preparations and the interview itself were very interesting, transcribing the bloody thing to use it as a basis for an article I'm writing is quite the opposite. In fact it's a royal pain in the rear.

But hey, it's only 6 p.m. and I've been in the office for a mere 9 hours. No reason to complain and plenty of time left today to work on the damn thing...

:-(

Missing those nights...

Now here's something that sucks. It's past 11 p.m., I just finished dinner and I'm slowly settling in what could be a productive night. Except that it won't be because if I don't want to be a complete train-wreck when I get up at around 7 a.m. I should probably head to bed in about 2 hours.

Normally the hours roughly between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. tend to be my most productive ones. Plus that's also what I generally consider me time. For others me time might consist of doing sports, listening to music, doing something artsy, cooking, gardening, whatever. However for me it's the time of the day when I can really focus on the things I'm working on without too many external distractions. This is when it's easiest for me to hit a flow:

"Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity."

A large proportion of the articles and code that I have written in the past few years were produced during such a flow state which more often than not makes me go to bed at dawn. With my university lectures hardly ever starting before noon I can easily work until 4 or 5 a.m., still get enough sleep (4 1/2 ~ 6 hours) and get lots of stuff done.

My current situation forces me to get out of bed at 7 a.m. each day which cuts down my nightly flow-hours to often less than 3 hours. And that's simply not enough time to even come close to getting all the things on my many to-do lists done. Especially with all the increased activity via OLPC lately I often barely manage to answer all the e-mails I'm getting before having to call it a day.

Some (I know who you are!) might suggest adapting my rythm accordingly but that doesn't work. No matter how much I sleep, I'm pretty damn useless in the morning. Due to the current circumstances I've actually attempted to adjust a bit by getting up earlier than I'd really have to. That gives me time to quickly browse through my e-mails and reply to the 2 or 3 most important ones. But beyond that I can't get anything done (right) and so I'm actually reluctant to hit 'send' in the morning. More often than not I'm not thinking clearly at 7.30 a.m. so I've gotten into the habit of drafting e-mails but not actually sending them before 9 a.m. or so.

Anyway, before I spend more time ranting about the whole issue I better get this post out the door and focus on the 3 ~ 4 things I still want to get done today. Needless to say I'm very much looking forward to July when I'm done with my internship and will again be able to cherish all those nights that I'm missing these... nights.

Note to self

Always bring the sheet with the PUK for your mobile phone when you're spending significant time in another country. You might wake up one morning, be tired and still a little hungover and mistype your PIN 3 times. That sucks.

When was the last time that Yahoo did something that mattered

Earlier this week I mocked Flickr Video as I simply don't buy the idea of anyone needing yet another video-sharing platform. And apparently I'm not the only one because there are already two prominent Flickr groups: one called "We Say NO to Videos on Flickr" (26.000+ members) and "NO VIDEO ON FLICKR!!!" (11.000+ members).

I had also mentioned that it's definitely yet another sign of Yahoo trying to catch up with Google (and thereby increasing the price that Microsoft or whoever is going to pay for the inevitable take-over). Continuing this line of thought I started asking myself whether I had used any Yahoo services apart from Flickr in the recent past. The answer is no. So I took it a step further and looked back at 2006-2007 and the interesting things that happened there when it comes to ICT. Again, Yahoo didn't come up except for me signing up for a Flickr Pro account last year.

What am I trying to say? Frankly speaking I'm not quite sure. However I do have to admit that Yahoo these days reminds me of a dark version of Schrödinger's Cat. Nobody is quite sure what's inside the box but the longer we wait to look inside the bigger the chance that the cat has died from natural causes.

Thoughts on Flickr Video

In case you've missed it:

If you’re a pro member, you can now share videos up to 90 glorious seconds in your photostream. ["Video on Flickr"]

I'm going to play devil's advocate here and ask:

Who needs Flickr Video? [me, now]

Or less provocative:

Who needs Flickr Video when there's blip.tv, revver.com, YouTube and a million other video-sharing websites? [me, a minute later]

Just like there'll always only be one Digg with and one Slashdot with a million also-rans following them I don't believe that the world really needs another video-sharing platform. Really, what incentive is there for posting a video-clip on Flickr Video instead of any of the other websites that I've mentioned above? Maybe because the 90 second limit is so alluring as someone suggested in a comment:

...the 90 seconds is akin to the Twitter 140 character limit (perhaps). Look at it as a chance to be concise and powerful.

Yeah, right...

Flickr Video is Yahoo's attempt to catch up with Google's YouTube by hitchhiking on the popularity of the photo-sharing website and its strong community.

In my opinion this will go down in history as:

Too little, too late. [me, 3 minutes later]

My Laptop: (Almost) Back from the Dead

It's been quite a ride these last 36 hours as I've been having some serious issues with my laptop which prevented me from getting any real work done. All the trouble started on the weekend during a LAN party with some friends. I had the very smart idea of deleting my Ubuntu partition in order to get some badly needed free disc-space for Unreal Tournament 2004 (our game of choice during most LAN sessions). Of course I didn't consider the fact that this partition also contained my GRUB boot-manager. Luckily I didn't reboot the machine on Saturday but when I did just that on Sunday I was greeted with a "grub error 22"...

Needless to say I spent the next 3 hours trying to recover from that stupid error. That process was significantly harder without a Windows XP SP2 disc since that would have allowed me to use the recovery console to get back to a working MBR. Of course once I downloaded the disc via my university I realized that I can't remember the administrator password which I selected 3 1/2 years ago when I originally set up my laptop. Trying other workarounds such as using Super Grub didn't work due a variety of issues. So in the end I did what I should have done all along: I simply installed an Ubuntu server edition which we had lying around to the former linux-swap partition and that also restored GRUB to a working condition.

Several UT04 death-matches and clone-wars later I shut down the machine only to look at an odd "your pagefile is corrupted" error-message for a second before it went into hibernation. Later that evening I wanted to watch a movie with my sister and right when I had enabled the tv-out the whole screen went black. The next time I booted my machine I looked at a "boot.ini couldn't be found" message.

Turns out I had to look at the message over and over again while I tried to fix my laptop over the next 24 hours. Of course again things didn't go as smoothly as they could because I was still without administrator password to access the recovery console. And oddly enough Windows XP has somehow gotten rid of GRUB again so I couldn't just boot into the Ubuntu server edition, install ntfs-3g and repair things that way. Once I did manage to boot Ubuntu I ended up starring at a "your CPU is too old for this kernel" message.

Things continued in that manner with a Live-CD that's able to set the Windows XP administrator password to blank not working due to a dirty NTFS file-system. It also took me 15 attempts to burn a working copy of the Ubuntu 7.10 Live-CD as the brand new CD-RW I used apparently had some bad sectors. Needless to say I didn't have a spare CD-R(W) around. After many hours wasted I finally managed to copy a working boot.ini to my C:\ partition but even though the "boot.ini couldn't be found"-message went away I was still looking at a black screen every time I attempted to boot into Windows. Then somehow I decided to boot via the Windows XP SP2 disc and I was greeted with the option of repairing an existing installation (that option previously hadn't shown up, due to the missing boot.ini I assume). That way I was finally able to get things up and running again. Of course it was 3:30 a.m. by that time and I had spent most of my day trying to revive my laptop...

Anyway, right now it's running through some extensive chkdsk tests, afterwards I'll do some badly needed defragmentation and then it should be good to go. So for the moment being I'm using my sister's Sony VGN-N11S that I choose for her last summer and I have to say it's a pretty good machine, especially the keyboard is really great to type with. The one thing that's a bit annoying is the glossy X-black LCD because sitting out here in the winter-garden it acts as somewhat of a mirror. I'd rather look at the text that I'm writing than see my reflection on the screen.

I'll finish my rant with a list of some lessons learned from this experience:

• never leave the house without a Windows XP SP2 disc
• never leave the house without a (working) Ubuntu Live-CD
• don't delete the partition that contains your boot-manager
  
• don't forget you WinXP administrator password (!)

Off to get some coffee and then I'll get some work done...

Unpacking Videos

If you're into technology as much as I am I'm sure that you've stumbled across at least one "unpacking" video in the past months. In case you haven't had the pleasure this is the appropiate moment to ask "what is an unpacking video?"

Well, it's basically a video of someone unpacking one thing or another, most of the times some hip new techno-gadget. I have to admit that I don't know exactly when or how that whole thing started but it has certainly spread in the past months and these days there aren't too many tech-sites that haven't done an unpacking video.

In case you're interested in watching such a video I'd suggest you head over to YouTube and simply start looking for "unpacking" but if you're lazy you can also click this link and watch a video of some guy unpacking his iPhone.

If you've clicked that link above and actually watched the video you've just wasted 5 minutes of you life. Why? Because you could have gathered the same information from looking at Apple's website and the iPhone's "what's in the box" page:

• iPhone
• Stereo Headset
• Dock
• USB Power Adapter
• Dock Connector to USB Cable
• Documentation
• Cleaning/Polishing cloth

There are even fancy photos of everything there so you can even get a good look and what the design of the box looks like! (In case that's your cup of tea.)

What I'm trying to say here is that at least from my point of view an unpacking video is a real waste of time. This is a case were using video as a medium doesn't really have any advantages over a text and some photos. So in my book looking at that list and the corresponding photos above gives you the same information plus it only takes 60 seconds instead of spending 5 minutes listening to someone's (mostly useless) comments. Some might argue that watching an actual human being tell you something fulfills an emotional need but I don't really see that...

Moreover it seems to me that making such a video is also a waste of time. Again here it really depends on how you do it because obviously some random dude turning on his camera and filming himself unpack something for YouTube won't take that long. But if you're running a tech-website you need to have some kind of narrative, add an intro and title, render it, upload it to various video-platforms, tag it and publish it somewhere. I'd say that the whole process takes about 30 to 60 minutes. Compare that to taking a couple of photos, writing the necessary text and publishing that (that certainly doesn't take longer than 10 minutes) and you're looking at a real waste of time.

Why do I know that? Because earlier this week I spent more than an hour filming, editing and polishing an unpacking video starring the Zonbu for a review over on EPIACENTER... Due to the fact that I don't have the intro here on my machine (and I couldn't find it on our server) I've asked Sascha to finish the video and it will soon be available via EPIACENTER, YouTube and host of other video-websites. Then you'll also get a chance to see yours truly wasting everyone's time with an unpacking video...