Happy New Year!

I originally meant to post a look back at 2008 (similar to what I did last year) before 2009 started but I’ve simply been too busy to finalize it so far…

So for now, all I can say is that 2008 has been an outstanding year for me and I’m really looking forward to 2009.

Happy New Year everyone! :-)

Personal productivity – Follow Ups

Over the past few years I’ve become increasingly interested in personal productivity. I can’t pinpoint it exactly but I guess it must have been at some point during my second year at university that I realized that even with very little sleep I only had so much time to get things done in-between getting up and hanging out at the bar in our student residence in the evenings…

Previously - during my last two years at schools – I started heavily relying on all sorts of lists, both on paper and my computer, to keep an overview of the things I had to do. Later I started using my mobile phone to write down all kinds of thoughts, ideas, to-do’s and other information while on the road.

I now have a pretty confusing (for outsiders) system of post-its (I count about 20 on my desk at this very moment), notes/tasks on my mobile phone (sync’ed to my computer) and e-mail tagging rules to to organize my to-do’s.

However lately I’ve been hitting a road block as I’m realizing that doing things is one thing, but following up and following through with something you’ve started doing is something entirely different.

For example for olpcnews we often get contacted by guest authors who want to submit an article. I read through the submission, write up some feedback and send it back to the author. My to-do list for the day then says read Ubuntu-for-XO submission.

Now the problem here is that I’ve only done part of what is really a multi-step task. And it’s all too easy to forget about the other steps in case I don’t get a reply from the original author which automatically triggers me to setup a new to-do task.

Dealing with this kind of scenario has become increasingly error-prone and time consuming. For some time I kept a second list on my desk with the names of people I had to follow up with on something. I also set myself reminders on my phone to follow up whether something has been done x days after I completed my initial task. Needless to say all of that only works so well and creates quite a lot of overhead…

One thing that would tremendously help me is an extension for  Thunderbird (my e-mail client of choice) which would allow me to set an automatic follow-up reminder before sending an e-mail. (Potentially even customizable depending on what kind of e-mail I send, e.g. replies to messages sent to editors [ AT] olpcnews [DOT] com come with a default 3-day reminder.)

The same kind of functionality should also be available for my mobile phone (which runs Symbian S60 3rd edition), allowing me to mark a task as done, setting up an automatic reminder and then pushing it off my regular tasks list and onto a separate follow-up list.

Unfortunately I haven’t seen any efforts heading into that direction so I guess for the moment being I’m stuck with my current system…

Blog: Personal Productivity – thoughts on follow-ups

Toying around with Windows Live Writer

Some of you might remember the issues I had when trying to install Windows Live Writer back in November 2007. Now I saw that a new version had been released so I’m giving this thing another shot.

This time ‘round installation worked smoothly and so I’ll be using Live Writer for the next couple of weeks to see how it goes.

The first impressions are certainly good: the UI is as clean as you get with Windows, the preview function is nice and quick, the tagging mechanism is quite quick too and while 37MB of memory usage seems quite a lot it’s still acceptable for this kind of tool. Plus in general I’m just excited to try out a stand-alone application instead of having to log into Blogger’s not-so-great backend…

Stay tuned for my thoughts on Live Writer and (hopefully) more blog posts in general over the coming days and weeks.

OLPC launches Give 1 Get 1 2008

Apart from finally managing to meet up with some friends today for a good game of soccer I spent most of the day glued to the screen and trying to stay on top of the developments surrounding the return of OLPC's Give 1 Get 1 program. That means reading / writings tons of e-mails, checking the olpcnews forums, following keywords on news.google.com, tuning into IRC, etc.

Anyway, since I've done quite a bit of blogging about it over on olpcnews.com I'm not going into details here. Except to say that despite what some media outlets are saying OLPC is a pretty great project making good progress, additionally I've met a large number of smart and awesome people via OLPC and that alone is highly motivating. And even if this sounds stupid ,I probably wouldn't know what to do with all my spare time if I didn't spend it on related efforts. ;-)

Most of this week will go towards OLPC as we're working on publishing lots of great content on olpcnews. Plus I'll be heading to Graz on Wednesday evening to hold a presentation for future CS teachers at the Technical University there on Thursday morning. Afterwards I'll be attending the USAB 2008 Symposium which I'm really looking forward to. I'll also have a small table there to present OLPC and especially some of the projects that OLPC Austria has been working on.

In related news I gave an interview to BBC Radio's Up All Night program last night and I was quite happy with it. (In case you're interested it's available as a stream here, the segment on OLPC starts at 01:11:40.) Last week I also had an interesting talk with Cyrus Farivar who was working on a story on Inveneo which I had visited when I was in San Francisco. You can find the excellent piece (with a short comment by yours truly) at The World/Technology - definitely my favorite tech-podcast these days!

Anyway, I badly need to grab some sleep now, I can barely keep me eyes open as I write these lines...

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

I just got back from seeing Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson and the documentary was everything I expected. And then some more.

As the title suggests it's a film about Hunter S. Thompson, the inventor of Gonzo journalism and the author of many articles and books, most famously Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas which was later turned into a movie with Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro. Having been originally fascinated by the movie I later decided to read the book and then subsequently also read Rum Island and Hell's Angels. It's hard to put it in words but there's something unique about how Thompson describes whatever story he's telling. And boy, the stories he tells! The great thing about them is that they are this perfect mixture of fact and fiction, combined by the genius that is Hunter S. Thompson. I really recommend reading at least one of his books, they're great reads and it's no surprise that I always ended up reading them while on the road myself.

With regard to the documentary it sheds light on Thompson's life, both through original footage and comments by people who accompanied him in his life-time. One of my favorite episodes, and a part of his life that I had never heard about, was his campaign for sheriff in Aspen, Colorado. The whole thing is just plain hilarious!

In the end the film also shows how Thompson got caught by his own fame and therefore turned into somewhat of a tragic figure himself. However both his suicide and funeral come off as being part of a larger plan and also the logic result of his previous life.

What remains is the realization that Hunter S. Thompson was a great and unique personality with a strong spirit and remarkable writing skills. Definitely the kind of person that the world could have more of...

Ein Augenblick Freiheit / For A Moment Freedom

I just got home from what might just turn out to be the best movie at this year's Viennale film-festival: Ein Augenblick Freiheit (For A Moment Freedom).

The movie, which had previously been praised at other film-festivals, tells three stories of people fleeing from Iran, hoping to get to Europe, but who all get stuck in Ankara. In a very touching (more than one person in the audience mentioned that the story went under their skin) yet at times also amusing manner the viewer gets an insight into the backgrounds, struggles, hopes and difficulties of the various characters.

To say that after watching Ein Augenblick Freiheit you know what people who flee their country are going through would be an overstatement. But I dare say it's as close as you'll ever get by watching a movie. In that context a comment by one of the lead actors struck me as memorable as he said that "this experience made me realize what my parents were going through when we fleed Iran in my childhood because obviously I was too young to understand it at the time".

Speaking of the actors, their performances were simply breathtaking, I can't describe it in any other way. Kudos also to the director Arash T. Riahi who obviously did an amazing job during the 7 years it took to make this movie. His previous work Exile Family Movie (which I had the pleasure of seeing during my internship in Washington, DC) is also an amazing film.

In the end I'd definitely recommend you to watch this movie, it's definitely one of the best ones I've seen this year. There's one more showing at the Viennale, on Tuesday, 28.10.2008 11 a.m. at Künstlerhaus Kino, and the general launch is set for January 09, 2009.

3 weeks without blogging...

I really can't believe that it's already been 3 weeks since I last blogged but time is really flying by quicker than ever before. Without looking at my Outlook calendar I can't even really begin to write down what I've been up to, it's simply been too crazy...

Obviously when I initially came back to Vienna after being gone for the better part of 6 months (except for those short weekend visits) I spent *a lot of* time meeting my friends around here and going out to all the bars, cafés and restaurants where I hadn't been in such a long time. We also had a reunion with many of my intern colleagues from the embassy which was a lot of fun!

What else? Ah yes, I spent 1 1/2 days down in Graz, a city in the south of Austria, meeting people from various universities and talking about the current state of OLPC, related projects they had started, plans for the future, etc. On top of that I got to see two friends which I hadn't seen in more than a year and, guess what, obviously another great night out was had by all.

The past two weeks here in Vienna have been quite busy with lots of time spent on preparing and organizing my university term which started on October 1st. Additionally I've been working on or at least discussing a couple of different plans for projects which all have somewhat of a long-term impact on the months and years ahead of me. I can't really go into details here but will rather talk about them in individual posts when and if things start moving... However I can say that I'm certainly spending quite a lot of time thinking about the future these days.

Looking at the next few weeks it looks like I'll be insanely busy, with university related matters and lots of coding taking up most of my time. Also the awesome Viennale film-festival (which I also mentioned last year) is taking place in the second half of October and compared to 2007 I almost doubled the number of movies I'm going to see to 16. I'll also have three cool concerts (Calexio/Lampchop, Mogwai and Welle Erdball) to go to in October and November. Plus I'm very much looking forward to extended visits from A. H. (of Canadian border cutie fame) and Patrick over the coming weeks.

Anyway, I'm certainly having an outstanding time and only wish that sometimes I had an extra moment (or two) to breathe inbetween all the madness;-)

I also hope to get back to a more regular post-schedule, in the mean time you can follow me on twitter/random_musings, I've also embedded my 5 most recent messages on the right-hand side of the blog...