Damn, flight no longer confirmed...

I knew it. The German trade union (ver.di) strike at Lufthansa is starting to mess with my flight back across the pond. Since 8:30 a.m. this morning my flight is no longer listed as a confirmed, unaffected flight. As I'm writing this I'm on-hold at Lufthansa's call-center which is "experiencing more calls than normal" as the introductory message says, what a surprise! Let's see what happens... :-/

Update: Looks like I have an extra day here in DC as the only available flight outta here leaves on Saturday evening and goes to Munich via Brussels. Definitely not the kind of option that makes me all to happy but for the moment being it seems to be my best shot. Will call back in the afternoon to ask for an update.

With love from me to me

Gotta love refurbished Apple products!

Damn you, John!

You really got me hooked!

iPhone sales

1/3 of all iPhones were sold in New York.
1/3 in San Francisco.
1/3 elsewhere.

And Research in Motion owns the phone market in Washington, DC because literally everyone here (or at least everyone riding the Metro) has a BlackBerry.

These are the results of my extensive research into the topic over the past few weeks. Don't believe anything else, it's all lies lies lies.

Countering jet lag

I thought I'd be smart about jet lag this time 'round by trying my best to counter it. Especially since my flight schedule from DC to Munich is quite messed up: I fly out at 3:20 p.m. and arrive at 5-something a.m. By the time I get home it will be closer to 10 ~ 11 a.m. and then I still have a full day ahead of me. Talk about a long day!

So my idea was to try and get up early today, tomorrow and on Friday, therefore enabling me to at least grab two or three hours of sleep during the flight which could ease me into good ol' GMT+2. But since it's past 1 p.m. and I just got up after almost 12 hours of relaxing and badly needed sleep I'm not sure whether that's really going to happen... :-/

15 hours left in Boston

Oh my God, these past 2 1/2 days have just gone by in absolutely no-time, I can barely believe that it's Monday evening already which means that I'll have to say my good-byes here in as little as 15 hours. It's weird, the last time when I was here at 1CC at the beginning of June the time also went by very quickly but at my departure I was very much aware of the fact that I'd be back soon. Tomorrow when I head to the airport it's going to be hard to convince myself that it's really au revoir, not good-bye as I'm sure to be back here at one point or another. However it's definitely going to be a few months and realistically the earliest I'll really be able to make it back to Boston is late spring 2009.

Anyway, no time to be nostalgic now, that's what I can do on the flight tomorrow. Now I'm going to make the best of the little time that I have left and thanks to a great and very enjoyable dinner with great company at the Cambridge Brewing Company I'm well prepared for the hours ahead of me.

Something to keep in mind

Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior VP, Product Management at Google posted some interesting thoughts on the official Google blog the other day. In an entry called "Our Googley advice to students: Major in learning" Rosenberg talks about the importance of "non-routine problem-solving skills" for knowledge workers.

Here's a real-life example, a challenge a team of our engineers once faced: designing a spell-checker for the Google search engine. The routine solution would be to run queries through a dictionary. The non-routine, creative solution is to use the query corrections and refinements that other users have made in the past to offer spelling suggestions for new queries. This approach enables us to correct all the words that aren't in the dictionary, helping many more users in the process.

He goes on to mention:

It's easy to educate for the routine, and hard to educate for the novel.

Not that this is a terribly new or exciting insight but it's definitely an important one to keep in mind when you look at things like education and learning in your own life.