Andreas

Got my Gym membership card today. 1hr cycling @ HR ~120.

Gave my first talk on economic theory (value, exchange, price) and the challenges of digital money – and for the first time ever, I “presented” without any slides or a computer; just me, a few notes on paper and a small crowd of 20.

Once I started talking and stuck to my script, everything went smooth and easy and I could talk freely. The talk was way too long for the time slot, but still pretty well received, I even got positive feedback. I enjoyed the experience and I hope to get another chance soon.

Oh… having a few glasses of red wine obviously helped :)

OMG, I’m so out of shape :)

Top Gym has a great motto: “Train harder. No wellness.” :)

Weights kinda sucked, but 1 hour cycling (33km) at heart rate 120 went great and was effective.

Ah, a new Gym. This time it’s something very basic; none of the usual, expensive, Wellness-type fitness studios, but an actual Gym. As in Sweat & Testosterone. Looking forward to it :)

I’m keeping this one for some time in the future, it just moved down on my priorities list

The clouds opened, angels started singing and there she was, in all her amazing beauty.

I had a lot of work to do last week and an extremely tight schedule, so I missed a couple of days, but I’d say that’s ok, no need to be perfect if you can be good, right? :) The important thing is to get back to the “routine”, and that worked. Mission accomplished.

I’m going to hire someone who’ll do it for me once a month – I just hate beancounting, and it’s a complete waste of (my) time. I rather pay for it than do all that paperwork. It’s ridiculous that you have to spend time/money to help the state steal you your own money. Thiefs.

I’ve structured my day according to my personal needs and priorities (7 habits…): get up early, workout, breakfast, work, dinner (incl. shopping & cooking), spend time with friends or just myself, go to sleep. Been doing it like this way for a week, and it’s working well for me :)

This is the second week of me exercising regularly (=daily, except Sunday). I’m following the Body for Life program – let’s see if that helps! I get up at ~06.00 a.m. and start my workout at around 7-8.00 a.m.; it feels great and it’s fun! Also doing Qi Gong once a week. Planning to do Yoga soon.

I’ve accomplished a lot today, and also every day the whole last week. I’m absolutely on track with this goal! :)

I’m doing very well with my one-achievement-per-day rule. Today’s achievements: got up early (0630 am), exercised in the morning, cooked & ate healthy food as recommended by the Body for Life programme (grilled salmon with potatoes & vegetables :) ), grab stuff from my former office.

I bought the (paper) book a few years ago, and also bought an unabridged audio book just recently from Audible (also available from Amazon).

Covey is not only a good writer, he is also a very good reader and speaker. I enjoy listening to his lectures on lazy sundays like today; it’s entertaining, relaxing and inspiring!

At least today…

I’m making progress on this one. Instead of trying to do everything at once, I now try to complete one “achievement” per day. I usually do more than this, but completing this one defined goal gives me a feeling of achievement and satisfaction. Today’s “achievement” was to pay an open bill … or was it to deliver that brochure? Hm, I don’t remember, but see.. I did both, so actually two achievements :) An while we’re at it, I also entered stuff into my database… so, even three.

That definitely is an accomplishment.

I started developing in Java when it came out in the 90’s, and headed two groups of Java software engineers for a couple of years.

There were many advantages over other languages that were available at that time, and I found Java’s class library and dynamic features to be very powerful.

But it all went downwards with the J2EE and XML config-file craze, when everyone suddenly thought that “dynamic” meant “put stuff in XML files”; so, everything was super-configurable, but the whole logic was spread in hundreds of XML- and config files; now they’ve added JavaDoc-style meta information, but that doesn’t make things easier in my opinion. JavaBeans, while a great concept, is a spec from hell.

Ruby on Rails’ “convention over configuration” rule is definitely the way to go.

If you want to become a Java Guru – I wish you good luck, but I personally don’t think it’s worth it. It surely depends on what you need, but I recommend taking a look at Ruby on Rails first.

OK, well, so I’m definitely making some progress after taking an hour at the coffee shop to read a Rails book.

One thing I ran into was that one of my columns in the database is named “Type”, which seems to be a reserved method name in Ruby, and so Rails complained. That was easy to fix by just calling set_inheritance_column.

Also, my database scheme does not follow Rails naming conventions; this makes things a bit more “difficult”, but “difficult” in Ruby terms translates to “nothing” compared to Java or PHP :)

Rails must be a phenomenal tool once you’re used to it. I still need a lot of time for reading about every single step that I need to do, but once you know what you need… man, setting up a database is a matter of minutes.

So, today’s conclusion: Like it, and will continue using it!

My interesting experience about Wikipedia was to learn how dumb and aggressive the uneducated mob is and why democracy is a failure.

I had added a few individualistic and psychological views about “Egoism” to the German edition of Wikipedia, with proper links to related topcis and everything. It took only a few hours until some guy reverted the changes and terrorized me, stating that “egoism is evil” and “bad for society”, etc, and he treated the article as if it were solely his own, and not only the article, but knowledge on the topic as well.

He was surprisingly resistant to reasoning and arguments, continuously reverting everyone else’s changes, but keeping and adding his own, effectively provoking an edit war. Needless to say that this guy had no clue about the topic, except for his personal opinion, whereas I and another person added information based on scientific articles that we quoted.

I wasn’t out to change his opinion, or delete it from the article – I just wanted to add “my” view, based on Wikipedia rules.

• take it as a hint, but don’t trust solely on it if you need to be 100% sure about a topic.
• democracy is when every clueless idiot is seen as equal, can raise his voice and legitimately terrorize you.

It may seem difficult to love yourself, but it probably isn’t. I will always remember the part of “The 7 habits of highly effective people” where the author, Steven Covey, tells a short story about a guy who approaches him after a seminar and who finds it difficult to love his wife after so many years of marriage.

What Cohey finally says to him:

“My friend, love is a verb. Love — the feeling — is a fruit of love, the verb. So love her. Serve her. Sacrifice. Listen to her. Empathize. Appreciate. Affirm her. Are you willing to do that?”

I believe that this is also the key to loving yourself. “Just do it”. Treat yourself better. Spend more time with yourself, rather than on your job. Do yourself something good. So love yourself. Serve yourself.

Sacrifice – your job.
Listen to yourself – write a journal.
Empathize – meditate.
Appreciate – get a massage.
Affirm yourself – go fishing for compliments.

Are you willing to do that?

(You can read Cohey’s story here: http://karmakars.com/2004/04/13/love-her/)