The top 10 meeting rules

Those are my 10 most important rules for a successful meeting:

For you to legitimately attend a meeting, you have to meet the following criteria:

* You contribute to the meeting's success.
You profit from attending the meeting.
You know goal and issues of the meeting as well as the expectations hold about you.
* You come prepared.

Give all participants the opportunity to come prepared to your meeting. Inform them of the meeting's goal and agenda and distribute the necessary material at least three days in advance.

It's essential that every participant has the opportunity to talk. You can facilitate that by delegating tasks whose results have to be presented in the meeting.

Reserve enough time to prepare well for a meeting. Develop a standpoint or, even better, a solution to every issue named on the agenda.

Start and end the meeting in time. Define a meeting schedule and a time limit for every topic. If there's not enough time, delegate the topic or schedule a followup.

Avoid distractions and interruptions. Ask the participants to switch off their mobile phones and Crackberries.

The issues should be ordered by priority and be dealt with in descending order of significance.

Avoid dicussions that sidetrack the topic and don't contribute to reaching the session goal.

Before finishing the meeting, repeat and summarize your decisions. Every participant has to know what he or she has to do afterwards.

A protocol is mandatory. The shorter and simpler, the better. Many times, a handwritten sheet with the most important decisions, responsibilities and dates is sufficient.

Addendum: Many Meetings are productivity killers If a meeting isn't urgent, it can be postponed. If it's not even important, cancel it.

Don't trust blood elves

I always knew there was something fishy about those snotty folks.

Social brainstorming

Brainstorming is an old and proven method of getting thought processes running. And now, BrainR, a project by the german information service Ideentower, brings this method to the Web 2.0. Just post a question and see how people make suggestions and tell their thoughts about it.

I just gave it a try by posting a question about virtual training seminars So please, go over and post your ideas! I'm very curious how that will work.

Twitter's got me

I finally gave in.

After discovering Twitter, I immediately came to the conclusion that this was the ultimate weapon of mass productivity destruction. Now, there's not only the phone, e-mail and IM that's disturbing focus and concentration, we also get a kind of micro-blog that informs us in realtime about the thoughts and situations of people all around the world. "What a waste of attention", I thought.

But after seeing how other people cave in because there actually are ways of using Twitter quite creatively and productively, I decided to give it a try, too. There's nothing like too much Web 2.0, is there? ;-)

So, if you're curious what I think but not deem worth the effort to blog about it, see the litte paragraph on the right of my blog's main page or directly subscribe to my Twitter profile

In the meanwhile, I will think of some creative ways of Twittering.

Questions you always wanted to ask a blogger

Robert Basic seems to have been quite annoyed by the ever-recurring questions and statements people pose about his blogging habit, so he finally wrote a blog entry (in german), covering the following:

But you mustn't go blogging this!

But what about your social contacts?

Get a Real Life.

That must consume heaps of time.

That's too complicated to me.

Who is supposed to read all this?

All bloggers do is whine and argue.

That's all too commercial, bloggers just sell themselves.

All bloggers are geeks and nerds.

What do we need that for anyway? There's always email, forums and chats.

You can't earn money that way.

That just sucks.

Why do you blog?

I sympathize with his answers, but I guess that at least the last question didn't get answered fully...

Live blogging from the German Perl Workshop

Yesterday, I arrived in Munich, land of the walking moustaches, for the German Perl Workshop that I will be attending from Wednesday to Friday.

After discovering the open WLAN at FH München where the workshop takes place, I'm able to blog live from the talks. So, head over to IT-Dojo if you're interested in my findings.

Five things you didn't know about me

Finally, the meme has reached me by Helaron, and here they are:

My first and only crime was the theft of a Sinclair ZX81 magazine that was too expensive for my allowance in 1984. I didn't have a computer yet at that time.

In my first semesters of computer science, I had been thinking about taking on catholic theology and become a priest instead.

When I'm excited, my eyes start to water.

I'm afraid of heights, but I can overcome that fear by will.

There's actually a way to make me really angry. Unfortunately, there's no place left to tell it to you. :-D

The stick goes on to my lovely Carolin, to Andy and to Kai

Germany isn't a very happy place

ScienceDaily reports that a pychologist from the University of Leicester published the first world map of happiness

The meta-analysis is based on the findings of over 100 different studies around the world, which questioned 80,000 people worldwide. For this study data has also been analysed in relation to health, wealth and access to education.

Among the top 10 of the happiest countries are many scandinavian countries. Other than the fact that the end of the list consists of african countries, this suprises me because countries like Finland are said to have a lot of depressed or even suicidal people due to the lack of sunlight over great parts of the year.

With Austria coming in on third place, there's also a german-speaking country with many happy people. But Germany itself only ranks no. 35, miles behind Ireland and many of the other european countries. So, if living in Germany makes you unhappy, there are 34 choices where you could be better off...

(via How to change the world)

Elvis Runetotem

Armin sent me this email:

You're not alone! I could touch him -- Elvis lives... standing in some little Tauren bar singing..."

Helpdesk -- suffering from idiots for centuries

It's hilarious to read what helpdesk staff has to cope with on a day to day basis; the web is full of those stories.

But it's even more hilarious to imagine how this may have looked like in the dark ages. No, not when DOS 5.0 came out -- I mean in the original dark ages:

[youtube=[www.youtube.com/watch](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRjVeRbhtRU])

(via Basic Thinking)

I'm on the Charlie!

When Adam Curry discovered the concept of sitzend pinkeln" (peeing seated, even when you're male; a habit gaining ground at least in Germany) in one of his recent Daily Sourcecode episodes, I knew I had 2 cents to give away. And, lo and behold, he started his newly created "Are posh people pigs?" segment in "episode 452&episode_id=49221 by reading my email! :-)

I guess the woman sitting in front of me on the tram must have become really frightened by my loony grin when I reached 19:15 into the podcast and was hearing my own words:

Adam, mein Freund!
DSC 540 had me in tears, listening to you speaking German about good bathroom manners!
You're right, the concept of sitting down to pee is a pretty strange concept to some men, as you can see on this illustration:

But if it's explained well, a man can get used to it after a while. I got too, especially because it's my turn to clean the bathroom including the toilet every second week.
As you will have guessed until now, I'm a folder, as is every good German.
Cheers, Jochen

And Adam, no, although german women indeed are something special, my girl isn't forcing me to clean the bathroom. It's a matter of fairness to do it in turn -- she has to clean my shit[1] every second week, too.

fn1. Not meant literally, we actually use the toilet brush, other than the (posh?) people your callers use to tell of.

Unix baby

You know your baby child is a born Unix hacker when it starts writing termcap entries manually

Angerwhale: blog software with digital signatures

Angerwhale" is the name of a new blog software written in Perl, and its first official version "Angerwhale 0.02 was released%20Released.pod to CPAN~jrockway/Angerwhale-0.02/lib/Angerwhale.pm today.

Features include guaranteed valid XHTML 1.1 output, social tagging, categories, syntax highlighting, RSS and YAML feeds for every article, comment, tag, and category, nested comments, intelligent caching of everything, space-conserving mini-posts, search-engine (and human!) friendly archiving, a flashy default theme, and lots of other cool stuff.

The software is based on the Catalyst Web Framework and uses the file system as storage backend instead of a database like MySQL. Another interesting feature is that Angerwhale uses cryptography to map articles and comments to users:

[Angerwhale] determines authorship based on the post's PGP digital signature. These posts can be in a variety of formats (text, wiki, HTML, POD), and new formats can be added dynamically at runtime. Posting comments is also supported, and again, authorship is determined by checking the digital signature.

Finally, there's a contender for all the (great nonetheless) blog software written in PHP!

World of Whorecraft

Okay, now I'd like to play on the Alliance's side. :-)

The blood elves may be as pretty as the night elves, but their attitude is much worse. You probably wouldn't live to tell about having seen one naked.

Farewell, floppy disk!

German news service Tagesschau sings the swan song,,OID6385352_REF1,00.html about a storage medium I grew up with: the floppy disk. The article describes how the floppy gradually got replaced by ZIP disks, CD ROMs, DVDs and USB sticks. Today, computer manufacturers don't bother with installing a floppy drive any more.

But the author not only knows about the reasons of the floppy vanishing but also about its emotional consequences:

It's time to finally say good bye to the floppy disk. But whoever saw the moist eyes of PC nostalgics when talking about the 5 1/4 inch disk, the bigger, somewhat floppier predecessor of the smaller quadratic disks, knows: that won't be easy for some of the hardcore hackers.

Oh yes, it's hard. Here's a picture of my first 5,25" floppy disk:

It came empty with my Commodore C128, so it's 20 years old now. The label says "128: The First" and was written with a typewriter.

Today, it's hanging on the wall at my desk at home. Above a Mac Mini that will never know what a floppy disk is. Or was.

Really, it's not a cow!

Although I keep trying to explain the issue to them, my colleagues seem to have a really hard time to understand that a Tauren druid is in so many ways different from a cow.

And judging from the "enhancements" I got as a present last week, it's even more difficult for them to distinguish between me and my World of Warcraft character than it is for me.

Error: Too many flies

No, I didn’t mean files”. It’s flies. Tiny, pesky flies (they’re called “sciaridae). And our plant pots at home are infested with them.

When the first ones appeared in our flat a while ago, Carolin prohibited me from swatting them; she found them cute and called them her little friends”. Well, when she returned from a weekend at her parents yesterday, she had to sweep away “more than a hundred fly corpses, including the ones she had instantly swatted herself. She had been warned.

Choose your friends wisely, or as Seneca said:

Ponder for a long time whether you shall admit a given person to your friendship; but when you have decided to admit him, welcome him with all your heart and soul.

Okay, I'm not a fanboy after all

First, I don't think the iPhone is the best thing since sliced bread. Especially when it'll be closed for third party developers. That would be a really stupid move for Apple. At the moment, I'd rather add the Linux-based Nokia N800 internet tablet to my E61 if I wanted a multimedia and internet tablet with phone and internet connectivity. (And of course I do.)

And second, I'm still far from writing love songs to a computer.

[youtube=[www.youtube.com/watch](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsqi2QHXaFI])

A storm rages over Germany

And not only does it damage roofs and cars, but als wblog. Evn coplte sent

What the hell is Twitter good for?

The one little thing that makes the difference

In his S60 blog, Tommi explains why Google Reader rocks

Google Reader and its mobile version rock. I find myself using it more than any other functionality on my Nokia N73. And I love the fact that I can access the same feeds via work computer, via home computer, and via mobile. In most other RSS readers, the items are stuck in that particular client.

Having access to your single source of feeds everywhere really is great. There seem to be many great newsreaders like NetNewsWire, but they can't provide me with news when I'm on the train or on the toilet.

It's obvious that Tommi doesn't subscribe to high volume feeds like Engadget or one from a web forum, though. Otherwise, he would know that it's a giant PITA to weed through dozens of product announcements or forum entry headlines on your mobile.

That's why I still stick to Bloglines I can choose whether a feed shows up in its mobile version. It's a small simple checkbox in the feed settings, but it makes all the difference why in my eyes Google Reader Mobile doesn't rock yet.

Apple's swiss army phone

Well, it seems that I was wrong. The iPhone actually is worth the hype. It's not just a smart phone. It's a genius phone. It's...

...everything you need it to be:

[youtube=[www.youtube.com/watch](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xXNoB3t8vM])

Well, almost.

Using UMTS from Ubuntu Linux

Everytime I go on my daily commute, I see people with blinking UMTS/3G cards in their laptops. Because I enjoy using my commute time to reduce my to-do lists, but on the other hand many of my tasks require internet access, I've been rather envious on their connectivity. When I had SUSE 10.0 on my laptop, I couldn't get it to work with my Nokia E61, so I started phantasizing about how a MacBook would improve my mobile productivity.

Having installed Kubuntu 6.06 now, I thought I'd give it another try last week. Et voila: after about half an hour of configuration, the 3G arrows on my smartphone started blinking! (Now guess where I wrote today's first blog entries.)

I'm happy. (Even if there's no real reason to get a MacBook any more.) And to make others happy, too, I updated the most-visited page on my website, my BlueTooth on Linux HOWTO I kept it in german because there's not as much documentation in my native language than there is in English.

Another year of sequels

2007 will again be full of new movies. Well, sequels of new movies at least.

There's Spiderman 3, Pirates Of The Caribbean 3, Shrek 3 and many others. If you want a roundup, take a look at Andy's summary of 2007's sequels (german).

Well, I like great sequels better than crappy new flicks, but come on movie makers, there's that thing called creativity, you know?

My new Mac blog

I've already published some articles about using the Mac on this blog, and I'd like to continue that. The Mac's fun, and I'd like to spread that fun.

But reading Robert Basic's comment that there aren't any blogs for mac newbies, I decided to start one myself.

So I proudly present my new Mac blog in german language: Mein-Neuer-Mac-Blog!

Come on over and take a look!