I have been playing around with google wave for a few months now. I was rather impressed when I first saw the “loooong video” presenting google wave to the public. I tried to get my hands on an invitation and played around with it for a while. I have to say it constitutes as an amazing piece of technology. The possibilities seem endless and using google wave to work on some kind of document seems really tempting. However using wave for code at work or business documents does not seem to be compatible with my contract especially considering the included non-disclosure agreement.

The second approach was to motivate my colleagues to try wave and use it for private stuff such as the occasional after work gathering or the recent climbing excursion. Again, wave offered great features. I embedded a map displaying the route from the company to the location and some basic information about the climbing center including a link to the homepage. This is nothing fancy and mails would have done the same job. By the time we got the third of the 4 people participating in at our trip to join google wave, we had long sat down together in the office, discussed a date and driving arrangements and fixed everything else. As far as the beautifully embedded google map goes, I was asked for directions to the climbing center on the afternoon of our trip and I think the climbing centers homepage was used to get the directions at the last minute and on second thought I would have done the exact same thing.

If organizing free time is not among the things I’m going to use wave for. What is left? I was told of a few public waves discussing all sort of thing. In theory I just have to find and join them. I tried and failed. However I found the wave analogy quite suitable. I got the feeling I was sorting through all the random noises produced around the world in a way that was not meant to handle this usecase. I think the analogy would be analyzing static.

So for me I have to say google wave is an incredible piece of technology but I can’t seem to find usecases that are not handled in a better way by different tools.

To give a small example: We all attribute a certain value to 5 dollars. We all know what we can do with 5 dollars if we save them on a purchase and we have an estimate how long it takes us to earn 5 dollars. Those things are constant which means that if we think rationally it does not matter whether we save 5 dollars on one purchase or another because this changes neither the benefit gained nor the work saved to earn them once more. One way or another we will have 5 dollars in our wallet. Nevertheless if asked if we would drive 10 minutes to save 5 dollars on a 8 dollar meal we would of course take the time and attempt to save the money. However if asked to drive 10 minutes to save 5 dollars on a 250 dollar suit we probably wouldn’t bother. This is totaly irrational because in both cases we gain 5 dollars for an investment of 10 minutes of our life. Even more surprising is that if confronted with this fact we would all agree that although it’s both about the same 5 dollars, saving them on an eight dollar meal is a very good deal definitely worth the effort.

This is only one of the situations that happen to all of us (or at least me) all the time. I think this book can have the very positive effect to tell us about the irrational nature of our decisions and by literally forcing us to review them help to change our decision making processes. This especially applies to the chapters discussing “The cost of Free” and “The High price of ownership” which at least taught me a valuable lesson. Definitely a book I can recommend although there might be some undesired side effects like temporary destroying the effectiveness of placebos you use, but that is a risk definitely worth taking.

Now I can enjoy a few new T-Shirts, I in particular like the one debating Schroedinger’s Cat, some fancy gadgets, a spork and of course a RFID blocking wallet. However there are a few minor cultural and technical problems. For the technical part, I’m not sure where to put the nice power adapter for one of the gadgets that is  expecting a 120V line but as it’s a standard adapter I hope to find something around here matching the output. The cultural part is a little more difficult. I completely forgot that American wallets don’t usually have a place for coins because it’s customary to keep change in your pockets instead of your wallet. I on the other hand hate loose coins in my pocket, but I’ll give it a try. The lack of a suitable place for coins is compensated by quite a few places meant for credit cards of which an average German person owns maybe two or three (debit cards included) but nowhere near ten. Those minor difficulties aside I am really enjoying the stuff that was in that box and already think of starting a new wishlist.

So much to buy ….

• the possibility to play podcasts in a reasonable size and resolution
• a reasonable amount of memory (to store podcasts and music)
• an internal GPS unit
• a keyboard (virtual or in hardware)
• the possibility to run custom programs (Java or native)
• a reasonable pricing
• the usual stuff expect of any mobile phone (address book, organiser, alarm clock, …)

I went for the LG KM900 because it fits this specs (well at least the manual says it does) and its price seemed a lot more reasonable than that of the iphone. So far so good, I bought it at the e-plus online store and had it shipped without any trouble whatsoever.

However I came to regret my descision after testing it for the first few days. I own the phone for about two months now and have worked out a considerable list of bugs that continue to thwart my initial enthusiasm for the device. Bugs include, but are not limited to:

1. Filesystem errors
   This is a good one because I have not seen this is quite some time. There are bugs in there that remind me of the days of the very first implementations of underdocumented MS filesystems in the Linux kernel. The effect vary from load screen that can be enjoyed (but not aborted) for 5 or more minutes, files or folders that can neither be accessed nor deleted to complete crashes of the operating system forcing you to remove the battery.
2. Poor GPS reception
   The device pretends to feature both GPS and A-GPS however I have not seen a position fix using pure GPS yet. This does not even seem possible during a clear night while standing in the middle of a large meadow. A-GPS on the other hand is only reliable if there is good mobile reception and if there is actual traffic on the line.
   Keeping this traffic up is not only stressful for the battery but the A-GPS module fails to generate traffic itself although continously queried for updated position fixes which effectively shuts down the positioning service as soon as you stop using the internet.
3. Poor battery run-time
   The battery run-time when surfing, using the GPS or doing anything even remotely challenging like listening to music is about 3-4 hours. This is extremely frustrating especially because the battery display consists of three equally bars that do not represent equal or even similar amounts of battery time. After about 6 hours of standby the fist bar disappears, then the second bar stays on for quite some time and the third one has 2-3 hours of standby but (and that’s the most annoying part) about 2-3 minutes if there is activity. This gives you phenomenal 3 minute warning before the device turns off automatically for lack of power.
4. Extremely picky video decoder
   Managing to encode podcasts to be playable on the device proves extremely difficult. The playback tends to crash halfway through the cast. I have not found a reliable way to encode podcasts using open source software which renders the video feature practically useless to me.
5. Focus on visual design instead of functionality
   The GUI is mostly designed to look pretty but not really tested for functionality. There are basic functions missing but useless shiny features can be found everywhere. For example the audio player is missing a “pause” function (although labeled with the standard pause label it effectively acts like a “stop” button), however there is a very nice and configurable visualiser (visualising music on the fly on a device with limited processing capabilities and battery run-time seems to be an extremely bad idea to me, but I’m sure the resources are well spent).

To sum this up this mobile phone (in my humble opinion) is poorly designed, poorly tested and should not be out on the market at this point. I’ve marked the date in the calendar when I can get rid of it and have something that actually lives up to it’s own specifications.

The system is a little strange. Mostly because the characters are a strange cross between a postman and a inquisitor in the times of the wild west. More specifically you are a young man (or woman because we are rather modern in this one regard) who was chosen to leave his village and graduate as dog in the capital. After a 6 week crash course you get a horse, a ton of letters, a route, a copy of the book of life and some nice companions who have as much clue about how to lead grown men and women back on the right way as you yourself, but who have faith — more or less — that they will manage.

It’s really fun to play in this setting however it is quite hard to uphold the high morale standards of the community when faced with a poor woman who has a very bad conscience because she actually thinks of leaving her extremely bad behaving husband who she was forced to marry in the first place. That aside definitely something worth trying out, too bad summer is almost over.

The site offering the most TV series (in Germany) seems to be lovefilm. I went for a two week trial of the one DVD flatrate and so far it’s extremely comforable. However there is a little downside. The round trip time for DVDs seems to be at least 4 days because the shipping center is somewhere in the far north of Germany. This is a little more than I expected especially given that they don’t ship on weekends which more or less makes it one DVD per week. This is actually fine for feature movies but too slow if it comes to TV series and definitely not what I had in mind when I read “flatrate”.

To be fair the German post service issued a press release stating that letters might take a little longer durring summer holidays, but given the location of the shipping center I don’t think it’s going to get much faster, so I’ll just have to see. Maybe taking the 2 DVDs flatrate option is a viable way to go because then I can at least have one here at all times.

Round trip time aside this is a great service and I will definitely keep using it.

However there was a kind of training that was only available to premium members – or was it a service module, I don’t remember – but I wanted to give it a try without spending extra money back then and now there was my chance. They have two bodytec units and people training at the units kept telling tall stories about how intense the training is and how bad their sore muscles hurt afterwards, so I talked them into giving me a test session with one of those.

Bodytec is a new and somewhat disputed form of electric training. You put on a vest and a few bands around arms and legs that deliver electrical impulses to those body parts making your muscles contract. While this device shocks you gently, you get into various positions where you use the muscles to be trained. Nothing is for free, not even fancy electric training. The incredible thing is after five minutes you are sweating like you have just been in a treadmill for 50 minutes. This only being a test session we did all the positions 4-8 times and finished after 15 minutes of semi-intense training.

I have to say it felt pretty good and a real training session would sure be nice someday, however I really doubt if it’s worth the extra spending for the supervised training (we are playing with electricity after all). As a side note I liked the feedback of being able to take on more weight after a few weeks of training. The only feedback from this machine is your own exhaustion which is simply not that satisfying.

Feet of Clay (Front Cover)

On Sunday I finished another book. “Feet of Clay” a discworld novel by Terry Pratchett. I must say I really like the discworld novels, not only because I’m a fan of fantasy in general, but because Pratchett puts a lot of work into his characters and the description of the physics, the magic and the politics of the discworld itself. In addition to that he writes with an almost infinite amount of humor, mostly of the dark kind.

In this particular novel you will get the invention of modern police work in the biggest city of the discworld . The city watch starts following clues (instead of solving rimes in the traditional way using fists and swords). At the same time there is a theological dispute about the nature of golems and the social problem of integrating dwarfs, goblins and undead people into the already chaotic society of Ankh-Morpork.

Definitely fun to read! If you want to give it a try consider reading it in English because some of the gags are rather hard to translate if one can translate them at all.

If you are in town and like icecream, you definitely have to try this. I’d recommend strawberry, but haven’t found anything that did not amaze me yet, so take your pick.

She tells her story in a way that definitely will make you listen and think about what she has to say, but then again you are left to wonder whether it is just an unusually frank description of the things happening or somewhat exaggerated for the sake of story telling. Eventually I decided that it does not matter all that much because even if you take to be exaggerated it still makes a valid point that can not be ignored. The point being valid and noteworthy I write about it now and hope you will invest the time to take a look at the video, take it  with the appropriate grain of salt and give it some consideration.

Then I realized that the contract for my mobile was due to expire and that there are quite a few mobiles that come with an inbuilt GPS unit. So I decided to wait and last week I finally got my new mobile and have been on a few geocaching trips since. Unfortunately we were not that lucky thus far, mostly because we started out too late and a GPS unit does not help you that much when you’re in a dark forest during the night.

Anyway, we found a few caches and I’m definitely going to geocache a few more times. On one of the weekends to come we want to try the “CSI Stuttgart – Murder in the red light district“-cache recommended by Renate which is a multi cache involving a fictional murder case. The stages of the cache mark the clues found on the crime scene and the final cache promises to reveal the murderer. Sounds fascinating don’t you think?

It’s different with twitter. It’s easy to stop for a moment and write 160 characters tops and while you’re at it check your timeline and read about the things your friends or people you are interested in do. Granted most of it is trivial but as explained in the twitter intro video most of our life takes place in the little things and knowing what our friends do or have on their minds creates the feeling of sharing their lives.

My consequence is that I will be using twitter for a while and see what happens. But I’ll not tell everyone how much milk I’m going to buy when I get to the supermarket in about five minutes because there are things that even the people most interested in sharing my life will not care about. So I guess the challenge is to find the right degree of trivial.

So follow my experiment on twitter.

• The movie was nice and funny but it was the third of a series and guess what, the first two were much more fun.
• 3D is nice but if your eyes are able to sort out the frames whenever there is fast motion on the screen, you wish you had a good old fashioned 2D movie featuring sharp pictures no matter how fast the characters move.

So nice popcorn movie, but that’s it.

1. There is a children birthday party and
2. there is a party with his family.

So this weekend we first met on Saturday afternoon, with a bunch of ten year olds. There are two sides to this event. First I really love the two brothers and they usually invite a bunch of nice kids that are funny, rather enthusiastic and kind of chaotic but on the flip side they both have difficulties deciding who they actually want to invite and (surprise surprise!) end up inviting 20 friends.

No matter how much you love kids. 20 kids at there best can be a little bit of a challenge if you are adults trying to coordinate a program serving cake and settling the occasional dispute, so I was kind of relieved when there where only 14 kids. As a side note I remember Stefan talking about some strange rule saying that there should be only as many children as there are years of age to celebrate but normally he manages to enforce that there are not more than twice as many invitations of those years. (Did I mention Dominik is now ten years old.)

This year we took them to the very small street fair in Botnang, ate some cake and took them bowling or rather the German variant of bowling which was a lot of fun although bowling added a little to noise already present.

On Sunday there were aunts and uncles which renewed there respective political discussions which had not changed that much since the last family gathering and are not that much disputed but rather agreed upon. They discussed soccer and the infamous model train topic I really can’t get to like or even appreciate. However I had the chance to play with the two boys and thus had a lot of fun and the possibility to flee the political conversation (I happen not to agree with a lot of the opinions brought forth) without having to anger anybody or having to struggle to keep my mouth shut which made me luckier than the boys parents. All in all another very nice day.

My initial impression was not that far off, in fact it was more like two and a half months. But contrary to my prior experiences involving literature this heavy, this novel not only managed to keep me interested but got me reading while walking from the subway station to my flat which is way to go knowing my reading habits.

Schätzing really knows how to build up suspension and keep it on a high level while simultaneously describing is characters, their thoughts and profiles in great detail. So even when he goes on to discuss the family problems of his characters that don’t have a major impact on the story you are absolutely spellbound. Another thing that clearly helps keeping you bound is the fact that it becomes clear in the course of the story that not all is going to end well and not everyone is going to have a big party after everything is over. While this is true for most books Schätzing does not merely sacrifice the character that came on 2 pages ago just to keep the story credible but accepts that some of the major characters have to be sacrificed during the course of the story to keep it from being a classic fairy tail. Contrary to fairy tales not all the characters die in a last heroic act of self sacrifice but sometimes simply happen to be in the wrong place at a bad time.

All in all a book I can definitely recommend.

Of course there is still that nasty habit of the Internet remembering all the things you said while being in a strange mood, advertising it to your friends, colleagues and potential future employers and leaving them to wisely judge whether your actions where governed by the moment or by careful consideration. But coming to think about that: One can’t help it anyway!

So I will start and just see what happens.