With summer around the corner and my inlaw owning a caravan this thing looks like the geeky way to join the club...
Practical Motorhome Doubleback VW Camper review

Bit of 20 what?
Age of the driver?
Age of the Car?
Temperature?
...

Weather should be nice tomorrow

I am surely ordering one of these kits. Will play the LOL song with my strawberry plants :-)

http://www.ted.com/talks/jay_silver_hack_a_banana_make_a_keyboard.html

A Rainbow in a cloud. Seen on this sunny day. There's got to be a name for this phenomena. Anyone knows?

Roman roads and bridges, Arab walls and towers. Synagogues, churches, monasteries and above all, friendly people and great food in Toledo

A beautiful weekend in Toledo Spain

Chocoholics of the World, Unite!

RESHARE:
Well written thoughts on where 3D printing stands.

Reshared text:

Spring dress
I walk every day past this not very special tree. Today it surprised me with its branches full of flowers. A hymn to spring. Happiness for everyone.

Augmented reality demo

The folks from Noser implemented an augmented reality app on an Android phone that allows the user to turn lamps on or off by pointing the camera at them and selecting an action to perform.  They did this using our digitalstrom technologies.

The application detects a pattern in the surface of the lamp and uses this to identify the lamp spatially. It is amazing at how effective it is at identifying the lamps.

Noser Engineering Mobile Solutions Augmented Reality App Demo

#digitalstrom   #augmentedreality   #android  

The still ongoing story in XKCD
This page has taking all snapshots and allows you to see what how the story evolved. 
The comic is also an illustration of passing time. From the spectator's point of view, each image is meaningless by itself ; the only possible perception of time is to "wait for it" and see how things evolve. Thus, time is in the spectator's perception, not in each individual frame.
As of this writing, after more than 670 hours, the story is still ongoing - even after many new, different comics have been posted on the front page. It was initially updating every 30 minutes, but is now updating on the hour.

How do you think the story will end?

http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=1190:_Time

The cows know
Spring is finally here. The cows are out. They must know. They are enjoying the spring flowers and the view :-)

Making engineering jobs attractive for girls
The Girl's Day in Germany has the goal of getting young teenager girls to know what engineers do and hopefully decide for a technical career.
The day will be held tomorrow all through Germany.  Today there was a preparation event in the Bundeskanzlei where several girls  went to look at the the career possibilities in engineering.

We at digitalstrom were lucky to be one of the companies that could show how interesting it is to be an engineer. Some of our female colleagues were there showing our technologies.

Almost forgot to mention, Ms Merkel came by our little booth as well

#girlsday2013   #girlsday   #digitalstrom   #femaleengineer  

A friend of mine is having a birthday party this Saturday Night.
His invitation made me remember this song, with its special dance.
All those who danced to it plus one it :-)

Tuesday morning sun by the lake

Beautiful day by the lake

Spring is finally here

#sunday

A sunny Easter Monday in Rapperswil by the lake of Zurich.

Happy Easter
Kids (and their mother) have been quite busy these last days.
Who is going to eat 44 boiled eggs?
#easter   #easteregg  

Found a great restaurant in Cologne, Germany: in the Wasserturm hotel.
Greatly decorated dishes and cool creations.
http://www.hotel-im-wasserturm.de/

Ever heard of openMaterials?

Through a TED talk I discovered this great community trying to become a wiki of modern materials. From their site:

In broad terms the aims of openMaterials are:
- Collect interesting resources (news, techniques, theory, artworks, videos, etc.) and share them via links and blog posts
- Publish in-depth articles and interviews
- Create a repository (wiki) of relevant materials, tools and techniques. eg. - descriptions, physical properties, what it’s good for and what it’s not, tricks and hacks, where to get it, who’s using it, who’s improving it
- Experiment and document experiments, and share them via how-tos and tutorials (text and video)

Check them out: http://openmaterials.org/

Wait 42 years to unlock a phone
A friend of mine is having some issues with his iPhone.
He will have to wait 42 years to enter his code again.

Maybe his gandchildren will be able to do it
#funfriday   #funny   #iphone  

My smart home checks the health of my refrigerator

Some of you might be familiar with the case of the refrigerator open door where all food in there goes bad.  It happened to me a few years ago when one of the kids together with his friends "inadvertently" plugged off the big freezer in the basement.

Wouldn't it be great if my smart home could watch over the refrigerator for me?  This is indeed possible.  Every refrigerator has a "heartbeat" that can bee seen in the energy consumption over time.  The pattern of energy consumption is the compressor turning on and off to cool down the contents on the freezer.  The frequency and lenght of this pattern depends on the type of the compressor, on the ammount of food inside of the refrigerator and also on the difference of temperatures between the freezer and the external air.

Provided this data is available a smart home system could monitor the operation of the refrigerator.  If the energy consumption stays near zero for a period of time longer than what its normal heartbeat it would mean that the device is unplugged.  If it remains on for a longer period of time compared to its normal operation it would mean that the door remained open.  The home owner can be alerted for both events using e-mail, twitter or other means.

Together with my team we are currently developing such a feature. We hope that in the future these unhappy surprises can be avoided at most homes.

Which other energy monitoring tasks would you like to do your smart home for you?

#cebit   #digitalstrom   #refrigerator   #energyefficiency  

Can my smart home protect itself from hail?

The other day I received my yearly invoice from my home insurance company.  With the bill they included a brochure describing how the amount of damage done by hail in buildings has increased in the last years.  

And this is not only related to any change in weather patterns, which is difficult to prove. The main reason is that modern homes tend to have larger windows compared to the homes we used to build some decades years ago.  This results in larger surfaces that can be affected during a hail storm.

You might wonder, why not just have a rain/wind/hail sensor mounted in your home.  Well, the bad news is that there is no such thing as a local hail sensor.  And the main reason is if you can sense hail, it is already too late.  So the only proper way is to have a service warn the home that hail is on its way.

We have done such a prototype together with one Swiss university and a meteorological institution from Switzerland.  The idea is to get what meteorologists call Probability of Hail data in advance of the storm.  Every home will register with the service providing it its coordinates. When the service receives a hail alert from the meteorological serviceit will send a command to the connected home controllers to bring up the blinds or awnings.

Which other kind of events would you like to have your smart home protect itself from?

#cebit   #smarthomes   #digitalstrom   #haildamage   #weatherandnaturalforces   #weatherwednesday  

What do you want your smart home do for you?
Which ideas come to mind when you hear the words Smart Home.  Which functions do you expect it to do for you?  Lets start a discussion and see what we all want!

#smarthomes   #cebit2013   #cebit   #digitalstrom  

Our technologies at CeBIT
Yes, we have been quite busy adding functionality to our system and will be showing them at the CeBIT
You already have a smart phone and a smart car. Come and see what a smart home actually is!
Would be happy to show you personally at the show, just drop me a note below.

http://www.cebit.de/en/about-the-trade-show/topics-trends/product-innovations-2013/lamp-to-control-lamp-to-control-control-can-you-dim-me

#cebit2013   #digitalstrom   #smarthomes   #smarthouse  

Snowman family.
Spotted during a Sunday walk

Snowy Switzerland
Yes, we have had our share of snow this winter.  I definitely will not be having tea in my patio today.  It is all white out here. Time to get the sledge.

On the left, the night lights. On the right the sun rising over the alps. In the middle the mighty cloud

Snow at 500 meters

The border between day and night.

The fort of San Juan de Ulua in Veracruz Mexico.
It has a small but interesting museum on precolonial art. It used to be a prison, a garrison and is now a museum.

Back from visiting family in Mexico
The food was excellent as usual. 

The fort of San Juan de Ulua in Veracruz Mexico
Family history says that my grandfather quit the Mexican marine by swimming from this fort to the port of Veracruz.  He had lost the silverware of the fort commander when he was bringing him his food and feared the reprimand.

The way

Happy robochristmas!
From the lab of a good friend of mine
Autonomous Christmas Lab

The Rational Person's Guide to the Mayan Apolalypse
Courtesy of Prezi, a great way to do presentations.  Midway listen to the Aquarius song and remember the good old days:-)

http://prezi.com/kdpymtr6x4lp/the-rational-persons-guide-to-the-mayan-apocalypse/

Greetings from snowy switzerland

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Nice pictures of benches
Makes you want to visit these gardens.  

Reshared text:
Come and sit for a while.....

Light interacting with people.
Check the video, cool idea.
http://studioroosegaarde.net/project/crystal/

Customer is king
How often do we hear this phrase and is just lip service?  Well today I experienced the great support from Amazon.  My Kindle froze some 2 weeks ago. I went through all the procedures (resetting, recharging) and then contacted Amazon support.  A lady by the name of Silvia helped me organize a replacement at no charge since it was still under guarantee.  I will be able to read my books on my Kindle over the holidays.  Now I just need to get some new reading glasses...

Thanks for the invite +Evo Terra 
Let me reshare my experiences publishing in the Amazon Kindle program. Hope this helps some folks here:

The new publishing paradigm
Do you remember that cartoon of Snoopy where he was writing in his typewriter on top of his dog house, just to get his manuscripts sent back with a note Don't call us, we will call you?.  Well, Snoopy would love this new brave world of self publishing electronic books. In this story I want to tell you my experiences publishing my book “The power of social media” http://www.amazon.com/power-social-media-ebook/dp/B006NOG5JC electronically for the Kindle Direct Publishing program from Amazon.

Let me start by sharing a little secret with you:  I’ve published 2 books in my life and the first one was a flop.  Back in 1996 when Internet was getting started, I created a web site with funnies where people could vote for the best ones.  This was at the time when you had to code your CGI-scripts in C and Amazon was for most people still a geographical area in Brazil.  After several months of running the site I decided to write and publish a book with the best stories.

Back in those days you had to either get a literary agent to promote your work or use one of the many editorials that would publish the book for you, as long as you footed the bill.  Needless to say, I took the second path.  After getting the material together, and the book printed I went to the Leipzig's book fair in Germany to promote it.  I found out I was not alone.  I also tried to promote it locally, but found that I had to do more explaining on what Internet was and how people could actually vote for the stories than read stories in the book.  And I also found that English jokes do not always fit within the German speaking humor. I don't need to tell you that I ended up loosing money, but gained experience and had fun in the process. (The human brain is a champion at rationalizing)

Fast forward to 2011.  Amazon launches the Kindle Direct Publishing program allowing authors to create electronic versions of their work and submit them to the Amazon Kindle book store without paying a dime. I caught wind of the program thanks to a post by +Guy Kawasaki and over a weekend got a collection of my articles on social media formatted as an eBook.  

The process of submitting a book has the following steps:
1) Write the content
2) Format the content into an eBook
3) Create a book cover and other supporting elements
4) Submit to the Kindle shop and promote it

Amazon makes several set of tools to format your eBook here: https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A3IWA2TQYMZ5J6. There are tools for Windows and Mac users. I used the Windows based Mobipocket creator tool and a Word document with my content.  Disclaimer: I know it is not the path that would be taken by professionals, but I believe it will be a popular path among the large use base of those tools. The Mobipocket creator does not have the most modern interface, but it is quite straightforward to use.  You need to first export your text in Filtered HTML format. Word will create a directory where all the images you are using in the book are copied to be referenced by the final html document.  Make sure you format the chapter titles using the standard Word headings since this will come in handy when creating a table of contents later.  Also do not create a table of contents or an index in Word. See additional hints on KDP simplified formatting guide https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A2RYO17TIRUIVI

it is important to understand that a Kindle book does not have a static definition of “pages”. The user can change the font size and the pages will arrange themselves dynamically. Thus it is better to leave the page numbers away.  Note that if you use hyperlinks in your text they will be referenced by Kindle, provided of course that the user has WiFi access at the time the links are followed.

Within the Mobipocket creator you will need to provide your book metadata, including author information and a brief description.  While not mandatory I do recommend providing a cover page.  To use the Mobipocket table of contents generation utility you will need to know which HTML tags did Word use to export your chapter titles.  If you used the default “heading 1” and “heading 2” formats they would translate into the H1 and H2 HTML tags.  You can enter the tags used and the table of contents will be generated automatically.  You might need to repeat the generation process more than once until you are happy with the results. I recommend starting a new book from scratch since once imported the tool does not seem to deal well with changes.  

Once you have the final .prc file I suggest using one of the Kindle viewers to ensure the document looks the way you want it to. I used the Kindle previewer for this.  The next step is to submit your book for publishing https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A37Z49E2DDQPP3
For this you need to have an Amazon login, and to create a KDP account based on this login.  The KDP program provides two pricing categories.  You can select from a flat 35% royalty, or a 70% royalty where you pay separately for the data transfer of your book.  Unless your book is heavy on graphs and therefore large, the 70% royalty makes more monetary sense.  Note that the 70% royalty applies only for purchases from selected countries. https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A29FL26OKE7R7B  This means that sales to users outside the 70% selected zones will be paid at 35% royalty. I also suggest that you enroll your book on all Amazon sites (uk, de, fr, es, it, com) since some users specially in Europe use these localized shops.  

The KDP program provides you with an easy way to promote your book by either making it available for lending to Amazon select customers for free, or by making your book available for free for up to 5 days in a 3 month period.  If you make your book part of the KDP select programm https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A6KILDRNSCOBA you will be paid if your book is borrowed by Amazon Prime members.  This is a great way to promote your book among your friends that are part of that program, since they do not have to pay to read it, but you still get paid for them borrowing it.  The KDP as the program is called has a fund every month and you get paid depending on how often your book is “lent”.  For December 2011 the total fund was 500,000 US, and every lend paid 1.70 per borrow. Also note that if you make your book available for download for free, you will not be charged for the data transfer fees if you are using the 70% royalty model.

When promoting your book remind your audience that there are Kindle readers for many platforms:
Android reader: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=red_lnd_shrt_url?ie=UTF8&docId=165849822
iPad reader: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=kcp_ipad_mkt_lnd?docId=1000490441
iPhone reader: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=kcp_iphone_mkt_lnd?docId=1000301301
PC reader: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=kcp_pc_mkt_lnd?docId=1000426311
Mac reader: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=kcp_mac_mkt_lnd?docId=1000464931
And even one for Blackberry users. http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=kcp_bb_mkt_lnd?docId=1000468551

How did my book do? http://www.amazon.com/power-social-media-ebook/dp/B006NOG5JC   I published the book on the 19th of December, and then made it available for free from the 23 to the 25th of December.  I promoted the book 4 times in my stream.  On the publishing day, and then informing my close circles, the secret santa group created by +Carter Gibson, and the public stream once the book was available for free.  The book got downloaded some 450 times until the end of the year, with the lion share of these downloads coming from Amazon.com.  Amazon.uk was the second ranking site, followed by the .de, .it and .es sites.  No one downloaded any books from the .fr site, I guess it reflects the number of my french speaking followers.

You will get paid royalties separately by each site, and only if the amount of money owed to you is above 10 USD/Euros/Pounds.  It is recommended that you provide Amazon with your electronic bank accounts so that they transfer the funds electronically to you.

All in all it was a great experience.  A weekend worth of work allowed me to test this new publishing paradigm, and I even got to help the secret santa program.  As you can see from my royalty page I actually am on track of getting my first 10 bucks out of this, which is way more than the money I put in when publishing my first paperback.

I can only recommend would be authors to try this new publishing paradigm.  And I am sure that if Snoopy were to publish now his “It was a dark and stormy night” adventures they would be an electronic best seller.

Internships make a difference
In this well articulated piece George Weiner makes a point for internships.  I have studied and worked in the american and the Swiss system and can only agree with the point he makes about internships.

In Germany and Switzerland most kids will start an internship in their late teens.  I believe this helps them in two ways:
1) They learn the value of earning their money
2) They can understand better which skills are required in the professional area.

Compare this with a kid that only goes to college, and does not know if what she is studying is relevant at all, nor does understand what earning money means.

And the companies benefit in big ways as well.  Talented junior people can be given projects that might be useful in the future, but are not "material" enough to be granted a pre project status.  And an extra pair of hands can always be helpful  for all kind of minor tasks such as getting events together or as in our latest christmas decoration efforts :-)

Good read:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-weiner/college-unemployment-internships_b_2248786.html?utm_hp_ref=business

Greetings from Snowy Switzerland.
Thanks for getting the community started +Athena Carey 

Check out our interactive Xmas decoration
http://www.digitalstrom.com/x-mas/

Snowy December
All is white around us, and the sun came out to see it all.

#zensunday   #snow  

One of the most inspiring TED talks of this year
Janine Shepherd talks about how she got her life back after an accident that crippled her down.  Worth watching.

http://www.ted.com/talks/janine_shepherd_a_broken_body_isn_t_a_broken_person.html
#tedx  

This holiday season I wish for all of us to sing together, irrelevant of how pure and educated our voices might be.  By singing together we become part of an entity greater than us, and by doing it in family we remove any judgment calls on the quality of our music.  We get back to living through the sheer joy of making music and not only consuming it.

http://culturalpurveyor.com/concerts-that-we-make/

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Explains why we end up overexplaining or being totally inarticulate :-)

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So true!

Amy Cuddy on First impressions
I quote: In general I really think people make the mistake of over-weighting the importance of expressing strength and competence, at the expense of expressing warmth and trustworthiness. I think this is a mistake. How can you possibly be a good leader if the people who are supposed to be following you don’t feel that you understand them? How is it possible? No one is going to listen if they don’t trust you. Why would they? Why should they? Trust opens them up to what you have to say. It opens them up to your strength and confidence. Trust is the conduit through which ideas travel.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/11/amy-cuddy-first-impressions

Like chocolate?
Then you will probably like this weeks article.
http://culturalpurveyor.com/of-markets-and-chocolate-shops/

In these shops you can select which chocolates and how much you want to have.  They usually have thin wafers with many different ingredients. There are of course the dark chocolates in all possible percentages of pure cacao.  My favorites are the ones that have nuts or fruits in them.  The chocolates with embedded roasted hazelnuts are usually a safe choice.  But I have seen some with salt, all kinds of fruits and of course white chocolates.

In the heat of the fall

RESHARE:
Thanks to +Jaana Nyström for resharing this article about why Google+ gets you in flow.

Reshared text:
Here is a very good piece of writing from +Miguel Rodriguez 

Google+ gets you in a flow state

Shared from Google Drive... :-)

See how:
http://googleplushelper.blogspot.fi/2012/11/this-is-big-direct-share-from-drive-to.html

Movember: Increasing awareness about Men's prostate cancer

I am growing a moustache this mont, I am a MoBro
I can only recomend watching this TED video on how Adam Garone came up with this idea.  It is not what you would expect.  I quote a few of his comments

The first thing he told the head of the prostatic cancer organization in Australia:
"I have this most amazing concept, its going to transform your organization"
Ended up repeating it to the same organization in Canada, basically with the same answer.

On the similarity to the ribbon campaing for breast cancer:
Our ribbon is a hairy ribbon

On what he does:
Essentially I became a mustache farmer, and my season is November

Looking forward to the moustache party at the end of the month.

http://www.ted.com/talks/adam_garone_healthier_men_one_moustache_at_a_time.html

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The Training world
Training World is the place where all the practices work always. Where we suspend our disbelief long enough to learn and where real problems are only touched on but not completely addressed.

Reshared text:
Bring Training World Back to The Real World
(by +Alan Dayley)

I have led and co-led many classes about Agile practices and frameworks.  I rather enjoy it!  I love the "A-ha!" moments that happen, sometimes many times in a session.  And I often see the pensive looks, the puzzled pondering and sometimes depressed resignation on the faces of some people in the class.  Such looks lead to questions like:

- "I understand story points but we can't possibly use them for our project."
- "Wait, you say the team gets to decide who does which task?"
- "How do I tell my boss to stop interrupting the work every day?"
- "My team is spread across 5 time zones so how do I do face-to-face communication?"
- "It's so hard to just move to a cubicle near my team, how could I possibly get a team room in place?"

Training World

My friend and mentor +Mike Vizdos introduced me years ago to the idea of "Training World."  In a training class the instructor must do two things with the limited time available.

First, the instructor is there to teach concepts and ideas.  For example, in a Certified ScrumMaster Workshop the pure pieces and parts of Scrum are taught according to the definitions of the Scrum Alliance.  There is little discussion of variations nor of transition from old ways to new ways.

Second, the instructor only has so much time, from a few hours to only a couple of days, to cover quite a bit of content. While tempting (Believe me!), the instructor cannot let the session become consultation for individual difficulties of each attendee.  There just isn't time to do that.

These two constraints on a training class are needed in order to fill the class goal of imparting topic understanding, an academic understanding, for the class topic.  Mike calls the environment imposed by these constraints Training World.

Training World is the place where all the practices work always. Where we suspend our disbelief long enough to learn and where real problems are only touched on but not completely addressed.  It is the nature of a training class and it sucks sometimes, especially for the person teaching.

Real World

We all know where this place is.  We have to return there when the class is done.  We take all our enthusiasm of the things we learned, carry it into our real work environment and often see the excitement die as current work and process and policies drain the hope of Training World our of our heads.

This is not to say that work places are terrible!  It's just that the Real World cannot be changed by a two day class. The realities of daily work have momentum and history that takes time and work to change.  Many training attendees already leave the class knowing that much of what they learned will take a long time to implement, a hard long time, if at all.

What To Do

Here are some ideas of how to turn Training World hope into Real World results:

- As an attendee, dive into the Training World fully immersed. Set aside the Real World concerns a bit, long enough to have a full experience and really get to understand what the class is teaching.  This will help later.

- When the class is over, don't start work right away. If your brain works like mine, the different ideas from the class need time to gel, to process and settle in your head.  If you dive straight into work this settling time is disrupted.  Better yet, take your class at the end of the work week so you have a couple of days to allow the Training World to sink in before it's overwhelmed.

- Write down your thoughts during the settling time.  Yes, take notes during class, I do that too, but I'm talking about writing thoughts, not notes.  This will speed the settling time too.  Gather insights and important points as you remember the class.

- Decide on one or two changes you can make when you get back in the Real World  Yes, just one or two that will make an impact, show you and others that the training had value.  Sure, you can make a list of more changes, maybe you did that in the writing of your thoughts.  That's great!  But for now, right away, bring the Training World into some small but visible part of the Real World as a first successful step.

- Keep making changes and enlist help from your teammates, your manager, anyone who will listen.  Teaching others will help you better learn the concepts but most importantly learn how to apply the new ideas to your work.

Training Sponsors Take Note

Now, a note to the people who send attendees to training classes. And this will sound strong.  *If you don't want the person taking the class to make changes when they get back, don't send them to the class*.  Really.  If someone goes to a class but is not allowed to apply what they learned, you have just created a more disengaged colleague.  And no one wants that!

Instead, expect them to want to make a change or two.  Help them help you understand.  Let them try experiments to learn and figure out how to bring the ideals of the Training World into your Real World. 

Other Tips

How about your tips?  What do you do to bring Training World hope into reality of your Real World?

RESHARE:
The Training world
Training World is the place where all the practices work always. Where we suspend our disbelief long enough to learn and where real problems are only touched on but not completely addressed.

Reshared text:
Bring Training World Back to The Real World
(by +Alan Dayley)

I have led and co-led many classes about Agile practices and frameworks.  I rather enjoy it!  I love the "A-ha!" moments that happen, sometimes many times in a session.  And I often see the pensive looks, the puzzled pondering and sometimes depressed resignation on the faces of some people in the class.  Such looks lead to questions like:

- "I understand story points but we can't possibly use them for our project."
- "Wait, you say the team gets to decide who does which task?"
- "How do I tell my boss to stop interrupting the work every day?"
- "My team is spread across 5 time zones so how do I do face-to-face communication?"
- "It's so hard to just move to a cubicle near my team, how could I possibly get a team room in place?"

Training World

My friend and mentor +Mike Vizdos introduced me years ago to the idea of "Training World."  In a training class the instructor must do two things with the limited time available.

First, the instructor is there to teach concepts and ideas.  For example, in a Certified ScrumMaster Workshop the pure pieces and parts of Scrum are taught according to the definitions of the Scrum Alliance.  There is little discussion of variations nor of transition from old ways to new ways.

Second, the instructor only has so much time, from a few hours to only a couple of days, to cover quite a bit of content. While tempting (Believe me!), the instructor cannot let the session become consultation for individual difficulties of each attendee.  There just isn't time to do that.

These two constraints on a training class are needed in order to fill the class goal of imparting topic understanding, an academic understanding, for the class topic.  Mike calls the environment imposed by these constraints Training World.

Training World is the place where all the practices work always. Where we suspend our disbelief long enough to learn and where real problems are only touched on but not completely addressed.  It is the nature of a training class and it sucks sometimes, especially for the person teaching.

Real World

We all know where this place is.  We have to return there when the class is done.  We take all our enthusiasm of the things we learned, carry it into our real work environment and often see the excitement die as current work and process and policies drain the hope of Training World our of our heads.

This is not to say that work places are terrible!  It's just that the Real World cannot be changed by a two day class. The realities of daily work have momentum and history that takes time and work to change.  Many training attendees already leave the class knowing that much of what they learned will take a long time to implement, a hard long time, if at all.

What To Do

Here are some ideas of how to turn Training World hope into Real World results:

- As an attendee, dive into the Training World fully immersed. Set aside the Real World concerns a bit, long enough to have a full experience and really get to understand what the class is teaching.  This will help later.

- When the class is over, don't start work right away. If your brain works like mine, the different ideas from the class need time to gel, to process and settle in your head.  If you dive straight into work this settling time is disrupted.  Better yet, take your class at the end of the work week so you have a couple of days to allow the Training World to sink in before it's overwhelmed.

- Write down your thoughts during the settling time.  Yes, take notes during class, I do that too, but I'm talking about writing thoughts, not notes.  This will speed the settling time too.  Gather insights and important points as you remember the class.

- Decide on one or two changes you can make when you get back in the Real World  Yes, just one or two that will make an impact, show you and others that the training had value.  Sure, you can make a list of more changes, maybe you did that in the writing of your thoughts.  That's great!  But for now, right away, bring the Training World into some small but visible part of the Real World as a first successful step.

- Keep making changes and enlist help from your teammates, your manager, anyone who will listen.  Teaching others will help you better learn the concepts but most importantly learn how to apply the new ideas to your work.

Training Sponsors Take Note

Now, a note to the people who send attendees to training classes. And this will sound strong.  *If you don't want the person taking the class to make changes when they get back, don't send them to the class*.  Really.  If someone goes to a class but is not allowed to apply what they learned, you have just created a more disengaged colleague.  And no one wants that!

Instead, expect them to want to make a change or two.  Help them help you understand.  Let them try experiments to learn and figure out how to bring the ideals of the Training World into your Real World. 

Other Tips

How about your tips?  What do you do to bring Training World hope into reality of your Real World?

Dont mow your mo bro
Ever heard of Movember?
During the month of November each year, Movember asks men across the world to grow a moustache with the aim of raising vital funds and awareness for men’s health issues. Movember moustaches were first grown in Australia back in 2003 and since that time word of Movember and its men’s health messages have spread across the globe.

I'll be letting my "mo" grow, not that I would not have done it anyhow...
http://dk.movember.com/en/team/640361

Our catkin
Happy Halloween

Radio is still what I hear

Nowadays we carry our music everywhere in our little personal electrical companions that we call phones, despite the fact that we seldom use them as such.  The problem is that it takes an effort to move music to your little device, and therefore we don’t do it often. This means that after a while we end up listening to the same music over and over.  When looking for something new to play we might not have at hand what we are looking for.

So, somehow after years of being able to select exactly which song I want to hear next, I am kind of tired to do this.  This takes me back to the old radio station model. Lately I just get my commercial and news free favorite stations going.  The good old DJ comes and saves me from my predicament.  And not only that, radio stations have gotten better.

http://culturalpurveyor.com/the-radio-is-still-what-i-hear/

Beautiful fall colors

3D visualization of music
At #tedxzurich  

A leaf is born
Great baristas at TEDx Zürich
#tedxzurich  

Fantastic talk on working, exercising and eating well by a 95 year old guy.
#tedxzurich  

At TEDx Zurich.
Got a dragon in my coffee

Tomorrow is TEDx Zürich
The program is out.  I will be there, who else is coming?

http://www.tedxzurich.com/speakers-2012/

#tedxzurich

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Cloudwashing anyone?
Via +stephanie wanamaker 

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Meanwhile on the other side

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Proverbs Illustrated for Nerds, Episode #34 of 100.

beautiful colors this morning
Over the lake of Zurich

Colored clouds in the sky
They where white, gray and several shades of red. This one looked like cotton candy.

Added photos to Would you like a day of Commoogling?.

The original Pixar lamps video
Thanks to the post of a good friend I remembered about this first video by Pixar from eons ago.  A great story that opened up our current computer animation era.
Pixar Jr.

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Lots of great information in one page
Thanks to +Jaana Nyström for putting this together. Hope it helps you make more of G+

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Beginners and all, ahoy!

Google+ cheat sheet and advice in formatting posts

With good links and different languages...

Enjoy and share with your newbie circles! :-)

#Plushelp   #newtogoogleplus   #newbieshelp   #Googleplustips   #Jaanablogs  

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For the F1 fans out there
Sunday 8:00 AM European time, GP Korea.
Just in case my favorite is of course Alonso...

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Looking forward to the Formula 1 weekend:

Go #Kimi !

#kimiraikkonen   #F1   #formula1  

What is cool?

I quote wired:
When it comes to technology products, cool is typically something with a beautiful design that works well, does unexpected things, and makes life easier. Something that is not only innovative but that also engenders further innovation something that lets the people who buy it create wonderful new things.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/10/ballmers-secret-message-were-making-microsoft-cool/

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To have a scru master or not to have one

What is your take?

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Why a Scrum team should have a dedicated ScrumMaster

Having a dedicated ScrumMaster for a team or teams is a sticking point for many organisations. They often struggle to see the value. 

Let's help them out by compiling reasons why it's a good idea to have one :)

My #1 is by being outside of the system you can see what's going right or wrong within. 

What's your #1 reason?

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Ever seen a Fogbow?
Must be quite an spectacle. 

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This makes me want go back there in autumn after enjoying the area last summer.

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Fantastic visual representation of the flight of the bumble bee

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+Dirk Talamasca shared a video by this guy of Beethoven's Hammerklavier sonata, and I started digging through more of them and found this awesome visualization of Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee. I really love creative ways to visualize music, especially when it shows the relationship between different parts of the piece in ways which aren't at first obvious.

Making my Kindle book available free of charge for 3 days

Social media will transform the world as we know it. This book aims to explain the reasons behind the exploding popularity of this new medium. It is a collection of articles originally published in the online magazine mediatapper.com. I reflect in ideas from Csikszentmihalyi’s flow, to Pink’s Autonomy-Mastery-Purpose and Gladwell’s Mavens-Connectors-Salespersons to try to explain the social phenomena in which the wide acceptance of social media is based. 
Social media adapts very well to basic human communication needs. It allows users to reach the flow state by creating a personalized experience paced to their needs. It also taps into the autonomy and mastery intrinsic motivators of users by providing them with timely feedback and allowing them to find like-minded people they can relate with.
The variety of people and cultures that we meet on social media platforms represents our whole world, and it is important to understand them, either from their time perspective or from their language mentality. Social media technologies are the next link in the development of internet technologies. They have changed the pace and way that ideas or memes get created or passed around. 
Social media builds on hierarchy of popular people, but also on people that provide original thoughts. There are feedback mechanisms within social media that help connectors but also mavens to fine tune their postings.
In the end the social media sites resemble smart swarms that follow similar crowd rules that allow school of fish or beehives to behave as one organism. Some of this grouping result in a net increase of the IQ of humanity.
I hope that by reading this book you will understand better this brave new world of social media. I can only share my enthusiasm by this new set of technologies that allow us to communicate and enrich our lifes.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006NOG5JC

Great nature pics
More at the link below:
http://500px.com/udadennie

via +Bryant Hansen 

http://500px.com/photo/14957291

Impressions from the 3rd digitalSTROM developer day

The 3rd digitalSTROM developer day took place on the 20th and 21st of September in the New Tech Club in Zürich, Switzerland.  Here is a photo show with the impressions of both days. 
DigitalSTROM products provide connectivity to electrical devices in the home over the existing power cables. This includes every lamp, light switch, blinds and any device plugged in. This network of devices is connected through a server mounted in the electrical cabinet to a local area network. Our applications begin with the intelligent, comfortable and energy efficient orchestration of lights, shades and any
electrical devices at home.
Digitalstrom components are based on a high volt IC in a small size module. Its minimal size allows mounting it behind existing lights and switches. This allows retrofitting houses using the existing power cables. Each digitalSTROM module can switch, dim, measure electricity and communicate its status. It also has its own processor enabling decentralized intelligence.
Our application is customer driven. To make it easier to use, the preprogrammed standard is context driven and the system can be controlled out of the box using existing electrical light switches. The light switch is the ultimate user interface and digitalSTROM uses an event driven paradigm. There are predefined events such as “I am leaving home”, “I am going to sleep”, “I am having breakfast”, “I am watching TV”. All these events can be called by flipping a switch. DigitalSTROM enabled devices know how to react when these events are called. The system also benefits from knowing the context where the userlives, i.e. which devices are in which rooms. This enables the system to predefine intelligent behavior while allowing the user to modify this initial configuration at will.

#digitalstrom   #smarthomes   #energyefficiency   #energybalancing   #hackathon   #iotzurich   #iot  

Quantum decisions
How do you build consensus and get a team back up your decisions?  What if you present an argument in such a way that the party discussing it with you is driven in the direction you wanted them to go by themselves?

Welcome to quantum decisions. The decisions you already have in mind but dont want to express as yours, but want your conversation party to arrive at them on their own.  This increases their accountability, and their backing. 

Read on:
http://culturalpurveyor.com/quantum-decisions/

7 best new global cities for startups
Switzerland

When Google looked to set up its European engineering headquarters, it turned to Zurich, and Yahoo followed suit. The U.S. tech giants liked Zurich's robust broadband infrastructure, but the real appeal is the local talent: Switzerland is the No. 1 country in the world in patents as a percentage of GDP. The Swiss government has multiple programs for investing in small businesses, and the effort seems to be paying off. Zurich is home to hundreds of startups, including calendar software maker Doodle and Wuala, a cloud storage company.

Good for

R&D/inventions
Hardware
Green/sustainable

http://money.cnn.com/gallery/technology/2012/09/19/startups-global-cities.fortune/2.html

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Rio Secreto
A good idea for the upcoming holidays
Via +Alfonso Meneses 

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"Rio Secreto: Mexico's Secret River"

Rio Secreto: Underground river in Riviera Maya, Mexico

Rio Secreto is a new tourist attraction in the Riviera Maya that thrills visitors with a visit to a natural underground river and the limestone cavern system it winds through. Discovered in 2007, the cave is part of a 7.5-mile long network that is still being explored and mapped.

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How games and life intersect Apart from studying the economic systems of video games, some academics are interested in how online worlds function within the broader real-life economy. Americans are set to spend $2.9 billion on "virtual goods" in 2012, according to trade figures, and the market in Asia is even bigger. That's still a fairly small slice of the global economy, but academics think virtual communities could raise interesting questions if they get bigger. "Facebook has an entire currency system that isn't taxed or regulated. At what point does that threaten what the Federal Reserve does?"

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Not the economics of making and selling video games, but the economies inside those games.  Would you expect a video game company to have a full time economist involved in game play and design?

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Gotta love the titles of the papers that got the prices.
"Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller"
Vía +James O'Sullivan

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The IgNobel prizes have been announced. My personal favorite is the Literature Prize, which went to the "US Government General Accountability Office, for issuing a report about reports about reports that recommends the preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports."

It's all laugh-out-loud stuff, of course...

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Ever heard of the Rodriguez asteroid?
Well, here it is ...
http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=rodriguez

You can check if there is an asteroid with your name on the JPL site. Or if there is one of your favorite singer, comic book character or dinosaur :-)

Via +Philip Plait 

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Who has his/her name up there in the sky ?


I was talking on my previous post of asteroids with "famous" names, pointing at one called Diplodocus which looked funny. And I just remembered that many of them were in that case.
At the beginning, asteroids were named after gods, goddesses, mythological characters, famous astronomers, famous scientists, ...

But the list of name is short, and the number of asteroids is huge.
Now you can find asteroids with the name of a dinosaur :

Diplodocus : http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=58671
Brachiosaurus : http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?orb=1;sstr=9954
Archaeopteryx : http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?orb=1;sstr=9860
Triceratops : http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?orb=1;sstr=9937
Iguanodon : http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?orb=1;sstr=9941

The name of singers or groups :

Simon-Garfunkel : http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?orb=1;sstr=91287
RollingStones : http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?orb=1;sstr=19383
BeeGees : http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?orb=1;sstr=15092

Some TV people :

JayLeno : http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?orb=1;sstr=13212

Some movie celebrities :

TomHanks : http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?orb=1;sstr=12818
MegRyan : http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?orb=1;sstr=8353
SeanConnery : http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?orb=1;sstr=13070
JamesBond : http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?orb=1;sstr=9007

Some sportsmen or sportswomen :

KatarinaWitt : http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?orb=1;sstr=36800
KimClijsters : http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?orb=1;sstr=11947

Some children movie characters :

HumptyDumpty : http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?orb=1;sstr=17627
WhiteRabbit : http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?orb=1;sstr=17942
DonaldDuck : http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?orb=1;sstr=12410

Some ... well ... humm :

Qwerty : http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?orb=1;sstr=6600
CCD : http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?orb=1;sstr=15000

And some Google+ guys with, that time, a real link to astronomy :

PhilPlait (+Philip Plait)  : http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?orb=1;sstr=165347
FraserCain (+Fraser Cain)  http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?orb=1;sstr=158092


Will we be hit one day by an asteroid called DonaldDuck ? No chance with that one !
But imagine what it would have been like if it were on the way to hit us :-)

#astronomy   #asteroids  

How much do people trust you?
Rachel Botsman's TED talk takes a wider view to the hidden value of the trust we have earned online: in Amazon, eBay, Air B'nB and many other places. Worth watching

http://www.ted.com/talks/rachel_botsman_the_currency_of_the_new_economy_is_trust.html

Opernhaus Zürich
This is the view from center stage. They had an open doors day today.

Getting ready for the digitalSTROM developer days
Getting ready for the event where companies and developers interested in smart home and energy metering applications will meet.
I will report live on the hands on day where we will showcase all applications that the community can put together after a hard days work.

Check the program here:
http://aizo.com/de/news/documents/2012-09_Invitationdeveloperday.pdf

#digitalstrom   #smarthomes   #energie   #energy  

Why are we grumpy?
With a few hard truths and interesting quotes:
You’re worth more than your code. Whatever your next gig is, make sure that you’re not a short-order cook. Don’t accept a job where you’re told exactly what to build and how to build it. You need to work somewhere that appreciates your insights into the product as well as your ability to build it.

http://www.nczonline.net/blog/2012/06/12/the-care-and-feeding-of-software-engineers-or-why-engineers-are-grumpy/

Got my TEDx Zurich ticket
Anyone attending the event?  Will post about it on the day.

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How do you run Scrum with geographically distributed teams?

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Working with geographically distributed scrum teams
by +Miguel Rodriguez 

One of the principles of Scrum is that teams should have physical proximity.  However as anyone who has tried to get an A team together knows, it is not always possible to achieve this.  I believe great teams are build from talent, and that when talent is given there will be a way to bridge location differences.

I've worked with distributed teams and want to give you some ideas on how have we modified our process to allow for people to cooperate while being hundreds of kilometers away from each other.

As with any scrum team we do have our backlog, in our case it is electronic.  We use Redmine with the scrum add on hosted in an external server.  This guarantees access to our backlog to all our team members without having to set up VPN's or other login mechanisms.  For source control we use Git, specifically the Gitorious front end.  This again allows for distributed development where every developer has its own local repository and can work off line if required.  One of the advantages of Gitorious is that it allows us to enforce peer code reviews for every check in.

For day to day communication we use an IRC channel, and have created a bot that pushes all code checkins to the channel asking for a review.  We also run our daily scrums at a fix time every morning where the team members present their status, what do they intend to complete and any blocking issues they might have.  The IRC channel is full with code comments, but also with the odd geeky pun.

We run our sprint planning, reviews and retrospectives using Skype.  For the grooming sessions we use an online planning tool where all developers enter their estimations and are made public when all estimations are available.  We also do continuous integration using Jenkins which is also set up to start some automated tests at given time intervals.  We even build our documentation using LaTex templates in Jenkins.

And finally, we gather the whole team in one location every 6 to 8 weeks for one week.  These get togethers allow us to get to know the human side of our team members, and sometimes will include hackathons where we also involve members of our user community.

Do you run scrum in distributed locations?  Which processes have helped you keeping the process running smoothly?

Links to tools:
http://www.redmine.org/
http://gitorious.org/
http://jenkins-ci.org/
http://www.skype.com

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To save people some time, here is the Agile Voices circle that I've been accumulating.  I think everyone from the Agile Voices list is in here.

Ever had dinner in a hangar?
Found an interesting location last night by the airport in Zürich. http://www.runway34.ch

Take a look at their Smooth landings , err desserts
http://www.runway34.ch/cms/images/stories/Dokumente/karte_sommer_2012n.pdf