Monthly Archives: April 2012

Cold As April

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Still not seeing a lot of spring here in Zwingenberg. And I hear it’s pretty much all over Germany. Statistics show that we had have the coldest April in years.

The farmers like it. The cold weather was accompanied by quite some rain, and we all know that a rainy spring is the farmer’s delight. They all look forward to a good harvest if the next couple of days continue with some rain and the sun and warm weather comes out in early May.

I’ll miss the beautiful time here on the Hessian Bergstrasse. Spring is just gorgeous here in the Rhine valley. We still have many apple- and cherry trees, and the blossoming is phantastic.

But I’ll be in Italy and participate in a meeting close to Naples and then attend the Eclipse Day in Florence. And I admit: Things could have been worse for me!

Dear Lufthansa

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Just read today that you folks have problems with your Miles & More program. You thought if you make people use more miles to fly you would easily be able to get your liabilities down. And then your customers started to sue you. That is just not fair!

Airline Lounge in SFOWell, another way to get rid of people and obligations is to work on the service. Old cheese, broken soda dispensers, oddly shaped arm chairs that make your back hurt after 30 minutes of sitting: That will get your lounges empty in now time. And really – your service in the lounges is too good to be true! You don’t believe this works? Just check the setup in the photo that I took in SFO. And guess what – there’s not too many people in here!

So how about the following deal: You don’t de-value our miles, but you cut down on lounge cost. Are you ok with that?

Open Source Think Tank (Thursday)

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Day One turns out to be very interesting, despite of being pretty tired from jet lag.

Earlier today a panel discussion how communities should be managed and treated with a lot of insight from very experienced community managers, then introduction to GENIVI project and initial workshop work. While most of the questions we are supposed to work on have obvious and simple answers (“YES”, “NO”), developing the reasoning in the group shows a large bandwidth of experience and opinion.

The keynote of the day came from Chris Vein, who is CTO for Innovation in the Executive Office of the President. The most interesting talk was on Open Governance, what the different departments are doing to innovate the way they are serving (and want to serve in the future) the individual citizens of the country. He gave a couple of examples from NASA to the department of food and drugs how open source empowers the government agencies. I hope that the talk will be available for public consumption soon. It will certainly give other organizations an idea how far OSS is already spread throughout the governments of the world.

Now I’m listening to the next case study presented by the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs – an open source project comprising a full-blown system for large hospitals.

Looking forward to more!

Easter Snow

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Last week I was in southern Spain to prepare for the golf season and to take a couple of days off after EclipseCon 2012.

The most discussed topic was the weather: As to be expected the temperature was just between 16 and 20° C, we saw some rain showers and the nights were not as warm as in the mediterranean summer. This is totally in sync with the weather that you can expect at that time of the year, but the complaints were all over the place.

Just not fair, the people said. I have one week of vacation, and then the weather sucks so badly. So the whole resort was full of whining about the luxury problems that the resort’s patron’s. I actually have no complaints. The rainy day we had we took off and spent the better part of the day in Seville. Even on a cloudy afternoon the Alcazar of Seville is worthwhile spending the whole afternoon! And the other days I was working on my golf game, with reasonable success.

And now I’m back home in Germany and went up to Gersfeld for a late Easter celebration with my family. And guess what: It snows! Do I hear complaints?

Forgetting is Costly

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Every year the same stupidity.

Golf season starts and I have a hard time to remember what I did right and what I did wrong in the last season. I took notes last year, bit it doesn’t help: The ‘muscle memory’ just fucks up and has lost all its data.

So back to the pro-ette I go and spend a good amount on Euros. She is pleased, and she has expected me already. She says that way she is happy and I am happy. We go through the exact same routine as last spring. And things start to work again, its now only a matter of practicing the same thing over and over. And get some playing practice. And lose a couple of pounds.

So it appears that the weakness of my muscle memory serves a higher purpose.

Barbara, you are so lucky!