For this year’s holiday we went to South Korea one more time. After my first trip to Korea in 2004 for only a few days, this time i took three weeks off to get a deeper impression of the country and the people and to get the head free of the stressful day-by-day business. Below you can find a collection of the best pictures of this holiday from my point of view. You can also find a google map of almost all places we visited. I added a link to the corresponding photo album for each spot within the map so you can use it to browse through the albums by location.

show holiday korea 09 on a bigger map.

wenn informatiker zu viel zeit haben kommt DAS dabei raus.

Link: www.youtube.com

i found a nice collection of very creative business cards. thanks to martin for the link. here is a good example:

wiederverwendung ist nach wie vor ein heiß diskutiertes thema, besonders in zeiten von soa und enterprise-architekturmanagement. lofi und ich haben in einem beitrag im neuen objektspektrum dieses thema im kontext der produktlinientechnik beleuchtet und versucht aufzuzeigen, wie pragmatische produktlinien-architekturen entstehen und praxistauglich eingesetzt werden können. den artikel gibts hier zum runterladen oder in der neuen ausgabe 02/09 als hardcopy.

über kommentare und anregungen freuen wir uns natürlich.

if the last all star game was to disappointing for you, watch these nice plays…

Link: www.youtube.com

bob sutton published some nice words about innovation and on how much failure is related to it. he brings out that in a creative environment there should be enough room for experiment, errors and learning. i really support this idea and therefore want to recommend his list of advices that correspond to it here:

1. take a little risk
2. try something you are bad at
3. encourage someone who has given their all and failed – don’t humiliate or punish them
4. remember that by insisting on perfection and worrying too much that something bad will happen, you preclude the possibility that something great happen – or of suffering failure that will teach you a lesson that will make you a huge success the time after
5. talk about your mistakes and let others know what you have learned from them (this is all about after action reviews and retrospectives)
6. punish inaction
7. punish “cover your ass” behavior – that isn’t the kind of action we need right now

last year i wrote about the carnegie mellon professor randy pausch, who inspired millions of people with his “last lecture”. last friday at the age of 47 he died of complications from pancreatic cancer. once again i want to recommend his speech, as it is one of the best presentations i’ve ever seen.

also i want to recommend the website “building virtual worlds” which hosts content of a class founded by randy pausch dealing with interactive worlds and virtual realities that are built by students. you can watch a video of one of the funniest worlds below.

Link: www.youtube.com

have you ever wanted to watch tv online for free? now you get a chance at zattoo.com. i’m really impressed by the quality of this service, as it is all for free. you only have to download a small client to be able to watch the local channels you like (right now there are 8 countries with 187 different channels supported). the software has also build in a nice program guide which displays the schedule of all channels in a clear way. so have a try…

auch wenn es schon diverse howtos und einführungen im internet zu ruby on rails gibt, habe ich mich entschlossen, eine von mir kürzlich zu dem thema erstellte präsentation hier zu veröffentlichen. ich hoffe es erleichtert dem ein oder anderen den einstieg in rails…

yesterday i was at the atreyu concert in cologne. all in all it was a nice show, although the first supporting band “engel” had a poor start and wrecked their equipment right at the beginning, so that there was no bass for a few songs. the second band “still remains” did a better job and managed to heat up the crowd quite well. afterwards atreyu played a good mix of old and new songs. you can find one of them as a video below (i’m sorry for the miserable sound quality). or you can have a look at the photo gallary…

Link: www.youtube.com