This evening I decided to ride home through the woods and over the fields - instead of cycling besides the streets - in order to come down from a long working day. I passed an old barn in the middle of nowhere. Last year in autumn I read an advertisement on this barn's door: reserve your St. Martin's goose now! Today there I saw a huge enclosement with some dozens of geese eating, walking over the green grass or just lying in the evening sun.
As I am a vegetarian and I really love animals, my first though was: Damn! Those poor geese won't live to see this winter or next spring. Not considering reality for a moment I really wanted to save them... perhaps by buying all the future St. Martin's roast geese until they are still alive. But where to keep a bunch of goose?
The second thought was then: these geese are somehow lucky - compared to other geese vegetating in narrow, dirty boxes perhaps even fattened in order to kill them soon to produce foie gras. Compared to them those geese I saw have a short but species-appropriate life.
And in my point of view this goose story is only an example of so many things in life that have two sides: a sad one and a lucky one. A serious and an easy one. - The art is to recognise both and to decide which one is the more powerful for oneself.
Do you have any thoughts on this topic you want to share?
Showing posts with label work. Show all posts
Showing posts with label work. Show all posts
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Saturday, May 30, 2009
The greatest justice we face everyday....
... is that everybody's day has 24 hours. These were the introductory words to the short seminar about "timemanagement" I attended yesterday with some of my colleagues.
The seminar leader pointed out, as you only have 24 hours everyday you can't really manage your time - you only can manage your tasks you have to or want to do during your time. So it is all about task- or even better: selfmanagement!
For me the whole gist was that I have to organise my business and private todos, obligations, wanna-dos, etc. in a way that they conform with my personal values, with my aims and visions I have for my life. Sounds pretty easy, doesn't it? ;-)
Among other things, she recommended a book of Stephen Covey who is one of the founders of FranklinCovey; it is called "The 7 habits of highly effective people". It is not intended to change things quickly but to spark thinking about the whole subject.
She also pointed out the Eisenhower-method (you can easily google it) or the 72-hour-rule. The latter is really interesting; it says that for everything one really wants to do i.e. for an aim or a vision (e.g. running a marathon or even start running at all) one should make the very first step in the next 72 hours. With this rule you don't clutter your mind with things you may do "someday" and you quickly get feedback if you should stick to your aim or abolish it.
So I just ordered the book of the 7 habits online and now I am going to enjoy the sun and the blue sky outside - another essential aspect in selfmanagement: get your mind, body and soul in balance. :-)
I am excited to read what YOU think about the whole selfmanagement thing, how to cope with your tasks, stay in balance, ... so please feel free to comment.
The seminar leader pointed out, as you only have 24 hours everyday you can't really manage your time - you only can manage your tasks you have to or want to do during your time. So it is all about task- or even better: selfmanagement!
For me the whole gist was that I have to organise my business and private todos, obligations, wanna-dos, etc. in a way that they conform with my personal values, with my aims and visions I have for my life. Sounds pretty easy, doesn't it? ;-)
Among other things, she recommended a book of Stephen Covey who is one of the founders of FranklinCovey; it is called "The 7 habits of highly effective people". It is not intended to change things quickly but to spark thinking about the whole subject.
She also pointed out the Eisenhower-method (you can easily google it) or the 72-hour-rule. The latter is really interesting; it says that for everything one really wants to do i.e. for an aim or a vision (e.g. running a marathon or even start running at all) one should make the very first step in the next 72 hours. With this rule you don't clutter your mind with things you may do "someday" and you quickly get feedback if you should stick to your aim or abolish it.
So I just ordered the book of the 7 habits online and now I am going to enjoy the sun and the blue sky outside - another essential aspect in selfmanagement: get your mind, body and soul in balance. :-)
I am excited to read what YOU think about the whole selfmanagement thing, how to cope with your tasks, stay in balance, ... so please feel free to comment.
Friday, April 10, 2009
Maintaining the coffee machine
I nearly did not blog almost a whole month as there is a lot of work to do at the moment and spring is coming. So I prefer being outside - e.g. doing sports - instead of sitting in front of my computer in the evenings. Yesterday I had an amusing discussion with one of my office colleagues and as I promised him to blog about it - here it is: the ultimate maintaining-the-coffee-machine-discussion.
While getting a nice afternoon coffee from our comfortable full-fledged "Jura" coffee dispenser we started arguing if one has to maintain the coffee machine, e.g. disposing the coffee ground, or refilling beans/water, AFTER getting ones coffee (my opinion) or if it is legitimate to leave the company's kitchen as fast as possible without doing this - eventually leaving the next colleage the nice "present" of maintaining the machine before getting the vital brown hot beverage (his point of view).
He argued that using an ordinary coffee machine at home requires some steps BEFORE getting a hot cup, too. And of course the fresh tapped hot coffee gets cold incredibly fast - no time for emptying the coffee ground at all. :)
Another colleague who followed our (hopefully) not too serious discussion was on my side whereas three former team members I playing billard with in the evening shared my office colleagues' point of view. Altogether this discussion was a lot of fun - we laughed a lot in the afternoon (getting faster to knocking-off time the day before easter holidays) and in the evening. And now I know where to complain if I would like to have a quick coffee next time (probably in a hurry) and our coffee machine is demanding the "all-aroud carefree-package"... ;-)
While getting a nice afternoon coffee from our comfortable full-fledged "Jura" coffee dispenser we started arguing if one has to maintain the coffee machine, e.g. disposing the coffee ground, or refilling beans/water, AFTER getting ones coffee (my opinion) or if it is legitimate to leave the company's kitchen as fast as possible without doing this - eventually leaving the next colleage the nice "present" of maintaining the machine before getting the vital brown hot beverage (his point of view).
He argued that using an ordinary coffee machine at home requires some steps BEFORE getting a hot cup, too. And of course the fresh tapped hot coffee gets cold incredibly fast - no time for emptying the coffee ground at all. :)
Another colleague who followed our (hopefully) not too serious discussion was on my side whereas three former team members I playing billard with in the evening shared my office colleagues' point of view. Altogether this discussion was a lot of fun - we laughed a lot in the afternoon (getting faster to knocking-off time the day before easter holidays) and in the evening. And now I know where to complain if I would like to have a quick coffee next time (probably in a hurry) and our coffee machine is demanding the "all-aroud carefree-package"... ;-)
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Performance Tuning for Eclipse Ganymede
As a java developer I am using Eclipse at work. By adopting to Eclipse Ganymede some days ago, we encountered serious performance issues, especially while the workspace was compiling. The complete IDE was blocked while building the sources, even on a dual core system with 4 GB RAM.
After googling a while, we found out a combination of VM parameters that seem to work fine. Here's what is currently running on my machine (a dual core with 3 GB RAM): __path_to_eclipse__ -showlocation -vm __path_to_java_6_vm__ -vmargs -Xms1024m -Xmx1024m -XX:PermSize=512m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m -Dide.gc=true -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:+ExplicitGCInvokesConcurrent
With this configuration, I am able to work while the thousands of projects are compiling happily in the background. ;-)
What are your experiences using Eclipse as a Java IDE concerning performance?
After googling a while, we found out a combination of VM parameters that seem to work fine. Here's what is currently running on my machine (a dual core with 3 GB RAM): __path_to_eclipse__ -showlocation -vm __path_to_java_6_vm__ -vmargs -Xms1024m -Xmx1024m -XX:PermSize=512m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m -Dide.gc=true -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:+ExplicitGCInvokesConcurrent
With this configuration, I am able to work while the thousands of projects are compiling happily in the background. ;-)
What are your experiences using Eclipse as a Java IDE concerning performance?
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