Well, I understand that it’s a big deal…

The music industry finally lost their last stronghold. The iTunes
Store has become the music distribution channel of
the digital age.

But Steve, when this thing so important to you that you even give it
the apple.com homepage, then why let an intern do the
photoshopping?

Having a smooth day

This morning, I woke up. And I mean, for the first time since I went to bed! Which is unusual because over the last weeks, Amalia either woke me up by walking up to my bedside in her sleeping bag in the middle of the night or simply because she has a bit of a cold and occasionally coughs really heavily. At other times, I woke up by myself with thoughts running around my head, not being able to get back to sleep again.

So, this was a really good night for a change. We had to hurry to get her to daycare in time, but if that’s the price of sleeping through, that’s okay.

On the way to the S-office, as always I tapped the button on my headset. Instead of the podcast playlist I expected to hear, the iPhone started a Smooth Jazz channel in TuneIn Radio. What a relaxing way to get the brain running! That’s what I call a smartphone.

I decided to make this whole day a smooth one. Relaxed, swinging, smiling.

What about you? Leave a comment!

I’m officially an expert on chaos

I just got an invitation to the 4th Chaotic Modeling and Simulation
International Conference in Greece.

Since I’m not an active member of the international physics community,
I can only assume Google Street View now also publishes workplace
photos.

DevOps – Zehn Tipps für Entwickler

http://evan.bottch.com/2010/09/16/devops-ten-tips-for-developers/

1. Verstehe die Beweggründe

2. Beziehe Ops frühzeitig ein

3. Ein Team

4. Ziehe die persönliche Kommunikation vor

5. Ops ist ein Endanwender (und ein Teammitglied)

6. Teile Verantwortung

7. Gib nicht nur Bestellungen auf

8. Halte Versprechen ein

9. Missbrauche die Freundschaft nicht

10. Bilde dich weiter

Und zuletzt noch ein Nachtrag in puncto Höflichkeit: Es schadet nicht, “bitte” und “danke” zu sagen — und “sorry”, falls du was verbockt hast.

Amazon bietet eigenes Linux-AMI für EC2

“Many of our customers have asked us for a simple starting point for launching their Linux applications inside of Amazon EC2 that is easy to use, regularly maintained, and optimized for the Amazon EC2 environment. Starting today, customers can use Amazon Linux AMI to meet these needs.  This just adds to the great selection of AMI options in Amazon EC2 that range from free to paid, giving you access to the operating systems and environments you need.”

The Candy Black Studio

via candyblackblog.com

A dream of an office! (via @jkleske)

Google Streetview: Die Stunde der Hypokriten

Illuminate your thoughts!

via funktionalley.com

“Snakkes”, a speech bubble lamp that can be written on with whiteboard markers.

A clever idea to keep customers up to date

Wufoo greets customers who haven’t logged in for some time with a list of interesting new developments.

Weeknote #18

Organizing

Man, I wish I could buy time. While the company bank account is quite well equipped, I just can’t find the time for everything that gets put on my plate by me or by others. Time Management my ass, it’s Getting Shit Done™ what it’s all about and that means: Differentiate the urgent stuff from the important stuff. And then do the latter.

I have to admit that I struggle to keep that in mind all the time. There are always many unplanned things that threaten to become serious distractions, be it a call from a customer in need of some hand-holding, a disrupted IT service or a sudden stroke of genius that of course should be worked out immediately. I try to be a good GTD disciple, but instead of a “mind like water”, my mind every so often resembles more a flushing toilet.

Learning

Starting a business means starting a new way of learning. I’m amazed what amount of things I’ve learned since I started planning my business in late 2009. After relearning things I had forgotten already and acquiring new knowledge about topics I had only heard about from my directs at my previous job as an IT manager, my sysadmin knowledge today is at a new height. At the moment, I’m doing heavy in-depth reading about MySQL performance and MySQL high availability concepts.

Working with clients is another great learning arena. There’s the client that first consumes a lot of support effort (“How do I create an SSH key?”, “Please help me install git on Windows!”, “Can you explain to me what the Features module is and how I use it?”) and then cancels during the test month nevertheless. There’s the customer that enjoys explaining to me how we should do our job. And there’s the client that is pure pleasure to cooperate with and pays their bills a year in advance.

Marketing

I’m happy to have closed the deal of sponsoring the Drupal-Initiative, the german equivalent of the Drupal Association. All their websites are going to be ported to a DrupalCONCEPT Drupal cluster and we in return will be mentioned as their hosting sponsor.

My next action will be an email newsletter to all my Drupal contacts. I’m unsure how successful this will be, but I’m afraid there are a lot of people that haven’t yet heard of DrupalCONCEPT and I’m definitely going to change that.

And with that, I’ll return to doing important things!