No, I won’t describe the revolutionary features of the new iPhone announced this week by Apple at Macworld Expo. Check out Apple’s website and – MUCH better – watch Steve Job’s keynote for that.
The fact that Apple only wants to ship the iPhone in June in the US and in the fourth quarter of 2007 in Europe, however, leaves plenty of “room for improvement”. Many of my own thoughts about the coolest mobile device ever to see the light of this world appear in an New York Times online article. Of course, there are zillions of blogs rating about all the issues iPhone supposedly has. Paul Kedrosky runs just one of them.
The device itself is a KILLER, yes, but I’m eargerly awaiting some information regarding the carriers in Europe. While Apple opts for Cingular as the exclusive carrier in the US I think that strategy won’t work here in Europe. The market is simply different. The problem here is that wonderful features such as Visual Voicemail (“An industry first, Visual Voicemail allows you to go directly to any of your messages without listening to the prior messages.”) require a carrier to make modifications to his infrastructure and his services. How many carriers are willing to do that? At what costs? What does Apple have to offer them in return?
Of course, one major shortcoming I expect to see corrected is the lack of 3G network support. I think 3G support is a MUST for any multimedia mobile device.
I’m in no doubt that the iPhone released in June to the US public will be quite a bit different from the one Steve Jobs presented this week.
Last weekend I learned about Fotofeeling; the website of a German couple who’s totally into photography. My wife and I were totally mesmerized by the wonderful photos those two took back from Africa and elsewhere. It was a quick decision to order the Africa 2007 calender. In fact, all the photos and helpful information about Namibia, Botswana, and South Africa awoke our interest for those countries. We definitly plan to spend a month or more there as soon as time and budget permits.
By concidence, I found out that a fellow Toastmaster from the Toastmasters club in Zug, Switzerland, has spent most of his life in Namibia and South Africa. Another wonderful source of information! That’s how life just happens.
Where are though?
Scrum is a lightweight agile method for, well… basically for (project) management in general, but mainly applied in software development. The Internet provides piles of information about implementing Scrum, the Scrum Alliance … there are two entries at Wikipedia etc. So, help yourself if you’re looking for a more efficient, more natural way to manage your projects. Ken Schwaber’s talk at Google (movie), though, makes for the best of all introductions to Scrum. You hear most of what you need to know in an hour.
I’m Swiss, I live in Switzerland/Schweiz, and it’s quite true that the Swiss in general are often a bit reluctant when it comes to adopting new/better “stuff” (technologies, methodologies, etc.). It certainly is the case for Scrum. My current employer is probabely the one company in Switzerland/Schweiz with the highest number of Certified Scrum Masters – we’re 4. And Lucern, the company’s home base, is most likly the city with the highest density of CSMs in Switzerland/Schweiz – we’re 6.
That said, you can imagine that finding a new job here as a Senior Software Engineer can be pretty tough if you’re looking for an agile software shop; or one that wants to introduce Scrum with my help. Drop me a line if
- you are CSM, live in Switzerland/Schweiz, and are NOT one of Joseph Pelrine’s “desciples” (I’m sure he wouldn’t like such sectarian terms…). There’s a good change the Scrum movement in Switzerland doesn’t know you, yet
- if you need a Senior Software Engineer (J2EE) and provide an agile environment OR – even better – if you want me to help establish one!
Btw, the German translation of ‘Switzerland’ (Schweiz) was added to this entry to have it indexed by the search engine spiders under both ‘Scrum Switzerland’ and ‘Scrum Schweiz’. This should help folks who query Google and other search engines with German terms find my blog. Wonder if it works.
Since my wife is Japanese it came as a natural choice to me to learn Japanese. For a westerner like me Asian languages are far from every other language that we might be familiar with. The first and most obvious reason are the different character sets. It took me quite a while to memorize the two Kana sets Hiragana & Katakana. I’m still struggling with Katakana…
How do you practice the vocabulary of a new language? There are tons of strategies available to you…none really seemed appealing to me. C’mon, there mus be easier ways to memorize what fridge means in Japanese than to write the translation onto the backside of a small card, no? So, yesterday I started decorating our home with white labels!
I went to a stationery, bought some ten sheets of Avery-Zweckform L6023REV (stick & lift category for easy removal) labels, and sat down in front of the computer with my wife. We went through dozens of objects in our appartment and I typed their Japanese names into the prepared Word template. I then printed the labels and attached the label to the corresponding object. Nice!
As I am typing right now I’m confronted with that white label on my keyboard that says ‘キ－ボ－ド’ on it. Very easy to remember…
Here a few more examples:
‘tansu’ – the closet
‘sofaa’ – the sofa
‘hikidashi’ – the drawer
I find wordpress.com a decent place to set up your own blog at. It's free, it's got a nice admin interface and the available templates look good. I have to admit though that I haven't tried many other options as I'm currently a bit under pressure. My wife Akiko and I are leaving for a two month trip to North America next Tuesday and there are still quite few things that need to be arranged. Look out for a travel dairy here at this blog!