vdboor - Life

Interesting books to read

nospam@example.com (Diederik van der Boor) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 22:35:00 +0100

Over the last few weeks I've been reading some intersting books, which are definitely worth to be read.

The first one is "Barbarians Led by Bill Gates". The book gives an intersting view point about Microsoft by an ex-programmer. How the work has been in those times, how projects were managed.

Interestingly to mention: it seams Windows was in fact seen as an unimportant project after it's initial failure with version 1.0. Management abandoned it, and some programmers kept poking arround to make it better - without all the management pressure. It appears the success of Windows 3.x was completely unexpected to Microsoft too!

The book also tells about the beginnings of the marketing machine - you can say the biggest product of all. However I missed details about Microsoft's (imho unethical) behavior towards the outside world. I guess that stems from the fact the author is an ex-programmer, and he mostly tells what he has seen from his position: how projects were managed. Still an intersting read though, because it gives quite a different view on Microsoft's own developments and successes.

The second book I'm reading right now is "Getting Things Done" by David Allen. And oh my this is real nice piece of work! I've gotten an introduction to GTD before, but with the book everything falls more in place. I'm at page 66 now, and it's already an revelling experience for me. Not only does David advocate a different model of tracking todo's and planning projects, he also explains how his methology actually co-operates with the natural, intuitive, way your mind operates all the time.

Additionally it's really geek friendly, addresses common pitfalls and yet I can manage my stuff with simple tools! I have got a pen+paper with me all times nowdays, I collect the todo-notes in a simple basket at home, and process those later into Kontact notes, Basket or KOrganizer (but even .txt files would do fine!).

Everyone who is doing "knowledge work" benefits from GTD. It works bottom-up, addressing the hectic atmosphere at your work/home first (which prevents you to move forward), and slowly helping you to get more overview of your projects, responsabilities and vision. It does this by helping you getting stuff out of your mind, so your mind can focus itself on more creative stuff, and do what's really good at (which isn't recalling todo's at the moment you actually needed them).

GTD promisis an interesting end result: to overcome stress, feel confident you won't miss something important, feel more relaxed and have more energy to actually do things. And while reading David's reasoning I believe this system will actually work for me, both personally and professionally.

Sinterklaas presents

nospam@example.com (Diederik van der Boor) — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 16:16:00 +0100

Long time no blog... I didn't make much room for it lately.

Previous week we've had Sinterklaas in The Netherlands. It's an annual Dutch tradition, which can be compared somewhat with Santa Claus. At 5 December, Sinterklaas brings presents to both children and adults. Some presents are also camouflaged in an imaginative way, accompanied by a fitting poem to make fun of the recipient.

This year I had to make a nice present for my father. The present contains a pocket-size book about wine. This is the end result after two weekends

The body consists of a soft-drink bottle and two small wooden planks. These planks form a cross which is nailed on the soft-drink bottle. The whole part has been wrapped with paper machÃ©. The small book didn't fit entirely, resulting in the amazing booster effect below the wings

Additionally two pictures of the construction:

The present sticking out:

That was enough creativity for me this year.

Kickoff!

nospam@example.com (Diederik van der Boor) — Mon, 6 Nov 2006 21:46:57 +0100

I've been thinking for a long time about it, but finally decided to start my own weblog. I've been reading planetkde.org for some time now, and really like the sneak previews and thoughts about the progress in KDE.

So this blog also won't be flooded with personal things either. Instead I like to share some programming experiences, KMess improvements, and maybe some random things found at the web. Not sure how it will work out, but I'm all set now to find that out