This and That – Homepage & Blog of Michael Schobert
I moved my photoblog back to a self hosted site a while ago. In case you are interested, please head over to photomichel.net.
Posted in photography, whatever.
– August 15, 2009
Just a brief note, that the new business of my wife has gone life with a shiny new web site. If you are interested, head over to Durchblick Ernährung (in German). Enjoy.
Posted in whatever.
– January 2, 2009
Update: Selfhosted yet again: photomichel.net.
I am happy to announce my new photoblog over at wordpress.com. I started it for two reasons: 1. to play a bit with a new theme called Monotone, which automatically determines the background for images on the site shows one post at a time (like a real photoblog should do). 2. because I had a couple of shots that I wanted to show to a couple of friends on the net.
Have fun with it or just ignore…
Posted in whatever.
– May 12, 2008
Today is my first day working for a new company. Well, actually it is not just a new company for me, it is a new company: Thomson Reuters.
As you might have read in the last couple of month, Reuters has been aquired by Thomson. Today now is what we’ve been calling “day one” internally. The merger is now effective. Let’s see what comes up in today’s celebrations.
Interesting and challenging times..
Posted in whatever.
– April 17, 2008
Just a quick note that the guys over at PM Hut have republished my little piece “Done or not Done: That is the Question” from a while back. You can find it here, but you have read it anyway, haven’t you? 
Posted in whatever.
– April 1, 2008
I recently stumbled upon a nice deal on the APress website. They offer a different title as electronic book for $ 10 each day (called ebook deal of the day).
After a couple of days I started to be annoyed by looking on the website every day and wondered how I can make sure that I do not miss something interesting.
I went on and wrote a little ruby script with the cool hpricot library by why the lucky stiff. It runs as a cron job every day and sends an email with the title and description.
In case you are interested, here it is (just edit the smtp_server, sender and receiver variables):
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'rubygems'
require 'hpricot'
require 'open-uri'
require 'net/smtp'
smtp_server = 'your_mail_server'
sender = "your@email_address.here"
receiver = ['receiver1@test.xx', 'receiver2@test.xx']
doc = Hpricot(open("http://www.apress.com/info/dailydeal"))
description = doc.search("//div[@class='bookdetails']")
title = description.search("a").first.inner_html
msg = "Subject: [APress Deal of the Day] #{title}\n\nDeal of the day at APress: #{title}\n\n"
(description/"p").each do |p|
msg = msg + p.inner_html.gsub(/<\/?[^>]*>/, "") + "\n\n"
end
msg = msg + (description/"div[@class='footer']").inner_html + "\n\n"
msg = msg + "Order at http://www.apress.com/info/dailydeal\n"
Net::SMTP.start(smtp_server) do |smtp|
smtp.send_message(msg, sender, receiver)
end
Posted in scripts.
– March 29, 2008
Disclaimer: This will be my first politically biased post, but here I can not stay silent in this case.
In a recent edition of Financial Times Deutschland I read an article reporting that Josef Ackermann CEO of Deutsch Bank calls for public help to support banks that had been hit by the Subprime crisis.
I do understand that he talks about stability of the economy and jobs in the end of the day, however this is the guy that always argued that in banking and business is to much intervention by administrations.� Further he is one of the guys – amongst most of his colleagues for sure – filled his (private) pockets doing risky business and asking the public to stay out of his way.
Now, loosing the money (due to risky business) the public should pay the bill? Will these guys get a bonus for collecting public money to fill there companies losses after all? Unbelievable thinking if you ask me. I find this a rather cynical move – even if he tried to correct his statements later…
Remark: Links (Articles) are in German (my apologies), however you should be able to find similar discusses in basically every business press these days.
Posted in whatever.
– March 20, 2008
The recent issue (2.08) of the German magazine “Business Technology” has an interview with management consulting luminary Reinhard K. Sprenger (quite famous for his book “Mythos Motivation”).
I am not sure if I buy all his theories about management mentioned in the interview (though it would be interesting to see some evidence for them, I should look in his books for this I guess), however a couple of his statements actually made me think and quite intuitively they make sense (again, some evidence would be good to support this).
The first refreshing thing I read was that he actually said problem instead of challenge. The point here is that teamwork and cooperation these days is often pushed per se without having a common problem to work on. This often fails when there is no clearly defined problem to work on or to state it otherwise a common goal to work towards.
So as a prerequisite to initiate teamwork we would need a common understanding of the problem as well as the goal for the combined effort. This should be explicitly defined by and for all participants or (to stress another buzzword) stakeholders.
In addition to that I see the need to clearly understanding the interests of all people involved. I see it actually quite often that objectives (including and in particular those that are bound to a bonus or commission (say money)) are quite contradictory to effective teamwork. Many times these drivers (or agendas) needs to be adjusted by management to facilitate (or enable) team work.
Decisions are only needed if there is a situation at hand where there is no obvious answer – meaning there are as many good reasons to turn left as there are good reasons to turn right (otherwise if there would be a bias for either one, no decision would be needed).
This actually happens quite often and managers need to decide based on improper or insufficient information.
Sprenger says that a good manager should feel at home within this situation and should be able to come to a good decision due to his ability of creating a good contextual model to support the decision – particularly without all the details. Sprenger says that ability stems from a good (humanistic) education – I often call it “common sense” (“gesunder Menschenverstand” in German).
I – by the way – think that this ability does not only make a good manager but also a good employee, a good consultant etc.
If an organisation gets risk averse, if nobody is willing (or able) to make mistakes and take risks, innovation is dead. And so in creativity and speed. If people just start to do something if they are 100% sure they will not make a mistake, barely anybody is moving at all or just doing the true and tried standard work.
It is up to the management to create an infrastructure and environment were mistakes and failures are accepted (as long as we learn from them).
Posted in leadership, management.
– March 18, 2008
Bruce Tate writes about this in his book “From Java to Ruby“. But what does this mean?
If you are running projects or are managing a team/company (for that matter), you have been told to manage risk(s). Chances are good that you also have been told that risks should be avoided or at least mitigated. Therefore risks are bad, aren’t they?
Well, there is an economic saying: “stagnation mean regression”. This means you need to progress and you need to do new things to do so. So you go for chances. This in turn implies that you take some risks in order to gain (economic advantage). In general you take the more risk(s) the higher your gain may be (unless you run into a rare lucky case).
So taking risk(s) is good and important after all?
It sure is. However you need to know what you do, you should take those risks intentionally (instead of accidentally).
That is what risk management is all about.
Posted in management, project management.
– August 26, 2007
I just received a new toy I have ordered for our upcoming vacation: A GPS data logger to allow geo tagging of my photos.
I basically had the choice between this one and the Sony GPS CS1KA. After reading this review of the DG-100 (with a comparison to the Sony) I opted for the Globalsat one and found an online shop in Germany.
Two days later I got that beast. First test are quite impressive (haven’t tried to geo tag photos though). Only thing I found so far is that it takes quite a long time to come online, lock the sats and start recording.
Another pay-off compared to the Sony is that no geo tagging software is included, but there is a lot of stuff on the market. I will try them later on.
I am now very curious how this will work out for the photos on our Scotland trip…
– July 7, 2007
