Confront Your Fears

It's been 4 weeks since I started my vacation and almost 4 months since I've decided to leave SAP and I still do not have anything concrete yet for my 'second career' - For all the non-believers, I'm ready to collect the bets :-) Don't get me wrong, I have no complaints and I enjoy this unique period of time.

It’s a very interesting situation and my days now seem much, much different than a few months back (more details in another post). The days are different not only in the location (beach vs. office) the people I spend time with (my kids instead of managers), my clothes (shorts instead of buttoned shirts) but mostly in the level of uncertainty.
At SAP I dealt with uncertainty on a daily basis but it's incomparable to what I have now - my career related activities are less predictable.

I'm checking now some promising but with high risk options and although at this situation there are ups and downs, it gives me a lot of fresh energy. On the other hands it requires me to confront some basic fears. As I believe that fears are great source for energy, I'm ready to confront them…
Talking about fears, I have a small fear of heights (nothing serious), which I tried to confront by climbing a 10 meters wall. Another thing I learned is that technology cannot help you when you need to leave you hand and try reaching a higher anchor. It’s you and only you…

And, as Michael Scofield said “Just have a little faith” :-)

Bugs...

Background:
One of the goals I set to myself lately is to improve my physical fitness by improve my ability to run long distance in good pace. As a gadgets lover, first thing was to buy the right equipment – Nike + iPod. I’m embarrassed to admit that I did not have an iPod until lately so it was a good opportunity to close the gap. The chip in the shoe and the iPod are cool accessories to track running distance and pace (relatively accurately). Nike has (of course) a web-site that allows syncing runs, define goals, track records… (check my runs)

Why am I telling all of that?
A few weeks ago I ran a nice 8K run (in record time) to find out that during my sync the run data got lost somewhere in the cyberspace… The amount of sweat I put into this run did not allow me to let it go so quickly. Looking in several forums I found that it’s a known bug that happens rarely and that there is no official way to re-sync the lost run. Note that whenever there is no ‘official’ solution there must be an ‘unofficial’ one. And indeed there is a ‘simple’ solution:
1. Connect the iPod the PC as a disk drive
2. Find the ‘synced’ folder
3. Copy the relevant run (in an XML format) to the ‘unsynced ‘folder
4. Sync again and magically the lost run appears

This is only one example of a software bug that appears in ‘normal' device. It happens with our phones, DVD players, PlayStation/Xbox and other devices.

Conclusion:
· Software is never perfect and has bugs

· Software is an integral part of our life

=> we would suffer from annoying bugs in many activities we take

Do it yourself

The first week of vacation is over and it was great… What should I do with all the spare time I have now (at least theoretically)? So I prepared a ToDo list of the things I wanted to do but did not have the time to.
One of these things is to build a small cabinet/table for my bedroom. Being an ‘old-school’ guy I took a paper a pencil in order to draw the sketch. Wrong! So not cool! Did they invent the computer for nothing?!

OK. But I do not want to have a building engineering degree and do not want to spend days on days learning a complex CAD program. Surprise… Google… I found a relatively powerful but very simple program by Google that allows drawing 3D models called SketchUp (check how a sketch of a chair is created).

After understanding the principles it took me minutes to design my desirable cabinet.

Unfortunately, I still do not have the 3D printer so I would need to build it the old way (wood, nails, hammer…). Somehow I assume it will not be as nice as it shows on the PC but I will not lose my faith. If worst comes to worst I have planty of other things on my list...