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...

Farewell – Leaving SAP - Personal Post

More than 10 years ago I joined a small start-up company, called TopTier, which was acquired by SAP a few years later. In fact, I joined TopTier right after graduating from the university and since then I did not leave the company. But now it’s going to be changed as I’m leaving SAP…

In these 10 years I experienced so many things, met fascinating people and faced tons of challenges. Basically, all stages in my career were very interesting and meaningful for me. If you are really interested you can check the details on LinkedIn but here I would prefer to tell a few things about myself and about what I learned that you cannot read in any CV.

There are people who wake up in the morning, go to work and get back home in the evening (or at night). There are other people who do not distinguish between work and home (besides the physical separation) and for them the borders are very blurred – they are always at work and feel like they are at home. I belong to the second group and I do not regret that for a sec. SAP (and of course my family) gave me the opportunity to excel in that.

It’s not simple to summarize what I achieved and learned along these years but if I could share with you only 5 insights/tips I took from these years at SAP, these will be:
· Don’t look for shortcuts – “The dictionary is the only place that success comes before work” – there is no substitute to hard work
· Be open to new things - No matter how experienced (or clever) you are, you are (and always be) a student who can and should learn from everyone – therefore always, listen, be open to other opinions, learn and challenge your ‘truth’
· Make a difference - Independently of your role or seniority, your ability to influence is huge, therefore do your best to impact according to your believes
· Keep your own integrity - Always be faithful to yourself as at the end of the day, you need to ‘report’ back mainly to yourself
· It’s all about the people - Organizations might seem they are based on rules and policies but in the end they are based on people – no matter if it’s your boss, your boss’ boss or someone reporting to you, treat everyone as human being

And one bonus tip – don’t forget what is really important in life (for me, as you can guess, is my family)

At SAP there were ups and downs but I had it all, I learned tons of things, influenced up, down and sideways, was able to keep personal integrity aligned with the company’s integrity and of course the best people to work with. And for all of that I’m grateful!

So why the hell am I leaving SAP?
I gave it hours on hours of thoughts before making the decision and there are some logical reasons, like my ambition to take my career forward in a different pace and path, to explore new areas, to face new challenges but probably it is something I cannot really explain as it is what my heart tells me… and I’m going to follow my heart.
The decision was not easy first because SAP can offer a lot and mainly because of the people.

For all the worried people, who worry about what will be the tomorrow for them, the team, the company or something else, it reminds me a line from a nice song "Everybody's Free to Wear Sunscreen!"

“Don't worry about the future; or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday.”


What am I going to do next?
3 months ago, when I’ve decided to leave SAP, I was sure that by this time I would have something. A week ago I was sure it will take me 3 more months and I will be able to spend some time doing nothing. However based on the last days, it seems I know what it will be but it's not final until it is...

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End User Technology

When I started this blog I had in mind to stay up date mainly as a developer or as a tech geek. However during this time I found out a couple of things – one is that many of the things that in the past required writing code are now part of ‘ready to use’ applications. And second that as an end-user I still have a gap to close.
The challenge that I faced in the last week was to publish some pictures/videos from my trip, which is a good excuse to share them – June ’08 Trip (apology for the non-Hebrew readers).

Ok, using Picasa is not such a thing, but downloading pictures from your camera, editing them, uploading them to a site, adding titles and putting the position on the map is not a trivial thing.
All of that caused me to realize a third thing (which is the opposite of the first two) – sometimes these so called simple applications are not so simple.

Another experienced I had that demonstrated that - I bought lately a new HD camcorder and did not understand why there is a ‘one click burn to disk’ button. Maybe it’s because I’m such a guy who always choose the advanced option when installing something or maybe because it’s not so simple to burn a disk. The task of taking a couple of videos I took, edit them a bit (just merging and removing 10 seconds at the end) and upload it YouTube required some good tech skills and a few programs. But this is another excuse to share my first YouTube video – alpine coaster (don’t miss the almost crash) – highly recommended!.

No internet for you

I’ve just returned from a great vacation (link to some pictures will be available soon).
During this week I found how much we depend on the internet. I’m not referring to emails, IMs or facebook ‘twittering’ but to elementary stuff like checking the weather in your next day site, checking opening hours of a park/zoo or getting recommendations for a spontaneous route.

Mobile phones started to provide solutions for being away from a computer and allow you being online wherever you go. Anyhow, it reminded me a nice episode of South-Park. If you like their humor check episode S12E06 ‘Over Logging’

Vacation 2.0

This picture illustrates how my vacation will NOT look like

Yep, it happens also to me, I’m going on a vacation with my family :-)

I remember a few years ago that planning a trip route was involved in opening paper maps all over the floor, marking notes in a traveling book, calling to check availability and making reservations over the phone to find out later that the info was not updated and the zoo moved already to another city…

Today the steps seem differently
· Starting with relevant forums and searching for recommendations on the area you want to travel to.
· Each place has a web site (even if it’s a small guest-house with 2 rooms) in which you can get detailed and updated information.
· Checking availability and making reservation is done online or via email.
· And most impressive is the ability to place the sites on a dynamic map which helps visualize locations, calculate route and make changes on the fly.
As a relative novice planner I’m sure there is much more that could be done (e.g. check traffic, send positions to the GPS…) but for me it was already a nice leap compared to the paper-age.

For that I tried two maps sites – Michelin and Google Maps. It seems that Michelin is richer with more feathers but I liked Google more (less ads, faster…)

However this is not an end-user blog so wearing the developer hat I looked under the hood and understood there are two options for developing using Google Maps:
· Google Maps API – Allows embedding maps in any web site and lets users manipulating them (There is JavaScript version and Flash version)
· Google Mapplets API - Mini-applications that run within Google Maps and add features on top of Google Maps

For the moment I’m spending my time on building the trip although my fingers are tickling to develop something using these APIs (I already found some missing features)

P.S. I updated the Facebook Notify Me app