Being online is addictive indeed

Having a smartphone with unlimited data plan turns you its slave. You remember I said iPhone is evil? Well I fall for that trap. Even though it's not an iPhone but a Motorola Droid 2 Global it has the very same effect.
There're just way too many apps and new ones are coming every day and you can make cool stuff with them ;S
I became a droid...

A little taste of home

There is a wonderful little market we found, thanks to the friends of my wife. It was a huge thing for us. I'm not saying that we starve here ;) and American food is great don't get me wrong, but you do miss the small things from home you got used to.

A solution is Crossroads World market. They even had chimney cake (kürtőskalács)!

This one here is Bavarian (bayerisch), reminds me of Munich I miss much:

Finally! Thank you Nancy!

Tangerine hair studio, San Jose, CA

Back to when life was good

I just have a feeling that the traditional values will come back into fashion really soon. Shoes and make up from the fifties pin-up girl style are already coming back, and watching the American Idol and almost 40% of the contestants are singing country just gives me the same feeling...

I wanna be a Solutions Architect

Well it does involve on sight work which I hate. But I could limit it to 2 days/week. I can put in the contract I'm only flying first class, and if my hourly rate is like $200 the client will respect every second I spend with them and feel honoured.

This is what I'm seeing. We reached a point in the project where we could say educated the client on the tools they bought (without evaluation, of course), and provided them with our solutions and started working on it. So know the ball is on their end. Yes, we'd need input. For that they should work... Solution to avoid this is:

1. Re-arrange project plans so we - as vendor - will be busy restructuring our work to meet the new deadlines
2. Bring an expensive solutions architect on board (see first paragraph) who knows all the tools they've bought so they can ask the very same questions we answered a half a year ago.

Point 1 and 2 applies at the same time.

However I'm not sure if a company who's very existence is depending on the success of this project should follow such strategy. But this is not my problem really, now is it?!

A solutions architect in a situation like that can only answer the questions by reading up the appropriate sections of the User's Manual of the system the client is going to use :) For $200/hr please hit me with a job like that! Shall I put this in my LinkedIn status message? :)

The power of ®Excel™

I haven't seen so many Excel files before as in the US, and I think it is because America is 15 years behind. It is true to fashion, furnitures, methodologies but not for technology. And manufacturers here are really lucky that the rest of the world can keep up with them and will buy their products, because with the attitude I'm seeing they barely could sell anything in this country.

Facts that support this idea:
1) Agile SW development methodologies are available for many years. But here a 'Scrum Master''s most important problem is that he cannot see dependencies between tasks across the whole project till the smallest details.
2) Best solution to track project progress involving team overseas is to send an Excel sheet back and forth in emails. (That's where the title comes from today) There're many online collaboration tools available, but it was a big effort to loose this Excel-Email idea. I think it is because the biggest benefit of the solution is that no one knows where is the latest version ;)

I fought my fights I can say I did fulfil some of my goals but I had to compromise. We didn't go with any state-of-the-art solution but an online version of Microsoft Project. Well better than nothing.