Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

Well, it seems that my first year at the OU is done and if nothing went amazingly wrong then I should have my Certificate in Management in my pocket. Feels good. I wrote the test in Frankfurt yesterday which was a very interesting day anyway.

It started the night before when I read that TMF will start charging for their discussion boards. Roughly $30 per year. They will remove the ads and add several new features as well as develop new ones on request. I was wondering about weather I should do it or not but then decided to pay for it as I really met wonderful people and learned a great deal on the boards. And for what I have gotten out, $30 is nothing. But then, a mail arrived.

Congratulations! You have been awarded a free one-year subscription to the Fool Community — no strings attached.[…]
This is our way of thanking you for being a valued contributor to the Fool Community in the past.

Well that’s settled then. I will stay. The discussion is going on like crazy with the “Improve the Fool” board alone getting over 500 posts since yesterday morning.

Then I got up early yesterday and started my trip to Frankfurt. The trip was nice, filled with reading and trying to talk with a turkish guy to explain to him that the train will be late and that yes it is going to Frankfurt. He also told me something but I had no clue whatsoever what he was saying
I found the location of the test relatively fast but had over 1 hour to kill so I went into a small coffee shop and soon started talking to an elderly woman who was telling me everything about her studies (International Politics something) and that she got an electronic parking card now and is very proud of that. She told me everything about her choice of dress and he talks with the person from the university giving out the permits which did not seem to be easy mostly because he wanted to first give parking places to younger students. Weird. She also asked me dead about what I was studying and in retrospect I have to thank her a lot. First of all she gave me her luck for the day But the bigger thing was that I explained to her what I am studying in a few examples and one of those was the gaps model of meeting customer expectations, or not meeting them. This was one of the questions in the test later on. It was really nice being distracted by her for the last hour and not going through all the papers again.

The test went very well but I am a bit worried that I wrote too much again. We will see, in two months when the grades come back.

I then met Marcus, whom I haven’t seen in a long time, and had a wonderful time talking about a million things and eating at an american sports bar. It’s amazing how much he can eat, really amazing. I still can’t get it into my head.

One of the most interesting things was probably sitting in the train and somehow starting off a very good conversation with somebody next to me and we talked for the entire train ride. He is Product Innovation Manager at Creon Lab Control. What a nice titel After talking over what I do, what I would like to do in the future, what he does, what the company does, neural networks, finding parts of molecules in huge test samples, aibo, computer gaming, artificial inteligence, … wonderful talk really. It has been amazing. He told me to come over some time to the company to take a closer look and I might just do that because it sounded very interesting.

So in short, read a lot of great things, finished a year of studies, wrote a good test, met an old friend, met two interesting people and found a new cool company to possibly work at. Wonderful day.

While I still believe that the biggest single thing speaking for 3G is the need for more capacity, the general usefulness and features that people want to use are still of interest to many, including me. What will people really want to use?
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Just finished Life Is So Good by George Dawson and Richard Glaubman. George Dawson is now 102 and learned to read at the age of 98. He now lived in 3 centuries and the book is full of amazing stories. His grand parents were slaves and he worked hard all his life.

There are lots of interesting stories in there like a friend of him being hanged because a white girl thought it was safer to say she was raped by a black man than admitting to having sex with a white guy before marriage and being pragnant from him. Nobody said anything when the child was white. Dawson traveling up to Canada and Mexico, wondering why there are no drinking fountains for black people and never fully knowing what to make of the fact that white and black people just ate together in the same restaurant. Paying railway tickets whenever he could but also riding the rails by jumping on a train and almost getting shot one time. Working on building dams for years without a brake and still paying double for a mule because the owner was sick and old and he thought it was the right thing to do.

The emphasis is really strongly on the fact that there is no poor work, just work poorly paid and poorly done. A great book with lots of perspectives that shows you how good you are off and how humble you can be in the worst of times.

He now fills the class room learning to read because other people who were a lot younger said that if he can do it at his age then they can too.

Great book to read I can only suggest.

Wonderful story about the Auction at Be, Inc. at The Register:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/23718.html

I have to say that from time to time MS really knows how to build something that is nice. My old mouse broke down and it was a real pain moving the mouse pointer around. Saturday I bought an MS Intellimouse Explorer 3, the optical one and I have to say that I love it. It works so much better than any other mouse I have used! Plain wonderful.