Thomas Michelbach

Getting things done

Found on a yellow note on my desk and declared as work in progress:

- get jquery.geolocation plugin ready
- buy those YSL high tops
- get the microframework done
- do 10x200lbs on the benchpress
- do blog at least something sometimes

A logbook

In order to keep track of my advancements in life, I’ve decided to invest in a new Moleskine - totally analog book-keeping - not only for my expenses but also for my progress in bench-pressing and a more balanced nourishment.

Even if you can’t reblog or like my entries there - i do (like ‘em)

Ideas worth spreading

Below you see my all time favorite TED talks.
 
Arthur Benjamin does Mathemagic
Toys from the future
Elizabeth Gilbert on genius
Woody Norris invents amazing things
David Merrill demos Siftables
Dan Ariely asks are we in control of our own decisions
Joseph Pine on what consumers want
 
Spread the idea(s)!

What's app'ening? - Research

As ‘research’ is a very broad field we distinguish between basically two different types of research: scientific and literary research on the one hand and finding practical relevance for our application on the other hand.

Torsten and Sebastian are focusing on the pratical part of the research generally by finding different scenarios and problems where our application could be suitable. I’ve recently spend a lot of time in the library delving into the main problems of commands, (human/machine) learning and dialog based information exchange. As we know where we wanna go this is a quite usefull way to figure out how to get there.

We’re solving our reseach problem by a “divide and conquer” approach: dealing with smaller challenges and reassembling them to finally finish research/conceptual work.

What's app'ening? - Introduction

In order to keep myself motivated I decided to do a series of posts named “What’s app’ening?” regarding the progress we’re currenty making with our first ‘real’ application. I’m declaring it a ‘real’ application, because development deals not only with programming but also with research in a scientific and technical way: not that we didn’t do that before - but this is the first time it’s for ourselves and not for a client’s project.

Right now I’m not able to focus 100% on the application’s concept because there’s too much client work around that keeps me on the move but I’m optimistic that this will change during the next weeks. Even though we see each of our clients as family, client work is not as satisfying to me as working for my own (respectively our) interests is.

So, what’s app’ening? We’ll see.