I often skip Dave Pollard’s blog entries, because they are rather long pieces of text. Yet, Dave’s latest posting struck me:

Our traditional education system teaches learned helplessness, and does not teach us how to make a living for ourselves. It perfectly feeds the industrial business-political-economic system, which wants an excess of cheap, frightened, obedient, dependent labour.

That’s basically how I felt at school and (a bit less though) at university. I dropped out of university, because at that point I had learned what I wanted to learn and it did not make any sense to me to invest two more years just to hold a piece of paper in my hands.

In the same blog entry, Dave writes:

Get a bunch of us together, bunches of bunches of us together, to start imagining how this virtuous cycle could work, perhaps using Open Source, telling stories of this Natural Economy as if it already existed.

Right, Open Source is also a way of living, a way of supporting what Dave calls “Natural Economy”. That’s why I only work for Open Source companies. I would die like a flower not getting enough sun and water in a proprietary company - which reminds me of IBM Distinguished Engineer Gunter Dueck, who believes that human beings should be treated like flowers with some of us loving the sunny deserts with little rain and others enjoying the shadows of a rain forest.

Just photographed: the evening sky as seen from my home office in my little home town Munderkingen.

In the footer of a LinkedIn email:

Fact: Harvard Business School graduates have 58 connections each (average)

I did not even finish university and not even at Harvard and I have currently 132 connections. What’s wrong with Harvard Business School?

About 6 years ago I quit my studies and started to regularly earn money. I did quite a few different things: from running my own business to being employed, from software development to marketing.

Experiences I’ve made were good and bad, but mostly good, hence I almost always enjoyed what I did. Whenever terrible things happened, I realized that in the end, all you can do is to keep trusting others.

Of course, I became more aware of what can go wrong and I became more picky on whom to trust and also to which extend. But what it all comes down to is that you cannot be happy in your work life if you refuse to trust and instead become skeptical and bitter.

Those who do not trust, they are quite easy to spot: They take all the fame for themselves and blame others. They are extremely nice to their boss and behave ugly to their subordinates. They are always under pressure and make others feel nervous.

Those who don’t trust others, don’t trust themselves and lack confidence in their own and other people’s abilities. This prevents those without trust from achieving successful results.

I have written a little Wiki entry about how to merge the design of MediaWiki and WordPress, just as I did it on my Web site. The Wiki page explains the setup and you can also download the relevant PHP and CSS files of my design at that page. Use at your own risk.

My wife and me moved to our new house at March 2nd 2007. Find below some pictures and more in my House Building Flickr photo set.

We found the real estate about 1 year before we moved in, around Feb/Mar 2006. It’s at the border of Munderkingen, one of the smallest towns in Germany with roughly 5000 inhabitants. We immediately decided to buy it because of the very calm location and great view.

Next was to find someone who builds our house. We finally decided to go with Manuel Kirstein Baubetreuung, which was a very wise decision now that I can look back on our successful house building endeavor. Here’s the historic picture showing him, my wife and me after signing the contract (no, no, it’s not us being small, but him being tall).

In July, the building actually began:

Of course, just like every German house builder, we had to place a sign that trespassing is prohibited - it felt like claiming my land

Our (fabulous!!!) construction manager Erwin Gerber, my father-in-law (who helped us a lot and whom we jokingly used to call “assistant of the construction manager”) and me inspecting the basement:

The house with the basement and ground floor done:

A few weeks later, the roof is in place:

… that’s when we celebrated the topping-out cereomony with craftsmen and neighbours:

Afterwards, the windows got integrated and a lot of work happened inside. I already wrote about myself setting up a LAN infrastructure in our house. The other thing I did myself was to wall in the bathtub. According to the tiler who later had to fix my mistakes, the result was almost perfect

It was quite spectacular when the company (BauGrund Süd) came who drilled 2x 100m holes for our geothermal heating system:

With the heating in place, it took only some more weeks to get almost everything done inside to be able to move in. This is a rather new picture of our house from where the terrace will hopefully soon be in place (I am sitting behind the top left window while writing this post - can you spot my monitor’s back?):

This is the view outside from the top middle room:

The whole building project worked out very well. We had a good team we could trust (Manuel Kirstein and Erwin Gerber and all the craftsmen). Of course, there were problems, but everyone took care that they get fixed in a good way.

We enjoy living in our new house very much. Every day we realize that the architecture was well thought out. If I remember correctly, we spent more than 4 weeks on figuring out the best architecture before the building started.

It was a huge work and I am happy that it’s done. I spent long nights and weekends on all sorts of tasks and never want to build a house again. Nevertheless, I’d never want to miss the experience, it also taught me a lot about management skills.

Next is the garden, but we’ll take that one easy

Roughly one week ago, me and my wife moved to our newly built house. I made sure that almost all rooms have two ethernet plugs. Actually, I set up the whole LAN infrastructure myself - which I am really proud of.

There are duplex Cat7 cables from almost every room going down to the basement where I reserved a little room (about 2.5 square meeters) for the servers rack (Triton). We have an external Wireless Access Point (Linksys) which I will turn on once the weather is good enough to sit on the terrace.

Here’s a picture of me connecting the cables with the patch panel (Telegärtner, some of the best ones on the market), using an LSA plus tool:

This picture shows the bottom of the server rack, where I mounted the patch panels and the Linksys switch:

Here’s the whole baby, including one Linux file server, one server with Windows for communication and media (phone, fax, least cost router, UPnP), plus one NAS as backup storage device and a 4-port KVM switch (Trendnet TK-400K, works well for a good price) to rule them all via one monitor, keyboard and mouse:

You bet that the server room got finished first

March 1st, I will start my new job at Mindquarry as VP Marketing.

Mindquarry’s Open Source product is enterprise social software, simply called “Mindquarry”. It supports spontaneous collaboration by including a Wiki, task tracker, file management, etc. The software is MPL licensed, version 1.0 will soon be available to the public. There’s an early access program available upon request.
The company was founded in 2006, it is located in Potsdam, Germany close to Berlin. The main investor is HP Ventures of SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner.

I’ll be in charge of strategic and operational marketing and community relations.

What I like most about this new job is:

• I move from an Enterprise 1.0 Open Source company (eZ Systems and its eZ Publish ECM) to an Enterprise 2.0 Open Source company (Mindquarry).
• Having 5 years of PHP programming experience, I am now looking forward towards working for a Java company. Although programming is not part of my job, I am very interested in digging deep into the code to really understand the application’s inner workings.

I actually have known one of Mindquarry’s co-founders for a few years via internet: Lars Trieloff. We only recently met in person. His expertise always impressed me.

I created a dedicated Mindquarry RSS feed for my future postings about Mindquarry, also served by the newly created Planet Mindquarry.

At this cross road of my professional life, I would like to especially thank the following persons who always supported me:

• Zak Greant
• Georg Richter
• Aleksander Farstad

Thanks guys! And of course, thanks to my wife, my biggest supporter

It all started at Feb 13, 2003 and it became true love. I admit, sometimes I cared too little about you, at other times my love for you was hot and intense. I was always true to you and I cannot imagine life without you. We both have gone through an evolution in the past 4 years. We made new friends and are always happy to meet some more. Such is life, such is blogging.

Yours forever,
Sandro

At February 13th, it will be 4 years that I posted my first blog entry - I am still lovin’ it! Let me tell you about some of the changes I had to deal with in those 4 years and what you can do about them.

The most important changes were:

1. My Weblog has moved to different domains (from zzoss.com to sandrozic.de to groganz.com as of today).
2. I changed the software several times (from b2 to a self-made eZ Publish-based blog to Wordpress).
3. There were times when I blogged actively (~5 blogs per week) and less so (1 entry per month).
4. My focus on certain topics varied over time (e.g. from general LAMP-based Web development to ECM, from development to marketing).

Points 1. and 2. lead to the fact that I repeatedly lost some link love, especially on Google and Technorati, because Trackbacks and Pingbacks got lost. Just recently, I managed to import all posts I wrote in my first 2 years of blogging - it’s amazing to see that some of them made it back to be listed among the most visited pages in my site stats (mostly referrals from Google).

What’s most unfortunate is that I could not recover comments to old postings. Well, I could, manually, but that would mean a lot of work. Lost comments is like lost friends.

If you want to avoid the same mistakes, make sure

• to keep your blog at the same domain at all times to keep your permalinks valid,
• to choose a Weblog software that is well supported to avoid migration problems.

When it comes to point 3., it has a lot to do with point 4.: The level of active blogging correlated with what I did. I blogged more actively while I was self-employed, simply to raise awareness which would lead to consulting contracts. After getting employed, there were times when I was simply buried with work that did not require me to blog.

Concerning point 4., I believe that there is nothing you can do about the shifting focus of what you write about. I even think that Weblogs are there to show how individuals change over time and how their interests change.

If I narrowed down my blog to one specific topic (e.g. Open Source ECM), it would not be in sync with my personality. My general interest is in being open and combining Open Source software with the knowledge society. That’s a rather broad topic, but also a thrilling conjunction where most new things happen these days.

The only problem I see is that my tagcloud does not reflect the change of interest. Some tags (e.g. “pear”) appear much too prominent, although they are outside of my scope of interest these days. Hm, I should get a chronological slider for my tagcloud, just as they did here to display Microsoft’s evolution based on a tagcloud.

In the end, it’s all about transparency and authenticity in the blogosphere, including the ability to deal with changes. Blogging is a lot about learning to cope with evolution, reflecting upon what happened and letting others know how to avoid some of the traps. Hope that helps!