What I mean by media player here basically is a music player with the capability

1. to create playlists
2. to burn audio CDs using these palylists
3. to create a listing of tracks including track number, title and duration of the track.

While most media player support my first two requirements most fail with the third.

And most media player I tried actually failed at all running properly under Windows Vista. itunes for WIndows, Winamp and a newer version of SonicStage all are pretty much unusable on my system: they respond very slowly and after a while don’t respond at all and freeze on my Vista system. I guess I have to blame Vista more for this than those tools, but anyway: no useful option for me.

I am using a very old version of SonicStage on my old Windows XP box successfully to do what I want. It stores playlists in a Microsoft Access Database (mdb) file and I used OpenOffice Database to connect to this database and query the list of tracks I need to produce the CD Cover sheets.

I also tried the native Windows Media Player on my Vista box. It doesn’t support my third requirement, there is no way to show the track number in the playlist and no way to get it printed or exported somehow. And I hate their design how to edit playlists. I never will grasp why I have to load it into the right sidebar in order to edit it and how to save my changes; I am always confused by this and have no idea what steps to perform in what sequence.

Then I re-discovered Media Jukebox 12 by J. River Inc., a free version of their awesome media software. I had installed it long ago on my computer but after an initial trial did not use it anymore and almost forgot about it. I had almost decided to uninstall it but luckily I didn’t and gave it another trial in these days.

It turned out to be the best choice for my requirements. Creating and managing playlists is very convenient with their easy to use user interface, I can burn audio CDs and most important: it provides a numbered track list and I can either print a CD Cover sheet right away ( and may be print it to a pdf file and then re-use the list of tracks through copy/paste with my graphics program I use to create my own CD Sheets ) or even copy the track list to a spreadsheet application and re-use it from there. That’s where most other media player fail – besides their usability under Vista in general: easy access and copying to clipboard or printing of the track list.

My odyssey came to a happy ending: Media Jukebox 12 rocks !

OK, folks, we are in the process of planning a 3.5-week-trip to New Zealand.

We plan to explore the North and South island and since we love hiking I would love if you could come up with some good hiking recommendations here in my blog as a comment to this posting.

What good day hikes can you recommend in New Zealand ? Can be anything from a 2 hour to an 8 hour walk, or even a 2- or 3-day hike with over-night stay in a cottage or hotel; we don’t plan to do any camping out there with a tent.

Please let me know your ideas and experiences, hikes you have done already are heard about, links to good sites describing those hikes or book recommendations.

Sometimes it is hard to keep your brain under control. Because a lot of things are processed more or less automatically without requiring your attention. Which is good and probably even vital to survive.

I became aware of this fact this morning when listening to one of our radio stations here in Germany during breakfast. They have a little game running during which one candidate is asked tricky questions for 30 seconds and all he or she has to do is to respond and avoid three words: “Ja” (“yes”), “nein” (“no”) and “Bonn” ( the former capital of Germany ).

You would think this is easy to achieve. You have to concentrate for just 30 seconds and you have to apply a very simple rule: avoiding those three words. I tell you: most of the candidates fail. Because when asked a question – and of course the questioner knows how to do this the tricky way – those words simply flow into your response automatically and suddenly you lost. The point is you have to communicate in a very different way. Instead of letting your brain fire pre-defined response phrases you have to slow down and review each phrase before your allow your mouth to send it out. It is unbelievable how hard it is to do this, and even you do this your checking might be incomplete and you have escapes.

The rule looks simple at the beginning, but may be is a bit harder. The German word “ja” is part of other words like “jawohl” and often also used as a filler word, thus there are so many opportunities that you use it even you did not want to use it.

People are forced into a very unnatural communication mode to do this checking of phrases before releasing. It is not the way we communicate. If you get a question and you would like to answer “ja!” but then have to find an alternate response it is very hard to generate one, it takes time and the new response somehow will sound weird and artificial.

"Reigh’s Brain rlwat" by Reigh LeBlanc.

A nice example of how tasks are automated in our brain. Think about how many things you do when driving a car without even realizing. You know how difficult it is when learning how to drive a car: you have to think through every task you perform. The automatic execution of tasks later on is a true indicator that finally you really learned how to drive a car. The stopping of thinking as a true indicator of maturity, experience, skill, professionalism ? Interesting thought.

Does it sometimes happen to you that during a meeting or phone call you say something which a moment later falls into the category of things better not said ? Blame your brain for this ! It has been doing too much in automatic mode instead of consulting your conscious.

While with some discipline you might learn how to control your language it becomes much much harder to control your body language. Not a big point currently in the world of web conferences and phone calls, but in a meeting your brain might generate a lot of messages through your body you actually don’t want to send out. But – why not ? Your brain may be less of a liar than your conscious, those automated responses may make you appear more natural and frank than your artificial responses and finally foster truth, openness and trust. Another interesting thought, don’t you think ?

… we all know this, right ?

What I actually mean: the physical size of a person does not determine whether he or she would be a great leader, right ? You need to be big with other things to become a great leader – like your capability to deal with people, to communicate, to facilitate, to organize. A lot of “soft skills” and “social skills” are needed to form a real leader and I always wonder to what extent one can learn and train this and to what extent it simply is part of your personality.

I just have been reading “Why Do People Resist Leadership?” in the Dharma Consulting Blog to learn that people usually love and hate leaders at the same time. Or to phrase it with the great quote by Marty Linsky used in this article: “Leadership is disappointing people at a rate they can absorb.”.

A great resource to find lots of example how not to become a great leader of course are the Dilbert comic strips. One brilliant sample you can see below about the art to delegate.

Since October last year I am playing Atlantica, one of those MMPORGs which I think is similar to WOW ( I guess since I don’t know WOW yet ), but this one is free to play. I am fascinated by the real smart reward & reputation system of this game and how it keeps your motivation on a high level and thus keeps you going.

You level-up based on your experience and of course the higher you get the more experience you need to level-up. On a higher level you gain only little experience by fighting low level monsters, thus you have to deal with the difficult ones to grow your experience. At the beginning of a typical quest you just have to fight one party of monsters, occaisonally you might run into a second or third party in parallel if this place is very crowded. Later in the quest you are forced to enter those called shadow dungeons where it is almost guaranteed that you have to fight two or three parties in parallel. If you are not strong enough at that time you might decide to collaborate with other players and form parties yourself. Fighting in a team is rewarded by gaining extra experience points; basically experience made by one of your team members contributes to your experience growth as well.
I love this concept since it simply pays back to collaborate and get in touch with other players to accomplish missions. This "shared experience" gaining has given birth to what is called LDP in the game ( "Long Distance Parties" ): these are parties of player who are actually strong enough and don’t need to fight in parties, they just form one to boost their experience growth. Or if someone isn’t fighting currently he joins the party of someone else just to keep experience points coming in.
Atlantica also has a mentor concept and often a mentee joins the party of his mentor who typically is on a much higher level to profit by his experience growth.

As I said already: on a higher experience level you gain little experience points when fighting low level monsters. But sometimes you have to do it simply to gain important items or money. This then is a typical trade off you also have to make in real life sometimes: money versus experience, dollars versus skill improvement, learning and excitement. In other words: sometimes you have to do the boring stuff to earn money instead of doing "exciting projects" to grow your skills.
In that sense it is amazing how close such a game matches with reality. One blog article is actually not sufficient to describe all aspects of it, one could write an entire book about it. And even I play it almost a year already ( and have reached level 79, 120 is the maximum currently ) there are still new aspects of that reward and reputation system I learn from my guild buddies or other friends each day. It must have taken the developer of that game years to come up with a clever and complex system like that.

Let me simply list a few more features of the game I have not mentioned so far which also play a role for your "career" and "business" in Atllantica as well:

• Like in real life money plays a role as well.
• You can carry it with you or keep it on your bank account. In the first case you risk some loss when loosing a fight against an opponent.
• You get some interest rates for money you keep on the bank, but you have to pay for transactions ( deposit or withdrawel )
• You get money through fighting
• or crafting items and selling on the market
• or exchanging books and selling on the market
• You learn extra ( magic ) skills through books
• You can boost your intelligence, dexterity and other attributes in several ways, e.g. also through getting equipement and weapons. You can craft those on your own, buy it on the market, get it during a battle, upgrade it. To craft you need to have an appropriate crafting skill and you have to buy or collect material. You can also learn crafting skills from other players. The higher your level is the higher level equipment you need, which of course gets more and more expensive, thus you need more and more money.

In some sense this reward & reputation system mirrors real life to a great extent. In some sense I wished the reward & reputation system in large companies would work the same way: e.g.

• a straight and objective experience measurement system. No "self-certifications" any more, you get experience points right away after you have accomplished something, not once a year based on some fuzzy rating delivered by your boss which might be more based on statistical or political aspects than anything else,
• a reward for team play and mentoring
• a permanent growing of your skills by ensuring your future missions ( e.g. projects ) fit to your current skill level in a way that they ask you to do a little more than you have done before; that’s what a healthy growth is all about: the "little more" over time.
• earning money or some form of virtual credits you can use for future projects

This motivation mechanism in those games actually is that efficient that it can become dangerous. In the recent "bild der wissenschaft" magazine there has been an article about pathological gambling, a new disease of modern societies. WOW is mentioned as THE example of a dangerous game making people addicted and disabling them to survive in real life. MMPORGs are drugs for those people who use it to escape their real life, even to an extent where it becomes pretty dangerous for them: they loose their jobs or stop finding a new one, they even forget to eat and sleep.
Used in the right dosage however those games can provide a great experience. I know, reality is not a game. And of course we do not fight monsters, instead we try to help our customers and sell our solutions. But wait a minute, all the obstacles getting into our way – technical defects, plan changes, issues, change requests, budget cuts, team conflicts, politics, conflicting stakeholder interests – aren’t those like monsters in those games lurking at every corner waiting for us to get them out of our way ? What else can we learn form games like Atlantica for our corporate culture and the way we do our business ? Probably more than we initially thought when we said: "Hey, that is just a silly game !"

Before we developed our capability to use languages – to talk and listen by using an agreed upon vocabulary – there was probably no way to have some form of complex communication. Before paper and writing had been discovered there was simply one option: talk to someone face-to-face. After that one could decide whether to write a letter or meet someone to talk to probably after a multi day or week travel. And we rarely had the idea to communicate with people on a different continent.

"Tower of Babel" by ThomasThomas.

The phone invented more than 100 years ago opened up a third option and a real revolutionary one. Ten years ago many options had been added meanwhile, according to this 10-year-old article: audio tapes, video tapes, CD-ROMs, radio, fax, internet, e-mail, TV, video conferencing. What is meant by “internet” ? Well, remember, that was the Web 1.0 era, where a few could publish their messages through internet sites. Instant messaging and newsgroups are not mentioned as well but I guess have been available already to some extent, may be still too exotic in these days.

While reading through this list I realize how many options have been added meanwhile in the Web 2.0 era: blogs, wikis, photo and video and audio ( podcasts ) sharing sites, profile and social networking sites, bookmark sharing and survey sites, twitter, Q&A tools and collaborative document sharing sites. I believe: we experience a sort of exponential growth in the number of communication options.

This means that we have to invest some of our time in finding the right communication tool for a given purpose. Face-to-face, instant message, e-mail, comment on a profile page, blog post, wiki page, a document sent via e-mail or shared in any other way, a tweet, a  phone call, a video conference, a meeting in a virtual world ? And for each option we have to find out: company internal or public ? Within the boundaries of an intranet or going out into the wild wild web ?

Will this actually lead to a smarter society, will this increase the body of knowledge of the human race or a particular community or enterprise, or are we more and more running into confusion how to use all these options right, how to communicate efficiently ? Are we encountering a new Tower of Babel phenomenon ?

Instead of becoming smarter, don’t we spent much time on trying to consolidate all these sources of information and to worry about how to use what communication vehicle efficiently ? Is there any value add in developing tools to feed or integrate multiple communication tools ? Is it good to have multiple social networks which are different ? Isn’t it more good luck than intention to find some useful information ? How much time do we spend each day to learn new communication tools and communicate about communication tools instead of focusing on something more important ? is there anything more important ? Why do we fail to take options away, to consolidate and to reduce complexity ? Is the human race or an enterprise as a collective unit intelligent, are its individuals, and where are we heading with this ? What dominates in our life: competition or collaboration ?

Am I getting too far with my questions ? Definitely yes. I will need to write some more postings to really sort out this brain dump.

This is an excerpt of last weeks “fun@work “ posting in my company internal blog ….

Something to surprise: my favorite "I really didn’t know this" of the week – about neutron stars

Did you know that a neutron star typically has a diameter of 20 kilometer, that 1 cubic centimeter of neutron star material weights 1 billion tons, that the gravity of a neutron star is 1 billion times higher than on our planet, thus a particle would need two third of light speed to escape, we probably have 1 billion neutron stars in our galaxy, that a neutron star is born out of a supernova with amount of material below 4 to 5 times of our sun, otherwise a black hole would arise, that similar to our planet neutron stars have a solid surface but are liquid inside, and have a supra liquid zone full of neutrons ? Source: bild der wissenschaft 7/2009

Something to enjoy: my favorite photo  on flickr under a Common Creative license – about a red bus … where ?

"IMG_8682" by gengish. Nice shot by gengish skan from Italia. Unfortunately it does not come with any useful title or description. I would guess it has been taken in London. Does anyone recognize the building in the background ?

Something to talk about: my favorite quote of the week – about being nice to others

Wait a minute, a comic strip in the section where usually quotes appear ? Did my blog editor mess up this posting ? Nope, this Garfield comic strip comes with a nice quote, don’t you think ?