InVisible

The Stockholm Syndrome is described as when hostages evolve sympathy or empathy with their captors. That’s what I felt yesterday evening, hours before an email went out to 1000 participants of the Lift Conference in Geneva where we are showcasing Mobino as the official mobile payment provider - and we found a critical bug in our iOS app that was sent to review to Apple a good week before. If all goes well, Apple currently takes around 6 days to review and approve an application for the iOS AppStore. We counted on being reviewed and approved yesterday evening, with another day to spare (the conference starts tomorrow). Worst case, we still had the old version in the AppStore that was missing one noteable feature, but still was fully functional and usable. Then however, one of our customer found a problem. And it turned out, that this problem was much much bigger than it first seemed like. In effect, it would have prevented everybody with an iPhone set to regional settings that use a comma for decimal separation to crash. And two countries that have this are France and Germany. Not good. Especially because the crash happened in the version that was available and the one that was in review. ...

One of the things that make me incredibly happy about my line of work is the following: In every case, when things don’t work (there are errors, strange behaviours, weird things) there is a reason. And it is possible to identify the reason, find the cause for the errors and to fix them. I find that very powerful and very reassuring. There is no such thing as chance or randomness in the errors we encounter. There is a (logical) reason for every glitch, error and problem. ...

Living a life can be difficult. Many things can go wrong, work different than expected, lead to problems and sorrow. I’m thankful that I can share all of this with my wonderful wife - and I appreciate how down to earth she tackles all the problems that come our way. Thank you, Daniela!

Every couple of months, we get a visit by one of the great Aikido masters in our Dojo. This weekend, Stéphane Benedetti, the “lazy Aikido” master. 5 hours of Aikido today for me - and I can feel every muscle and bone. Obviously, I’m doing it wrong. Here’s a video from our Dojo, from 2008 where he demonstrates principles. Enjoy (and I will take it easy the rest of the evening) ...

A long long time ago (8 years) three crazy people started a project called Zappata. I was one of them. It started as a super RSS reader (RSS bring hot new technology) and morphed into a peer to peer email server that used authentication via its own implementation of DNS servers with a Public Key Infrastructure, encryption but still was usable by just using a regular email client. Sadly, it never got of the ground - you can - if you are interested - read some of the things I have written about Zappata in the past. ...

As you may have seen in my post about habits I am practicing guitar daily (and have been doing for a bit over a year now). This is not my first go at playing music, I have a long (and unsuccessful) history behind me. The last year I studied guitar basics: Open chords, simple strumming, gradually moving towards more complicated stuff. I would consider myself a beginning intermediate player now. I can accompany many songs, I can do 16th strumming, solo over a blues or over a G major song (Wish you were here), have started with some fingerpicking and am revising the “jazz chords”. Those chords, I learnt when I studied Jazz guitar with Philipp Schaufelberger here in Zurich around 10 years ago. I got this as a birthday gift of my wife (together with a wonderful Fender Telecaster). I played with Philipp for about 2 or 3 years and was way, way over my head the whole time.Philipp never bothered to introduce me to the beauty of an open E chord, but began with the Maj7, Min7, min7b5 etc. Oh - and soloing over Jazz standards of course. I learnt loads from Philipp, but never was able to put the pieces together consistently. I think it helps to have a grasp of music theory when playing (jazz) and sadly, this completely eluded me during that time. (It is starting to come together now) ...