My life at the Cloud, what I learn and what I do
Writing about my own workspace some days ago, I submitted some shots of it over at deskography where I also subscribed to the RSS feed, per which I now found this crazy desk:
Desk by Mitch Haile
At his web-site Mitch Haile wrote a FAQ about his desk. Have a look and go crazy!
Note: I definitely would love to have such a desk but just can’t afford something so expensive at the time, being a student!Michael Mistretta wrote a great post about ‘Talent and hard Work’ pointing out that Talent isn’t the main part of success or great work.
People use talent as a crutch — an excuse: “I couldn’t possibly do such and such because I’m nowhere near as talented as so and so.”
That’s what people use to say to me as well. And I don’t understand that! And if I tell them that I have to work hard get the sings the way I want them to be, they tell me that they can’t — what?
Maybe my value is determination, persistence, passion, a stubborn refusal to say “I quit”.
And maybe, just maybe, that’s more valuable than Talent.
That’s the point for me! I have no ‘birth-talent’ — or I just don’t know it yet, if something like that even exists — but I like different things and am passioned about them which makes me work hard to get better. One part of which is my writing and I think all this thoughts fits very good with my ‘Why I write English‘ post. I try to get better even if I’m ‘normally’ a not that talented person in writing and getting better at it is hard work but I’m not going to stop!
I’m thinking we should all take a break from email for 30 days. Those we have to communicate with we could call or talk to in person.
~ Via Michael Mistretta and Shawn Blanc
I think the problem is not just email, it’s the whole communication. From Twitter to Email back to RSS. Some stuff is just not of value. I started to fight that in the last days by deleting some social-networks and cleaning up my friend-lists.
Great, I published a post about having a clean desk to get work done and Michael Mistretta posted a tweet about the same topic:
A cluttered desk equals a cluttered mind. And an empty desk equals …well… nevermind.
A useless about page is one of the worst things you can have at a blog, right? I’m now — finally — about to change that. The last post was about why I write English — and also the first partly completing the about page —, this one is about my Mac Desk or Workspace — you choose how you call it.
For me its like for many creative or freelancing people — OK, I’m still at school but hey, I do my projects on side. Working at a desk is just impossible if it’s cultured with papers and other crappy stuff. Which means, that I normally have nothing lying around, especially if I want to enter the creative zone. The only things which are allowed to be there, are my MacBook, secondary screen, phone, a folder containing papers belonging to current projects I’m working on and — of course — my Keyboard, Mighty Mouse and Graphic Tablet.
The Whole Desk
My Two Chairs
Little about my desk. It’s 2.4m (94.49 inch) wide and 90 cm (35.43 inch) deep. It’s white which is one of the colors I like most. There are usually two chairs in front of my desk, one with a back which is chilly and one without which I like best for long sessions cause it doesn’t let me lay back and forces me stick to the work to get done.
Like I already sad, having a clean workspace is key for me to get creative or even just to get some work done. I can’t concentrate if there are many papers — which don’t belong to the project I’m currently working on —, dust or other stuff lying around. If you look at the pictures you’ll probably notice that there are two colors which dominate the room. White and Red. I love the white because it lightens the room and I also love the red because it’s a strong contrast to the white which is supposed to let me think out of the box and makes me fell good.
In the end it comes down to a clean, ordered and uncluttered work-area which makes me happy and helps me to get work done. The best part is I’m happy when I can sit down at my desk to get work done rather than sitting at school at desks which are not that great designed and chairs which are not comfortable.
The MacBook plus Screen, Keyboard and Mouse
What is your thought about the workspace? Is it worth spending some time and money to design a great work-area and to keep it clean? Or don’t you care about the place you are working in? What do you think? Feel free to leave a comment.
Writing this blog in English — which is not my first language — I got some feedback about my writing, which was not so positive. Some people mentioned the quality of my writing and that there are problems with grammar and the spelling of words. That being sad, I started to think about the reason why I blog English, rather than German and why I write in general?
I always had problems writing something at school and for personal usage. My hand writing is not the best, my grammar and spelling was and still is kinda bad. But the quality of writing does not change if you don’t write. But just writing for my own just bored me. Don’t get me wrong, for me it has value to write down the day at the end in some quick lines but just writing a few lines a day wasn’t enough at someday and I started to write more. Doing that, plus some other reasons, I started this blog (there are more reasons for this blog but not for this post). I wanted to write, I wanted to put my thoughts out there and I wanted to get better writing skills. Even if that means getting critics some days. That’s the why I write.
I started to learn English in 3rd grade of school. Till now I never stopped learning English – which adds up to now over 10 years learning English at school. But since some years, I have started to train my English even more, especially listening and reading. Why and how I did this is a post for its own, for now the reasons why I train my English, which are pretty obvious. English is the worlds most important language — followed by Chinese? — which means if you can understand and speak English, you are able to communicate with most parts on this planet. You can go to other countries for vacation much easier and you maybe able to someday life in another country — if you want that. All that is — in my eyes — much harder if you can’t speak or at least understand an other language — for which I choose English. In the first place I trained my English listening skills but about 1.5 years ago I started to train my writing skills as well and over the years I have seen an improvement — which makes me happy. At the beginning I haven’t been able to write everything down what I wanted, cause I had just a little vocabulary which lead to problems with finding the right words. For now an enormous part of my life is English. I like to communicate with people from other countries and do that with people from Canada, New Zealand, the USA and Australia, but not just communication is English, I write my to do lists, project ideas, mind maps, code comments and this blog in English, which is nearly half of my days language usage. All that I think makes me better in writing, speaking and using the English voice.
I hope that I made clear why I blog and why in English.
If you have some thoughts, own ideas or an own reason to learn other languages or to blog please feel free to leave a comment.
This post is one of many to complete my about page.
I just did it. The night, 31st of January to first of February, I updated the design of my blog to the now new and online version 2.4 which manly is an update of validity in standards (xHtml and CSS), jQuery effects and a better compatibility between different browsers. Well some are not yet completely ready – I hate IE6. But why now? That’s the thing.
I’m a web-developer and designer which means – for me – that I can’t just let the design like it is now and am constantly improving my website theme – even if I should be doing other things. I just can’t let it look the same if I get a new idea, I just have to implement the thoughts. That’s manly the reason why I updated the site’s theme.
Reading many different blogs, I learned that you risk loosing readers which come to your site constantly. New readers will see the new and just don’t care. But for the constant readers it can be hard to see your site change completely one day to the other, which means, it is much easier to through little changes out than a big update, moving all objects and change the colors, which was never my thought cause I’m happy with the design like it is now.
Thinking about not updating with one big update rather than pumping out little changes. I decided to updated my local copy, giving me a deadline in which the update should be ready. I started updating my local copy, thinking about the changes, updating again and looking at it again. Some days before the update went live, I stopped implementing new things and just got rid of all this validity errors and browser compatibility problems. After all the little update which hit the ground at Sunday morning was ready 2 days earlier than I thought – which never hurts!
I think this milestone updating of a website is much better than just sending out updates when they hit you and you just implemented the new ideas into your local copy. You never know which problems that update will bring you, or if you really like it.
I’m now planing on getting other projects done. At this blog I now want to focus on writing posts rather than updating the design. Following the advise which is spread at many places from various people: “Content is King”
I hope you like the changes – even if they are a little hard to spot. If you have some thoughts about it or have an additional thought about updating a web-site, please leave a comment.
Hi and welcome, my name is Christoph Spiegl, I'm a full-time student, entrepreneur, designer, web-publisher, photographer and mac addicted. If you are interested, come on and read [more]