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Time tracking with Toggl
At the end of each week I have to fill in my timesheet with a breakdown of all the projects I have been working on that week. This used to be a though exercise. I checked my calendar for meetings, scrolled through the mails I received and sent and tried to retrieve things from my own memory to make some kind of estimation for the division of the hours between all my projects and activities. broken.
Another problem was that it was pretty hard to remember how many hours I had actually worked each day. Estimating and remembering extra hours in the weekend or in the evening made this even more difficult. This method was clearly broken.
So I started to add entries in my Outlook calendar for each activity, but this only lead to a cluttered agenda overview. Also this was not fast and easily forgotten.
And that’s where Toggl came along. Toggl is an online time tracking tool that I’ve been using since the start of this year. The concept is really simple: Add the activity you are working on and press the Start button. When you start another activity, just add it and press Start again.
After entering an activity once, you can quickly reuse it by clicking it in the tracker log. You can arrange activities to projects, and projects to clients. As I only want to register the time I spend on different projects, and not on the specific activities (creating an impact analysis, meeting etc.), I choose to only use the projects and leave the activities empty.
Search like a pro with DuckDuckGo
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo as my default search engine for a few months now, and I’m still not thinking about going back to Google. Yes, there are other options for search, just as in the nineties! Apple recently even added DuckDuckGo as a standard search option in Safari on Yosemite and iOS 8, behind Google, Bing and Yahoo!.
My problem with Google Search is that I don’t always want search results that are tailored to me. When I want to learn more about a certain political event, I don’t want to see only the FoxNews reports as search results; I want the best results, including other opinions. This phenomenon is called the Filter Bubble and is explained in this ‘guide’. DuckDuckGo doesn’t track its users and thus doesn’t collect personal data, so the results are not user specific.
But, over time I got an even bigger fan of another DuckDuckGo feature: The !bangs. With these !bang commands you can directly search on thousands of websites, without having to visit those sites first. When I enter !a Xcelsius in my Safari search bar, I’m directed to the Amazon.com search results for Xcelsius. !yt takes me to YouTube, !imdb to IMDB.com, !bol to BOL.com and !w to Wikipedia.
SAP BI4: Override OLAP Connections in Promotion Management
The Promotion Management corner in the SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform CMC is still a bit of a strange place for us coming from the SAP BW world. I really like the fact that you can use a single promotion job to promote a report again and again after each change. In SAP BW that would require a new transport every time. But, something as the Overrides Settings is still a difficult to get through and set up. The official admin guide for the BI4 platform mentions it briefly, but does not explain it good enough.
Until we had this configured we had to manually reconnect each SAP BW BEx Query in a promoted Webi report. I wrote about this annoying situation before.
With an override setting on an OLAP Connection to a SAP BW system, we can make the connection change (or better: override) its settings when promoted, so it connects to the right source system. Say we have two SAP BusinessObjects Platforms (BOTest and BOProd) and two SAP BW systems (BWTest and BWProd). We want the OLAP Connection on the BOTest environment to connect with the BWTest system. The connection on the BOProd environment should connect to the BWProd system. So if we promote a Webi document that uses this OLAP Connection from BOTest to BOProd, the Webi should load data from BWProd after refreshing it on the BOProd environment.
Now, how can we set up this override thing?
1. Log in to the CMC of the SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform that acts as the ‘source’ (where you want to promote from).
2. Make sure you have an OLAP Connection set up on your SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform. You can create this in OLAP Connections.
Audiobook: The Martian (Andy Weir)
I listened to a great sci-fi audiobook last week: The Martian by Andy Weir. The plot is that a human mission to Mars goes horrible wrong a few days after arrival. The crew has to evacuate when they get in a big dust storm. During the evac the main character Mark Watney is heavily wounded, and believing he didn’t survive it, the other astronauts leave Mars.
Imagine being the only person on a planet, with broken machinery, no way to communicate and very limited food. What would be your plan?
Watney writes a log of all of his experiences and tells us all about the science and calculations he uses to fix things, create water and how to grow food. On Mars! Of course the story also switches to what is happening at NASA back on earth and to the returning spacecraft with the other astronauts.
The narration of this audiobook is excellent. Even when I arrived at home I stayed in the car for a few minutes to finish a chapter or a section of the book. Regarding the story I like the fact that there is no unnecessary/unwanted deviation from the core storyline. So no romantic bs woven into it.
In 2015 a movie will be released based on this novel. Director is Ridley Scott and Mark Watney is portrayed by Matt Damon. Looking forward to that one!
The Martian – Andy Weir – ISBN 978-0091956141 – Audiobook version
Cutting the cable: One year later
In the summer of 2013 we made the decision to cancel our expensive cable subscription. We had it all: Around 100 channels from Holland, Germany, Belgium, UK and even some Spanish and Italian channels that nobody watches. Ten Discovery-like channels, several music channels, a bunch of 24/7 news channels and all the regular stuff. Of course I had the HD upgrade to watch everything in high quality. In addition we had the recorder feature upgrade, so we could pauze the broadcast and easily record shows.
Oh and I almost forgot the premium channels to watch my sports: Sport1 and FoxSports, so I could watch all mayor football matches in Holland and Europe live and finish the weekend on Sunday evening with the live broadcast of the final round of the PGA Tour Golf tournament of that week.
The Problem
Yes it was great. And a giant wast of time. And money. And focus.
So what did we actually watch? As many others we enjoy good television series. But, commercials are awful and most series are broadcasted way behind their USA release schedule. So we’d rather get the Blu-ray box and watch them that way. About the news: You can get way better news updates and opinions through the web, so that was already over for a long time. For music and radio we have Vevo, Spotify and YouTube. And for sports, all the games are viewable via the channel’s websites and apps. Only problem with that is that the quality is not really the best you can get.
The biggest problem was that we were watching things we didn’t need to watch. The TV was always on and sometimes we even kept switching channels until we found something viewable.
The alternatives
