"Postcard" from Oxford

Can it get more postcard-like than this? :) It's the view from the church tower I mentioned before. I finally found the name of the church: "University Church of St. Mary the Virgin". Go there and climb the 127 steps to the top to enjoy the views.

On Multitasking

Most women usually pride themself that they are able to multitask, and us men aren't. Mostly it's true, and probably originates from the stone ages, where men were out hunting and had to concentrate on that, and women had to manage the family, the camp, collecting berries etc.

I doubt that they multitasked the way we do today (or try to do) and apparently multitasking isn't good for you, according to an article in TIME Magazine (covered here by Ars Technica). It might sound far fetched at first, but I think they're on to something. At the moment i'm trying to fill my head again with the usual work stuff, and at the end of the day I feel like I'm walking around with potato mash for brains or something.

Perhabs I should actually start meditation as I've thought about so many times before :)

Don't Go on Vacation!

I am so exhausted from returning to work, that it seems like a really bad idea to have taken a vacation - or perhabs it's because I got used to getting up late (around 8 or 9, compared to 6 am normally) :) Anyway, as I expected there is quite a bit of catching up to do, and I probably should get some work done this evening, just to be back to normal regarding my projects. It's amazing how many things can change in a week, and how difficult it can be to get on top of it all again. Katrin and I had a great time in London, visiting friends and relaxing. I think one of the most relaxing things we did was to go to bookshops. Somehow that is one of the most relaxing things I can think of, besides perhabs reading the books after buying them. The really cool thing about the english bookshops (we went to a few while we were in Oxford too - just to see if they had a better selection, or something :) ) is that you grab a basket, fill it with all the books that look interesting, and head for the coffee shop to get a cop of coffee and calmly look through the books you've selected. I took a huge pile of books on our last trip to a book store, just to get an idea of what all the topics was about, and it was really nice to be able to sit down comfortably and skim through the books to get an idea of whether they are interesting or not. In Denmark you would probably not even be allowed in the store if you were strange enough to actually have bought a coffee-to-go, let alone sit down comfortably and make sure the book you selected from the shelve is interesting enough to buy. There are never any nice chairs or sofas to sit in, no coffee shop and I bet that in most stores they'll complain if you start reading a book (I always expect to hear a voice cry "It's not a library you now!"). Besides spending time in book shops, we went to Oxford as i mentinoed before. Oxford is awsome - if you haven't been there yet, start planning. It has this really brittish feel about it with the old buildings, tea houses and people wearing strange kinds of cloaks that probably have a significant meaning. The city center is fairly condenced, and there are loads of small ally ays, back streets and squares, to make a walk around town very interesting. We ate at a place called Tootsies (apparently a chain that specialises in goog quality burgers - and they do that well) which was actually in the old Oxford Castle! They've taken the old castle, renovated it from top to bottom, and let people open restaurents and offices in the buildings. It was quite a spectacular experience to walk around inside the castle walls, not in gloomy and scarry looking damn corridors, but in a series of bright and airy courtyards with the old wall illuminated in a trendy way. It was quite clear that it must _the_ place to party (we were there on a wednesday which was fairly quiet). A bit by chance, we staid in a B&B at this nice Australian woman named Vivian, in a place called Heather House. It was fairly priced at 66 pounds for a night including breakfast, and the room was quite nice. The only downside was the shower, which seemed to have the intention to deliver water, but lacked in will-power and ability to perform. The B&B was luckily within a fair walking distance to Oxfford centre, and we could leave the car in the lot the day after, while we toured the city and it's huge number of colleges. Oh, one last thing if you ever go to Oxford, make sure to climb the church tower near the old library (I've forgotten what either place is called) It has the most fantastic views of all of Oxford, and it so happened that on the day we were there, the sun was shining and there were not a trace of a cloud in the sky - beatifull! :)

Unfogging the future

I've just bought a book called "Coach Yourself", since I've found that I have no idea of where I'm heading. It could have been the big letters on the cover of the book "It's your life. What are you going to do with it?" that cought my eye, but either way, I think it could be interesting to get some help fuguring out what I actually want to do with the time I've got. The first task in the book was to list all irritations in my life, and while doing that I found one I could easily do something about. Actually two now i think of it :) One of them is stop using so much time reading RSS feeds, and the second is blogging more than I do now. The second one is what I'm working on now, but the first one probably needs more adjustment once I see the result of my initial changes. To cut down the ammount of time I spend reading RSS feeds, the first simple sollution was to cut down the number of feeds. This turned out to be easier than I thought, because of simple redundancy. I had several danish news feeds, which usually carry the same stories, as well as a list of Mac related feeds that are all equally fast in delivering news and rumors. Cutting away those I usually only skim anyway, was a quick way to reduce my feeds. Now I just need to find out if it will make a difference or not. In regards to blogging a bit more than I do know, I'll be working on that...

Statistics

It's not that I can really use the information that Google Analytics give me for anything specific, but I still find it interesting to see how people get to my site.

Aparently, the things I've written about Getting Things Done (GTD) and the various tools I've tried, is a fairly popular way of finding my site. Another thing that keeps popping up in the list of used seachphrases, is Google Analytics. I guess I've written a bit about it, so that makes sence as well. What I found today doesn't though...unless my memmory is worse than I thought :)

Someone got to my site by searching for "stupid treehugger", and eventhough that might begin to fit my description, I don't think I've written anything that would result in this site poping up as a result. "Google analytics complaints" seems a bit stretched as well, but given the number of post about the topic, I guess it's natural.

Another interesting thing, is that my goal of getting people to look at my thesis, seems to have failed. The first day I had 43%(3 of 7) of my visitors look at my thesis page, next day 13% (1 of 8), then 0% (0 of 2), 0% (0 of 2), 0% (0 of 2), 0% (0 of 8), 0% (0 of 6), and yesterday 0% (0 of 2) again.
Either my thesis sucks, my visitors are english speaking and can't use more than the executive summary or I've only got about 8 visitors in total of which only 4 have been curious enough to click the link :)

As I said in the beginning: I can't really use this information for anything, but it's still interesting to see how you might be able to attract visitors (keep writing about the same subject) and how short a lifespan content can have (my thesis page was only interesting the first time someone read the post).

Well...back to the real world of work :)...

Google analytics part II

I've been looking a bit more at Google Analytics, and have tried to figure out what I could use their "Converstion goals" for. So far I haven't been able to think of a single thing, but that might just be because this blog lacks a focus/goal/subject or whatever. The only thing I could think of, was to see how many would end up looking at my CV, but since I haven't wanted to link to it, that's going to be a really tough goal :) Perhaps I should see how many are interested in my thesis about system integration?