The wall

In the last two months I´ve done quite a lot of reading and researching for my master thesis. Everytime I stumbled over something useful I wrote it down on a piece of paper in order to collect sub-topics, ideas and so on. To keep an overview and see the ideas most of the times I started to create a wall (seems that I got somehow internet-addicted and copied the facebook concept to real life ;-)

Anyway I start to like this way because each time I want to get into the topic (again) I just can have a look at the wall, if I remember that I wrote down something I don´t have to search for it in my messy pile of papers and if I have a new idea I just can add it to the old ones and it mentally says Simon wrote on his own wall ;-)) Still, I have to be careful that I don´t overuse it and write down everything without filtering it. Otherwise it just gets another post on the wall or a wallpaper.

My wall

Marina di Massa

As already mentioned before, I´m quite busy these days. After Kick-off I spent only two days back in St. Gallen - one was for relaxing and the other for studying. On Wednesday evening me and some friends from my club left Switzerland and headed to Italy. We spent 4 marvelous days in Marina di Massa, a town in Tuscany between La Spezia and Pisa. On the beaches and in the sea we trained for around 6 hours a day our skills in Surf Lifesaving containing swimming, surf ski, surf board or running on the beach. As you can imagine I was pretty tired from the trainings and the travel back to St. Gallen when I arrived on sunday 11pm.

For all those who are interested in what you can do in lifesaving sports, you can check out these two sites:

Swiss Surf Lifesaving
Australian Surf Livesaving

Unfortunately there was no time for me to relax or even recover because the course which occupies me this week started already at 9 am on monday. The topic of the course is Emotions in Organizations and is an interesting topic. Though I´m facing classes from 9 am till 5 pm for four days in a row which is pretty exhausting. I´m just glad that it´s a mixture of lectures and case studies and not only lectures otherwise I might fall asleep...

Back from the OC

A lot was going on the past few days and will go on in the upcoming weeks. Since last wednesday I´ve been in Fiesch for Kick-off where I worked again for the organizing commitee. It was again a lot of work, not so much time and even less sleep.
To sum up there was a mixture of different feelings and emotions. There were cool moments like most of the time together with the OC. There were annoying moments, like during official dinner and awards night. There were tiring moments like driving through the whole Valais and back to get some inkind. There were relaxing moments like sitting with the laptop and some music in the sun while waiting for people showing up for coffee break.
There were hurting moments like when you just woke up after only 2.5hrs of sleep and move still a bit sleepy to breakfast and delegates telling you (as a joke for them) that you should work and not sleep. There were challenging moments like setting up several external workshops at the same time combined with room reallocation and there were stupid moments like fixing beamer problems because the beamer was attached to one extension cable meanwhile another not linked extension was put to the power supply.
There were disgusting moments like cleaning up in the morning after global village. There were funny moments like playing CSI with some OC members. And there were just great moments like when a delegate honestly and directly acknowledged our worked and thanked for it! And there were of course some really amazing individuals around!

Life in Cartoon Motion

Yesterday when I played around with photoshop I found out something I didn´t know yet.
After some learning about it I decided to do a post about some beautiful and / or important places I visited or lived in lately. And it´s somehow in cartoon motion...

St.Gallen, 2007

Bamberg, 2006

Venezia, 2006

Berlin, 2006

Stuttgart, 2006

Barcelona, 2007

Heidelberg, 2005

A part of my family story

Today in an article of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung about the election of the new federal canchellor one of the representatives of my family was mentioned. He - Johann Ulrich Schiess - was the first federal canchellor in Switzerland and the NZZ said the following about him:

Der erste Bundeskanzler, der Ausserrhoder Johann Ulrich Schiess, garantierte während einer Amtszeit von 33 Jahren Kontinuität im Wechsel der Regierungsmitglieder. Bereits in den Konflikts- und Kriegsjahren von 1847/48 hatte der damals 35-Jährige Kanzleiämter inne. Wie einer Dissertation von Simone Iten zu entnehmen ist, war es Schiess zu verdanken, dass sich die Bundeskanzlei zu einem mustergültigen Apparat der Bundesverwaltung entwickelte. Der äusserst exakte Bundeskanzler verlangte von seinen Untergebenen allerdings grosse Arbeitsdisziplin. Schiess stellte sich jeweils neben der Kanzleitür auf und verabreichte jedem, der zu spät kam, einen tüchtigen Klaps. So viel zur guten alten Zeit.

Apparently he had a very intersting managing style, especially when it came to management of his employees. I don´t know yet whether this style is in our genes or not. Probably I can say more when I got to a position where I´ll be responsible for some employees...

No friends? - !

Today when I finally signed in in studivz as well (why do we need 2 platforms for the same thing??) I really got a shock! This anonymus, computer-controlled thing told me the following:

I´m really depressed and feel very, very, very lonely ;-). At least I have a laptop which is still my friend and does what I want :-)))

Under construction

For the second time in around one week, the website where I uploaded pics for my blog-template somehow lost my stuff. Therefore I went back to a regular blog-template. And finally I managed to solve all technical problems which came along...