Jessica Hische:

The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.

That’s a great sentence. It implies one of the principles I think is most important for one’s professional life: Do something that’s fun for you. I can’t stand the idea of doing something for a living that doesn’t appeal to me. This may sound harsh, but I’d rather shoot myself in the head than spend 30-40 years of my life doing something I don’t like. It’d be pointless, too ‘cause I really suck at doing things I don’t like.¹

Therefore, the quote above frightened me. It is great and true I think, but it frightened me. It frightened me because when I procrastinate, I check Twitter, watch TV Series or work on my blog.² And that has nothing to do with law in general or my studies in any other way. Well, don’t I like studying law? Nah, that’s not it, when I do intensified studying, it’s fun. I really enjoy working on my very own solution for a case and write it up in some 30 pages. And I love to be right, so I just might as well make it my job. But to be honest, I constantly fail at getting a routine to do intense studying on a regular basis without any pressure, any deadline or exam.
So the quote above stood open in a page in the Safari on my iPad and I couldn’t get it out of my head. I wanted to live by it, but what is it that kept me from doing so?

And it got me thinking. There are hobbies that can be professions, like all this Web 2.0, Public Relations, Social Media, Designer stuff that takes place in lofts in the most expensive offices in town. It’s real work, you don’t need to tell me, but you don’t have to read a book to do this kind of work. It’s very likely anyone who now works as a graphic/web designer used to launch Photoshop (while procrastinating) and play with it.
And there are professions that can’t be hobbies, and those are hard to come by while one procrastinates. It’s very unlikely anyone without further knowledge of the law begins to ruminate on some civil law matter. In order to do so, you’d first need to acquire quite some knowledge. As one of my teachers used to put it: ‘We have to chew some brown bread!’, meaning there’s some work to do that’s not much fun, but obligatory. And I hate to admit it, but for me the crude ability to get over my weaker self and take on something that is not fun from the beginning is the most crucial skill in studying law.
It’s like the postponing of ‘do something that’s fun for you’ to reach a higher level of doing so is the ultimate challenge. This of course even applies to the decision of beginning a study or a job training after school.

Well, the above seems very obvious to me now that I read it, but it took me quite some time and thinking to get there.

1. Still looking at you, mark I got in French in 7th grade, still looking.
2. The latter is more productive procrastinating, but it still isn’t studying.

When I wrote about my iOS-centric workflow, or: funflow, I forgot to mention two apps.

First, the important one: 1Password Pro. I keep all my passwords and account logins in it. It’s one of the apps I launch most often, because it’s all in one place. Once I got away from the foolish ‘same password for every account’ policy, I learned that one safe place to keep all the individually generated passwords is the only way to go. Of course, if my master password gets cracked my other passwords are worth nothing, that’s the downside. Still, I think it’s the only reasonable way to handle today’s requirements of amounts of logins and passwords.
The Pro version is optimized both for iPhone and iPad, and looks and works marvelous, especially on the iPad. If you’re lucky and use a Mac, it syncs to it. There also is a windows client that’s supposed to sync via Dropbox, but I never figured out how. And by that, I mean it just doesn’t work (yet). But you can back up your data manually in a single file. Attention: These files aren’t necessarily interchangeable between iPad and iPhone because of different passcode-systems. Still a great app. There also is a non-pro version, but don’t ask me what it can or can’t do.

If you own an iDevice and are younger than 35 years, you probably already know the second app: Flipboard. It sucks in your Twitter, Faceboom and Instagram data and presents it in a beautiful way. So beautiful, I can’t stand seeing the crappy status updates of my Facebook friends in it. But I love flipboarding the tweets I favorited once in a while.
Flipoard also signed deals with the Guardian, Wired and TechCrunch, probably to avoid getting sued over some copyright matter. But for your benefit: The Wired stories for example, are beautifully animated and integrated. For me, that’s much more of a deal than the heavily advertised Wired Magazine App.

That’s it, for now.

Some time ago, on a Sunday evening, I had an idea. Everyone in Germany watches ‘Tatort’ on Sunday evenings, and so my Twitter timeline’s full of it, too. The ‘Tatort’, somehow, isn’t for me. Call me arrogant but I have to tell you that most of the time, I can’t even stand original German TV anymore, not just the badly dubbed US stuff. Maybe I just watch badly acted scenes whenever I peek in a German channel. However, I thought it would be great if everyone would watch something good and tweet or blog about it. Like a book club, just for films.

Well, the idea stayed an idea. Then, I started to listen to some 5by5 podcasts and discovered that on The Talk Show, John Gruber and Dan Benjamin talk about every single one of the James Bond Films. They do kind of what I thought of! I loved the Bond films a lot when I was younger, and I also like the reboot with Daniel Craig. And I like films and thinking, talking about them, especially considering the time they were made in and how they take effect today.

Having people talking about films, listening to their opinions really works for me. Although I sometimes think Dan just agrees to whatever Gruber’s opinion is, I use their discussion to think about the points they bring up and compare it to my opinion of the film. For instance, I honestly, really truly like the one with George Lazenby, ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’, especially compared to the following ‘Diamonds are forever’ for which Connery was brought back and which seemed completely uninspired and dull to me.
During the Roger Moore period, which sadly lasted more than a decade, you may start questioning yourself what the heck you are doing, wasting your time with some of the worst bond films¹. But I have to say that as a kid, I loved the kind of humor Moore gave the character. This way, it’s still fun to try and pinpoint what it is that makes the films so different than the Connery ones, and how much of it couldn’t have been helped either way cause they were made in the 70s and 80s (and, how Gruber loves to point out, were directed by John Glen).

That’s it for now, I just wanted to address what I think is an interesting kind of film criticism and getting it out there. Maybe we/me/whoever can start a little something like this some time, realized through blogposts, another podcast, or just Twitter, we’ll see.

1. Which ones exactly are the worst is subject to heavy discussion, like you may have guessed. But I’m sure it’s consent that quite a few, if not - let’s say the worst two to three - are to find in Moore’s era.

Well, I’ve been wanting to write this post for a long time. I’ve been collecting quotes that made me laugh or want to clap my hands and shout ‘Right!’ when they were said. Today, I stumbled over SiracusaSaidSo.com, a neat website that collects some lines by John Siracusa. It reminded me of my plan. What follows are memorable quotes, mostly from different 5by5 Podcasts, the network which’s shows I currently mention in every post. I try to make the quotes as exact as possible but have to alter them a little in order to keep up the readability. Here we go.

1. The Magic of the Internet - Hypercritical #1, 29:00
   John Siracusa talks about TV, cable companies, TiVo, Netflix etc.

So I’m paying all this money to all these different people and still end up downloading content because it’s a better experience. It’s HD, my cable company doesn’t offer BBC America in HD, and I dont have to wait for it to appear on Netflix streaming. But through the magic of the internet an HD version of the thing appears after the day it airs.

1. Coffee - Build & Analyze #9, 14:00

Marco Arment and Dan Benjamin talk about coffee, especially the chemex coffee brewer.

Marco: It’s the kind of hour-glass shaped coffee brewer with the big wooden handle in the midde. You’ve seen of those, right?
Dan: No.
Marco: What? Come on. Have you ever been anywhere cool ever? Oh yeah, that’s why you live in Florida.

1. Geekism - Build & Analyze #11, 05:30
   Marco:

I’m a true geek. I like it when people are passionate and particular about things they really enjoy. So listening to other geeks talk about things in a geeky manner is still interesting to me, even if the topics are not.

This reminds me of a sentence in the article [Success, and farming vs mining](http://blog.wilshipley.com/2011/04/success-and-farming-vs-mining.html). > The doctors and DNA-researchers and dancers and chocolate-makers and oceanographers and cosmologists and investors all have one thing in common: they are total nerds. They work on the thing they love literally all the time. You can't talk to them without talking about their passion.

Here is an article in German I liked, too. It ruminates on a very related topic: Why someone without any enthusiasm is hard and unpleasant to talk to. UARRR.org - [Begeisterungsfähigkeit](http://uarrr.org/2010/08/27/begeisterungsfaehigkeit/)

1. Being a designer - The Pipeline #43, 38:30
   Mike Monteiro:

And you can see on Twitter that there’s a ton of bitching about: ‘No one respects me as a designer. But I’m also not willing to put in the effort to get respected. I want to sit here at my desk in front of my iMac screen and my very expensive headphones on, listening to house music, cranking out beautifully layered Photoshop files that have nothing to do with my client’s business goals.’

1. Ferrari - Enough #18, 06:00
   Patrick Rhone:

I didnt’t buy a Ferrari to drive it on a 25 mph sideroad. I bought a Ferrari ‘cause I want to drive it on the frikkin’ Autobahn.