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Kozen Reloaded


It feels like Koz is back writing some more articles these days. Indeed, I got a little motivation back for doing so. I don’t know why, but it just happened that I felt I had to express myself again.

Let me take a second here and apologize for switching to English rather than my mother tongue German. I believe my non-German speaking audience is growing every day! 🙂 For everyone who still prefers to read my useless 2 cents in German please find a German flag and link below the article title.

To be honest, I am actually extremely busy these days. A lot happened in the three months that passed this year already. I was traveling a lot which is quite unusual for me: New Year’s Eve party in BL City, BlackBerry Developer Conference in Bali, Mobile World Congress in Barcelona incl. one week Spain holiday, one week Koh Samui / Thailand holiday including severe floods – kind of an adventure holiday.

Business wise, I get asked a lot: “How is it going?” Well, I can say that these are currently very exciting days, weeks, months. Being in the mobile application business for more than six years (way before a word like “app” had been invented) has proven to be a slight advantage over our competitors. Of course, we weren’t the first ones and there is new competition popping up every day. Copy cats here — spammers there — serious competitors around the corner — let’s just say it is challenging, yet rewarding. A lot changed, a lot more is about to change, but one thing is still exactly the same it was six years ago: Even after tens of thousands of reviews and comments we received for our products it still feels good when people just love what we do. Despite all the other stuff that comes with it, that’s what it is about for me.

Well, seems the “writing-flash” hit me today. Still, I won’t promise to update kozen’s blog more regularly. The day has just 24 hours polyphasic sleep didn’t work for me so I have to make the best out of the 16 hours I have of each day. A lot more travels, parties, weddings, may be new boating adventures are coming up and I will see what else I can share. Right here, publicly on my server with my very own privacy controls. You won’t get this on Facebook 🙂

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Koh Samui Floods and What Happened After


Deutsche Version: Google Translate

Even Germany’s ARD Tagesschau was reporting about massive floods on Koh Samui เกาะสมุย, Thailand.

It so happened that my family was on holiday right at that time and I was scheduled for flying over there on Wednesday 29th, 2011. From TV news and phone calls with my relatives I learned that the airport was closed due to massive floods. The airport is owned and operated by Bangkok Airways which I booked a plane ticket with as well. That airline is actually quite alright, once their planes have taken off. Their off-plane customer support / service is just horrible. Concerned as I was, I tried to contact them on all of the four phone numbers on the HK airport. Nobody picked up. So I called their representation at the Bangkok airport. Nobody picked up. Then I called the headquarter in Bangkok. Again, nobody picked up. I just wanted to know whether my plane actually leaves or not. So I went to the airport and luckily I took off about 1.5 hours delayed.

When I arrived in Bangkok, I noticed that there are not many people at the airport. Yeah well, didn’t expect that, but in fact, there was nobody there except us 20 from Hong Kong (the Airbus A319 was quite empty). So the first person at the airport I told that I want to go to “Bo Phut” beach and I want a Meter-Taxi and don’t wanna pay more than 200 Baht บาท (€4,64) laughed at me and said: “No taxi! Water to here! No taxi!” (pointing at her waist) “Can give you big van for 500 Baht!” Yeah, right! (I thought and said and walked away) Then I got to the next counter for taxis. Again, no real meter taxis there and what do I here? Same same, but different: “No taxi! Water to here! No taxi!” (pointing at her waist) “Can give you big van for 600 Baht!” Wow! 100 Baht more, that one must be good. After 15 minutes of negotiating, trying not to get wet because it was still pouring cats, dogs and little elephants; I agreed.

There was only one driver crazy enough to drive me over to that “Bo Phut” beach and one of the shallower parts looked like this:

He switched off the fan and A/C to make sure no splashed water gets sucked into the car. Yet, it was a funny ride. He was joking sort of: “You know, every year we have Songkran – water festival – can have lots of fun now!” At least they didn’t loose their sense of humor in the land of smiles. Apparently, it was the day after the worst day of floods and news all over the world showed massive land slides, military personnel evacuating citizens and tourists with dinghies. Well, not at our place. We couldn’t get out much the first two days I was there, but despite that there was no problem at all. And later on I even had a bird sitting right next to me, waking me up while I was roasting in the sun.

P.S.: I turned out quite pink, not nice roasty brown.

If you want to travel to Koh Samui you may check out the Koh Samui Travel Offers at Agoda.

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Asian Women and Their Boobs

I know, this becomes more and more a site of just posting videos and pictures. Kind of reminds me of Facebook a bit… Anyway, I have to share this right here and right now:

The above video I found on Facebook because friends commented on it. They can go even further with boob vibrators:

And if you wanna see how Japanese can turn into wild monsters, check this out: “Japanese Infomercial Gets Out of Hand”

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Big dudes walking around in Wan Chai

These not so hot days I like going home by Tram a.k.a. Ding Ding — yes, the locals really call them Ding Ding, just because they make “ding ding” all day long when people cross the street without looking out for approaching Ding Dings. Today on my way home, I noticed an uncommonly tall dude tumbling around in front of one exit of Wan Chai MTR station. I was a bit slow in pulling my camera and start shooting, but if you pay close attention you may notice him 🙂

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Office Stock – What kind of snacks do you have in your office?

We have some free snacks in our office and due to incredible demand – we are mostly stocked with instant noodles, chips, chocolate and nuts. For drinks we have coffee, tee (black, red, green, flower, power), Coke, Pepsi, milk, ice tea. Here a photo one part of our cupboard with some instant noodles. Got to keep the coders happy! (and everyone else too :))


(photo was taken behind a glass wall, with very low light on a BlackBerry Torch – sorry for the bad quality)

What snacks do you have?

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China Copy – They can’t even take their own photos

I just received a spam email to a non-public business email address that is forwarded to multiple people. The title of that email is: 專業..CCTV..DVR.. (Tel: 6063 7382) So obviously this was a spam email and everyone of us is getting those every single day. We can’t do much about it and still, sometimes we even open those spam emails and take a look into them. This one was quite surprising.

This is what shows in that spam email:

[…]
IT Solutions


[…]

There were also other images with CCTV equipment and stuff.

Now everyone who reads Joel On Software might have already noticed that the photo above somehow appeared somewhere before. The actual article from Joel back in December 2008 “The new Fog Creek office” showed that very photo – here is the ‘original’ one:


(Courtesy Joel Spolsky at FogCreek)

I doubt that Chinese factory actually obtained a license to advertise their products with that image. Darn, the photo is not even one that has been taken with one of their CCTV cameras 🙂

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This is Hong Kong – Scaffoldings and Chinese National Geography

For those who haven’t been to Hong Kong yet, this is a very unique way of local construction companies to build up some scaffolding made completely out of bamboo. Hong Kong is the only place I know where bamboo is almost exclusively used for this purpose. The first three pictures show a construction site in Wan Chai where The Oakhill is being built.

Hong Kong Bamboo Scaffolding - The Oakhill Wan Chai #1 Hong Kong Bamboo Scaffolding - The Oakhill Wan Chai #2

Please note that they scaffolded up to over 55 stories! The right photo below shows some other construction site on Bonham Road in Sai Yin Pun. Very close to where I lived before.

Hong Kong Bamboo Scaffolding - The Oakhill Wan Chai #3 Hong Kong Bamboo Scaffolding - Somewhere on Bonham Road in Sai Yin Pun

Besides bamboo scaffoldings Hong Kong is of course being flooded by “Cheap China Copies” of pretty much everything. That’s nothing unsual – copy iPhones, MacBooks and so on. However, just a couple of days I passed by the 7eleven in Sheung Wan and saw the “CNG” magazine which stands for “Chinese National Geography“. To be honest, I was thinking that is a “National Geographic“. Here both

National Geographic Magazine Cover March 2009

NatGeo Photo courtesy Gobonobo

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Freelancer.com – I tried to deal with their support

Freelancer.com has the worst customer support ever
Yes, we use Freelancer.com for outsourcing projects. I purposely don’t publish the link here. For over six years, we have had a good relation ship with them; though we barely interacted with the people behind Freelancer.com. For some reason, one payment to Freelancer.com did not work because PayPal messed something up. This resulted in our PayPal account to be locked down (which we easily re-activated) and our Freelancer.com account to be suspended as well. Freelancer.com still gets US$510 from us, but we can not pay them as our account is still suspended. Therefore, I took the chance to consult their online support – and I am not the first person who did that. This is what came out:

Myla: Hi there, how may I help you?

HR Department: Hello Myla
HR Department: Please review ticket YHV-383840
HR Department: We are still waiting on our account to be re-activated.
HR Department: Our PayPal account is back working and we would like to settle our debt with Freelancer.com now.

Myla: I will be more than happy to assist you.
Myla: Please give me a minute while I check this for you.

HR Department: I will be leaving for a congress soon and therefore, I will not have much time to take care of this the rest of this week. So it would really be great if we can get this resolved now.

Myla: Thank you for your patience. The ticket that you submitted have been forwarded to our Tier2 department. Unfortunately we will not be able to view the updates or status of this ticket from our end. Kindly wait for the reply from that department for the resolution of this issue. We are hoping for your understanding.

HR Department: Myla, we just want to pay you.
HR Department: Please connect me with your superior. If I can’t get this resolved within the next 30 minutes I will have to close our company account. Which means, your company will loose $510.
HR Department: and future projects we were going to post. As you can see from our track record, we are a respectable service buyer and actually bring business to your company.

Myla: We undestand how the situation can be frustrating for you. That is exactly the reason why the ticket was forwarded to our Tier2 department for accurate resolution. You need to wait for there reply regarding this concern. Rest assure that we will follow on this.

HR Department: Yes, frustrating and extremely disappointing.
HR Department: If you can not help me. Please put me in touch with someone who can. A phone number would be great for example.

Myla: We do not have a voice support in our site. We need you to wait for the reply on the ticket that was already forward to our Tier2 department.

HR Department: Please provide me a form to close our account.

Myla: We understand that you want to close your account . However, you have to reinstate your account first before we can process your request.

HR Department: You are kidding.

Myla: I am afraid not. Do you have any other inquiry?

HR Department: Yes.
HR Department: 1) I want our company account re-activated now!
HR Department: 2) If this is not possible, I want to close it now!
HR Department: These are my inquiries. Please help me with those.

Myla: Please understand that we need you to wait for the reply from our Tier2 department to resolve this issue. We cannot just reactivate or close your account without following the protocol. We will appreciate if you try to understand this points.

HR Department: When will your Tier2 department be working again? They did not do anything yesterday …

Myla: We will follow up on you ticket for the resolution. Rest assure we will reply to your ticket as soon as possible.
Myla: Thank you for contacting Freelancer.com, please don’t hesitate to contact us again if you have any other questions or concerns.

Myla has left the conversation
Click here to leave a message

I understand, that it might be out of Myla’s control, but then it is a massive design failure in their support system. However, Myla should never ever just hang up on a customer without any confirmation that he is not satisfied with the result of the support. May be that’s just my understanding of customer support and may be that’s the way how customer support works in Australia or Sweden?

Did you have a bad experience with them too? Feel free to leave a comment below or tweet your experience to them @freelancer @geta@freelancer or about them #freelancer #getafreelancer. I did: @kozen23

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KI 2000 Dance Action – 6 Freaking Years Ago – But Timeless Shit

This one is for our thousands and thousands* of friends all over the world; including former international class/uni-mates and current friends!

For those who don’t know: Kozen studied at HS Harz University of Applied Sciences a bit of computer science, but basically he was mainly focusing on drinking, partying and the other enjoyments in life 😎 Anyway, around summer 2004 we were about to graduate and therefore, had to have a proper party before. As there were a couple of other majors from our uni that were about to graduate, many of us prepared some sort of performance. Of course, the IT nerds with their glasses and terrific body language wanted to embarrass themselves as well. So we prepared a little dance too. The main part was roughly based on the ‘team spirit performance’ shown in Old School which succeeded right after the Gizen & Kozen intro (based on ‘Frank the Tank’s solo sports performance’ from the very same movie).

Just for the sake of having it forever and ever available on the world wide and wider web, here the video for everyone’s amusement:

OK, the principle of synchronization still needs to be practiced. I have to admit that we started that thing around 11 p.m. – as you can see. The party itself started 8 p.m. and before we had to “warm up”, of course. Well, the formula was very easy: Germans + Students + Party = Beer + Vodka + Tequila + Rum + Sangria (the perfect equation that solves just about everything). I remember that the evening ended well for me … if I remember correctly … 😉

  • Kudos to Schlappen – the brave warrior who was filming this masterpiece of stage performance with just one hand above the heads of an unbelievable crowd.
  • Kudos to the performers – King Kai (a.k.a. Blutverspritzer, Nummer Eins), Ive the Thief (check the ryhme!), Taucha (guy who dived into delirium at the end), Ghent (ooo), Gizen van der Fizen and Kozen

* … might be slightly exaggerated.