Okay, maybe this was inspired by The Dark Knight.

It’s Monday August 11th 2008, 10 days after our first app was published at the iTunes App Store. Before that date I had somehow been living under the stupid illusion that after it was once published life would get quieter. It didn’t. Starting last Sunday, Elli and I have been working virtually around the clock for the last week. On Friday we finally got to upload the badly needed update, and only then did we take some time off to relax and “smell the roses”.

And in this week of superhard work I learned something pretty useful:

There is a reason why some people happily work 60-hour weeks while others can hardly stand working a 38 hour minimum working time, even if it’s at one of the greatest companies ever.

You know that verse about humans being created to the image of G-d? Many scholars have put forward their interpretation, some explaining this special relation as one of humans having free will, others as one of humans having a soul just like their Creator.

Maybe there is more than one aspect to it. The aspect I would like to point out is that humans too have the capability to create something. (Sure, our resources are limited, but hey, we’re still doing pretty well for being an image!)

In recent years there has been a lot of talk about “GTD”, “Getting Things Done“. But of course, getting things done can only be the first, albeit non negotiable, step in achieving happiness.

Once you got things done and everything is in its order, do the second step: Create something.

My experience is that if you meet unhappy people and ask them “What are you creating? What are you engaged in?” you will reliably receive a blank stare, usually accompanied by some pseudo-smart cynical comment.

On the other hand, when you meet happy people, they are reliably engaged in creating something beautiful that they consider meaningful and have talent for. This can be some crazy business project, it can be searching for the perfect coffee brew as employee or owner of a private coffee shop.

I think it boils down to this: Create something beautiful, and the rest will follow. (And if it don’t, well, at least you created something beautiful!)

What are you creating?

(Cartoon in High-Resolution - Note: Elli pointed out that I have done a very similar cartoon before. Well, maybe I was in a similar mood back then!)

KosherMe is available at the iTunes store! We are super-happy, thankful… and working on the next version. But enough of KosherMe on this blog, Shtikl is for cartoons.

Y’all have a wonderful weekend. As for us, we will treat ourselves at Restaurant Weiss (Cologne) tonight.

Update: Restaurant Weiss is closed. Vacation. But Elli is preparing some surprise.

[To follow: Some thoughts on waiting in general and KosherMe specifically. Note: The following is mainly of interest for the Jewish and Judophiles.]

So Elli & I have completed a new and wonderful version of KosherMe, the Brachot reader for the iPhone. We are really proud of it, cause it looks and works great. You wanna see for yourself? Here are some screenshots.

We have submitted KosherMe on Monday, so now, for better of for worse, we have to wait. It’s really eating me. Maybe KosherMe will be available in the App Store tomorrow, maybe in three weeks. Maybe there will be reasons for another rework and another round of waiting.

But we are not the only ones. Another Jewish iPhone App is waiting to be published, iSiddur by Barry Schwartz. While this waiting is bugging all of us, I am sure that in a year’s time there will be several great Jewish apps for the iPhone. And that’s definitely something worth forward to!

Note: To stay updated on KosherMe, please check out the blog.

(get this pic in high-res)

This is what I call Zen. What is Zen to you?

Apple has had troubles with the introduction of its new products in July 2008. While the iPhone registration glitch and the MobileMe start problems seem to have been resolved, behind the scenes there are hundreds (or thousands, who knows?) of iPhone developers who have paid money to have their apps reviewed and put into the App store, but Apple keeps their Apps “in review” for weeks on end (1 2 3). Sadly, I am one of them. Beloved Apple has gone from shining star to pretty buggy (or is it “pretty, but buggy”) in 2 weeks. What a pity. (The new iPhone still is wonderful - if you ignore that it crashes once a day on average.)

Amazon’s file hosting service S3 has been down most of today. While the majority of people still think of books when Amazon is mentioned, fact is that many Web 2.0 companies are outsourcing their raw data hosting to Amazon via a Service called “S3“. Well today it was down. And so was the data (images, files) of many websites (e.g. this one).

Lesson learned: Trust involves risk. Trusting a technology heavyweight involves risk that is beyond your control.

Dave Winer writes: “as probably a lot of others are doing today, I’m thinking of ways to avoid these outages in the future”.

I guess the future has to be: Make sure to put up your business in a way that at no point you rely on the services of a single company thus that their failure could seriously harm you. And: The fact that a company has provided excellent service up until now doesn’t necessarily enforce that it will do so in future.

Which reminds me of an interesting philosophical thought: You can’t prove that world is non-chaotic. The fact that it has been behaving according to rules up to a certain moment doesn’t entail necessarily that it will do so from that moment on.

And with this soothing thought I go to bed. The latter being a fact I might post on Twitter… if it’s working. It’s been having serious downtimes recently.

Shtikllikes: Scott points out the visual definition of recursive. Indie writes: “Still the same person, but different. Now I knew. I knew how to write footnotes.” And, thinking of rats, check out this rat poison label!

Some Sidenotes:

1. The first sentence in this cartoon actually makes sense. It is part of the one possible refutation of the ontological argument for the existence of G-d.

2. You can download this cartoon from Flickr in HighRes.

3. I checked via Google-search whether I got “necessary” right. At second place came up an article by Forbes titled “Is Sex Necessary”? (Screenshot) O tempora, o mores.