Adventures of Mr.Behi

Time and Deadline

I have collected the entire set of this podcast (The Manager Tools) finally after listening to their new episodes here and there but now I bought this FM transmitter for the ipod and can listen to things in the car so decided I would rather start listening to the whole collection. Not that I am a manager and I am not even close and I honestly don't want to be any close but this show is a good one no matter what your position is...(BTW, the ipod transmitter, it is fun but damn it all this mobile phone noise you get as you drive! they should put an ipod stand in the cars from now on, right?)

Distracted...the very first show of the series is recorded back in 2006 and is about time management. It has this exercise to help you find your priorities and fill your calendar with them before it gets filled with rubbish. Truth be told, it happens very often.  Starting the exercise, I became a little more cautious or lets say aware of the passage of time during working hours...normally I get to work and after finishing the morning e-mail part and a couple of phone discussions, boom it is 1100 hours.

By the book, one should do things by schedule to prevent staying up all night to finish a presentation or working late for a report or working from home in the weekend. Maybe many other people are like that but I get absolutely and fabulously efficient just before the deadlines. I stay amazed how fast I get things done just before they are due or when they are a little over due. The next day when I am a little relaxed I just freeze finding out which next task is the best to start and that will be the last relax day at work again before another storm kicks in. I keep telling myself that this is all right...boss is happy metrics are up (they were in 2007. so far the first two months of this year were kind of barren).
Compared to many others, I might say I am damn organized (I never say that to people..this post is just my mirror talk :) Let me tell you: digital calendar and task list from outlook always up to date with deadlines sync with my on-line calendar and PDA for other people to know where and when I would be available. Excel sheets and mindmaps of tasks and priorities...Just a little more focus would do...

Something funny to confess: Since high school I have been known as the guy with the big bag..this continued in my university times and in all through career years. I could not just pass two hours in the library reading only two text books and call it the day...and now, the 4 Kg laptop and accessories+ papers and books as usual and you see me jumping from one to another at work. People see me in the lift and say: Hey are you traveling today? or, oh straight from the airport! where have you been? :)

Finishing the 30th....

I have something else to celebrate valentines day for and that is my birthday. I finished my 30th year  this year with a little birthday surprise from Mrs.Behi. I could not believe that she had all those planned since our time in Barcelona in January. As usual, a beautiful setup of candles, card with nice words and the birthday gift. What surprised me most was the home-made cake in front of me, knowing that it was indeed the first time she tried making one. Our little celebration continued with both of us bursting into laughter when she started telling me the story of the cake :) Read her story here.

We had already bought our new means of fun the day before. Two new bicycles! It was almost sunset when we left our place for a relaxing ride along Tripoli port, a place that is yet to be discovered although we drive by it every day. Wide and nicely paved, it is a perfect place for jugging, running and biking or even for a relaxing walk, resting on numerous benches here and there. Valentines day, calm of the sea, nice breeze and the chill of late evening invited many Libyan couples to the safe haven of the port side. Hiding behind the bridge, swirling around street lamps or just face to face with hand crawling in the back on the benches, boys and girls were celebrating the romantic night as we passed them cycling and we all had a smile on our faces.

The Orbiting Dream

The news was a real surprise: Iran launched a rocket to space to add yet another surprising stride to the basket of its advanced science collection. After active stem cell research and a really noisy nuclear program, I guess we shall now be happy about having something up there rotating! Oh we already had an Iranian lady who became the first woman space tourist. I remember when I was a graduate student, I spent some time as an intern in a government-owned agency in Tehran and our job was to analyze satellite images for environmental and meteorological studies. Many of these satellite were and still are out there with their images publicly available for purchase. That was well before the age of GoogleEarth and what we were doing was very classy and Hi-Tech. This agency later got transformed and merged into Iranian Space Agency. I remember seeing a couple of graduate students of IT and Telecom in one of the rooms spending a multi-million dollar grant to design a communication satellite together with the Chinese :)

When the agency started before the revolution, we were the big friend of the Americans and were the first in the region into which US started transferring space imaging technology. Near Tehran there was a huge imaging factory with a monster satellite receiver. The receiver had the serial number ending to 001, the first of its kind to be built for the purpose of receiving images from a new earth observing satellite for civilian applications. The station soon hibernated after the revolution. And now we sent a rocket!. I would be happy though if we really could have achieved the domestic potential to carry something that far but I hope it is really true and not like another thing bought from the Russians and the Chinese. Russia is practically sweeping its soviet warehouses to sell to Iran and China with its garbage quality exports, cheap labor and the VETO power has been busy waving its spider web for the Iranian cash.

Barcelona, Top Deck Tour

The gap between my posts are getting bigger and bigger. Some days during the big rush of work I just open the blog page not to forget how it looks like and try to remember what happened in life that I did not write. Again it is Friday and a chance to blog.

The week in Barcelona had a fun start. We had some good suggestions from visitors of the blog for places to go but we literally had only less than a day to explore the city and during winter that means very little chance. We tried to explore the city on top of a double decker tour bus. Barcelona has three routes of tour buses, the blue and green covering the southern and the red covering the northern part of town. We had no idea so just by keeping the finger up in the air and looking at the number of stops in the blue route, it became the choice.

Barcelona was very nicely built and maintained. Alive and with refreshing scenes. Maybe it was only Sunday morning but the calm and comfort of Barcelona attracted our attention. The second interesting thing was the great initiative of bicycle rent and go stations and the city was filled with those. You could see many people on those red and white bikes picked up from stations and apparently they could put them back in any other stations when they wanted to drop them. We eagerly wanted to do the same only we later discovered that the rental was not by credit card but via special cards and through a registration in the city hall. Mrs.Behi loves bikes and she was really looking forward to this. I had to distract her after this not-so pleasant discovery with a scoop of her favorite chocolate ice cream:).

From the explanations of the audio tour it was easy to understand that Barcelona got her fresh new look from the Olympics, renovated neighborhoods and the area near the port only became popular after the  event when the new residential blocks of the Olympics were on for sale and only the rich could buy. It was Sunday and people were out for refreshing their body and mind in a mild winter day. Flag of Catalonia with red and yellow strips on air everywhere and Catalonians on the bike, on the run or just walking the dogs  left us with a a very harmonic impression of the city.   

I could take a couple of good photos but I am not putting them here for one reason. I am shutting down the photo albums in my typepad blog and try to avoid putting pictures in the text any more. Instead, I have opened a brand new photo sharing account and I am uploading selected pictures from all my travelings into it.

After that one day of fun with Mrs.Behi I spent all the rest of the week in meetings. We had this company-wide gathering and many people from Africa, Europe and former Soviet states attended. It was fun meeting all those people but not easy to bare those many hours sitting and thinking about business. Good news, I won a prize! it is called the President's Club and 22 of us from Europe and Africa got it in a nice ceremony on a rotting restaurant on top of the Olympic village. Our company president was calling each person to the front with a little introduction and humor with information from our employee page. Mine was: Behi like to learn from other cultures, he likes digital photography and the Mac computer and he wishes to put our company products on Mac :) It is a great prize to be won in what I do and I think I am supposed to be more motivated now in fact I should really think if I am enough. Some heavy thinking is ahead. All I know is that I shall not settle till I find something that I believe is great work!