Hello, my name is Tim Teege
and this is my blog.

The spoiler comes right at the beginning. In 2018 I succeeded at all but one of my yearly and monthly goals, and for 2019 I’ll keep nearly the same list. Here is the new one.

• 12 Marathons
• 2,000 Kilometers of Running in Total
• Run Every 2 Days (at least 5 km)
• 5 Million Steps
• Read 12 Books

Now I can elaborate. For two consecutive years now, I have published my yearly goals and how I did on them on my marathon blog, teesches-marathons.eu. It’s a motivational boost for myself to do so.

Read on

First off, to absolutely no one’s surprise, you’ll lose weight. 

So, if that’s your goal, you have the recipe right here.

My goal wasn’t to lose weight, much rather it was about finding out what will happen to my body in general. Losing weight is one outcome. But what else happened? And what is it like every day? What’s the unforeseen challenges? Here’s my experience.

A Third Attempt

Yes, I have tried and failed this month-long project twice before. The vegan month, that is. In 2017 I set the challenge for March and got too frustrated and lazy after just three days, if I remember correctly. I started another attempt in June of 2017 and made it to the 15th, half-way through, having learned a few minor things that helped. I also realized that tiny mistakes are not avoidable. 

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For the first time in my life I missed a connecting flight and was stranded over night in a different city. 

Of course my first reaction was to turn to Google for answers what to do about this, but I couldn’t find any helpful stories about what would happen. So here’s my story, maybe someone will find this helpful.

Italian Weekend

I spent the weekend of December 15 and 16 in Pisa, Italy, to run their marathon. Lufthansa flew me from Hamburg (HAM) to Frankfurt (FRA), I changed planes to get to Florence (FLR). The second legs’ operating airline was Air Dolomiti, a tiny company using just 12 planes. They are owned by Lufthansa and fly under their label. Tiny delays, no problem. Rental car over to Pisa, 80 kilometers.

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This is the post that I really wanted to write but felt like I need my own blog for it. So now, after spending a few days creating this blog and writing some other posts, it’s time. 

First Off, Why Build a Tiny House? 

For playing the drums 🥁.

My journey towards playing the drums has been going on for about 20 years now and never gotten to a fully satisfactory status so far. There are so many problems for an aspiring drummer, it’s kind of tough to get there.

First, in my childhood years, when I first wanted to start learning how to play the drums, my parents were against it. A bit later, I kind of managed to persuade them through the old strategy of nagging until they gave their Okay.

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I have started a new experiement, as I do. This one is not about buying new expensive stuff as the title suggests in a click-baity way, but about being more compassionate and building empathy.

The Experiment

For about a week now, I’ve been putting 1 and 2 Euro coins into my jacket’s front pocket for easy access and I will give at least 1 Euro to every single beggar or homeless person I see.

Why?

I used to not understand the problem that lies behind being homeless. Here in Germany, everyone is entitled to a (small) basic income and a rental apartment, right? You just have to show up at the Job Center from time to time and state your claim and you’re fine, right?

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As you might know, I run another blog mainly for my marathon running hobby. It can be found at www.teesches-marathons.eu. Design-wise, I keep it as simple as possible – not unlike this blog –, but from time to time I like to throw in some minor changes like little quirky experiments. 

This post is a description of how one of these came into existence. 

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I really like the hex code color of #3399ff, or #39f in short form. It’s a bright blue with a hint more green than red in it. Whenever I need an accent color for anything, like for example a link color or header background color, I use this first. 

#3399ff

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Is the time for single purpose website over? Maybe a few more years, what do you think? Make your guess and set your own timer with my new single purpose website!

www.timethetime.com – Set Up a Free Countdown Timer and Share It!

Granted, this marketing copy leaves room for improvement. But the tool does what it says it does.

Earlier this year I thought it would be nice to build a very simple countdown timer tool, because I needed one and all the others I found were looking horribly. Also, in contrast to every programmer on earth, I really like playing with the problems that the world’s inconsistent timezones bring with them. There’s something fascinating in it for me. I used some helpful libraries, JavaScript and a bit of good old PHP/MySQL and threw this together in about a week. 

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I’ve been having a mobile phone contract for more than 20 years now, and it always had the routine included of getting a new phone every 24 months. Some little changes here and there, but it never made sense to go to an Apple Store on an iPhone release day to buy one directly.

Until Today.

I had heard a bit about it, seen the pictures of crazy crowds storming into the Store at 8 AM sharp, being greeted by huge applause. Is that still the case? I wanted to finally have that experience myself. And after 24 months, my “old” iPhone wanted to get handed down to Sophie anyways. 

I’m far from a pro regarding these Apple events. So I made no reservation and prepared nothing. I thought, the times of people sleeping in front of the store in tents are surely over, the excitement must have gone down over the years. No need for a reservation, right? 

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This is a tech post. I recently came across a problem with storing data I’d like to share.

As you might know, I earn money by running a web development agency. Years ago, I used to even work as a web programmer. Not so much anymore, but I still like to keep up a bit and learn about interesting things. One of those things is utf8mb4 in MySQL databases. 

A few weeks ago I was debugging a weird Emoji problem with my colleague Maxim. He is a great programmer, I used to be an average one at best. Still, it took some time for us together to find the solution to the problem. 

Why would the character ”✅” get saved into our utf8 enabled MySQL database without a problem, but “🤜🏽” would not?

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There were times when I liked to read books so much, I didn’t even want to stop while at a public swimming pool. 

Somehow, it got less and less. That might be just a simple shift in priorities, but it could also be due to the collective attention deficit disorder we as a society have cultivated with our social networks. 

Anyways, I think it’s time for me to start reading again. It just is a pleasurable experience worth anyone’s time. You’re being entertained or even captivated, you’re learning new things, you’re improving your own ability to focus. 

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