What I’m up to Now

This /now page is inspired by Derek Sivers’ idea. See nownownow.com. Or check out more general information about me or what hardware and tools I currently use or what sort of things I have planned for the future on my bucket list.

Last updated on September 1st, 2023.

🪨 Basics

Living in Hamburg, Germany. Amazing wife, four wonderful daughters aged between 5 and 11.
Working as co-owner and board member of a web design and development company, a team of six.
Blogging about sports and other things at teesche.com 😉

👨‍👩‍👧‍👧 Family

Education of the four daughters is never finished, new questions and challenges arise every day. Lots of coordination between school, friends, and hobbies. Summer weather wasn’t as good as expected and the kids’ and our moods often are heavily influenced by that.
Spending deliberate time with all of them, mostly in the mornings and evenings. Many afternoons, too.
Looking forward to the next one on one trips which I do with each of my daughters. Every daughter can select a European city to visit for a weekend. #1 and I went to Paris in May, checking out the Eiffel Tower and Louvre and had the world’s third best Croissants. More recently, #3 and I went to the city of Amsterdam and enjoyed the channels, food, and time together. Planning another trip with #2 during the fall season, after the two of us have already been to Copenhagen and London together.

💻 Business

Now more than 12 years in, I have been working on applying some structural as well as strategical changes to the company I’ve been running. We have just made one of our SaaS products a new stand-alone company and additionally I have sold half of my company and added a new Co-CEO earlier this year. Now, starting in September of 2023, I have made the decision to step back from day-to-day and give all CEO tasks to my new partner, while continuing as co-owner and member of the board.
A new direction for the company feels right, but an additional commercial activity isn’t out of the question for me, either. Trying out more writing and writing-related stuff, as well as coding of fun side projects which could maybe be developed into something bigger later.

💪 Health & Exercise

I’m streak running since January 1st of 2022, which today are 637 days. At least one mile (1.6 km) per day, ’cause those are the rules! The rough goal is to make it to 1,000 days, which will happen on 27th of September, 2024. In the meantime, I was accepted into the Streak Runners International, Inc. and am currently ranked #69 of the active Germans.
Aiming to do a minimal core strengthening workout every day, I have recently switched from my own made up exercises to using the free workout of the Seven app or a Freeletics app workout, if I feel more like variety. In August this has happened on 58 percent of the days.
A breathing exercise like the Wim Hof Method or an Othership app routine still helps me to refocus and catch a breath every other day.
Eating fully vegan on about 50-60 percent of all days, but if not, defaulting back to vegetarian. Super rarely some fish, never meat.
Since April 1st, 2023, I have reduced alcohol consumption to zero in order to give this One Year No Beer movement a try. Every day without alcohol or animal products is a win.
Bed time and screen time: aiming to be in bed by 21:30 every night so I regain enough energy for the next day, as well as to keep my mobile screen time below 60 minutes per day – just for staying sane and being more in touch with what’s actually happening instead of what’s happening on the screen. In August, I reached that bed time goal on 84% of the days and had an average phone screen time of 44 minutes per day. Happy with that.

⌨️ Writing & Coding

I’ve been enjoying writing since I started this blog in 2011, but lately that enjoyment has even increased. Which is why I’m doing more of it. In addition to the blog, You can subscribe to the newsletter, which I use to provide enriched notifications about new posts on the blog.
A few blog post and even book ideas, some of them nearly finished, are lying around in the pipeline, just waiting for me to find the time to make them happen. Those are constantly on my mind, giving me a feeling of unfinished work, but in a positive way.
Tinkering on teesche.com with JavaScript, PHP and MySQL has been more fun lately, too. I’m avoiding using any frameworks or libraries, if I can, so building everything from the ground up is sometimes challenging, but also very rewarding. Check out the Quantified Teesche section.
There are two side projects which lie around half-finished on my server. The Read & Run Club is going to be a web tool to help you increase motivation for running marathons and reading books, since I think both should be done more by everyone. You log your books and my code pulls your running activities from Strava (or you can log them manually, too), so there’s a helpful overview for you, as well as regular nudges via email into the right direction. The second side project I’m currently working on is called STRAVA BATTLE. Inspiration hit when two runner friends of mine told me about their intention to battle it out over the rest of the year 2022 over who could collect the most amount of running kilometers. They’ve done it before in 2020 and it escalated to a very entertaining level, but it was hard to follow the current status of it – who’s in the lead, how’s the trend been during the last few days, et cetera. This one is 90% done, but I can’t get a satisfying login mechanism going, so I’m thinking about learning basic SwiftUI in order to make it a real native app.

🎸 Music & Hobbies

Daily guitar practice, although sometimes for just a few minutes. Still trying to get the major parts from Polyphia’s songs G.O.A.T., 40oz, and Look But Don’t Touch perfect, but then I just had to start practicing their amazing song, Playing God, and it’s so hard. But that’s the fun part for me. Still thinking about their live shows I got to attend in Baltimore, Antwerp, and Hamburg. 🤟❤️ I recently upgraded my guitars with Tim Henson’s (of Polyphia) signature semi-acoustic, the Ibanez TOD10N, because it sounds and looks so cool. And since my kids took part in a week-long band practice workshop and came out of it wanting to play the electric bass at home, I got one immediately. Playing bass is lots of fun for me as well.
My drums are also used often. Pounding the electronic pads of the Roland TD-17KVX as hard as I can to rather simple songs, mostly those by the Foo Fighters, Rage Against the Machine, or Taking Back Sunday. Not going for improvement of my chops here, it’s mostly because the drumming itself is so satisfactory.
Since 2016, I have decidedly made reading books a new hobby and part of my life. Over the years since then, the amount of books I read has gone up and the fun and knowledge I’ve been collecting, too. Every couple of weeks, I usually finish another book and publish my notes on it here in the /bookshelf section.
Podcasting. Recording sound has been of some interest ever since my time as guitar player in a funk band back in the day, so this year I had the idea that I could just record reading my own new blog posts for those people who want to save time. The result: a Podcast! I enjoy those few hours spending on it every few weeks.

More about my story and history is on the /about page.