GEEK OUT

MATHIAS RHEIN

My professional life

I studied Biochemistry in Frankfurt, Germany and am currently employed as a Post Doc at Hannover Medical School in the Lab for Molecular Neuroscience. The interface between mind and body has ever since been my passion while my current focus is in addiction research.

Most fittingly I am well-acquainted with my personal drug, technology: I am administering the lab computers, maintenance the lab robots and am preferentially dealing with everything needing a plug and making mechanical sounds. This of course includes my workhorse MacMini, my MacBook 13" Retina, iPhone 6 and iPad Air. I get goosebumps if an automated procedure is exactly fulfilling its purpose - in that moment it doesn't really matter exactly how much time I invested into developing and troubleshooting.

Apple and I

My last windows laptop was modded to the point where I scratched off the paint to reveal the white-ish plastic from under the fake metal and spent considerable amounts of time running a UI skin (Flyakite, for those who still remember). At one point I realized that simply buying a Mac and dealing with compatibility issues would be less time-comsuming than constantly stealing resources through experimental skins only to end up with a cheap, laggy and buggy copy of the real thing.

I bought my first Mac during my PhD time (2005), the iconic Powerbook 12" with a G4 Processor. I am not exaggerating stating that our relationship was very emotional. My thesis was conducted in Mellel, the fastest and most reliable word processor at that time.
My first iPhone was imported from the US at the earliest possible timepoint. Together with a fellow Apple enthusiast we spent a whole night jailbreaking the device in order to unlock the telephone features. Anyone familiar with this or any comparable situation is smiling in reminiscence while all the others are calling you nuts- over time you get used to that.
These stories are two highlights from my personal Apple diary, consequently in my professional and private life technology bearing the apple logo is dominant. This might sound a little snobby but is actually simple pragmatism. I am rather willing to pay a little more money while sparing myself the hassle dealing with the operating system.

In my leisure time I…

- enjoy spending time with my wife
- am passionately doing Freeletics
- listen to handmade music (no techno, no dance and electric) of all time periods and styles, the only exceptions being HipHop and Soul
- sing in a local Acapella Choir where I am also handling the web site
- read comics somewhere inbetween the cracks. I used to collect Spiderman and later Wolverine, now I am enjoying the freedom of Marvel Unlimited. Great fan of Bill Wattersons "Calvin&Hobbes"
- am listening to popular tech and productivity podcasts (Back to Work, Productivity Show, MacPowerUsers)
- am excited to frequently be able to translate and contribute articles to Geek Out

The latter is mainly fueled by my love for the english language. My operating system and all things I am writing for myself as well as movies, music or podcasts are preferentially in english. I spent next to no time abroad and can't otherwise explain my preference except stating that it simply is this way.

Least common denominator

Productivity apps had my attention from their first real manifestation. I was already playing around with Kinkless, then passionately joined the OmniFocus Betas while reading "Getting Things Done" for the first time. I was both inspired and fascinated with this productivity revolution, trying out every new app that tried to assist this radically new mindset: *OmniFocus, Things, Thinking Rock, Personal Brain, Wunderlist, Toodledo, Remember the milk, The Hit List, Goodtask, Firetask, Taskpaper, Foldingtext, 2Do und Todoist*- to just name a few. Starting to think myself in and out of these different productivity paradigms I ended up more and more scouring the respective forums, getting to know people with the same preference.

Thomas and I got in contact through a shared passion of ours: helping others solve task-specific problems in the OmniFocus forums, talk about changing between the different apps and their productivity philosophies, complain because OmniFocus does or doesn't do XY (insert your most requested feature) but app XY is doing just that and so on... Thomas was musing aloud about searching someone to translate for his blog. The rest is history.


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