So I added a tweet button to the website, at the bottom of individual posts, right after Evan Williams tweeted about it. I’m probably too optimistic to think that my posts will ever get tweeted by the handful people who are kind enough to follow me. If this post gets read, chances are that it’ll be on fb anyway, and how many people actually know about the website or figured out that hitting “View Original Post” will bring them over here. Heh.

p.s. I just realised it tweets the website, not individual posts. Or does it? I’ll have to test.

So I thought I should take a screenshot of google wave before it goes away. From the amount of white space it’s pretty obvious that I don’t use it. Aside from a small handful of waves when I first got my account, I haven’t gone back at all. It certainly is before its time and I’ll join the many who didn’t know what to do with it.

In other news, I don’t like buzz and don’t know what to do with it either.

Sarah Lacey at Techcrunch wrote about why she doesn’t use foursquare, which is rare in in the Silicon Valley world. The pros are abundant — location based services allow personalising, and the game aspect is pretty cool. But as she says,

telling my friends where I am doesn’t gives me enough in return to warrant the privacy invasion

I bought a couple of new ebooks and when I went to read one of them it kept freezing the ereader. After doing a soft reset several times, the screen was still stuck on the start up page. So I decided to do a hard reset, which is like reformatting and wiping it clean.

All the books I’d purchased are in the calibre library, so I wasn’t worried. The free classics that I got when I first bought the ereader are also on the mbp, but since I never got round to reading a single one, I didn’t even reload them.

I really have to figure out how to a) convert and load my own stories and b) getting everything on the ipad.

A technician came to Car’s house to fix their very slow internet. After changing to a wireless router, he got the download and upload speeds to significantly increase. He introduced us to speedtest which pings a nearby server for internet speed. My speed isn’t all that good, but it’s fine enough for me.

My itoys: ipod original, nano, classic, iphone, ipad.

Yes, I went and bought an ipad. The wifi version, not the 3G. This one is actually for Mum. I can’t get one for myself yet — it’s not compatible with Tiger so I have to either upgrade to snow leopard or get a new mbp first.

Anyway, look at how huge the original “cigarette case” ipod is, especially next to the nano. This one has a lot of memories for me. I bought it with mm’s sis, and in those days ipods were mac only. In a way, I’m glad apple opened it up to PCs, cos it shows that the revenue has gone into further research and design. Of course we’re all having to adjust to more people in the apple space nowadays.

I was saddened to learn that Prof Fritz Sennheiser has passed away. He was of course the founder of Sennheiser, one of the biggest names in audio technology. Microphones, speakers and headphones with the Sennheiser name usually mean high quality.

When I started using my ipod again, I was immediately on the lookout for earphones to replace the original apple ones. Shures and Boses were too expensive. Skullcandies didn’t fit. Everywhere I looked, the answer was Sennheisers. For everyday listening, I use the twist-to-fit models. I used the green ones for running for the longest time until I broke the arm so I was on the lookout for replacement ones last week.

These are adidas branded but made by Sennheiser pmx680. I was at first skeptical of the behind the head arrangement cos I thought there won’t be room around my ears to fit these and my glasses. Turns out, I didn’t have to worry. These absolutely stay in place, even better than the twist-to-fit. The sound quality is excellent and I like how it comes with a short cord for armbands and an extension for other use. I’m not using the armband anymore, having switched to a spibelt (well, Nathan shadowpak), that’s another post.

There was a rumour that the macbook air might get refreshed this week, citing a source that was reliable in the past. And that the refresh may come as early as Tuesday. Well, Tuesday has come and gone and no announcement. Sigh. It seems more likely that any refresh will be later this year. According to ars, who spoke with intel,

low-power Arrandale-class processors “for the ultra-thin segment” are coming later this summer

I am very tempted to get an mba in addition to a new mbp (may be even an ipad) this year. Walking around London for 4hrs with the mbp, the e-reader, adaptors, wires and 3 books in my backpack was good training, but I can do weights at home and an mba would have made it feel less like hiking expedition. Big apple year this may end up being.

youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAl28d6tbko

We were at best buy and I couldn’t help it. Played with an ipad for a bit. Yep, it’s just like a larger ipod touch. It’s still a bit too large for my liking. It can’t fit into my back pocket like the iphone, and it’s kinda too big and heavy to carry around. My maximum size tolerance is the ereader and it’s bigger.

Way cool though. No doubt I’ll get one eventually.

Will it blend? Looks like it does. I watched this with horror.

I’m not buying an ipad yet. I know I will, eventually. But not now.

Some other people also think this way.

A stupid, annoying number has been calling my iphone 3 times a day for the past 2 weeks, always at the same times. Silence when I pick up, and unreachable when I try to call back. I think it’s a fax or modem or something automatic that got programmed wrong. Finally I couldn’t stand it and I called at&t. The rep and I tried to think of possible solutions. There is a blocking plan but it costs $5 a month. Finally I said, why don’t I just change the number. Seeing that only 6 people have my iphone number, it’s no big deal.

In any case, I’m switching to my google voice number so I can have better control. I can block numbers in gvoice, as well as get notifications inside gmail. I’ve been juggling multiple numbers for a while, I seem to have gathered a horde of them:

• iphone — secret number only 6 people know
• google voice — “public” number
• pre-paid plan I use for the nokia — disposable number for services etc
• office
• blackberry

Ironic, since I never answer if I don’t recognise the caller and the only people I call are my parents and mm. Looking at my account, I’ve used up all of 9 mins this month. Shock.

Only recently that I discovered that there’s mobile signal in the underground sections of the red line — tolerable 3G signal at the stations, but spotty in the tunnels. I should be excited, but all I can say is: a) about time and b) it’s still below global standards.

[via df] Click on the image above.

This works only on chrome and safari (and I checked). Anthony Calzadilla used css3 to create this moving at-at walker, no animated gif, no photoshop, no video. Just css. Wow.

I learned a little html and css when I first set up the website, but I haven’t kept up. And now it’s html 5 and css3, I’m not sure I’ll ever learn it.

Why I won’t buy it (yet):

• can’t multi-task
• no flash
• no webcam or camera
• no usb, not even an sd card slot
• adaptor isn’t magsafe, ie need yet another power supply set
• additional 3G cost — unless there’s a bundle for iphone+ipad
• it’s just a larger iphone / ipod touch, can’t take the place of the mbp
• price will drop

mm just called to tell me that she got her iphone. In white, so we’re now “a pair”. Heehee. I told her about the apple event tomorrow when every single person in the world knows that the tablet will be announced. I’ve deliberately avoided posting about it, cos I know it’ll just be post after post of how I want it. But, well, I want it.

[via giz]

Akamai just published their 3Q09 state of the internet report, and it’s interesting reading with lots of stats. A couple stands out. Globally unique IPs grew by 17% yoy, but China alone grew by 30%. Yep, my opinion that China is a self-sufficient single market still stands.



The other stat is the average broadband connection speed. Growing in the technologically advanced countries like Korea, Japan and in Scandinavia. But decreased in the US. Another sign of decline that unfortunately no one seems to be surprised about.

youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwEupAQReCs

Talking about google, I’ve been using google chrome on the netbook and at work. The official work browser is still IE6 (*yuck*) so for personal stuff I use another browser. It used to be firefox, now I use both.

I really like chrome. It’s fast and uncluttered. The thumbnail page of recently visited pages is brilliant, as is the search directly at the address bar, which google calls omnibar. It’s already overtaken safari in certain browser market share measurements. When it gets more plugins, most importantly ad-block plus and I’m sure Gina will make some Better google extensions, I’ll make it the default browser on the netbook.

Unfortunately it’s only available for 10.5 and later, so I’ll stick with firefox on the mbp. Reminds me of the old days of firefox 1.0 when I was on system 9 on the pb2 and couldn’t use it. Man, I was using netscape then. How far and fast browsers have come in just a few years.

youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6COwgigJ-g&feature=player_profilepage

don’t get me wrong, I’m forever an apple fanboi, but omg is the google nexus one fantastic or not? I’m so tempted to get one because: a) it gets full 3G support in US, UK, HK and Singapore — my 3 primary locations are all there; b) it fully integrates google voice!!! c) android is bringing serious competition to apple but mostly d) I have 4 sim cards but only 3 phones, this is the perfect opportunity (*excuse*) to correct that anomaly.

I bought wii fit plus during black friday even though it wasn’t on sale. At the time, I was debating between this wii fit, which I’d always wanted, and the new Tony Hawk skateboarding game.

The first time I started it up, the program did some body measurements — height, weight, bmi, balance. Then there are some basic exercises — yoga, strength training, cardio, which are pretty decent. I tried the balance training ones — skiing, heading a football etc and not only did I suck, it told me I was unbalanced. Heehee.

I did better at the advanced games, and these are fun! Segway, biking, martial arts, flying — all involve some form of balance, cardio or at the very least, moving the body. They really did great on the games.

Its selling point is that it’s a fitness program. Hmm. I’m on the fence on this one. I know people have claimed to have lost weight on wii tennis, I’m just not sure it’s an effective weight loss program. It will benefit people who aren’t active normally. For me, it’s a fun game. It’s not gonna replace running or strength training.

Yes, I’m well aware that yahoo bought flickr ages ago. But why is there a need to force the yahoo branding onto the flickr logo? I hate, hate, hate it. I don’t hate yahoo, I just think that this move is desperate and unnecessary. There is nothing to gain by diluting an already strong brand. Plus, it makes it look really jarring and ugly.

I’m certainly not the only one. Poor judgment, yahoo.

i shut down the mbp this morning with a guilty twinge — i’m gonna be without it till next sunday — a good 10 days. I’m going away on holiday, then to the conference. I’m taking the netbook. A fb friend, upon reading my dilemma tweet (mbp or wind?) put it aptly — that it will be an experiment to see if I’m compatible with netbook computing. I think I am, but ask me again in 3, 5, 7, 10 days.

This is an important pic for 2 reasons: a) it’s my second new toy this week and b) it was taken on my iphone. Yep, i succumbed to the temptation and got myself a netbook. It was basically as simple as Car emailing me a Tigerdirect link and me saying go ahead. MSI Winds had been leading contenders in any case. I didn’t end up getting the u120 at the end, I got the u100 which is older but had more functionality like b/g/n wireless, bluetooth and faster upload speed. For just under $400 I get a 10” screen at 2.6lbs, 1GB RAM, 160GB HDD, 3 usb ports, 4-in-1 card reader, neat. It even came with a case which is shiny plastic and kinda tacky and i won’t use it.

I’m writing this post on it, and typing is fine — I’d eliminated the Acer and the 9” Eees cos i was constantly making mistakes on the keyboard, this one is fine. I have my usual tabs open in firefox, and have been happily surfing on it.

I suffered through installing stuff on it — firefox and add-ons, itunes, mcafee, ccleaner, and bemoaned Window’s lack of userability when i found myself forgetting basic stuff. The ability to hackintosh was a deciding factor in the decision to go for the Wind. Will I end up making it dual boot? Probably, but i’m not in any hurry.

As to the second important event, this was the first pic taken with the iphone camera. I have to do a big shrug cos it’s pretty pedestrian, even for “just” a 3MP camera. It will be useful for taking disposable pics for twitter, that’s it. I can see myself embracing this new form of photography though. At the very least, expect even more food pics.

I can’t get away with just yesterday’s one line post about the iphone right? Of course not.

So, i’ve had 24 hours with it, is there anything new I can add to the millions of words already out there about the device? No, not really. All I want to do is add this: SQUEEEEEEEE!!!

In a way, I feel like I have 2 years of catching up to do. That I couldn’t be a part of the early adopter crowd, or the 3G excitement last year, only to partake vicariously. But, c’est la vie, I wasn’t living in the correct part of the world. Then again, I am glad that this is my first, that I won’t be holding onto a 2G or a 3G and wishing I can get a 3GS.

Early impressions:
pros — fast, fast, fast. apps. easy to use. easy to sync. apps. beautiful. great functionality (see that apps wall at WWDC this year?)
cons — my fingerprints are all over the screen! luckily i have one of those sticky protectors. and it’s a bit big for my pockets, especially when wearing work clothes, i probably need to get a holster.

Basically, I can see why Apple sold 1 million in the first weekend. I know i’m guilty of disdain / contempt at people who’ve recently jumped on the Apple bandwagon — that i’m no longer the anomaly with the cool computer — i guess it’s either swallow my pride and be one of the masses or get on another train. I suppose I could have gone the Gina Trapani Android route, if it were any manufacturer but Apple i may have. As it is, I’m seeing a long and mutually enjoyable relationship with my iphone(s). And I haven’t even been tempted to jailbreak it yet.

I went to the Apple Store after work and got my iPhone. Enough said.

I hadn’t planned on having spare time this weekend, so I didn’t bring the mbp. *gasp* So when I find myself with spare time I naturally started missing it, or wishing I had a netbook. There does seem to be a huge netbook mania nowadays. I think there is a time and place for netbooks — as second computers for basic tasks only — but it seems that there’s already feature creep on these machines.

The majority of netbooks are Windows (mostly XP) and Linux. The nearest mac equivalent is the mba or the new 13” mbp. Both very attractive machines undoubtedly but not even I will want to spend $1200 or $1500 on a spare laptop. If I wanted a mac netbook I’d have to get a regular netbook and hackintosh it. I missed out the chance to get a hackintosh-perfect dell mini 9, even though I’m sure it’s available on ebay. I’m not saying I will necessarily hackintosh any netbook I get, but hackintoshability is one of the criteria. Luckily lots of people are also interested in this, and bb gadgets have been keeping track of the various netbooks in the market. So it looks like I’m getting the MSI Wind U120.

I’ve been playing with hunch, a new startup from Caterina Fake that

helps you make decisions and gets smarter the more you use it

What is it? It’s a “decision engine” — I ask it a question, it asks me several related questions, then it gives me answers based on my answers. There’s also a big list of 70+ questions that i can answer that educates hunch about me.

So far, hunch has told me I should get the iPhone 3GS and not the Palm Pre (like, duh); that if I were to visit London I should stay at the Blake; and that I should try deep water aerobics as a fitness program. The last one is, well, pretty inaccurate — and I get a chance to disagree. It’s still a work in progress, there are not so many questions, but it’s fun.

There are tens of thousand of iphone apps available. This one, Brushes, created a stir last week, as it was the app used to create the June cover of the New Yorker magazine. Of course, artistic talent had a lot to do with it.

I was following the liveblog of the WWDC keynote. Price reduction on mbp! Snow Leopard out in a few months! All very exciting. But of course everyone was waiting for iPhone news. That there’d be a 32GB model, compass, video, cut & paste, new OS…it’s all been leaked already. But it’s still nice to have it confirmed. Now the question is, how soon after 19 June can I wait?

Yes, I’m a gadget freak, and I love looking at shiny gadgets. Interestingly though, I’m not an early adoptor, and I use gadgets for a long time. The mbp is an original from 2006, camera is a 350D from 2005, cellphone is from 2007, i only got my ipod nano recently. So it’s a pleasant surprise to hear Anil Dash and Gina Trapani talk about how cool it is to keep using older gadgets. Anil has even set up a new website last year’s model to promote the idea:

It’s totally normal to lust after the hottest new geeky gadgets. It’s also cool to put some thought into what we buy, and what we throw away. So this is a place to show the world that a lot of us are choosing to use Last Year’s Model.

since twitter seems to be BIG news these days, here’s a couple of twitter tools for the iphone I want to bookmark.

1. birdhouse
They call it a notepad for twitter, and basically it’s for draft twitters. Like how I use read it later.

2. tweetie
It’s now for the mac, but 10.5 only. This is a twitter client that has a much more mac feel than tweetdeck.

Seeing that there seems to be more, more, more and even more rumours of a mac netbook, I’ll hold off getting an mba this year. May be upgrade to the new mbp, but I still need a smaller machine.
ars talked about why apple will or will not bring out a netbook. There are cases for an apple netbook: it’s all the rage, and there’s too many rumours and “we’re not doing it” statements…and we all know about these statements. OTOH a netbook means stripped down functionality, which apple doesn’t go for. Besides, it’s arguable that the iphone is a good netbook-quality small computer already.

Apparently it was just a display issue, and my account was credited with 100 classic books. I looked through the ebookstore today, and even though there are over 900 books, it took me a whole day to come up with 66. Jane Austens, Shakespeare comedies, and a bunch of Dickens. But there were many from authors who are obscure, like Charlotte M. Yonge. And for some like Trollope, they’re not offering his most popular books. They have just one or two of each series, like just Barchester Towers above, but not many more. Actually the entire list looks like it was gakked from project gutenberg and if i wanted i could just download them free from there and convert.

I have to register twice for the ereader — once at the sony website for the device itself, and a second time via the stupid PC only software at the ebookstore. The first went fine, cos I did it on the mbp. The second wasn’t so smooth. The device had been authorised before to another user. What? It became obvious that I had been sold a returned product, as new. This is very annoying.

I emailed Sony, following the instructions on the faq. The fact that they had the answer to that question is disconcerting.

I got a reply within a few hours. They gave me 2 codes, each for 50 free classic books. I entered the code one at a time, and hey presto! Only one code worked. My account has 50 free books, but the other 50 was missing. I’ve emailed again, and waiting for the answer.

This is becoming ridiculous and a farce. Am I not supposed to have bought it? Was someone thumbing their nose at me for getting the 700 instead of the more popular 505? Should I have been more patient and ordered direct from Sony instead of getting from Borders?

Very bad taste.

so I was visiting Car this weekend, and she’d told me during the week that she’d ordered the sony ereader and it was expected to arrive on Friday. And when I got there Friday it was there, all tiny and thin and cool looking. How possibly can I resist such a toy? I had myself during the week went over to the Borders at Michigan Avenue to look at them in person, and i was amazed at how small they are.

Instead of ordering and waiting, I just decided to go get it. Originally I thought I’d go during the week when I’m back in town, but Car very kindly offered to take me to a nearby Borders. The one we went to first was further away, in a large shopping complex. I queued up at the till and told the person there I wanted to buy a sony ereader. She gave me a blank look for a few seconds before something snapped. she was still a bit clueless, first having to ask a colleague, then offering me the 505 when I specified the 700. Eventually i found myself at the information desk, and a VERY helpful lady told me they actually have one and was bringing it out. Then it turned out the they didn’t have it, but she continued her helpfulness by calling another store nearby and holding it.

Backtrack. Why not the kindle 2? The main reason is the DRM — I want to buy books from sources other than amazon, and the conversion process put me off. The k2 still looks like a toy to me. I will probably use the iphone, when i get one, perhaps on a daily basis. I wish I had gotten more into ereaders last year when I was travelling so much. Why the 700 and not the 505, at $100 cheaper. One word: touchscreen. I’m a big sucker for geeky things I can touch. When I was playing around both the 505 and the 700 at Borders, I’d finish with the 700 and was poking at the screen of the 505 expecting something to happen.

Okay, back to the buying adventure.

The other Borders (at 95th and Western) turned out to be elusive to find. First off, it started raining heavily, then there was zillions of traffic. We ended up at the mall, but it wasn’t inside the mall. Finally we got there, and I queued up again to buy my ereader. The helpful lady at the first store had told us, “it’s behind the registers” which we first thought it was the store that was behind some “registers”. Hee. Anyway, i paid for it, got suckered into getting a Borders card, and off we went back home.

Close. But the story doesn’t end there.

I carefully opened the box, fondled my new ereader, and then discovered the usb cable was missing. It’s a fairly standard cable, and i have a couple at home just like it, but still…it was missing so we should get the whole package. i called the store, and was fairly inept at the whole explaining thing, but finally i found out that i could go back and exchange it.

After a dinner of “shit on a shingle” — i was too concerned with my ereader to take pictures of the new food — we headed back to the store to exchange my ereader. Actually it ended up at the store assistant ripping apart a 505 package and giving me the cable. LOL

So i sit here, it’s happily charging up. The only hurdle to overcome is Sony’s STUPID decision to make their software PC only. Then again, they make vaio’s so they don’t want to be associated with macs? As i said, stupid, and it rings a sour note. But i’ll get round it somehow.

Farhad Manjoo wrote in the NYT about managing his email inbox. Taking his cue from the great Merlin Mann 43 folders inbox zero concept, his method is simple but easier said than done. Basically we should limit our time spent on checking emails (crackberry addicts take note) and should start clearing out our inbox. Then incoming emails should be subject to the following treatment as soon as they come in:

1. reply to it straightaway
2. archive it — folders can be as elaborate or simple, as long as they’re used
3. forward it — to the correct person who will deal with it
4. hold for future action — this is the least preferred method, emails that are read and stuck in the inbox have no use

To this, I add one more: delete it. Sacrilege I know, but if it’s part of a chain that has been superceded, or is useless, or will not have any use for me in future. I delete it. Especially at work where our mailbox capacity is capped. With gmail I might archive it.

My gmail and yahoo inboxes are empty. My work inbox has about 10 emails, all read. THAT’S IT. So I think I can lay claim to one of these cool nerd merit badges.

via techcrunch, a neat little web 2.0 game — try to recognise as many web 2.0 sites by their logos. Some are instantly recognisable, but some are more tricky and some i’ve never heard of. And in true web 2.0 fashion, the site is facebook connect enabled.

i got 23/34, which is as many as i could have expected.

25 years ago, on 22 January 1984, this ad showed once during the Super Bowl.

The rest, as they say, is history.

I had the website graded by website grader,

a free seo tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors

Apparently I have no meta data, which is strange cos I thought movable type does that, have to look at the archive templates again. The other point is that I have too many images. Well duh, it’s a blog. On the positive side, I have an Alexa rank of 5,545,875 which is in the top 18.05 % of all websites.

I bought a new external hd, a small 320gb one for travelling. It transferred the mp3s alright, but when I opened up itunes somehow it was still wanting to locate the files at the old drive. So I did something drastic and deleted the whole library (keeping the files of course). What i forgot was to take a copy of the library database file, so i lost all my playlists and more importantly, play count, import date and ratings — the soft data so to speak. Sigh.

I guess it’s no big deal, some of the playlists date back to my first ipod, and are ratings really that important? I’ll just treat it as a new beginning.

At least it’s good news that drm is coming off itunes soon.

First I went crazy at amazon and bought three earbuds. Then I met up with my parents for lunch, and went crazy with more gadget shopping. Here’s what I ended up buying today.

  

from left to right: sennheiser mx75 sport $27.68, sennheiser cx300-b $19.99, skullcandy ink’d silver $9.63. Also bought a ton of replacement earphone sponges and buds.

Bought the my taxi game for the PSP. This is quite an old game that I’ve played on the PS2, and mm’s brother let me play on his PSP at christmas, so I had to get it.

Another gadget was a spare card reader, 55-in-1, it’s the same one I have now. It doesn’t need a power supply, just plugs in straightaway.

Mum and I went to look at apartments cos I suddenly decided I can afford to buy a small investment property. Saw something quite promising, will explore further.

Early dinner at the casual restaurant at the wet market. Then had to go back across town to get the wooden car beads that I forgot to get. Those were heavy, man. And no, I don’t have a car. But I will in Chicago, so I wanted to get these now.

One of the stories that surfaced during my nano stint was the one where the washington post helped shut down a major baddie web hosting company and spam traffic dramatically fell. It’s true! Since I started using igoogle, I only log into gmail proper about once a week. There used to be hundreds of spam messages waiting for me to delete. Today I went in and there were 46, mainly Russian or Chinese spam.

Whoever was responsible for this, and I think Washington Post is taking the credit, millions of people will thank you. Yes, the spam kings will be back, but this is one battle won.

I did the unthinkable. I joined facebook, and myspace. Actually I’ve had a couple of myspace accounts for ages, but I never updated it. And I discovered one of them has been there since 2005. Wow. I updated it, but I’m quickly getting a tad bored of it.

The leap to facebook is even more extreme. I held out for the longest time, then I thought sod it and bit the bullet. Again, 2 accounts. Big firewall between them cos I have to separate my online life with my real life-life. So far I’ve been systematically adding friends, and others have friended me, it’s an all round friendly situation.

So, follow me, friend me, write on my wall. Follow the links on the sidebar here ————->

I’ve been thinking of which phone to get in Chicago. The heart says iPhone, but I hate the prospect of going through the whole pwnage process. The android G1 is tempting, as are the new blackberries. I will have a bb from work, so it may be weird to have two.

In any case, the thought is that a landline isn’t necessary so I will need more functionality and I know the plans in the US are not competitive, especially since I will only consider the GSM networks. Still, I doubt I’ll change my behaviour even if I get super-duper smartphones:

• I don’t give my number out
• I won’t answer a call if it’s a number I don’t recognise
• Even if I answer, I will let the other party speak first and hang up if it’s not a legitimate call
• I will not use voicemail, if it’s part of a bundle I’ll not activate it and certainly won’t respond

I don’t understand why when a phone call comes in, I have to drop everything I’m doing and attend to it. And calls where the caller ID isn’t displayed is plain rude. I mean, with most forms of direct interaction—be it a letter, email or ringing the bell at the door—I, the recipient, can usually see who is sending/initiating the contact. Why phones were developed without caller display is baffling. Even so, why stop at just displaying a number? Even with unstored numbers all callers should be forced to display their name and purpose for calling.

And now there is hope. A new invention, truecall, intercepts all calls. It has a pre-programmed white- and blacklist. If the call is from the whitelist (the inventors call it the star list) the call is let through automatically. If from the blacklist (or zap list), it is rejected. An unrecognised number will receive an automated enquiry that asks for name and purpose for calling. It will then ask you whether to let the call through or not. The white- and blacklists are remembered. £99.99, which I’d be willing to pay to be rid of nuisance calls.

The best way of hacking through and possibly getting a response will be to text me. I like sms, because it’s not intrusive, gets the message across, and is free of the needless small talk that is necessary in a phone call. I’m glad that my feelings are vindicated. wireless and mobile news reports on a Sprint-sponsored study that:

a text is far more likely to elicit a quick response than voice mail. In fact, those under the age of 30 are four times more likely to respond within minutes to a text message compared to a voice mail, and 91 percent respond to a text message within one hour. Adults 30 and older are also quick to text — and are twice as likely to respond within minutes to a text message as compared to a voice message.

The older you are, the less likely you will respond to a text. I guess it’s the resistance to change — older people have gotten stuck in the habit of listening to a human voice. Even though we all know that speaking is less concise. As giz pointed out:

Why listen to your friend Jane hem and haw about a good time to meet up [on voicemail] when you could’ve spent three seconds reading “Im in da city. U free 2 meet?”

When I first got the mighty mouse, I was advised by the shop person that the wireless version was sluggish and couldn’t hold up to the wired version. After trying it out, I agreed so I ended up with the wired version.

Even though I wasn’t altogether comfortable with the mouse, I used it since getting it in 2006. It never occurred to me to explore anything outside of the Apple comfort zone. RSI in my right hand is less serious than in my left, but I knew it was only a matter of time and since it isn’t as bad I should try to preserve the condition.

My search for a wireless ergonomic mouse started with an informative lifehacker article. When I was in Chicago, we went to Tiger Direct and my specific goal was to buy a new mouse.

I deliberated between the logitech MX revolution and the microsoft natural 6000 although I’d originally wanted the evoluent vertical mouse, which wasn’t available.

In the end I got the—gasp—microsoft one because it felt more comfortable in my hand. It’s not obvious in the picture, but the mouse is slanted, so the grip is more natural. I find the angle works for me, and the scroll wheel better than the tiny pointer on the mighty mouse. It’s huge and heavy, reviewers have compared it to half a softball. Others commented that it was too large for their hands although I don’t feel it’s too large—and I have small hands. I guess it comes down to personal comfort.

I’m still a little freaked out that I just hooked up a microsoft product to the mbp. Well, for the sake of my hands, I just have to get over it.

I just kinda decided, spur of the moment, to get an ipod nano. I’ll probably still end up getting the iphone, but the nano will be useful for travelling and running.

I got the 16GB black one (what else). Now that my iTunes library is over 50GB I have to be selective, so I spent this morning sorting songs and moving to a nano playlist for copying. It’s easy.

I also created a playlist for running: 60 favourite songs, rated at least 4 stars. And I did take it out running. And it did make the running easier and more enjoyable. Nice.

The reason I hadn’t been all googly-eyed and want!want!want! with the new mbp is that I know I am getting it. Soon. 3 years is a decent run, and the old mbp won’t go to waste — Mum will get it, and she’ll be slowly weaned off her PC and become a mac person.

Word Clock for Mac, PC, iPhone from Simon Heys on Vimeo.

I’m not a big screensaver person. Normally I’d just let the screen get dark and that’s it. Then I discovered word clock. It’s mesmerising, I’m tempted to adjust my energy saving settings and let it go to screensaver sooner so I can stare at it.

Five years ago, there wasn’t facebook and myspace was an unknown site that had just launched. LJ and blogger hadn’t gained the popularity they enjoy now. MT was on version 2.x. Wordpress was still in its precursor state of b2. Personal websites existed but most people had their sites hosted at places like geocities and tripod.

My original blog was on tripod and I wrote my first ever post on 23 September 2003. I can’t believe it’s still there.

I had some pages hosted on xoom when it was a hosting site. I’d started a very basic site in 1999 using Claris Homepage but it’d lapsed while I went on assignments all over the world.

I re-registered invisiblecompany.com on 29 September 2003, moved it to a proper hosting company, and started redesigning. I still can’t figure out why I decided to use MT, it’s not like it was easy and it’s not like I was a web expert then. I don’t regret the decision, in fact I think it was a rather good one.

Five years later, I have 7 installations on the site. I’ve written at least one post a day for almost a year. I have over 1,700 posts including blog posts, technical updates, travelogue, recipes and stories. It’s the best method of finding out what I’ve been up to, where I am and what is on my mind. At times I wonder if anyone is reading but mostly I do this for myself.

It’s been a great 5 years with the website. Happy anniversary.

I read the techcrunch article about how voicemail is dead the other day and I found myself nodding in agreement.

I hate voicemail. I delete them and never reply. I haven’t activated the feature at work or on my cellphone. I think it’s the whole paranoia about being being contacted and people’s false sense of urgency about everything. Besides, I can see who called by looking at my missed calls log.

Lifehacker set up a poll, and to date, those in agreement that voicemail should die has the highest vote. One of the best remarks in the comments state simply:

My cell phone is not a leash. I may not get back to you immediately.

I can’t help but think that we are slowly rebelling against being constantly available. Even though the crackberry phenomenon is well known and documented, where the ‘blame’ is on the user, it’s only a matter of time before the blame shifts to employers and the expectations of bosses and colleagues. Disputes and unions may get involved.

There is nothing, baring family emergencies, that require our immediate attention. The world doesn’t stop if things are not attended to within a minute.

From Nury Vittachi, a delightfully funny satire on why facebook is a bad idea.

“No. Poking is the first stage of a relationship. Studying a person’s profile is the second.”

“And the third?”

He pulls out two large pieces of blank white card from an art portfolio bag. “Stage three is to write on each other’s walls.”

“Do we write poetry? Or do some sort of art?”

Peter shakes his head. “Nah. We just write inane phrases or we forward ancient jokes.”

She watches to see if he writes anything clever or witty, but he just writes words she doesn’t understand: “Whassup? LOL.”

One week of using firefox 3, what do I think?

Is it faster? I can’t tell. Sometimes it’s very fast, but other times it loads and loads and loads and times out. Whether or not it’s firefox or a poor connection at the apartment I don’t know. I have to reserve judgment till I get home to a connection I have confidence in.

The good stuff — supposedly it’s more secure, which makes me feel good. The text is a little more scrunched together, which maximises the view area. Rounded buttons. Tags for bookmarks is a bit late, cos most of my bookmarks are on delicious anyway. The way bookmarks are handled could be good, but I need to get used to the menu. The awesome bar, I can’t see myself cheering about it. There’s a little tweak to improve colour handling.

The bad stuff — I have to revert to the default theme cos I can’t see any scroll bars. It’s not saving my passwords, even though I tell it to allow passwords to be saved. It imported an older version of my firefox 2 bookmarks.

Like all new things, it’s a matter of giving it time to stablise. Would I have waited before upgrading if I’d known? I think so, especially with the scroll bars and password issues. It’s a little disappointing.

I’ve done my bit towards the world record. I downloaded firefox 3. If you haven’t, go download it now.

My first experience at an Apple Store.

My colleague wanted to buy a mbp for her friend, and I went along to offer support. We found a nice sales associate who punched in the order in a macbook. There were some small specs including bumping the RAM to 4GB and installing iWorks. Seemed to us very straightforward.

Until we were told to come back in 3 hours to pick it up.

What?

3 hours? It doesn’t take that long, surely.

I bumped my RAM to 2GB (max), and they wanted to take an hour to do it. Again, what?

But we had no choice, so we came back. My overall impression of the Apple Store? Lots of nice young sales people, how indoctrinated they are about the Apple culture I’m not sure. I guess they know their products but they seem more like shop assistants than mac geeks, you know?

When I first switched to digital photography, I had a 128MB card, then a 512MB card. And I thought they were great.

When my card failed in NZ, I bought a 1GB card for megabucks.

Then I got a couple of 2GB, and recently a 4GB.

But today Microdia announced that they will begin shipping the 64GB XTRA ELITE CF card in June. No, that wasn’t a typo, CF cards are now 64GB.

I’m sure in 3 years’ time, when tetrabyte cards are the norm, I’d look back fondly at these GB cards.

firefox 3 RC2 has just been released. Mozilla is aiming for a world record for most software downloads in 24 hours on Firefox 3’s official launch day. The exact day isn’t posted, but it’ll be sometime soon. Must keep an eye out.

A few google-related things I came across recently.

How google map really places markers, via giz. Hee.

Now I don’t use google maps a lot, what I do use everyday is greader, and the better greader download from lifehacker has been great. Skins, new functions, and favicons.

It’s amazing how google has penetrated our daily online life. Then again, some people are still thick and asks questions when they can just fucking google it.

There was an article and poll on lifehacker on ready written sites aimed at educating serial junk email forwarders. The one I like most is thanksno. Next time I get a chain letter, lolcat picture, or lame joke that wasn’t sent bcc I’m gonna reply with the link to the page.

Hi. The person who sent you this link is a friend who likes you a lot but who wants you to respect their email address, their privacy, and their time.

Chances are, this person asked you to visit this page because you did one of these things:

• Forwarded a funny story, a virus warning, or a photo that you enjoyed
• Sent email to lots of people using the “To:” line (instead of the “BCC:” line), thereby exposing your friend’s email address to strangers
• CC’d your friend unnecessarily on something you had sent primarily to someone else

In any case, you might want to go back and have another look at the email they’re replying to. They asked you to visit here because, while they love getting one-on-one, personal messages from you, they really don’t want to receive more messages like the one you just sent. Cool?

You’re not a bad person, and no one hates you, but it would be valuable to learn the very personal preferences of your friends, family members, and co-workers before including them in unrequested email or choosing to expose their private address to people they don’t know.

The tone is a little passive-aggressive and rude. But I figured sometimes you need to be painfully direct for people to get the message.

So, iPhone 3G is coming in June. Exciting.

Well, I’ve never been too bothered with 3G. It’s been available here for donkey’s years and I still only have a 2G phone. But what got me excited was this:

Apple will announce their new model at the WWDC Keynote on June 9th. The second-generation iPhone will be available worldwide right after the launch

Does it mean it’s no longer tied to a particular provider? That it’ll be available unlocked, like every other phone out there? If so then it is truly exciting news. I just have to remember not to be tempted and wait a couple months for the price to drop or a newer version to come out.

This is a random daily meme I came across. This week’s Sunday Seven at Patrick’s Place tells us to:

List either the name of a favorite blogger or their blog’s title that begins with the first letter of each of the first seven letters of the alphabet.

I have 80+ on my greader. About 10 are of friends, and most of the rest are techie or news related. I follow #2 to 5 of the 50 most powerful blogs according to the Observer. I’ve kept my subscription to harpold out of respect, even though the website is no more. So anyway, back to sunday seven:

• A is for Infinite Loop at Ars Technica — Ars has a bunch of sections, from PCs to gaming to gadgets to security. But who am I kidding, all I want to know is everything Apple
• B is for tomato nation by Sarah Bunting aka Sars from twop — I don’t know if the twop connection is good or bad, because there’s more than just TV on tomato nation. It’s funny, astute and just a little bit quirky, just like its owner. The only thing I don’t like about it is that the feed is truncated, I really would prefer a full post feed
• C is for chocolate and zucchini by Clotilde Dusoulier — great food writing, lovely recipes that aren’t run of the mill…they are interesting enough to make you want to try and needing just that much more technique to ensure the proper amount of showing off
• D is for daring fireball by John Gruber — I read DF and kottke last on my greader list because I’m the sort of person who leaves the best bite till last. Beautifully designed and with all the right connections when it comes to tech stuff, one of these days I’ll get the t-shirt
• E is for Elise Bauer — there are two blogs I religiously follow on elise.com, simply recipes and learning movable type — they are very different, and LMT has moved beyond just Elise; but whether it’s cooking or teaching people how to use a complicated CMS platform, the matter-of-fact style of writing can’t be beat
• F is for Finance and Frugal (okay this is a little cheating) , as represented by wisebread — there’s a lot of good advice on wisebread, some I think are just common sense, but sometimes we need the obvious pointed out to us
• G is for gizmodo — it may be sacrilegious, but I can’t tell much difference between giz and engadget. Apparently giz is more frat-jokey and engadget cooler and more straitlaced (note that gizmodo has a funky nickname but not engadget, like call it “eng”? hmm). Like a lot of readers, I go to both, so it doesn’t matter much

I missed the first two macheist, so when I saw the teaser for the latest bundle, I thought this was finally my opportunity to get it. From what I read, it seems that this contains some of the apps that had already been offered before, and this is more a non-geek version. It is further distinguished from regular heists by being described as a retail bundle, and that it will be sold in stores later this year.

But having looked at what’s on offer, I’m disappointed. 12 shareware apps valued at $285 for only $49 sounds like a steal, but when I looked at what the apps more carefully, I wasn’t interested. Lifehacker even came up with a list of alternatives that are free. Oh dear.

Ars reports that MacUpdate will be releasing a similar bundle for $65 vs $474.76. Now these apps look way more useful. There are 10 apps altogether, and the first 7 are immediately available.

When you purchase bundles now, you’ll be the immediate owner of Hazel, Art Text, MenuCalendarClock, Leap, StoryMill, Typinator and DVDRemaster Pro. Then when the Mac community spreads the word and reaches 5,000 bundles sold, Sound Studio will be unlocked into the bundle for free. People that purchase the bundle before each unlock milestone will have the unlocked products automatically added to their accounts for free.

The next 2 milestones, at 10,000 and 15,000 unlock BannerZest and … **gasp** Parallels Desktop. My original Parallels is out of date so this is a great opportunity to upgrade. There’s 10 days left, so I’m gonna come back next weekend and check on progress.

Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty? asks the New York Times Magazine this week as they cover the work of Jan Chipchase, an anthropologist-designer working for Nokia whose job is to live and understand how cellphones means for people in Tibet, Uganda, Ecuador etc — in other words the other 4 billion people on earth who don’t have access to a mobile network.

Yes, ultimately the likes of Nokia and Motorola are there to make money but what strikes me as inspiring is that they are making an effort to learn about unique local needs in the developing world. These are potential customers for whom a cellphone isn’t just another gadget or device .

Something that’s mostly a convenience booster for those of us with a full complement of technology at our disposal — land-lines, Internet connections, TVs, cars — can be a life-saver to someone with fewer ways to access information. A just in time moment afforded by a cellphone looks a lot different to a mother in Uganda who needs to carry a child with malaria three hours to visit the nearest doctor but who would like to know first whether that doctor is even in town. It looks different, too, to the rural Ugandan doctor who, faced with an emergency, is able to request information via text message from a hospital in Kampala.

Given resources and the right motivation, people are fantastically inventive. That’s why some humanitarians favour the bottom up approach to aid rather than top down — empower and encourage entrepreneurship rather than telling aid recipients to wait for money to filter down through bureaucracy or corrupt agencies. An example is what Grameen Phone Ltd in Bangledesh offers:

Women use microcredit to buy specially designed cellphone kits costing about $150, each equipped with a long-lasting battery. They then set up shop as their village phone operator, charging a small commission for people to make and receive calls

In the Philippines, pre-paid cards double as currency and gives an alternative way of sending money to far away relatives. Monks in Mongolia are unbelievably tech savvy. In India locals want cellphones to tell them about the weather because they have no access to TV or radio. In Ghana locals are given a chance to test some new Nokia designs:

“Hellllloooooo,” Chipchase said, smiling broadly.

“Helllllooooo, Brudda,” she said back in English.

“We work for Nokia. You know Nokia?”

The woman said nothing, but reached down and from the folds of her wrapper produced a Nokia phone. “Not good,” she said, shaking her head disparagingly. “You call. It switches off.”

Chipchase enlisted the interpreter to explain that her problem sounded like a network problem and not a Nokia problem. Shrugging, the woman went on to inspect the prototype phones, testing their weight in her palm, pressing them against her cheek, punching buttons. She pooh-poohed the stylus phone but said she liked the one-button model if it meant she didn’t need to use a lot of numbers. “Brudda, how do you charge it?” she asked. From his bag, Burns pulled another still-conceptual design, this one a thin metal cylinder with a whirlybird antenna on top. He showed the corn seller how to rotate the cylinder in small circles, causing the antenna to swing, which, he explained, in 15 minutes or so would generate enough power to charge her phone battery.

The woman picked up the futuristic gizmo and began to swing it; the antenna whipped around and around. She let out an enthusiastic whoop. Then a friend of hers who’d been sitting in the shadow of her umbrella started to laugh. Another woman, a spice seller perched on a stool next to small mountains of turmeric and cumin heaped on canvas cloths, began to laugh also. “Very nice,” the corn seller said to Burns and Chipchase, swinging the antenna like a toy. “It’s good!”

Seems that my posts the last few days are kinda related. Just yesterday I was complaining about the need to sign up to use Photoshop Express (compared with picnik where I don’t need to re-sign in if I’m just doing simple edits). And today on a list apart, Luke Wroblewski tells us Sign Up Forms Must Die. In his book he

described the process of stumbling upon or being recommended to a web service. You arrive eager to dive in and start engaging and what’s the first thing that greets you? A form.

Oh man, yes and yes. Everyone wants our personal information nowadays and it’s obvious that it’s for marketing. I’ve come to the point where, yeah, I’m giving out my yahoo email knowing that it’ll get spammed. It’s stupid. What the article suggested is a process of gradual engagement. Allow users to sample and explore the web service first, then if they need to go further then ask for registration. There’s always the 10-minute email option, but sometimes more information than email is requested.

The absolute worst example is facebook. To this day I have no clue how facebook looks like, cos I refuse to sign up. At least on myspace I can look at people’s public pages without being forced to me a member.

I realise I may be in the minority here, cos there seems to be less and less paranoia about personal data and online presence. But I can’t foresee myself changing my mind soon.

As soon as I read that firefox 3 beta is stable enough for non-geeks I grabbed the download.

My first impressions, verrrrrrry nice. Especially the address bar features and the advertised speed hike is true. Most of the plugins aren’t working yet, obviously. The qute theme isn’t available yet but I’m humming happily along with the default theme. It looks so much like Safari. I read a comment on gizmodo from someone guilty about using Firefox and not Safari, but hey … Firefox is such a good thing it transcends platforms.

Can’t wait for the release.

The strangeness that is my mind. I saw the periodic table poster on thinkgeek and my first thought was: “I wonder if someone can make a steampunk version.” I guess it’s the greenish grey background.

I find it not an exact science to define steampunk. It’s science; it’s fantasy; it’s history; it’s animation; it’s an attitude and a mood. It’s Jules Verne and laputa and Firefly.

Just watch that video, the guy’s work is so intricate.

On the topic of birthday and looking at the surely oversweet cake that Caterina Fake posted for flickr’s anniversary, gizmodo today posted the ultimate question: is getting caked a good omen for gadgets? According to Brian Lam, giz’s editor:

no one makes a gadget cake unless they love the gadget

hmm. Surprising how baking and gadgets come together. It doesn’t take long to google: kindle cake | wii cake | iphone cake | ibook cake and a whole bunch of geek cakes celebrating engadget’s birthday. Basically I could find whatever gadget, comic and geek-related cake I could think of.

Yesterday was delete your myspace account day. The person who started the movement was fed up with myspace so he started a facebook group to tell people to delete their myspace accounts on a set day. Now the irony of using a social networking site to tell people to nix a social networking site is … ironic, and I can’t help wonder why it’s not Delete All Your Social Network Accounts day. Surprising number of tech savvy people don’t use these sites but the fact of the matter is the rest of the population are blind lemmings, so there’s no getting away from them. Speaking of social sites, young people are not happy that older folks are going online. They cite examples like their Mom IMing them or their Grandmother posting on their facebook wall.

Well newsflash, noobs, the older folks made the internet, many of them have been online longer than you’ve been alive so show some respect. Also, to the university student complained:

“I mean, I’m in university. There are bound to be at least a few drunken pictures of me on Facebook, and I don’t need my parents’ friends seeing them.”

Why are you inflicting your drunken pictures on an unsuspecting public and most importantly, are you sure you want your drunken pictures accessible by a potential employer?

In a week’s time, AOL will stop supporting netscape. I remember fondly my first browser experience with Netscape 3, then Communicator. There was also the long period when I was still using OS9 and firefox wasn’t available — I’d stuck with Netscape 7 then.

There’s a lot of nostalgia to what was an excellent product in its day. That it fizzled out after being swallowed by AOL, and the advancement of Firefox is a shame.

I tried to get a screenshot using the pb1 but I couldn’t get connected. Must be something wrong with the TCP/IP settings, which I didn’t have patience to figure out. Like many people I’ve stopped thinking about Netscape a long time ago, perhaps it is time to put it in the museum.

Ever since the kindle came out I’d been having on and off thoughts about getting an ebook reader. I’m still not sure about the kindle. I’m with Philippe Starck, it is a little sad. No, it’s actually pretty ugly, expensive and the wireless all but useless for me. I wonder why ebook reader designers insist on using a one page portrait orientation. I’d prefer a device that shows 2 pages on a screen, landscape — like an actual book.

But ebooks aren’t just for handheld devices. ebook software has existed for a long time, and I can’t believe it took me this long to download ereader. I have the free version now, but the pro version is only $5, which is…nothing.

Car did all the research, cos she’s the one who likes reading on the screen. There are so many places to download ebooks, one of the early favourites is manybooks with they claim almost 20,000 titles, mostly from project gutenberg. The books come in all sorts of formats including: kindle, palm, iPhone, pdf, even newton. Most of the titles are public domain classics and with so many available, it’ll be a long time before anyone is tired of their selection. Here’s how Pride and Prejudice looks on my screen.

For fanfic closer to home, there’s pdafiction, and Susan has converted a number of stories on the muse to ebook format — it was weird downloading my own stuff. Hee.

Ease of reading is very high. I can choose one page, two-pages and full screen. There’s a range of backgrounds, fonts and sizes — these may be pro only features but like I said, $5 is a doddle. I can pageup or down using my arrows. There’s also links, annotations and a dictionary. No complaints here. For $29.95 I can get ereader studio which allows me to create ebooks. Oh boy, I can see days and days of fun.

Look. Aside from the one post with four screengrabs of last week’s Stevenote have I said a word about the macbook air? No. I have been very restrained. I’ve gobbled up every review I can find, and I exchanged emails with tues about it … no wonder since we were early mbp adopters. But have I gone all geek about it? Hardly. A small mention, yes.

I’d be deluding myself if I said I needed it. It would make travelling better, since my backpack tends to get heavy with mbp, wires, camera and book. Taking thickness and 2lbs from that certainly helps. The problem is the lack of ethernet port since the hotels I visit, though 5-star standard, doesn’t seem to be too “in” with technology and are mostly still on ethernet. Or actually, they want us to pay the $19.95 a day internet connection charge cos they’re conning us. It’s disheartening to read that:

While most midprice and extended stay properties include Internet access as part of the overall rate, most upscale properties still charge extra for the service.

But I digress. I’m talking about the mba and why so many people (or may be just the techie bloggers I read?) are waiting, waiting for the mba to come out. So how to deal with gadget envy? The choices are stark: a) resist, with difficulty or b) give in. lifehacker readers suggest everything from getting married to mooch off geekier friends, though the consensus is practical — analyse need vs want; and don’t impulse buy using money you don’t have.

Now that I’ve established I don’t need the mba; and I don’t have money issues, how can I be spared the gadget lust? My saving grace will likely be — I’m lazy and a homebody. It may take me ages to actually get myself to the shop to check it out. By that time I would have read more reviews, the price could have come down and Apple could be adding more features to the product. I got kinda burnt getting a early mbp with the battery and heat problems, so if I get a mba it’ll be a 1.1 or 1.2 version.

One of the suggestions was to use the girlfriend factor. If she gives “The Look” it means the wallet stays in the pocket. Heh, may be that might work.

via engadget. As Macworld expo looms nearer, here’s a little flash game to get us in the mood. The blurb:

Imagine being Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
Imagine getting ready for this years MacWorld Expo keynote presentation.
Imagine having to collect all the insanely great Mac, iPhone and TV Stuff you are going to present at Macworld Expo without revealing it to industrial spies and journalists.
Try the game that lets you experience what it feels like to be Steve Jobs just before your Keynote presentation.

It should be an easy enough game, but I suck at it. Steve Jobs I’m not.

One million exhibitors. Sixty million attendees. Four trillion booths spread across an area the size of Rhode Island.

It’s an exaggeration of course, but that’s how the New York Times described what it felt like at CES, the Consumer Electronics Show at Las Vegas.

Since the weekend, all my technology feeds have been obsessed with what’s going on there, if I forget to read my posts for a day, there’d be hundreds of post from engadget and gizmodo alone. But it’s too much, too overwhelming with all the huge flat screen TVs (150” from Panasonic), DVD players, GPS devices, computers, keyboards, cellphones and every gadget under the sun. Out of all the multitude of reviews and scoops I’ve read, the one that caught my eye (and that of lots of people) is the alienware curved display. 2880x900 man, that’s double the length of the mbp.

And then there’s Apple. The consensus seems to be that Apple announced refreshes to the less glamorous MacPro and x-servers to leave time and room for the big attention-hogging announcements next week at Macworld. If anyone can steal CES’ thunder, it’s Apple.

All of a sudden, I decide that I want a new iPod. And as we were walking around the electronics store today I was extremely tempted. The reasons I didn’t:

• I didn’t want to get it at that particular store. My usual Apple reseller will probably give me a small cash discount.
• I want to get the nano, the classic and the iPod Touch — it’s hard to decide on one
• Macworld expo in 2 weeks. One thing for sure, don’t buy anything so close to dates when Apple is likely to announce new products. It’s unlikely that they’ll significantly upgrade the iPod range, but there may be bumps in memory sizes, especially for the models that use flash memory.

so no. I didn’t get one.

via techcrunch, 73% of Americans have never heard of google docs and other online office applications.

This is an example of how techies and early adopters are different from the general public. Ever since I was introduced to what was then writely, I’ve sworn by it — and posted many times on it. Yes I dislike the google redesign — prefer the old orangey yellow theme and hate the menu on the left — it’s just cosmetic and I can live with it. Can’t beat the ease of use, large screen area and the collaboration feature. It’s sad that the public has been so conditioned to IE and Office that they don’t know better. Perhaps ignorance is bliss, once something becomes mainstream it loses its geek appeal, and the functionalities that make it special get diluted — market share becomes more important than features.

Lately I find that I’m not even using photoshop. Ever since I started using picnik for image processing. The flash / ajax-like interface is fast and has all the functionalities needed for day-to-day uses — crop, resize, rotate, colours, exposure, sharpen, basic fixing — in an intuitive browser based application. And I can now launch it within flickr. I will still need photoshop for more complex photo-manipulation and to process my pictures, but I highly recommend picnik for most imaging needs.

That was one of the easiest tasks on the list. The magSafe airline adapter works with macbook and macbook pro and connects to in-seat empower and 20mm power ports on planes where DC power ports have been enabled.

I haven’t tried it out, cos normally I eat, watch movies and read on planes. May be on my next long haul flight.

I’m sitting here quietly thankful that I made a conscious decision not to sign up for facebook. The need for real name, the sheer amount of personal information it tries to wheedle from users at sign-up and wanting to know my gmail password totally wigged me out. A report by the UK Information Commissioner’s Office [pdf] revealed that 71% of young people weren’t concerned about strangers having access to their personal information; and as many as 4.5 million people aged 14-21 had posted information on the internet which could make them vulnerable to identity fraud or blight their future careers. It’s chicken-and-egg isn’t it — social network sites breed indifference causing more participation in social network sites.

Now comes the furore over Facebook’s Beacon marketing program. I thought the signing up process was squicky enough, this sounds downright scary. Here’s what it does:

• you log into fb and do your usual stuff — I’m guessing like most users you’ll leave the tab open during your online session, or at least you don’t consciously log out
• you open a new tab and buy something from say, amazon
• you may or may not see a little pop-up window telling you that amazon is sending a “story” to your fb profile — you may not know what a “story” is and even if you do, you click the close button like you do with any pop-up that escapes your pop-up blocker, and forget about it
• because you hadn’t explicitly told it not to, amazon sends information (I think it’s something javascript-esque) to your fb — how? you’ve still got fb open right? or if you logged out you haven’t deleted private data yeah? amazon and fb both read from your browser/cookies
• information about what you bought from where is fed to fb
• it’s posted for all your friends to see

That’s right, all your fb friends (and to me “facebook friend” is almost an oxymoron, but that’s another post) can see that you bought 48-count boxes of regular strength ex-lax chocolate stimulant laxative. Oops. Or worse, your gf sees you bought an engagement ring and either: a) start subscribing to Modern Brides or b) break up with you because you surely have someone else on the side.

You do some digging and realise that there are ways to stop amazon (and 40 other retailers at last count) from automatically sending stuff about you to facebook without you knowing. But it’s already too late. The damage is done.

Facebook claims that the mechanism for opting out of the program is available. But users found that they have to physically opt out from every single website that does that, and only after they have sent one round of information. It’s the lack of transparency and that it’s an opt-out rather than opt-in scheme that leaves a very sour taste. It seems to me that a large-scale website like facebook is making users jump through hoops to protect their private information rather than taking steps to protect that information.

Perhaps one of the best argument, for me, is presented by Jonathan Trenn: it’s all about user relationship. People accept that when they are within fb, that they’ve signed up to display all sorts of personal information, hobbies and shopping habits. But that’s within the closed fb framework. They do not expect that their electronic footprint outside of fb to be brought inside fb, without their explicit consent. A nice analogy in that article:

When I buy a product from a local retailer (an actual store, you know, a physical one), I’m a customer of that retailer and not the local newspaper. I don’t expect the store to then send a press release to the local newspaper about what I just bought and then get a phone call from a reporter asking me to approve of them putting the news in the paper. Screw that.

Moreover, there is absolutely no user benefit to this scheme, all the benefit goes to fb, retailers and the great data mine in the sky. Now if that’s not scary, I don’t know what is.

Admittedly, it’s not the first time that activities on one site can be shown on another site. I have my bloglines feed on my website; and should I choose to, I can display what is on my iTunes, what I’m doing on fm.com (assuming that I am on fm.com), books I read on amazon, my flickr photos … the list goes on. The big difference is that I would have had to actively do an action to enable those functions — mostly it’s adding a script to the webpage template. flickr doesn’t put up pictures from one of my sets automatically, I control what gets displayed.

Perhaps we are being naïve. That no one’s data is safe anymore. That someone somewhere is tracking our IP address, our keystrokes, our surfing habits and it’s part and parcel of being online. 4.5 million young people in Britain don’t seem bothered. In fact, some people may get a kick out of this — purchasing risque items just to show off to their friends.

But I am. There’s something wrong with how the information is passed from one third party to another, that I, the owner of that data, don’t have active control over it. I’m sure the ToS in both facebook and the retailer will have appropriate legal wording, but again I feel like I’m being suckered and making this too big a deal.

Arguably facebook doesn’t care one bit whether I’m signed up or not, and that’s a good thing. I’d be petrified if they do.

The third new book from yesterday’s big book order is a nice story about government, the President of the USA, a writer and 3 kids. It’s also set in year 2020-ish. Looking at the publication date, first published in 2001 which means probably written during 2000 or earlier.

Though a well-written story that flows easily and with likeable characters, I can’t help but smirk at some of the “advanced” technologies that we thought in 2000 would be in place in 2020.

1. voice activated computer and media systems with voice authentication, as in “Computer, start playback on disk, code 123456” where you had to use your activation code Every.Single.Time you issue a command — um newsflash, voice activation is a hassle and stupid; and needing to speak a code as security is worse than no security
2. taking pictures on a film camera — i mean, who uses film anymore?
3. paper newspapers — I won’t be surprised that by 2020 paper versions of newspapers and magazines would be overtaken by electronic versions
4. people using the phone to contact each other albeit with holographic images, no mention of IM, sms or anything using the web

I’m not deriding the book, in fact the tech part is small and only incidental to the story. I’m just kinda amazed at how quickly technology has advanced and how writers have to think very far ahead when writing a contemporary story set in the future. There were hardly any blogs in 2000 and certainly no facebook or skype. Again, amazing.

digg (from a while ago) via warpedvisions, a tongue-in-cheek flowchart to tell if a website sucks. Honestly, I’m only posting this cos I led myself to believe that I’m the Real Deal. Snerk.

When Software Update prompted me to install the Tiger upgrade, I was doing something else and closed the prompt. But like a good mac citizen I finally got round to upgrading the other day. The reason I’m even writing this post is because it didn’t go as smoothly as I expected.

My experience with any automatic upgrades, which are mainly Apple and adium related, have been simple: download, install, reboot. Download and install went fine, but when I came to reboot, the mbp was stuck at the grey spinning wheel (aka grey screen of death) forever. And the fan was whirling around like crazy.

After a few minutes of this I got tired of waiting and did a hard powerdown (held down the power key for a few seconds). After that reboot, everything went fine.

It’s the first time an upgrade hasn’t been 100%, and looking at the Apple forums, other people have worse problems.

There’s been a lot of attention, not all of it good, on Apple lately. Even long time loyal fans are becoming slightly disgruntled — the iPhone price reduction, iPhone bricking, Leopard teething problems amongst others. I know no one or company can be perfect, but kinks are definitely appearing in Apple’s previously impeccable armour.

There’s been a fair bit of attention on amazon’s kindle lately. At first I skimmed past all the articles but today I sat down and read a few of them. First impressions? Very mixed reception and boy, is it ugly. Conclusion? No thank you.

I’ve never considered using an ebook reader at all, although I can see the benefits especially when travelling, or for students who are carrying around too many heavy textbooks already. The demo video on the product page sure is enticing, and it tempted the gadget-geek in me for, oh, about a second.

why I might buy it

1. it can store hundreds of books in one book-sized package — saves lugging lots of books around


2. as of launch, almost 90,000 titles available from amazon at a lower price than paper books


3. amazon name, especially the book selection


4. eliminates expensive shipment fees


5. built-in wireless means instant shopping gratification


6. subscriptions to newspapers, magazines and blogs


7. dictionary and wikipedia

why I won’t buy it

1. oh lordy, is it ugly or what


2. $400 for the reader alone — there’s comparison with iPod pricing, but thing is … music requires a widget, be it walkman, boombox or iPod but books don’t need no hardware, dude


3. monopolistic — it can only read the proprietary amazon format, cannot load other formats, no connection between the book on my shelf and the ebook


4. DRM — who’s ever heard of DRM-ing books? Once bought, it’s mine and i should be free to do as I please with it, including sharing with my friends


5. although cheaper than paper books, $9.99 for best sellers is expensive — the publishers don’t seem to be passing along the vast amount of savings from not needing to physically publish and distribute books


6. charging consumers for books in the public domain doesn’t seem right


7. charging consumers for stuff they can otherwise get free is ridiculous — $0.99 per blog per month? Kidding?


8. omg, black & white screen?


9. what is the keyboard doing there? why isn’t it a slide-out panel?


10. the so-called built-in wireless uses EVDO, which for those of us who live in non-caveman networkland is something unknown — apparently it’s a CDMA (omg!!!) based cellular wireless network that is provided by Sprint. In other words it’s completely and utterly useless outside the US


11. I said ugly already, right?

I want to like this device. I’ve not thought of using an ebook reader but I’m intrigued. I read enough books to want something small that can hold more — I took 6 books with me on my 2 week trip, imagine the convenience with a kindle. I can imagine the convenience of having loads of travel guides when I’m on holiday.

Many people, including the newsweek cover story likened the kindle to the early iPod. Not apples to apples, I’m afraid. Yes even though the analogy is there, there is one HUGE difference — the consumer can happily use and enjoy the iPod without ever going near iTMS. I mean, I like amazon and order a hell of a lot of books from them so it’s not a huge problem that the content is tied to the hardware. But it’s too closed. What if a book I want isn’t on amazon but is available from say a niche publisher? So my choice is limited, isn’t it?

The iPod sold us something we never thought we needed before, but can’t live without after. There’s no such buzz with the kindle, for me it’s meh at best. It’s a great idea, and I hope amazon will continue to improve the product. Until then, I’ll stick with traditional books.

And really, they have to do something about the dismal design.

I did a little site re-organisation. I put the weblog back to the second tab like before. The homepage is now an aggregate of:

• the weblog
• tumblr posts
• del.icio.us links
• twitters

In fact, the homepage is the tumblr page. At first I followed the official instructions and changed the IP of invisiblecompany.com to 72.32.231.8. This meant invisiblecompany.com points to invisiblecompany.tumblr.com. Unfortunately all my other pages came up as 404 not found — because I changed the IP for the entire site to tumblr. Oooops.

I got suresupport help, logged back into my control panel and restored DNS defaults. I tried another method for redirection. In the root .htaccess file I added one line:

redirect /index.html http://invisiblecompany.tumblr.com/

I was talking to an ex-colleague who just bought a macbook, only for his wife to appropriate it … and now he’s thinking of getting a black macbook for himself. We were talking about software and I realise how much of my normal work is done on web apps. There’s a big shift from desktop apps to web apps definitely. When I was backing up the mbp I noticed how few docs and files are stored purely on the hard disk — the hard disk is the backup for web storage, as opposed to the other way round.

Inspired by Chris Garrett’s list, here are my top 10 most important apps. And no, Lotus Notes isn’t coming anywhere within a million parsecs of this list.

1. firefox — the obvious choice as #1. Almost all my time is spent online and at this point I shouldn’t have to explain why firefox is better than the rest. Safari is fine, and I use it as a backup but there’s nothing about firefox that I dislike.


2. gmail — long time ago I started with excite, then email.com, before settling on yahoo. I switched over to gmail late but I never looked back. I still use yahoo for registration and stuff. For disposable emails I use either jetable or 10-minute mail. Plus greader has taken over from bloglines for keeping up with feeds. I prefer some of the bloglines functions but greader is too convenient. Damn those Mountain View people!


3. adium — I *heart* adium. It’s so heart-worthy. The number of friends I keep in touch with is small but they’re all over the world, and adium is essential in that regards. It’s hands down the best chat app, ever. Just the tab function alone takes it heads and shoulders above all others, including I expect the mac version of trillian.
   Need to try: meebo — about time there’s a web-based IM tool. I think it’ll be useful at work or in situations where I don’t want to use a desktop IM program.
   Need also to try: campfire — web-based group chat that doesn’t need an IM client. The only restriction I see currently is that the free version only allows 4 participants, but perhaps that may change.


4. google docs — wow, I remember the days when I fretted over not having Word on the pb1. Ancient history. The sentimental geek in me still has google docs bookmarked as writely. The spreadsheet and presentation functions are pretty useful too.


5. movable type — since most of my website is built on MT, it’s logical that I need MT to run it, right? I mean, if MT stops functioning, I have no website and hence nothing. Hmm let’s not talk about that catastrophe.
   also: tumblr. The new 3.0 version is so slick, I’m thinking of shifting my pages a bit to make the tumblelog the main page.


6. control panel — by the same token I need access to my website. I do a fair bit of direct editing there, of simple html coding using the built-in editor. I also upload images directly rather than using an ftp app.


7. photoshop — considering how important pics and images are to daily web living, photoshop is a must. I know there are cheaper alternatives and for what I use it for I don’t need something so “big” but I’ve been using it since version 3 and it’s second nature to me.
   growing on me: picnik for when I want a quick image editing tool. Simple crops, resizes can all be done in the browser. It’s extremely convenient.


8. flickr — have pics, will need somewhere to store them. Yes, photobucket is bigger and in theory I can host my pics on the website. But why? Collections, sets, tags, organizr, groups … everything is there.


9. dreamweaver — okay I don’t actually need dreamweaver because i don’t use it for coding. It’s gonna sound so strange but I use it to backup my website. The ftp function is good, and I can have both local and server views at the same time. Oh, and I heard Dreamweaver is a handy tool for web design too, who would have thought [/cheeky] ?


10. vlc — a couple of weeks ago K sent me a video with the direction “enjoy”. I looked at the extension and groaned. wmv. So what to do when your windoze friends forget that you don’t share their “joy” of using clunky, unfriendly and downright unsafe software? You power up your trusted version of vlc, of course. It plays almost every audio and video format out there, and it’s free. That’s it.

No big surprise this list. Like most people, I use a browser, use email, write docs, publish on the web and need to do stuff with pictures.

Over on tuaw (the unofficial Apple weblog, in case you were desperate to know), there’s an article about whether or not to upgrade to leopard. Basically.

If you have only one computer and it’s your production machine, don’t upgrade.
If you work with Adobe software and need your software to work reliably, don’t upgrade.
If you work with Windows, don’t upgrade.
If you have a lot of system customizations, don’t upgrade.

In theory, I shouldn’t have issues upgrading. The mbp is my production machine, and I use Photoshop and Dreamweaver, but neither extensively. I also have good upgrading instructions from John Gruber, so I should be okay.

But I’m gonna wait for a while.

I’ve decided I’m not an early adaptor, even though in theory I can be. The only early adaptor action I did was to get the mbp soon after it came out, because I really really needed to replace the pb1 then. I don’t think not having leopard will affect my daily routine and I want to wait for a few dots before shelling out my $129 equivalent. There’s also the niggling notion that I want to wait till there’s a 10.5 version of cleardock because guess what? I’m one of those apparent minorities who have the dock at the side rather than at the bottom.

What will I get when I upgrade? I believe the new features will be worth it. The os has come a hell of a long way from the b&w mac plus days, sigh. Sometimes I get a little nostalgic at the old look and feel … I’m still looking for that playable version of bandits (fat chance …). How better to wax nostalgic lyrical than to look at how far system preference panels have evolved. There’s this nice Apple Insider article / illustration. Look at how it changed from System 1, through System 4 and how it looks on System 10.5 now. Thank you, Susan Kare.

via tumbl.us and how better to celebrate the release of leopard.

Typing “virus” in the search box on apple.com gives an amusing reminder about The Obvious Superiority.

Relating to yesterday’s post and an example of how my thoughts flow in strange directions, here’s some mind babble about information explosion, email addresses and human-robot relationships.

We are surrounded by information. Lots of information. Ever since I switched to google reader I’ve been spending a lot more time than before reading feeds. Comparatively I shouldn’t have enough feeds for rss fatigue to set in — around 60, of which some are to keep track of friends who hardly post. That’s pretty manageable, even though I dread to think what I’d have to go through if I went on vacation for 2 weeks.

It’s not just the sheer amount of information around us, it’s the speed at which it’s coming at us. We’re literally bombarded 24/7 by an unending stream of news, or stuff on digg, or pictures of the newest gadgets. We don’t have enough room in our brains and we’re remembering fewer and fewer basic facts these days:

This summer, neuroscientist Ian Robertson polled 3,000 people and found that the younger ones were less able than their elders to recall standard personal info. When Robertson asked his subjects to tell them a relative’s birth date, 87 percent of respondents over age 50 could recite it, while less than 40 percent of those under 30 could do so. And when he asked them their own phone number, fully one-third of the youngsters drew a blank. They had to whip out their handsets to look it up.

It’s true. When I left OldJob I printed a copy of my personal Outlook address book but I couldn’t take the entire company email database of course. Sending emails to ex-colleagues became less intuitive; I actually had to think about it. Fortunately, like most corporate emails the external emails were mainly firstname.lastname@company.com; but there were a few exceptions I had to specially remember.

It’s even worse for friends’ and family’s email addresses. I can remember the ones I email regularly, but the rest I rely on gmail’s autofill feature. I can’t remember anyone’s birthdays apart from the most important people; and forget about addresses — 90% of letters I send via snailmail are to pay bills at places I can’t pay online. Every memory seems to be archived, it’s now a matter of remember where the information is stored rather than the information itself. It’s like I have flashdrives hooked up to my brain that I need to download and upload memories to.

I feel like I’m developing hardware. The mbp is almost an extension of my body, it is more important than the tv, or any sentient or insentient entity in my existence.

AI researchers were talking about the possibility of sex between humans and robots in five years and marriage by 2050. With humans becoming more robot-like and robots becoming more lifelike, it’s a matter of time before the two species merge. There’s enough sci-fi stories and movies about this that it’s not as whacky of preposterous as it first may seem. Yes, it’s icky and the exact ethical implications haven’t been thought through, but pesonally I don’t want to rule it out. Some part deep down inside me can see how the idea may be attractive.

Robots can provide a tremendous amount of comfort. For example look at the Ri-Man that was developed at the Bio-Mimetic Control Research Center in Nagoya. It’s a robot that is intended to be a nurse’s aid, to help pick up patients at the hospital. But with artificial intelligence that allows the robots to learn emotions and even develop personalities, who’s to say that there is a limit to the degree and type of comfort / companionship that a robot can offer? Think real doll [nsfw].

At least, robots can be programmed not to a) engage in or b) feel hurt if they’re told that they are engaged in annoying behaviour. Which leads me back to email addresses, a reminder to think before forwarding those cute / “send to 10 other people or you’ll die” / “send to 10 other people and you will meet the love of your life” emails because:

• may be it was cute once, a very long time ago when people only read one newspaper; but not after you’ve seen it 457 times
• nah, a hippo with a baby chimpanzee on its back eating a banana ain’t cute
• by the time I get one, the fwd:fwd:re:re chain is so long, I wonder why it took me so long to get it … am I not popular enough? [/sarcasm]
• if I were a spam harvester I’d wet myself — all those hundreds of email addresses of real people
• baby elephants and polar bears cuddling with an Eskimo child ain’t cute … really
• most people are too embarrassed to tell their cute-email-sending friends to buzz off (um I don’t have this problem, I tell them to buzz off)
• they’re not just sending me an email, it’s a AYCE malware party — open an attachment, get viruses, trojan horses, spyware, worms compliments of your (shouldn’t it be ex- by now?) friend

Is it a stretch to see why a customised robot may be a viable alternative?

We live in a universe of short attention span, yet we crave attention and connectivity with strangers whose faces we hardly know.

The rules are changing. Just a few years ago, it’s enough to have a livejournal and belong to a forum or two. Then came the likes of mt and wordpress when it became sport du jour to show off your technical street cred by running your own blog on your own webspace. Blogger changed that. Then came wordpress.com, vox, and this wee little phenomenon called myspace.

And then it exploded, with new social network / microblogging / web presence platforms announced every other day; and there doesn’t seem to be an end to them. If I wanted to, I could friend people (or be friended) at facebook or myspace; if I had a business I’d want to be on linkedin. I could upload my pictures to flickr, my videos to youtube and share my mp3 collection. To tell people what I’ve been up to I can use twitter, pownce, tumblr, not to mention the old fashioned (oh my, “old-fashioned” already) blog. That’s a lot of time spent on posting.

Apparently, the trick is cross-posting. But do I really want the same message to appear in five different places? Does the argument that “I use these platforms for different purposes and I need them all” hold any water? When does keeping to the forefront end and social network fatigue begin? Who cares?

The long and short of the situation is, not only am I talking to myself here on the website, I’m now doing it in more than one place. That doesn’t hide that fact that multiples of zero is still zero and I’m still only talking to no one but myself.

Still, I stubbornly persevere.

I can’t find the article but I remember reading that the average tumblelog only last 3 weeks before fading away into oblivion or the owner finds a newer shinier social networking platform to play in. Which is why I’m happy that mine has lasted over a month. It didn’t take me long to figure out the difference is external vs internal.

• external — the tumblelog is where I keep a footprint of where in the webverse I’ve travelled to — articles I come across, links I want to tag to del.icio.us, photos, videos and odd bits that float my way. That they conveniently split posts up to 6 types gives me a framework to think about what I should be including. The only slightly non-external type of posts are chat snippets, but that can be argued both ways. Mostly, I intend the tumblelog to be about fun. Case in point, the most recent post is about the skirt that turns into a vending machine disguise. (Yes, really.)
  

  
  

• internal — what I’ve tried to do on the main page is concentrate on longer posts that are more article-y. I’m not sure I’m there yet as any sort of original thinker, one might say I’m being delusionally indulgent. It doesn’t mean all posts will be serious — the Apple love, the travel journal, the pictures of food I’ve eaten, nano word counts and everything that defines me will still be here, which may or may not be a good thing depending on how high your tolerance of my insanity goes. Hee.

But what about twitter? facebook?

I have a twitter account but after a handful of posts, I found out that I was forever posting about me reading, or messing around my website, or playing a game — in other words how boring my life is. There’s no point in documenting this. What few twitters I have are crossposted automatically to tumblr.

As for facebook, as long as they insist on real names and don’t seem to be transparent (video link) about why they need it / who they give it to, I’ll pass thank you.

Some call it an about turn but mostly the reaction to Apple’s announcement that they will make available an SDK (software development kit) to be positive. The SDK will allow third party apps to be developed for both the iPhone and the iPod touch; it will be rolled out next February.

It sounds like this is the beginning of making both devices much more open. In a way this is like plug-ins for wordpress or photoshop. Third party apps will be developed no matter what Apple does — it’s inevitable given the tech focused user base. The hoopla about jailbreaking the iPhone is testament to this. Who wouldn’t want to more functionality?

Plus with the prospect of unlocked iPhones in France I’m more and more hopeful of getting an officially unlocked one eventually.

All the attention and big whoo hoo about the iPhone unlock mostly did the rounds in the tech side of the blogosphere. It’s ironic, that it didn’t hit the big time until the firmware upgrade to 1.1.1 bricked the phone. Heh, I wonder who coined the term “bricked” because it’s so appropriate and easily understandable.

Naturally the tech world reacted quickly, with instructions to unbrick appearing right away, to varying degrees of success. The latest? downgrade to 1.0.2. Oh dear.

In other parts of the world, iPhone will be carried by O₂ in the UK, Orange in France and T-Mobile in Germany. What about the other European countries? Personally I am keen to see how it does in Scandinavia and how it comes up against Nokia.

When I try to explain the US model to my friends, inevitably I am met with expressions of disbelief and incredulity at the outdated and preposterous nature of it. Apple will have to think carefully about how they tackle Asia markets where:

• there is intense competition between carriers
• phones are not tied to carriers
• there’s often no strict service contract
• customers demand all the latest in technology (ie, it must be a bells and whistles 3g iPhone)
• phones are commodities
• copycats and parallel imports are a fact of life

I was tempted to get an iPhone in Chicago, but I’m glad I didn’t. I’m not a good enough hacker to be able to deal with the unlock and I don’t want to pay someone to tamper with it. Still, it’s hard to wait. May be I need to console myself with a lego iPhone for the time being.

ETA: via engadget: for this clever bit of advertising I might even stick with Nokia when the time comes.

As a result of my small research into how the online community feels about Lotus Notes, I came across talk about Enterprise 2.0. It’s strange, that terms like Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 and Office 2.0 are branded about, but really … only geeks have a true idea of what these are about. I can guarantee that not one single person in my immediate social / work circle has a clue.

I remember 2 or 3 years ago when our department needed a calendar for the annual performance / compensation review season and we approached the IT department to see if they can build a simple web based solution for us. The answer was a regrettable no: because they didn’t have the budget and didn’t have an easy solution that fit what we were looking for. They offered to build an Access database, but it didn’t fit the criteria.

At the end, I ended up building a simple solution using *gasp* Wordpress. Divisions, departments and action items (performance appraisal, bonus recommendation) were categories, often grouped together as parent / child. Each event — eg [dept] deadline for bonus pool allocation was an entry. It was easy to call the monthly archives to show all the events that month; and it was easy to call the category archives to show each category.

I paid for the domain name from my own pocket because that little project wasn’t exactly allowed by the company. Use of an internet address was frowned upon. Wordpress uses php and sql and these were also considered risky.

None of the data was truly confidential — no numbers, no names, no specific proprietary information was used. I put a general sign-in form to even allow access to the website.

I let the domain name lapse now, so the work isn’t available (though I have the backups). If it were now, I wouldn’t have used wordpress on a website, I would have used wordpress.com or even better, a wiki.

The point is, IT departments of large companies don’t think like end users. Often they have a vested interest in keeping to older, clunkier, solutions from brand names because that’s what they know. They fear the wrath of the business so they ban IM, webmail, forums, social networks and a whole lot of perfectly innocent websites in the name of productivity. They don’t realize that those are what the next generation of employees take for granted in their lives. Banning IM is like banning the use of phones to 2.0 users. Not using wikis is akin to throttling the flow of information. But that’s what conservative corporations do. That’s why they will never catch up.

I cannot believe I’m saying this about a Microsoft product but I miss Outlook. NewJob uses Lotus Notes, which I’d never used before. I took me 2 days, and a ton of IT Helpdesk help to get it working — it was showing some bad domino server error. The last few days I lost the folder view on the desktop. I have to switch to using a secondary (and slower) server to see the folders. Some of the weird stuff I’ve experienced so far:

• can’t import pst files. Yes I know that I’m expecting too much, it’s like trying to get Excel to read 1-2-3 files (oh wait, it can do that)
• calendar items do not function as email — can’t forward meetings, can’t forward meetings as email, can’t suggest new time
• too many clicks to get anywhere
• opening an attachment involves, again, too many clicks, the dialogue box doesn’t close automatically
• selecting multiple messages is not intuitive — I want to be able to do shift and ctrl, but no those don’t work
• confusing Reply and Forward actions — I’ve replied to myself only lots of times, when I wanted to use the same mailing list of a sent mail
• date sort defaults to oldest on top (silly)
• what are memos? why are email messages called memos?
• I was afraid to delete a meeting invite because I wasn’t sure if it’d stay in the calendar — untrustworthy
• why do I need to decide between delete, remove and some other “get rid of this item”? Don’t overcomplicate things
• moving a mail to a folder doesn’t delete it from the Sent folder
• can’t recall or resend

What I do like:

• tabs — I can see the inbox and however many open emails as tabs
• um … that’s it

There’s a couple of debates about Outlook vs Notes. Very interesting. One commenter suggested that

Endusers - Prefer Outlook
Administrators - Prefer Lotus Notes

IBM describes it as Groupware, pointing out that it is not just an email too, it’s a collaborative / total productivity solution. Most proponents are sysadmins who are puzzled at why there are so many complaints, and are quick to point out its features — stability, scalability, use of databases, and that 120 millions users can’t be wrong.

But I’m not a sysadmin, and I have an increasingly stressful job I need to be doing. My needs for Notes are email, calendar and (to a lesser extent) address book. I simply don’t have time to tolerate the ugly user interface (I expected Comic Sans to show up at one point), controls that are not intuitive and not trusting that what I did was actually what I was supposed to have done. It’s no use telling me about the fantastic database and sharing functionalities that I don’t use. It can’t even handle email properly. I remember using ccMail and it was okay. What happened?

Another commenter, in Notes’ defence, said that most users don’t receive enough training to use it properly. They acknowledge that Notes takes longer to learn but once learnt, “you’ll never look back.” To be honest, most corporations don’t have the time or resources to train their staff; we’re expected to know the system or figure it out ourselves. I’m self-taught on all the software I use and consider myself a little more advanced than most typical office workers. I should have a jumpstart on the Lotus Notes learning curve and I find that I’m struggling. I don’t think I am the problem.

My sense is that Notes tries to be too much. It obviously is a good piece of software, but IBM isn’t in touch with what the users want. The majority of its users don’t care that it’s a cool database system — they just want to read and write emails, set up meetings and store a list of contacts. If I wanted a database I’d use Access, or get an IT person to set it up for me. If I wanted to share files and data I’d use a web-based tool, using Notes as an intranet makes no sense in this day and age.

This is an old discussion but there was an interesting tidbit in the comments. The chief designer for Notes 8 posted a link to a user survey. The first question was:

How do you prefer to access your databases?

• Workspace
• Bookmarks Displayed as List
• Bookmarks Displayed as Workspace

and one of the commenters aptly pointed out:

Why is this question mandatory? Why do you assume that I want to access my databases? What are you talking about?—I want to access my email messages.

It’s kinda amusing, in a sad way.

Apparently there’s lots of improvement for versions 7 and 8. A fat lot of good that is, because NewJob uses 6.5. Don’t tell me that comparing Notes with Outlook is apples and oranges; because as far as I, the USER, is concerned I am using both for the same purpose and therefore the usability comparison is valid. And don’t tell me 120 million users can’t be wrong because how many of them had a choice in the matter?

Oh great. I start posting on tumblr and another similar site shows up.

This one is called jottit and its tagline:

Jottit makes getting a website as easy as filling out a textbox.

And it’s true! Type some text into a text box, and if it’s the first time it will prompt you to claim that site. Give it a name, a password, enter an email address and make some simple font and colour settings and it’s done. Obviously no further customisation, but I can edit my jottits which is more than I can do with my tumblrs.

After playing around, I came to the conclusion that it creates webpages, not posts listed in reverse chronological order like I’m used to. I randomly added 2 posts and they show up as separate pages. So, different concept from tumblr.

Oh my, I can sit here all day updating all my various websites.

I signed up for tumblr. I have no idea why because it overlaps with so many parts of the website. What is tumblr?

If blogs are journals, tumblelogs are scrapbooks.

In other words, a more organised way of side- or link-blogging. For the big bloggers who churn out magazine article length posts and who regularly entertain lots of comments, it may be something useful. A big advantage over regular blogs (be it mt, wordpress, LJ, blogger), according to lifehacker is that:

unlike regular blogging - which confronts you with a large, empty textarea to type your thoughts into - there are 6 distinct types of posts that have their own visual format: a “traditional” blog post, a photo, a quote, a single link, a conversational transcript, and a video.

This means even fewer formatting and coding headaches, and instant posting gratification.

The disadvantages are no comments, no trackbacks, no categories, no search and no functionality to change the timestamp. Actually, this what-you-post-is-what-you-get type of low touch posting has its appeal. The tumblelogs are hosted at their site, though there is a functionality to bring it on-site — but it looks like they can only point to the root and there’s some palaver about A-record and needing to mess with domain name DNS. Oh hell no.

The other thing is, it comes with standard themes. To make it look like the rest of the website will take some nifty (and time-consuming) css work.

Still, i can’t quite distinguish in my mind how I’d use the tumblelog vs the website. There’s no clearcut demarcation unfortunately, grey like the rest of the world. I’ve posted one youtube link before, and theoretically it should belong to the tumblelog now. hmm.

And besides, this is yet another social networking tool (like twitter and facebook) that is supposed to keep me in touch with my friends. I doubt it, cos I can’t see many of my friends joining. And like the my first tumblepost quotes, “If no one reads your post, does it exist?”

In any case, go check it out.

Friend of mine asked if I was on Facebook. I replied “no, but I can be.” I’m usually late to the party (though early among my immediate social group) but I tried myspace for a while and wasn’t interested. I like the music part of myspace very much, great place to find new artists. But friending people? Having thousands of “friends” for basically the headcount rather than actual interaction? I don’t get the appeal.

I’m not saying I’m against having a wide social network. With the internet, geography and physical distances have become less important in making, and maintain, friends. I’m comfortable in my small compact network. The virtual world is a convenient tool and environment, that’s all.

This is what a survey from researchers at Sheffield Hallam University said.

Although the numbers of friends people have on these sites can be massive, the actual number of close friends is approximately the same in the face to face real world.

Some theories that say that most people can handle around 150 contacts — friends, co-workers, neighbours — in their circle, and tend to have 5 close friends. The others are people we keep to varying degrees of closeness. And this is the same in the case of real life friendships or online friendships. Or a combination of both.

While it is likely that some people will have more than 150, it seems overly optimistic IMHO to think one can keep in touch with friends numbering in the 5- or 6-figure marks. Remember the guy who has 19,000 flickr contacts and claims to follow them all? How can they be more than a passing fancy?

The researchers agree, that face to face contact is almost a must for close friendships. “Face to face contact is a requirement for intimate friendships. There are many emotional cues that people give face to face, such as smiling and laughing, which are impossible to fake, whereas online it is easy to say “You are wonderful, I love you.”

It’s common sense, really. Until you actually meet someone, you don’t know if they’re real or not. With online friendships, there’s always that uncertainty, no matter how close you’ve become; or how much you talk to each other.

Anyway, back to social networking sites. The likes of usenet, forums, communities, chat and now flickr, myspace, facebook, twitter — has facilitated this. Made contact easy, and maintaining contact easy too. But I must admit, that without my having flown halfway round the world so often, it may be harder to maintain the closeness of my friendships. I don’t have many close friends in my immediate vicinity — basically it’s mm (and her sis when she was alive). I fall below the threshold of 5 close friends too.

I’m not on facebook. Yet. I didn’t like how I have to enter my name and all sorts of personal information. I know I can put an anonymous name but I dunno, it icked me out. People on the internet used to be so paranoid of their identity, but with the advent of myspace, facebook and the like, it seems Real Name is In. I don’t know if this newfounded open-ness is goo, or whether people are becoming more blasé. The recent quechup fiasco is perhaps a wake-up call, that we need to be vigilant again.

Which brings me to the final part of this post. I added some small icons in the meta area of each post. These are social network bookmarks. What are they? I think the BBC explains it best. Click on one and it’ll bookmark it online, then you can retrieve and share it with the community. Now why would I suddenly offer the facility for people to share and tag a post? Why would anyone want to bookmark one of my posts? I get 8 people voting in a poll and I start getting delusions of grandeur.

Anyway, from left to right: del.icio.us, digg, facebook, google, reddit, stumbleupon.

All the recent hub-bub around iTMS offering ringtone functionality made me think about ringtones in general. For the record, I don’t like fancy ringtones. From my observation and experience, most of the people who have Glamorous or such like on their phones are the ones who: a) make them ring loudly and b) talk at the top of their voices on the bus about their dog puking on the carpet.

It’s actually pretty straightforward to make your own mp3 ringtone using audacity. Just slice and dice the song and bluetooth it to the phone.

But I don’t want a snippet of a song, however much I like it. I just want a regular ring that sounds like a ring and not some high pitched version of bagpipes blowing. Unbelievably my new phone has only one tone that I like. Fortunately there’s no shortage of people who think the same. A little research brought me to rcptones and a nice selection of non-offensive ringtones. Here’s what I’m using, it’s called norm01:

powered by ODEO

There are a few simple tones that have emphasis on understatement rather than shouty. I like this popular one called Wheels:

powered by ODEO

Oh, read how to embed an mp3 to a website.

I started building the recipes section, click on the Taste tab. I’ve developed a sort of reputation for photographing the food I eat, which I hope comes across as endearing rather than annoying. Photographing food I prepared is actually full of problems: 1) I have a tiny kitchen, there’s literally no room to set up a tripod; 2) I have a dark apartment, very little natural lighting that provides bright light for photographing food; 3) clutter everywhere; 4) no decent flat, light surface. Confession: the white surface in a lot of the recent pictures? That’s my microwave. It’s the only white surface available.

I have a whole plastic folder of recipes from magazine pages, a couple of shelves of recipe books, and the old recipes section from html days is still around. So there’s lots to post. In the meantime, to whet your appetites here’s all my flickr photos tagged with food.

The entire website has been converted to the new design now, hopefully I haven’t left any page out. This is a time when I wish I had readers, sigh. Anyway, I’d be grateful to know your opinion on the new design. Please vote in the poll, and feel free to add further comments (at the bottom of this poll click on Comments). I’m not looking for compliments, it’s just that I feel like I’m bumbling along without much direction and it’d be nice to know if I did the right thing or not. Thanks in advance.

Couldn’t have done it without dreamweaver and photoshop. I’m glad I kept the panic to a minimum when the old photoshop 7.0 conked out. CS3 is nice, very nice. But I was looking at animated checkered flags for the Sports project yesterday and suddenly discovered that CS3 has gone and left ImageReady behind. It used to be that ImageReady was bundled with Photoshop, but no more. Apparently some of the functions have been absorbed into Photoshop CS3 and some ported over to Fireworks.

There’s been a fair number of frustrations by longtime ImageReady users. Among the biggest complaint, that we can’t open an existing animated gif in Photoshop and see all the frames. We have to use either the old ImageReady or Fireworks. But Fireworks isn’t as intuitive, and I tried opening up a CS3 psd file in my old ImageReady to bad, bad results.

Sigh, another new software to learn. Thanks, adobe.

sigh, sigh, sigh, sigh, sigh, sigh.

I wonder why it only has 16GB. If it has more, I’m getting one when I’m in Chicago in 2 weeks.

I was chatting with Car (literally just 5 minutes ago) and she was telling me about the books I should be reading. I said I have little time for reading right now, cos of the 80-20 rule — I’m now at the time-consuming 20% part of the Great Website Redesign project.

She said, and I’ll quote:

80-20 rule? is that something you’ve made up in your anal little mind? lol

Oh my friend, it’s real alright. It’s called the Pareto Principle and was used originally to describe the distribution of wealth. In project management terms, it means that 80% of the work uses up 20% of time / resources.

As anyone who’s spent splodges of time putting the final touch on any project — baking, planning a holiday, building an office block — it’s the last litty bitty details that take up most time, energy and frustration. In terms of the website stuff, it means I’m spending time on the css details before moving onto the static pages.

I tried to explain all this, and the response was still:

car: I think that’s something you’ve made up
me: HA! it’s on wikipedia
car: oh whatever…it simply justifies your need to spend hours changing the color and margins of your website. LOL

Who’s a skeptic now? (Or she’s pulling my very anal legs.)

I upgraded to movable type 4. It looks vastly different from 2.661 and 3.35; SixApart added more functions and changed the way the indexes and templates work. I’ll write it all up in the technical section this weekend. I did a full upgrade, which even SixApart say is for the brave of heart. I deleted everything except the content and completely rebuilt every single index and template. Using the car analogy, I didn’t just change the brakes and spark plugs: I took every single part out and put in a new one.

The current stylesheet is called Minimalist White and it’s a default stylesheet. There aren’t so many available styles for MT4 and I thought I’d stick to one that works initially. This means that:

1. the font behaviour isn’t exactly what I want — I use verdana instead of trebuchet, I’d like my links to be a different colour
2. the customised styles from the old stylesheet (like the float and box elements) haven’t been implemented
3. some more work needed on margins
4. some formatting will look kablooey; an example is the ul list at the top left — it will be a tabbed nav bar eventually

I also need to look at all the pages underneath the main index to change default wording, take out unnecessary code etc. The static pages (about, faq, personal pages) have not been converted to the new style yet.

I’m very excited and happy with what I have so far. It’s been hard work and consecutive late nights. Here are some of the new features:

• quiet thoughts is now the homepage, the preamble is gone
• both writing sections are merged and stories categorised in an organised manner
• I’m starting on the recipes section
• I can now publish static pages like the about page
• I’m now able to use subcategories
• tags and tag clouds
• registration on sections that allow comments means no need to re-authenticate when returning

I’m lucky that I wasn’t a big user of plugins. My favourites like Blacklist and Markdown have been incorporated into the program. I did find the most coolest plugin — Crossposter from Arvind Satyanarayan. Because LJ and Vox are now part of the SA stable, I can crosspost to LJ. No more copying, pasting and reformatting. And this is the first crossposted post.

so at long last I bought a printer. It’s an Epson CX6900f — colour printer, scanner, copier and fax. Very fancy. Easy to set up, just install the drivers and follow instructions.

After I set it up the Epson way, I connected the USB cable between the printer and the Airport, restarted the printer (and Airport for good measure) and whoohoo, wireless printing. Can’t scan wirelessly of course.

The downside is, the installation screwed up my Photoshop. Probably something to do with the colour settings. I can use ImageReady but Photoshop crashes every time I open it. I’m long overdue for CS3 anyway, so I’ll see what alternatives there are.

After yesterday’s musings, I made a prototype page for the gallery using simpleviewer and flickrviewer. I wrote up the technical details.

This displays all the pictures in my favourites flickr set. Full screen shot to see the location of the flash viewer.

Once I upgrade and redo the stylesheets, I’ll integrate this page more fully with the rest of the site.

Researching into how best to redo the gallery. I don’t have stats but it seems to me that a typical personal website will include a blog and a place to put photos. I’m surprised that there aren’t more integration between the likes of flickr / photobucket and MT / Wordpress. May be I’m not looking hard enough, but I don’t think so.

Like many before me, I hacked MT to make it a sort of photoblog/gallery type page. Six Apart say it’s straightforward — witness the number of SA staff using Byrne Reese’s PhotoGallery. But honestly, it’s not immediately intuitive, especially the treatment of thumbnails. There’s the flickrphotos plugin but there’s a fair bit of fiddling needed, it seems to me.

Of course, I don’t have to use MT or a specific CMS. There are several popular solutions:

1. gallery
   PHP/database, flexible, seems easy to install but I’m not sure how well it can integrate to the MT-based css. Apparently some performance issues.
2. lightboxphoto
   Full-featured, gallery maker more suited for professionals selling their photos. The most basic license is $399.
3. pixelpost
   PHP/mysql based, developed specifically for photoblogging. Looks fantastic, allows comments and all that we’ve come to expect of a blogging software.

But I’m not going to use pixelpost or gallery (forget about lightboxphoto) because these require that my images are uploaded and hosted on my server. Not that I haven’t done that, but for the purposes of the gallery I really want to use flickr. Why? The practical reason is because of tags, sets, convenience and not having to upload to multiple locations. They’re neatly organised on flickr, I just want to link them back.

I’m glad I’m not the only one considering the options.

There are quite a few options. My thoughts:

1. chasr
   Simple app that displays thumbnails of sets, click on one and it goes to a page with the photos, then the photo itself. Includes recent photos and popular tags. In order to view private pictures, add comments and the like, I have to sign into flickr. Feels to me like it replicates flickr feel on my own website.
   comment: not for me. I’m not looking for a flickr clone, I’d like something that looks more elegant. Apparently I can play with the demo to see how my sets look like, but I never got it to work.
   
   
   
   
   
2. pictobrowser
   A flash widget that displays flickr pictures. Simple filmstrip design and interface. Choose a set, tag or group and it generates a block of code to embed into a webpage.
   comment: very easy, no need to worry about design. But it’s for single sets or tags only, and in order to display multiple sets, I’ll need to code it myself. Basic, but I need more functions. Here’s my 26thngs for Sept06.
   
   
   
   
3. jetphoto
   More of a desktop photo organiser that happens to generate a flash web album after it’s uploaded to flickr. Has GPS and geotagging. In use, it’s very Windows look and feel. The flash feature generates a pop-up page that has fairly basic navigation elements. For instance clicking on the photo brings me back to the album.
   comment: I don’t want to organise my photos through their application because I use iPhoto on the desktop. The whole point is I don’t want to manage my photos in multiple places. Such a Windows-heavy application won’t make many friends with mac users anyway.
   
   
   
   
4. satellite
   Another PHP application that makes use of flickr’s API. Uses mootools and slimbox for sleekness. Displays thumbnails of pictures of a set; clicking on one dims the set and overlays the picture in question over the set. Looks nice, very nice. Comes with a black and a white theme, so I’m not sure how much it can integrate into a sitewise css.
   comment: nice, worth looking at.
   
   
   
   
5. flogr
   Similar to Satellite in its use of the slimbox overlay method. Themes are customisable and EXIF data is displayed.
   comment: similar in concept to Satellite, appears to have a few more features. Worth looking at.
   
   
   
   
6. simpleviewer
   Very popular. Generates a flash slide show with thumbnails of remainder of photos at side, makes it easy to navigate. Integrates with flickr, wordpress as well as desktop apps like iPhoto.
   comment: I like this. Clean and neat navigation.
   
   
   
   

Verdict? At the moment it’s between simpleviewer and flogr/satellite. It’s to do with navigation — do I like the slimbox overlay approach or the filmstrip approach. Ah, decisions.

I changed mobile provider and while I was it I got a new phone. I mean, I love my 7280, it’s fancy, freaky and not many people (still) have it. But the battery is on its last legs and the phone has the annoying tendency of shutting down without warning, in the middle of a call. At the back of my mind I know that I’m waiting for the iPhone, so I didn’t want to get one that is too expensive. I decided on the nokia 6300 quickly. I don’t have that much patience when it comes to shopping. It’s nice — slim and easy to use and omg! numeric keyboard.

I’m at the tedious stage of the Great Website Re-design: tagging entries. I must admit I’m not a huge tagger, despite having a fairly long flickr tag list. I mean, I don’t tag a photo with food, food&drink, “food and drink”, lunch, meal, “cold meal”, chicken, salad, “chicken salad”, greens, lettuce, tomato, dressing, “balsamic vinegar”, “olive oil”, “oil and vinegar”, yummy, yum, yums, delicious, “I made this”, homemade, “made in a kitchen”, etc etc nor do I cross post to a pageful of groups.

Anyway, tagging the technical and writing sections was easy. Tagging the main blog, now that’s a task and a half. I can’t filter by category and mass update, there’s more to it because of the variety of posts I have.

I’m going through every single post, all 900+ of them. Yes, tedious. But, the upside is I read them again.

One thing that strikes me, as I’m reading 2003 posts. I was a better writer, a better thinking. And I was happy then. Sigh.

I spent the last couple of days upgrading my website’s database from mysql 4 to 5 and playing around with Movable Type 3.35. Anyone remotely interested who’s been reading this journal for the almost 4 years it’s been in existence will probaly know that MT is the blogging software that powers 99% of this website. I’ve been using version 2.661 since day one, and didn’t follow the upgrade path when Six Apart released MT3 because they started charging for it. Now that they’ve gone back to no fees for personal user; and having just released MT4 beta, I think it’s high time I upgraded.

I partially upgraded to MT3.35. I will wait till MT4 becomes more stable, or the GPL version is released (supposedly Q307). In any case I want to get used to the new backend, and to watch for any problems for a week or so.

What does it mean for the readers? Not. A. Thing. What you see in your browser is no different to 2 days ago. But there is a big difference for me, when I write these entries — the look is different, I have tags now, I can do sub-categories, I know my website is safer from spam, and good stuff like that.

The only possible issue is that permalinks have changed, but that only affects anyone who’s linked to an entry which … I doubt there are any. The changes are to the naming convention and the doing away of truncation. So before, there may be a permalink like:

individual entry: http://invisiblecompany.com/archives/my_inner_science_ge/0001747invisibly_new.php
category archive: http://invisiblecompany.com/my_inner_science_ge/index.php

we now have:

individual entry: http://invisiblecompany.com/archives/2007/08/21/invisibly_new.php
category archive: http://invisiblecompany.com/my_inner_science_geek/index.php

There’s more to do in the next few months, if I keep at it. Next steps:

1. Merge both writing sections [ETA23.08: done]
2. Redo gallery — flickr is a better place for my photos, there are a few plug-ins and software that will display flickr sets as a gallery on websites
3. Think about what I want to do with Delicacies [ETZ23.08: deleted]
4. Add recipes section
5. Add tags for all entries (!!!! that’s over 1,000 entries for the entire site)
6. Delete unused weblogs [ETA23.08: done]
7. Site redesign — this design is getting old, I don’t want to look like a 2002 website, I need web 2.0 look

via bb, someone put a whole NeXT system on ebay. WOW. That brings back memories. 1996. My first job at ex-ex-company, I had a huge NeXT plus a regular monitor (the large ones, not the flatscreen ones we use nowadays) on my tiny desk — I was left with the equivalent of an A4 sheet of paper for writing space. It was a funny system, there was home and objects and it was slow but pretty. The trading floor used it, and there were in-house software written on it, so certain people had to have it. I just remember there were black NeXTs and white NeXTs — mine was black. In terms of computer history, I’d just gotten rid of my LC and was about to purchase the Performa 6200.

I automatically updated to adium 1.1. First of all, it now only runs on Tiger which, with my pb1 still on a combo of jaguar and classic os 9, is kinda sucky. Then again, I don’t chat on the pb1.

Quite a few new features, including the ability to arrange tabs on any side of the message view, not just the bottom. It’s really cool, especially if I have multiple tabs open. I do love the tab feature of adium as well as how it combines IMs from the same contact. Of course, if the same person messages me on yahoo then gtalk I won’t tell the difference, but that’s another story.

Apparently BUZZ in yahoo is now fully supported. I’ll have to ask Car or K to buzz me one of these days, hee.

On ars technica people are saying they can’t participate in yahoo group chats on adium. It threw me at first … I’ve done group chats on yahoo using adium. Then I realise — group voice chat. Ah, the good old days, the reason why I got the dell. *shrug* Skype works just as well for me.

I’ve said this many times, for a program that’s free it’s fantastic. I would say it’s an essential program for any mac user. Yep.

Apple announced (among other new things) iWork ‘08, which now includes Numbers, a spreadsheet function. It compliments Pages (the word processor) and Keynote (the powerpoint equivalent). It’s supposed to work with MS Office and at $79 for a single version is very affordable.

iWork came with the mbp, and I’m ashamed to say that I’ve never tried it. Like 99.9% of the population I use Office at work, and the poor mac version at home until a couple of years ago when I discovered writely. Even though it’s now under the google umbrella I’ve continued to use it. I dislike the newest layout but nothing can beat its portability and clean interface.

So, will I try out iWork? May be. Don’t hold your breath.

Sis was asking me about burning photos to dvd for backup. I told her to back it up to an external hard disk instead because of the capacity. But then I remembered mm making a dvd of her pilgrimage trip and how she said I should make a dvd of my trip.

I mean I have the programs, so I really should make better use of them. Especially since I already use iPhoto to organise my pictures.

Heh. So straightforward with iDVD. Pick a theme, split the trip up to smaller slideshows, add music, add comments, customise the menu and burn. Tested it on my tv, it looks good.

In other news, still blastfully hot.

In further other news, this is entry #888 for this MT installation.

Oh wow I can’t believe how dependent I am. I woke up this morning and gmail was down. Stupid 502 temporary error. Well that temporary turned out to be more than a few hours, which in this day and age is several lifetimes. Searched around the google help forums and found several alternate login addresses. The only one that worked was this one. I’m trying to find out what the difference is, but it seems to me that it’s not javascript enabled, there is no periodic checking of the inbox, gchat / contacts isn’t available. For simple, straightforward checking of email this worked great.

Talking about being connected, lifehacker linked to internetfrog where we can test our broadband speed. My download time isn’t bad but what’s up with the crappy upload time?

Lifehacker reports on some fantastic people who lists possible methods of accessing pandora from outside the US. I haven’t tried them all, but the most obvious public cgi loads, but is slow. Kudos for them for trying to help.

Talking about Pandora, the day after I decide to listen to it more, it will no longer be available to non-US users because of some crap-ass licensing issue. It was always intended for US users only but they were okay about users supplying any zip code.

Pandora operates under Section 114 of the DMCA, which gives them a clear process for paying rights holders in the U.S. There is no international equivalent of the DMCA, and so to operate legally in other countries, Pandora must sign deals with rights holders directly. That means separate deals with labels and publishers for each song, an extremely difficult and time consuming task.

You really gotta hand it to the music industry don’t you. They’re gonna kill their own industry all by themselves. If it weren’t for Pandora, I wouldn’t have discovered Brookville, Ivy and a whole slew of artists. And today I went to HMV looking for The Village Green! (Didn’t find them, I’ll probably order from amazon.) How are less well known musicians going to have this sort of exposure? Pandora is easy to use, has great recommendations and is not intrusive. And now they’ll lose a large chunk of their users because they live in the wrong part of the world. The world, and especially the internet world, is global nowadays, when will greedy businesses ever catch on to that?