Digital Lifestyle - More Gadgets
... or at least: more connectivity.
Played around the entire Saturday (which was a cold, rainy day here in SF) to get my PDA/PC music sync going (successfully) to make my PDA a mobile music player with ribbed CDs from my collection as well as purchased songs from Raphsody.com.
Also, I managed to connect my bluetooth headset to both, my PDA-cellphone as well as to my PC-Skype (using vitaero, formerly SkypeHeadset software which I bought for GBP 10). Cool stuff. My Jabra BT 350 headset is able to pair with two devices at the time. Once I start my PC-bluetooth (and finish the PDA's), the headset automatically rolls over to the PC. Rolling back to the PDA is less easy: You need to refresh the "headset service" in the pairing profile to re-connect.
California Intermezzo
One week in San Francisco to catch up in the office, attend meetings and enjoy the first concert of San Francisco Symphony this season (MTT conducts Russian oeuvres). Juan enjoys his champaign, the music or me being back... Next week I'll be in Europe.
2x Party on the Same Friday night
Another 'first': I had a great Friday night out in Auckland, New Zealand, went to bed, slept, flew to Hawaii (picture) and went to party there on Friday night once again. Cool.
Picture: crossing the dateline on the flight from Auckland to Honolulu
Down Under!
Arrived in Sydney - and I like it! Temperatures have been a moderate 25 degrees (after a record 45 degrees on New Year's Eve!), and with a cool white wine at the harbor in my hands, that was bearable!
I had a nice dinner with Ogi Pishev, who has one of the most exciting biographies you can imagine: Computer Engineer in Bulgaria before 1990 to reverse engineer Western products, then ambassador of the new Bulgarian gov't to the US (achieving, among others, the WTO membership for Bulgaria), and now a software expert in Australia with a focus on the electronic patient record, using object-oriented methodologies and products. Ogi will be presenting db4o at the Sydney roadshow tomorrow, which takes place at the Menzies hotel.
BTW, the picture is taken with the new dopod 818. Not perfect picture quality, but fun, because you always have it with you. And aren't blury digital images part of today's culture, too?
Digital lifestyle, now more mobile
Just purchased the latest gadget here in Singapore -- a Dopod 818, a Chinese-made PDA running Windows Mobile 5.0 with Triband GSM/GPRS as well as WIFI and Bluetooth. It also has a 2MPix camera on board and many other features, among them the simple yet important ability to synchronize more than just the Inbox of your Exchange server to the device.
Cool stuff and certainly a step forward from my old, T-Mobile branded PDA with Windows Mobile 2003. This one seems to crash much less than the old one and is much better suited to be a phone (reception is much better).
All together a great help for the mobile digital lifestyle which I have subscribed to.
In KL: Petronas Towers
Great view to see the illuminated Petronas Towers in KL the other night. When I saw the first pictures of the towers some 10 years ago, I thought they were ugly.
Now I think they are magical - especially at night: The Twin Towers very much remind of a gothical cathedral towering over a French city. And the white illuminated stainless steel is really attractive.
Talking of skyscrapers: I have seen the world's five largest skyscrapers just within the course of 18 months. Amazing!
- Taipei 101, Taipei
- Petronas Towers, KL
- Sears Towers, Chicago
- Jin Mao Tower, Shanghai
- 2 IFC, Hongkong
Another Step to Loosen Microsoft's Grip
I must admit, that I am a lazy mainstream user - such as many other people, too - when it comes to selecting desktop software, and therefore used Microsoft's product often and convinced: "no experiments". According to my technology adoption behavior, Geoff Moore would certainly classify me somewhere in the early or even conservative majority.
Now, there should be some worries for Microsoft given the fact that I switched with another key software platform away from Redmond's products: Firefox turns out to be a much better web browser (tabbed, faster loading, less errors, etc.)
The decision was taken after I had used Firefox in a Laotian Internet Cafe. First I was looking for IE, because I thought that Outlook Web Access would work better with it, but then it turned out that Firefox worked similarly good. The last decisive step was the fact, that I couldn't access my Bank of America homebanking anymore with IE after they had introduced some fancy security features - but with Firefox I could.
In 2004, I had already switched from MS Office to OpenOffice - but so far only partly: For documents I use OpenOffice and am, in general, happy, unless it comes to more complex formatting tasks (such as our sales collateral). This is because documents have become much less important in our web-based business conduct - so much is done by mail, who bothers to write letters any more? For Excel (and PowerPoint, which I try to use less and less), I still rely on MSFT, since OO didn't convince me so far.
On many other product platforms, I was totally lost for Microsoft from the beginning. Hotmail, Messenger and everything with Passport was a total red-flag zone for me. For enterprise applications, I am very happy with on-demand products such as Salesforce.com (though a bit pricy). I'm also not a gamer, so I won't spend money on an XBox. And don't mention Microsoft search...
Give us another year, and perhaps I switch to Linux desktop (with a Windows VM from VMware for certain moments...), drop Excel in favor of OO, and switch Outlook (which I would love to do since I am rather unhappy with the stability and the very limited search and archiving functionality) to - I don't know - Scalix? -- and MSFT would be entirely replaced by Open Source and/or On-Demand Software.
Isn't this quite a big change?
A successfull business year comes to an end
Proudly we wrap up the first full year of business conducted through db4objects, Inc. It has been a great ride with thousands of new users, many new customers and great accolades, e.g. being named "
the most eye-opening technology of 2005".
I look forward to the development of the business, together with great customers, a very strong team and a very compelling and differentiated business model, which turns out to be a great showcase for Tom Friedman's Globalization 3.0 theory.
Some Pictures from Vietnam and Laos
I uploaded my Vietnam and Laos pictures to
my Flickr's page. If you are a friend you can see 'em all, otherwise you'll only see a small selection.
