Carlos Domingo - Un poco de todo

The last few weekend I have been too busy with either work or other personal activities to blog, this is the problem when you are a weekend blogger, you missed a weekend, then two weeks without posts. Next two weekends I am back in Tokyo so I will be having the same problem (unless the jet lag keeps me awake at nigth and I can blog then). There are few topics that I wanted to blog about that by the time that I blog might not be news anymore, one of them the scandal in Japan with Livedoor and Horiemon (as their founder and CEO is known there after merging his name Horie and Doraemon, the cartoon character). Also, I got several reponses and emails about my GTD post so I want to do a follow up one on that topic. Thanks to all the contributors.

CD

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Originally uploaded by carlosd - unpokodtodo.

Yesterday, after two years in Seattle, I finally visit Freemont and I was pleasantly surprise, nice neighbourhood, really close to downtown and near Lake Union and lots of hip shops and restaurants. Very tiny though, Mari and I explored the whole thing in a couple of hours.

One surprising thing that I had heard about is a statue of Lenin brought here from Slovaquia after the colapse of the Soviet Union. It is a pretty impressive bronce statue, around 5 meters tall and it is cool to see that in spite of the potential negative political connotations they decided that the historical and artistic value was worth keeping the statue there.

CD

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Gizmodo reports on the new Samsung Dual Core laptops that look extremely similar to my Sony Vaio S-Series. They do report a battery life of 5.3 hours so pretty good considering that to get 4.5 hours in my Vaio I need to have an extended battery that makes the rear of the computer stick out and is not very convinient to place on my bag. Apple has not announced the battery life for their new MacBook Pros but since they use the same processor, shall we asume that it will be similar? I hope so since I really want to get one but it battery life is an issue I might not do so.

CD

Samsung is trying to do one on Apple with its new X60 and R65 dual-core laptops. Sexy and sleek like a MacBook Pro, with their polished metal and black keyboards they have an TiBook-esque appearence. The X60 has a 15.4″ widescreen which looks stunning, Gigabit ethernet, five-hour battery life, and so much more. 802.11 a/b/g wireless, Bluetooth, and twin-array microphones to filter out unwanted ambient noises and ensure high quality sound add to the mix to make the X60 a serious powerhouse laptop. The R65 has all the bells and whistles as well, but adds built-in rear SRS 3D speakers for the ultimate multimedia experience. These lovely laptops will set you back about $1585 for the X60 and $1765 for the R65. Start saving, buddy.

Samsung Thin & Light Dual-Core Laptops [BIOS]

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While in Tokyo this Xmas, I had a change to play with a XBox 360 with a 50” display and I have to say that the quality of the games in HD is impressive. However, the games seem to be just portings of existig games so gaming-wise, the games were not necessarily much more fun. But certainly much more beatiful and faster than PS2 or the old XBox games.

I also had a change to visit one of the largest electronic stores in Tokyo, the Bic Camera shop in Yurakucho, near Tokyo station to confirm that it was very easy to buy a Xbox 360 there, no shortage, the XBox was actually being displayed at the very end of the store with just one guy wondering around while in the other section of the shop, the one near the entrance where PSP and PS2 games where being sold, it was really crowded. Check out the two pictures to see the amazing difference in attention between the "Sony Area" and the "Microsoft Area" of the shop.

Most of the gamers that I talked to they said that Japanese people are waiting for good games to come up (the Final Fantasy version released on 360 works only online) and also news from Sony about PS3. It seems the majority of the Japanese are waiting for the PS3 and not buying Xbox 360 which is somehow surprinsing given how Japanese people tend to jump to the latest gadget as soon as it is available.

CD

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It has been already a couple of months since I read the book Getting Things Done from David Allen and started using his methodology for dealing with email (only using there but I live in Outllook so just improving how I deal with email can go a long way into making me more productive) including their Outlook Plugin. The results, the methodology is good but the plugin sucks. Let me be more specific:

- The GTD method of how to deal with incomign email (discard, deal with it if you can do it quickly, put it in a project, delegate, etc.) is perfect and I think that intuitively, I was sort of already doing that but now I do it in a more structure and organize way. You have to come up with your own refinments of the process since folllowing the exact way as it is describe in the book might not work for everyone (for instance, the adivce of dealing with every email that takes less than 2 minutes to deal with does not work for me since sometime I only have one hour to deal with 50 emails and if I spend 2 minutes in many of them I cannot read all of them).

- Moving things out of the inbox as soon as you can and organizing things in few folders (projects folders, someday folder, etc.) is a good idea. I was actually doing the opposite which was keeping everything in the inbox and once in a while trying to organize things in tons of folders. The main reaons in the past for doing this was that Outlook search was really slow and then having lots of folders neatly organize was a very good way to find emails. Now I have MSN Desktop (yes, I do not use Google Desktop, it is fast but the interface, the search options and the usability suck compared to MSN Desktop, I am still using Google for Web searches, there MSN has a long way to go) so the search issue is gone. The other problem with my old method was that I ended up getting so much email and have so little time, that most of the email will stay in the inbox and never get organized into folders. Since moving to the GTD methodology, I have reduced the amount of emails in my inbox from more than 10,000 to under 250 and I use the inbox as the periodic review list that is recommended on the book. A side advantage of this is now Outlook works way faster than in the past since Outlook does not seem to scale very well when you have very large inboxes (mine is close to 3GB) or large folders.

- The plugin sucks, it is clearly not designed for the latest version of Outlook, it does not work well when setting up projects or tasks and it slow. Moreover, it does not greatly reduce the number of clicks that I need to do with Outlook (I am using 2003) to acomplish the same task. I can see the value of having a better designed plugin to folllow the GTD methodology but the current version is not worth the price. Using flags and just simple drag and drops for moving emails to folders or to create tasks out of email do a good enough job.

My recommendation? Get the book, read it and understanding it and come up with your own custom GTD version and do not spend any money on the plugin. So Jim, I am ditching the delegate button but I am still forwarding you emails….

CD

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I spent few days in Delhi and Agra after new year, it was a reallly cool experience, the people were great, extremely friendly and educated, the food was awesome and the sights amazing (Agra is obviously a must with the impressive Taj Mahal and the Agra Fort but the Qudbut mosque and minarete in Delhi are also a great place to visit in Delhi that is less known but equally beatifull). I can wait to go again and to visit some other cities or to see more of Delhi since I missed most of the city.
What was surprising is the city infrastructure, I was expecting Delhi to be more like Bangkok, Manila or Beijing (Bangkok has actually improved a lot in the last 10 years, it now takes only 20 minutes to go downtown from the airport versus 2 hours 10 years ago when I first went) but they are definitely behind which is surprising given the economic growth that the country has had in the last years. I was told that all the investment in infrastructure has not been enough to keep up with the growth in population and this is the reason that they roads seems to be permanently collapsed or there is no reliable source of electricity and all the high tech companies have to have their own power generators to guarantee 24 hours. The other theory that perhaps explains this better is that while the growth in countries like China has been due to manufacturing which provides jobs to all sort of people in the society, low and middle class included, the growth in India has been driven by high tech and IT outsourcing which provides jobs to the educated part of the society but not to all of them. So the recent economic growth in Chinas has been spread more broadly than in India, the theory goes and this is reflected in the country infrastructure which is extremely unbalanced. If this is the case, I think that the goverment there might not be doing a good job in making sure that all the wealth coming to India is reinvested back into the country. Another interesting statistic that I heard was about health care spending, India is way behind countries like Europe or Japan (and the US but the US seems to actually be spending way more than anyone else in health care which should also raise a red flag) so this again points towards a bad goverment spending policy.
In any case, India is definitely the country to watch in the next years, for the last few years they have started getting into manufacturing so they might go through a change similar to China in the last 10 years, they are obviously ahead of the curve in the high tech arena compared to other countries in the region and even compared with China, they have a large population of very hard working people and dedicated people and a beatiful country with lots of natural resources. Countries and cities can change surprisingly fast (witness Shanghai in the last 10 years or Bangkok as I mentioned) and I am sure that India will change for the better. I will definitely keep watching and visiting them.

CD

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Originally uploaded by carlosd - unpokodtodo.

And this one for all the geeks visting Thailand.

CD

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Originally uploaded by carlosd - unpokodtodo.

The amount of tshirts that they sell in the streets in Bangkok is amazing and with a bit of negotiation, you can get most of them for under $2. Here you have a funny one imitating the Intel Inside logo (that is on its way to dissapear…).

CD

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After attending MacWorld, I am rethinking a bit my MacOS X in Dell boxes theory. I think that Apple will not officially endorse that MacOS X runs on non Apple computers (even though I really think that this will happen, someone will come up with a simple way of doing that). I think that the opposite will in fact happen and it will become very easy (perhaps not with XP due to the BIOS issue but certainly with Vista) to run Windows on an Apple machine. In spite of Apple doing a fantastic job providing the best must-have applications in MacOS X (iLife looks really good, specially iWeb, when I saw jobs demoing it to create a web site and a blog with a podcast, I was thinking that this is exactly what I have been looking for in Windows and could not find) and Microsoft comitting to anoher 5 years of Office on MacOS X (so no rush for Apple to release their own spread sheet), people will still need Windows once in a while since there are too many business applications that only run on Windows. However, now that Macs are no longer more expensive than Windows based computers (check out this article for a very good price comparison between the new MacBook Pros and a similarly configured Dell notebook) and actually in some respects better (we still need to know about battery life though), I can get myself a MacBook Pro, install Vista when is ready, and spend most of my time on MacOS X and only switch to Windows when it is strictly necessary. Is this going to take market share from Microsoft? Certainly, but it seems that it might actually affect more PC manufacturers like Dell if people start buying Macs instead of Dells (at the end of the day, Microsoft market share of the PC market is 97% versus Dell’s market share of 22% and their margins are also much better so Dell has a lot more to lose). So no wonder that Michael Dell said that they will gladly license MacOS X for their computers, they probably see the risk. Either way, I am expecting 2006 to see the year of the Mac for Apple instead of the year of the iPod as it was 2005 and this is only good news for computer users and Mac developers.

Another thing that kept me thinking is that one of the potential growth opportunities for Apple is .Mac. Their new release of iLife is much more integrated and they only have 1 million paid registered users (nothing compared to any other Web company like Yahoo!!) which is probably less than 5% of their users. People argue that at $100 a year is expensive but if you start to think, I pay $24.95 for my flickr pro account (which I really only use to share pictures with friends and family, I really do not care or use too much the community features) and $8.95 a month for my Typepad blogging account that provides one of the worsts interfaces for blogging I have seen, nothing to do with the beauty of the new iWeb and it only allows blogging, not creating a full web site as iWeb does. So I will actually be saving money by switching to .Mac and I get a better experience and lots of other features I do not get today. The downside is that I need to have a Mac but assuming the new MacBook Pros do not overheat as much as they did at MacWorld (lots of geeks are going to have reproduction issues if they have those laptops for too long on their laps) and they provide a decent battery life, I am certainly switching in February. I think that what Apple needs to do with the .Mac pricing is to change it to a monthly pricing instead of a yearly pricing. Not change the overall pricing, just how they charge for it, I know it is a perception issue but that is how consumers take purchasing decisions, based on perceptions. Obviously the other strategy will be to port iLife to Windows and open up .Mac to Windows users using iLife, in a move similar to the port of iTunes to Windows to reach the Windows community with iPods and the ITunes Store but this is probably less likely to happen short term since it might then drive users to Windows based PCs instead of to Macs.

CD

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One of my 2006 resolutions is to participate on the Tokyo Island Triathlon in Niijima in May, check out last year info here http://www.tourism.metro.tokyo.jp/english/topics/040520/1.html

They have a time limit of four hours and the record time is usually slightly below 3 hours depending on the course chosen and the sea that day, I will be happy finishing within the 4 hours time since this is my first year.

CD

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