Carlos Domingo - Un poco de todo

The first presentation I attended at MindCamp was some sort of commercial pitch for a product called MindManager that claims to have 750,000 users, a pretty decent install user base. At first, it looks like some sort of digital white boarding tool so I was not too excited about it but the more the guy got into how to use it and what it does, the more interesting it looked. I particularly like the integration with the Research feature in Microsoft product that he demoed and also how he positioned the product as a tool to help to get things done (something I am very interested in, there were two sessions on this at Mindcamp but both Sunday morning so I missed them, too bad, I will have to read online about the discussion) and even more interesting, as a way to reach consensus on a meeting and track the discussion and the decisions, actions, etc. After some research on the web I found that there is an open source version called FreeMind that also looks interesting  (and free even, this in not cheap stuff, the basic version is more than $200 an the professional one is $350) so I will keep this on my list of things-to-do-when-I-have-time-that-almost-never-get-done and perhaps check it in more detail in the future. The idea of trying to map the mind while you are brainstorming and use that as a way to capture the resulting discussion and agreement and then use it to track progress against it certainly seems very appealing to me.

CD

Technorati Tags: mindcamp2.0

Share on Facebook

So this year again there were few people teaching lock picking and I actually got to try one. The particular technique that a guy called Pablo told me is the following (check the picture to understand a bit better how it works although it is a bit fuzzy). You have a key that fits on a particular kind of lock but with all the pins very low so obviously, won’t open the lock as keys have pins of different highs but it will fit on the lock well. With one hand, you put some pressure on the key inside the lock and then with something like a small hammer, start hitting the key on the lock horizontally till the energy of hitting the key will lift the internal pins of the lock and you will feel how suddenly you can turn the key and open the lock. Not sure I explain it well but it was pretty cool, it took me a couple of attempts but it was a really cool feeling when the key turned around and open the lock.
In case you are interested in the topic, check out this web site.

CD

Share on Facebook

The unconference started a couple of hours ago, I will be posting later tonight or tomorrow, so far looks similar to last year with the usual suspects from the Seattle tech scene around.

CD

Share on Facebook