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PowerMenu gives useul features in windows eg keep always on top, transparency etc.

Recently this got me thinking as I got a Google Voice account (by having one in GrandCentral which Google bought a while back). Here is how we do telephony in our household:

• Mobiles - both of us have one but it’s always on silent/vibrate not to risk waking up our baby, so we do miss calls. Also a lot of times we are not home and wish to make international calls to family, in which case having Google voice (see below) & a Rebtel account really helps.
• Landline - We have a skype-in number (with skype-out feature) that we use through a Voip phone (Netgear SPH200D) which hooks up directly to our internet router so we are not dependent on a computer (and skype software) being on. And it ends up being much cheaper than paying monthly fee for landline. Of course if your internet connection is down, so is your ‘landline’ with this solution.
• Google Voice (GV) - And finally the part that brings it all together: Having a GV nr allows people to call this nr, which in turn will ring all the other phones until someone picks up or it goes to voicemail. Voicemails gets transcribed to text and searchable from gmail. Further you can receive txt msgs on this nr.  There are tons of other features on GV beyond these though. Some of my favorite features:
  • Calling international numbers (call your GV nr and then dial an international nr, not free but very cheap)
  • Having your voicemails accessible from the web and any of your phones
  • Voicemail transcriptions
  • ListenIn
  • Call screening vs. Call presentation
  • Switching phones during an incoming call
  • Temporary call forwarding
  • Sending all calls to voicemail
  • Recording outbound calls
  • Conference calling on the fly
  • Call widgets
  • Goog411 integration

And I expect soon enough Googletalk will be part of this solution which then really makes the possibilities endless.

Hearing about it on the radio today, something similar is, in smaller scale, happening around us here in the US at least. It seems with the ongoing recession and home sales so low, real estate agents are taking to new tricks to sell houses: they hire actors to play the roles of good neighbors and plant them around in the emptynext door house or as dog walkers up and down the street or lawnmover neighbor 3 houses down, or a few kids playing on the street…you get the picture.

I personally found it quite disturbing, especially when the buyer in the story realized this after buying the house and moving in that his street pretty much has only empty foreclosed houses.

So, next time you are house hunting and meet a friendly future neighbor, make sure they actually live there.

PS. This is not a April’s fool joke.

PS. I do have a twitter account (curiosity) but I think I have logged into it maybe twice in the last 6 months.

The UN and rest of the world has passed resolutions one after the other and this has been a thorn in the side of the Iranian goverment that they can’t just continue do as they please.

And here is the goverment’s latest shameless play: they arrest seven of the Baha’is, imprison them and charge them for espionage. After this, the Noble prize winner and human rights activist Shirin Ebadi declares that she will represent the Baha’is and stand up for their human rights. The government then charges Ms. Ebadi with tax evasion and once imprisoned, this is then followed by formally charging these imprisoned Baha’is for espionage.

Further the timing of these events certainly are interesting. In the light of president Obama studying what to do about the relations with Iran, I personally find the timing of these event very interesting and cunning from Iran’s side. Why? because as mentioned violating the rights of Baha’is has been a thorn on the Iranian goverment’s side and now is their chance to see if they can get away with it with the new US president. I.e. is President Obama willing to prioritize this down in favor of starting a dialouge with Iran and instead focus on other matters that also are in contention with US (e.g. nuclear energy development).

Whether this is all one big consipirasy theory or not remains to be seen over time, but one thing is and continues to be clear. Iranian goverment is ready to sink as low as it takes to continue their shameless persecusion of Baha’is.

What I see happening is that we are either too lazy or overloaded with information that majority seem to want the news to be fully processed/digested so that we do nothing but be fed, be influences and move on to the next piece of information we need to absorb. And media sources are greatly taking advantage of this to the degree that sometimes the reality seen through their eyes is very distorted if you stop for a minute and think about what they serve us critically.

Even the small sources, e.g. blogsphere, be it technology or financial can’t help themselves and stray away from just telling the facts and background and leaving it to the reader to do the digestion.

So really not much has changed since the days of the past and although we can all agree that the media have both a powerful influence on people’s attitudes and perceptions and a weighty responsibility to contribute to social integration, it is not where they are and that is probably more of a reflection on where our society or mankind as a whole is. Sooner or later though this will need change and the future of journalism will have to be impartial, objective and factual, not processed or entertaining.

• Manage my life.  One look at the home screen and I know what’s up for the day
• Triage (work & personal) emails. Mostly delete and quick/emergency replies
• Access/Manage my contacts which syncs with Outlook which in turn syncs with plaxo.com
• Access the web for quick info, price comparison when standing in a store etc.

Let review each phone (or rather OS) and what I like/dislike about them:

iPhone

I disliked:

• When replying to a work (exchange) email on the iPhone, it doesn’t show up as replied to in Outlook on the PC.
• You can’t flag messages like follow-up etc.
• Have to tell the mail client which account to send the message “from”. No default send account can be set.
• Switching between mail accounts required ~5 taps
• It syncs mail whenever it wants to.  I had personal mail set to sync manually.  It syncs when you open the mail client.  (I didn’t tell it to do that!)
• In contacts, the search wasn’t anchored at the top.  If I happened to be at Zach Zimmerman, I would have to scroll to the top to search for Buck Brown.  Not cool.
• It syncs ALL contacts folders in your mailbox – specifically it sync’d the folder I didn’t want on my phone, and I had no way to control it.
• Calendar – you can’t:
  • Create a request and invite others
  • Create a recurring meeting
  • Color things based on type (personal, etc)
  • Do free/busy
  • Change time zone of meetings
• Tasks – doesn’t sync from Exchange – not that I use them.
• Notes – doesn’t sync Notes folder from Exchange. Don’t really use those either.
• No Home Screen!  Looking at the home screen shows a ton of cool things to do: Facebook-which rules, iTunes, Safari-a browser that actually works well on a mobile device, and so many more.  Problem is the clock is miniscule and I had no idea what time my next meeting was unless I clicked into the calendar.
• Battery life – horrible – not even 1 full day.
• No Picture Text Messaging (MMS)
• No tactile keyboard – touching the screen keyboard was decent for typing.  I am way faster on WM keyboard devices.
• No video cam – not that important, but sometimes useful for a good joke or a concert clip.
• No copy/paste.
• No SD slot – makes transferring data more difficult.

Things I LOVED about the iPhone:

• INTERFACE – if you haven’t played with an iPhone, you are missing out.  The touch screen simply rules.  Nothing in WM comes close in my opinion. (Not even the Touch which has a cool home screen, then switches out to the standard WM interface inside an app.)
• Safari – their web browser actually allowed you turn surf the web. Interesting concept – WM take notice! (ps-we are making IE6 available to WM devices later this year.. should be a HUGE help)
• Built in GPS – very nice.  Google maps works perfectly and is very smooth and easy to use. (I realize we have Live for WM)
• Accelerometor – when you flip the device, the screen flips into landscape/portrait.  That’s nice.  (WM requires you to open the keyboard to do this.)
• Applications – the social aspect of the device simply rocks.  facebook, youtube, and so many other cool/useful tools (for social/personal use)
• I could tell it to always use First Last when creating/sorting Contacts.
• I never had to reboot the device once because it flaked out.
• It never ran out of memory
• Coolness factor

Nokia E71

Dislikes:

• Small non touch screen
• you can’t reply-all to everyone on an exchange appointment (if you are late) - same as iphone
• Very basic exchange features (worse than iphone in some areas)
• Symbian can be as user friendly as unix, menu system is not always friendly or intuitive.

Likes:

• Radio
• Podcast over 3G - awesome and can’t get it on iphone
• Very slim profile - I have to feel which pocket I have it in sometimes since its so slim and light
• Battery - goes without the need for charge for 2-3 days with moderate surfing and regular email download.
• Good GPS - that is not picky and get signal even in pretty covered areas (like driving in a car)
• Stable - have not had to reboot.
• Nice tactile keyboard - makes life easier when typing

Overall, very happy with my E71 and no regrets so far, although lack of good integration with exchange does sometimes make me start considering going back to windows mobile device, but until I find something that is good enough (HTC HD is the only possible candidate so far), I am not going to bother.

There is an ongoing debate on how Europeans do work hard (occasionally) but often stop to smell the roses along the way vs. Americans who are too focused to waste time on such things in their quest for consumerism. Of course, this is generalization and even within Europe people make jokes about other less efficient countries who do not but, oh say, drink wine and go on strikes…the point ultimately being that one side sees their way being superior to the other’s.

From my observations though, this does ring a bell in many aspects. A simple thing like vacation, when living in Sweden for instance I had 5 weeks vacation each year and during yearly reviews I (like others) would negotiate for additional vacation days or weeks rather than focus on salary (maybe because after certain level you pay 55%  income tax anyways); here in the States two weeks is the standard with more generous companies giving three.

At work here in the States, most people are not interested in your life, or to get to know you on a personal level, not necessarily because they don’t care (although that is the case many times) but because there is just no time to waste on those things. Or maybe this is just limited to the tech industry here? Anyways outside of my non-work friends, the concept of having lunch, coffee or phone chat for the sake of getting to know someone is rare here so unless there is a (work related) purpose to it what you will see is an initial small talk (usually short and somewhat awkward/abrupt) followed by getting to the point/topic at hand.

And in Rome you do as Romans, so I have realized I am doing just that, i.e. either avoid small talk altogether and go to the point from the start ( to avoid the whole awkwardness) or simply avoid talking to people about life outside of work even if I am interested so that they don’t feel like their time is being wasted or ask me politely “what’s up?” to stop the non-work related talk.

Maybe it’s the cultural in this fast paced industry where effeciency and results (followed by performance- and midyear reviews) is all that matters and there is just no room for much else  as there is not enough time in a day. Either way, I like to get to know people beyond their professional capabilities, so I have started swiming upstream, let’s see if I can make it last.

Then came Google Chrome along and at a first brief encounter (installed on my Windows Server 2008 machine), I wasn’t impressed with the promised speed along with the fact that there were virtually no plugins out there to use.

A couple of months passed and I kept reading in blogs and other places about the amazing performance of this browser (e.g. test done by ExtremeTech), so I decided to give it a week on my Vista machine just in case in case…and surely I started seeing results. Web pages do load faster and I really find the omnibar very useful saving me both time and click as it tends to find what I am looking for 85% of time as the first result.

So even though I have to give up a few of my plugins (and thereby features) due to chrome being so new on the market and lacking proper plugins, I still find it worth it even if the speed gain is 2.3% (according to the tests). You may think above certain limit small gain in speed does not matter and it’s more of a marketing ploy. I disagree because performance hit even in small dosage is very noticeable and frustrating, so I take performance over feature richness if I have to.

Nevertheless, what I really dislike is that many carriers (e.g. AT&T) lock the phones they sell to their own network. I am paying for the phone and you are already making me commit for 2 years to use your services, so the only way I interpret your move to lock the phone beyond our agreement is that you are insecure of the quality of your services, hence you use this method to shackle me down to continue using your network. Of course there is more to this as carriers usually pay through the nose to get exclusive deals with (hot) phone manufacturers and this is one way for them to try and get back that money. Bottom line though, it is not very customer oriented.

Anyways, for all you iPhone fans who are not on AT&T but still want want to be able to use an iPhone, here is a method to ‘unlock’ your iPhone and still keep your warranty (which other methods such as jailbreaking can’t do)

Moogle.com offers an unlock adapter to achieve this for $29.99. I am sure there are other sites that offer this service and the way these work is that they don’t modify any part of the phone itself, neither by hardware nor by software. The only thing they do is they intercept the data traffic between the SIM card and the phone, and when the phone asks for sim card’s operator code it gets a “fake” code back (basically, the phone thinks it’s using ATT sim card although it is not). That check is done once upon phone boot, sim insertion and/or signal re-acquisition. The other parts of the phone do not care (so they display proper operator logo, connect to the right network etc.) and do not ask for the code again.
Then again, I am sure it is a matter of time before Apple & the carriers who have exclusive deals with Apple tighten up the model further through the software updates so this stops working.

Why is this so cool? If you think about it, a major part of having family/friends close to you geographically means that you get to know about the small details of their lives as you have frequent interactions which provides this wonderful aspect. You know, small seemingly unimportant details that we feel there is no time to share or are simply not important enough when we are thousands of miles away from each other and chat over the phone/skype/chat etc.

With my (3G) Nokia and Qik installed on it, all I need to do is send a text msg to whoever I want to share a visual moment with, be it when I am at a concert, our baby doing something cute or some other share-worthy event happens, and they can get on qik site and watch it live (with ~10 seconds lag). It also gets recorded in case you want to see it later. No more a need for a web cam connected to computer with internet connection.

And here is an actual example of a situation when it was very useful : When being at a pool with our daughter Carmel, I sent a text message to my parents telling them they can get on qik.com which they did back in Finland, and they were able to enjoy Carmel, seeing her splash and laugh in the pool, *live*. Alternative to this would have been to record it on the phone or other camera, download it to a computer, upload it to youtube.com, send an email to them to watch it which at best would have been a few hours after the event; not anywhere as good as watching something live and feeling you are part of it.

Still, there are many instances where I do wish I had something on my own blog, so to all my 22 subscribers  out there (according to feedburner.com), I will be posting a bit more frequently going forward.

As I watching this, it certainly saddened me to see ignorance and/or indifference when a human being is treated that way. It also reminded of a more tragic fact. In this case, let’s assume the by standers were apathetic or sided with the clerk because of ignorance and understood all Muslims to be terrorists because of the actions of a few rotten eggs. At least they had ignorance or being misinformed to blame it on.

What about all the Baha’is in Iran who have been and are being terrorized in countless ways? How can recognition of mankind to be one and wanting to unite all the people and races of the world possibly be used as a reason for persecution, imprisoning and killing? Further, how can this be justified to systematically vilify and subject innocent children to cruel treatment??

At least when I grew up in Iran, the government just expelled me from primary school (for being a Baha’i) and that was the end of it, rather than now humiliating and ostracizing in different ways before expelling.

Make no mistake, this is not prejudice. This is certainly not ignorance. This is nothing other than systematic attempts to eliminate human rights, and force people to stop believing in oneness of mankind, oneness of God and oneness of religion.

In our family we abandoned the paper calendar a while back in favor of an online one. This way you can access it from anywhere…this greasemonkey script gives you a integrated view of google calendar within Gmail. It applies only to FireFox and before doing anything you need to install the greasemonkey add-on to firefox.

And here is a guide if you have switched from PC to Mac….for faster acclimatization.

These are very deliberate denials. And Iran’s regime knows that no one will stand up to them on the question of minorities in Iran. Why? Because there are bigger issues that they get away with, so this one is a walk in the park, and that is why the president himself can outright lie and deny facts and get away with it.

Putting that aside, the question in mind today is what level of hatred, ignorance or whatever you want to call it does it take when you put so much energy into even destroying the Baha’is’ cemetery which is located somewhere very remote and desolate. And what have these Baha’is done that generates such a level hatred? They believe in oneness of mankind, oneness of religion, universal peace, elimination of poverty and many principles similar to these I just mentioned.

so 5 minutes later I have successfully managed to reserve a table for dinner. Well a couple of years ago I decided no more of this, so my resturaunt/starbucks/general waiting line name became Bob Heart. Think that solved the problem? Oh yes! However, once every three months, when I order coffee at a coffee shop and they ask for a name to call when its ready, I get the question sometime: “You don’t look like a Bob. You sure your name is Bob?”..to which I respond, would you like to spell my real name instead?

The closest description I have come to, that most can relate to is going through, what I call, pink-clouds-period of falling in love: Nothing else matters, you walk around with smirk on your face, you don’t need food, sleep or drink. You are in a constant wonderful high and each time you hold your baby or see her face, your heart just melts away and you are washed over by a giant wave of joy. Every little movement or sound she makes is the cutest thing you have ever heard and as a bonus her occasional (reflex) smile puts you over those pink clouds.

Simultaneous to these feelings, there is a sense overwhelming feeling that you can’t help being reminded about constantly, mainly the great responsibility you have for this soul’s well being and development. The well being part being a walk in the park in comparison to the development part. I am far from having perfected my own flaws and character and yet here she is and it is a reality that can be overwhelming. And of course, I can’t get away with do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do.

The start of this journey is a happy one as at least for me, fundamentally, it comes down to knowing the purpose of life before you start focusing on smaller puzzle pieces. It makes it a little easier to align the rest of your actions in accordance to this objective or at aspire and try to.