When I told the man at the taxi stand that I wanted to go to Buhkit Timah, he said, “Don’t get lost, sir.” What he didn’t realize was the taxi driver was the one who didn’t know where to go. Fifteen minutes later I was outside Old Ford Factory, having failed communicating in both English and Mandarin that the driver dropped me in the wrong place.

A half mile hike back the way we just came brought me to the park entrance, already sweating from the humidity. As you walk up to the ranger station where the park officially starts, you pass four comical monkey faces, which represent the four faces a monkey will likely make if you encounter any. Bared teeth is the one you need to worry about most, because that’s an aggressive reaction. I saw it later in the day when a monkey started getting uncomfortable about a guy who wouldn’t stop looking at him.

Bukit Timah is the Central Park of Singapore. A vast green space surrounded by encroaching city. It’s the highest point in Singapore and also some of the last remnants of rain forest. Bukit Timah plays a role more vital than Central Park, in that it also offers protection to many native island plants and animals now found only in the nature preserve. It’s a reprieve from the surrounding city, organically disguised from noise pollution by a consistent drone of cicadas.

While there is a paved trail leading to the summit, 163 meters above sea level, the real experience of Bukit Timah is all the loop trails along the way. Most of these side trails consist of steep inclines and declines. In some cases the path is paved with medium sized rocks that presumably help prevent erosion due to foot traffic, but in many cases the trail is composed of sandy soil interspersed with jutting tree roots.

The trails are definitely not an easy hike. There’s no predictability to the stair step arrangement of concrete erosion steps, making navigation more complicated than it should be. There’s enough challenge to the paths that North Face hosted an ultra-running event the day before I arrived. Combining a 6k mountain biking loop and the various side trails, you could probably spend a day putting in 10 miles of asent and decent. I wore Vibram Five Fingers for the hike and other than the occassional sharp rock jutting into my foot, found the “barefoot” experience to be quite enjoyable.

While Bukit Timah is a nature preserve, I was surprised at how little wildlife I actually encountered. Within minutes of walking past the parking lot, I watched a monitor lizard hunting in the foliage just off the path. The cicadas were a constant droning in the trees. Occasionally you could hear the call of the native squirrels, but it was a long time before I saw anything living.

I had gone hoping to see monkeys, because I was curious what it would be like to see them in the wild. It wasn’t until I started my descent from the top of the trail that I encountered the first group of long-tailed macaques, which were spread throughout the foliage on both sides of the path. I was lucky enough to see them with no other park-goers around, so I could quietly observe without too many people. As long as you don’t make eye contact with the monkeys, they largely ignore your presence.

As soon as other people appeared on the trail and started pointing and making clucking noises to draw attention, the monkeys started getting nervous. Apparently no one else had paid attention to the signs, or they were simply overcome with curiosity. Only one macaque seemed really distraught, baring its teeth at a guy who kept inching closer with his camera. Nothing serious occurred and the monkey eventually climbed a tree and ignored the guy.

I didn’t see any of the Malayan flying lemurs who reside in the park, but they stay closer to the top of the tree line and blend with the bark. The squirrels also stayed out of site. While I returned from my hike drenched with sweat and exhausted from a combination of 17 hours of flying the previous day and a short night of sleep, Bukit Timah was definitely the highlight of my trip to Singapore. The city itself feels like it could be anywhere in the English-speaking world, but the park felt like I had lost myself in a distinctly different place.

When I got to Singapore last week I got a SingTel pre-paid SIM card for local data access and any emergency calling I might need to do. I haven’t traveled outside the U.S. for several years, so I’d completely forgotten my current phone wasn’t unlocked. There’s nothing I find more frustrating than finding out something won’t work after I’ve already opened the package.

Back in my hotel room, I made a call using Skype to T-Mobile customer support requesting an unlock code for my phone. T-Mobile is usually great about unlocking phones for international travel, unlike the other GSM phone company with the three initials A. T. and T.

The customer service representative I spoke with offered to put through my request, but suggested they might not have the code for 24 hours. She indicated they would email me the code, since I was outside the country and was calling via Skype. Unlocking a phone from the network should be a standard request, but if I had to wait 24 hours, it was my own fault for not planning ahead.

Being the impatient person I am, I decided to see if anyone online had a faster solution. There are dozens of sites offering IMEI unlock codes for various cell phone models. Most of the sites seem potentially scammy. All the sites have wildly variable pricing.

I ended up trying HTCimeiUnlock.com, which looked the most legit of any of the sites I investigated. They promise money back if they can’t unlock your phone and they indicated it would take between 15 minutes and six hours to process the request. I crossed my fingers as I sent the IMEI number for my phone and $25 via Paypal.
Ten minutes later, I got an email with an unlock code and instructions. The unlock code worked and I was on the SingTel network. As it turns out, this was lucky because the network access in the hotel was flaky for the next two days.

I never did get the unlock code from T-Mobile. When a third party can deliver in less than 10 minutes, while the carrier can’t deliver at all, there’s a problem. I do appreciate T-Mobile’s willingness to help me unlock the phone. I’d even pay them for expedited service, though having purchased the phone at retail with no contract, it shouldn’t have been locked in the first place.

Do you have experience unlocking a phone? Was it good, bad, impossible?

As I’m packing for tomorrow’s trip to Singapore, I’m faced with the same challenge I have every time I travel – which gadgets do I bring with me? Or rather, which gadgets can I safely leave behind? I’m a minimalist when I travel. With the exception of my tripod, which I need for the work I’m doing while I’m in Singapore, if it won’t fit in my Tom Bihn Tri-Star, I’m leaving it at home.

I’m going to be in Singapore to shoot video at an HP event there, but I’ll have a little time to do some sight-seeing as well. If you have suggestions for things to do in Singapore, I’d love to hear them.

So what gadgets am I bringing for my 5 days in Singapore? The new entry level Kindle will provide most of my reading entertainment on the plane and at the hotel. With approximately 34 hours of flying time ahead of me, I figured this was a good opportunity to dive into Neal Stephenson’s new book, Reamde. I’m packing my Canon T3i for photos and Canon HF-S21 camcorder for video. My Sennheizer wireless microphone will provide audio. And of course, I’ll have a laptop and cellphone, though I’m not sure how much I’ll actually use the phone. Supporting chargers and cables round out the gear in my bag. The remainder of the Tri-Star is filled with clothes.

What do you take with you when you travel? Do you bring the digital kitchen sink, travel light, or fall somewhere between?

We finally did it. Our house no longer has a cable subscription (no satellite either). I’ve mentioned the possibility of abandoning my cable subscription in the past, but could never bring myself to do it. I didn’t want to miss any Mariners games. We’re a couple weeks into this new cable-free existence and the world has (not surprisingly) not ended.

This doesn’t mean we’ve stopped watching shows and movies at our house. With the exception of Mariners games, virtually everything we watched previously is available on demand in some form.
Doctor Who is the only show I watch in the current season. It’s available on demand via Zune on the Xbox, iTunes, or Amazon Prime the day after it airs on BBC America. Many television shows are available this way.

Depending on which option you choose, a season may cost about $20 or $1.99 an episode. That’s not free, but you could pay for quite a few shows on demand before you hit the $100 per month the average cable subscriber pays. If you pay for Amazon Prime, which is essentially pre-paid 2-day shipping from Amazon, you also get a fairly impressive library of streaming video you can watch as part of the package.

Netflix was already the primary source of entertainment for our kids, with everything from Blue’s Clues to kids movies on demand. For a wider selection, here again iTunes and Amazon Prime offer options.
For the Mariners games, I’ve started listening to the AM radio broadcast, which has better announcers than the TV anyway. I frequently have MLB.com Gameday on my computer, so I’m not missing much.

The Xbox is now our cable box, for everything but Amazon Prime. I’m considering getting a Roku to handle Amazon Prime, since that’s a bit more elegant than connecting my computer via an HDMI cable, but I haven’t actually made the jump yet since the net result of not having Amazon Prime connected all the time is we don’t watch it. And it’s not like I really need to find more excuses to watch television.

If you are considering cutting the cable too, Roku is definitely the most complete integration of services at this point, though I still prefer my Xbox 360 to just about any other set top box solution. I will say that ditching cable or satellite television is probably still not an option for serious sports fans. The ESPN service on Xbox Live keeps adding more college games, but it’s unlikely to have the major pro sports anytime soon. I long for the day when MLB.tv stops doing a blackout of local games – I’d even pay extra if it meant I could watch Mariners games in Seattle, instead of needing to leave the state to see the home team.

Now the question is – can we live without those DVDs?

How about you, are you still watching cable? Did you cut the cord? What are your favorite online video services?

Google receives a large percentage of my online attention. They host my jakeludington.com email as well as my calendar. Google deposits money in my company’s bank account every month thanks to their Adsense product. I collaborate with people using Google Docs. I promote products and services using Google’s Adwords. If I need to map directions, I use the Google Maps-powered navigation feature on my Android phone. And of course, I rely on search results from Google to find all kinds of information. Now I’m exploring (and loving) Google+. But I’m left scratching my head at the idea of pointing my blog at my Google+ profile.

While I did what was essentially blogging for LockerGnome back when we only published newsletters, I created my first personal blog as a place to share my thoughts on things that didn’t really fit with any of the tech themes we wrote about daily. I setup an early version of Movable Type with a fairly ugly design and was off to the races. The type of personal blogging I do remains a largely personal affair. Sure I’m posting my thoughts in a public space and I welcome feedback, but I’m really writing for me.

When Kevin Rose announced on Twitter he was redirecting his kevinrose.com domain to his Google+ profile, my first thought was, WHY? Kevin is correct that the feedback on Google+ is more instantaneous, but I don’t write for instant gratification. I write because I feel like I need to say something.

While my posting here is erratic and I should spend some time developing it out a bit, JakeLudington.com is 100% me. I chose the elements on the page. I can ban commenters if they offend me. I can swap in a new theme if I choose to. The various sidebar and header elements were handpicked by me as things I wanted to draw attention to. Google+ affords me none of that. I can add a few selected fields to my Google+ Profile, but I’m otherwise at the mercy of the Google UX team. Blogger and WordPress.com provide more personalization if you prefer to let someone else deal with hosting issues.

The other reason I won’t be moving my blogging to Google+ is because someday it will be gone. Social communities on the web are nomadic, making the social camps impermanent. Yesterday’s AOL became MySpace became Facebook and Twitter and now Google+. It’s unlikely any of the places we are spending the majority of our time now will still be there ten years. While I may change my focus, I will very likely still be thinking out loud on the JakeLudington.com domain for as long as I’m able to communicate.

Of course, you will also find me on Google+, where I share interesting things I find that I don’t feel the need to write about.

There was a time when I couldn’t imagine riding in silence in my car. My daily routine typically involves a nine mile round trip to a parking lot near the ferry terminal and most days I would have KUOW, the local NPR station, or KEXP, the greatest music station in the United States, as background for both ends of my drive. During baseball season I would catch parts of Mariners games if they were playing, because I still love picturing the game as described by radio announcers more than I like watching on television.

Back in February, in the wee hours leading up to the Verizon iPhone launch, someone smashed the driver’s side window of my Suzuki Grand Vitara. They neatly removed the AIWA car stereo I paid $99 for in 2003 and a Tom Bihn Aeronaut bag that’s been all over the world. I point out the neatness of the job, because aside from the broken glass, the thief was careful not to damage my dash at all and even took the time to remove the USB adapter from the 12-volt power outlet and place it in a tray in the console. The stero wasn’t particularly special and can’t have had any real resale value – I originally got it because it was the most affordable car stereo I could find with a jack for my MP3 player. A broken MacBook in the back would have garnered more money from parts, as would the Manfrotto monopod that had sat under the bag, but the thief left those items behind.

The next day I paid to replace my window and have driven without a car stereo ever since. The Suzuki is probably not going to last much longer and I didn’t see the point in buying a stereo when I didn’t really plan to keep the car. Most days I don’t even think about the missing stereo. I’m usually lost in thought on my way to and from the ferry. It didn’t occur to me until this morning how much I’ve come to value the quiet. I’m someone who solves problems by thinking them out while doing something else. Often I take a walk when I need to think. It didn’t hit me that my morning drive was also serving this same purpose, until I realized I’d resolved four lingering issues between my house and the last stop sign before I turn toward the ferry.

This largely unconscious processing is happening to me every day as I drive to catch the boat. When I open my laptop for my first focused effort of the morning, I’ve been quietly surprised by how much I seem to accomplish in the thirty four minutes of time between Bainbridge Island and Seattle. What I hadn’t realized, until this morning, is that much of my success in focusing on small tasks in that brief strecth is due to the quiet, distraction-free drive before I get there.

In a world where radio stations custom tailor morning programming to the drive from home to work, it’s hard to remember to take time for yourself. When I was doing audio podcasting on a regular basis, I used to love hearing from people who said they listened on their morning drive. Now I’m left wondering if maybe all that early morning ear candy isn’t just noise drowning out important thoughts and big ideas.

What would you hear if you turned the volume down?

I’ll readily admit that I’m fascinated (some might say obsessed) by the concept of gamification. This tech industry buzzword is typically associated with the process of awarding actions in order to encourage more actions. While most of the buzz around gamification is focused on getting people to participate more in online spaces, by providing things like Foursquare badges, Xbox Live Achievement Points, karma points on forum sites, and unlocking social gaming awards on sites like Empire Avenue, gamification is starting to spill into the real world. Or has it always been there?

Salesforce.com Chief Scientist, JP Rangaswami, used gamification in the workplace as a basis for his talk at the ReadWriteWeb 2Way Summit [VIDEO] last week. The idea of awarding symbolic tokens, like Foursquare badges for work performance, when an employee successfully upgrades his skillset. By providing a virtual reward for the effort, you visually establish what people’s skill levels are and reward them for those skills. The premise behind Rangaswami’s talk is that work is changing and we need new ways to help people adapt to those changes. Gamification in the workplace is nothing new. Rangaswami seems to have ignored many years of what can only be described of gamifcation in the workplace prior to relying on a buzzword to explain it. I’ll use my own work experience as an example.

Shortly after college, I worked in the mutual funds division of Farm Bureau Life Insurance, providing support to insurance agents who were selling the FBL mutual fund products. While I didn’t have any direct interaction with life insurance products, the company offered incentives for anyone who wanted to take LOMA (Life Office Management Association) courses. If I remember correctly, there was a cash bounty for each individual test passed, with an additional bonus when you’d completed the entire series. You also got to put some letters after your name, which is a big deal in financial services circles. Another important aspect of this was, if you didn’t show up for the test, you got penalized the cost of the test (there was no penalty for not passing). There were similar financial planning designations that also included bonuses and rewards. I didn’t complete the entire series of LOMA courses because I went in to the bar business and left mutual funds behind, but I did complete a few of the courses. In theory, the reward for the company was a better educated workforce. For the workers, the short term cash reward for a few hours of study time made it worth my time to take the tests. In the long term, LOMA certification probably presented additional opportunity to get a better job in the insurance industry, had I elected to stay. That’s definitely gamification in the workplace by today’s definition.

Many industries have examples similar to mine. A decade ago I had friends who got an annual salary increase of $5,000 for completing Microsoft’s MCSE designation. For most people, an extra $5k per year would be enough incentive to do many things. These days, you’d be looking to either MCITP:SA or MCITP:EA as equivalent certification, though there’s probably greater market value to Cisco’s CCIE. For people who don’t do a good job of task chunking, it might be harder to see that end goal of a bonus for completing all tasks. In a gamified workplace, you’d probaly do something more like the LOMA reward system I operated under at Farm Bureau, because MCITP is more like beating the big boss at the end of a video game.

As a more recent example, I’ve rallied small developer teams around rewards for beating deadlines on a project. Rangaswami does make the important distinction that adding gamification to work that is largely without reward isn’t likely to make people more excited about the work. The ultimate solution to the problem of hating your job isn’t to have your employer reward you, it’s to find work you love instead. While it may not have been called gamification, what are some examples from your working world where you’ve seen rewards for actions?

If I remember or document something about you, should you have the right to silence my memory or documentation of that event? That seems to be the crux of an argument around the Right to be Forgotten in a proposed revision to the Privacy Directive by The European Commission. Peter Fleisher, a member of Google’s Global Privacy Counsel, breaks down the variety of ways we might invoke a right to be forgotten in his post Foggy Thinking About the Right to Oblivion. I’m not going to rehash the eight variations on the right to forget covered in Peter’s post, you should read them for yourself. I do want to speak more specificially about the idea of someone posting something about you online and you asking them to remove it.

I’ll use myself as an example. Lets say I attend a party at your house, I have too much to drink, and along the way you take a photo of me dancing on your table and post it on Flickr or your Facebook account. Maybe I’m embarassed the next day and ask you to delete the photo. As my friend, you might do me the favor of editing my embarassing behavior from the Internet, but do I have the right to demand the photo be removed if you choose not to?

Like it or not, I don’t think I have any right to demand the removal of the photo. It’s your memory of an event where our personal timelines intersect. There could be social repercussions in your ignoring my request. At the extreme end, I might stop interacting with you or I might simply think twice about attending your next party. Since this is me we are using as an example, my more likely course of action would be to edit my own behavior and accept the photo as a reminder that I shouldn’t act like an idiot in public because other people are watching.

Another example comes from my inbox. Sometime ago I wrote an article about how to delete videos from YouTube. Occasionally I get emails from people asking how they can remove a video on someone else’s YouTube account. One particular instance that sticks out is a woman who wanted a video deleted because the person in the video no longer worked for their company. There was a link to the video in the email and from what I could tell, the video presented the company’s product accurately, it just included someone who no longer worked there. The woman who contacted me wanted to know how she could get the video deleted from YouTube. My response was that I wasn’t sure she could, unless there was some misrepresentation of the product, because just like being quoted in an article, or being cited in a book, the video was a snapshot of reality at the time it was recorded. The video did not appear to be created with the intent of doing harm to the company, nor did the person representing the company in the video appear to be doing anything other than performing their job. Like any other historic documentation, that video was a snapshot in time.

That’s where my greatest concern lies around the right to be forgotten. People who want to demand content be removed from the Internet, just because they are in it, are asking the rest of us to censor our thoughts. They are asking that we edit our memories. As science moves forward, will we get to a point where we are asked to edit the ultimate storage of these memories? Our own brains may become subject to the discussion around the right to forget. What if as part of the job termination process we are asked to have our brains cleansed of corporate secrets. Or in a divorce proceeding we are required to have the details of the relationship eliminated from memory.

We have appeared in other people’s photo albums and scrapbooks for years. Sometimes the memories are fond, sometimes they are embarassing, and sometimes we’d rather they never happened. The Internet is making this scrapbookng more public, but it doesn’t change the nature of it. Anytime I show up in your blog post, or in your photo archive, it’s because our lives interesected. In my mind, that gives you just as much right to the memories as it does to me. Just because I don’t like something about myself, doesn’t mean I have the right to make you forget my past, does it?

I frequently talk about how much I love Amazon’s Kindle products. Not just the physical ebook hardware, which is currently my favorite way to read long form fiction and non-fiction, but also the way you can easily access the same content on every device. Mac, Windows, iPhone, Android, Blackberry and iPad are all devices supported for Kindle ebooks. Notably absent from that list are the Barnes & Noble Nook and Sony Reader. The thing I really like about this scenario is being able to start reading a book in one place and pick up where I left off somewhere else. Today Google ebookstore becomes the only real alternative to the Kindle platform.

Like Amazon Kindle, Google ebookstore offers a huge selection of titles you can read on virtually any device. Google currently does not support Blackberry or the Amazon Kindle hardware. Sony and Nook readers are supported by Google. Both bookstores use technology that allows you to start reading in one place and continue elsewhere. Both allow you to maintain a library of books to download to devices or through mobile apps. As would be expected from Google, the search function works very well in their ebooks. Google also seems to keep the concept of a “page” alive in their ebooks, which allows for a common currency in discussion between someone reading the online version and someone reading a print edition of the same book.

Where Google lags Amazon at the moment is in the ability to highlight text and take notes. While I don’t personally use this feature, I find the idea of being able to use it useful for referring to information in the future. The other thing Google does not have is a track record in providing great customer service. I haven’t needed any help with the Google ebookstore yet, but based on other customer service experiences I have had with Google, that may be the thing that drives people away.

As someone well invested in the Kindle platform, I don’t plan to switch to Google’s new ebook offering. Having said that, if you’re in the market for an ebook provider, definitely take a look at Google before you make up your mind.

Have you tried the new Google ebookstore? What did you like (or not)?

I’m getting an early dose of winter this week, with snow, a power outage, and roads blocked by trees all at the same time. Normally, Bainbridge Island gets a couple of days of snow each year, with everything melting off by the next day. And power outages are a common occurence because of all the large trees, which do fall down from time to time. This is the first time I’ve seen 2 of the 3 routes from my house to the ferry blocked by trees.

Having my power out is slowing down the collection of annual Black Friday coupons I pull together for newletter subscribers. For the past several years, I scour the Web and work with software vendors to find coupons that aren’t the standard offerings at every major retail outlet. This year will be no exception, I just may have to spend more time at my Seattle office putting the list together. Assuming the lights stay on, look for some great bargains on software coming your way early Friday morning. If the lights are out, Black Friday may be a bit more literal than I’d like. Maybe it’s time for an extended tutorial in how to wire your house with alternative energy sources. :)