category archive: Off-topic

I don’t need much

Tuesday, 8 May 2007 | Off-topic

Although I really like my job, it is quite demanding and when I have finishes writing 63 (!) emails on a weekend I have a coffee and wonder what I will do with the rest of my weekend … which will by that time be reduced to half a day. I start thinking about those times before I was working and how much I enjoyed not having to do anything. So somehow, I need to make that possible.

I need 2 million euro.

Lets say you gross an average of 5% yield on that kind of money. Perhaps a little on the high side, but not at all a ridiculous number. Those 2 million would then split into two parts. The first half will give you enough to make the amount grow to compensate for the loss in value (due to inflation) that typically happens every year, up to about 2.5% inflation. The second half would gross about 50.000 euro income every year, which translates into about 4.000 euro per month to spend on travelling, shopping, etc. That kind of money makes for a comfortable life I would say.

Now all I need is the plan to make those 2 million. Please submit your business proposals to me by email!

Single destination trips (the tricks of travelling, part 1)

Sunday, 1 Apr 2007 | Off-topic

I love travelling. In recent years I have especially been traveling a lot for my job. I had gotten the routine down quite well and travelled only with the things I really needed. I was always looking to see if I could squeeze it down a little more, for instance by using a small bottle of shaving oil¹ instead of those big cans of shaving gel. At some point I will be writing about that as well.

There are actually endless articles on how to best travel lightly, how to travel efficiently, etc. I wanted to write this first article in a series on the tricks of traveling to be about the single destination trip. This is quite different from what I used to do, traveling from hotel to hotel every day. I’m now spending an entire week in one place.

So how is that different? You pack differently and you settle in the hotel differently.

You really don’t care about efficiency anymore. You simply take whatever you feel you will need and also take the things you feel you might need. And you allow yourself more luxuries. The thing is, you’re only going to be lugging it along twice - to the hotel and going home. So who cares if its a few kilograms more. What is especially surprising is the amount of electronics I took with me on this trip. A laptop, mobile phone, iPod (not mine, I borrowed it), headset for Skype, digital camera. I even took my wifi router which I’ve been taking with me on trips for a while now.

Settling in the hotel is different too. If you’re just there for 1 or 2 nights, you pretty much live out of the suitcase. There is no sense in unpacking, you just get something from your suitcase when you need it. This time I unpacked and put the suitcase away, turning the hotelroom into a little home. Especially nice is that this hotel has iPod docks in the rooms so I even have some music instead of always having the tv on.

So here is my trick … when traveling to only one destination, allow yourself the luxury of choice by taking more than you actually need and the luxury of luxuries that make your life more comfortable. It makes you feel better while away from home.

Design differences

Sunday, 11 Feb 2007 | Off-topic

We all know I am a big Starbucks fan. I’m not a fan because they sell the best coffee on the face of this earth. I’m a fan for several reasons, which mostly have to do with the concept and execution that makes for the Starbucks experience. The reason why I like Starbucks has actually changed over time. Anyway, thats not what I wanted to write about.

When I was in Hong Kong and ordered a coffee, I noticed one of the overhead signs about how you can customize your drink by using different kinds of milk, syrups, etc. Pretty much every Starbucks has this sign, but why I noticed it was because the design was completely different from the one I’m so used to seeing here in Bangkok. So I whipped out my camera and took a snapshot and yesterday did the same here in Bangkok.

The difference is very interesting. While some of the icons are similar or even the same, I feel the overall design of the icons as well as the layout of the page reflects the general attitude of the two cities. Hong Kong much more structured and business-like, Bangkok cute and relaxed. The message at the top just underlines all that.

Yeah, I know. I notice weird things. And then bother you, my esteemed and valued reader, with this non-sense. But you know what, there are at least 3 people who I pretty much know will click through to compare those images. I wonder what it will be like in Singapore!

A new mobile phone and computer!

Friday, 12 Jan 2007 | Off-topic

A few days ago I was sitting at my computer at midnight. I had a drink ready and was waiting for something to start on the other side of the world, in San Francisco to be exact. Steve Jobs, the big boss of Apple, was about to deliver his keynote speech at the Macworld Conference and I wanted to be among the first to know what was about to come. What was I looking at? Basically, there was somebody in the audience over there who was writing text messages of what was being said on the stage. Myself and other pathetic individuals were watching these messages on our screen as they were rolling in. I was hoping for an Apple mobile phone and a sub-compact notebook computer.

Apple introduced a mobile phone. And it seems to be one incredibly amazing device, I won’t go and list all the features here because you probably don’t care.¹ While a lot of those features are really cool and I certainly don’t mind they are there, it is the integration of iPod and mobile phone that is why I will try to get my hands on one as soon as I possibly can. I never wanted an iPod, because I will not hear my phone when it rings. Also, I don’t want to have to carry many devices around with me. I wanted phone, music player and digital camera in one device. And nothing out there² was good enough for me. So I just decided to buy nothing. I’m glad I didn’t. Because the iPhone does everything I want. Ok, perhaps the digital camera is not so impressive at 2mpx, but whatever. It’s good enough for snapshots and when I want to take real photos I’ll take my Canon with me. What sucks is that the phone will not be available in Europe until November 2007 and in Asia somewhere in 2008. That is a really long time to wait for something. But I’ve waited this long, I’m sure I can wait a little longer. One wish came true. But the other one did not.

There will (for now anyway) be no sub-compact notebook computer. So it looks like I will be replacing my Powerbook with a Macbook sometime this year. My Powerbook is turning 3 in April of this year and is getting sluggish. I can still sort of do what I want to do with it, but the increasing demands that new applications put on system resources are making the it all slow down too much. A black or white Macbook will be the replacement. If history is any guide, May will see a new Macbook be released. And around that time the new operating system will also have been released. So I’ll probably wait until May until I buy my new notebook computer.

The difference between men and boys

Tuesday, 17 Oct 2006 | Off-topic

The last couple of days have been spent nurtering the inner-nerd in me. I’ve been to Pantip countless times and spent quite a bit of money on technology. What did I buy? I got an LCD monitor, keyboard, mouse, printer/scanner, digital camera, Bluetooth headset and I’m still considering extra memory for my Powerbook and possibly a coolpad for my Powerbook. Oh and speakers, ofcourse. I figured, since I will be spending quite some time at my desk, I better get comfortable. Here is a list of all the things I got …

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I got a Bluetooth Apple keyboard. When using two screens and especially so when using the external as the primary display, it’s very uncomfortable to have to use the laptop keyboard. I know, because I did this for a while in Amsterdam. What can I say about this keyboard? Well, it’s not as comfortable as a laptop keyboard. I’ve been mainly using laptops for the last 10 years and so I’m used to the light keystrokes of those. The Powerbook keyboard is especially comfortable. So using this is an adjustment. Other than that, not a whole lot to say. It’s a keyboard.

I also got a Bluetooth Apple Mighty Mouse. I had a normal wireless Apple mouse, but I left that in my dads home by accident when I left for Thailand, so it’s not of much use to me here. Regardless, the Mighty Mouse has a few more functions so I went ahead and got it. Same rationale as getting the keyboard really. It has mostly been really, really cool to have this mouse. The scrollball is great, I can move up-right-left-and-down with a tiny little ball in the top of the mouse. Whats also great is that pushing down the ball and then pushing through to click functions as a third mouse button, which I can set to do anything. I’ve found it to work best when this it is set to enable Exposé. Squeezing the mouse is cute is another trigger I can set, but not a very useful function as it requires a re-setting of the hand on the top of the mouse. The one comment I have on the mouse is not so much the mouse itself, but more so the way OS X deals with the right-click. I’ve found it to behave inconsistently. Other than that, I love it.

Then there was ofcourse the big one, the Acer 22” LCD screen I briefly wrote about previously. It’s been great so far and I’m really enjoying all these pixels I can use to put windows. My laptop screen is now secondairy and houses the windows to applications such as MSN, my email, iTunes … stuff thats ‘always open’. The main desktop and the windows of whatever it is I’m doing are right in front of me on the big screen. My poor little Powerbook is having a hard time powering all those pixels though, it regularly runs quite hot.

The first shot.

Then ofcourse there is the digital camera I got. I’ve borrowed a Pentax Optio S4i from Arjan repeatedly and really liked that camera, but even the newer generations remained to have the one downfall - a 5 second shot-to-shot time. After doing extensive research, I ended up getting a 6 megapixel Canon Powershot SD630 (IXUS 65 in Europe, IXY 80 in Japan) with a 3” display, there is no optical image stabalization (a feature common among the new crop of digital point-and-shoot cameras) but whatever. Image quality is consistently raved about, it records 640x480 movies and while it’s bigger than the Pentax, it’s still a decent size. I got a 2GB high speed memory card with it, which will hold over 700 photos at the highest resolution or 15 minutes of video at 640x480. Ofcourse, I will share the first picture I took with it on this site!

While I was tempted to go for a laser-based printer/scanner, I ended up getting a really cheap Brother DCP-115C color inkjet printer / scanner. It’s done fine so far. It allows me to print faxes that I receive by email, scan bills if I have no clue what they are for (thanks, Nuy!), copy paperwork for whatever reason and ofcourse print whatever it is I want to read while I’m on the skytrain. All in the comfort of my own home.

And I finally caved and got a Bluetooth headset. I remember when wired headsets for mobile phones first hit the streets, I thought they looked ridiculous and ‘I would never get one’ - about a week after I had one. The same happened with the Bluetooth headsets, they make you look like you stepped right out of Star Trek but they really are very convenient. For me there are two reasons. First of all, to use with Skype (please email me your Skype name, so I can add you to my list) and second of all to use with my mobile phone. Reception in my apartment is not always great, so I put the phone right by the window and can still walk around my apartment without a problem. Maybe soon I will be brave enough to walk the street with that thing on my ear.

Like I said, my Powerbook is running quite hot lately. When it does, it gets sluggish. That could mean I need to cool it down, but perhaps adding memory will also fix the problem. I’ve posted a few questions on the Apple Discussion forums and I’m monitoring how it behaves. I should be able to make a decision on the purchase of memory and a coolpad soon.

And this afternoon I did some research on the web for speakers. I’ve been listening to music on my laptop speakers, which is not the best sound. I don’t want to spend a fortune on the iPod Hi-Fi (which by the way sounds REALLY good) so I’ve been looking for small, affordable 2-speaker systems. After being terribly disappointed by the Creative Gigaworks T20 today, I’ve decided to wait a few weeks until the shipment of Bose Companion 2 Series II comes in and get a pair of those.

So there ya go … wasnt that useful information?! Oh and by the way, the difference between men and boys … is the price of their toys. But you probably already knew that.

Raving about RSS

Friday, 5 May 2006 | Off-topic

RSS is a standard way to gather information in a structured form and manner that requires little effort from the user. And it does so perfectly, if you ask me. For quite a number of years now, RSS¹ has been around. And for all that time I never really considered it being usefull to me. A little over a year ago I decided to give it a serious try and it has changed the way I keep myself up to date on world affairs and my personal interests.

“Rob, what the hell does that mean?”, I hear you ask.

Well, what I mean by structured form is that RSS more or less forces publishers to adhere to certain standards² in publishing their information. So instead of having my brain adapt to the different layouts of each website I visit to stay up to date and scanning the screen for the information I’m looking for, I simply decide on one format in my RSS reader and all information is formatted in a consistent and comfortable manner.

In saying that it requires little effort from the reader, I’m referring to the fact that it’s easy to subscribe to an RSS feed and that my RSS reader then keeps checking that feed for new articles - notifying me in the way I have decided is best for me.

“Reader, feed, RSS, subscribe … how does it actually work?”

Alright. If you’re like I used to be, you probably read a few websites regularly that have information you care about. You probably subscribe to a few mailinglists, because they too provide information you care about. These two things have something have in common that the information you receive through them is 99% ‘read-only’ - meaning you don’t ever hit a ‘reply’ button like you do in e-mail. You read it and thats it. Like TV! The daily, weekly or (even worse) incidental reading of those websites is a pain because you keep having to adapt your brain to each website layout. Perhaps less so if you don’t read 10 sites daily like I used to, but still. The mailinglist are an equal nuisance, because they put items in your email inbox that are non-personal and just ‘information providing’.

Many website publishers and mailinglist providers these days also offer their information by way of an RSS feed - or ‘feed’ for short.

An RSS reader is a program you install on your computer and is sort of a cross between an email program and a web browser. With this reader you can subscribe to a feed, meaning you click on an icon on the website or add a URL much like you would in a browser and the reader puts the address in its list of feeds. It then periodically (every 10 minutes, hour, day, week) checks each site in that list for new articles, downloads them if there are any and then saves them in something that is like the inbox of your email. You can then read that information at a time that is convenient for you. There is no need to be online³ to do so, since the information is stored locally on your computer. For instance, I do it during my commute.

And the cool thing is that it’s not only official websites of big media companies that publish RSS feeds. It’s not only ‘news’ that you will find in your RSS reader. All types of information can be subscribed to. For instance, someone who writes an online journal might publish the articles in a feed - I do that too. Or you could subscribe to new photos published on the internet by friends - my friends Bradley and Simone publish their photos on a photo sharing website called Flickr and I automatically get their photos in my RSS reader.

While perhaps you might not really see the use of RSS right away, neither did I before I actually started using it last year. Now I find myself wondering why it’s not used inside my company for keeping people up to date on things they care about, or really why it’s not used in a more widespread manner. I guess the masses still have to catch on.

I highly recommend you give it a try.

Read the rest of this article

First, let’s get you a reader. I’m an Apple user myself and there are two readers I recommend for use on the OS X platform. The first one is NewsFire, a stunning and very functional newsreader that I’ve been using for a while now. Another one is endo, which is has some interesting added features but has yet to pull me away from NewsFire. If you’re a Windows user, I’ll warn you in that I don’t have any experience with this software. But I’ve played around with Thunderbird, which is actually an email client that also supports RSS. So check that out. If you don’t want to install software just yet but would like to give RSS a try, BlogLines is a web based reader. You can access it from any computer and it will collect all your feed articles in one location, just like a Hotmail account does with email.

Second is ofcourse the feeds. This is where I am sorry to say that you are on your own. It’s such a highly individual collection, telling you which feeds are good is like telling you which websites are good: it all depends on what your personal interests are. But, one place to start is with my weblog ofcourse! On the subscribe page, you’ll find a link to my RSS feed that you can add to your reader. Where to look for other feeds? Well, most browsers these days will show an icon in the address bar if the site you’re looking at has an RSS feed you can subscribe to. So I recommend you visit some websites you frequently read and check for that icon.

And finally, some tips. A common problem with RSS users is oversubscribing: adding to many (high volume) feeds to your reader will result in hundreds or even thousands of articles you feel you ‘should read’. So try to avoid oversubscribing. Because you can’t, you wont and you might stop using RSS. It will require some experimenting, but try to find that balance. Don’t feel obliged to read everything and learn to tweak your reader in such a way as to limit the number of unread articles for a certain feed. And by all means, do avoid those ‘general news’ feeds that publish 100 articles or more each day. Watch the evening news and you’ll have all the general news you need to know about. Also, don’t feel like you have to actually read each article. I skim through about 250 new articles every day, a number I’ve found to be comfortable for me. But I don’t read them all, especially in the case of news feeds I just check the headlines and read only those that I find interesting - just like with a newspaper. What also helps in readability is grouping feeds into a certain subject, such as ‘news’, ‘friends’ and ‘asia’ are groups in my reader. Work reading your feeds into your routine. I do it during my commute, reading them over morning coffee or after coming home from work might work better for you. Something I’ve also found to be a good thing is to have some ‘bullshit feeds’, for instance subscribing to a list of links someone publishes on random subjects. They can make for interesting browsing!

The latest thing in RSS world is podcasting and video podcasting, or vodcasting. These are basically audio or video based feeds. While an interesting development, they require more involvement on the user side, currently lack quality in my opinion and so for now are not an interesting option for me personally. I hope mainstream media will pick up on the development though.

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1. When I mention RSS in this article, I actually mean RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom feeds. All of them are similar from a users’ perspective and I honestly couldn’t tell you which standard any but my own feeds use.↩
2. An argument could be made that HTML does the same thing. The big difference between RSS and HTML as far as adoption goes, is that RSS is very content oriented and there is no programming of navigation inside the feeds except for the occasional links. I personally find the addeding of things like ‘add to del.icio.us’ at the bottom of RSS feed articles a bad development I’ve seen in some feeds. ↩
3. Now, I do have to be honest here and tell you that some sites that publish a feed don’t provide the entire article in the feed that is downloaded. It just provides a summary, an incentive for you to actually visit the website. I’m guessing this has something to do with advertising. I hate those type of feeds, but have learned to live with them - I simply read the summaries, mark any articles I think will be interesting and read them when I find an internet connection again. ↩

No classes

Sunday, 26 Feb 2006 | Off-topic

Last december I started a gig on the side. A co-worker introduced me, I clicked with the people and we soon after decided to give it a go. Sure, the details had to be worked out. But eager as I was, I decided to go ahead and start working on it. I was going to coach and teach students in their final year before getting a bachelors degree in ‘Management, Economics and Law’. Coach them in their first steps into the corporate world for those researching their thesis in a corporate environment and teach them about project management. Teaching different students than those I was going to be coaching by the way.

Involving professionals ‘from outside’ is all part of a program by the institution to better prepare students for the entry into the corporate world, as they have found that the education and ‘the real world’ don’t really match. I think it’s a great initiative, which was part of the reason why I was so excited about it.

The classes in project management were to be given by me and a full-time faculty member. We started working out a curriculum for the classes, worked on a syllabus together and decided on the format and timing of the classes in relation to the rest of the students’ course load. We really clicked and both thoroughly enjoyed working on this together.

This week, the curtain fell for the project management classes. I feel it to be poor form to detail the reasons why on a website, but both parties agreed there was no solution to be found and although everyone involved regrets it we all understand eachother. Next week we’re meeting to make sure that all our work has not been in vain, most likely the classes will be tought by the person I developed them with in a slightly different form. I’m disappointed I won’t be there.

The coaching has already started though and has been an interesting experience so far.