In my ongoing series about life in the States and how it differs from previous countries I lived in, I have recently pondered about how life here has changed me (temporary or permanently remains to be seen) and a couple of points came to mind.

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.

Had to look up binding adjustments for my skis ahead of  a trip and found this page useful.

A long time ago I switched to Firefox mostly because of its extremly useful plug-in model (which also includes add-ons such as ieTab). I do use Internet Explorer (IE) from time to time since certain sites still are optimized (or only work) for/on IE.

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.

I don’t have an iPhone but rather a Nokia E71 which for my needs is better than the iPhone (maybe I will write a comparison later).

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.

I heard of qik.com a while back and been wanting to try it out but unfortunately it was not available for Windows Mobile phones. To summarize it in one line: the site allows you to stream live video from your phone on the net.

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.

It’s been a while since my last post and multiple reasons for it. Primarily because other things in life have higher priority (e.g. our daughter Carmel who just turned one). But I have also noticed that my initial purpose for this blog which was to note down items, links, thoughts etc that I suspect I would want to come back to (and be reminded of the context) and the same time share with whoever that might find it interesting are being served through other means, be it I posting on Facebook or sharing through (Google) reader which enables me to still track things down. These channels enable better distribution, quicker feedback and since far from majority know how to subscribe to a RSS feed or care to do so sometimes it’s quicker to just do things in those forums.

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.

ABC primetime had a very interesting and moving segment tonight. It was a social experiment taking place in a bakery. A Muslim woman (ABC’s actor) dressed with a head dress wanted to buy something and the clerk (also ABC’s actor) was refusing her on the grounds that she was a terrorist, non-american and was being insulting. Here is the interesting part as they did experiment several times: 22 customers said nothing, 6 sided with the clerk and 13 stepped up and defended the customer.

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.

I am big fan NPR radio for multiple reasons, mainly its news is international, as apposed to all other news here in the States which is extremely city/neighborhood/state and nation focused. Further, they have a few good programs, such as Marketplace which this week is covering the Middle East this week.

Pretty funny video

On potentials of nano tech

A funny self-depicting video about Bill Gate’s last day at work starring Bill himself and many celebrities…

In this day and age who wants to go to a photo store to take passport pictures? Take as many digital ones as you want and then use this guide to turn them into passport size and print away…

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.