Sitting at a cafe, Carmel turns to me and asks:
Daddy, is that carrot cake (pointing to my plate)
me: yes, just like the piece I shared with you.
Carmel (~3 secs later): is this carrot cake?
me: yes
Carmel: is this carrot cake?
me: yes
Carmel: is this carrot cake?
me: yes
Carmel: is this carrot cake?
me: yes
Carmel: is this carrot cake?
me: yes

~10 secs later, Carmel: Daddy, what is this (pointing to the same cake)?

repetition is the mother of all learning I guess.

In case you are hosting wordpress yourself and have trouble using the “auto upgrade” feature, here is good tip:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/not-performing-automatic-upgrade-to-30

And that left me wondering why and where that came from? I guess i will never know…

Friday morning:
Carmel: where are you going dad?
Me: Work
Carmel: (starting to fake cry), no I don’t want you to go.
Me: sweetheart, if I don’t go to work, we won’t have money so we can’t go to store and buy cereal for your breakfast.
Carmel: Oh ok, I like cereal. Bye daddy.

Monday morning (after going to grocery store on Saturday with her)
Carmel: where are you going dad?
Me: Don’t you know?
Carmel: Are you going to work? Remember, we went to store so we have cereal in the pantry now, so you can stay home.
Me: but we are running out of bread soon. So I have to go to work so we have money for bread.
Carmel: I am ok with cereal.
Me: Naysan likes bread though.
Carmel: oh ok…bye daddy.

The sweetness of these days are passing too quickly already.

I don’t consider myself your average phone user. I consider my phone an important productivity tool (and a device that most wives wish were used less at home; more on that in another post, i.e. what men do on their phones as I am sure a lot of wives out there would like to see an academic study on this topic).

I have written on this topic, used Nokias and iPhones and yet even after today’s announcement of iPhone 4 I am torn how long this phone will satisfy my needs before making me frustrated. Some of my current frustrations with the iphone (and AT&T):

• Locked - even if my contract is up and i *own* my phone, no, I can’t use it with another carrier. On principle this is a biggie, but I will let it be a simple bullet point.
• Running multiple applications at the same time – It doesn’t do it and what it does is so limited it is useless.
• Tethering - i.e. using it as a device that gives your laptop connection to download things when needed. Not a big one but competition offers this.
• No flash – I get it, its a principle for Apple not to risk their brand and battery time AND they are in a position that they can force adaption of new technology (HTML5). In the meantime, majority of websites use flash and I want to be able to use them fully.
• Closed application store – Meaning I am not allowed to customize everything. E.g. I don’t want to unlock my phone, go into calendar app just to see where my next meeting is. I want this to be shown on the lock screen and so on.
• Ability to find your phone when lost – you can get this service from Apple for $99/yr, but it’s not worth that much to me, especially when I can get it for free. This one is very handy given that my daughter has misplaced my phone a couple of times and having it start to beep even when in vibration mode through the service above has been very useful.

Sure, Apple can’t risk their brand by opening the gates for some (I say some as a couple of these restrictions are imposed by the carrier, AT&T)  of the above and make their device into a unstable crashing phone (after all, they don’t have the time to do all of this work and ship a new phone every year). But this could be mitigated very easily but having a expert mode where you are on your own and can do some of the above without being ostracized if you did which is the case today. So the only alternative is to turn into a rebel Jailbreak and/or unlock your iPhone with some risks but that’s what I finally did and felt like a outcast (who has the option of coming back if I wipe and reset the phone to Apple clean version).

And now that I have, I can’t imagine going back to the vanilla version of the iPhone OS that comes from Apple. So even if I get the next iPhone, I will get it after I know I can at minimum jailbreak it or just switch to other phones that that have slightly better OS than the iPhone, i.e. Google’s Android.

I needed to turn an image into an .ico (icon) format and did not have access to any image editing software.

for online editing of images : pixlr.com is pretty handy.
for image file format conversion I came across this site which seems to work:
converthub.com

Not sure about the source (often misattributed to Nelson Mandela):

“Our worst fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God; your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God within us. It is not just in some of us, it is in everyone, and as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

One of the things I really dislike is the idea of buying a new car. Scratch that, I just really dislike dealing with car salesmen because with the exception of one or two, you are surely going to get suckered, you just don’t know how much and most likely you will never find out. It’s different from buying anything else in my opinion (even a house) as it can be researched a lot easier and you can arm yourself with all the needed information before going into a store.

With cars there are just too many unknowns that you simply cannot find out (for mortal people at least) before starting the process, hence that uneasy feeling of “wonder where I rank in the list of people this guy suckered” feeling just won’t go away. The car industry would sure benefit from more transparency as I don’t mind dealerships making a living/profit as long as I am paying very similar to what the other 20 people who bought the same car and that just is not the case.

Anyways, we needed a car for the next many years that we can use as the kids grow up, so we decided to go with a mini-van (which is another post by itself) and Honda Odyssey seemed the natural choice. Next came the buying part. We decided to not trade-in to give the sales person one less parameter they can milk more profit from. This is the story of how we tried our best to minimize the risk of overpaying for the car.

In short, it came down to the following steps (we happened to get our car right towards the tail end of this year’s model and in fact only teen nr of odysseys of the model we wanted remained in our vicinity as one dealer looked it up):

1. Know the EXACT car you want, brand, model, down to options, exterior and interior colors.
2. Find out how much the MSRP price & invoice price (e.g. from truecar.com), how much the holdback is (usually 2 or 3%) and if there are (marketing) incentives offered to dealers/consumer by the manufacturer (typical ahead of next year’s model to get rid of last inventory of the current year)
3. Calculate what price you should be paying based on this info e.g. invoice price minus holdback minus incentives (this is as far as you can get with arming yoruself with the info)
4. Get a list of quotes from internet (e.g. from InvoiceDealers, Cars.com, Yahoo!Autos, Autos.com, Edmunds.com, MyRide.com and CarsDirect)
5. Get a list of all dealers within a readius of X miles from your house (ie as far as you are comfortable to drive to get the car if you get a good deal) from yellowpages.com
6. Start calling the farthest one.
7. Important! Ask for the fleet manager or internet sales (fleet manager is someone who is on a fixed salary vs sales people that get commission based on how much they sell)
8. Tell the person you are looking to buy a car today (don’t lie if you are not planing on this) and are calling a few places to get the best price and go in and close the deal. Then ask them what they can offer if they have the car in stock.  If they are savvy they will ask what price you currently have and you can share the lowest price you have and ask if they can beat it. Here is where it gets tricky. When I did this, a lot of them would just say thats a good deal, you should order it from the internet then. Don’t waste time and move on to the next one as if you want to wait, you can always order it from the internet site.
9. Make sure to confirm that this is the *bottom* line price (usually including everything but tax) as otherwise you will be surprised how much other fees they will try and insert in there. Some will refuse to give a bottom line price over the phone saying you will use it to call the next guy for a lower price. Again, don’t waste time, you started by telling him/her you are looking to buy a car today and if he is not trying to work a deal, chances of getting a good deal from this person are next to none.
10. If they do, ask to call back, call the next dealership closer to you and repeat the process until you get the price closest in step 3.
11. Go and buy the car!

Common comment from sales person : I am giving you the car at invoice and not making any money. Well, they may have paid the price of invoice to manifacturer yes, but then they get different rebates and holdback, so in reality that is not how much they paid. Example: if you buy a watch for $20 and you get a mail-in rebate for $8, your invoice was $20 yes, but you actually paid only $12.

How did we do? After buying the car, it turned out one of the parents whose kids are in the same age group as our daughter and we have seen each other a few times works at a dealership and when I told him about the price we paid for the car, he said he would look into it and told us later that we got a really good deal, as good as it pretty much can get for this area.

and here is a very comprehensive site about buying a new car.

A few video’s that once again reminds us about the amazing things we humans are capable of, and while some of these can’t be achieved through hard work, most become apparent only after hard work and perseverance.

Do you have other videos to share?

The concept of microblogging has been around for a while and is championed (based on userbase?) by Twitter. I for one don’t seem to get why and at the risk of making an ignorant statement like these,  I find micro-blogging in its current form (with exception of a handful scenarios) frivolous and useless. The main argument I hear about it is that twitter (or similar services) are the real-time web and unless Google or others move towards that, you will be losing the game by serving the users content that is not super fresh and real time. I can see that being the case eventually and maybe the current form is just a stop-gap to figure out how to get us there and just maybe that is why Facebook is so obsessed with turning into twitter to the degree that it changes the site to even look like twitter. And then you have Google to some degree drooling over Facebook and certain aspects of its model and Microsoft trying to catch up with Google. We have a full ecosystem right there with these four guys.
Here is a good video summarizing my sentiments on tweeting (thanks to Karina):

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

It baffles me how low the Iranian goverment is willing to sink to continue their violation of human rights. For years, they have persecuted Baha’is of Iran, imprisoned and executed them on the same old and lame charges of espionage for Israel. Why? because Baha’is believe in the same God as Islam, want to achieve world peace and because we have our Holy places in Israel, like every other religion of the past.

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.

It used to be back in the days that news sources (and in particular papers) were started and used as propaganda machines for wars or political systems and you would think in this day and age with information so readily avaialbe to us through a host of sources and technologies, things would have changed. Not so much.

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.

iPhone 3G is a cool phone on the market but when I finally decided to get a new phone and didn’t choose iPhone, many asked why and here are my reasons. First a few points on what I do with my phone:

• 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.

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.