Archive for June, 2009
Next up: the kitchen sink!
Posted by chris in General SysAdmin on 19 June, 2009
For all you Unix geeks:
Yes, Android can do that!
On the road…
Posted by chris in Uncategorized on 18 June, 2009
For some reason, a lot of cafes here like to blare Vietnamese pop music at all hours–even early morning. This cafe is nice because they humour me and allow me to jack my iPod into their sound system. Carlos Santana, anyone?
Android gets no love!
It seems like all the smartphone love is dedicated to the iPhone. Even here in Viet Nam where there is no “official” iPhone presence, all the cool kids have an iPhone. My poor G1 gets no love, and I think I know why:
Apple is a master of marketing. The original iPhone was a huge success in spite of several shortcomings. Each successive iteration of the iPhone has made it a stronger device. Each update of the iPhone’s OS has added key features that make the iPhone a stronger contender in this market. But it’s really Apple’s marketing might that took a weak, also-ran phone and turned it into the sensation that it is.
Even th e Palm Pre is garnering a lot of attention, though I think much of it is morbid curiosity. Tech fans everywhere are waiting to see if the Pre is enough to pull Palm out of the tech industry dead pool.
Which brings us to Android. The Android OS is incredible, yet Android doesn’t seem to get a lot of love. I think this is because Google relies on the phone makers and vendors to market it and, so far, T-Mobile is the only big vendor in the US. For reasons unknown to me, HTC, the makers of the G1, don’t really market their individual handsets. We hear a lot of hype from other companies like Samsung and Asus about upcoming offerings, and I can hardly wait to see what they have. But what they don’t have is Apple’s marketing might.
I love my Android phone. I have the G1, which I got from T-Mobile before leaving the US. It’s an invaluable tool and condenses all of the “wants” that I had when playing with things like Internet tablets, yet provides me with a phone. I’ll be writing up some of the tools that I use to help me in my freelance work. For now, though, I just want to give it a little more love…
Life at 50kph
I get into these discussions with Jane about going places and seeing things:
“We’re going to Cha Ben Tanh. It’s about 40 minutes from here. It’s a nice, weird and wonderful market.”
“How far is it in kilometers?”[1]
“Let me look—8.”[2]
“40 minutes?!?”
The other day, I finally realized the issue. When we were living in San Diego, getting in the car and traveling for 40 minutes in pretty much any direction would take us a pretty long way. This is because it was a short jump from the house to the freeway where we were then free to travel at 120kph. Now, though, we are living life at 50kph. And it’s only 50kph on a good day.
Scooter traffic can be pretty horrendous. Add construction or rain to the mix and you can find yourself going barely faster than a good walking pace. As a result, we really don’t consider distance when we decide to travel somewhere. Rather, we consider time.
Even outside urban areas, traffic and road conditions can combine to really slow you down. Can Tho is 180km from Ho Chi Minh City, yet it can easily take 6 hours to get there. That’s an average of 30kph.
Time is a great measure of tasks. When going somewhere, don’t focus so much on how far, rather, focus on how long.
[1] Thankfully, Jane is Canadian, so I don’t have to do distance conversion when having these conversations.
[2] A great tool for measuring distance between two points, even in a city as convoluted as Ho Chi Minh City, is Google Earth.