Microsoft finally found out that it is not wise to use years as version numbers. Their latest server software called Windows 2003 Server sounds very old in 2005.
This week microsoft announced two new products which follow up on a year–version: Microsoft Mobile 5.0, and Microsoft Office 12.
This is the feedmap for Lleida. I feel very lonely :-(
They managed to locate my feed surprisingly precise!
Yes! I managed to get my phone configured, so now I am finally a member of the ‘moblog crew’. You can expect more pictures from now on.
The trick was to define another GPRS connection, using another APN name. Does anybody know what this APN is?
[Update 2005.05.03]: APN stands for Access Point Name, which is the name of the destination network.
Quack quack: Duck Ska.
In the last 12 months I haven’t found a single false positive in the spam folder of my mailbox. I still receive some false negatives, but that doesn’t bother me. No false positives means that I am able to change my processing workflow. Until now, all spam ended up in the spam folder, which I checked for false positives once a week. Today I changed my mail configuration to discard all messages flagged as spam. This saves me about 15 minutes of work every week!
One week ago I received my new mobile camera-phone. I was happy, since I wanted to use it for publishing photo’s on Flickr. How disappointed I was when I found out that Amena had delivered me a half configured phone. No international roaming, GPRS, MMS or e-mail configured. :-( In short, my wonderful multimedia phone was delivered with all the multimedia functions disabled.
Now one week later, I have managed to get GPRS activated (I have to pay activation costs!) which also made MMS active. After talking 5 minutes with customer support they also told me that they have activated roaming, so the next time I go abroad I can call home. In theory, everything should be alright now, but… somehow I still can’t send nor receive e-mail. And that is exactly the feature I want most!!!
To be continued…
The idea has been lying on the shelves for over two months now, and today I finally did it. Besides a big all-in-one feed, I have created some more specific feeds:
All current subscribers will from now on get the weblog feed instead of the all-in-one feed. And of course, all these feeds have been outsourced to FeedBurner.
Why is it so difficult to do? When I buy a phone, I want all functions to work. Since yesterday I am using my new phone that came with the new contract. Since this phone has a camera, I would like to take pictures and send them to my friends or publish them on Flickr.
Well, that is not possible, since I do not have GPRS. Last year I had exactly the same problem with Movistar, but that solved itself after a while. But now I want to send my photos, so I checked the Amena site for instructions. Without success. So tonight I will try out the support department. And when I speak to them I can also activate roaming, since they have decided to deactivate it by default since most people never leave the country anyway ;-).
It’s not that difficult to do it right!
People are individualists; we prefer to do things alone and don’t care about the others. Fortunately, we are also ‘intelligent’ and realise that we need other people in certain situations. But if this is not strictly necessary, we are selfish. This is a big pity, since we can do so much more when we co-operate!
I was realising this when I was waiting at the luggage belt of the airport. As usual, everybody was bending over the belt to see whether his or her luggage was coming and thereby blocking the view of the people behind him or her, who in their turn had to bend even more over the belt to see something. In this struggle, only the first person is able to see the luggage coming, and is able to get the luggage without problems. All others have two problems: they cannot see their luggage coming, and when they finally see their property, they are not able to get it because of all the people blocking the way. The solution is very simple: if everybody keeps 2 meters distance from the belt, everybody is able to see their luggage coming, and everybody is able to get to the belt to pick up their suitcase. If it is that simple, why won’t people do this? Well, mainly because there is no incentive for the first person that has the view and the space no matter the distance to the belt. And when the first person chooses to stay close to the belt, all the others have only one solution: get even closer to the belt!
In my work I encounter the same problem. Whenever I have contact with a possible dealer in a new country, the word exclusivity falls within the first two conversations. They have seen our product and think it is good and have the idea that they can conquer the whole market because they have a better product. They are so wrong. Dominating a market is extremely difficult and usually does not depend much on the quality of the product (Microsoft?). If you want to sell a lot of our product, all you need is demand, which is difficult to create. The best way to do it is to have many, many dealers. If many dealers are offering this product, it will become visible. And when it is visible, clients start asking for it. This is how we work in the Spanish market. There are 400+ dealers of our product, and in some branches our product has become the ‘de facto’ standard. Local dealers sell a lot more because there are many other dealers offering the same products; they would never have reached those sales using an exclusive product. If only our foreign contacts could have this insight and allow for more competition in their markets. I am 100% sure that they would sell a lot more!
If people would be less individualistic, we could do bigger things!
The main reason we went to the Netherlands last weekend was to visit our family. Finn is about a month old, so it was about time to meet him!
And babies are such a great subject for photos, so I uploaded some to Brain Pics.
