Alfred's musings

TEDTalks : Nigel Marsh: How to make work-life balance work - Nigel Marsh (2010) In this TED talk, Nigel flags a few things about work life balance: * It's up to you and me to fix it * we should approach the balance with balance * small things can make a big difference Lovely quote: "Millions of people work long hours on jobs they hate to enable them to buy things they don't need to impress people they don't like." Have a good weekend!

TEDTalks : Cynthia Breazeal: The rise of personal robots - Cynthia Breazeal (2010) Social is important. Nobody is arguing with this. But to text, to chat, even a photo or video presence is just so poor compared to the meeting in the flesh. This TED talk really got me thinking about the next social wave!

With Vodafone's troubles yesterday , the value of my Android phone's ability to call using a wifi connection, was again demonstrated. Essentially, my set-up is this: I signed up for a sipdiscount customer, which allows me to make cheap calls to family in South Africa and elsewhere abroad. I've got a Fritz!Box at home (an old one bought on ebay, that was originally issued by a Greek Telco) that are connected to my broadband, my TalkTalk phone line and also my normal home DECT phones. When my non-IT family place a call to 002711.... or any other international number (as I've defined in Fritz!Box rules), the call is not connected to my landline, but rather routed over broadband, via sipdiscount, and it just cost me €0.06 per minute to SA (or free to the UK). On my Android (a Nexus S), I've configured the same sipdiscount account, and when I now dial a number - any number - it gives me the option to dial using the cellular network or the wifi/voip/sipdiscount netwo

Music is built deep into me... it moves me, it energises me, it transform my thinking... so no wonder that my highlight of the (short thus far) week at work, was the impromptu flashmob-style singing that me and a few of my fellow Googlers did a few minutes ago in the canteen. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x25WuQ0ih8 And thinking back through my life... other highlights certainly included Windhoek youth and school choirs, Randburg School choir, Sonitus, Dolce, Dagbreek  Eiffelkoor , and the worship teams I've had the pleasure to sing in... Kerugma and at Southcourt Baptist Church. 

I recently suggested that developers interested in attending Google I/O should act quickly... Yesterday the public ticket sales for Google I/O opened... and less than an hour later, all were sold out! ... and we're thinking about how we can create a fairer distribution of tickets, rather than just see who can fire up Chrome the quickest after registration opens... If you have any smart ideas, please shout! Also remember that you can watch the live stream of the event and follow the IO team on twitter .

The last quarter have just seen smartphones outselling PCs . Apparently, there are more phones now in the world, than toilets... and any day soon we'll have more phones than people having access to taps with fresh water!  All this means that marketeers and businesses that are not already thinking about serving the customers and markets on their phones, are missing an enormous opportunity.

...build cloud printer drivers. http://code.google.com/apis/cloudprint/docs/devguide.html I've been an early proponent of moving things to the cloud... even before it was called "the cloud". But in the early 2000's I always used a few things as examples why not quite *everything* would move to the cloud. One by one, these "never to move to cloud" items are moving there! a) Spell checking... surely locally would be better, not true? Well, sort of only. By using my browser to do spell checking (perhaps with local processing, but fed by a dictionary from the cloud), I'll get better accuracy across more words and languages. And by building it into the browser (or OS), all apps benefit from this, not just my word processor. b) Video editing... I could not envisage how the web would ever deliver a better experience... but it does!  http://www.youtube.com/editor , and now rendering can be done one a farm of powerful machines, rather than my own limited mach