Archive for category Personal

Quotes to live by

These are my favourite quotes… what are yours?

- If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough. – Albert Einstein

- "All that is too complex is unnecessary, and it is simple that is needed" – Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the AK47 Kalashnikov assault rifle, which has been in continual use since 1947. (He attributes this quote to "God" but says he has lived his life by the motto.)

- Say no to compromise, so you can say yes to good ideas. (I wrote a whole post about this… Why Sony can't compete with Apple — or why you should always say no to compromise.)

- Life is what your thoughts make it.

- Think different.

- For true success ask yourself these four questions: Why? Why not? Why not me? Why not now? – James Allen

- Make your passion your job and then you'll never work a day in your life.

- "Editorial independence is not just a moral thing, it's a business thing as well. The market soon works interference and agendas out" – Alan Kohler

- "The creative flame burns best when given plenty of air to breathe. In suffocating surroundings, hemmed in by over-supervision and second-guessing, with constant emphasis on price rather than the merit of a proposition, there's soon likely to be nothing but ash." – Gerald Stone

- Time flies like the wind. Fruit flies like bananas. – Groucho Marx.

NAB finally gets iPhone / Blackberry internet banking

Well, to be precise, it's iPhone / Blackberry / Nokia internet banking — they're the platforms that NAB has tested with (but NAB says "not all models" … only more recent ones, as older models have less capable web browsers.)

You just have to go to nab.com.au in your mobile phone web browser and you'll find the link for internet banking. NAB has also created an iPhone icon on its webserver, so if you add it to your homescreen, you get a neatly formatted NAB logo button. (They're not making an iPhone app available though, because they have designed the site to be handset agnostic.)

Hit the more link for screenshots and more of my ranting…
Read the rest of this entry »

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I rode the Google staff shuttle bus!

I'm on a Gray Line bus out of San Francisco, en route to Yosemite National Park. There is FREE wifi on the bus – amazing! San Francisco really would be the place to live if you were tech minded.

The bus driver just commented that the reason this bus has WiFi is that it does double-duty as the shuttle bus for Google employees! He showed me the WiFi setup — it was installed by a particular Google engineer and has four mobile broadband cards — Sprint, Verizon, AT&T and some other network attached to a WiFi router with auto-failover in case of no coverage on one of the networks. All I can say is thank you Mr or Ms Anonymous Google employee!!!

I've also decided not to use global roaming for data on my Blackberry while I'm here because it's easy enough to find WiFi hotspots here with reasonable pricing like $US15 per day — or free in some hotel lobbies. Of course, my Blackberry is practically useless with WiFi — I'd forgotten how atrocious the Blackberry WiFi implementation was. Most of the time it can't associate with a hotspot or it can associate but can't get an IP address (while other devices like a MacBook or iPhone have no problem associating).

I am therefore very glad that I also have an iPhone 3GS with me (on review loan from Optus, and before anyone asks: no, they didn't offer to provide global roaming access as part of the review!) In fact, I'm writing this post from the great WordPress app for iPhone.

I have also noticed that hotels in the US increasingly don't have wired Ethernet broadband in their rooms any more, instead having WiFi only. "So what?" you might ask. "Isn't that more convenient?" The answer is no; it means you have to pay for each device you want to connect separately. Although hotels with wired Ethernet have the same rules, you can get around the per-device charging restriction by using a WiFi router plugged in to the Ethernet port. Can't do that with WiFi only hotels.

 I rode the Google staff shuttle bus!

 I rode the Google staff shuttle bus!

 I rode the Google staff shuttle bus!

pixel I rode the Google staff shuttle bus!

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