A photoblog and other things

I think the most important is a phone conversation recorder, and I don’t know why it isn’t automatically built into the phone systems that corporate engineering companies (well, this one at least) use. When I’m having a technical discussion over the phone with my tech lead or something (and sometimes these conversations can go for over an hour, especially when a group discussion is going on) I always miss stacks of points. There are a couple of ways I know of to record what was said during the conversation: make notes while you’re listening, or listen very hard and try to understand so no notes need be taken. If I’m doing the former I’ll miss key points without realising it because I’m concentrating on getting down on paper the information in a form I’ll understand later. If I’m doing the latter I’ll just forget stuff. Why don’t they give us a “record” button on the phone so I can play back the conversation later to see if I missed anything? Maybe there is stuff out there that can do this, but they don’t supply it to us by default.

Secondly, I reckon we should all get a drawing tablet. This would be especially useful when doing a netmeeting with someone. You can’t draw with a mouse, that’s stupid. You can’t do it quickly with Word, you end up with what looks like fat Lego blocks. We need a drawing tablet so we can draw diagrams etc. quickly and easily. Please!!!

People talking on their mobile phones in the restrooms whilst sitting on the toilet seat. Not cool guys. Not cool.

Google is so cool. It helped me in my job so many times by getting me the best search results. It’s just like an external brain… there is a heck of a lot of stuff I don’t know but then I google it, get the answer, answer the question and then I *seem* smart, when in actual fact I’m probably not – I just know what keywords to use. I guess it’s like how people in South Beach *seem* perfect (or walk around like it) when in actual fact of course, they’re not (1). They just find ways around it (read plastic surgery). Oh, and I’m not talking about personality here either. I’m actually just dribbling.

Anyhow, Google has just released google maps: maps.google.com. I’m a big supporter of clean, usable interfaces (props to Frosty who actually got me thinking about that stuff in the first place) and this interface rocks. It’s so quick, clean and intuitive I just love it. You search for a business nearby and va-voom! There it is. I’m saying goodbye to Mapquest from now on. For now maps is only US-centric but I expect that will change as Google modifies it to cater for other countries in the future, especially considering it’s still only a beta.

Also, I’m now an even more major fan of Google because of their Picasa photo organising program. I thought I’d give it a shot and see how it’d do with organising my 7+ gigs of photos on my computer. No problem. It found ones I’d actually forgotten about and because the interface is so damn good I had no problem in actually realising this.

Oh, I also use blogger, also (now, anyway) by Google. And I use gmail (e-mail addy is daecks@gmail.com by the way) Why? Because they’re piss easy to use and I’ve never had any problems with any of them.

(1) – ok, I don’t think she was from South Beach but it’s a funny story anyway. At the Superbowl party I went to on Sunday night these stripper-like girls turned up. I thought “wow, these parties really go off!” but as it turned out they were only friends of friends (2). Anyway, the blonde one was looking at a globe of the world later on in the night and showing us where her family comes from. She didn’t know where Belgium was. I don’t think she was even looking in Europe.

(2) – that’s not to say of course that a friend of a friend could not be a stripper. Had to make that clarification. A friend who was a stripper would be even better though. Had to make that clarification too.

*Finally* I went for a night out in South Beach. Only one word describes that night out: awesome. When you’re kicking on to breakfast at 6:30am in the morning and making sure that a friend is ok as they’ve been getting sick in the toilet, you know you’ve had a good night. I *think* we ended up in a place called “Pearl“. The name of the place was “Rumi“. Check out the pictures of this place! They played some bloody good music but only towards the latter part of the night. It seems that the music has to be dumbed down a lot earlier on in the night to please the fickle part of the crowd (err, rethink that. It’s South Beach. The fickle part of the crowd is the crowd) and they only play the non-commercial, actually good-to-listen-to stuff later.

The club’s closing song was “no woman no cry” by Bob Marley so I grabbed someone’s cigarette lighter and ended up walking down the stairs at the head of my group swaying the lighter from side to side. It kept on extinguishing and I ended up flicking the little steel drum out of the lighter somehow, and at some point I burnt my thumb although I only found that out the next day.

I crashed at Nina’s place in South Beach which was about one or two streets away from the club. Her and my friend from work (she was my friend’s cousin, and my friend is from my workplace) had another breakfast (at 3pm) at the Big Pink. I tell you what, the potato omelette they make there is bloody fantastic. That is completely neutralised by the fact however that they don’t know how to make an iced coffee. And what is it with this cinnamon thing again? Why do they have to have it on everything???

Anyway, gotta get back to doing the thing I was sent over here for: work.

*sigh*