That this would happen eventually I had no doubt, but the speed by which it happened is still amazing. I still haven’t bought a Kindle 3G so I’m still using my old Sony PRS-505 but I’ve started buying and downloading booksfrom Amazon and loading them into the Sony reader (this sometimes requires a bit of processing). There are a bunch of things which are convenient with the Amazon model and its ebooks (the format not being one of them ;-), I especially like is the free sample you can request which gets sent instantly to either my PC or my Android phone. It’s much easier to check out books this way and look at the table of contents. If I were to change anything in the way Amazon sends the books I would have them send the Amazon customer reviews along with the sample. I usually just ignore the top reviews and go straight to the 1-2-3 star reviews to see what issues and drawbacks people found with the book. Saved me from buying a bunch of books which otherwise seemed like a decent read if you just look at the title and raving reviews.

Tags: Amazon, android, downloading, ebooks, ereader, free, free sample, Kindle, Paperbacks, reader, sample, sony, table of contents

It looks like my hate relationship with Facebook has recently transformed, maybe not quite to love but definitely not a hate / despise relationship anymore.

Yes, I used to hate Facebook, I disabled my account there and blocked all messages and communications. Why? Because it was very annoying, it seemed to add nothing while just wasting my time. It was like a more advanced version of a Solitaire game, but less fun. (I never really liked Solitaire to begin with, I’m more of a Mines guy).

So why the change? I asked myself the same question, and it wasn’t difficult to come up with the answer. I started liking Facebook more when people stopped sending me silly virtual fish for my non-existent virtual aquarium, and didn’t ask me to join even more silly farming games, or “empire” building fantasies and all that other annoying infantile time wasters, and instead started using it as a social site! Who’d have thought? So from a site associated with rejecting requests to pass around “hot potatoes” and such it became a means to keep in touch and share things with people about their life and work. Mostly people whom otherwise I would have little chance to interact with.

So that’s it, maybe I don’t quite love facebook, err it’s just a social site, but I certainly started spending more time there and I think I’ll stick around for a while. At least as long as Google’s new social experiment GoogleME comes out :-) Hopefully they learned a thing or two from Orkut and the Buzz fiasco.

Tags: Buzz, facebook, Games, googleme, hate, Love, orkut, relationship, social experiment, time wasters, wasting my time

Warning! Spoilers abound, reading about the end of Inception (damn I can’t wait for this) will really spoil it for you. If you haven’t watched the movie go and watch it first.

OK, so assuming you have watched it, what did you think of the ending? Is Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) still in an alternate reality / dream state somewhere in limbo or has he woken up and this is the real reality? The movies sort of ends in a way that suggests it is up to the viewers to make up their minds on what kind of end they prefer but personally I think everything points to it that he’s still in a dream. For one, as someone who played with dreidels as a kid, they don’t spin that long :-) But more seriously there are plenty of other signs, for example:

1. We never see a kick out of the deep limbo after he finds Saito (excellent acting by Ken Watanabe), it just jumps back to the airplane – how you get to a scene is important when dealing with multiple realities right?

2. Saito who was supposed to be subconsciously aged and of weak mental state after dying in the 3rd level of the virtual reality and spending many years in limbo, simply snaps out of it immediately and makes the call straight away.

3. This in my opinion is the top clue, when Cobb gets back home to his kids, what are they doing? That’s right, playing in the back yard, looking exactly the same, wearing exactly the same clothes.

Either way, whether you think the end is a happy ending one or a sad one the movie is still quite rewarding. And if you liked this movie you’ll probably like this onetoo as the premise is similar.

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Finally, what I’ve known for a long time, games are good for you!

Men’s Health Lists : MensHealth.com

. . . grab your joystick.

Not that joystick, but the one attached to your kid’s Xbox. British researchers found that the longer people play video games, the higher their levels of concentration, sometimes equaling a trained athlete’s ability to focus. “Playing video games requires a high level of concentration to be successful, and that seems to transfer to the real world,” says Jo Bryce, Ph.D., the study coauthor.

P.S. The Men’s Health lists breakdown by 1 paragraph per page to make people click their site more is just terrible, absolutely terrible!

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My old and trusty Samsung SGH-D900 started getting the hiccups recently as the keys became less responsive. I bought it in 2006 so I forgive it, 3+ years is a reasonable lifetime I guess. So I was ready to spend a few % points of Friday’s P&L on a new phone ;-) I wanted to get a new Samsung since I like their physical and UI design but I also wanted a phone that supports Hebrew, at least in the browser so that when I check Gmail I can view emails. After quite a bit of research and digging around it turned out that most Samsung phones don’t and will not have Hebrew firmware since they aren’t very popular in Israel while Nokia’s and Sony Ericsson’s do. So I started looking at SE. I finally went with the T700.

Mostly because of:

1. It’s cheap, only 7,200 Bhat or about $200.
2. It’s super slim and lightweight at only 10mm thin and 78grams. The thinner and lighter the better.
3. Has everything I need: Quad-band + 3G + music player + camera + a really good built-in HTML browser (NetFront 3.4) + expansion slot up to 8GB.
4. There’s Hebrew firmware for it (another $10 at MBK shopping mall, can also be a DIY job if you know how to use a USB cable and google “debranding’).

So I bought it yesterday and I really like it so far. The screen is only 2″ but is of excellent quality, super bright and clear. The sound quality through the headphones is great, the camera produces good results for a 3.2Mp phone camera, the interface is fast and responsive and very intuitive. It supports java applications and stuff like google maps and geo-tagging through GSM triangulation. What else could I want. OK, it doesn’t have an Apple logo at the back ;-)

So the obvious reaction I’m getting is folks I know is: you should have bought an iPhone. Why didn’t I? Well it’s quite easy, in no particular order:

1. I don’t commute so it’s quite rare that I need to access internet on my phone.
2. I don’t need to bypass an employer’s corporate firewall to secretly check on Twitter / Facebook / Myspace / Jobsdb.com.
3. There’s no 3G in Thailand anyway (well not commercially and over HSDPA/UMTS yet), but there is 2.75G.
4. I’m a cheapskate who doesn’t like spending on status symbols / functionality I don’t use.
5. The iPhone is bigger and heavier without giving me anything extra that I need.
6. I don’t like touch screens.

I’m sure the iPhone is a fantastic phone which lots of people really like and enjoy but it just doesn’t suit my needs now.

So that’s it. I’m enjoying my Sony Ericsson. Maybe I’ll use the 18,000 Baht difference from the iPhone price to get a new travel lense for my Nikon.

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I finally got the Company of Heroes Tales of Valor expansion pack. Instead of going to a physical shop I got it online. Via a digital purchase. I really like getting digital versions like this or ebooks instead of the hard physical item (no shipping, yay!). I don’t need a DVD with a plastic cover and a printed manual and I’ve actually lost a few of those during my moves. Zeus knows where’s my AOM CD.

There are a number of places one can buy downloadable games, the main ones seem to be: Steam, Direct2Drive and Gamersgate. The advatnages I saw for gamersgate was that the game didn’t require any background client running during play like Steam requires, it had no restrictions on international purchase like Direct2Drive and they keep the game for you for download as well as the registration keys forever.

The whole buying experience and downloading process was very fast and easy with payment via paypal and instant availability of the CD Key and a small executable that downloads the game. I already had the previous versions of CoH including the CoH Opposing Fronts expansion so all I needed to do is download the latest patches and apply the activation key in order to unlock the unique campaigns and units and be able to play them in single player and multiplayer.

Looking forward to a fun weekend with the game.

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Here are some pics I took over the last few days. We went to Koh Tarutao which is in Satun province in the south of Thailand. I’ve been to Similan before which is also in the Andaman sea but never this further south. From one of the islands you can see Langkawi and Kuala Lumpur is actually nearer than Bangkok. We spent our time mostly hopping from Koh Lipe which is the main island of the Taru tao national park to the other smaller kohs for snorkeling and food. It was a fun trip and a good break.

Click thumbnails to enlarge.

One of the smaller islands of Koh Tarutao

Longtail boats and a crystal clear sea

Sunset on the beach of Koh Lipe