shahine.com/omar/

This is such a cool hack, worthy of being in Make. I just might order one.

A few weeks ago I gave up my trusty Timbuk2 Commute Laptop bag for a new Timbuk2 Track Day Pack. I simply LOVE Timbuk2 products… this back is fantastic and I’m happy to be using a backpack again. I also have their duffel bag for 1–2 day trips.

It’s amazing watching their product line expand in the last 3 years. They used to only have a single product, the original messenger bag you see all over the US on bike messengers.

• ETech
• Gnomedex

I’m pretty excited for both. I managed to go to zero conferences last year.

Looks like Windows Live Mobile Search has given Robert Scoble his Pony for 2006.

On your phone or web browser go to:

1. http://mobile.msn.com/pocketpc/
2. Click Windows Live Search beta
3. Click Web Search (you can bookmark this on your phone)
4. Enter any search term or web site
5. Click on the Mobile link next to any search result

Now you can read the page on your mobile phone. This is called adaptive mobile rendering. It does a great job rendering my blog.

This kind of stuff is insanley cool. If Google did this there would be like 500 articles and blog posts about it. But because we did it I didn't even find out about it till yesterday when the Mobile folks demoe'd it to me.

Update: yes, Google has done this already in their mobile search as well. However, I find that our adaptive mobile rendering is better/easier to read.

Wow…

I was thinking at leaving it at that. I’ve toyed with the idea of getting a wireless card for my laptop. When I had my Sony Vaio TX for a brief time I was intrigued by the built in Cingular EDGE support. However, I was not excited about paying the $50 or so monthly fee for 100K wireless access. I tried to teather my smartphone to my laptop a while back and during a 45 min train ride was only able to connect to my exchange server for about 1 minute.

Also, with such a small mobile laptop (my Fujitsu P7120) I found my self carrying it around more, and paying for one-time wifi connection fees. In the month of January, between wifi use and travel (airport and hotel) I easily spent $40 on less than one day of wifi. The economics just don’t work out there. I see this trend continuing (going to starbucks, paying for hotel and airport wifi).

Well I decided to do some research. Walt Mossberg wrote up a review (subscription required) of the two Cingular wireless cards and the service a few weeks back. He gave the service and the cards very favorable marks (which is a big deal for Walt as he is often very critical of tech products). So, after I migrated from Cingular Blue to Cingular Orange I bit the bullet and ordered service.

There are two things you need to understand about this sort of service. You need to purchase hardware and a wireless plan. If you don’t want to pay an arm and a leg you also need to sign a 2 year contract.

Based on Walt’s article I purchased the Sierra Wireless AirCard 860. After instant discounts and whatnot I got the card for $59 (normally $449.99). The data plan is normally $79.99 a month, but till March 31st there is a $20 discount bringing the cost to $59.99 a month. That’s much better. Through Microsoft I get another 12% knocked off that brining the total to $52.79 a month. Since I just cut our cable TV bill by $50, it was an easy sell to the wife .

Anyway, this is a pretty life changing piece of technology. I can get online ANYWHERE. Most of the time I get the full HSDPA service with about 500K speed with 1 MBit bursts. It will fall back to UMTS, or EDGE/GPRS.

This reminds me of the feeling I had the first time I used an AirPort basestation and Lucent WiFi Card.

Today I created my first mashup. I combined 75% of a Can of Talking Rain Soda Water (sorry, only available at Microsoft), with 1 can of Welch’s Cranberry Juice into a Microsoft issued Orange drinking cup. I now have my own tasty soft drink. Mashup analog style.

You can see the step by step process below. I love this Web 2.0 stuff.

I keep a pretty simple hierarchy for filing messages. I have a couple of top level folders, and dozens of sub folders. For example, I use:

• Projects
• Blog
• Code
• Hotmail
• Project 1
• Project 2
• etc
• People
• Person 1
• Person 2
• etc
• Personal
• Reference
• Deals
• Expire
• Travel

Now each of these folders can have many folders. I also happen to use this as my categorization system for tasks, and similarly, folders in My Documents folder. I basically call this my Productivity Namespace. This namespace also happens to be my ClearContext Topics which allow me to file messages to my folders with a few keystrokes.

However, there are two “special” folders: Reference and Expire. Due to the powerful search software that we have nowadays, when something doesn’t fit into my Productivity Namespace, I simply file it in Reference. This is the “one day I might need this”. However, if I know that some bit of reference info will become obsolete in a few weeks or a few months I place it in “Expire”. Expire has an AutoArchive rule that deletes items in there after 6 months. This gives me enough time to keep it around in case I need it but eventually it goes away, unlike Reference which stays around forever.

With most search tools you can do a search like this:

<search phrase> folder:<folder name>

which is handy for scoping the search to a particular namepsace of mine.

Something I’ve been meaning to blog about for a long time… and speaking of Natural Language.

For many years one of the more powerful and well implemented natural language parsers has been living in the Date/Time control in Outlook.

 And Outlook will translate this to 2/28/06. Now you can try all sorts of things like:

• next week
• friday
• next friday
• end of the week
• end of the month
• tomorrow
• 2 weeks

and so on. I bet you didn’t know about this . When you create a lot of tasks (like I do) this is a very fast way of typing what you want, hitting tab, and usually getting the expected results.

The other night I was playing travel agent and realized what a pain in the neck it is to use the travel sites out there. Most have lamo date/time pickers and require many mouse clicks to simply search for a flight.

Well, Aditya sent me a MagicWord for SlickRun that accomplishes this task very elegantly. All you need to do is type:

fly sfo to jfk march 15 - 20

And you get a ton of search results.

Just create a MagicWord called fly and set the url to:

http://www.mobissimo.com/onebox_process_air.php?onebox=$I$

Love it.

I think I just broke a rib laughing so hard. Mike does a better job than I do explaining the misery of the life of a former PowerBook user.

This paragraph is a Gem!

“Track pad. Extra features like scrolling on one side just cause flashing and beeping freakouts. Uninstalled driver leaves only the worst trackpad known to mankind. This is the one the engineer designed and said to his management "here's the prototype, it doesn't work for shit, but you get the idea." Of course his managers were high fiving and shouting "Ship it!" at the top of their lungs. This is why I carry a mouse with me everywhere I bring Mr. Crashy McCrasher.”

Last week I got an email from Dan Morse, a writer for the washington post. He asked me about my How the Moleskine Rocked My World post. Today he published, Putting Pen to Paper Anew, in today’s post (with quotes from me!). Jerry Brito was also quoted in the article. He was one of the first bloggers who helped me discover the little gem.

Pretty cool. If you are still wondering, I’m still using my Moleskine, albeit I’ve switched to a Small Ruled Reporter Notebook.

What I found interesting in the article was this quote:

“Americans are expected to purchase 2.2 million Moleskines this year, up from 970,000 in 2004, according to Modo & Modo, the notebook's Milan-based designer. The national bookstore chain Barnes & Noble counts Washington as its third-largest Moleskine selling ground, trailing New York and Philadelphia. In all, Washingtonians are expected to buy nearly 70,000 Moleskines this year.”

Wow, I wouldn’t mind experiencing that kind of grown in my business . I think if they go vertical they can sell even more, like a Getting Things Done edition!

I would never return a hard disk in a machine I’ve used to the manufacturer, sell it to a third party etc without using Boot and Nuke to wipe it clean.

You can grab the ISO, burn it to a CD and then be rest assured that your data is gone forever.

Last weekend I decided I would make the switch from Cingular Blue to Cingular Orange (legacy ATT to Cingular). I did this for a few reasons.

1. I had a few hours to kill
2. They no longer make or offer any AT&T phones (phones that can take an AT&T SIM card)
3. I knew I would have to do this one day (see item #2)
4. Cingular finally has their act together when it comes to “Premier” customers which Microsoft is (I get all sorts of discounts).
5. It’s cheaper! (well I do have to pay for incoming SMS now, Dammit!!!)

I did a comparison of what I pay now and what I would pay under Cingular and my bill ended up about $15 cheaper a month. Not bad.

So, when I went to the store, I decided I may as well get a Cingular 2125 (HTC Faraday) so that I could get the cheaper data plan. You see, Cingular considers a device like the 8125 (aka HTC Wizard) a PDA and charges you $45 for data. However, they consider the 2125 a Smartphone and only charge $20 a month. Both phones are pretty much running the same OS, so go figure.

Anyway, as you may recall, I’ve been using a k-jam for the past few months. Generally I’ve been pleased with a few notable exceptions:

• The GPRS connection flakes out on Cingular’s network. This seems to happen as I go in and out of service.
• It’s difficult to use with one hand
• The Pocket PC version of Windows Mobile 5 is half-baked. It’s somewhat optimized for one handed use and completely useless without a stylus in some situations. You also can’t do things like copy and paste with the keyboard.

I’ve found that I’ve been really surprised by how much I like the 2125 and the Smartphone form factor. I can drive the device with one hand, do things faster, make phone calls quicker, and multi task easier (due to the back button).

I think that the usability of the Smartphone form factor is much better. Unfortunately, it’s a real shame that Mobile team could not have made the distinction between the two more seamless. And there are just some silly differences between the platforms like:

• Dialing a phone number on Smartphone is 10000% easier
• Pocket PC has 4 Alarms and Smartphone 1
• Smartphone uses a huge font for the email application which is annoying
• Smartphone has a better camera phone and MMS support
• Smartphone is easier to navigate
• Web sites are easier to browse on Smartphone
• Reminder and alerts are easier to dismiss on Smartphone
• Smartphone has phone profiles and can switch to “meeting” when your are busy (automatically)
• Pocket PC has much better task support
• Pocket PC has File Sync and Notes support
• Smartphone has much better Bluetooth support and you can dial phone numbers from a bluetooth headset w/o turning the phone on

But the final kicker is that now that I have a teeny tiny laptop, I don’t need a big PDA like phone device. I can get by with a smaller read only device optimized for phone use, and use my little laptop with tons of battery live and a broadband wireless connection the rest of the time.