postaday

How’s your PrimeTel connection doing?

Just before the New Year, I’ve posted the good news from PrimeTel – free increase in the connection speed for all subscribers. I was excited back than. But over the last few days I had a number of discussions with a number of people and most of them seemed to complain about the degraded quality of service – speeds were not up, connection is not stable, and so on and so forth. On one hand, I trust all these people. On the other hand, my connection is doing fine. Compared to speed tests that I did in December, I see better results now. And I haven’t had any of the other problems.

So I am interested in hearing what are your experiences like. Have you seen any changes in speed? Have you seen any change in quality of service? Have you seen any differences since the New Year at all? Please let me know via the comments or directly.

Pages of history

Yesterday I came across this collection of nostalgic photographs that bring back memories from the USSR times. I was too young to see some of those images in real life, but they still have meaning to me. Most though are as they were back then.

Yet, these are staged photographs of some every day items. Today I came across something much more real and something much more dramatic. It is again a collection of images, but in a video form. The video shows the staggering difference between the modern day Saint Petersburg and Leningrad (as it was called back then) during the Siege. As Wikipedia puts it: “It was one of the longest and most destructive sieges in history and one of the most costly in terms of human casualties”. It lasted for 872 days and it took lives of millions of people. As per Wikipedia: 1,017,881 were killed, captured, or missing and 2,418,18 wounded or sick from the Red Army forces. Civilian casualties are in the numbers of 642,000 during the siege and 400,000 at evacuations. These are only those numbers that were verified. In reality that was much more.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQ9LGdamU20]

Motorola Defy – my first Android device

It has been more than three years since Google announced their Android platform, but I still remember how excited I was. I knew that it would be years before I’d own a device running Android, but that didn’t matter to me. It was (and still is) a very cool concept and initiative. Not everything worked out the way it was supposed to workout, and the process is still in its infancy, but I am super glad that I can finally participate rather than just read about it. A couple of days ago I spent 355 EUR to buy my first Android device – Motorola Defy smartphone (specs on one page).

Choosing which smartphone to buy was easier for me than it was for my friends. While most of them had to count on website reviews and comparison charts, I could actually spend a few minutes playing with different devices, since I was among the last people to get one. But the decisive factor was this video review (in German, but quite easy to understand even if you are like me and don’t speak the language). See, for me, one of the biggest problems with smartphones is that they are quite expensive, but at the same time, they are too fragile. No matter how carefully I handle them, it takes only a year and some to render them unusable – touch screens get stack, buttons fall out, etc. Motorola Defy seemed indestructible by comparison. Plus it was moderately priced and of a smaller size than most other similar phones.

So far I’ve been using this smartphone for two days and I am very happy with it. I am already used to the interface (which differs quite a bit from Symbian that I used on my previous phones). I am comfortable with configuration options. And I already went through hundreds and hundreds of applications. The variety is just amazing. Anything you could wish for is there – wallpapers, ringtones, games, calculators and converters, news and social updates, and much much more. And I haven’t even started yet with commercial applications.

Of course, as with any other device, there are issues and nuances. For example, there seems to be an issue with Android devices not being able to connect to ad-hoc wireless networks. (I guess not many people use them, but I happen to be one of those who needs this often – some of the offices that I work at don’t have wireless networks, so I connect my laptop via Ethernet cable and then create an ad-hoc wireless network to share the connection with my phone. I’m sure that it will be fixed in the future updates.) But what I get now is different from what I had before. Before I had to Google for the answers myself, read pages and pages of forums, and fight the problems on my own. Now, all my friends are using Android devices. And even though the devices vary, they have enough in common for us to share solutions to problems, cool applications, tips and tricks. And I absolutely love this bit.

This phone is very much like a modern computer – it’s not very useful when offline. With built-in synchronization of contacts with Gmail and Facebook, calendar synchronization, and support for Twitter, YouTube, and pretty much every other major social network, this phone shines when it’s online.

An extra layer of awesomeness is guaranteed by built-in GPS. And unlike the previous generation of devices with built-in GPS, this time it actually makes sense. No longer I need to wait for 5 minutes until all satellites are acquired and my position is triangulated. It just works and takes mere seconds. My position information can then be utilized by a whole range of applications – camera geo-tagging pictures that I take, Twitter telling where I am, and foursquare which is a lot of fun in itself.

Even though I had this phone for only two days, I’ve kept in touch with Android platform for years. So now I can talk about this for days. It turns out I am as excited about Android as I was three years, and getting myself one was exactly what I needed to do. My only regret is that I haven’t done it earlier.

Are Facebook Pages Killing the Corporate Web Site?

I came across this blog post asking the question of whether Facebook Pages are killing the corporate web sites. Just by coincidence, I’ve been thinking about this for the last few days. And not only thinking, but discussing it with other people and collecting their ideas, feedback, and data.

With a question like this its easy to fall into an extremist black and white view of the world. But an answer in the middle isn’t quite as interesting as an answer from either side of the debate. In my personal opinion, the answer is more yes than no. Let me now explain.

Corporate web presence is increasingly important. It is so important in fact that today it’s almost a requirement. Web site is one of those first things a company needs to do, together with the office, logo, and business cards. Yes, I am aware of the fact that not every company needs an office, or a logo, or business cards, or even a web site, but these are minority and more of an exception rather than a rule, so I’ll ignore them for now.

But as much as web publishing technology developed and improved these years, it’s nowhere near the accessible level. Take for a example a brand new company. And let it, for the sake of the example, be a small business. A store, or a small services company. At the stage where we are now, the company basically has these routes to establish its web presence:

Employ a web design/development company to create the website. There are a lot of variables here, but from what I’ve seen and heard around, such an option would cost somewhere around 700-3,000 EUR. It will also take somewhere between 1 week and 3 month to be completed. And then there will be maintenance/hosting/support charges ranging between 50-500 EUR a year. Roughly, of course.
DIY. Either one of the company owners will create a website in MS Word and upload it to his ISP hosting folder. Or a there would be somebody technical, somebody from the IT department, who will be able to find some cheap hosting, buy domain, install an open source CMS together with some free themes and plugins. Even though cheaper and probably faster for the company, this will end up being a one-time job and soon nobody will remember who is supposed to update the web site and how to even get to the administration.
Follow the white rabbit. As much as I wish for this option to be a free blog over at WordPress.com, the reality of the situation suggests that it’s more likely to be a Facebook Page. Free, fast and with no hassle.

Larger, richer companies have resources to invest into a proper web site, which would be maintained and updated, as well as constantly promoted. However many smaller companies simply can’t afford the option. And for them Facebook pages work surprisingly well.

In fact, I’ve spoken with a few local people who use Facebook pages to promote their business, services, and products. And most of them are very satisfied by this option. The outcomes vary, of course. Some people said that Facebook doesn’t help them at all. But they don’t mind since they spent only a few minutes setting up the page. Others are much happier. Two people in particular told me that they even had their own websites before, but those were a waste of time, since nobody ever visited them. But on Facebook they managed to capture their audience and now they have larger client base and its much easier for them to keep everyone in the loop on stock updates, as well as to collect feedback.

I think that this last bit is particularly important. It’s not about how much time or money you can invest. But whether you can break through and reach your potential audience. And somehow Facebook pages seem to be doing it better than standalone corporate website. At least for some types of businesses. And if it goes this way, I think more and more companies will start downgrading corporate websites from top priority to an item of lesser importance. After all, it’s never too late to start with your own website, but if you can survive for some time without it, and save money and time – why not?

Suckling pig – a dream come true

Cooking and eating a whole suckling pig has been a dream of mine for a few years now. Not just me – it was a dream that I shared with a very good friend of mine. Yesterday it finally came true. My friend decided that we’ve waited enough and that we should finally do it. So he got the pig and invited me over (as well as a few other people).

We soon discovered that cooking this thing was not as easy as we imagined. For one, it seemed that the pig was too heavy for the motor to rotate it. A new motor, more powerful, was bought. But it still it didn’t work. Luckily, almost everyone at a party was an engineer in one sense or another. So we figured out that the pig had to be re-adjusted, for better balance. It took us a couple of tries and a few meters of metal wire, but we managed to set it perfectly. Too bad it was still too heavy for the motor and it simply died. Gladly, we had more motors that finished the job.

One other thing we had to re-adjust was timing. Somehow we thought it would be somewhere around two hours to cook it. But finally it took more than four. I know there is some formula to calculate the time based on weight of th meat, but nobody seemed to knew it. Not to worry though – we had plenty of beer and things to talk about.

When the pig was finally cooked, put on table, and tried, I realized that all the wait was definitely worth it. It was one of the best dishes I ate ever. And it was the best pork ever. So soft and so tender, it was unbelievable!

Now that we tried it and realized that it’s even better than we expected it to be, something tells me we’ll do it again. With more preparations and better understanding of the process. And even though I’m still digesting it, I can’t wait for that next time. And if you never tried a suckling pig, I can’t recommend it enough. It’s one of those things everyone just have to try. Yes, it was really that good.