OOB for two weeks or so

Out Of Blog because of secret project again. Will update with details in 2 weeks.

Work till you can not work

Just finished "reading" the book called "Free" by Chris Anderson who authored the famous book "Long Tale". I used "read" because I actually listened the whole book while driving and on my trip to Silicon Valley for my job interview.

It's a brilliant book. It explains the "freemium" and "googleconomy" pretty well. I gained additional insight into the Internet industry. It even helped adding information to some of my responses of the interview questions a little.

The title of this post is from an article I was reading today. I was trying to solve an issue caused by the upgrade of my older laptop's Ubuntu's version to 10.04. I managed to get a work-around so the laptop can dual-boot Ubuntu or Windows XP. I certainly missed the days with Debian when I didn't have to deal with much upgrade issues.

As I was dealing with the Linux distribution, I wanted to know what Linus Torvalds is up to. Then I started watching a tech talk he gave to Google about Git. The next person I thought about was John Carmack. Then I started reading an interview someone had done with him. In the interview he explained the beauty of programming and said something like: you don't rely on anybody else; you just use your computer and work until you can not work.

This reminded me the 10000-hour rule mentioned in Gladwell's book "outliers". I read this book briefly before. Now I loaded the audio to my Zune player (as a poor student, can't afford a ipod). I'll "read" the book the second time thoroughly.

OOB for a few days

OOB (out of blog) for a few days because I will be on a trip to Mountain View, California till Friday. Then come back in Friday evening for the MBA end of the program Awards dinner. 

4 weeks till I finish the MBA. Hectic times. Hopefully good times.

140 Character Conference in LA

I attended the 140Conf in LA today. It was my first social media meeting. I enjoyed it quite a bit. So it was worth the 1+ hour drive from Orange County to The Comedy Store. The host Jeff Pulver flew in today from NYC and will go back with a red eye flight.

I think I added Jeff on Facebook initially because he is a friend of a venture capital list Fred Wilson who writes a quite influential blog called A VC. Then I got to know this conference through Tweeter.

Much to my surprise, the conference is not technical at all. And a lot of passionate female twitter users showed up. Since I suspected a large number of twitter users, I used tweeps around layer of the Android augmented reality app Layar. I was very surprised by how many twitter users and their pictures showed up on the app.

Experimenting with social media

I got a Google powered Android smart phone called Nexus One recently. This triggered a lot of things I've been doing and learning in the past few days. One of the biggest change that happened to me since this internet enabled phone is that Twitter suddenly start to make sense to me.

I've also started to try to add the "like" button from Facebook to this blog. After that, I got hooked. So I added twitter button as well. I think more people will click the like button just because there are a lot more Facebook users than twitter users.

Speaking of Twitter, Conan O'Brien signed up for Twitter because he was restricted from appearing on TV or Radio. For those who are not familiar with Conan's issue check this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tonight_Show_with_Conan_O%27Brien Basically Conan and his TV station did not agree with each other and Conan had to give up his show. So long story short, 1 million people followed him on Twitter in a few days he signed up. Conan decided to do a tour which he was allowed to do. He posted one tweet and the tour tickets were sold out in a matter of days without a dollar spent on advertising. I think Twitter and Facebook truly changed the way people get information and how advertising can be done.

Here is a video I enjoyed: Conan visits Google

Switching back

forgot to say that i'm switching back to this blog since I've been a student in the past 2 years and don't like to pay for hosting and domain names:).

Back from San Francisco

Met amazing people in San Francisco and the Bay area. Special thanks to everyone I met at Google, Ricardo, Caris, Yvonne and Pei.

Used my Nexus One phone through out the trip. Navigation, checking emails, making calls, twittering, getting public transportation, finding restaurants...The only problem is short battery life and overheating when mounted on the wind shield as a GPS. So I will bring my actual GPS on my future trips.

I'll try to return the car kit tomorrow since I won't be using Nexus one as my main navigation device. I'm keeping the Nexus One phone because I'm still on the AT&T 2 year plan till August, 2010. Nexus One is still the most powerful Android phone on AT&T. I plan to sell the Nexus One and switch to Verizon's most powerful Android phone then.

Here are some pictures I took on the trip:

2010-4 san francisco networking