Wouldn’t it be nice to know where the traffic jams are in Jakarta so that we can AVOID them ? Yup, we thought so too. Thus, we have been working on a solution to provide just this type of information and we call it FireAnts… (Why that name ? Watch the video below to find out !)
I have been using my MacBook now for about one month and I still tag my PC along when I go to the office. I’ve found that moving my Outlook to Mac isn’t quite as easy. I have expected this but not to the extent that I’m going through now.
Initially I thought that Entourage (part of MS Office for Mac) will be my ticket to freedom. Since it is a replacement for Outlook that was built by Microsoft for the Mac I presume that there will be no issues once I got it installed on my Mac.
Turns out I was wrong. The first issue was the edition of MS Office for Mac that I should be using. I had gone to a mac store and almost got the MS Office Home and Student Edition, which was reasonably priced. Looking at the comparison table on the back of the packaging, though, I found out that that edition did not support exchange server.
I didn’t know exactly what that means but just to be safe, I proceeded to look for the standard edition of MS Office which has the exchange server support. Well, I found it, but it costs me three times the home and student edition.
Ok, so I got my Entourage with Exchange Server Support, so everything should be hunky dory, right ? Wrong. For the life of me, I can’t seem to find how to synchronize my tasks and categories. I searched and searched and searched and finally realized that Entourage does NOT synchronize tasks and categories. Well that blew a big hole in my plan to migrate completely to Mac. I need the tasks and categories and Entourage apparently is not going to be the answer. Isn’t it weird that Microsoft creates an exchange client that does not support tasks and categories ? Or is this part of an evil twisted plan for sabotaging the Mac platform ?
Since I can’t use Entourage, I have to find another way of getting my calendars, contacts, tasks, emails, and categories into my mac.
I have two choices now from where I sit: Find out how to synchronize exchange with the Apple applications (calendars, tasks, etc), and/or install parallels and run windows within my Mac OS.
The quest continues…
I’ve been experimenting with a site that I created a while back. My current goal is to study how to drive more traffic to the site. In my quest to do this, I’ve been facing problems specifically in the area of what content to serve such that existing readers will be interested to stay on and new readers will be interested to join.
I’ve asked the readers themselves about what they want or need. This results in several suggestions which are quite good and will be implemented soon. However, the number of suggestions is not nearly enough and I need more.
Why the problem with finding good content to deliver ? After a little introspection, I think my problem stems from the fact that I’m not clear who my target audience is, my target persona. In order to be clear about what content you should deliver, the first thing you have to do is to define what persona you are after. In hindsight, this seems obvious. However, it didn’t click until recently.
Persona for me means a representation of a particular segment of a market. Thus, after doing your segmentation with whatever method, you would then define the persona. You would make this representation come alive by giving it a name, a somewhat detailed description of what they do, where they live, what habits they have, etc.
This step of defining persona is crucial before you even think about what content to serve because different personas require different things and the content should be tailored to your target personas. Once the target personas (I think it is possible to have more than one target personas) are defined, then it should be a lot easier to think about what they value and thus to think about what content to serve them.
Time for me to get going on my personas!
In the countless of hours that we’ve been stuck in traffic jams, have you ever got the funny feeling that there is really no reasons for a lot of the traffic jams that we had to suffer through ? You’d slow to a crawl at some point on the road and after cursing your way through the jam, it suddenly disappears. What happened ?
Apparently traffic jams can be created out of thin air, and I presume this is what happen most of the time: Check out this video I found on YouTube. Read the rest of this entry »
Always think twice or three or four times before giving out your password anytime you visit a site through a link given to you from any type of source, be it email, messenger, sms, or anything.
I recently received an instant message from one of my messenger buddies asking me to check out some pictures… (duh… this should’ve been clue #1). I would normally be extra cautious when I get these kinds of messages through emails. This time, however, the message comes from an instant message from a messenger buddy and I didn’t know you could get phished this way.
I didn’t think twice and clicked on the link. Read the rest of this entry »
Crossing over to Mac (Courtesy of laptopmag.com)
With the release of the new MacBook, I finally decided to bite the bullet and go all mac. I wasn’t sure that all the things that I used to be able to do can be replicated fully in the mac environment, but I got a little fed up with going back and forth using Mac and Windows. So here’s the story of me switching completely to mac, the problems I encounter, and whatever solutions I found to fix them.
Have you noticed that attaching a .pages document created from iWork’s Pages to a web based mail account, such as gmail. or yahoo mail never works ?
Well, you can stop trying. I did 
Here’s the reason: Read the rest of this entry »
If you have just recently claimed your blog at technorati’s site and you’re not seeing your updates even after numerous pings, it may be that your blog is actually pending a review to ensure that your content is legit and within the good blogging guidelines that technorati expects.
Here’s the FAQ that explains this process: Read the rest of this entry »
If you are like me, I didn’t really know which plugins I should get once I moved over to the self-hosted version of wordpress.
I found a blog article which goes over his top recommended wordpress plugins. This article also goes over the 17 steps that you are encouraged to take to setup your self-hosted wordpress blog. It’s a good read for someone just moving over to a self-hosted wordpress blog.
I just realized how helpful the wordpress.com community was in bringing traffic to my blog site. I recently moved my blog from a wordpress.com site to my own self-hosted blog using wordpress, and I see that traffic to my blog has gone down to zero . Not that it was that high before, but I actually took it for granted that someone will always stumble upon my blog through search engines and the likes.
Not so it turns out… I’m just starting to realize that moving out of wordpress.com mean that I’m no longer part of the wordpress.com community and thus my blog posts are no longer listed with them.
