Quick Thoughts

Good Morning from Manila! It's a nice bright Saturday enhanced by a marathon of NatGeo Adventure's curiously interesting reality program Bondi Rescue

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Really glad that ETC 2nd Avenue (a Philippine Cable network that mostly funnels American / British TV shows) is now airing "Live From Abbey Road". Saw an episode featuring the band "Muse"; the finale was very good. I reckon that video is at least a year old though.

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Been hearing so many good things about Bohol. Haven't seen it for myself. That's a new addition to my to-do list (if I could live with being away from the city for a few days).

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I've replaced my Nokia N96 with an HTC Touch Pro. The Touch Pro has been very very satisfying - especially since Google accounts (including Google Apps) can now be synched with a Windows Mobile Phone. Specifically, you can sync your contacts and calendar. Nothing for tasks (that I know of) and e-mail is still processed through POP. The sync service called "Google Sync" makes your google service work pretty much like Microsoft Exchange.

Back to the phone - on the downside: screen's kind of small for my preference and I'm missing what I consider to be the N96 killer app - Mobile TV. Plus, I'm still familiarizing myself with the O/S (Windows Mobile 6.1 enhanced by HTC Touch Flo). I like that it's a touch phone with a qwerty keyboard and I like the black design. I'm kind of peeved though by the arrangements I had to make to my contact list; it took so much time! Recall that Google / GMail doesn't make name field distinctions. The phone (because it's a Windows Mobile phone) does. Can you imagine what I (and perhaps many other end-users) had to work out? I had to rework my entire contact list (of X thousands of names) into 2 simple components. It's harder for people like us in Asia or Europe since we don't all have two-word full names. We're not all John Smiths or Jane Does. We have last names (and first names) composed of two or more words! What's happened is that names like mine "JP de la Vega" get saved in the phone as First Name-John Middle Name-Pauldela Last name-Vega. And from the phone - one can't search middle names. So to make things work with my phone, I had to standardize how my contacts names are saved on gmail. People with long last names (like mine) had to be saved as"JP de_la_Vega". The result - Windows Mobile detects the last name contents (like la or vega) but Google doesn't. Still not a perfect situation, but I can live with it.

Thing is, I saw from blogs and vlogs that the Touch Pro can be hacked to run Android. I'm not sure how but that's interesting. I'm curious to find out if anyone in the area authoritatively knows how already. All in all though - the summary point really is - the device inspires and enables real productivity.

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President Obama on Leno was interesting. Did he really get through?

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I'm grateful the weekend is here...