Looks legitimate enough right? That’s what I thought and I figured LinkedIn might have hired this 3rd party company to perform surveys for them. Most of us don’t normally care for surveys, but this one was only 4 questions and promised “exclusive offers” at the end. The “available today only” is also a nice touch to motivate the user to submit a survey (people who legitimately do surveys, take note!).

Since I just woke up and haven’t had my morning coffee, I blindly went ahead and filled out the survey. Finally at the end, here was the dead giveaway that this was fake:

The giveaway was that someone was willing to give away 2 laptops or a TV just for taking 3 minutes of your time to answer 4 simple questions? That’s where I drew the line and instantly knew this was fake and just a phishing scam.

Another dead giveaway was when I came back to this site and used incognito mode (effectively turning of my plugins), the first page had an audio loop congratulating me. In this case, my spam blockers actually made it more difficult to spot a fake site!

I’ve always considered myself tech savvy enough to catch these types of sites before I actually do interact with them. Luckily in this case I haven’t entered in any personal information. Probably clicking the “Select Prize” button would take me to a page where I enter in all billing and shipping information. So I lessons learned:

• Pay attention to what you typed in the address bar. New browsers are trying to hide the address bar to give the user more space to view the website. I think this is a major security flaw and will be a boom for phishers to take advantage of unknowing victims.
• Always pay attention to the site you are on. If the site looks suspicious, double check your address bar and your history to see you typed the right link. If this domain name is not the original name you typed in, close the browser and delete your cookies!
• Watch out for 3rd party URL’s. Websites that use 3rd party services to host pages on a separate domain should take note that they are at fault for causing this. How do we, as public users, know whether you are using a 3rd party or not?
• If something is too good to be true, it is! Free lunch, especially a coveted $1,500 laptop, is very rare or at least takes some significant effort to achieve!

The live coverage blogs

Kind of fun to see where the bloggers are sitting by viewing the perspectives from their pictures. The AJAX auto updating blogs are awesome. Those that require refreshing… not as much. Also the picture qualities are very different. You can tell which site has the bigger budget with the quality of their pictures.

One of the live blogs I was monitoring died towards the end of the keynote while the other 2 kept going. Turns out they were relying on the WWDC network to stream their live blog while the other 2 must have had their own network. Shows who is more prepared!

New MBP

Although the updated battery life is appreciated, I just feel this is another typical Apple move: milking the consumers once more. Although I have to say by dropping the prices this time around instead of introducing another insanely priced product, it makes the move a bit more tolerable.

OS X and Snow Leopard

Funny that they highlight Exchange support as one of the major features of the new OS. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t Exchange a Microsoft thing? hm…

Over 6 GB in extra HD space. That’s nice! Too bad the same can’t be said of Windows, exponentially increasing size with each upgrade.

New Chinese input is really cool. I’m sure my Chinese friends will love that! Doesn’t work for those of us who suck at writing though… I hope the existing input methods are still there!

Expose from the Dock for an application sounds familiar… what happened to trash talking Windows 7?

64-bit, finally catching up to Microsoft!

$29 upgrade price is great! I don’t think Microsoft would do anything like that. They would slap on some new “UI Improvements” and charge another $100 to upgrade. Although this point is debatable since sometimes Microsoft introduces new technologies for free with Service Packs (ie. XP SP2). I’d say those occasions are rare and most of the time Microsoft would charge the typical $100 for upgrades. Let’s see if those Best Buy Vista/Win7 upgrade prices rumors are true.

Exchange Support

Fill in email and password, and set across all 3 apps! Sucks since Outlook is just 1 app! I guess it’s a “better than nothing” approach without building another Outlook.

iPhone

Great that they acknowledged the developers. It is the developers that helped Apple make iPhone the platform it is today.

AT&T, the worst part of the iPhone experience in the U.S. No mention of MMS nor tethering. Get ready to turn in your first born in order to get such features.

Nice Safari improvements.

FindMyiPhone… an awesome service on the crappy MobileMe. C’mon hackers! Find a way to use this without Apple’s MobileMe!

The doctor app for the iPhone looks amazing. I’m sure a specific doctor friend will love it.

Sucks some of the demo’s failed. Oh well, it happens.

All the new features rumored (besides video chat) are there. Good that the prices have remained the same… now it’s up to AT&T to see who qualifies for this “upgrade” price and how much the rest of will be paying. Monopolies suck!

Went to see the new Star Trek movie today on an IMAX screen.

Fun movie. Not geeky like the original movie/series. More mainstream plot/acting to appeal to the masses. Even so, they did include lots of hints/references to the original Star Trek for Trekkie fans.

Don’t like how they keep changing the Star Trek story line with each new show/movie, but oh well… what can I do about it?

Just finished watching the Opening Ceremony for this years Olympics on NBC. I think we (the U.S.) are one of the last people in the world to see the ceremony due to the time difference (12-14 hours) and NBC not releasing the video until Friday night (Saturday morning in China). Sure I could have watched the opening ceremony on Youtube, but why would I watch a crappy flash video when I can watch it on TV in HD.

SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t seen the ceremonies yet and don’t want it spoiled, do not read on!

The commercials are annoying. There seems to be a 5 minute commercial for every 10 minutes of videos. Then when the athletes come in, they break for the “smaller” countries while staying for the larger ones. Since this is pre-recorded 12 hours ago, do they really need to time the commercials? Oh well, NBC wants to make their profit.

Speaking of annoying commercials, at least there were some good ones. The Budweiser commercial with the training horse was hilarious. After looking it up on Youtube, looks like it was actually a commercial made for the SuperBowl. Oh well, still good nonetheless. Another funny one was the Comcast/Mario Kart commercial. At first I thought it was a Nintendo commercial. Turns out it was just a commercial for the Comcast/Wii promotion.

In regards to the show, it was amazing! The chinese performers were amazing. The coordination with all the performances were stunning. The pyrotechnics and technologies used in the show were awe-inspiring. The finale left me speechless! Thank goodness this was all in HD!

One of the things I like todo is watch what kind of gadgets the athletes use when they walk into the stadium. There were lots of camcorders and cameras. Saw some iPod headphones, although why the guy had them on, I have no idea. I saw a couple of Nokia N95‘s as well. Neat!

Those girls dancing/cheering the athletes coming in must have super endurance. Dancing/cheering for ~2 hours in 90 degrees heat (so says the NBC guys). You can see them getting tired 30 minutes in. But all that was gone once the China athletes came in.

Well that was great. Now for 16 more days of HD-sports goodness!

On Sunday, I finally completed the MSF Basic Rider Course on my quest to learn how to ride a motorcycle.

It was a great experience. There was a total of 10 students in my class. The class was broken down into 3 sessions: classroom, range & classroom, and range. During the classroom part of the course, we watched some videos and reviewed a motorcycle handbook containing rules and tips on riding safely. On the range, we put those tips/tricks into practice by actually riding on the bikes. We started with learning how to start a bike and getting used to the friction zone on the clutch. We ended the range with learning how to maneuver the Box of Love and how to stop properly in a turn. Finally, the last hour was a riding test where we were graded on maneuvering 4 obstacle courses.

Throughout the course, the instructors drilled into our heads to always keep heads up and pointed towards the direction to go. Always look ahead and use the SEE (Search, Evaluate, Execute) strategy. Ease the brakes and clutch and never jerk them. Mental preparation is the key to riding safely. Speed is good on a bike. And of course, having the proper gear can save your life! I still can’t believe Utah doesn’t have a helmet law! I feel scared for those of you who ride on the highway going 80+ mph without a helmet!

Out of all the exercises, I would say the Box of Love was the most difficult. You have to maneuver the clutch to second gear, then make two tight turns in a small box without going outside of the lines. Sure it might sound easy to a seasoned pro, but for someone who just started riding a couple of hours ago, it was hard!

The only improvement I see to make the class better is to just extend the class. 15 hours was way too short! A lot of the exercises in the range I felt I needed more practice to get right, but couldn’t get that practice in due to the short amount of time. Since there were 10 students in the class and we all had to take turns, that made it even more difficult to put in that extra practice effort.

For anyone thinking of riding a bike, I would definitely recommend taking this class first! Besides the scorching heat (90+ degrees F), the class was a great way to meet other motorcycle noobs and to learn basic skills from the pros. It was fun meeting you guys and thanks to Dave and Kris for the excellent and fun 15 hours of lessons!

Now to complete the written portion to get my license and to get a bike!

However, if you’re going to be selling stuff online to different countries, please make sure your customer’s know where you’re based. That way we won’t be surprised when there’s a foreign transaction fee when we purchase goods from you.

Skype is a company that was purchased by eBay. eBay is an U.S. company. Boy was I surprised when I found this fee in my bank statement.

Skype is a great service and I’m willing to pay the extra fee. But the least you (I’m pointing at you Skype!) can do is let me know you’ll be processing my transaction in a foreign country causing me to incur a fee. And I mean something that is clearly stated, not some -5 font embedded footnote text! It’s just common courtesy!

I’ve seen this fee a couple of times already this year from purchasing goods online. Sure there’s no official internet tax, but this is slowly becoming one!

Clicking the link opened up my browser and navigated me to the Aperture Tutorial website with numerous videos about 1 to 3 minutes long. After watching a couple of videos, I realized how easy it is to learn from this website.

Now I’ve seen many webcast/video tutorials before, especially Microsoft ones. What makes the Apple one different, and better than the Microsoft ones?

The tutorial website is really well designed. True to Apple’s design, there is no clutter on the website and it is clear where you go and how to select videos to watch. Compare this with Microsoft’s Office website:

Seriously, how long will it take you to find the tutorials link on that page? There’s even advertisements on the Office homepage!

Another important factor to easy web learning is short and to the point videos. There is no marketing fluff in Apple’s tutorial videos. When you click on a video, you know exactly what you are watching. Each video shows you what the feature is and how to perform it and quickly ends.

Once again, let’s compare to Microsoft’s Office website. After 20-30 seconds of hunting, I finally find the Training link. From there I click on the “Popular” link showing a video on “SharePoint document libraries”. Now being on a Mac, I don’t have Windows Media Player to play the video, but just looking at that page with the “20-30 minutes” timer makes me want to close the browser. This is actually pretty good for a Microsoft video as normally Microsoft videos that I’ve watched in the past are over an hour long minimum!

Why are long videos useless? First of all, everyone is busy so no one has the time nor the patience to sit through an hour-long lecture. Second, long videos are long typically because it’s jam packed with lots of information. Thus it’s really easy to get overwhelmed and forget most of what was discussed in the video.

Another nice feature of Apple’s tutorial website is this:

Since there are numerous videos, Apple’s website helps you keep track of videos you have seen, have not seen. Wow, nice touch! These check marks even persist after you close the browser (through cookie’s I’m assuming). Come back to the website a few days later and you’ll see your check marks still there! Good luck trying to remember which videos you’ve seen/not seen on Microsoft’s website.

I used to dread watching video tutorials based on bad past experiences. Apple’s Aperture tutorial website has completely changed my perception. Now, I rather enjoy watching Apple’s video clip tutorials: I don’t have to waste time finding the videos and I get to control how much time I want to spend. And if i decide to take a break and come back the next day, I won’t have to waste time watching the same videos because I forgot I had already watched them!

A couple of weeks ago, my expensive Nokia N95′s backlight battery decided to die on me. Why, I have no idea. Just one day it stopped working. Since I am currently traveling and not at home (in the U.S. where I purchased the phone), I wanted to find a local Nokia support center in order to get my phone fixed. Since Nokia is a global company, I didn’t think this was a problem. However, as it turns out, I walked up to the counter and the person told me that since my phone was purchased in the states, they would not honor the 1 year warranty BY NOKIA. “Aren’t you Nokia?!?” I said. “Yes, but we are Taiwan’s division and we don’t support the warranty by the U.S. You will have to ship your phone to the U.S. if you want to use the warranty.”

Now correct me if I’m wrong, but a company that markets GLOBAL phones does not have a GLOBAL WARRANTY policy?!? A company that wants you to travel with their phones won’t support the phone if it breaks outside of the country you purchased the phone?!? Does anyone else besides me think there’s something wrong with this concept?

So I tried contacting Nokia U.S.A. to get support. My first attempt at calling, no one picked up. So I tried to send an email. I got the typical response that Nokia received my email and would respond in 24 hours. A day later, no response, a week later, still no response.

Finally I gave up and just decided to pay for the fix locally here. Since the time and effort, not to mention the shipping, will cost just as much, if not more to ship back to the states.

Companies need to get it straight. If you’re going to market yourself as a global company and create a global device, you better support your own product globally! Nokia gets an A grade for technological superiority, but an F for one of the worst support I’ve ever experienced.

First off let me say I am by no means an expert on this topic. I am also not saying I’m completely “cured” either. This post is only my reflection upon my recent experiences in trying to overcome this “problem”.

The first step is to recognize by yourself that being shy is a problem. Having other people tell you will not work. You need the inspiration to come from within. Personally, I knew being shy was a problem for many years and many people have urged me to change, but it was only the last few weeks that I came to the conclusion that I must change myself in order to transcend to the next level of life.

Once you’ve realized that being shy is a problem, here’s what I consider are the most important factors to overcoming shyness:

1. Have an encouraging set of friends. This might be a challenge for a shy person since this involves getting to know people. You can look internally within your family/relatives. If no one there can help you, then you can try meeting new friends at places where people congregate: the gym, church, and school to name a few. For me, I was lucky that fate led me to the group of classmates here at NTNU. My classmates here have taken on this role for me, and they were the ones who kick started my recent transformation. For this I’m eternally grateful to them.
2. Let your guard down. When among friends, it’s OK to let your guard down. You must do this in order to try new things. If you’re stubborn on your refusing to try new things, you will never get to experience new things. Never drank before? Do it when you’re with friends. Never danced before? Let your friends show you the moves. Part of overcoming shyness is trying out new things and doing this with friends is the best and safest way to do it. Your friends will take care of you and will support you so it’s OK to let your guard down to try out new stuff.
3. On your quest to become more social, you will make mistakes along the way. As the article says, don’t fixate on your blunders. After you realize something went wrong, consider the cause, consider how not to make the same mistake again, then move on. Shy people tend to be introverted, and introverted people tend to think about everything too much. So it’s natural for you to think way too much about something. Thinking about your mistakes too much will only exacerbate the feeling and make you feel worse, eventually causing you to give up your quest and cause you to lose everything that you’ve gained.

With these tips in mind, I’ve been successfully transforming myself into a more social person and meeting lots of new people. So far I’m having lots of success and with friends who support me, it’s been a lot of fun. Even though I missed out on so many years in the past, with another new year ahead, I’m enthusiastically looking forward to what’s upcoming.