Today notes

Make wide angle lense from door viewer

http://www.instructables.com/ex/i/1D59459A4AC71029AC23001143E7E506/?ALLSTEPS

Ooh, this is too good to be true. I’ve been searching for lenses to take closeup picture for my Canon Powershot camera. They are quite expensive and might not even produce the best quality prints. Worst yet, I will have to order online since shops do not carry them since my camera is not one of those top of the line built for accessories.

I will have a day in the city. Not sure where I can fine this thing and where.

I will update if I succeed.

Brief notes about DHL

• Investor of the year. Relocate European quarter from UK to Prague. Invest 180M euros. (source)
• 1/3 operating cost compared to that in Western countries.
• Need a major haul over with the support staffs. Some have no IT background and English. (my personal opinion)
• Purchase 100 per cent of the shares in Prague based PPL CZ
• World’s biggest inter. air express network
• Services offered:
  • DOX – Duty-free to countries outside the EU
  • WPX – Dutiable goods outside the EU,
  • ECX – All shipments within EU,Domestic Express, Express Document, Same Day Express, Import Express, World Mail, Worldwide Express Logistics, Track and Trace.

Notes for myself

• Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton taught him that if you take care of the customer, you win.
• Finance the next project from the profit of the current one.
• Bernstein’s tips for entrepreneurs
  • Try to have fun in everything you do.
  • Hire smart and invest in people.
  • Pay follows success for employees trying to impress employers and companies trying to impress clients. First show you can get the job done, then talk pay.
  • Take business courses if you are just starting out.

Keywords for the day:

Advertising, turn-around, do better,

Good links found today

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/14872497.htm (Bob Bernstein)

Zenica, the metal city

I visited Ta. yesterday in Zenica, a city north of Sarajevo. Before I left, I asked around about Zenica. According to all, the city was not important except that it had a large steel factory built by the Austrian government during its occupation of Bosnia. The steel employs roughly about 20,000 people out of the population of 120,000. Recently, the workers from this factory were on hunger strike against the management; something to do with their inability to buy apartments using their work credits.

I slept for the entire trip to Zenica. The bus arrived at 7 p.m. after an hour and a half drive. From afar, I saw Ta. She was difficult to miss because of her lean and tall figure, over 1.80 cm and her short, curly, black hairs.

Compared to Sarajevo, Zenica’ landscape was a mile a part with its flat level, green hills, and lack of traffic. In the middle of the city flowed the river Bosna, not amazing impressive but at least looked better than the pathetic “river” in Sarajevo.

Zenica

Ta. took me to a coffee & sweet bar, acclaimed the best of its kind in Zenica. We sat on the balcony, looking over the river, the park, the direction to her flat and downtown. Her sister Re. and Re.’ boyfriend, Se. caught up with us two hours later. Se. was of Dalmatian (the seaside in Croatia) origin, big built, tall, and spoke with a loud voice. He reminded me of a conversation I had with Ta. when she explained to me the accents in different regions, one of which was Split, a city along the Dalmatian coast. “The people from the seaside have this special airs about them which I like very much,” she said.

We headed toward the center where Ta. and her family bumped into friends after friends on the street. Even in Sarajevo, a bigger city, I always bumped into somebody I knew while strolling along the street walk in the center. Now I remember a comment made by one of my colleague, “eventually you will realize that this city is really small.” I acknowledged that fact after a few months in Sarajevo. Encountering acquaintance has become my tool to test the size of a city. Ta. and her family bumped into many people, therefore Zenica was very small. After checking the city, we arrived at a a local bar, frequently visited by Ta., Re., and Se. They liked the bar because it was off the center, thus not too noisy.  Before arriving to this bar, we passed a part in downtown full of people drinking, watching the World Cup in addition to the loud Turbo folk in the background. “C., here is your favorite music,” Ta. said. I sorta chuckled.

Ta. is a 4th/5th year music major at the Music Faculty in Sarajevo.  Her focus is musicology and aspires to be a music critic. She is the the type of person who has a taste in music and extremely choosy when listenning to songs. Therefore, every chance I got, I threw Turbo folk (a really sleezy kind of music) comments into her face for a few chuckes.

I ordered a dark beer brewed in Zenica. I don’t like beer at all, but it is my custom that I will try the local beer from whichever city I visit. The beer must have been strong or I ate little that day. With only 0.33 liter, I felt light headed and kept sliding down on my seat. Ni., another roommate of mine in Sarajevo, and her boyfriend coincidently entered the bar and joined us for a bit.
The Bosnian Croats
Ta. and her family are Bosnian Croats if tagging the “Croats” after the “Bosnian” is appropriate at all. I guess it is. I have to call them Bosnian Croats because they, plus another friend, are the only Catholic Croats I know in the entire time I was in Bosnia. All people I met and knew were exclusively Bosniaks. Ta. and her sister are ones of those non-nationalists who would not care less whether your name was Lejla, therefore a Bosniak or Claudia, therefore a Bosnian Croats. “After the war though, people start paying attention to that,” said Re.

I guess this is the reason why Ta., a non-political, would-not-harm-any-soul defended Tito strongly every single time I called him a dictator. Normally, she was not interested at all in the political discussions I tried to get her to participate. As a non-nationalist who cares more about economic issue than ethnic and religious difference, perhaps Tito fits her conception of a political leader. After all, under him, her parents had a good life.

I was in Zagreb for a few days, and Tito was mentioned in one of the conversations. It seemed to me that Tito was admired greatly among the young Croatian, at least the educated one. There are two possible explanations:

1. He is simply a great leader.

2. He is Croatian by birth, and the Croatians and Bosnian Croats had it better during his time.

Okay, enough for the politics. I would not matter at all even if I laid into Ta. for the differences in our political view point, not that there was any difference. She and her family are one of the kindest and earnest people I have ever met.

Music has been an important factor in my life. I think that this is why I have always favored musical people. For me, they are more sympathetic and can look at life in different perspective compared to the typica, over-represented rational, practical bulk. Ta., a music major who belongs to a female choir in Sarajevo. This choir has performed in many countries in Europe. So was her sister, a mechanical engineer, who sang in Germany during the war 19991 – 1995.

Ta., Re., and I went back to Sarajevo to catch the ballet “Swan Lake”, performed by an esemble from Russia, on Saturday night, Ta. and Re. returned to Zenica the next morning.

I am leaving Sarajevo for travelling in a few days and come back sometime in July for the remain of my luggage. Hopefully I will see  Ta. a few more times before leaving Bosnia.

Links

Some links I found interesting today

http://business2.blogs.com/business2blog/2006/08/mainstream_blog.html (top bloggers)

http://www.wetpaint.com (wiki)

http://www.markaboo.com/ (bookmark)
http://www.pickle.com (photos and video sharing)

Car rental

I just found a cheap car rental in Prague, with only 9 bucks plus insurance. Will check once I get there though. This is too good to be true

http://www.expats.cz/prague/czech/car-hire/car-rental-prague/

Learning web 2.0

I'm intrigued by Ajax, the technology behind Gmail, flikr, kayak, and gosh know what else. Ajax is the new technology of the era Web 2.0.  I've been setting sometimes now to learn about Web 2.0, so far not much progress. 

http://www.techsoup.org/toolkits/web2/ 

Today marks my real attempt to learn Web 2.0

Boompa car site

Wisdom from the entrepreneurs who built the online community car site boompa.com. I do not necessarily starting a business, but some of the advices are helpful for starting any technical projects.

Research

Everything starts with an Idea

Build a site that makes sense in the current market

The best way to find out if your site has revenue potential

Picking your Partners and Assigning Roles

Who's the better shot? Give them the gun.

Be Selective

Make sure any technology built is owned by the company, not the individuals

How to split up the company shares

The minimum skills you'll need to get the job done

1. Photoshop designer
2. CSS/SMARTY Developer
3. Data Entry / Database Populator Dude (scrapes are lame!)
4. PHP/JSP/Ruby Developer
5. JavaScript/AJAX developer
6. SysAdmin / DBA
7. QA/Product Management

There are also the following non-technical roles

1. Guy who talks on the phone
2. Guy who keeps the books and writes the checks
3. Guy who cleans the toilet

Office Space

You really do need office space

Back to College?

Things to watch for in your lease

Money

Find out how much you need first

Why we didn't try to find VC money

If it's that good of an idea, don't be afraid to put your own money on the table

How to set up your loans

What type of business entity to set up

Insurance

Preview of Part 2: Technology, Design, and our Build Schedule.

Tehnology Used

PHP 5: We used PHP as mentioned because we had used it before on other large sites and had seen it scale to hundreds of thousands of users. We also knew it really well.

SMARTY: SMARTY is a templating engine that you can use to seperate your frontend documents cleanly from your main PHP. For the most part we don't understand why it isn't more used and to us is a MUST HAVE on any web build.

MySQL 5: This was our first time using MySQL 5 and didn't have any real problems with it.

Fedora 4: We went with Fedora as our Linux build because it's free and it's very stable and supported.

CSS: Used to style our pages, I don't believe boompa.com has any tables outside of a couple we have to use with Dojo.

Dojo AJAX Toolkit: Pretty much our home run king. We would not have been able to work AJAX into the site without dojo. You see it everywhere from our fades on the front door, to our WYSIWYG editor in the boards.

Pear: We used a lot of pear scripts and functions for things like pagination and sorting.

Memcached: We use memcached to speed the site up and prevent hits to the database where we can. Along with SMARTY caching, it keeps the site running relatively speedy.

Tunnel museum

On Friday, the students from 2A took me to the Tunnel museum. We had to take the tram to the end of the tram line in Illija and walked to the Sarajevo suburb of Butmir, where the international aiport located.

Then I understood why people told me to take the taxi to the Tunnel when I asked for buses to get there. We walk on the earthen road passing small houses and fields under the summer heat and the relentles sun rays.

After walking for half an hour, we arrived in front of a shattered house, the Tunnel Museum of the Kolar family.

The tunnel 800 meter long, 1 meter wide, and 1.60 meter high (I circle the tunnel on the picture) was dug in 1993, a year after the war began, providing the only safe land route for humanitarian aids and escape in and out of the city. Two of the students on this trip walked through this tunnel during the siege. One had to go to her doctor, and one had to come live with her uncle on the other side. For 3 1/2 year, the city was sieged by the Bosnian Serb forces. A mixed Bosniak-Croat friend of mine told me that the reason for choosing the location of the tunnel was that people kept trying to escape through the airport runnaway and killed by snipers.

The part of the tunnel open for visitors was only 20 meter. It was a short walk underground, but I think that it was enough.

Where to watch the games while on the road?

Schedule

http://soccernet.espn.go.com/worldcup/fixtures?&lpos=wcnav&lid=gn_sn_WC%20fixtures&cc=5739

Online TV

http://www.yourglobaltv.com/vietnam/vtv3.htm

http://proxy.espn.go.com/broadband/ebb2/360Web/20051201/espn360.html?affiliate=verizon&btype=consumer

http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com/06/en/ (action only)

I will be travelling in late June to mid July. So with the schedule in the backpack, I see where I can and should watch these games.

links from thanhda.com

If you don’t want to be dumb, then shake your hard drive

My portable USB hard drive, DISKGO Edge suddenly misbehaved; the computers could not recognize it. This drive is a backup of my laptop that crashed recently. My other two USB devices broke. My MP3 player which could be used as a USB drive also stopped working. All my life work are lying in a single unreliable medium, that portable hard disk. I was worried sick and could not help beating myself up for not backing up the backup. Yes, I admit that I am really weak in the backing up department. I lost a lot of important files in the past, but managed to recover some of them. This time is entirely different. That portable contains personal and a lot of (A LOT) significant data. I tried to search online for hard drive recovery services, and boy oh boy, they charged a hefty fee. I considered sending the drive to the manufacturer since it was still under warranty. However, this approach would take a long time since the manufacture is in USA, and I currently live in Europe. Moreover, I’m a bit skeptical about giving strangers my life’s data. Who knows what these technicians will do with my drive?

Out of desperation and frustration, I picked up the hard drive, stared lovingly at the LED green light on this motionless creature and started shaking the poor thing. I did like this: Shake, shake, shake it baby! I paused for a second to observe any change. And I did it again: Shake, shake… Can you believe it? A popup window appeared on the screen showing options I can do with the device (when you hook up a USB device to the computer, this window appears). Terribly horrifyingly hysterical beyond belief, I immediately copied files from the USB to the hard drive and mocked the so-called technical competent boyfriend of mine who suggested there was nothing to be done and I should ship the drive to the manufacturer.

Then, I frantically began my backing up process.

What do I learn from this blissful disaster?

1. That it helps big time to be a semi-mean-spirited woman. Why? Since I am mean I shook the damn thing without mercy. But because I am a woman, I did not throw the bastard away. Some men might in minute of rage.
2. Oh let the Lord be my witness? I will back up, back up, and back up from this day forward. At least 2 copies in 2 different medium.

For another smart (much smarter) person who committed this unforgivable dumb act by not backing up his/her computer, check out this post by Guy Kawasaki.

C.D.
Internalizing the virtue of backing things up.

Shake, shake, shake your hard drive baby!

My portable USB hard drive, DISKGO Edge suddenly misbehaved; the computers could not recognize it. This drive is a backup of my laptop which recently crashed. My two other USBs broke. My MP3 player also stopped working. So all my life work are in a single medium, that portable hard disk.

I was worried sick and could not help beating myself up for not backingup the backup. Yes, I admit that I am really weak in the backing up department. I lost a lot of important files, however I was able to recover some of them. But this time is different. That portable contains personal and a lot of other significant data. I tried to search online for hard drive recovery service, and found out that it would cost a huge chum of money. I thought that maybe I had to send the drive to the manufacturer because it was still under warranty. But this approach would definitely take a long time since the manufacture is in USA, and they might just send me a new hard drive, suggested my boyfriend, by the way a master graduate from computer science.

Well, out of desperation and frustration, I picked up the hard drive, stared lovingly at the LED green light on this motionless creature, and started shaking the poor thing. I did like this:

Shake, shake, shake it baby!

Can you believe it? A popup appeared on the screen asking me showing options I can do with the device (when you hook up a USB device to the computer, this window appears).

Terribly horrifyingly hysterical beyond belief, I immediately copied files from the USB to the hard drive and mocked the so-called technical competent boyfriend of mine.

It is now in progress.

So what do I learn from this blissful disaster?

1. That it helps big time to be a semi-aggressive woman. Why? Since I am aggressive, I shook the damn thing crazily. But because I am a woman, I did not throw the bastard away. Some men might.
2. Oh let the Lord be my witness? I will back up, back up, and back up from this day forward. At least 2 copies in 2 different medium.

Links for info in Czech

Yellow pages

• http://www.allpraha.com/
• http://www.expats.cz/

Companies

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_50/b3963033.htm (dhl)

http://www.radio.cz/en/article/55327/limit (dhl investor of the year)

High school

http://www.soukromeskoly.cz/gymnazium.htm

Journalism

Czech Business Weekly