May 12th, 2008

MOVING !!!

Posted at 00.57.00 | PermaLink: MOVING !!!

I've had it.
The inability to manage - and the now complete lack of support menas I have decided to take the WordPress plunge.

This is my last post on this blog, and the new one can be found here - please amend your bookmarks or RSS aggregators. Over time, I will be migrating the existing content (350+ posts) to the new platform.

Sorry for the inconvenience

May 11th, 2008

Today: waffles !!!

Posted at 11.53.21 in  Fun Stuff  | PermaLink: Today: waffles !!!

Finally trying out the waffle iron we bought a while back.

Our sunday brunch is becoming alarmingly similar to the the Pacfic Complete (from the Hilton near Stamford U - my current all time leader in humongous breakfasts; close second comes the Trucker's Breakfast we had on the Cassiar Hwy in British Columbia)

May 10th, 2008

PocketMac does not work !!

Posted at 10.38.40 in  CGM  Journey to Mac  | PermaLink: PocketMac does not work !!

Grrrr ! not only it does not work for me - it does not work for anyone.

Why do they continue to sell it if it does not?
It serves the dorks like me who thought $24.95 is not much, why bother checking the boards.

General lesson: whenever you are buying some software that des not have a demo version to check out functionality, do yourself a favor and check the damn boards!!!

May 8th, 2008

Why I hate lazy realtors

Posted at 10.42.56 in  CGM  Why I hate...  | PermaLink: Why I hate lazy realtors

I know, a category so large as realtors has plenty of fine hard working people sweating out their hard earned commissions. It's just I haven't met many of them, and the nice ones I met were friends already, so nice by definition.

But I realize just how superficial this comment must look to someon on the other side of the fence, so I spent some time on the forum of the italian relators community and guess what, they are complaining all the time about clients who ask impossible prices for their property, or clients who don't want to pay the commission once the deal is done, clients that cut you off calling the prospect directly and so on.

I guess it all starts at how imperfect the market is for real estate - very local, very fragmented, very based on disorganized databases of unstructured  information.

I am right now both a seller and immediately afterwards I will be a buyer, and looking at the market prices of the properties I am/will be involved with, I will be worth about 50k euro in commissions over 6 to 9 months with an immaculate credit rating. In other words, I could be good business.
So what does it take to win over a client like me? I was hoping you'd ask, giving me the opportunity to describe...



Gianni's ideal Real Estate agent


I am starting from the general belief that work should be compensated - the more value it adds, the more it should be paid. The issue then becomes HOW a realtor can add value to the transaction, make it happen quicker, more professionally, at the right (market) price.

No shop
I could never understand why do most realtors need a store? Why do I need to pay for your store rent when all you have there some amateurial pictures, a layout and a very rough description.

Make me desire the product
In most cases, the only true informative service a realtor provides is the organization of a site visit. Which I could easily organize on my own with a simple phone call - prompting me to ask myself why do I need to pay tens of thousands for that.
How do you make me desire it? Well, there are many ways:
  • lots of pictures: why the restrain? digital pics cost friggin' nothing, why when I inquire about a 750k euro house I receive three or four pictures? I'd send a hundred !! Why not a digital movie (equally free)? Why not a nice (and free) slideshow?

http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" width="400" height="267" flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&RGB=0x000000&feed=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2Fgianni.catalfamo%2Falbumid%2F5199094726748857089%3Fkind%3Dphoto%26alt%3Drss" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer">
  • long, detailed descriptions; even better, a full 3D model enabling a virtual visit by the prospective buyer. This full model of our summer house in St Raphael was created in about 2 hours with Sweet Home 3D, a cool and very easy to use freeware software. The resulting model can be viewed as a flat image as you are doing now or, if you install the software, navigated and visited at leisure.


    Image:Why I hate lazy realtors
    • tell me about where it is. As the adage says, the three most important characteristics of a property are location, location and location and it is nowadays very easy to show the precise location of a property: see for example this same house in Google Maps

    A universal marketplace
    This is not even a market in any modern sense: realtors have a very small stock of properties for sale in the immediate vicinity of where their store is. As a consequence, if the prospective buyer is on the market - as it is my case - for a house which could be anywhere is a list of perhaps 15-20 villages, I have to take the trouble of physically visiting 30-40 tiny realtors asking them the same questions over and over again; no wonder then I feel I am doing all the work - I am ! How will you convince me to pay you your commission if I feel I have done all the work?

    If however properties were listed in a unique marketplace, sellers would pay for sophisticated pre-sales services enhancing the marketability of their property and therefore its value. They would be assured that their property would be visible by ALL the prospective buyers, but how well it will sell would depend also on how effective the promotion is in catching th eye of the prospective buyers.

    And this would require in turn the pre-sales services of The value add would be obvious: the better the service, the more money you make and - consequently - more commission I'd be willing to pay to use the services of the more sophisticated realtors - come to think about it, why should they get all paid the same commission? Are we some kind of communist economy where retribution is independent of merit and quality of work?

May 2nd, 2008

Printer losers

Posted at 02.00.21 in  Journey to Mac  | PermaLink: Printer losers

Remember the nice Canon LBP-2900 cheap laser printer I bought a while back, but never managed to get to print on the Mac?

Well, today I spent a couple of hours on the boards and - alas - there is solution! you can follow the full thread on the Apple support site, or I can give you the skinny:

  • Download here the latest CAPT driver released by Canon, install it and restart
  • Download here the new printer definition file for the LBP 2900, unzip it and copy it to the /Library/Printers/Canon/CAPT/Profile/Device folder.

If however you, like me, still get the maddening situation where the printer seems to install correctly, you can add it to your Printers selecting the CAPT driver, but still can't print as every job sits endlessly as "Stopped", try one more step.
  • Download the complete CAPT folder from here, unzip it, rename your old /Library/Printers/Canon/CAPT to CAPT_OLD or something, then copy the downloaded folder in its place (this is a folder of some guy that got it to work on one of his machines, but was unable to replicate the procedure on another Mac, so he simply copied the folder over, and bam!)
  • Install the CAPT driver you downloaded before

Not clear why, but it worked for me !!
Canon, you really unimpressed for sloppy work, here !!

I also downloaded the latest version of the GIMP and although I still find it complicated, it is a reasonable substitute for Paintshop for what I do.

This means I am down to basically two reasons to keep the VMware alive, and these are:
1.        electronic signatures on PDF - my Acrobat Pro license can't be carried over/upgraded to the Mac, and I don't particularly fancy giving another 600 euros to Adobe for something I already paid for, so looking into cheaper alternatives
2.        synchronization of Lotus Notes with my N95 still elusive - hoping Steve at PocketMac can provide a fix for the problem I have there

April 27th, 2008

Time travel

Posted at 16.37.57 in  Journey to Mac  | PermaLink: Time travel

OK so the setting up was trivial and works beautifully; the printer goes to sleep when unused and awakens when it gets a job. Wireless performs flawlessly and the best part is that nobody, except Marcello and I - who performed the job - even knows that the wireless network is now 11n capable, as the utility remembers which networks you had before you installet the TC and allows you to conveniently rename the network to one of the old names: think as if you unmounted the old AP and replaced it with the new one, all without ever stopping service. Cool !

This now means that anybody stumbling on our network could use the printer, but also that we now have a half tera fileserver for the Macs (the PCs, too?) which of course we'll never use, because it's unprotected

But TM is giving me some reason to worry: I left my MBP at the office the other day, hoping it would back up overnight, but when I came in the following morning it had only achieved about 35% of the total (about 96 gigs to back up - I know, I know). So I tried removing the snapshot of the VM from the backup (how many copies do I need? there's one already on my Home Storage Facility) but alas, this restarts the whole task from scratch, and leaving it on in the background is no good - progression is way too slow for the first big backup.

Solution? Don't quite know yet. Leaving the MBP at work for a full weekend is unthinkable (yeah, I know it sounds kind of sick, but this is one thing I just cannot do) so I should try another night job, perhaps connecting it to the TC by cable for higher transfer speeds...

The other thing I don't like is the fact that the default setting is for the TM task to simply continue to gobble up space with incremental backups until the disk is full - must remember the get the full tera drive when I re-do the home network. maybe more attentive perusal of manuals will enlighten me...

April 23rd, 2008

Can´t believe what I did !

Posted at 00.32.35 in  Journey to Mac  | PermaLink: Can´t believe what I did !

Had a busy day today, which meant I had no time whatsoever to play with the spanking new half tera Time Capsule which came with the post this morning.

I had to fork over another 300 to el Jobso, because using the Time Machine utility to back up some data on my home half tera drive would require reformatting it, i.e. finding somewhere else o put the 150-odd gig of stuff I only have there.

Anyway, I could only start looking into it after the last appointment of the day, i.e. 7:30PM meaning I was ready to invest perhaps 20 minutes max. before giving up and going home.

To put things in perspective, I was not trying to perform a completely trivial operation; in no special order the task was:
1.        install and configure the machine itself
2.        install and configure the 802.11n wireless network, replacing the existing 11g one and sharing Internet access
3.        connect Macs and PCs to the wireless network
4.        connect the monster printer on my desk to the TC (which doubles as a printer hub)
5.        make the printer available to the Macs AND to PCs (and specifically deinstalling it as a BT printer and reinstalling it as a wireless network printer)
6.        use Time Machine to back up my Mac
7.        back up (manually ?) Marcello's Mac

The item is an Apple classic white box, no switches or buttons; just plug it in and configure it using the Airport Utility that comes on CD.
Items 1 to 3 whizzed away in no time with only perfunctory glimpses to the little manual. At one point the utility got stuck because the replacement on the existing network meant one the default setting was not correct, but the instructions were foolproof ("Please change this setting to 'Bridged', you fool!)
Item 4 was a little more (physically) challenging, because the damn thing weighs like a tank and we had to move it across the corridor.
Item 5 happened on its own, you press "-" and the BT printer disappears, press "+" and find the new printer; then, just to be sure, you delete the printer from the BT panel.
We stopped at item 6, because I suspect the first backup may require a little more time.

From start to finish in about 15 minutes, I still don't believe it...

April 19th, 2008

iSync - bingo!

Posted at 13.07.54 in  Journey to Mac  | PermaLink: iSync - bingo!

OK, I am stoopid, but the people who write the error messages at Nokia are not much better. The error message I got when trying to install the N95 plugin was

"You must upgrade to the latest iSync to install this plugin"
when it should have read
"Dork! Put the iSync app back into the main Applications folder to install this plugin"
.Duh !

Magic of the boards...

Anyway now the synchronization with brain-damaged iCal and Mac Address Book work beautifully - handy when I need a number and Notes is not open; it does not seem to recognize precisely the data label though, so all mobile phones are labeled "Other"; ditto or email - I am just worried this might propagate back to Notes and I just HATE untidy address books...

April 17th, 2008

Journey to Mac

Posted at 00.13.25 in  Journey to Mac  | PermaLink: Journey to Mac

Today I did progress my personal departure from Windows just one little additional step, by finally managing to install Notes 8 for the Mac and connecting it to our servers, indeed without too much hassle (also thanks to Marco's help...); it actually got through so easily that I decided to move the Notes data directory from the Windows under VM instance to the Mac instance.

Theoretically, you just drag & drop files from one to the other, except it is not a copy, but a move and the target position is some black hole I could not find - in a blistering sequence I lost my ID file and my Names file (which includes Diary, Contacts, Connections and Locations) thereby crippling in one fell swoop both instances of Notes. I hit the panic button and started thinking very hard how to undo this giant screwup.

I had a VM snapshot (not a very recent one, about a month old) but luckily Diary and Contacts are replicated with my phone, so I restored the snapshot and replicated one way with the phone - whew !

So my only remaning Win apps are Paintshop (which could be easily replaced if I could get myself to learn to use Aperture or Lightroom) and the Nokia PC Suite, which does not exist for the Mac; the latter could be replaced by an awkward combo replicating Notes to iCal using e.g. PocketMac and then from the iCal to the N95 with iSynch.

Except iSynch does not support the N95, unless you install the appropriate plugin. which cannot be installed on iSynch 3.0 (maybe in need of an update? traditionally Nokia's support for OSX is somewhat weak, so I guess I'll have to wait on that one...)

April 16th, 2008

Slo-Mo Blogging

Posted at 23.02.14 in  CGM  | PermaLink: Slo-Mo Blogging

Yes, a lazy april for blogging, but frankly not much going on if one excludes rocketing oil price, floundering financial markets, an election where a man which could not run in most countries of the world got elected by a landslide....

I am working on a seminar series on web2.0 - with everybody and his brother running web2.0 conferences, I feel there is a distinct overexposure risk which can kill the meme rapidly; so I have decided to shift my focus on concrete applications of web2.0 to marketing and communications. After all, we now have probably more experiences and projects under our belt than anyone else in the world, so we should turn this experience in learnings to be shared with our clients (and prospects?).

In particular, we have identified so far four categories of projects and I am beginning to think applications of web2.0 sort of tend to fall into one of these or a combination thereof:

1. flanking - say you realize your traditional marketing campaign focused on a "concept" (a term I use to define a broad array of things like brand values, consumer behaviours, etc.) does not work; there could be many reasons for this (lateness to market, entrenched competition, hostile regulators or NGOs...); the strategy consists in identifying neighboring concepts and developing campaigns to "own" these.

2. coverage - most brands have a set of well defined brand values they are trying to associate with. We can measure how well this set is covered by you and your competitors; moreover we can identify and measure unexpected associations, highlighting opportunities for niche campaigns which are usually much more effective.

3. niche - we can define consumer profiles based on concepts associated with each; actually our approach is to define profiles by clustering concepts; venues and key influencers can be identified for each profile, allowing for a much more efficient and effective niche campaign development and deployment.

4. surveillance - a population of concept can be measured in terms of popularity over time, assessing e.g. how important a concept is becoming and triggering alert mechanisms which can drive an Issue Management program nipping the potential issue in the bud.

More later on this.