I was recently given a laptop bag courtesy of Targus from their latest Spruce EcoSmart(tm) range. I was delighted with the gift. My first laptop bag was a Targus too – years ago.

I checked on the Targus website and they do have some pretty nice feminine designs but the bags in the new range were all masculine models. No market for feminine designs? I wonder. Are women not concerned about the bags they carry their laptops in? I asked on twitter and Eevon responded, “the bags either make us (women) look like a messenger or a turtle.” LOL. I do have “turtle” bags and I agree that they will destroy any business image we try to maintain.

Anyways, I had an upcoming trip overseas and I chose one with a simple top-load design to take with me. Actually, I chose the one that looked least masculine. Function-wise, it passes. My laptop and all the other gadgets came home safely. It went through getting tossed around in the overhead compartment and kicked under the seat on a plane. The ergonomically designed strap padding was very comfortable. I have no idea what material was used to make it but it felt like shock absorbers which was great. This is important because a lousy strap padding can make a bag feel twice as heavy. The bag’s material is  soft to the touch and the inside is well padded. So cushy that when I laid it on the floor, my cat hopped on and went to sleep.

Targus didn’t disappoint in quality but maybe one day we will see more stylish and feminine looking bags in various colours other than black.

Hear it from the ladies, do any of you wish there were more feminine laptop bag designs? Example here: http://goo.gl/SKvw (Targus for her).

Want to get Kindle books on your iPhone/iPod Touch or PC? Here’s a hack, ok, call it a tip. This is not illegal, you still have to pay for the book. It’s just a way around the restrictions Amazon has in place to stop non-residents of the US from buying Kindle books. Let’s get to it.

What you need:
1. A PC (not on Mac yet) or an Apple iPhone/iPod Touch.
2. A credit card
3. An Amazon account. If you don’t have one, register for one. Some Amazon shopping experience will help too. Now who hasn’t shopped at Amazon.com these days?
4. A US address

1. INSTALL THE KINDLE READER SOFTWARE/APP

Installing for the PC:
Download and install the Kindle for PC software.

Installing for the iPhone/iPod Touch:
This is a little trickier. You can only download the Kindle for iPhone app from the US app store. Don’t mess with the account you have right now. Set up another app store account with a different email, a US address and don’t enter your credit card info.

If your app store is in the Malaysian app store, you can easily change that by clicking on the Malaysian flag icon at the bottom right and change it to “United States”.

Now, download Kindle for iPhone app and sync. You shouldn’t lose your information. Once you see the app on your phone, you can log out of the US app store and login to your usual one.

2. Set up your Amazon account to go shopping.

First, use your credit card to buy a gift card that you will send to yourself. The books I buy usually cost around $10-15 so I bought a $50 gift card which should get me 3-4 Kindle books. Don’t log out yet, wait for email. Once the email with the gift card claim code arrives, click on “Start shopping”. This will credit the amount into your Amazon account.

Remain logged in. Go into your account and remove all credit card information. This is what’s making Amazon stop you from getting into the Kindle store. Also change the region or country of origin to the US. If you’re asked to enter a US address, you can use the one above.

Now you’re all set. Click on “Kindle Store” and go shopping.

3. When you’re ready to buy.

Click on “Buy now with 1-click” and tell Amazon where you want the book sent – to your iPhone/iPod Touch or to your PC.

It will come with instructions on how to retrieve the book from the app on your PC / iPhone / iPod Touch.

Enjoy!

BTW, you can leave your second App Store account alone, it may come in handy in the future. I use mine to download other apps that are not available to Malaysians just so I can drool at what I can’t have.

If you are now wondering what this foursquare thing is all about, here’s the pitch. More info at http://foursquare.com/businesses/

Laugh now. Laugh while you can because the Minister of Information, Communications, Culture and Arts will ban Twitter and Facebook tomorrow. Soon, say goodbye to tv, radio and newspapers also. Mobile phones might go too. These are all western inventions – very bad.

All of you who tweeted with the #yorais hashtag will be sent to prison (including those innocently asking “what is #yorais ah?”) and put on the receiving end of hard labour and a few strokes of the cane, one stroke for each tweet. That will teach you to drag Rais’ reputation through the twitter mud.

Wonder if the PM is in on it or is he having a word with Rais about thinking before talking.

One can only wonder if they had a chat or what in the world possessed Rais Yatim to make a statement like this. In any case, welcome to Malaysia. Hope your stay is a pleasant one. If you need room service, please send a smoke signal.

I like Gowalla but Foursquare seems to be doing more to engage me. First, Flickr integration with machine tagging, then superuser status and now Layar – the Augmented Reality app. I’m tired of updating both Gowalla and Foursquare every time. Can one win me over soon? Let’s see what both has got to offer.

I’ll admit, I haven’t been a big fan of Foursquare.

I used to like Foursquare until I found out how easy it was to game the system and check-in to places without having to be there physically. In less than an hour I could get 300+ points to put me on top of the leaderboard. The game turned me off instantly.

Another thing that turned me off Foursquare was how long it took to check-in or create a new place as compared to Gowalla which picks up your location automatically so you don’t need to enter the venue’s address. People don’t always give a friend the address to a restaurant, we say it’s behind KLCC or between this place and that place. Who remembers the address anyways. So you take more time creating places in Foursquare than in Gowalla. Foursquare is also quite new in KL so a LOT of places are not on the map.

Talking about map – here’s another problem I have with Foursquare. Even with the address entered, the map can go wrong – placing  the pin in an area you haven’t even heard of or a place you’ll never go to like in the middle of a lake. Unlike Gowalla, you cannot edit the map at all in Foursquare which is really frustrating. I thought the Superuser status would let me fix the map but I still couldn’t do it. Gee, how hard is it to implement this feature? What I can do as a Level 1 Superuser is limited to merging duplicates and closing rubbish venues like “I hate my boss”.

Duplicate venues was the other reason why I found Foursquare messed up. This is also another way to game the system, you can create 5 different Mid Valleys, spelling it slightly different, check-in to all 5 and get extra points to get you closer to the lead in the game. Some guys love that and would often proudly announce on twitter when they become a mayor and what new badges they got. Maybe some of them deserve it.

It’s actually not all bad, there are cool things about Foursquare like its community of people who take the time to leave tips that pop-up when you’re near a venue. The number of people who are doing this to help others however, are still very small. When I see a really useful tip pop up from someone in Foursquare, I always say a silent thank you to the person who left it. This is what makes Foursquare useful. I hope this community of tip contributors will grow.

flickr machine tag

The integration of Foursquare into other services is something I find very exciting. It is integrated into Flickr so you can add machine tags to pictures taken at venues listed in Foursquare. Folks looking at your flickr picture can click on it and be taken to the venue page to read your review/tip or get the address to visit the place themselves. The map can’t be trusted yet and I would also sometimes add “Don’t trust the map” into my Foursquare tips. Foursquare venues and tips are also integrated into Layar as an AR layer. When you pan your phone around you’ll see venues and tips popping into your screen which is pretty cool. I can see my own tips and other people’s tips on what’s interesting nearby. Again, please note that the location map in Foursquare cannot be trusted which means that the locations in Layar are also dodgy. The integration (idea) into other services that I use regularly is what’s making Foursquare engaging to me. So I am taking a second look and going to use it a bit more, together with Gowalla.

I’m not about to forget Gowalla yet but Foursquare is close to making me give it up. Foursquare just needs to improve the venue creation process and make the map editable, not just for superusers but for everyone.  The game is fun for awhile (pretend you’re not hacking it) so it’s nice but not important. Game-wise, I like Gowalla’s better because it’s harder to exploit. The idea of picking up items and leaving something behind for others to pick up is a nice touch. In Gowalla, when you create a spot, you can become a founder by dropping an item. But it also gets very frustrating when you have run out of items to drop, it is a total killjoy. I want to like Gowalla and I’ve given a lot of feedback but it seems to have fallen on deaf ears. I’m now hoping Foursquare can improve further and make it the one and only location based check-in game on my iPhone.

Add me:

On Foursquare: http://foursquare.com/user/thechannelc
On Gowalla: http://gowalla.com/users/thechannelc

9 out of 10 location maps of places I create in Foursquare are off. Here's one example.

Jan 10 Update: There was apparently a January 8 update at the Foursquare blog that I missed. The location finder has improved and I tested it with a location I created this evening and I left the address field empty just to see if the app can track down my GPS location. It did, yay. But it still won’t let me edit the map and fix all the previous venues that have their pins someplace other than where it should be. Give us editable maps, Foursquare.

Even though I don’t have a kindle, I have been reading ebooks since 2003. I get the pdf versions from ereader.com and back then I was reading them on a Palm V.  One of the first apps I installed on my new iPhone 3Gs recently was Barnes and Nobles ebook reader – for the fun of it. B&N’s weird, they won’t sell me the ebooks like Amazon but they won’t stop me from downloading the reader unlike Amazon.

I do know a way to download the Amazon reader and buy kindle books but it’s a tedious process. This regional restriction put in place by publishers is stupid. If physical books can be shipped anywhere by Amazon why can’t ebooks be sold as well? For the first time in Amazon’s history, they sold more ebooks than physical books this Christmas. Ebooks are the future. No, ebooks are here today.

Ebooks are great, they don’t take up anymore space on shelves in homes or at the bookstores. They don’t kill more trees. They don’t contribute to carbon footprint moving around from printer to distributor to retailers and finally to a reader. They cost less and save consumers more. They can meet consumer demands faster. They weigh nothing so you can carry a small library in your pocket. More copies of a book in digital form can be sold because it’s a personal copy once it’s purchased, I can’t really share an ebook as easily as I can a physical book. More sales, more money, everyone happy. No? The one bad thing I see with ebooks though is that I can’t get an author to autograph it. I’m sure someone somewhere is working on a solution where I can have a video of me kissing the author and a digital scribble with the words “Last night was amazing. Sign” attached to the ebook.

There are so many reasons why an ebook is better than a physical book and why regional restrictions need to be tossed out the window. Who’s with me?

Check out:  The Business Case for E-Readers.

I had heard about Cristang from friends on Facebook and Twitter. “Cristang’s pork burgers are to die for” someone said. “For sure, one of the top three places for burgers in KL” said another. I decided to go taste for myself.

I went there after a meeting at 5pm and they were opening up for dinner time. Being first on the scene gave me the opportunity to chat with Yin – part-time restaurant manager and long-time assistant to Gerald, who owns the place. I told her I came to investigate claims of Cristang having the best pork burgers in town and we started talking. Not long after, Gerald came and we sat down, talking for two whole hours.

I told him I was surprized his name was Gerald and not Cris Tang. “I get that a lot and I’ve had people come in here telling me they are friends of Cris Tang and wants a discount on their bill.” He explained that “Cristang” is a slang that means ‘people of Christian faith’ and is commonly used by the Eurasian community of Portuguese descent to refer to each other.  Portuguese itself is not the correct term to refer to folks like Gerald because he’s not Portuguese and the food he serves isn’t anything you’ll find in Portugal. We’ll call it Portuguese anyways, to keep it short. So, it could be that our Malaysian Portuguese food is the country’s first fusion food if they win the Pie Tie and Pongteh ownership debate with the Nyonya’s (Malaysia assimilated Straits Chinese?).

Gerald is full of wonderful stories. There’s a story behind the restaurant’s famous pork burger called P7 The Urban Legend. I asked how that name came about but first, all the burger names have a P and a number. What that means is the number of pork items in the burger. P1 means one pork item and that’s the pork patty and P2 has two pork items – patty + bacon etc. The P could also mean grilled cajun prawns, petai, chilli pork con carne and pineapple. P7 however, doesn’t have seven pork items but because P1-P6 were taken. The P7 only appeared on the menu a month and a half ago but they have been serving it for over five months like a beta test. It was so good that word got around and people were often heard asking for the P7 like an urban legend.

I figured most of the items on the menu are from recipes passed down through generations of portuguese in his family but the burgers were far from the usual Portuguese fare. “Most of my dishes are accidents in the kitchen” he said, “I love to cook and I’ve never been to chef school so I don’t know my limits and there are no rules to tell me what I can and cannot do with food.” He does have one personal rule though, after one of his dishes become famous, he won’t eat it anymore in case he jinx it. I think this trait is in a lot of artists or perfectionists or both. They always think their best work is yet to come so if he tasted his dish, he might fix something that’s not broken and end up breaking it instead. It’s not like programming, flavor is highly subjective.

Well I had a great time today tasting the legendary P7 and having a wonderful chat with Gerald. The P7 is indeed very delicious. The petai (a strong tasting bean) did not over-power the taste of the pork which was so juicy and tender, it melts in your mouth. I’m a fan of burgers again.

Cristang is at 8 Avenue, Jalan 8/1. Tel: +603.7956.7877. They are opened for lunch and dinner, 6 days a week and closed on Mondays. Highly recommended are of course the P7 Urban Legend Pork Burger, Bacon and Eggs Soup, Bacon Rib Ambila, Tenggiri with Soy Limang and Debal Chicken.

Follow Cristang on Twitter: @cristangrstrnt

Disclosure: I have not received any freebies for writing this article. The only privilege I got was Gerald’s time and the wonderful chat we had.

so-just-where-does-all-that-iphone-money-go

Now let’s look closer to home. Malaysians pay Maxis (the only telco offering the iPhone) US$714 for a 32GB iPhone 3Gs with a 1 year contract. Let’s assume Maxis pays Apple the same $550 per unit, Maxis still makes $164 just from selling you the phone and you pay the entire sum upfront, Maxis doesn’t have to subsidize a thing and they’ll make even more money from your voice and data plan. There is nothing to lose and all to gain for Maxis. Brilliant.

Did you say “This is so unfair. To think I’ve stayed with them all these years, through good reception and no reception and I get jack”? Well, if you’re the only player in the market, the rules are yours to dictate.

Want to pay nothing or close to it for a Maxis iPhone? Their corporate customers get the iPhone for free. So if you know anyone who’s a corporate customer, you can buy it off her for cheap or convince her to give it to you. Keep telling her it’s a bitch to type with a touch screen keypad – this is the bain of many new iphone owners in the first week of playing around with the device. With a hint of urgency in your voice, tell her to get rid of it (and give it to you) before technology becomes obsolete and she has to pay people to take it off her. Check ebay and she’ll see how many unsold first generation iphones there are. If she has no patience for touch screen, she won’t search ebay and will just take your word for it. Score! Congratulations and welcome to the iPhone owners club.

This is a social media aggregator disguised as an elite social media hall of fame. Vocanic Ltd, a company based in Singapore started a social media campaign in search of Malaysia’s top 500 social mediaphiles to take part in a secret project that was revealed yesterday in a “briefing”. I had the invite but I had better things to do on a Sunday afternoon.

With an eye on twitter I watched the briefing unfold. It became clear that this was a cheap stunt to collect data from unsuspecting social media users.  The company had little clue how to develop a service and now they need the 500 people to give it some direction. Or maybe this was another disguise because what they were really after was user information. There must have been more than 500 people who have given their information in the 6-page registration process.

I’m especially disappointed at being misled into a beta testing program and having to fill 6 pages with personal information that the developer couldn’t even use to create a service that’s half decent and launch-worthy. Then again, the 6 pages of questions were so badly structured, flawed and irrelevant, I’d be amazed that any meaningful data can be extracted to help an application developer. Just take a look at the pages I’ve screen capped.

I am ever happy to beta test new apps and volunteer feedback if a developer makes it clear that this is an invitation to a beta test. And if it’s a beta test, don’t collect personal information that has little relevance to product development.

So would I be willing to participate in this further? No. This is now Project DELETE.