As of august I will be leaving my position as director at my current employer and will be heading to business school. I got admitted to Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School for a full-time international MBA program. Although I will miss Slovakia a bit I am really looking forward to the new environment and all the new challenges I will face there. And tbh it's not about "jump starting my career" or "taking my career to another level" it's about doing something I am really passionate about and changing to a really international environment. So I am resurrecting this blog and am going to use it to post about my experience there and hopefully talk about stuff I learn. Btw I am starting on September 1st, 2010 in Leuven, Belgium.

So I am on vacation with friends hoping to get some well deserved rest. There is no wifi where we are staying so the only connection possibility is edge (no 3G here). Can you imagine 100k data costs 26 cents? Unbelieveable. The EU should crack down much harder on the european carriers to lower the roaming data costs. Thank god Blackberry email doesn’t need much data.

Not sure whether you noticed but yesterday the Swedish authorities attempted to take down The Pirate Bay. I don’t want to go into details of what happened – you can read all about it here, here and here (actually on most of the internet) – suffice to say the page was back up in 3 hours due to the fact the TPB crew was ready for a move like this.

Today I don’t want to talk about whether pirating music/movies is morally ok or not.

What I want to talk about is the fact that the music labels and studios still don’t get their own customer.  Why do people pirate music/movies? The RIAA and MPAA would like you to believe that it’s because it’s easier to pirate than to buy CDs and DVDs. And you know what? They are RIGHT.

But it’s not easier because pirating enables you to get music/movies for free but because the user experience is much better when pirating.  Imagine until the arrival of the Apple iTunes store and later the Amazon MP3 store the only legal option to get media was to buy it on a CD/DVD. If you heard a great tune somewhere on the radio there was no way for you to get it immediately. You had to jump in your car, drive to a mall and get a CD. Same goes for movies.

The arrival of iTunes a few years back should have been a wake-up call. On every Apple keynote (WWDC or Macworld) Steve Jobs reminded everyone how well the music store was doing. With each passing keynote we saw the rise iTunes on the list of top sellers of music in the US. Did the labels/studios get it? No way. They put pressure on Apple to have all the music DRMed just so none of that music would get pirated. They got the chance to get it again when iTunes introduced movies or when Amazon started it’s own MP3 store but they still didn’t get it. The final straw came when iTunes became the top seller of music in the US.

Pirating is the best competition for the distributors of CDs/DVDs – the user experience is much better. You think of a song and in minutes you can have it with little effort and free.

So why is iTunes successful?

Because the user experience is much better than to go and buy a CD or to pirate music. It’s just that simple. If you think pirating music is easier than to buy stuff of the iTunes store just try it. You have to install a torrent download application. Find the right file that is not compromised by a virus and that contains what you want, you have to hope you got enough seeds for you to download at a reasonable speed and you have the thought in the back of your mind that you are doing something illegal.  Yes you are getting the song/album for free but is it worth the effort compared to the 5-10 $ you would pay for the high quality song/album from iTunes? I don’t think so. 

My point is the RIAA and MPAA should treat TPB as a competitor to the distributors of music. They should step-up their effort in online distribution and try to create space in the online music/movie retail market for an iTunes/Amazon competitor. They should help Apple and Amazon setup licensing of music/movies in Europe so that these companies can make their services available in more countries. I understand that a better service will never kill pirating – there will always be pirates – but the music/movie industry can go a long way of getting a much bigger piece of the music/movies downloads pie and even get paid for it. Isn’t it all about money in the end?

I couldn’t resist and upgraded to the new MacBook Pro (2,66 Ghz, 4GB RAM, NVIDIA 9600GT, built in battery) from my early 2008 MacBook Pro (not unibody). Not that I needed to but after changing jobs and having some tough times in the new one I figured I deserved a present for myself. Anyway the machine is unbelievable – powerful, long lasting battery and a beautiful screen – I like glossy. I know some people hate glossy and actually Apple in yesterday started again to offer the matte screen (50$) but I really like the vibrant feeling the glossy display delivers. Also I installed the Windows 7 RC build on a 50 GB partition and was testing it. Only issue I ran into was that I couldn’t use my headset mic in games. In the Windows desktop it works fine but once I enter the game the mic just doesn’t hear me… Anyway to anyone wondering whether the new MacBook Pros are worth the money – as far as I am concerned – no doubt about it.

My girlfriend Martina has had her current Acer 12" laptop for quite some time now and she recently asked me whether she should start looking for a new one. As the Acer is equipped with the original Core Duo Intel processor (yep the really shitty one) I told her she is ready for a refresh.

When picking a new laptop her main priorities were size, weight and compatibility – she works as a professional translator and needs a lot of Dictionaries that don’t necessary run on Linux and Macs. Nevertheless when choosing we have actually eliminated all windows laptops and came to the conclusion the new MacBook would be the best choice.

The size is about right, it’s quite light – she didn’t want the original plastic MacBooks due to weight concerns and in addition it’s quite powerful. As far as the compatibility is concerned I helped her by testing all the stuff she needed on my MacBook Pro and to my pleasant surprise all of her applications either run on Mac OS X, have good replacements or you can run them through CrossOver. With her fears silenced she went on and bought the 2.0 GHz new unibody MacBook. In the coming days I will be helping her with the migration to the Mac and I hope she will get accustomed quickly. And if I come across anything interesting I’ll post it here.

My girlfriend is a professional translator and interpreter (if anyone needs one – I can supply a contact) and she uses a 2005 (!!) Acer Travelmate 3012 WTMI as her main computer. Now I know what the common opinion is regarding Acers product lines but I must say it served her quite well. It has a nice build, decent performance (2005 context) and is quite small/light (12"). The problem is obvious – it’s old and needs to be replaced by something a bit more – well current. As I am a recent convert to the Mac platform and Apple just released a new portfolio of great notebooks I’m thinking a beautiful new MacBook would be the best choice for her.

We all know this situation – me a tech guy, recently jumped the Windows ship and am happily swimming in the Mac sea – am trying to persuade my girlfriend that this new 1300 $  MacBook is a perfect solution to her problems. Smell bias? Normally I would say she absolutely does not care about tech – she just needs to get her work done – but these new Macbooks have really penetrated the ignorance aura of a completely un-techie person. This means two important things:

1. I think I can get her to buy it:)
2. Apple did hit a cord with the non-ethusiast consumer with the new Macbooks

As I mentioned in the earlier post – the decision made by Apple not to go to the low-cost notebook market seems to have a decent chance of paying of. The new Macbooks are really polished, beautiful looking and powerful which does not only justify the higher price but also gives you the feeling your main tool for work is not some grey box but a work of art made by people that enjoy their work.

It will be perfect for her. Or is that just the Mac-Convert effect?

Anyway I still have to get all her stuff running under OS X – especially dictionaries. Anyone got experience?

Today, I have finally delivered my thesis and now I am wondering what to do. After 2 years during which this unfinished business was always on the back of my mind I at last feel a bit free. The problem is – what do I do with the newly won time? One thing is I started this blog, though I still ain’t sure what’s it gonna be about but I am not sure this will take up much of my interest. I am thinking of getting back to some coding but will see… Until then I guess I’ll vent my frustruations here.

I am a tech person. What does this mean? Well it means I spend a lot of time with tech stuff – computers, internet, online services, gadgets – everything. Any new tool, gadget or service will get my attention and I’ll most probably at least try it out. People who have no idea what Flickr, iTunes music store or Audible is are for me difficult to understand. These services are amazing and really use the power of the internet to deliver value – so why don’t all people use them.

Well non-tech people don’t know and don’t care. My mother is on 6 week stay in Ireland and she wanted to share some photos from her stay. Before she went I set her up with a gmail account, including blogger. She wanted to document her stay and was willing to give blogger a try. Now after a few weeks she is ok with blogger but also wanted to share pictures she made there and she didn’t know how. So I helped her over Skype to get picasa and upload some albums on to the internet. It is not something she would have done without me but as I recommended her these things she got used to them and now is happily adding pictures to her web albums all the time.

The point is it’s up to us tech people to sort the really good tech stuff from the crappy stuff so the non-tech people can be what they want to be – just plain users.