Blackberry sync on Mac - thank god for gmail contacts

I tried to sync my blackberry contacts with my Mac address book contacts today using the not so long ago released software for this, and I have to say that RIM has some work to do here yet. Thankfully I have my contacts stored in my gmail account cause the sync made a mess and a half of my blackberry AND my mac address book. I can understand that this isn't the easiest thing to get right, but when my email fields say SMTP instead of the actual email address for many contacts, I think the software is unusable. Data loss in this type of application is not acceptable. I'm sure there is some perfectly logical explanation of how this happened, but sorry guys, I am just an end user and I was just running your software. Let's just say that this is a great way to motivate Mac users to buy an iPhone instead of a Blackberry when the next upgrade moment comes. Hope you can fix it before then.

Now back to fixing my address book, I am at 'J' and have been at it for a while now.........

ING Rights Issue - Great scam!

[EDIT: Ok, I was quite frustrated yesterday. Today I did manage to get trough to the bank and get this done but I am still not impressed with the hassle that it was.]

For those who are more versed in the financial world, I apologize for messing up the names of some things, I hope the message gets across nonetheless.

Recently ING announced that they would be holding a rights issue for their current shareholders. I own some ING stock and so this morning I decided to call ING and exercise my right to buy extra shares at a discount. Once I got on the line, I finally understood what this rights issue means. First I have to backtrack a bit and explain what happens if you don't contact ING in order to exercise your right to buy shares or to sell the options. You get nothing. They don's sell the options on your behalf as I have seen done in other situations, you get nothing. At about €2 per share discount of the rights issue stock, this can be a lot of money that you lose. After reading this in the letter they sent, I wondered who would be so lazy and not call to at least sell they rights that they have. So I called and realized what the deal is. The call line that they have set up has an infinite wait time. The machine at the beginning tells you that the wait time is 'longer than an hour' which can literally mean forever, and that they are charging you €0.10 per minute. This is the ONLY way to exercise these rights even though I do all my other banking and investment online. Nice way to treat their investors, right?

My personal guess is that this is done on purpose. No, I don't think they care about the €0.10 per minute on the phone line, they are a bank and this amount of money is insignificant. No, this is merely a means of making sure you eventually give up and hang up. This way they can have tons of press about a rights issue and how they are giving opportunity to shareholders, etc while at the same time making it impossible to actually exercise these rights. What then happens to all the rights that people had and could not exercise? Does the bank get to do that instead? I don't know the answer to this, but in light of recent behavior of the financial institutions worldwide, I would not be surprised if the bank exercised those rights on their own behalf and essentially sold themselves their own stock at a hefty discount. They then sell it on the market at market value and dilute the stock thus hurting those that the rights issue was supposed to protect from this dilution - the investors. Mind you, I don't think that all investors have this problem, I am sure there is a special phone number you can call if you are one of those who are "in". I am however one of the small investors who doesn't have such contacts and am sad to say feel like I am being given the shitty end of the stick. Par for the course these days I guess, I mean we can't expect a large bank like ING to compete if they don't rip off somebody.

new xcomplica.com

A few days ago I launched a new version of xcomplica.com . My friend Alex at Wars van Peoha made a great design for me to start from and I am proud to say that I did the rest myself. The html, css and jQuery bits took me the longest since I am no expert in these while the ASP.NET MVC back end was a breeze.

This is the first step in my plan to grow XComplica past the one man show that it now is. Other steps are underway, stay tuned.

Don't be evil, right?

Yesterday and today I felt first hand how giant Google has become and the negative effects it has on the world. I now see that while the stuff coming out of the Googleplex is often very cool, Google is in some ways becoming the Wallmart of the internet. As soon as they show up, everyone else is expected to go broke. What do I mean by that? Well online there aren't physical locations that companies compete in, but there are product spaces. And as soon as Google enters a product space, any companies active therein are suddenly second class citizens expected to be overtaken by the giant Google. So while the Google product may even be inferior, just the Google brand gives it the edge.

How did I see this? I own shares in a Dutch company called Tom Tom that is one of the market leaders in navigation systems. Yesterday Google announced their entry into this market, and shares of Tom Tom as well as others in the market plummeted. I am of course not happy about the financial outcome for me. More importantly however, I am starting to see that the sheer size and reputation of Google is going to make it impossible for them to stand by their "Don't be evil" philosophy.

Working on MAC

I have been working on my Macbook Pro for a few weeks now and have to say I have been quite happy with it. The hardware is great and I have found OS X to have everything I need for my daily tasks. I do miss having Visual Studio and MS Office on my local machine, but I have a virtual machine using Parallels that I use for this software. Parallels has been working quite well, I just can't get the automatic snapshot thing to work. It took an automatic snapshot once, and since then has been ignoring the schedule I gave it.

The only downside that I have found on the Mac compared to my Thinkpad is that the Macbook is not as tough. I have unintentionally put both of them through the same drop test and the Thinkpad fared much better. Both times I dropped the machine in question a half meter onto the floor. The Thinkpad had a little cosmetic damage on the battery, which can be replaced quite inexpensively. The Macbook has a nasty dent on the bottom right corner, and I don't think I will be trying to hammer it out anytime soon. I have yet to talk to Apple to see what the repair would cost but I have a feeling replacing the unibody will not be so cheap. Luckily both machines work just fine, which is more than I would expect from many other notebooks if I put them through this test. I guess I have now "personalized" my Macbook and will have to live with the dent. I do feel like a tool for doing this to my computer right after I bought it. I just hope my warranty will still be valid.

Code snippet for Visual Studio for creating site columns

I have created a code snippet file which I use to create site columns in CAML. It is by no means perfect or complete but I find it useful so someone else might too. How to use code snippets is explained in many places so I won't regurgitate that here. I will mention that you need to type the open angle bracket, hit ESC to disable intellisense and then type the site column shortcut followed by TAB.

Get the snippet file here http://www.xcomplica.com/downloads/sitecolumns.snippet.txt and remember to remove the txt extension.

Screwed by sky europe

Gotta love the 5 hour delay on a 2 hour flight, and the sudden change of destination. Thanks sky europe, never flying you again. I guess I'm not alone though seeing as you're going bankrupt.

UPDATE: Screwed a second time when they really did go bankrupt and I had to buy a new flight home from vacation.
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