Black Orange – Peter Du’s Blog

Boagworld explained to me today 10 techniques for an effective ‘call to action’. In which he wrote:

Studies in supermarkets have shown that if the shopper is presented with too many varieties they are less likely to make a purchase.

Many Pantenes on one single shelf

I am a bit skeptical about this “studies”, which I thought could be a conjured case, so I did some googling, leading me to an article published on American Psychology Association.

In the article there is my familiar jam/food/shampoo picking experience:

when shoppers are given the option of choosing among smaller and larger assortments of jam, they show more interest in the larger assortment. But when it comes time to pick just one, they’re 10 times more likely to make a purchase if they choose among six rather than among 24 flavors of jam.

And in an experience where 800,000 employees at 647 companies are given multiple choices about their retirement plan:

When given two choices, 75 percent participated, but when given 59 choices, only 60 percent did

While these two types of experiences remain true to my shopping experience in the supermarket and electronic store, I have also noted what I think is one important aspect of this choice situation: when I have something to buy in mind, especially those products that cost more than $500, I would have some criteria in mind. Fitting those criteria would mean I achieve the goal of buying the right product for use. I have recently bought my Canon VIXIA HV30, a very nice high definition camera. I didn’t go through all the available products on amazon like I would do in the supermarket, looking up and down, being afraid of missing any important product on the shelf. Instead, I just set up some simple filters to pick the features I want (Live Firewire Connection + HighDef), sort the price and read some reviews before I hit the checkout button.

That is explained by Nobel Laureate Herb Simon:

when consumer enters with an articulated preference, they often choose the first decent choice that fits their preference as opposed to exhaustively scanning all options until finding the perfect, or “maximizing” one.

Hope you’ve learnt something, I did.

Quick Version: Disable PEAPV1 and PEAPV2, they are the culprit preventing the proper connection.

Long Version:

Choose Connection from Settings Menu

Select Access Points

Create A New Access Point

Connection Name: NUSPEAP, Data bearer: Wireless LAN (!), WLAN netw. name: NUS(!), Network status: Hidden(!)

Change WLAN security mode: 802.11x(!)

Change EAP plug-in settings.

Move to PEAP

Enable It

Disable The Rest

Configure PEAP

Select a CA certificate

Select Thawte Premium

Keep the Realm and User Name unchanged

Disable PEAPv1 and PEAPv2(!)

Click Right to move to EAP settings, Disable All but MSCHAPv2

Move to MSCHAPv2

Configure It

Enter User Name (with domain) and Password

Voila, you have a working NUS PEAP connection

Choose Access Points

Browsing Google!

Guy Kawasaki, who is going to Malaysia to give a talk soon, has a good idea on this, but I am not talking about him. He’s Gary Vaynerchuk, interviewed on CNBC on his ideas how he has realized his dream, and how they helped other people.

The awesome writer Tim Ferris wrote a book called “The 4-Hour Workweek“, which talks how about how to cut down your time wasters in every day’s life.

Here is not-that-short interview by Robert Scoble.

There is a nice book excerpt on Life Hacker here.

I have read the book once this Month, and I am going to read the book again in one month’s time. Once thing I learnt from the book is the 20/80 percent rule. And one application of that is to find the 20% people which brings 80% of your happiness in your life. And talk to them more often.

Working less brings more opportunities for you to broaden your thinking and expand your vision, for the product of being effective in working is an improvement in amount of free time you have.

However, that does not mean you are able to get away with less effort. “Working Less” sounds deceptive enough as “Working fewer hours with same effort”

The secret of getting more productive through less time of work is to put in more efforts, not less. Why? I think you know the answer

4-hour work week,reading,interview,reading,rules

I think the success of Twitter over Jaiku is not really the technology behind it, or how good the technology is, but the fever of technology that is penetrating into people’s life since the lit of fire. Look, here is one new add-on for your Firefox which allows you to write anything you like without leaving the browser.

is the tool that I personally use to update both my Twitter and Jaiku account, though I love the way Jaiku is gathering information from my blog and flickr’s rss feeds.

My current update for both flickr and twitter account is:
Watching the censorship on Flickr (It actually mentioned Singapore)

Update: it looks like Jaiku is going to roll out a killer app in the coming supernova conference [via mashable]. I am really looking forward to that, Jaiku’s overall performance is great!

Update2: Oh well, here is the video posted to viddler about the new application running on top of Nokia N95. It looks awesome with native phone integration. I so wanted a Nokia phone now.

twitbin,jaiku,twitter,imfied,singapore,censorship

This cool dude is using his twitter to create this:

(a flower consisting of all the twitter avatars)

and Twitter Mosaic Qulit with all the avatars cached. I learn this from him: you can always create arts from a huge pile of things, regardless if the things are artistic enough to the standard of the creation.

Flying aroud the Google Map is kinda boring, as twittter vision realized, so they put this 3D version online. It’s totally cool with only AJAX and Flash to show 3D model!

The twitter badge provided by twitter itself seems to be only working when they are fewer than 2 people accessing it at the same time, so a self-made badge like this one is really cool. SWX is powering it

Twitter is again a good platform to harvest information, I am imaging the data and statistics they have should be huge, and personalized Ads and information service should be not that far from realization.

Seriously, Jaiku is better

twitter,fun,new media

Today (in different time zones) is Google Developer’s day. 
There are only two locations where Google is broadcasting live, one of which in London. Check it out here.

I know we coders..

Google Calendar now supports sending SMS reminder to phones in Singapore – Singtel and M1, and here is mine:

How can you shorten your URLs in your Gmail or any other web applications using only one key stroke? Use this piece of greasemonkey script http://bitterpill.org/gmail_tinyurl/. It’s really that simple, choose the URL, press Ctrl+Shift+T, voilà, done!

How can your organize you life better with dear Google Calender’s reminder function? You need a task list yeah? Just milk your Google Calendar with RememberTheMilk.com

When you don’t feel like putting a long post but rather gathering your thoughts and capture the links, comes to save you, it’s a very cool collection tool I would say – imagine it like a repository for all your thoughts, photos and discoveries.

These days, more and more people are using twitter to communicate with each other, but they are also longing for more functionalities that could help them. Guess what did I use more for reporting my activities to my friends? Jaiku -> it can import your Gmail account!

In case you wonder what did use for writing this post’s skeleton? Google Talk! How did I do that? Alright, there is this secret weapon called ,this the secret powerful weapon I use to do everything I need from an IM client.

sms,google,im,useful,url,imtool

Today I was about to share some audio files on my blog when I discovered, by surprise, there is no easy way of sharing single audio files at all. Comparing to Youtube, there is no iListen for audio files of shorter length. I miss my blip.tv.

After doing some researches on the Internet, I discovered some posts are suggesting using ODEO to share the files, so that you can have a nice flash player for the files like this:

When I found I could not upload any audio to ODEO, I came across this page which says "SORRY NOOB NOT ALLOWED TO UPLOAD" and encourages people to use alternative services to host the audio files. It’s a weird decision of a company which needs the listeners to use their service. So in the end, I used a mix of SwitchPod + ODEO so that I could still have the nice flash player instead of the tiny wordpress player.

wordpress,odeo,swithpod,audio hosting

A sizable number of blogging tools has this topic centric idea implemented in their interface. An example is as follows:

Title:What do I need to blog with a topic in mind?

To a great extend, this “topic centric” design forces people to think around a main point. You will always hear from people who seldom blog asking this question: “What to blog? I have nothing to blog about.” But is there really nothing happening in their life they could write down, or the amount of things and events taking place around in their life is so overwhelming that they have no clue how to organize them under different titles on which that they could write down their ideas?

For most of people, we will agree on the latter point: organizing disordered matters into ordered topics. There are really indeed interesting things taking place every second – be it in the real world, near you and I, or in the virtual world, on the Internet. We are observing them every day, unavoidably. We cannot shut our eyes when people are in front talking, treating them as non-existing objects with voice capabilities; we cannot ignore a piece of email with a title like “Girl running naked in NUS, as seen by thousands of students.”, reading it as “Aliens found in School of Computing, NUS”; and we cannot stare at a book, as if we are staring at a log, disguising itself into a deceiving shape that looks very much like an ordinary book.

Many a time we choose to ignore something because either we do not want to acknowledge the importance of the item in our life, or its importance has no value to our life. Take an annoying big black fly buzzing loudly around you with its fat wings. We do find it uncomfortable when we are concentrating our every single nerve in the brain to prepare for the upcoming history exam. However, the option to snap the fly from the middle of its tiny fragile body is beyond our ability. So what do we do instead of flying around to catch the fly? We IGNORE the fly, treating it as non-existing object with strange voice capability.

The more we ignore, the less we categorize things into different classifications. As more and more things accumulate, piling up in our head, we could only think of two types of things, the important ant the necessary. What our leaders ask us to do is important, and what we do to live is necessary. Then we push ourselves comfortably into this loop: Important-Necessary-Necessary-Important… The longer we linger in this loop, the better we are at doing it. Living a life become simple: when the waves of things are rushing ashore towards us, we set up a barrier right in front with this “Importance & Necessity” net, capturing only those tiny fish which could squeeze through the net.

Writing up until here, I realize my life is in this mode for most of time. The fish I let through, though being of great quantity, are too tiny in size to fill my everlasting craving for food, and I constantly stop myself from capturing the big fish, for I think it takes more time to set up the net, more time to process the prey and more time to cook the meat. These are just the imagination in my mind and in fact does not have to be, if I could equip myself with a proper attitude, arm myself with a right spirit and change my attitude to be more positive and affirmative.

I want to go hunting, to be a fisher.