Personal Archives - Page 3 of 17

Microsoft is cool again

I may need to see a shrink because of my addiction to email. I bet I’m the only one in my circle who has ever paid for an email app on the phone. Who does that? Considering that I use Android where you could get everything and anything (didn’t say anyone) for free then you could understand my malady.

Don’t be quick to blame me though. I live and die with my emails. I hate phone calls to a passion; my phone has been on silent since March 13, 2006. Don’t ask me how I could remember that date.

So having an efficient app is one thing that could make my miserable life bearable. After all what’s the most efficient way to harass my hapless colleagues? Emails!

My company uses Microsoft Exchange, and nothing beats that better than a native app. Too bad, Microsoft came late to the party. With the ghost of Ballmer exercised, Satyah started balling. I can tell you now that the most useful and fun to use app for managing emails on iPad is Microsoft Outlook. Not only does it do that, it hooks to your Drive, One Drive, Dropbox or other places where you’re hiding your smurty pictures.

Ok, Microsoft bought Acompli but who cares?

Excellence is an OCD

Sometimes you don’t know where to draw the line between OCD and the strive for excellence. Maybe it doesn’t make any difference or does it?

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is terrible and has made lives of millions a living hell. This is just a comparison and in no way making light the suffering OCD patients go through every waking minute of their miserable lives.

I was lucky, or unlucky as some of my friends would say, to have started my career at an organization where the passion for excellence was a religion. Looking back, I think I drank more than my fair share of that Kool-Aid because I really can’t see quite a lot of that excellence there anymore. But that’s a story for another day.

Those were days we believed we could do anything and nothing but the best matters. It affected my life; I ended up striving to get things done properly. Let me be truthful, to get some things done correctly. For the rest, I couldn’t give a damn.

I haven’t and may not reach perfection, but I never lost that drive. For a lot of my colleagues and friends, it can be an annoying nervous tick from an over-caffeinated dude struggling with a mid-life crisis. What has the straightness of a table got to do with excellence?

Maybe it has a lot to do with it.

I’ve always been amazed at well-made things – buildings, furniture, accessories, electronics, websites, and even well-written articles. I’ve since driven my unfortunate colleagues mad with that maniacal catchphrase “we should be the best.” Whatever that means.

IMHO, the underpinning of excellence isn’t about where you are but never losing the desire to get better every day or week (depends on your schedule :-)). It has helped me in a lot of ways. For example, even though my blog (this one you are reading, or what do you expect?) is riddled with more grammatical errors than the grains of sand at Eleko Beach but then it never matters to me. Show me, and I will correct them. Teach me, and I will learn. I get better every day!

No story better captures this than the quest of a man to rid Wikipedia of one single grammatical error: Comprise of. Now, I’m not a language buff, but it has been argued that this is bad English. He’s done thousands of edits and has been sworn at by thousands of Wikipedians for his overbearing manner. Who cares? He’s probably using that to calm the demons demanding perfection in his feverish soul.

Is it worth it? Maybe, after all, I think a straight table with chairs neatly tucked is also worth it.

Old geeks die hard

So here I’m, sitting and swearing at my desk trying to solve a server side graphing problem. How did I end up here?

You see, I should have transitioned from geek to management but the devil inside some computer just wouldn’t leave my tail alone. I have got that long thing trapped in a server door. Lord have mercy.

Anyway, what’s make some hair gray is that Adobe, in its tiny non-existent wisdom, made a mess of charting in CF11. I bet I’m the last person (OK, including some random dude in my office) left on earth who still do sh*t in Coldfusion. So I spent the whole day trolling the web like a serial killer, looking for some random piece of whatever to solve this problem.

Meanwhile I already preached the parable of the bulldog to my unfortunate colleagues yesterday. A bulldog, as long as it isn’t in Calabar, never gives up. So how dare I give up on this today? Truth is, I think I made up that parable. I can’t even remember if a bulldog doesn’t run away at the slightest sound of trouble.

Which bull dog wants a stone on the head?

I need a hefty lunch.

Nothing Good Lasts Forever

When I moved to the Android world the first thing I kicked off was the inglorious Samsung keyboard for Swiftkey. It felt so good.

Like everything that looks too good to be true it didn’t allow me to enjoy it too long. It started dragging my phone badly with typed messages taking seconds to appear. Sometimes as long as 5 seconds.

I haven’t been known for patience so I promptly kicked its butt out for something more in use but less popular. Google Keyboard.
So far its working like charm but let’s see how long that lasts before I hit the divorce courts.

50,412,559 Nigerians on the Internet

The reality is, I’m not much better than the armchair consultants I ranted about. Some months ago I wrote that Nigeria doesn’t have more than 17M internet users. I did my calculation based on MTN’s year end result and extrapolated that for the whole industry.

Please read paragraph 5 of page 50 of the MTN Group Annual Report for 2012.

Not a bad try but then NCC poked their fat fingers into my eyes and called me a freaking liar.
Based on the current data, as of July 2013, 50,412,559 dudes are ~~watching porn~~ using the internet in Nigeria from mostly their mobile devices.

Well I’m starting to see that around. Not that I can see 50M Nigerians dancing Azonto on the internet. After all, how many users actually come around to read my rants? I’m not that popular. You never know, I could be suffering from a chronic case of megalomania.

I can’t overcome the temptation to rant.
Some years ago, Blackberry was the king of Nigeria’s fondlesmob market. But they were expensive and very bad. Sammy and Lugi boys came around but they were expensive too. Then Ching Chong! The market is now getting driven by extremely cheap, I mean outrageously cheap, Android phones knocked out from X,000 Chinese factories for the world to use. And they work! Some days ago, I heard how the 5 inch Tecno Phantom A+ apparently sold out in Lagos; at N35K a pop, that was a badass bargain :-). Now we even have N14K full Android phones and of course they are all on the internet. The executives of MTN and others must be going through a paroxysm of excitement.

By the way only about 114,760,406 lines are active now. That’s more than all the population in the other African countries combined 10 times. OK, that was a joke!