Richard for real

This is quick summary of presentation I did today at my uni’s study abroad fair. These are basically seven principles for maximing the use and pleasure of a limited period spent in a new location. All based on my personal experience as an Erasmus exchange student in Amsterdam last semester, but it should be applicable for other places and situations as well.

1. Learn the language

Even if English is widely spoken, knowing a few words and phrases of the local tongue will get you long way. It’s also a great of showing respect for and increasing your understanding of the locals you meet.

2. Conscious socializing

The uneasy feeling of not knowing anyone in a new place can easily make you bond with whoever comes in your way. This can lead to great things of course, but there is also a risk that it will keep you occupied from opportunities later on. Try to assess people as you would with anyone back home, especially during the first two three weeks.

3. Spare time occupations

A great way to get involved in a new community is to take up a familiar hobby or sport in the new context. This is a great way to connect with people with whom you have common ground, and a good entrance point to local networks.

4. Be a foreigner

Don’t limit yourself to being just an exchange student or just a guest worker. Frame yourself as a foreigner and you will see a lot more posssibilities. The expatriot community is a rich source of information, services and connections.

5. Bring what you want to be

When you are packing, don’t go for the things you use the most. Go for what you would like to use the most. This goes for clothes (bring more shirts to force yourself into a business look for example), accessories, gadget, books and everything.

6. Makes the most of mobile

I found a smartphone with internet access to be many times more useful in a new place than where I am more familiar. Just time you will by not getting lost is worth the investment in a mobile internet bundle.

7. CouchSurfing

This hospitality exchange community is an invaluable resource of information, events and people. It will definitely help you to get on the fast track to integration.

Beer

Hoegaarden
Singha
Sailor’s beer, plastic bottle with metal cap
Mosaud-mate, Mr X help me out on the spelling

Thoughts

The discussion ranges between philosophy on one end and tools on the other.
Shuffling info should be the desired modus operandi instead of copy/paste. For this to our software needs improve text handling, for example to be able to differentiate the name of a person from that of a company.
Mr Y is looking for a unified tool to handle all his to-do needs. From capturing ideas to calling people.
The tricky part is to catch ideas fast enough on a non-pen-and-paper input device. Voice recorder? Then it has to be channeled to the right place, efficiently.
Always think about the next action!
Mr Z says his phone is for organizing while his laptop is for producing. I think I would like to be able to do both on both.
To really get stuff under way you sometimes need to apply some Viking berserk gtd, said Mr X, inspired by his boss.
Mr Z was slightly frustrated by his transition from producing to coordination. Nowadays he rather delegates than produces himself, even if the latter would be more efficient.

Online tools

Gimp, open source PhotoShop
Inkscape, open source vector graphics?
Timescape, ??
Share-o-holic, for spreading the things you like
Remember the milk, = gtd
Monity, ??
Read it later, offline storage of webpages you want to check out
OneNote, productivity by Microsoft
Evernote, for writing everything down
TullDo, another to-do site
Del.icio.us, sharing is caring
Posterous, ??
Yahoo Pipes, apparently very useful for channeling your stuff

Gowalla, Foursquare, Brightkite, location services

Tips

Use “#word1 OR #word2″ to make better searches on Twitter
Mails and posts from a phone will be shorter and probably more reader friendly
Use the wrench menu in Google Chrome to add Google wave notifications
Use Excel for being creative and organizing thoughts dressed in words, as long as you turn off the grid (remember that excel was the first software to feature tabbed browsing)

Recommended reading

Getting things done by David Allen
One minute manager
A perfect mess, (creating and maintaining order actually drains a lot of energy in relation to what you get)

Anonymized (SWEnglish I know) quotes

“When you die you will still have stuff on your todo lists. Live with it.”
“Give a problem, then give a solution.” People will be more inclined to act your way.
“2008 – the digital seventies.”
“My broadband is 10 MB/sec, but when I start creating something with these lumps [hands] I feel like a 56K myself.”
“The first time you delegate something it will always be less efficient than doing it yourself.”

Google stuff

Google notes – development has ceased, must alert my friend S so he migrates all his stuff
Google docs – easy to use and great, but hard to find for me. Use it for documents, spreadsheets and forms. A bit like Google wave
Gmail – turn on auto suggestions for search in labs. Go over labs every now and then. Why doesn’t search work like on normal Google web search?
Google voice – what exactly will it do and when will I have it?

Business concepts

A more human yet digital project management toolbox, coordination platform
A standard for virtual business cards, like ambadoo

Sites to watch

Engadget
Gizmodo
Lifehacker
Readwriteweb
Mashable

Upcoming events

Thoughtmade
TedxOresund

// Mr unsecretary

My first ever post typed up on my beloved HTC Hero. So it will hopefully be more reading friendly than they normally are.

Like so many times before this post describes an obvious conclusion I arrived at when talking to a good friend. She was complaining about her inability to make decision and stick to them. In some extreme cases she has even tried deciding “yes” for a day, to evaluate the feeling of it. Then the she would wake up the next day and be all like “no” to see what that felt like.

This seemed very tiring and ineffective to me so I suggested she should use some technique to make decisions and stick with them. We were talking about cooking at the time so this model, or principle, I invented can be described as a chicken-beef model. Or tofu-beans model if you prefer that.

Suppose it’s Tuesday and you’re thinking about whether to make chicken or beef when your friends come over on Friday. Instead of making a preliminary decision for beef and then reconsidering it for the rest of the week I suggest that you take immediate and decisive action once the decision is made. In this case it would mean stopping by the store on Wednesday, or even sooner, and picking up the beef. What you need to do is follow up your decision with an action, which indicates what direction you chose and maybe even eliminates other options. The action could be no more than a token thing like writing “beef” on your list of groceries needed, as long as it firmly tells you that the decision is made and is not allowed to take up any more mental energy.

Another related method for choosing what to eat is to buy groceries in loosely measured amounts. If you follow the recipe when cooking you will hopefully end up with a few leftovers. You then feed these leftovers into an online cookbook and repeat the whole process with the recipe you selected based on the leftovers.

And here’s my soundtrack writing this post. Happy cooking!

I just came back from watching Renzo Martens’ Episode III: Enjoy Poverty at my local scene for quality documentaries. Afterwards I had an intense and interesting conversation with a friend who has a Master in International Economics. One tripod and one dialectic concept came out of this discussion.

We were lucky to have a Q&A session with Martens after watching the film and among other things (such as saying that the most important goal of the film was for it to be an auto-referential piece, depicting a certain status quo) he said that what people in materially well developed countries can do to improve the situation for those with a lower standard of living is to put pressure on the companies that deliver products which originate in less fortunate places by asking them for increased transparency. A key point in this is to demand fair wages and a thorough corporate social responsibility throughout the whole production process.

The tripod thought builds on this by adding two other ways of producing change and a more equal global society. Slightly au contraire to what Martens claims I would like to think that people who travel from rich to poor countries can actually make a positive difference. But as I see things the key to success here lies in personal engagement, which means that this behavior will probably be far less efficient than, to put it roughly, staying at home and buying the right things at the right price. What I have in mind here are small-scale projects aimed at developing competences and overall empoverment. For example, teaching languages or setting up internet access points. The second example is an already ongoing process, where people from developing countries who have made themselves a career in the traditional sense abroad return to their native area to share their experience and teach others the skills necessary to take a similar path as they themselves.

What is maybe more interesting is that Martens statement about how the power of the consumer can and should be used also highlights a way of seeing the world in two perspectives. These are different perspectives on where change necessary, given that we today live as humans in a global economic system that produces and perpetuates inequalities. The most obvious thing to change would be the system, since this is what seems to be the source of the problems. We see a number of groups acting to achieve this sort of change today. But we tend to forget that there is an alternative, which is more along the lines of Martens ideas. This alternative is quite simply to change the humans and how they act within the system. If we want a global system to be equal we need an entirely new paradigm of global consideration. Rather than trying to dismantle our economy to prevent harm, we can strive to evolve the people within the framework of this economy so that they think differently and behave in such a way that the system produces inequalities. This is a great challenge, which may seem as overwhelming as “putting an end to global capitalism”, but I believe it can be done. I believe the first step toward an equal and sustainable world economy is to promote and create a true global awareness.

If you doubted that this was something else than a not so personal open diary with an ambition to change your thinking, then here’s to prove you wrong.

Today we, the undisclosed interlocutors, were discussing what things have intrinsic value. Pleasure was proposed as a strong candidate for the title, which is to say quite a lot. But what is it actually that were saying if we decide that pleasure has a value in itself? Roughly speaking this would entail that we could take a chunk of pleasure and put it in a box and the box would contain something that is valuable, regardless of everything that goes on around. But this is an uncomfortable thought. I mean, who would it be valuable to for example? I personally would mind dropping this box of isolated pleasure to the bottom of the sea if I found it so something must be a bit off track here.

Looking at this from the point of a human being it makes sense to to say that it is actually the experience of pleasure that has an intrinsic value. Many people would agree that the feeling of pleasure is an end in itself. But how do we know when we experience this pleasure? It isn’t all the time, right? To distinguish the experience of pleasure we need other experiences to relate it to. What this means is firstly that these other experiences are important means to reach the state of pleasure. But they could also be something more because we cannot have the experience of pleasure, or at least not know what sort of experience it is, without them. So these other experiences are not just means to feel pleasure which could be be cut out of the process by those who wish to proceed straight to the end itself. The necessity that surfaces here seems to me to raise the value of the non-pleasure experiences, almost to the level where they are self supporting as far as value is concerned.

And let us not forget that the experience of pleasure also requires a someone to have the experience. In other words, the experiencing agent is also a necessary mean. This opens a very appealing option of giving human beings a certain undeniable value as potential carriers of the experience of pleasure. Think about it.