Macbook Air brought me not only joy but also disatrous nights. How come?

Well, it’s not Apple’s fault. It’s VMware’s!!

I installed Windows XP using boot camp and tried to use it with Vmware Fusion. Just natural desire and a must for everyone!! But it didn’t happen as I expected. VMware had kept crashing and I did everything I could imagin, but without success. Why not?

The answer is, Macbook Air doesn’t have a Super drive and VMware just crashes when it starts to run boot camp partition and can’t find a CD/DVD drive. Duh? But you can easily fix it by going to VM settings and disconnecting the CD/DVD drive. It works like a charm. If you want to know more about it, please refer to this thread. FYI, Parallel works just fine.

Recently, VMware Fusion team opened their team blog but I couldn’t find any information regarding this issue there. But I could find their marketing posts ( 1, 2 ) regarding Macbook Air and Fusion. I think that information like this remedy, not marketing materials, should be published in the blog until the official fix comes out. I spent several hours in googling to find out the solution to this issue and it was not pleasant or efficient.

Hey, Team Fusion guys, please post more valuable information for your precious users. I paid for your service and I don’t want to debug your product and googling for the fix. Please do it for me, it’s your job!! Thanks in advance.

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You can check out his speech-related blog post here.

This Harvard Business Review article is written by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore and published in 1998.

As goods and services become commoditized, the customer experiences that companies create will matter most.

There is a book written by the same authors.

“The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage”

A few weeks ago, I bumped into a blog, where I learned the simple mantra of experience economy.

I’m not an order taker. I’m an experience maker!

This mantra reminds me that, all we are designing/creating experiences for our clients/customers.

It’s the picture that I took with iPhone in a restaurant in Seoul, Korea. The poster was on the front wall of the kitchen where waiting staffs get dishes from the kitchen. It says, “From the moment you step outside here, you should be an actor/actress.”

Korean companies are also investing on user/customer experience as a way of innovation. For example, SK Telecom has HCI (Human-Centered Innovation) group and KTF has CEM (Customer Experience Management) team.

We, D’strict helps companies create their original and unique customer experience, especially in digital display market. I will write more about this later on.

Update: I decided to change the category “User Experience” to “Customer Experience” since the latter is broader and more appropriate.

Update: Customer support at Hoover’s DB contacted me and promised a full refund for this matter.

We are sorry that you were unhappy with the report you purchased from Hoover’s Inc. While we strive to maintain up to date and complete records, we occasionally find a company with fewer data points than others. Please know that I will be sending this for a full refund to our accounting office. Once they notify me, I will let you know via email. If any questions, please let me know.

Original post as below.

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Just don’t buy anything from Hoover’s DB.

I needed to know about IDEO’s financial information and found Hoover’s website and they provide paid financial report service. So I paid US$29 for it. After downloading the report, I found out it has all the necessary chapters and titles for the general financial report that we expect, but not *the data*. All the fields are blanks. I couldn’t believe my eyes. But it is true and see it for yourself.

Duh?

There is no new information on this page. I will explain why. Those revenues (2003~2005) are already on their web page. You can find it here. So you can easily calculate - if you really want to call this *calculate*-, the 1-year-sales-growth 18.8% by (82-69)/69.

I thought those blanks are filled in the paid report, since Hoover’s DB says the following:

The IDEO financial reports offered by Hoover’s provide more detail about IDEO’s financial performance than most information services. Financial reports are supplemented by business information that includes company executives, competitors, and operational insight into a potential customer, investment or competitor. Get access to business information for over 19 million companies, including research similar to IDEO financial reports.

Where is *more detail* about IDEO’s financial performance?

“than most information services”? << What does this mean?

Am I blind?

Agian, all the fields are blanks.

Here we go again.

The last page in the report, that I can’t reveal here, has two new numbers which I couldn’t find in 2 web pages for IDEO on Hoover’s DB. They are numbers of employee for 2003 and 2004. (the number for 2005 is on the main IDEO page, here) These two numbers may be worth US$29 for someone, but not for me and I don’t think it is for most of you.

So I decided to respond to their pretty-much-blank service.

Here’s the email that I sent to Hoover’s DB claiming a full refund.

I just downloaded the Hoover’s financial report on IDEO and found out that it has no financial information at all. All the field are just blanks.

 

I can’t understand how you charge me US$29 for this garbage? What is any new information provided on this paid report other than your web page for IDEO?

 

Unless you give me a full refund, I will write a blog about this to make other people realize the value of your report.

 

I hope this is just a mistake , where your quality assurance failed.

 

Please fix this to make your customer happy.

Buying digital contents should not be a gamble. Please someone at Hoover’s DB tells me what the value you provide for your custsomer and what I paid for.

In the recent post of Scobleizer,

Something about the sunset got me to pull off of Sand Hill Road and think about the entrepreneurs that have passed by this tree. The Hewletts. The Packards. The Jobs. The Wozniaks. The Ellisons. The Gates’. And hundreds of thousands of others. It’s the tree at the top of Sand Hill Road overloading FWY 280 and Sand Hill Road. Off in the distance is the Stanford Linear Accelerator, the longest straight building in the world and home of the first Web site in the United States.

Sand Hill Road is where entrepreneurs come and pitch VCs in fancy offices and try to talk them out of funding. It’s a place for idealists. For dreamers.

Now I don’t feel quilty any more because I get to know, there are more people like me out there.

I can happily say, I am an Entrepreneur. I am an Innovator.

I added two new categories to my blogs. They are User Experience (UX) and Bookshelf.

User Experience: I added this category since I joined D’strict and will lead UX Consulting group there. D’strict is a professional service firm speciallized in creating digital experience, in the field of Digital Display. I will write about how I define ‘user experience’ and ‘innovation through user experience’ concept.

Bookshelf: I will show my bookshelf and talk about books I read.

Stay tuned!!

Happy iPhone life!!

1. How to rollback theme when you get a critical error
I kinda get boring with my current wordpress theme, which is a default theme for wordpress 2.x. So I tried K2 RC3 theme but as soon as I activated it I bumped into a terrible error and my blog stopped working. :-{

I went crazy but I couldn’t find a solution of rollback on the web. I didn’t want to spend more time to fix K2 and customize it for my blog. So I just wanted to get rid of it. It took a while for me but the solution was very easy. Just delete the theme-specific directory (this case, ‘k2′) under ‘wp-theme’ directory. Wordpress will soon turn into the default theme automatically. I will stick with the default theme for more.

Update: K2 RC3 works just fine. I found it out when I re-do the everything I did, in order to take a screenshot of error message for this blog but I couldn’t repeat the error. So don’t be afraid to try it. (I still prefer default.)

2. WordPress OpenID support
Here’s a great post which covers everything about OpenID support in WordPress. I’ve tried this plugin quite a while but it gave me nothing but a headache. The post relieved me and I am sure that it will give you a nirvana. Thanks, Rotacoo.

Don’t be afraid if you get lost in the middle of upgrade. Just start from the beginning and you’ll be just fine. If your iPhone doesn’t seem responding during the procedure, I’d recommend you to wait for 4 more minutes. (especially, when you use AppTap or Jailbreak in iNdependence.) If it’s still not responding, turn it off manually and disconnect iPhone from your computer and reboot and re-connect. Try again the step where you screwed.

Note: When you are told to connect your iPhone using SCP command, you can’t do it unless your iPhone is already connected into the wireless network. In my case, I had to activate my iPhone using iNdependence and set a proper access point before copying installer. Also sometimes, SCP just don’t respond without apparent reason, then just install again SSH/SFTP/SCP using iNdependence. Sometimes you have to jailbreak again.

# Find the AppTapp application from before. Right-click (or hold the control key and click) on the AppTapp icon, then select “Show Package Contents” from the contextual menu.
# Navigate to Contents/Resources. Drag the enclosed file “Installer” (this is actually the iPhone application, and its full name is Installer.app) to your /Applications folder.

>>> # Open Terminal (located in /Applications/Utilities) and type the following: scp -r /Applications/Installer.app root@IPADDRESS:/Applications/ replacing IPADDRESS with the IP address of your iPhone (you can determine your iPhone’s IP Address by tapping Settings, then “Wi-Fi,” — tap the arrow next to the name of the Wi-Fi network to which your iPhone and look at the IP Address) [If you get an error message regarding ssh hosts or saying “WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED! IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY!” enter the command rm ~/.ssh/known_hosts and press return]

If you jail-braked your iPhone 1.02 and upgrade it into 1.1.1, you will loose certain features: arranging springboard icons, scrolling springboard up/down, ect. But if you ask me, I’d say, I don’t bother. So I encourage you to upgrade to 1.1.1 and I am sure that you will like it. Don’t forget to sync your iPhone into your computer before you upgrade since you’ll lose everything on your iPhone and you can’t use restore function in iTunes. You have to manually make sync settings from nothing after upgrade.

Also if you ever unlock your iPhone for any SIM card usage, you have to take a different track with mine. But don’t worry. It’s a proven solution.

Hope you enjoy it just like me.

I’ve been hospitalized for a month due to a car accident in a tunnel at the Youngdong high way. I was on the way home from 1-week vacation in Kangwon province. My car had been crushed by a SUV filled with 4 athletes weighing more than 0.5 ton, passengers alone. I stopped due to traffic in the tunnel and I was watching the SUV coming to me in my rear view mirror, thinking ‘it will stop. It will stop.’ But it slipped and crashed into my car because the lane was wet and slippery under heavy rain. Thank god that a car in front of me just drove forward at the moment of crash and my car avoided crashing into it. Otherwise I wouldn’t make it here today.

The vacation was great, though. I spent 3 days only with my dog, Alto in the deep mountain. At the last day, I kept my so-long-unfullied promise taking Alto to the sea. You can see some pics of Alto swimming at my flickr site.