E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

Goose Bumps

That is exactly what I had earlier on this week when, thanks to Kellypuffs, I bumped into this particular video clip from YouTube:

There is just not much more than I can say about it, is it?, other than it is these little things we keep bumping into every now and then that make it all very worth while, don’t you think?

Very touching, moving, adorable. Priceless!

——

Plus it is now Friday, getting ready for the weekend and just found out earlier on today that I am about to exceed the monthly bandwidth from elsua.net, so need to take care of it as we speak. You may expect a few hours of down time while I get it all sorted out. But I guess that is what it takes to be popular, right?, although nothing to compare with Conny and her over 7 million hits and counting!

Have a good one everyone!

Tags: Conny, YouTube, Video, Life, Wizard of Oz, Somewhere over the Rainbow, Precious Moments, Talent, Kellypuffs, Goose Bumps

Finally Joining the Mac Side!

Tags: MacBook Pro, Mac, Apple, Windows, Lenovo 3000 N100, Lenovo Notebooks, Andy Piper, Twitter

Last week was one of those weeks that I could have certainly done without, and for several various reasons. From the disastrous fires that created a massive havoc in both Gran Canaria to Tenerife (And a bit in La Gomera) to the fact that my shiny Lenovo 3000 N100 notebook decided to die on me after just one year and three weeks of usage. Well, the LCD display, that is.

I am not sure if there was an issue with it because of the extreme heat we went through for a few days or what (Hard Drive Inspector indicated my notebook’s hard drive reached a whopping 50 degrees C!), but the fact is that last Thursday the LCD display decided to play funny with purple colours and vertical lines making it almost impossible to use. Goodness, I thought. This is the last thing I need now, for sure. A broken LCD display just three weeks after the one year guarantee expired! Ha! It makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Things are no longer built today  like they used to be a few years ago, I tell you!

Anyway, I decided to play along with it and called the customer service centre to arrange an appointment to bring it along and have it fixed. I talked to the folks who would be fixing it and they told me that it would probably take between a couple of hours to a full week, depending on the damage of the LCD display. Ouch! I am not sure I can afford another week of forced vacation after the recent problems I have been having with my Internet connection (Been running just fine for the last few days though).

I love the Lenovo 3000 N100! It really is a good machine and has served me very well all along. However, for a long while now, I have been thinking that one day I would be switching to the Mac. Not a chance that I would move on to Vista any time soon. So I decided to play safe and prepare my way towards having a backup machine, that by the looks of it, it is now turning itself into becoming my main primary machine.

Yes, indeed, I am now a proud owner of a brand-new shiny MacBook Pro 15”4! YAY! Finally! I made it to the other side! The Mac side! heh. I am not going to share any pictures with you, since I am sure you have seen it all over the place, but, boy, do I like this machine or what? I thought it would be my backup machine while I am getting the Lenovo 3000 N100 repaired, but in the last couple of days it has become my main machine and do I feel ever so much more productive?!?! You bet!

I know plenty of you folks out there are feeling the exact same way. So I will spare you any further comments on that. At this very moment though I am continuing to have a number of different applications installed in it that I am using in the Windows environment and which I consider essential for me to be able to do my job and stay connected with everyone, an everything, so probably in an upcoming weblog post I will mention which ones those applications are and see how it goes from there.

For the time being, I have been reading with great and avid interest the good number of posts that the one and only, Andy Piper, one of my fellow IBM colleagues and a good friend of mine, has put together beautifully in his own external weblog and which I am going to find incredibly helpful as I suspect I would be finding there plenty of Mac gems to enjoy.

It surely is going to be quite an experience, while I am getting the Lenovo notebook fixed, to continue playing around with the MacBook Pro and even more when I will be testing it out very shortly as my work machine while the repairs take place. If it makes it successfully, I bet that the Windows notebook would become then the back up machine and not the MBP one. We shall see. Although I bet you already know the answer, right?

Ahhh, it is good to be on the Mac side. I must confess though that there is a little bit of a learning curve, but quite enjoyable at most times, which is not what I can say from the various Windows OS I have been using thus far. Yes, if you ask me, it was a very expensive move, but so far, and from what I have seen till now, very worth while! And I will be sharing some more insights in that respect as time goes by. You bet!

(Special thanks to all of my Twitter friends and to my fellow colleague, Andy Piper, for the initial help provided thus far. You have all certainly made that learning curve a lot less steep and quite an enjoyable journey! Looking forward to some more soon!)

Heartbeats

Tags: Hearbeats, YouTube, Jose Gonzalez, Unplugged, Live, Chill out Tunes

It has been a hard week, I know. Too long, perhaps. For me, too. I just cannot wait for the weekend to get started, I tell you. Specially, on a week like this one where things haven’t stopped for just a few minutes to chill out a bit, relax and get back on top of it. Phew! Yes, one of those weeks… Sigh.

Well, what a better way then to start celebrating the weekend than keeping this weblog entry short, enjoying some fine tunes with some incredible lyrics and get slowly in the right mood. It has been a little while since I have last shared a video clip in here so without much further ado, here is one of those songs that helps stop everything, relax, chill out and … move on!

(You would probably remember the song as it was used for a very popular commercial, but this version is just … priceless!)

Innovation with the Capital “I” - Photosynth Demo

Tags: Innovation, Ian McNairn, Photography, Pictures, Photos, Flickr, TED, Photosynth, Social Computing, Social Software, Social Media, Social Networking, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, TED Talks

I know that it is Friday already and you probably have got better things to do than read, yet again, another  weblog post from myself on my experiences at the TLE event I attended last week in Paris. So I am going to skip that, actually I am just going to create one other weblog entry over here, but still going to skip that for another day. I am going to talk about something else that a fellow colleague, and good friend of mine, sent out to me via e-mail and which I thought was worth while sharing across. And which fits in quite nicely with what I have talked about a couple of days ago and also with the fact that it is almost time for the weekend! heh

The link came from my good friend Ian McNairn, who, apart from sharing with him a whole bunch of interests and the same passion for social computing and knowledge sharing, is an impressive and stunning photographer! Check out his Web site over here. (So much to learn, so little time!)

Well, he just sent out to me via e-mail the following link to one of the many, and very popular, TED Talks and in it you will be able to watch a seven minute demo from a product called Photosynth that, on its own, just proves the whole point of social computing and its huge and massive business value for businesses, not just consumers / producers. Apart from the WOW!s and the Whoooaaahhhh!s you will just be amazed of what social networking, and the various different social software tools, can do to help build up on the collective intelligence of the group. And build something better as a result of it. *That* is what I would call Innovation with a capital "I".

Here is the link to the video clip.

Yes, I know, after watching the video you would have to agree with me that it was pretty much worth it and you will probably come to the same conclusion I did after I watched it. Thank goodness, I am using Flickr and now I know why I got started with it a couple of years back!

Have a good one everyone!

Back from Paris after Attending IBM’s 2007 Technical Leadeship Exchange - What an Experience!

Tags: IBM, TLE, PLTE, TLE-2007, Technical Leadership Exchange, Innovation, IBM Technical Community, Knowledge Sharing, Knowledge Management, KM, Collaboration, Communities, Social Computing, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, Euro Disney, Paris, N95, Twitter, Free Wireless, Roo Reynolds, Michael Coleman, Andrew Webb, Flickr, Pictures, Work Life Balance, WLB, Social Networks, Connections, Conversations

Oh dear, where did that week go again? Goodness, I cannot believe that today is my first day back at work after having spent a fantastic week attending IBM’s Technical Leadership Exchange conference event in Euro Disney, Paris, and then enjoying four wonderful days in lovely Paris doing a bit of sightseeing here and there! I know that I mentioned back then, before starting my trip, that I would be doing some more weblogging about the APQC KM & Innovation event and also about some of the stuff I have been exposed to during the course of the IBM event last week. But alas my network connectivity had other plans for me, errr, I mean, for us.

Euro Disney is probably not the best place to try to get 2,200 IBM folks connecting to the Internet through free wireless at the same time with their Thinkpads while getting started with the event itself. Of course, it crashed the network. And for four days! Ouch! That hurt! And quite a lot! So what I was planning on doing , i.e. weblogging a few times during the course of that week, actually never happened. It just wasn’t doable.

And, what is worse, the paid wireless fees were not the cheapest I have seen in a long while! So I didn’t get connected at all. I have been happily making use of my N95 for the very basic Internet stuff (a.k.a. twittering away all along!), but for weblogging further thoughts and insights on what was going on in my mind back then it was not what I expected / wanted. Thus my regular weblogging activities went dead for a few days to the point where I didn’t even get a chance to reply to most of the comments that folks have been sharing all along with some very interesting thoughts altogether! Yes, that is right! Very disappointed!

And then Thursday afternoon, I went downtown to Paris (Close to Rue de Rivoli) to enjoy a lovely long weekend till Monday evening when I got back. And that time around the everlasting battle between the work - life balance was actually won by life, of course! It is Paris, after all, don’t you think? I just couldn’t get down to weblogging when there were so many cool things to check out since last time I was there about five years ago!

That is why I didn’t get a chance to weblog much while I was enjoying that long weekend break in Paris. There is always something to do, something to check, something to see, someone to meet up with, lots and lots of interesting food to try out (I went out every single day for lunch and dinner and throughout all those times I only had French food once! The rest was Thai, Indian -twice-, Chinese -DIM SUM-, Tibetan, and so on. Loved it!) and the list goes on and on and on! Phew! I met a whole bunch of people with whom I have been connecting already on the Web through our social networks, so it was really nice to be able to put a face to a name, a voice, a blog post, you name it. As the time goes by, I will certainly share some further thoughts about this, because, as usual, it was one of the major highlights from the entire week!

Yes, that is right. I am now back, for the first time in years my mail inbox is now empty! Yeah, sorry, had to say it … EMPTY! and I am now on a massive catch up mode with the several thousand RSS feeds waiting for me to scan through and check out what most of you have been doing while I have been away. The fun continues, indeed, but I think I am going to cut this weblog entry short right here and just point out to you some of the different Flickr pictures I have already started uploading into my Flickr account. Some of which you can already see through this post to give you a sense of what I went through in that lovely long holiday break !

Oh, and if you are looking for pictures of the IBM TLE event I must say that I didn’t take any since I thought that plenty of other folks would. And, indeed, Roo Reynolds, who I finally got to talk to after hanging out together in Web 2.0 for probably too long!, Michael Coleman, another fellow IBMer who is all into KM, collaboration, community building, innovation and social computing, and Andrew Webb, who I have been in contact with quite a lot as well as we also seem to be sharing a bunch of common interests around the world of social computing, have been sharing a whole bunch of them to get you going.

For the rest, let me finish off this post sharing with you folks that my regular weblogging activities will resume shortly… It is good to be back!