Harry Chen Thinks Aloud

In addition to hotels and plane tickets, there are some important travel expenses that many people may have overlooked. These include (1) emergency medical expenses, (2) emergency cash in case of wallets are lost, and (3) wireless communication.

Before you travel, call your medical insurance company and find out whether your policy will cover any medical expenses you may have in a foreign country. If the policy doesn’t provide any coverage, consider buying a travel insurance from a trusted insurance company. It pays to have peace of mind.

Before you travel, have a plan for emergency cash in case your wallets are lost. One easy plan is to take advantage of your credit cards. Check if any of your credit cards offer emergency cash assistants. I know American Express does. Know how to in touch with your credit card companies while you are in a foreign country (collect call numbers, toll-free numbers, websites, email addresses etc.)

If you plan to make phone calls in a foreign country, look around for alternative wireless plans other than the ones offered by your current cell providers. If you have a Tri-Band GSM phone (unlocked), you may be able to acquire prepaid SIM cards for one of the local service providers.

Similar tips spotted on this IHT article.

Bob Sutton, a well-respected professor at Stanford’s School of Engineering, wrote an interesting article on how to organize and conduct effective brainstorming. Every company wants their employees to be more creative and innovative. Since time is a limited resource, teams that are responsible for innovation can’t simply spend too much time talking and meeting without producing measurable results.

Among the eight tips that Bob has written, I especially like the following three:

1. Use brainstorming to combine and extend ideas, not just to harvest ideas.
2. Do individual brainstorming before and after group sessions.
3. Brainstorming sessions are worthless unless they are woven with other work practices.

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I played around with ask.com’s MyStuff feature. I’m quite impressed with the application’s simplicity and intelligence. MyStuff is similar to del.icio.us and Google Notebook. It allows users to bookmark Web search results, tag saved links, organize links in folders, and share folders with other users.

On the surface, MyStuff is very similar to other applications. However, there is a minor but important feature design that distinguishes MyStuff from its competitors.

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Amazon.Com is expanding it’s business to include an online grocery store. It’s business model differs from its predecessors (e.g., Webvan and Pets.com) in the following way:

• Amazon will not ship perishable items, and will instead concentrate on goods like packaged cereals and canned food.
• Customers can receive free shipping if they subscribe to Amazon’s Prime service. Otherwise, the shipping costs $6. The Prime service, for $79 annually, gives customers unlimited two-day shipping on most Amazon items, including all groceries.

Spotted on IHT

When two people get into a fight, it’s always difficult for them to stop. Why? Because the person who received the last punch always want to get even the opponent with an additional punch.

If getting even with your opponent is the end means to stop a fight, in theory it should relatively easy to get two people to stop fighting. Each person just count how many times they have received a punch from their opponent. They should stop fighting when each has received equal number of punches.

However, this is hardly achievable in reality.

A recent study, reported in this NYTimes article, shows that while people think of their own actions as the consequences of what came before, they think of other people’s actions as the causes of what came later.

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I used to think science is more important than arts — because it’s more likely for a person to make a better living for studying science than arts. As I grow older, I come to appreciate arts and understand its value. I now believe arts is as important as science in moving forward the positive development of humanity.

Sir Ken Robinson gave a great talk on why it is important to encourage creativity (e.g., arts) in children education. He pointed out that the current education is set up to produce workers for an industrial society. In the current system, while students are encouraged think and learn, but often they are not encouraged to be creative.

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The maker of Panasonic plasma TV, Matsushita, annouced that it will begin shipping the 103-inch plasma TV September 2006. How much? $50,000 US.

Only 20% of the customers for the monster screen will be TV viewers.

The 103-inch panel is bigger than a double-sized mattress and weighs about as much as an upright piano.

Spotted on the BBC News.

With blogging software, you can create digital contents to express your own ideas. Now with Blurb.com, you can go one step further and publish your ideas in a real book.

Blurb.com’s software is still in beta, or test version, but it comes with a number of templates for different genres like cookbooks, photo collections and poetry books. Prices start at $29.95 for books of 1 to 40 pages and rise to $79.95 for books of 301 to 440 pages.

The New York Times has an article on the emerging online book publishing companies — Real books, made on the Web.

Personally, I really like the idea of publishing blog books. I always wonder what I’m going to do with my blog when I get tired of it. With services like Blurb.com, I can make a book of my own blog and shelve it in my study room. Excellent!