In less than an year, I’ve bought my 3rd, **3rd!, **smart phone.

This time was a personal mistake: I lost my last phone inside the public bike’s baggage compartment. I was sooo pissed. The son of a bi*** that took the bike later removed the GSM chip and then I was unable to track it back. Even an application installed remotely was not able to reveal the position of the phone in order to let me to retrieve it.

It took me so much effort to get it back that I finally decided: I’m going to buy another phone. I had to decide if it would be a smart phone or a simple one. But frankly, this is the kind of thing that you do not see any use if you never used, but after having one you know the use. You get addicted to this phones.

So next stop was choosing one. After some thought, I decided to buy the very hipped Samsung Galaxy S3.

Samsung Galaxy S3

The white version is simply gorgeous. Very good looking phone. The ICS (Ice Cream Sandwhich) was already installed with a very nice selection of preinstalled apps.

Nothing like the old Motorola from T-Mobile and those crap German stuff. Samsung gave it a real love and personality. While the S Voice, the voice command app, is not very good, the calendar one is very beautiful and handy. I like it a lot. The Samsung app store does not add any value from the Google Play, but it does not hurt either.

I’ve never had an Apple’s iPhone, but comparing to my friends that have one, I absolutely prefer the Samsung Android. First is the hardware: S3 have an amazing camera and camera memory (it can take several several several photos in sequence), it’s faster, with NFC (but here in Brazil is not used at all) and expandable storage through memory cards. On the software side, S3 uses the latest Android, ICS, and have the whole flexibility of Google environment. Also, as already said, the Samsung software is fairly good

I was really upset about losing my last phone. Who wouldn’t? But I’m definitively happier with the new one

Note 2012 11 19: Last night Jelly Bean update has been delivered! The butter initiative to make the UI more responsible seems to work (however it is not revolutionary faster, no). All the eyes go to Google Now: the new search app is now very, very voice driven. It gives nice answers several daily questions with a nice card concept.

Due to my personality, I’m generally a very active and anxious person. Loads of ideas come into my mind every day. I struggle to keep focus on what is important, what I’m currently working.

To “gain” time, I like to listen to podcasts or audiobooks while I am working on something. It is fine when the work is repetitive, and you can free your mind by putting your body into an autopilot, separating mind from body. You can even see your physical existence, like you are dead and see your corpse. It requires training but by perfecting this technique allows you to do multiple things at the same time.

However, for tasks that require both concentration and creativity, identifiable sounds get in the way. Some words triggers some brain switches that makes my attention to direct to stuff that is not the work. And takes a lot of time to force my mind to concentrate back into productive tasks. Listening to music triggers the same switches.

I don’t recall the exactly place where I found about that rain sounds are relaxing. It’s kinda of common sense, but to deliberately listen to rain is not. Investigating the internet I discovered a web site that is so simple that is great: rainymood.com. It keep an infinite loop of a pure relaxing rain recording. With the eyes closed, you could easily feel sad and introspective, with an immense need of a good book and a blanket by just freeing your mind with this hypnotic music. An equivalent solution exists for my Android phone, with Rain Sounds. When the sleeping time comes, it makes a lot easier to put this on and lay down in bed. The sleep comes much sooner. Much calmly. Much rainy.

As an alternative, I’m also a Grooveshark.com recurrent user, BUT, basically listening to the ambient radio station, which have a selection of music that are essentially instrumental, no identifiable patterns and never raise the music energy to the point that is bring our attention. Since Grooveshark is not -currently- blocked on my company, it is a great place to avoid the external noise and focus in the work. With your ears locked, it is time to kill some to-do tasks using martial arts like GTD/pomodoro.

Getting Things Done (GTD) is an organizational method created by David Allen, described in a book of the same name. The Getting Things Done method rests on the principle that a person needs to move tasks out of the mind by recording them externally. That way, the mind is freed from the job of remembering everything that needs to be done and can concentrate on actually performing those tasks.

I read the book and love it. It balances theoretical reasoning and practical attitudes. It says explicitly that it is not about a computer program or a special type of notebook. You are free to use any system you want. Webmail, Outlook, notebook, folders, color tags… you decide. But the book is smart enough to give you hints about using them, just for the sake of starting soon and being practical.

It at least opens the mind to be more productive in our ordinary life. Just don’t go crazy thinking about it all the time because, paradoxically, it can be really nonproductive.

PS: I recommend you strive to use itfor 3 months, forcing yourself. It’s easy to start but because it requires a new mindset, keep using the system harder and harder with time.

Jesus just resurrected.

The bunny brings us chocolates. Chocolate eggs in fact.

It’s birthday of: the writer Tom Clancy, my cousin André Massa and my uncle Alexandre, F1 team manager Flavio Briatore and – god was right on this one – the wonderful actress Jennifer Morrison.

Also, it is the day of twin saint brothers Cosmas and Damian.

Happy Easter for everyone

From the series Things I Used To Hate Now I Am Using, now I finally testing Twitter.

I created my account as brmassa and I started to post micro stuff: my favorite football team stupid results, political jokes and things that are REALLY useless for most of people.

After about 2 months, I still don’t see much use on this, except on spying on peoples lives (HEY, they are aware of it… they are publishing the tweets).  With instant messaging, blog witting and spam reading, they are the Time Wasting Toolkit.

It is now just another fragmented piece of information about people. The only advantage I see is for companies like Google now have another source of free external data about potential customers. They can cross with their own data and offer ads more and more targeted to them. Social networks + search history + email history + tweets + photos = complete profile about you!

And I foresee that soon the site will add a higher level of permissions, so you will choose which people can follow you or can do some operations regarding your profile. In other words: it will gradually transform in a Social Network site.

PS: I just added the Twitter messages list at the bottom of this blog. It’s updated hourly.