Mr. Aggarwal

We have all been touched or hurt by the emotions we envision someone else has gone through. At what point, if any, is this taken too far?

When do other people’s joys and sorrows begin to affect you to the point where you are being “too empathetic”? What kind of person is prone to being/becoming “too empathetic”? Do you even believe there is such a thing.

I think there very well could be, and in a society where we feel that people are becoming less sociable, I tend to believe we will end up with some level of social “climate control” issues…where people cannot form the proper balance with many important social constructs, including empathy. I am concerned that people will begin to go to the extremes of feeling either too little empathy (I believe that everyone feels at least some small amount of empathy) or too much empathy. I believe there will be empathy balancing techniques that will be devised and training courses for the “social climate control” crisis we are already facing or will soon face in our technology-driven, impersonal world.

What are your thoughts? I know many people must be seeing this as it unfolds in front of all of our eyes. Maybe we can get to this and improve people’s quality of life in the current and future generations faster than we can find ways to solve the ozone issues or viable alternative fuel sources.

If you have been connecting to a machine via remote desktop and using the blow command, you may have noticed this no longer connects to console:

mstsc /console

With XP SP3, you now need to use:

mstsc /admin

If you aren’t doing multiple monitors yet…you need to. Here are some tools that will get the wheels turning:

• Matrox
• Multiplicity
• MaxiVista

If you have a laptop, at least get started with two monitors for which you should not require any additional hardware or software, expect for the external monitor, of course. If you have a desktop that has multiple video outputs (i.e. VGA and DVI) you too should be able to try this out without any extra tools.

I know this may seem obvious to some people, but believe me…it needs to be said…

When you drive in city, highway, fast, slow…anywhere…

LOOK CAREFULY FOR THE LIGHTS ON CARS AROUND YOU, specifically, the signal and brake lights.

Here is a freebie tip…while on the highway, don’t just look for brake lights of the car directly in front of you. Be conscious of brake lights for a few cars ahead as well. You will be better able to anticipate any sudden stops, which is how many highways accidents occur.

Again, I know even you might think you do this, but this is all about training yourself to do it constantly and consistently when you drive. Thank you for keeping the roads safe all the time, not just when you have nothing better to do like talking on the phone, finding your favorite CD, plugging in your cell phone to the car charger, reading a newspaper, responding to SMS’s/emails, or something even more insane that I can’t even image, yet I know people can think of and actually do while they drive.

Better comparisons can be drawn once the Instinct is released, but I can comment based on what I know about each…

1. Instinct is slated to support Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync on day one — how Apply and iPhone could avoid this for so long is amazing to me, but I am glad to hear that even they plan to support Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync this summer

2. Instinct supports faster broadband speeds than iPhone (again, iPhone is coming out with a new version this year that supports similar speeds)

3. Instinct is being released on Sprint (and I’m not sure when they plan to release on any other network). I really dislike the idea of a phone only being available on one network. I hope Instinct does not pigeon-hole into Sprint for too long.

4. iPhone is releasing an SDK. Instinct programs are written with Java BREW. I guess we will see how many useful applications will be written for each in time. I assume iPhone will get the advantage on this because of the simple fact that it currently has so many more users.

5. iPhone incorporates all the iPod features. I don’t have/use an iPod, but so many people do and there is a distinct advantage in combining the most popular music and video solution into the phone as a single device.

6. Apple has marketing prowess and a general sexiness factor that Samsung can do almost nothing to compete with. I really like Samsung products (like their gorgeous LCD monitors), but I don’t see the overall market share tilting a great deal regardless of how compelling the phone features prove to be.

I am hopeful that the Samsung Instinct will be a viable competitor to the iPhone since healthy competition is only good for us consumers. As I mentioned, I don’t think the market share for this kind of device will shift too far away from Apple (reference the history of the iPod and the many viable competitors that came out before/after it), and this will be a large factor that continues to lands in Apple’s (and the iPhone’s) favor. Besides, in this case, Apple has quite a bit of time ahead of all other devices in this arena and the multi-touch was real innovation that was brought to the table (and it worked perfectly from the day it hit the shelves).

Apple has proven to innovate at a rate and with a quality better than others, but this, combined with their lead time and market share will make it very difficult for any other company or product to make a real dent. Of course, I remember another product (Palm Treo) that was considered the de facto standard “smart phone” in somewhat recent history; so I look forward to allowing our world’s business, marketing, and technology surprise me as soon as possible.

Hmmmmmm…maybe the oPhone will do it…

I am just at a complete loss as to why I can’t sort emails in Outlook by the sender’s domain name. As much as I use searching and search folders, as well as color-coded rules, I use sorting once I get to a