02B98: New Tech Experiments

Monday Sashimi

Metro Manila Community Quarantine - Day 912    

I'm flying to Bangkok at around 09:00am tomorrow morning, which means I need to get to the airport around 06:00am, which means I need to wake up around 04:00am. And it's nearly 11:00pm as I start writing this blog entry and I still need to pack my bag for tomorrow and settle other things. That's really not a lot of time.

For tomorrow's trip, I'm going to try using Airalo's eSIM service (referral code: ROCKY6358) as they have an offer for unlimited data in Thailand for 8 days for just 9.99 USD, which is a lot better than paying PHP600 a day for Globe's roaming data. I was a little confused about whether or not my phone could support this service since the Airalo help page for identifying if my phone had eSIM support didn't match my device, but I eventually found a dedicated option to add an eSIM plan, so I guess it can work? I've gone ahead and purchased the plan and we'll see if it'll work once we land.

In other news, I'm going to start a limited experiment with Notion to see if this will help me improve my work-related notetaking and potentially task management among other things. Most people in my network seem to use Google Keep/Docs or OneNote, which are the more commercially available solutions, but there are still a few Notion people along with my brother. I'm worried that it may be "too much" for my needs, but at the same time, I feel I'm not getting the most out of my notetaking with OneNote as finding information that I had noted down is quite tricky.

My priorities for this Notion test are (1) my work notes, (2) my RPG notes, (3) then maybe some of my work-related task management. I've previously written about how I've become comfortable with using a combination of our work platform, Google Calendar, Google Tasks, and Google Reminders to manage all my different to-do items. But there's still room to try other things - even if it means possibly moving away from some Google solutions.

Then again, I've defaulted to OneNote for some time now after the closure of Springpad led to a forced migration to Evernote and eventually an exodus to OneNote given the thought that a company like Microsoft wouldn't kill its platform anytime soon. Getting my notes out of OneNote won't be easy, so we'll see how all those goes - but a full Notion revamp could be rather exciting. I mean, I wasn't even all that sold on Canva initially, but now it's part of my daily blog updates and how I process my O Bar YouTube videos now. So anything can change. 

I've installed my Airalo eSIM and I've created a Notion account, but I'll have to leave things at that for now. I need to get my bags packed so that I can get a decent amount of sleep before I head off to the airport.

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