I have been reading about the H1N1 flu since it was first reported in Mexico and most likely, so have you. I have been worrying about it since them and to some extent, so have you. But now I have it and you probably don´t and that´s why you may be interested in knowing what is like.

How is it to have “swine flu”? Well in my case it started as a cold but in a few hours it degenerated into a nasty flu with high fever and all sort of aches throughout the body, especially in the chest. When I called my doctor in Madrid and told him what was going on, he advised me not to come to the hospital as they are concerned about patients like me going into the hospital and making others sick. While I could understand the policy of keeping sick people at home, the “have somebody pick up the Tamiflu” proposition left me somewhat surprised. Especially since I wanted to get a confirmation that I did have H1N1. My offer to send him some saliva a la 23andme fashion was politely refused. Flu I learned, it´s a social disease. You do not have one person with flu and flu is always part of an epidemic. And right now, still in the summer, the little flu there is H1N1, especially considering that in the last week I have been flying through the world´s busiest airports. So no going to the hospital and no test. Testing was done on patients that were in bad enough shape to end up at the hospital (a policy that probably leads to tremendous under reporting of the disease). I was also confused about the other piece of advise “if things get out of hand do come and check in at the hospital”. Out of hand in what sense I asked? Not being able to breath was one example. Mmmm. Not being able to breathe, I wonder how I could make it to the hospital in that condition. But whatever I decided to follow my doctor´s advise and hope for the best.

After talking to the doctor yesterday my fever kept rising, all the way up to 38.5C in spite of the heavy dosis of Paracetamol I was taking. And I couldn´t stop coughing. During the early afternoon I started taking cold medication and Tamiflu. Now a day and a half later, the good news, is that I am doing considerably better. Fever is around 37.5C and all symptoms are back to what I would call a normal flu. I am in bad shape but no worse than you have been in the past when you had any flu.

Was it the Tamiflu that made it turn around so quickly or my own immune system? Frankly I don´t know but whatever it is it is nice to be able to say a few words without coughing, a novelty of the last few hours.

Interestingly nobody around me got the flu so far. Nor Leo, Tom, Isa, Nina who were all with me. Nor people who work with me. In any case I am now keeping considerable distance from the few people I see. Wash my hands frequently and where a special 3M mask when others are around.

Update at 10pm: now the symptoms have gone from being severe and nasty, to being those of a normal flu, to being those of a normal cold. I am doing much better than last night. If this is all there is to the “swine flu” I would summarize it as 12 very tough hours. Hopefully the rest will be a quick recovery.

…is that in America you can´t sell health care reform by telling the truth. The truth would be something like this.

“We live in a country that has 50 million people without insurance. This is unfair and immoral. The right thing to do is for all of those who have insurance to get slightly worse medical care, so everyone can be insured. And that is what people do in other countries. And that is what we should do here.”

But solidarity does not sell well in a country where the 80% of people who have insurance don´t really care about the 20% who don´t. To use a public transport analysis what is going on here is that as 20% more passengers board the train some people may have to ride standing up. But the passengers in the train don´t want more passengers. They don´t care if the others have to walk. So then, aware of this Obama paints the plan in a too optimistic fashion, by telling the 80% who are insured that everything will be the same for them. And the vested interests in the status quo nail him because that´s just no the case.

In democracies it is very hard to pass measures that improve things for minorities because democracies are the rule of the majority and if the majority is better off, they just don´t care enough about the minority.

Ok, I am not an expert on this matter. And maybe reading my post is a waste of time as I am sure many other people have given more thought than I have to the issue of drunk driving. But governments around the world spend fortunes trying to find out if people are driving drunk by randomly stopping them and testing them. This leads to enormous amounts of lawsuits and all sorts of miseries. And while I think the intentions are excellent and drunk driving is the cause of an incredible amount of death maybe some of their efforts are misguided. What society should really want to know is not if a person is a dangerous driver. And the two are not exactly related. Take my case. I am a terrible drinker. I rarely drink. When I do is a glass of wine. The few times I have had 3 glasses of wine during dinner I got drunk, silly smiles, poor coordination and all. And wine is all I drink, no beer which I dislike, nor hard liquor that except when greatly diluted in fruit juice, I also dislike. Gin? Ron? Tequila? Vodka? Not for me. My body seems to have very little tolerance for alcohol. So what I am trying to say here is that while I could pass alcohol tests better than my friends as I drink much less, I know that my friends can drive much better than I can after drinking, say, 2 glasses of wine. I am very sensitive to alcohol. The point of drinking and driving is not to find out how much you drink but how well you can drive. If that is the case how about testing THAT. For example my neighborhood in Madrid is full of speed bumps. How about replacing those with serpentines that not only would slow you down but also be very hard to navigate when drunk? Or how about having cars make you do a simple coordination test in order to turn on? What we would like to know is not how much people drink but if their reflexes and ability to drive is still there. And this could be tested for all drivers in 30 seconds before they get going. In that sense the tests they used to do in the States when I live there made more sense. They did not test you for alcohol but made you walk tight rope style on the road dividing line. At least they were testing coordination and that relates more to driving than alcohol itself.

I don´t know why, but I do have my best and worst ideas when I am riding on my mountain bike. A few times a week I get in my car and go to the Sierra de Madrid which is around 30m from my office and ride there. I rarely run into anybody, it is incredible vast and empty. If you look a the population density map of Spain you will see that Madrid is an island of people in a sea of nada. And I love riding in the “nada”. So I go there, frequently alone. I ride on my bike and I start….thinking. What else? And I have wild thoughts. It´s kind of dreaming awake. Many don´t make much sense but some do.

All this intro was meant to tell that I just came back from riding my bike and this is what I thought that may be worthwhile. I was wondering why would my friends and partners in Fon (Danny, Mike, Janus, Niklas) buy Skype again. I know they all became rich thanks to Skype but why risk being poorer thanks to Skype. So first thing I thought is what would I do to Skype to make enough money to justify its super high price. And my IDEA was, an alliance with Google. How would this work? Well, Google is great at convincing people to do new things that they did not know they wanted to do. And some of them are quite negative but they do them in the end because the reward is greater than the pain. By pain I mean advertising. So Google has convinced millions that Gmail is a great product, never mind that Google´s computers read your emails in search for words that may induce you to buy something that is related to your email. So if I write to Nina, why don´t we go to Ibiza this weekend, her email will come with ads of hotels in Ibiza, restaurants in Ibiza, flights to Ibiza. And tens of millions of people get these every day. And tens of millions of people don´t mind.

Now think of Skype. Why not do the same with voice technology and chat? People chat, you give them contextual ads. People say things, you listen to what they say and give them contextual ads. If they put up with this in Gmail why not in Skype? And all of a sudden Skype would be worth a lot more. So that´s the first idea.

The second idea concerns Tom Tom, a great company that in my view is now facing serious if not terminal threat from Smartphones. I go around the world, literally, even in Japan, using Google Maps in my Blackberry or iPhone (there is no clear winner, I carry both). I don´t go around the world carrying a Tom Tom navigator. Why? Other than the fact that many times when I check Google Maps I am walking and not in a car it´s all because of search. Now how could Tom Tom bring search to its devices? Using Smartphones. I like the big screen of the Tom Tom. I would like for the Tom Tom though to be integrated with Google Maps, not for display but for search. For display Tom Tom technology is still better. So I would like to be able to search in my Blackberry, send the result over Bluetooth to my Tom Tom and then have the Tom Tom guide me. It´s all about search and input. It´s at that level that Google Maps kills Tom Tom. Oh and I forgot about traffic info. I want that live in my Tom Tom as well.

I just upgraded to Snow Leopard and it is basically Leopard that runs faster. It is as if you had a BMW 320i and for $29 you get a BMW 325i. Now Microsoft is another story. Microsoft jolts you when they upgrade you. To me the change from XP to Vista was as if you had a Vokswagen Golf and Microsoft gave you a Chrysler Mini Van, regardless of whether you had a family or not, some people loved it, many did not and just wanted to go on driving their Golf. There´s nothing new to report in Snow Leopard, same great driving, just a little faster. As they say, if it ain´t broke, don´t fix it.

It is not that I did not know about userscripts, but other than one script that allowed me to reply to comments on this blog, I had never really taken advantage of userscripts. Yesterday morning we had breakfast with my friend Rodrigo Sepulveda at Cafe Hugo in Paris and he alerted me to the possibility of making web sites run in different manners thanks to users cripts. This is how Lifehacker defines the need for user scripts.

Sometimes web sites don’t work or look the way you want them to – but if you’re using the Firefox web browser with the Greasemonkey extension, you can do something about it.

So let me give you an example. I live in a country, Spain in which we pay a tax on digital memory (hard drives, DVDs and so on) but on the other hand, downloading is legal. So when in Spain, I frequently download movies from torrent sites using the Fonera 2.0n that is about to come out. But the problem of torrent sites is that they don´t come with reliable movie reviews. For movie reviews then, I, like most people, use IMDb. But it´s a slow process to alternate between torrent sites and IMDb. So after becoming aware of user scripts I tweeted if anyone knew of a script that allowed you to add IMDb stars to torrent sites. It turns out that that did not exist, but the opposite was available and is pretty useful. Thanks to some helpful and more advanced followers on Twitter I found this script here that adds torrent links to IMDb so you don´t really need to leave IMDb to choose torrents. With this script IMDb becomes both a movie review site and a sophisticated torrent search engine. And if you combine this functionality with the Firefox extension that the Fonera has that makes it automatic that when you hit a torrent link the Fonera downloads it into its attached hard drive, leaving your computer free to do whatever you want, then you have a great solution in your hands (if you are not in Spain there is plenty of legal content in torrent sites like Legal Torrents to try this solution out). And when it gets to be the time to watch the movies if you use the Fonera you don´t need to copy them on to your computer as well. You just connect to the Fonera by typing Fonera in your browser, select the movie from the Fonera´s hard drive that you want to watch and stream it to your browser over WiFi. But this is one example of a script that makes life easier for me. If you browse through Userscripts.org you will see that there are thousands of scripts, and many are for new browsers such as Google´s Chromium.

If I had anything to do with promoting user scripts I would say “because the internet not always has to be the way it is”.

BT’s wifi network has reached half a million hotspots. Fon has made a major contribution toward its growth, since about 90% of the BT hotspots are BT Fon. The rate of growth is such that, together with BT, we are on the way to one million hotspots. This is the goal for February 2010.

With this initiative, BT responds to the exponentially growing demand for mobile connectivity. The sites include BT FON hotspots, BT Openzone, 12 wireless city centres and BT Openzone hotspots via the BT Business Hub. BT Openzone hotspots can be found in hotels, coffee shops and airports. Users of BT FON are part of the Fon wifi network which itself comprises more than 600,000 spots worldwide.

Mobile data traffic growth is now doubling every year. Handheld devices have been a strong driver for this growth, as an increasing number of affordable devices run data intensive applications. Although 3G is widely used, consumers seek more reliable coverage and faster speeds. Wifi networks are also valuable for mobile operators in that they help offload traffic from their 3G networks, amongst other advantages.

Dave Hughes, BT Retail’s director of Wireless Broadband predicts that “Pretty soon there will be a Wi-Fi hotspot on every corner in the UK”. Fon is well suited to help meet the growing demand for ubiquitous and affordable mobile connectivity. Fon spots are numerous and widespread and their locations complement those of commercial hotspot networks that focus on coffee shops, hotels and other businesses. Also, Fon’s uniquely scalable model, based on user-generated infrastructure, is capable of responding to this exponentially growing demand cost-effectively.

A few days ago I wrote a post in which I commented that we had taken out my kids from Spanish schools in Spain because the Spaniards are unnecessarily tough on children. As an example I mentioned that in many Spanish cools kids don´t have a choice of food and they are forced to eat whatever food there is. I also commented that the “colleja” an unusual Spanish spanking that involves hitting a kid on the back of his head is still considered acceptable by most Spanish parents as a way to “teach kids a lesson”. But at the same time in my post I recognized that Spaniards, as adults are by far the most organized and ethical people in the Latin world. This includes not only all Latam but also Portugal, Italy and France. I am not saying that Spaniards are a global model but they are more likely to treat you well, less likely to rip you off, than other Latins. They may not be the brightest, something that I attribute to an education that focuses more on memorization than on reasoning, but they are the best behaved and ethical. So the question here is: does being tough with kids pays off in terms of ending up with better behaved adults? My hope is that the answer is no because I don´t endorse some of the practices of the Spaniards vis a vis children. I would like to believe that a system like the American, that relies more in self discipline and rewards, is better.

Now enter Japan in this equation. I include Japan for a personal reason, this is where I landed a few hours ago and where I frequently come for work. And Japan is the most educated society in the world. People here are incredibly polite, incredibly efficient, incredibly professional, almost devoted to doing the right thing. So the question is: How do the Japanese do it? Or in other words, how do they turn their children into adults who are patient, polite, hard working, honest, highly ethical and even quite creative. Are they tough on their kids? Are they extremely demanding? Do they use physical punishment? Do they force kids to eat the food they don´t like as the Spaniards do? If European education is more about treating kids as little grown ups gone astray and American education more about self discipline and rewards, where do the Japanese stand?

Frankly I don´t know the answers but here at the Ritz Carlton, as we have breakfast with Nina, I have been observing young children and they seem to be as well educated as their parents…already. So whatever they do must this great education must start at a very young age.