Talk to me
Posted: June 23, 2006 Filed under: Computers and Internet Comments OffI am a good updater. I update religiously.
Periodically I’d check for updates for most of the programs I have. It’s like a car needed to be filled up with oil. The computer programs needed to be updated. I take comfort in downloading updates. They constitute part of my pc’s health.
So I hate those ’automatic check for update’ thing. I would turn them off whenever I can. Cause not only it deprived all the fun I could have but it also depressed my self-confidence and self-respect.
Recently I have received a letter from The National Psychologist Monthly asking me about volunteering in a research program which will probe into the psychological damage ‘automatic update’ cause. I guess I am not the only one who started to suffer from ‘sitting in front of my computer but can’t find nothing to update’ syndrome.
That being said, however, I had been getting notice from MSN to update my messenger for almost 6 months now. I turned it down everytime. I was reluctant to update from MSN 7.5 to the so called MSN live messenger, namely, MSN 8.
The reason was that I had skinned my messenger to a mac OSX look and was unwilling to give that up for the unimpressive vista look and the advertisement.
I had checked out lots of introduction websites what MSN 8 was about and I was not terribly excited about the new functions they add in. I was fine with 7.5 and I had a great looking OSX Tiger skin (without the ads, sorry.)
Four days ago, on Monday June 19th, MSN 8 finally went out of beta and being released officially. I have been trying not to notice it, not to download it, not to update it. But I guess I must be constrained by the ‘update behavior’ now. I resisted for only four days and then I couldn’t resist no more.
Just updated to MSN live messenger. Wanna chat?
Detour
Posted: April 25, 2006 Filed under: Computers and Internet Comments OffRecently found out ‘blogger.com’ is still blocked in China.
That means my other blog —"A huge pill", written in Chinese, was not able to be accessed by the biggest market in the world. 
Since my blog is nothing related to anything they would need to censor, I will justifyingly offer a workaround to access it.
然後點選任一連線 在展開網頁後 再輸入網址
www.ahugepill.blogspot.com
There. I think that will do now.
solution | proxy | workaround
New layout of the New York Times
Posted: April 5, 2006 Filed under: Computers and Internet Comments OffStarted from April, New York Times had totally changed its online website layout.
I can’t more welcome enough to see the change.
To a certain degree, I am a consumer yet not a customer. I read my Times on the internet and got very used to it. Maybe once in a blue moon I’d purchase a copy on the weekend.
So I am very grateful for the great content I can get from them and hardly dare to complain.
Except for if they really want to ask me, I’d say why not try to get rid of one or two of those movie review reporters. They spoiled the movies for me.
I happened to meet a friend’s friend who just moved here from California last weekend. He works at New York Times’ ‘new division’, videos. It sounds interesting to me that they are starting to take the multimeida content seriously.
I said, I watched vedios on New York Times. The technology section. Those new gadgets or new product reviews thing. He chuckled. I said, I know, those are quite home videos.
Anyways. I was just gonna say I liked the new layout. It’s cleaner. It looks a bit like a blog. But the most important of all, it looks very web2.0.
Don’t you wish your boy friend was a GEEK like me? Don’t you? Don’t you???
Posted: March 20, 2006 Filed under: Computers and Internet Comments OffI am not very interested in video games or computer games.
It’s not that I have something against them. It’s simply because I am the weakest link when it comes to games. I can’t even stand myself when I see me play. I played space invader but never pass round 4, the Mario under my control just doesn’t jump but fell right into the deep hole.
When I was in 13th grade, my father bought me a computer. Of course I begged for it. But my father was nice enough to buy me and my brother a computer. Back in 1980s, personal computers just started out in Taiwan, it was like an expansive home gaming machine. I remember it ran programs from a tape. My brother had a good time with that machine, not me. Later on, the real game machine came out, like Nintendo. It replaced that miserable monochrome computer in no time.
There’re so many nostalgic games you can find now online. Like pac man, frogger, space invader, ping pong. I’d play them for old times sake. But I can’t never play more than 5 minutes. I got bored.
But I have an addiction in online forms. Like surveys, sweepstakes, feed backs…etc. When I see them, I have to fill them out.
So when I ran into some kind of tests as online forms, you know I have no resistance to them. In a spurt to find out if I am at least a bit geeky, I did a long long test.
The geek test. Then found out I am actually kinda geekish. That was fun and satisfying.
As for the definition of geek 2.0, I certainly know a lot of what they are talking about.
But the most fun thing is this personality test called PersonalDNA. It’s a very long test, 10 pages. But the result is quite accurate. I always think that personality test help us to understand ourselves. And this one is like a crystal ball.
After you finished the test, the test result will be generated as a webpage. Why don’t you post the link to that result here. I would love to read them.
By the way, this one is so funny you don’t want to miss.
social bookmarking… it’s del.icio.us
Posted: January 29, 2006 Filed under: Computers and Internet Comments OffThis should count as part two of the post ‘share bookmarks’ I have written earlier.
Let me try to recall it. I was tweaking my firefox browser and adding extensions here and there to make it accustom to my favour. Then I found this tagging bookmark extension, which is an off-line version, sort of so-called ‘anti-social’. I was happy with it for a while since I can still keep my little privacy and in the same time catching up with the new ‘tagging’ trend. But then it was kind of troublesome to have to type the tags all the time. Meaning, lots of work to bookmark a website. So I decied to try out del.icio.us. At least the idea that I can access my bookmark from any computer sounds pretty good to me.
And there’s no going back since then. I installed the toolbar. It makes tagging a website so quick and convenient that I was bookmarking for bookmarking’s sake. Trying to add up bookmarks as well as testing out the service, so I bookmarked bunch of pages nonsensically.
Now I love it. Not only I can access my bookmarks anywhere but also I can look into the ‘popular’ category to see what is hot and what people are bookmarking. I have gotten into other sites from here, like digg.com, shoutwire.com, newsvine.com (they are all news, I am a news addict.) and some other really nice web 2.0 services.
What is web 2.0? You ask. It can be answered by google it but to sum it up short, it’s a new infrastructure of the internet which will be more secure and people oriented. But the idea, from my understanding, is that the internet is going to take over most of the application you have on your desktop and in the future you’ll only need a web browser on your computer. There’s now calendar online, to do list online, bulk storage online, …etc. It’s all just like web email services. You’ll have a whole office suite online.
I am currently using hipcal as my online calendar, ta-da list as online to do list. I love both services. It’s so great that I don’t have to transfer files or syncing back and forth between desktop and laptop.
Welcome new technology.
tagging | del.icio.us | web2.0
share bookmarks
Posted: October 12, 2005 Filed under: Computers and Internet 1 Comment »I can’t figure out why in the hell people wants to share bookmarks.
I checked out one of those sites about bookmark sharing like Yahoo my web, del.li.cious. It’s quite a good idea to keep your bookmarks online so that you can access it from any computer you are using. But I have no idea why people are sharing bookmarks for.
For one thing, aren’t bookmarks private?
Yahoo my web 2.0 offers a new technology that you can ‘tag’ a bookmark with keyword or any related words. While looking for information, people search for certain ‘tag’ instead of the information itself. It can say that by using this ‘tagging’ system, they are reorganizing the information for all the users. But I still can’t figure out what is the difference to search for a ‘tag’ than search for information.
Tagging system is a great device for indexing information that is by itself unindexable. For example, flickr.com uses this tagging system for pictures. People put tags on pictures so when searching for ‘dog’, all pictures that were tagged ‘dog’ will come out as results. But if the information itself is already searchable, why bother?
Also tagging is a great means to organize information. I have installed a ‘Bookmark Tag’ extension for firefox browser. Now when I save a bookmark, I don’t need to think what folder it should be in or how should I name the folder. There is no folder. I simply ‘tag’ the bookmark and it just goes in the list. When I need to find that bookmark, I find out the tag and it will show me all the related links. It’s super convenient. It’s the future of file organizing. I think the new windows system is built on the same structure.
Appearently because Yahoo bought flickr.com and got the ‘tagging’ idea from them, now Yahoo is tagging everything. Not only ‘my web’, but also ‘yahoo potcasts’ and other yahoo owned service. By this advantage, I think Yahoo can tie even on the competition wtih Google in the future.
Google is already $300 a share, no need to think about it. How about Yahoo? It’s only $33 a share now and there’s plenty more place to grow.
But I still think sharing bookmarks doesn’t make sense.
bookmarking | web2.0 | yahoo
