Tag Archives: web

Dance with the “Where the Hell is Matt” guy in Shanghai and Beijing

Around the World, ,

China friends! Go dance with the “Where the Hell is Matt” guy in Shanghai and Beijing! I want to see you in his videos. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, watch his old videos here.

According to a tip on the Shanghaiist:

In Beijing, he’ll be dancing in the Sanlitun area at the San Li Tun Fountain, near the northwest corner of the fountain. The time and date: 3pm, Saturday, February 19.

And in Shanghai, he’ll be at the Science and Technology Museum in Pudong (on Line 2) near the sculpture at the entrance. The time and date: 3pm, Sunday, February 20.

Added Lifestream Page

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somegirlwithacom web lifestream 1221713967636 300x300 Added Lifestream Page

Don’t know why anyone else would be interested in this, but I like having this documentation of my actions all across the web in one place. It’s like the newsfeed in Facebook, but it’s my very own web lifestream page. I used David Cramer’s lifestream plugin for wordpress. You can download it here.

There’s also an entire wordpress theme designed around this whole lifestream thing called Agregado.

If you want to connect with me using some of these tools, get your hands dirty.

Picasa 3 beta (windows only)

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Again, Google continues to carry out its mission: to try to take over the world.

I’ve just downloaded the Picasa 3 beta. You can now make movies, take screenshots and webcam shots, add watermarks and print captions. It also comes with a new photo viewer that looks like this:

fullscreen capture 942008 10201 pm Picasa 3 beta (windows only)

Hey, the easter egg still works! Anyone else trying out the beta?

The Dot, Plus, and Googlemail Gmail Hacks

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Here are some neat things I’ve found recently. They might not be new, but I think I need to jot them down here so I won’t forget these tips. These hacks could be helpful for fighting or tracing spam.

The Dot

Apparently, Gmail does not recognize the dot (or capitalization either) in gmail addresses. So yourusername@gmail.com is the same as your.user.name@gmail.com and all the different combinations are sent to your inbox.

The Plus

Did you know you have an unlimited amount of aliases with Gmail? You can receive messages that are sent to your.username+any.thing.you.want@gmail.com. For example, if you forced to register online, you can use Your.user.name+some.spammy.site@gmail.com. If you start getting spam, you ‘ll know who gave your address away and you can probably then set up a filter to automatically direct those messages to, oh, say, THE TRASH.

Googlemail.com=gmail.com

Of course, I don’t want to forget that yourusername@gmail.com is also the same as yourusername@googlemail.com. Mail from either address goes to your inbox. This is probably because they can’t use gmail.com in Europe. Just a reminder though, you’ll need to login with the original address you signed up with and some websites won’t accept symbols as valid email addresses. Still, I think these are pretty neat tricks.

Flock: Sporting New Feathers

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Ok, so maybe it’s not THAT new, but it’s new to me because I haven’t played with Flock since version 0.0001 beta. Apparently, I got Joey hooked on Digsby. Not sure why he likes it so much. Now I have another thing to introduce to him.

Joey, meet Flock: the social web browser.

flock Flock: Sporting New Feathers

Not sure why I decided to have another looksy, but I’m glad I did. Essentially, it’s a tricked out version of Firefox that gives you quick access to most of your social networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, webmail, Picasa, you name it, it’s there.

There’s an integrated RSS reader and blog publisher too (although I don’t like to use it because I can’t, or haven’t figured out how to, upload images onto my server with that tool).

Many of the Firefox extensions seem to work, which is the only reason why I’m willing to give it a test drive.

Is anyone else using it or giving it a go?

getFlock EN Flock: Sporting New Feathers

April 4th, 40 Years Ago

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Update (April 5, 2008): Everyone’s knows of his “I Have a Dream” speech, but check out his very last speech in Memphis, the night before he was killed. Part one and part two, which is especially powerful and moving.

mlk April 4th, 40 Years Ago
Photo Credit: Trikosko/Library of Congress

April 4, 1968- Dr. Martin Luther King was shot dead at a motel in Memphis, Tennessee. I was listening to NPR on the way to work this morning and heard a story of Robert Kennedy delivering news of MLK’s death:

It was supposed to be a routine campaign stop. In a poor section of Indianapolis, 40 years ago Friday, a largely black crowd had waited an hour to hear the presidential candidate speak. The candidate, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, had been warned not to go by the city’s police chief.

As his car entered the neighborhood, his police escort left him. Once there, he stood in the back of a flatbed truck. He turned to an aide and asked, “Do they know about Martin Luther King?”

They didn’t, and it was left to Kennedy to tell them that King had been shot and killed that night in Memphis, Tenn. The crowd gasped in horror.

“For those of you who are black and are tempted to … be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling,” he said. “I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.”

Many other American cities burned after King was killed. But there was no fire in Indianapolis, which heard the words of Robert Kennedy.

“What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.”

Two months later, Robert Kennedy himself was felled by an assassin’s bullet.

Remember history and learn.

Dark XP and Gmail

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For everyone who has followed me on the internet all these years, they know that I have a dark side. I absolutely LOVE dark-themed websites, for some reason. All my websites have been dark, save my very first Blogger template. I even wrote about the switch from light to dark back in 2002. Too bad I didn’t post a screenshot. I use dark desktop/wallpapers on all my computers, even the one at work. For my personal computers, I’ve been using a dark theme called Royale Noir. It looks exactly like Royale, the blue default XP theme, only it’s, uh, dark.

royalenoir Dark XP and Gmail

Download Royale Noir Windows XP theme:

Instructions:

  1. Extract files to “C:\windows\resources\themes\royale noir”
  2. Double click on “luna.msstyles”
  3. Select “Noir” from “Color Scheme”

Because this theme has been code-signed by Microsoft, No UXTheme.dll hack required.

More recently, I’ve been testing out a darkened version of Gmail. It requires the Stylish Firefox extension and the Gmail Redesigned user style by UneasySilence. Cool interface, eh? Has Gmail ever changed it’s look since it was launched?

darkgmaill Dark XP and Gmail

Oh, and I’m also trying out the dark Google web search. I wonder how many people out there are into dark skins/themes.

City!N launches in China

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City!N (read CityIN), is a new China-based social networking site that launched earlier this month.

An article at VentureBeat explains why it’s a bit different from Facebook.

Users create profiles where they explain their interests such as favorite movies, cars, or celebrities. They rate items and then the site recommends other people in the same local areas who have similar interests.

Currently, the site is only in Chinese, but they plan to expand to English language support at some point in the future.

Headphones and Feed Readers

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jvc noise phones1 Headphones and Feed Readers

Look, these are only $30 on Amazon! I posted about them back in November.

I gotta stop looking at all these deals. I've been buying online too much. Online shopping is addicting!

I've also been sharing some of the deals at the bottom of this page. People have been asking me where I find them. Truth is, I don't go looking for them. They come to me. Many sites now offer their content in RSS form. You can subscribe to these feeds using an aggregator such as Bloglines or Rocket RSS Reader. I personally have been using the new Google Reader. I can choose to "read all" and scroll through all the articles as though I were reading one long webpage. There are lot of other google reader tools and neat things you can do with RSS. Is anyone into this? And if so, what reader do you use and what types of feeds do you subscribe to?

We have achieved fluidity…again.

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Been playing around with another photoblog plugin for WordPress.  Still a lot of things I need to figure out, so we’ll see if I stick with this one.

So this site is once again what they call fluid.  All the columns should be pretty flexible now, and adjusts to the size of the browser window, up until a width of about 980 pixels.  So it’s a little bit fixed and a little bit liquid.  I should rest my eyes now.  But before then, I’ll leave with a couple of neat ‘net nuggets’ I found.

You can call China for free.  Thanks, Ariel.

One of my friends in China really liked a poem that someone made into a website.

My A’s have made it into the playoffs.  Hopefully they won’t lose in the first round like they always do.

Are girls supposed to be this geeky?

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My brother got me another stick of ram for pennies, er, just about. I’ve been complaining that my computer has been running slower and he said it’s from all the junk that I run. Hey now. Anyways, the deal master came through and here it is, next to the old RAM that’s covered with a soft layer of dust. And yes, I put it in myself. It’s not that hard, but I just don’t like working with hardware. Messes up your skin and nails. Hehe.
1gbram Are girls supposed to be this geeky?

Hsin already gave me slack for taking pictures of my computer. What’s wrong with that? He takes pictures of engines and cars and I just take pictures of…whatever.  I wonder how many ladies are out there who work with computers, whether it be hardware or software, web stuff, internet, or design.  Seems like the percentage is quite low compared to men.

X marks your experiences

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Here goes another (I wonder how much of this people know about me):

Place an X by all the things you’ve done, or remove the X from the ones you have not, then answer the following questions and post it on your blog.” My comments in [].

( x )Smoked a cigarette [that's according to my sister, but I have no recollection of it]
( ) Drank so much you threw up
( x ) Crashed a friend’s car
( ) Stolen a car
( x ) Been in love [phileo, agape, koinonia]
( ) Been dumped
( x) Shoplifted
( ) Been laid off/fired
( x ) Quit your job
( ) Been in a fist fight? [Does Wing Chun count?]
( ) Snuck out of your parent’s house
( x ) Had feelings for someone who didn’t have them back
( ) Been arrested
( ) Gone on a blind date
( x ) Lied to a friend
( x ) Skipped school
( ) Seen someone die
( x )Been to Mexico
( x ) Been on a plane
( x ) Been lost
( x ) Been on the opposite side of the country
( x ) Gone to Washington, DC
( x ) Swam in the ocean
( x ) Felt like dying
( x ) Cried yourself to sleep
( x ) Played cops and robbers
( ) Recently colored with crayons
( x ) Sang karaoke
( ) Paid for a meal with only coins
( x ) Done something you told yourself you wouldn’t
( x ) Made prank phone calls…
( ) Laughed until some kind of beverage came out of your nose
( x ) Caught a snowflake on your tongue
( ) Danced in the rain
( ) Written a letter to Santa Claus
( ) Been kissed under the mistletoe
( ) Practiced kissing on your hand and/or pillow
( ) Watched the sun rise with someone you care about
( x ) Made a bonfire on the beach
( x ) Crashed a party
( x ) Gone roller-skating [roller-skating when I was little, roller blading when I was older]
( x ) Ice-skating
( ) Ever been the butt end of a joke from a comedy show?

Any nicknames;? BJ, Beej
What is your favorite drink? water, juice, coffee, milk tea
Tattoos? no.
Body piercing? only 3, including the ones on my ears.
How much do you love your job? It’s fine. Lots of work, supportive management, learning so much.
Birthplace? San Francisco
Favorite vacation spot? Anywhere new.
Ever been to Africa? No
Ever steal any traffic signs? Yes
Ever been in a car accident? Yes
Salad dressing? Kraft zesty Italian
Favorite pie? Fresh Strawberry
Favorite Number? 7,8,12,22
Favorite movie? The Princess Bride
Favorite holiday? Christmas
Favorite food? Yes. Food is a favorite.
Favorite day of the week? Friday
Favorite brand of body soap? Dove
Favorite current TV show? CSI
Favorite smell? Recently, it’s the smell of the woods, probably because I live in the city and I don’t experience it as much as I did before.
Toothpaste? Colgate
What do you do to relax? Read, watch TV, play around with this website.
Message to your friends reading this- “Thanks for reading this.”
How do you see yourself in 10 years? Not sure, God knows.
What do you enjoy receiving? Affirmation, including comments. :)

CenSEARCHip

Around the World, Geek, ,

CenSEARCHip – A neat project at the Indiana School of Informatics compares Google US and CN for the same search.  From the about page:

When you click the "Web Search" button, each side of the display will first show you an estimate of how many English-language results the search engine has for that national version. Our system will then begin downloading the top few pages that are unique to that country’s results. As the pages are downloaded, you’ll see a set of words of varying size in each half of the display.

We get those words by breaking the pages up into individual terms, throwing out some common noise words ("and", "the", etc.), and tallying up the results. We then find the 50 words that have the highest relative frequency of use on each side and draw them in a font size proportional to their frequency. For example, if you see that the word violin is very large on the CN side of the display, that means that the pages unique to the CN search results use the word violin much more often than the pages unique to the United States search results.

You can also see image searches. Unfortunately it does not support inline URL searches so I can’t link to specific searches, but try Dalai Lama, Tiananmen, or Falun Gong (image results shown below).  The "SafeSearch" feature was disabled so you may find some disturbing images, such as seen below.

falungong google 1 CenSEARCHip

But check out the results through Yahoo:

falungong yahoo 1 CenSEARCHip

Performance publishing, Nike blog, and web 2.0

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Performancing for Firefox is a full featured blog editor that sits right in your Firefox browser and lets you post to your blog easily. You can drag and drop formatted text from the page you happen to be browsing, and take notes as well as post to your blog.

Check out the Performance Metrics Plugin for WordPress.  You don’t have to worry about hard coding it into your theme.  I love it.

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Nike has launched a basketball weblog.  It’s written by the team that designs the shoes.  I really like their use of pictures.

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I found some really neat RSS start pages called Fold and Goowy.  I wonder if anyone uses them.