8 posts tagged “tech”
How can digital immigrants educate digital natives and prepare them for the future?
If you found that interesting, watch this video recommended to me by my colleague YP.
And for the really interested, a great video on Web 2.0, which is one of my current interests.
I only started twittering (see my tweets on the sidebar) a couple of days ago, but I think I'm really getting into the spirit of things! By all accounts, it's the Next Big Thing on the Internet.
Like many Web 2.0 technologies, it's a very simple concept that's not so easy to explain. So let's watch a video.
Follow me! I've also set up another Twitter account (you need a different e-mail addy) to post announcements for my students.
I've also been reading up a bit on the other microblogging service, Jaiku. From what I gather, it's Twitter + bells and whistles. I'd sign up for it except that they're closed to new members for the time being, having been newly acquired by Google. I bet I can use my Google account to get on later.
Going full steam with my conversion to mp3s.
Creative Zen (4GB), with USB power adaptor - $184
I almost sprang for the 8GB one, but since it has an SD expansion slot, I figured I don't really need another 4GB. My old Zen is only 1GB! Beautiful display, but I doubt I'll use it to watch videos.
Seagate FreeAgent Desktop external harddrive (500GB) - $175
Getting through the crowds was a nightmare! Thanks goes to JusChev for braving the crush with us!
When it comes to software, I'm super kiam and will never pay for anything I can get for free. And you don't have to break any laws either. There's lots of really good freeware out there. More importantly, free anti-virus programs and other programs you need to protect yourself from the big, bad internet.
The 2 most popular AV freeware are probably avast! and AVG. I've tried both, and prefer avast! because I had problems with AVG's auto updates once.
There are also free anti-spyware programs out there. Spybot is practically a classic but my dad also likes AVG's. AVG is "prettier", but its resident shield is on limited trial, after which the program becomes just an on-demand scanner. Meaning you have to remember to scan regularly. ETA: How could I have forgotten Ad-Aware? Also an on-demand scanner, I believe. With so many on the market, I dug up some reviews and finally decided to keep 2 on my PC: AVG and Spyware Doctor Starter Edition offered free with Google Pack or here.
Have you heard of rootkits? I hadn't till recently, myself. As always, there are free solutions, and I'm going to install one right after this post. There are many listed here, but I hear AVG and Panda are good.
ETA: For complete protection you need a software firewall, though if you're behind a router it isn't as crucial. I just installed Comodo and it looks quite user-friendly.
It's easy to find freeware with Google, but to get really good recs, I like the alt.comp.freeware newsgroup.
I use lots of other freeware, but more on that another time.
I knew that Google has a penchant for hoaxes, but I never actually saw one for myself until I found this on Wikipedia. I find their Google Romance hoax "tour" especially funny!
Fellow Googlers, let me share this cheat sheet with you. I like their calculator function very much! And online shopping is better with Google Product Search (what used to be Froogle).
18:21 ET, Tue 4 Dec 2007
By Joanne Kenen
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - For the Facebook generation, love now comes with a drop-down menu.
With profiles on the Facebook social networking site almost de rigueur on college campuses, students can define their relationship status with menu choices ranging from "married" to that perennial favorite, "It's complicated."
"It's complicated" could also describe the emotional calculations people in their late teens and early 20s make as they decide whether their relationships are what they call "Facebook-worthy."
For Stephanie Endicott and Marcus Smallegan, first year students at George Washington University, announcing to the world that they had found love in a college dorm was a no-brainer.
"It was important for me to share this with my friends since I'm so far away," Endicott, attending school 3,000 miles away from her home in Maple Valley, Washington, said as she clasped Smallegan's hand on a park bench on the campus.
"Neither of us had been in a really good relationship before and ours turned really good really fast," added Smallegan, who had posted a relationship on Facebook once before, only to have that girl move out of state and break up with him via a text message on his cell phone.
Some of their friends, however, have had less harmonious Facebook experiences. Both Endicott and Smallegan know of other college students who thought they were in a relationship -- only to have it all blow up when they tried to link their two Facebook profiles as a couple, an option that requires the consent of both parties.
"It was this major emotional crisis breakdown," Smallegan said of a close friend at a Midwestern university who was heartbroken when her cyberlink was rebuffed by a young man who thought they were "just friends."
Not all students post their relationship status. For some, it's a matter of privacy. For others, it's all about marketability.
"I have NEVER changed my Facebook status -- it has always been single, even when I started to get involved with girls. I think it's better this way, until you are VERY serious, because people look, people talk, etc., and unless it is super-serious it can ruin any chance with any other girl!" one young man, who asked that his name be withheld to avoid alienating his current and many ex-girlfriends, wrote in an e-mail.
But for many couples, being "Facebook-worthy" confers a status on a relationship.
When a couple was "going steady" in the 1950s, the young man might have let his girlfriend wear his Varsity team sweater or given her his fraternity pin. But the 1960s swept aside those rituals. Now the Facebook link has become a publicly-recognized symbol of a reasonably serious intent short of being engaged or moving in together.
"For those in a relationship, the theme that kept echoing was that Facebook made it official," said Nicole Ellison, an assistant professor of telecommunication and information studies at Michigan State University who has studied social networking sites. "That was the term they used. And when the relationship fell apart, when you broke up on Facebook, that's when the breakup was official."
Facebook even produces a little red broken heart icon when a couple splits up.
Duke University student Adam Zell concurred. "Putting it on Facebook made it official," said Zell, who had a "serious sit-down relationship talk" with his girlfriend last year after two or three months together. They made a joint decision to put "in a relationship" on Facebook, and link profiles.
Dave Berkman, who does mental health counseling at the University of Wisconsin clinic, finds that some students feel compelled to define themselves on a Facebook page, or to compulsively update their status over and over again.
"People are beginning to use it more than phones, more than text messages, more than instant messaging, even more than talking in person," he said. "It speeds things up. People are prone to define where they are so they can show other people (online)."
If Facebook can certify a relationship, it can also destroy one. Ellison in her research learned of one young couple in a "Facebook-worthy" relationship. But he cheated with a young woman who naturally looked up his Facebook profile. When she saw he had an "official" Facebook girlfriend, she contacted the other woman.
"Then the two of them were in cahoots to make this guy's life miserable," Ellison said. "So if you are in a relationship and it's listed on Facebook, don't cheat."
© Reuters 2007. All rights reserved.
This post is by way of a PSA for fellow bloggers.
1. Chinese input
Having explained how to use XP's native Pinyin IME, this question was posed to me: how does one input the ü sound? Er.
In the course of googling for the answer (which is to use v instead, i.e. nv3 = 女), I found this. Ha! I just knew there had to be a better (and free) method out there. Especially since I've just discovered that you can't actually use MS IME to input Chinese directly in Blogger (you can use Notepad - choose a Unicode font - then cut and paste, but that's a bore). Ok, I've downloaded Google's version and installed it. Here I go.
哈！ 这太棒了！
Well, okay, it does take awhile to get used to the shortcuts.
Shift = swaps Chinese and English input (can be changed to Ctrl instead for fewer accidents)
Arrow left/right = moves the cursor along your pinyin; e.g. if you type pin you get the characters with that sound, but arrow left once and you see the choices for pi instead
Arrow up/down = highlights word/phrase within the current character choices - select the one you want with spacebar or click the magnifying glass icon to google it
-/= or ,/. = moves up and down rows of character choices (not documented but I found tab/shift+tab to work too)
Spacebar = inputs the highlighted choice (but I usually just type in the number of the one I want)
Enter = inputs what you type as English
The great thing about this IME is that you can use pinyin to input 繁體, something which MS IME stupidly doesn't allow. I'd like to be able to enter tone numbers to narrow down character choices (like MS IME), but this doesn't seem to be possible. ü is still v. Phrases are no problem - try entering a string of pinyin without spaces for faster typing.
谷歌输入法
2. Blogger
It's been acting up again, I think due to the removal of the old Blogger. New Blogger is supposed to replace it, but some things aren't quite fixed yet. Use Blogger: Dashboard for best results.
I'm trying to find a good client for posting to Blogger. Tried Windows Live Writer, which is very good, but doesn't support all Blogger features. In particular, it will not upload pictures to Blogger. Tested Scribefire and Qumana before I discovered that Blogger's image hosting service doesn't allow uploads from external applications. Bummer. Back to Blogger's web editor. WLW is excellent if all you want is text though. If it supported Blogger labels, I'd definitely use it for text-only posts.
LJers should try out Semagic - looks like it's way better than LJ's native interface.
A belated Happy New Year from me! I spent my New Year's Day sniffling, so 2007 has been quite blah for me.
I have just upgraded to the new Blogger - love the new Layout and Labels functions, but I just wish they had also added more interesting templates. I could find nice ones elsewhere, but few are compatible with the new Blogger features, it seems.
Speaking of blogs, it seems that many people find it difficult to keep track of new posts on their favourite blogs (I'm excepting those who read only LJs). If that's you, then you need a news aggregator. A news aggregator will work not only with blogs but any site with an RSS (or similar) feed. At a glance, you can see which blogs have been updated, and with how many new posts. You can choose to read all the new posts from all your subscriptions, from a particular group of blogs, or from an individual blog, on the same page. I use and love Bloglines because it's web-based and the interface makes it so easy to use. With the latest Firefox, it's become even easier to subscribe to sites with Bloglines, since Firefox's built-in RSS subscription function now offers Bloglines as an option. The blogroll you see on the right sidebar on this page was created from my public Bloglines subscriptions; as my list of subscriptions changes, so does the list on this page. Together with my del.icio.us roll, I never have to edit the links on my blog directly.
I guess the easiest way to talk about what I've been up to is to list my new acquisitions. I've been very good with clothes and shoes shopping recently - nothing new there.
I did buy some new makeup during the recent Isetan private sale: MAC Jadeye and Graphic Brown fluidlines, and Aire-de-blu and Pastorale pigments.
I've also got some new books: Süskind's Perfume (in anticipation of the new film), Deutscher's How to Read Derrida (finished the library's copy and found it worth buying), Mill's Michel Foucault (good reviews) and a copy of Advanced Grammar in Use for self-reference. I bought all but Perfume during Kinokuniya's 20% off sale.
Also new are a pile of CDs: Natsukawa Rimi's Selection, Eason Chan's What's Going On...?, Ivana Wong's 詩情.畫意 and Pet Shop Boys' Fundamental. I've got a few more CDs on my sights - lots of listening to catch up on. Finally, having watched The Cat Returns (猫の恩返し Neko no Ongaeshi) recently, I decided I needed more Studio Ghibli goodness and bought Kiki's Delivery Service (魔女の宅急便 Majo no Takkyūbin) on DVD.
My recent perfume haul is more substantial. I haven't commented on everything below simply because I haven't tried everything yet.
eBay decants:
Divine L'Homme Sage (my favourite Divine)
Mazzolari Patchouly (excellent amber-dominated patchouli)
Serge Lutens Encens et Lavande (best lavender scent I've tried)
Lorenzo Villoresi Alamut (very pretty, but not for me)
Profumum Santalum
Profumum Patchouly
Eau d'Italie Paestum Rose
Swap decants:
Miller et Bertaux #1
Comme des Garçons Jaisalmer (a spicy incense)
Parfums de Nicolaï Balle de Match (one of my favourite citrus scents)
Lorenzo Villoresi Teint de Neige (my 2nd decant of this sweet, powdery scent)
Samples:
Les Nez set (3 very interesting scents, though no must-haves)
Eau d'Italie set (Paestum Rose plus 3 others)
Divine L'Inspiratrice (their newest and quite pretty)
Andy Tauer Lonestar Memories and Orris (former extremely leathery, latter a limited edition which thankfully I did not fall for)
Full bottles:
Serge Lutens Tubereuse Criminelle (thanks to the very kind S, who brought it back from Palais Royale)
L'Artisan Fleur d'Oranger
Okay, the last I don't actually have yet. I found it for 20% off, local shipping waived, at Vivre.com, and realised only after it'd been shipped that vPost won't forward perfumes anymore. The only way out of the bind was to pay vPost $$ to send the package on to somebody in the US (who will then forward it to me the "usual" way, i.e. lying on the customs sticker). Panicking, I posted on the MUA fragrance board for the first time, asking for a kind-hearted soul who'd help. I did get a few offers, to my relief. Then in a strange twist of fate, it wasn't required anymore.
What happened was that I'd also ordered a wireless laser mouse from eBay, to be delivered in the same vPost shipment. As usual, vPost couldn't match invoice to package correctly, processed the FdO package as the mouse and sent it on the Singapore before I could even arrange for it to be sent to the MUAer. Once I make the vPost payment, it (and the actual mouse) should be delivered.
Despite the happy ending (I'm assuming the package will arrive at my doorstep nice and intact), I worry about how much more difficult it is becoming to order perfumes from abroad. Already, Strawberrynet has stopped selling perfumes. Some vendors are using ground shipping for their customers abroad, but that's both slow and unreliable.
Friends always want to know what I do to fill my time these days. Well...
I watch DVDs (in addition to huge amount of cable tv I already watch daily).
I scan the papers and websites for job opportunities, and send in applications.
I read and write (too occasionally) online.
I sell some things on eBay (makeup and perfumes). For some reason, swap offers have increased recently too.
I started attending yoga classes at the CC.
I cook for the family sometimes, a dish or two for dinner, or a simple lunch.
Here's something new I tried recently that my family really liked: Orange Duck Casserole. I'm cooking mostly non-Chinese dishes, but I try to keep it to stuff that isn't too "exotic" for my family.
