Wild Hogs

Just got back from a film: Wild Hogs, it was surprisingly funny, especially after a long day at work. If you are a serious film lover, it is probably better not to go there, cause you may end up writing reviews like this, this and this.

Well, the story line is a little bit dated for sure, four guys went on a road trip to renew their friendship and find new value in their life, but I was laughing pretty much from the beginning to the end. A comedy film should be focusing on the comedy, wild hogs certainly does the job.

Cool stuff on the web(1)

Spotted these two on the Internet today:

1. Chork, an improved version of chopsticks.

2. And this super cool laptop sleeve

Neighbour’s WIFI

Well, my neighbour has just set up a WIFI network, with strong signal and high speed; But the thing is, he also left his network unlocked, no password or login required. So if I am working on my laptop in our kitchen area, I could well be using his network rather than mine. Good thing, isn’t it? Wait until you read this post

Apparently, you can run into “£500 fine and a conditional discharge for 12 months sentence”. With up to five years in jail, don’t know about you but I am configuring my network card right now!

Apple iReader……Anyone?

I just have to talk about this post from scobleizer, with so many die-hard Apple fans out there, cannot believe it has been left largely un-notice. iReader, Apple’s book reader, similar to Sony’s reader but with better graphics, longer battery life and more features. These all sounds very exciting, but to me, it needs to have the following features:

1. Big flash drive, none of those 50M, 100M crap, give us proper storage, 50G, 100G would be ideal.
2. Direct digital camera hook-up, need to be able to download and view photos.
3. Write/Save note, we all had times where we needed to make some notes while reading, so instead of grabbing a piece of paper, I want to write on screen and save it.

p.s. why not add radio into iPhone?

Twitter, new Internet buzz?

Twitter has been mentioned by others many,many times. Last weekend, I created my own account and started twittering.

On their website, it says Twitter is “a global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing? Answer on your phone, IM, or right here on the web”. My first impression: bad website design, funny font, and old concept. Within a minute, I already came up with a list of reasons that this won’t work.

Logged into my account, just took me two seconds to finish my “Hello World” post, shockingly quick and kind of neat, with limited 140 characters per post, it’s much easier to write a post like this compare to blogging. A few post done the road, I started to check out other people’s post, I could sense a very relaxed community atmosphere, people even left notes about eating lunch or going to toilette etc.

I still have my doubts in Twitter, posting short text just seems to be another online to-do list. Radar project is far more interesting to me, video interview can be found here

Join “DoubleClick” debate

For the past couple of days, I have seen countless amount of posts about “Google beat Microsoft on buying DoubleClick”.

Both Google and Microsoft are currently expanding their online buiness at shocking speed, and most of their revenue come from online advertising, this makes DoubleClick a natural target. Google got it in the end, good for them. But would Google’s board be very pleased about the result? would Microsoft be left heart broken? I have my doubts .

$3.1billion in cash…. my instant reaction is “man, that is a lot of money”, even for Google (I know they are not short of money). But what are they getting? DoubleClick’s customer pool and their service. In terms of technology, there is not a lot apart from tradotional image and text advertising. Personally, I wouldn’t pay $3.1billion for just a bunch of customers. In fact, there are some evidence shown by Don Dodge‘s blog.

DoubleClick was a publicly traded company two years ago and valued at less than $1 billion. Anyone could have acquired DoubleClick, but a private equity firm took them private less than two years ago for $1.1 billion. They later sold off two divisions for $525 million. Yesterday Google paid $3.1 billion for what remained of DoubleClick.

Moving away from commercial ISP

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind use commercial ISP. In fact, my first website is still hosting on a commercial ISP. It gives reasonable amount of flexibility, design website from scratch, create CSS, HTML sheets, mess around with JavaScript and PHP, most importantly you get professional support if something went wrong. But only under one condition, you will have to pay.

Fees depend on the service package you chose. I am using 1and1 UK, pay £7.99 for the domain name each year, and £1.99 a month for the beginner package. It gives me 250M disk space and 20 email accounts, which is fare enough since I need neither big disk space nor more than five email accounts. But to run a blog software, I will have to upgrade my current package to business package in order to get database access and it costs £13.41 a month. Consider I am only going to use the site to write non-business stuff, it simply leaves me no option but to shop around for better ISP deals. Dream Host is currently doing a promotion, $7.99 each month with a free domain name, it is much cheaper than 1and1’s business package, but with two year tide-in period, personally I felt its too much.

My goal is to host both economically and efficiently. First, I can only pay a tinny amount of money, however, I want to run WordPress, which means MySQL and PHP support are essential, also I would like to keep a couple of current email accounts. In addition, the website should require minimum time to maintain, none of setting up database connection, running out of disk space or bandwidth, security or admin crap. After a week of intense research, I have learned that there doesn’t exist such an ISP. Luckily, found the solution in free world: WordPress.com and Google Apps. See my following post for details.

Then & Now

A lot of things happened since last August. Quit my PhD, started a full-time job, went through six-month-long work-permit application period, got married “again” in China and right now buying a house. I also built a website, started and abandoned a Chinese blog, on the edge of writing this new blog…