Trip to China

Yes, tonight at 12:10AM I will be on the flight to Hong Kong, after that I will visit Canton and Bei Jing. Strange thing is that it feel more like a relief from work/daily life rather than excitement of travelling to a new place. The life has been busy if not stressful enough. I constantly found myself running out of time both at work and at home when I am working at computer stuffs. Most of the time it just seems too luxurious for me to still sleep more than 7 hours a day.

I know this kind of thinking may not be very efficient and I may ends up running around with nothing done…  at least that’s always been my worry, worrying about time wasted.  I hope this trip can help me to calm myself down a bit and re-think on the new ways to do better time-management. Wish me luck~!

Peace before the upcoming Storm…

Today is a great day! It is the last Sunday before our trip. My fiancé and I are taking a 3 weeks vacation to China starting the coming Saturday (flight at 12:10AM) and we do not have any errands to run today except to stay home to do some chores and I can work on computer stuffs. This is great

We are lucky to both get approved for vacation since we are both very important roles in our job (or at least that is what being recognized:-p ) . We are to visit Hong Kong, Canton, and Bei Jing. So we are all very excited! Yes there will be a bunch of flickr photos after I return.

Kristie has been very diligent on planning this trip, so diligent that she makes me feel kind of guilty on not being much helpful. For some reason my time has been exhausted by some sort of unknown dark matter and it seems like I can’t do much other than working, eating, dishes, shower, scooping cat litter, and sleep. Heck I have been doing blogging at work since my home life is so “fulfilled.”

So any way, we are to joint her best friend’s wedding and shop for bridal merchandise in Canton, go Hong Kong to shop more and visit my dad at Bei Jing. I do hope this is going to be a very constructive trip, and wish me luck that I can get Internet access there… without being censored by their government

GeoTagging!!!

One more discovery for web2.0 today: Geotagging!  I came up with an idea couple days ago to make a website with function for social geotagging.  And today I found couple of good sites (listed below) that has done just that for a long time now, they are all nicely done, but not exactly what I have in mind… I think I may be digging into this to create a nicer variance.

 MapBuilder.Net: this site offers social geotagging, but the search function does not make the tagged information quite helpful, and I am not sure if its revenue is from just the AdSense bars.

BlockRocker: this is a Classifieds service using GoogleMap API

Map Bureau: this offers geotagging, but not in a large enough scale.  Also the API seems to be slower.

Flyr: offers search on geotagged Flickr photos, interesting!

Anybody is thinking about the same thing I am thinking?  namely, Social Geotagging service with AdSense as a revenue maker?

Do you look like your aggregator?

Squash has a nice article comparing the current 3 major social aggregator sites: Memorandom, Digg, and Reddit.

read more | digg story

EFF Warns Against Using Google Desktop

I wonder if Google Desktop can allow users to choose what to be shared (searchable, indexable), and what not. that should eliminate the privacy issue here…

read more | digg story

Linux Gaming

I tried Google’s BlogSearch today with keyword “Gentoo Linux” just for the heck of it. Interesting, the result coincided with an idea I had in mind before. The first post is this article from TheInternetOne and it summarizes the idea of integrating Gentoo, Linux, and some other crypto architecture to create a secure platform to develop Gentoo Gaming environment. The logistics would be making the game CD bootable via Gentoo and this can turn our PC’s into console boxes.

I love the idea of being able to turn PC into a console. Back in 1995 I used to argue with my buddy whether a PC is cool or a console is cool, since I was a layal PC gamer, while he was fed with console games growing up. Nevertheless, we have to face the shortcoming of a console: they are only gaming machines, can’t do much elsewise (yes, I think allowing Play Station and XBox users to browse the internet is a great idea) Therefore I would say if the hardware resource is allowed, there should be an option when booting into the games, to allow users to do web-browsing also. The recent trends of technologies such as GoogleDesktop, blogging, del.icio.us, flickr…etc have demonstrate the posibility to eliminate the idea of “personal desktop,” instead, they successfully showed us how we can be living in a totally “virtual world” with all the data are available on line, with security.

Gaming and Multimedia have been tough spots for desktop users to switch from Microsoft to Linux. To make a long story short, Linux had not live up to the hype on hardware detection and user friendliness. But all these has dramatically changed in recent years. hardware detection has been improved drastically, while more and more desktop converts helped to get the latest distros more user-friendly. Just try the latest Ubuntu Linux if you are not persuaded yet. Also, Linux can be optimized so that resource usage efficiency can be much better than Windows. Plus Linux is more secured and less possible to get virus and spywares, at least for the time being

Behold, Microsoft and Console makers, Linux is coming to town.

[Update] This Article from SlashDot and GameSpot reminds me what I forgot to mention: The Linux Game Disk should be able to boot systems directly for browsing and gaming, and it could also be plug into a Windows or Linux system and start the game from there, probably through Cygwin, or chroot environments…

Gtalkr Web2.0 & AJAX

I found a fairly cool site, Gtalkr, yesterday, found on Digg. This web site seems pretty good at the first sight. Mostly due to its use of web2.0 and Ajax. It has a 3 column interface, identified with the Google personnal page, and it act similiar to google personnal page also, as the news aggregator. What makes it different is that it offers Google Talk, Flickr, and YouTube extension to the interface to make its content ever richer. Further more, users can add content the same way in Google Personnal, to add customized feeds.

Web2.0, or AJAX, did the magic again, making the sections movable by the user, and the incredible part is you will be able to see YouTube video played in a floating box that’s overlayed on the existing webpage. This is obviously another step towards the light client structure of the internet! The browser almost seems to act like a desktop.

Geek’s Dream Machine!

This seems like a terrific way of getaway without leaving your home

read more | digg story

Kama Sutra

Found this on SlashDot today, beware~

 SlashDot Story on the new Kama Sutra virus that would erase your important files and there is no cure as of now.

Duke Nukem Forever

Found this on digg, I hope they can truely pull this one together without disappointment. It was a fun game after all.

read more | digg story