Scott Yang's Playground

今天凌晨趕工做出來今年 FOCUS Church Camp 的廣告片，然後早上就在教會的時候用了。

大家趕快找 Jason 報名吧！

Basically I have been playing with the HTC Dream smartphone for the last week and half, thanks to the loan phone from Optus. Let me say it first — it is a very very nice phone that I believe every geek would love to have one. On the day when it arrived on my desk, I can’t stop people from touching it! Too bad I had to return it last Friday. However the question is — would I buy one? Hmm. Maybe not. Not yet.

So let me compare it with the Nokia E71 that I got in January, which is my current phone.

Continue Reading »

Found this nice app for my Nokia today — Mobbler, an Last.fm client for Symbian S60 phones, i.e. most of the Nokia smartphones. It lets you sign into your Last.fm account, start a station, or scrobble the music files you have played through the Nokia Music Player on your phone. A very nice way to discover new music on the move except it can easily chew through the data plan (around 128kbps streaming I think).

My Last.fm username is scottyang btw, and no, I haven’t listened to U2’s latest album :)

So yesterday afternoon I tweeted:

Did a day of ‘cold turkey’ on the main walkway of UNSW. Really exhausted now but had some good conversations.

Got a reply from Big Al a few minutes later:

@scottyang cold turkey.. ?

So… What exactly does cold turkey mean, especially in my context?

I cannot remember where the term “cold turkey” was from, but I guess it would be familiar with the gangs at Unichurch or Campus Bible Study at UNSW — especially if you have done some SOCM courses (oops, way too many jargons already). It basically means doing street evangelism with complete strangers — and in my context, on the main university walkway during O-week. Another phrase for it — “library lawning” although as an engineering student back in my days, library has never been my territory :)

O-week 2009 for UNSW kicked start yesterday so I took a day off from work to get on campus to do pamphleting and chatting with whoever is interested to come to Christian church on campus. I had a few good conversations and I think one guy from China where I talked to near CLB might actually understand the gospel for the 1st time!

Another thing I have realised — I am probably getting too old to do this. Body is still aching…

Via Simon. Here is my super-hero, created with The Hero Factory.

No mention of what the knight is gifted at…

Well. Not really mine, but rather a loan phone from Optus and Bang PR, and I still need to return the phone back to them on Friday. The HTC Dream came to the office this morning with a strange packaging.

It came with only 15% of juice in the battery so the 1^st thing is charging it up. I like how it can be charged with an USB cable, similar to my old Skypephone, which means 1 less cable to carry around. Nokia E71 can be charged with an USB cable as well, with a $2 Nokia CA-100 cable that should have came with the phone.

Some first impressions:

• It’s smaller and thinner than I thought.

• It feels “plasticky” when I compare it with my Nokia E71. Nice grippy surface though, and less a finger print magnet than the E71.

• Nice sliding keyboard. A bit awkward to type on but maybe I haven’t got used to it.

• Awesome user interface. Light year ahead than Symbian/S60. The web browser is very usable for daily browsing, unlike the one on Nokia.

It’s currently on $59/month Optus contract + $15/month phone payment over 24 months, i.e. expensive — even more expensive than iPhone. I do see a lot of advantage HTC Dream has over iPhone, which is a phone that I would probably never buy.

More review in the next couple of days.

Just to preempt you that in case you have not seen me on MSN/Live Messenger for a while — I am still alive. Just that I decided that I would not use MSN Messenger any more.

No. I’ve got lots of friends there — some I know in real life, and some are just acquaintance on the net. However, there are also some — usually with weird email addresses — kept on be-friending me and trying to get me to add them into my contact. I do not wish to know what will happen if I approve their request so I usually just discard them, but it’s now getting more and more annoying. Just this morning I have to discard 18 such requests. Friends and spammers… Hmm sorry friends. Spammers made me do it! I am no longer a user of MSN Messenger.

The only IM that I am using regularly now is probably Jabber/Google Talk. Recently I migrated this domain to Google Apps, and now Gtalk is the XMPP server for yang.id.au. So feel free to add me if you are using Gtalk or Jabber. You can find my JID at the contact page.

Luke 13:1-5 from English Standard Bible:

¹ There were some present at that very time who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. ² And he answered them, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way? ³ No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. ⁴ Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? ⁵ No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”

Dominic Steele used these verses in today’s talk at City Bible Forum in response to the Victorian bush fire, and they made great rebuke to pastor Danny Nalliah who dreamed the Victorian bush fire was caused by the abortion bill.

Here’s a picture of my Dell Latitude D630 when it boots up.

The random freeze started around 2 days ago. Out of sudden the laptop will freeze, and left the screen with a blue’ish tint. A power cycle is required to get the computer back to work, and it happened a couple of times a day. Last night when I was working on my talk for this Sunday on it, it just dropped dead and refuse to turn back on. The symptom looks like there’s something wrong with the video card (it would sometimes boot with two Dell logos in “split screen”).

Anyway. It’s my work computer so it’s covered by warranty — but the Dell guys won’t be able to come and fix it until next week. Meanwhile I am stuck computer-less. :(

Have to blog about dalziel’s Twitter status here:

1. Go to WhitePages.

2. Search for “magic shop” (without the quotes) under Queensland.

3. And you get this:

   

Not sure whether it’s deliberated at WhitePages/Sensis, but surely it’s funny.