Scott Yang's Playground

A step by step guide on setting up a home theatre PC, including tips on software and hardware. It would come handy when I get my new LCD monitor.

I don’t mind having John Paul II’s funeral today, but I am very glad that Charles and Camilla have rescheduled their wedding to tomorrow, the 9th of April. At least I know that I do not have to celebrate my anniversary with them… :)

Had sore throat this morning and felt sick. Email work that I’m going to take a sickie, and then realise how many of them have I taken so far this year.

Must have been this age thing. Or maybe lack of exercise. Or maybe over stressed. Or maybe all of the above…

Yeah. One more ride on this blue planet around the sun will bring the number to the utterly evil big three-oh. Hopefully it will be a slow ride…

Continue reading »

One thing I really liked about Yahoo! 360 (ask me for an invite if you have not got one) is its implementation of access control. You can choose from multiple level of privacy for different sections of your Yahoo! 360. For example, you might want everyone on 360 to see your real name, restrict your residential address to only your 2nd degree friends, and then further restrict your primary email address to your first degree friends. Access control applies to not only your basic info, but also your full profile, your “Blast”, your lists and groups, and your blog.

Access control on blog is fantastic, especially when your blog is used mainly as a personal journal/diary whose writing might not be suitable for public consumption. Want only your close friends to know what you have been doing last weekend? Want to blog about your thoughts on certain complicated issues, but do not wish to share with everyone? Easy. And Yahoo! 360 does all the authentication and user management for you.

Moreover, when the privacy level is set to only your first degree friends, you can further restrict the visibility of your blog by your friend “Categories”. You can allocate your friends to one or more categories, or default to “Uncategorised”. Now let’s see. Shall I start a personal blog there that actually blocks everyone who knows me personally from reading it?

Hmmm…

In the April 2005 issue of In The Black magazine, there is an interesting article “Where is your manner?” designed for business travellers so they’ll know how to behave appropriately in different cultures. Out of the 10 trivial questions, I could only answer 4 correctly – and that was only because the background culture for these questions were Australia, Taiwan and China! For example, take this one:

3. When meeting a potential business partner in France, if you use the gesture that in North America, Britain and Australia means ‘OK’ (thumb and index finger joined together), according to his culture you’re saying:
   1. You can’t hear him
   2. You think he’s worthless
   3. You find him attractive

Yeah. Just don’t do that when you travel to France next time! (Check the article for the answer). And here’s one about Taiwan:

4. When dining with a host in Taiwan, it is most polite for you to:
   1. Eat everything on your plate, regardless of odour, texture or taste
   2. Leave something on your plate at the end of the meal or your host might think that you are still hungry
   3. Offer your host something from your plate as a sign of generosity

No wonder many Taiwanese have jokingly replaced greetings like ‘Hello’ and ‘Good morning’ with ‘Have you had enough food?‘

“The World” is a group of 250-300 artificial islands near Dubai, which will be developed into private homes, estate homes, dream resorts, and community islands. Taiwan is a 3.11 acres island in triangle-like shape. Anyone wants to buy it and declare independence?

Open gay bishop of Episcopal Church of US commented that Jesus might be homosexual. It bound to happen, when people started ignoring what was written in the scripture. However, the sad thing is, if his Jesus was practising something that is sinful and unacceptable to God, then how can his salvation be assured, when the death of this imperfect Jesus cannot be the propitiation of God’s anger and substitute of our own punishment?

Here is my BlogMap:

Only 46 bloggers near by? And what is it with Microsoft MapPoint banners all over the place?

Continue reading »

Matt M. responded to WordPress Google spamming accusations being reported previously. Is it about the money? No, he responded, but I just could not see what else. “Faith” is something that will be very difficult to re-acquire once one party felt betrayal (look at SixApart and their MT license), but Matt is certainly working hard on that.

Sixfoot! 660 is the social network of all social networks. Very funny playing a satire of Yahoo! 360.

NASA has finally found water on Mars – with photo as evidence as well. I don’t care about that water, but can I have that Mars, please?

Gmail was announced exactly one year ago, on the April Fool’s Day last year, and has forever changed the history of web mail. Well, at least in terms of mailbox size. I thought it was a joke last year, but no one is doubting its existence by now. It has became my secondary email account since I got mine June last year, and meanwhile it has grown so many new features – except it has not grown out its “beta” status.

Then I saw this when I logged in today:

Yes, 1295Mb! That’s an unannounced new feature which Google has just given me 30% more space! Even though I’ve only used 3Mb so far (so pathetic), but that extra 295Mb has just made myself so confident that I will never burst my inbox!

Or was that an April Fool?

Update: Thanks to the comment by Joey. I checked the login page of Gmail and now everything is clear.

… starting today, we’re beginning the roll-out of our new and top secret Infinity+1 storage plan.

And then there is a funky chart comparing the storage between different webmail providers, theoretical limit, and Gmail’s infinity + 1.

Matt M. of WordPress fan has been caught cloaking and spamming Google according to this Slashdot article. That is wrong. Plain wrong for whatever excuses. Now WordPress is tainted by this event, where shall I move to?

GIMPshop is a hacked GIMP 2.2 that makes it Adobe PhotoShop look-alike under Mac OS X. Very cool idea for a very cool product. Not that I needed as I have never used PhotoShop – been using GIMP since its 0.5x Motif days.