Monday, January 01, 2007

Happy New Year!

Happy 2007 Everyone! Hope you had a wonderful 06 and an even better 07!

Pretty much everyone I know make some sort of resolution in the New Year. I, however, have never made a resolution or take one seriously, so I guess I'll just live through another 'aimless' year.

Since I don't have any resolution to share with you, here are some New Year Resolution I found on Smile of the Day, reading these, I almost made my own resolutions.

New Year's Resolutions for Internet Junkies

1. I will try to figure out why I *really* need seven e-mail addresses.

2. I will stop sending e-mail to my wife.

3. I resolve to work with neglected children -- my own.

4. I will answer my snail mail with the same enthusiasm with which I answer my e-mail.

5. I resolve to back up my 10GB hard drive daily ... well, once a week ... okay, monthly then ... or maybe ...

6. I will spend less than one hour a day on the Internet.

7. When I hear "Where do you want to go today?" I will not reply "MS Tech Support".

8. I will read the manual.

9. I will think of a password other than "password."

10. I will stop checking my e-mail (and writing my blog entries!) at 3:00 in the morning.

Attainable New Year's Resolutions

1. I want to gain weight. Put on at least 30 pounds.
   
2. Stop exercising. Waste of time.
   
3. Read less.
   
4. Watch more TV. I have been missing some good stuff.
   
5. Procrastinate more.
   
6. Drink. Drink some more.
   
7. Take up a new habit: smoking.
   
8. Spend at least $1000 a month on hookers.
   
9. Spend more time at work.
   
10. Take a vacation to someplace important: like to see the largest ball of twine.
    
11. Stop bringing lunch from home: I should eat out more.
    
12. Quit giving money & time to charity.
    
13. Personal goal: bring back disco.
    
14. Start being superstitious.
    
15. Only wear jeans that are 2 sizes too small and use a chain or rope for a belt.

Labels: rambling

posted by Stavanger at 4:17 PM | 60 comments

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Amazing Photos

Today I found some simply amazing photo on cybernetnews, I will post a couple here, to see the whole collection please visit cybernetnews.

Labels: design, news, rambling

posted by Stavanger at 5:45 PM | 5 comments

Monday, December 18, 2006

Lightning Fast Browsing Trick For Internet Explorer And Firefox

Lightning Fast Browsing Trick For Internet Explorer And Firefox - video powered by Metacafe


Excellent video showing how you could be surfing the web faster!

Labels: rambling, tech

posted by Stavanger at 6:51 PM | 2 comments

Thursday, December 14, 2006

Underwater Hotel

If you are willing to spend $15,000-per-person, per-week reservation fee, you may very well be one of the few people in 2008 to take a vacation in the world's first large scale underwater hotel. Bruce Jones, a renowned submarine architect is planning Poseidon Mystery Island Resort by sinking many habitation tube in the island Fiji. Here are a few pictures of what's to come:

Labels: news, rambling, science

posted by Stavanger at 5:41 PM | 3 comments

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Threadless

The internet opens up many opportunities for brilliant ideas and ventures.
Whoever thought you would find a friend via a cold electronic machine? or
Electronic sticky notes? The basic idea behind Threadless is members can
submit their t-shirt designs and after votes, ratings etc Threadless will
choose a dozen every month to print! There are prizes and other incentives
to submit a t-shirt design, however having people buying your t-shirts is
just way cool.

Threadless is actually the very first t-shirt design community, there are
many spinoff from this idea and not just t-shirts either; NakedAndAngry is a
tie design spinoff, but I fine tie patterns limiting compare to the
possibilty of t-shirt designs.



Anyways today I just submitted my third design to Fast Food Nation Loves
Threadless competition. Threadless has three or four additional competition
around a central theme in additional to the ongoing general competition.



The theme of Fast Food Nation Loves Threadless is "Where Are You On The Fast
Food Chain?", but I think this is extremely hard to express and the result
may not be suitable for a t-shirt. So, as you can see, I went with "Fast
Food Nation". What other nation in the world can claim the title other than
the United States? Show your patriotism! Now if only I have some extra
colors (Threadless only allows five) I will change the hamburger box into an
actually hamburger...

For Fast Food Nation I have another idea of French Fries spelling out the
words American Fries with maybe a French Fry who has French mustache running
away. The competition ends on the 15th, otherwise I surely would have submit
this design as well. These design requires so much detail and time (which is
the reason I only enter the Loves competition thus far so I don't have to
think up my own theme) anyone interested can submit the idea as long as they
send me a shirt if it goes to print...o wait, I'm not sure I would wear that
:D

Here are some other awesome entries to Fast Food Nation Loves Threadless









Here are some awesome winning design which you can purchase

Labels: design, news, rambling

posted by Stavanger at 5:02 PM | 4 comments

Tuesday, December 05, 2006

NASA Moon Base!!

Yesterday, Stephen Hawking wanting to explore the last frontier; today, NASA announced it plan of permanent human habitation on the moon. NASA prosped the moon base mission will start in 2020 with the help of over a dozen countries and corporations and probably finished by 2024.

It isn't the first time a moon base is been comtemplated. In the 1950s, the moon was Pentagon's military outpost in space and "moon-based military power will be a strong deterrent to war..." Later in the 1970s with the oil crisis, the moon is sought after as the source of electricty for earth with solar panels the size of football fields. It would interesting to see how things turns out this time.

Labels: rambling, science

posted by Stavanger at 7:07 PM | 6 comments

Monday, December 04, 2006

Hawking Still Keen To Visit The Final Fronier!

A few days ago, the renowned scientist Stephen Hawking expressed his fear that terra firma will ultimately be destroyed by nuclear war or some sort of asteroid

"The long-term survival of the human race is at risk as long as it is confined to a single planet,"

-Stephen Hawking On BBC Radio

Hawking shows optimism in matter-antimatter annihilation as a way to settle on extraterrestial planets for that Hawking, wheelchair bound is still keen on visiting the final fronteir!

"My next goal is to go into space, maybe Richard Branson will help me."

-Stephen Hawking On BBC Radio

Well Prof. Hawking, if I were ever to build a spaceship or more precisely a starship, you would be my guest of honor.

Labels: news, rambling, science

posted by Stavanger at 5:27 PM | 0 comments

MSNHotmail

Email brings the world closer, the second after you send your email, your recipient will receive it in their virtual mailbox. Now, is this true? I knew for a long time sometimes emails can take minutes if not hours to be delivered by Yahoo or MSN Hotmail, but something different occurred today.

Earlier this afternoon, I sent two email to myself. Don't ask me why I sent the first, but the second one was sent after I forgot to attach something to the first...Anyways, I logged in to my email again, to my surprise, my second email was there however the first which was sent 2 minutes earlier wasn't. I waited for ten minutes and poof! there first email. I have no explaination for this delay...



Here you can see are two emails to myself :-8. One is bigger than the other by 100 times because of the attachment



The first, smaller email on top was sent at 3:57PM



The second, larger email at the bottom was sent at 3:59PM

Labels: rambling, tech

posted by Stavanger at 4:36 PM | 0 comments

Sunday, December 03, 2006

Futuristic Dates

With most book I read, the time is always set somewhere in the future and most of the time the precise dates given to the reader each chapter. When I finished Hammered by Elizabeth Bear, which is a pretty good cyberpunk by the way, it just occurred to me to check up if September 14, 2062 actually falls on a Thursday. So, I pulled out my calendar, and quite easily scrolled down to the year 2062 and sure enough, the 14th of September is a Thursday. I guess only amateur authors like me, if I were to right a book, would ever date their book Sunday February 31, 2106 :D.

Well next time I come to a book that takes place thousands of year in future and the author actually give me a date, I'll spend some time and do the math if my calendar doesn't go that far.

Labels: rambling

posted by Stavanger at 12:49 PM | 1 comments

Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Monday Traffic

Many web developer I have know all say monday is the peak of the week's
traffic as people return to work after the weekend. However, my experience
says the contrary. I recently optimized my forum Blogcrowds.com to be more
search engine friendly and I have to say the results are great, I'm getting
more and more visitors via Google. From the 1 guest constantly showing up at
my forum status display, I suspect Googlebot visits the forum quite a bit.

This upbeat traffic peaked over the Thanksgiving long weekend last week as I
added some content. Looking over the traffic reports, I thought "this is
Thanksgiving, most people wouldn't even be online right now, so monday
should be even better!" So Sunday night, I added a lot more useful content
and checked the traffic again Monday night. To my great surprise, the number
of visits to my forum remained constant, my pageview gone done, and there I
was expecting a huge jump. Even more surprising is that I only had 2 visiter
from Google while before almost half my visitor came from Google! That made
me look at my referers to my forum, it happens my Custom Template blog is
the leading contributor. So, this made conclude probably at the beginning of
the week, mondays, more people check news, read blogs etc. Over the weekend,
especially long weekend, people finally found time to tweak there blog (as
most of my Google traffic was from template fixes etc) change their layouts
etc.

I'm not sure if this is accurate but I'm waiting for next monday to try to
jump my traffic again, so wish me luck!

Labels: rambling, SEO, traffic, web development, website

posted by Stavanger at 6:04 PM | 2 comments

Sunday, November 26, 2006

Nuclear Poisoning

Investigation continues over the death of Ex-Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko due to nuclear poisoning from Polonium 210.

An investigation was under way last night into Russia's black market trade in radioactive materials amid concern that significant quantities of polonium 210, the substance that killed former spy Alexander Litvinenko, are being stolen from poorly protected Russian nuclear sites.

As I track this story over the last week, I couldn't stop making a connection to the 2003 movie Cradle 2 The Grave with Jet Li, featuring rapper DMX.

DMX and his professional heisters stole some extremely rare black diamonds that turns out to be top secret Taiwanese military project for stable plutonium until its enriched. Becuase of this, DMX is swept into a storm of people trying to get there hands on these diamonds namingly Jet Li - Taiwanese Agent who tries to destroy the diamond - and of course his evil traitor counter part Mark Dacascos, who kidnapped DMX's daughter.

The most relevant part of this movie is when Dacasco enriched the black diamonds with a green laser and read out its potential to a whole bunch of international terrorist representation...tomahawk missile, hiroshima, 2 hiroshima...new world order from one black diamond. Then Jet Li flies in and in an ultimant show down against Dacasco, Jet Li made the villian swallow a enrich black diamond. The special effect shows plutonium begin to radiate and light up as Dacasco quickly begin to quickly disintegrate atom by atom.

Labels: media, movie, news, rambling

posted by Stavanger at 3:19 PM | 1 comments

Fog

This photo is taken at noon yesterday, the lights that you can barely see are either store lights or lights from cars. With this much fog at the end of November you may think I live in London or something.

Labels: rambling

posted by Stavanger at 11:36 AM | 0 comments

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Pilgrim Thansgiving

In less than twenty-four hours, the world will approach the fourth Thursday of November (clarified by Franklin D. Roosevelt) and the Thanksgiving in the United States! Thanksgiving will of course feature the traditional turkey, stuffing, family, football etc. However, here are some interesting things about Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving & Pilgrims
According to The History Channel, the pilgrims like today's families would prepare for the feast starting to cook in the early dawns and some turning the spit over a open fire hours at a time. When the food is done, the pilgrims would have a largely buffet style feast with their hands, spoons, knives, but no forks. What's most interesting though is that pilgrims did not eat some of what we thought are traditional Thanksgiving food. Of course not everything is accurate as the first the pilgrim feast did occur hundreds of years ago. Something for sure though, pumpkin pie and maybe cranberry sauce, one Thanksgiving favorite is not on the menu.

Probably to some's liking, there were more meat and far less vegetables on the tables of the pilgrims than there is today. And not just turkey either, there were far more types of meat including lobster and seal!

Foods That May Have Been on the Menu
Seafood: Cod, Eel, Clams, Lobster
Wild Fowl: Wild Turkey, Goose, Duck, Crane, Swan, Partridge, Eagles
Meat: Venison, Seal
Grain: Wheat Flour, Indian Corn
Vegetables: Pumpkin, Peas, Beans, Onions, Lettuce, Radishes, Carrots
Fruit: Plums, Grapes
Nuts: Walnuts, Chestnuts, Acorns
Herbs and Seasonings: Olive Oil, Liverwort, Leeks, Dried Currants, Parsnips

What Was Not on the Menu
Ham, Sweet Potatoe, Corn on the Cob, Cranberry Sauce, Pumpkin Pie, Chicken/Egg
Source


Of Course, I don't have to go into the Thankgiving today in the United States, thinking of it makes me hungry. And for those who do not celebrate Thanksgiving or live in the United States, there is of course the official beginning of the holiday shopping season with price cuts and big holiday spending!

Labels: rambling

posted by Stavanger at 6:58 PM | 1 comments

Saturday, November 18, 2006

Title Problem Resolved

A few day or maybe a week ago, I posted an entry regarding switching to Blogger Beta and a particular problem I was having with Blogger not showing a title for my entries. Today when I was giong through the Blogger help section I came across this article. As it happens, I turned the title off in the Setting --> Formatting section, why I don't know, I don't even remember doing so. Anyways, good job man, you are really smart, this should teach you about complaining without looking things up first :D

Labels: blogger beta, rambling

posted by Stavanger at 5:06 PM | 1 comments

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