Finally got around to making Asides work on my backside blog. Thanks goodness for Gregorsmith who showed how I could implement Asides on legacy WordPress 1.2 template. Thing is I’ve been using Del.icio.us to track all my “remaindered links” and having a blog-posting php script parse my Del.icio.us rss feed for daily updates. I felt that this made for an ideal “remaindered links” wordflow. This script, called Yet Another Daily Delicious (YADD), is quite robust in that it actually won’t post anything if nothing new is added to my del.icio.us and can be configured for daily or weekly. Anyhow, I now have two options when posting short bursts on my blog… through Asides and through YADD.
UPDATE: A new blogging widget specifically for WordPress users is now out. Derived from DashBlog, WordPressDash was built especially for WordPress users and offers category support.
Of all the Tiger widgets out there, there are some which should be in the toolkit of every Mac blogger… these would include two of my favorites: DashBlog & Flidget.
While I’m into dressing up my posts with images and links, DashBlog isn’t about that. Instead, it allow for spur of the moment blogging just by hitting F12 on your Mac keyboard. This isn’t really documented anywhere, but configuring DashBlog is easy for WordPress users:
• Hit “Configure” on the DashBlog
• For Blog Type, select “Self-run via BloggerAPI”
• API URL: http://www.yourdomain.com/xmlrpc.php
• Username and Password are the ones you enter to administer your blog on the web.
• The “Leave Form Opened” kinda threw me off at first, but I believe it’s an appearance setting to let you choose if you want the widget to initially display an open form when you hit F12, or a closed, slim one that requires you to hit “New Post”.
Flidget is a great drag-and-drop image upload widget for Flickr. It’s is even easier to configure than Dashblog… just hit the tiny “i” at the bottom of the widget, enter your Flickr username and password and whether you want uploaded images to be public or private.
There are more Dashboard widgets out there for avid bloggers, such as RSS feed widgets and so on, but I think these two make great additions to your blogging arsenal. In fact, this post was made via Dashblog, and later tidied under Wordpress.
Associated Press covered a story about People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) where they recently protest in front of the Statehouse, in Providence, R.I., Monday, June 6, 2005. The protest, in which three people placed themselves in containers resembling supermarket meat trays, was meant to compare eating meat with cannibalism. While I’m respect PETA, does this mean that we are all suppose to be vegetarians? Is there an alternative humane way for eating meat?
On a related note, PETA regularly does cool undercover work in suspected companies to spot for animal abuse. You’ve probably seen some on the Internet which made you want to expunge your lunch after watching.
Their latest bust involved Covance laboratory in Virginia, where an undercover investigator documented workers who were striking, choking, taunting, and deliberately tormenting terrified monkeys. She documented monkeys with broken arms left without proper veterinary treatment and animals in desperate need of euthanasia who were kept alive and in agony just to please drug companies.
Yes, there’s a full scoop and a sick video included at http://www.covancecruelty.com/.
I LOVE Root Beer… in fact, it’s the only beer I like to drink (I can’t get used to the bitterness of the real ones). So it comes with no surprise that I’m into Dr. Fankhauser’s Guide to making root beer at home. Dr. David B. Fankhauser, a professor of Biology and Chemistry at the U.C. Clermont College, started collecting ingredients since 28 June 1996 and has been updating it ever since on his web site.
He explains that like raising bread and fermenting wine, fermentation has been used by mankind for thousands of years for brewing beer. The products of the fermentation of sugar by baker’s yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae
(a fungus) are ethyl alcohol and carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide causes bread to rise and gives effervescent drinks their bubbles. This action of yeast on sugar is used to ‘carbonate’ beverages, as in the addition of bubbles to champagne.
There are more root beer variations on the web, but if you’re lazy to go buy all the ingredients yourself, there’s always the Mr Rootbeer Home Brewing System. This sweet baby makes you two gallons of your own, delicious rootbeer and includes the mix, ingredients, no rinse cleanser, eight 1-liter plastic bottles, funnel, & instruction guide. Retails for $19.95!
I got a surprise this morning when my Flickr post got featured on MAKE’s blog, O’Reilly’s ever-popular DIY geek magazine. Entitled “PSP + Kaid + Wipeout Pure = Multiplayer over Internet“, I gave a brief intro to playing PSP multiplayer games via the Internet. The Nintendo DS supposedly has that feature built-in, but sadly the PSP relies on adhoc wifi proximity to other PSP players for multiplayer games. I do know that some PSP games do feature Internet play now, such as Twisted Metal. For the rest of us who own other games, here’s how you generally do it:
Posted by Phillip Torrone on June 11, 2005 at 12:06 AM
inju writes – Here I use a 12″ Powerbook running KAID and have it connected to the Internet via ethernet. I run Wipeout Pure on the Sony PSP and start up a multiplayer game then pop back to my mac to look for the PSP broadcast on the “computer-to-computer” or ADHOC connection via my Airport Extreme. A little tricky, but once you get it going, it’s so worth while! Get Xlink Kai
What I forgot to mention was the full instructions available in the Mac OS X PSP Connection Guide as posted in the Xlink Kai Forum.
Since Penny went home to Singapore for her vacation, I had to start fending for myself again… cooking wise. I’ve been here in Buffalo for 2 years before she came over so I had a bit of cooking experience. Now though, I had to regain my cooking intuition… you know one of those things where you picture what you want to eat and predict the ingredients you’d need to make it. I don’t cook much, so what I made for dinner should be quick, intuitive and fast for everyone. If you like what you see, try my recipe…
My Baked Pepper Salmon over Asparagus recipe:
- Rub on black pepper sauce or equivalent sauce as a marinate on the salmon
- Spray on butter (or rub butter) on a foiled baking pan so the fish can cook without sticking
- Preheat oven, then simply bake the Salmon at 350 degrees for about 10min
- Turn off oven and leave salmon to continue baking in the residual heat for 15min
- While baking salmon, broil or steam your bunch of cleaned asparagus
- Add some salt and olive oil into boiling water to taste
- For both salmon and asparagus, I observe if they’re ready by checking for firmness, so feel free to poke a little
- If the salmon (or any meat) is thick, sometimes the center might not get cooked. In which case, cheat by using a microwave
- Once cooked, arrange your food on a plate, throw some parsley on the salmon and add sides like cherry tomatoes and marinated mushrooms
Eating, and cooking, is an experience in itself so you want to make it as enjoyable as possible. I kept popping cherry tomatoes in my mouth while I waited. I must say that this dish is really hard to go wrong because baking salmon is easy and so is boiling asparagus. Really not much work involved… minimal prep time required. Totally recommended for geeks who’d rather spend more time blogging!
This diary entry was recently posted by Slashdot user ackthpt… read the original post for concluding comments! (Thanks goes to Ken Fujiuchi for the tip)
GIRL’S DIARY
Saturday, May 21st 2005
Saw him in the evening and he was acting really strangely. I went shopping in the afternoon with the girls and I did turn up a bit late so thought it might be that. The bar was really crowded and loud so I suggested we go somewhere quieter to talk. He was still very subdued and distracted so I suggested we go somewhere nice to eat. All through dinner he just didn’t seem himself; he hardly laughed and didn’t seem to be paying any attention to me or to what I was saying. I just knew that something was wrong. He dropped me back home and I wondered if he was going to come in; he hesitated but followed. I asked him again if there was something the matter but he just half shook his head and turned the television on. After about 10 minutes of Silence, I said I was going upstairs to bed. I put my arms around him and told him that I loved him deeply. He just gave a sigh and a sad sort of smile. He didn’t follow me up but later he did, and I was surprised when we made love. He still seemed distant and a bit cold, and I started to think that he was going to leave me and that he had found someone else. I cried myself to sleep.
—–
GUY’S DIARY
Saturday, May 21st 2005
Apple switched to Intel.
Absolutely gutted.
Got a shag though.
My friend Jun informed me that The Economist recently added some blogger-related news to their monthly City Guide for Singapore:
Net losses
Defamation lawsuits in Singapore usually involve ruling-party politicians and their opponents. But in May, a government agency used the threat of legal action to force a university student into shutting down his online journal or “blog”. Chen Jiahao, a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, apologised for his “Caustic Soda” blog, which criticised Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*star). Mr Jiahao’s web journal had gripes about the agency (which had awarded him an academic scholarship) and its chairman. A*star said the student’s remarks went “way beyond fair comment”.The agency’s behaviour brought a rebuke from the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists, which accused A*star of using lawsuits to “chill commentary on the internet”. Reporters Without Borders, which ranks Singapore only one place ahead of Iraq in its worldwide press freedom index, said the case underlined the limits of free expression in the city-state.
Before you read what I’ve got to say, do note that blogs that talk about the entire incident have been chronologically link to by Huichien Loy at The Singapore Angle. Loy also provides a plea to fellow bloggers in respect to the protection of bloggers involved.
Here I go with my late and rather quick reflections on what happened:
(If you spot any inaccuracies, please help me clarify any mistakes I make in my account)
I just got to know AcidFlask (aka Chen Jiahao) before this incident and also wrote in with the five or so other comments on his “controversial” article before Mr. Philip Yeo demanded the article be removed. Since then, Jiahao’s been keeping the rest of us Singaporean bloggers in touch with what’s going on. I think it’s rather silly how this started…
The article he posted discussed issues he had with A*Star and their bonded scholars (Jiahao was one such scholar). I agreed with Jiahao that there was nothing offensive when we looked at the article again, but Mr. Philip Yeo apparently took offense to one of the blog comments of the article (not sure who’s) and demanded Jiahao to remove the article and post an apology for defamation. Jiahao had no choice but to removed it of course, and posted an apology. Philip Yeo felt the apology wasn’t good enough and wanted a more unconditional apology. Fearing for his family back in Singapore, Jiahao complied, and even removed the blog entirely (which is a good move since his anonymity was compromised). FYI: He has a new blog up under a new pseudonym.
This incident really shows the dark power of our Singapore government and how the Internet allows citizens to fights back with the technological affordances of open democracy… How? Because by the time Philip Yeo sent out the demands, the rest of the Singapore blogosphere took action and posted the news on their own blogs… First the foreign press started publishing the news, then followed by the local news media like Channel News Asia and The New Paper (you can figure out why this sequence is so).
You can really see how information flowed based on this event. At one point when the media coverage of this incident went more than mainstream, the Singapore government even issued a press release stating that “Singapore government decides not to sue blogger“… ’nuff said.
It’s a clear win for the bloggers, especially for Singapore bloggers. With the kind of potential democratic power blogging provides, it’s clearly one strong reason why I blog. It’s available power to tip the status quo for those who seek it. There’s no better time to heed the words of academia: “Publish or Perish”.
Kelvin tipped me off to some wickedness on the iTunes music store. Called The Little Red Record, this album by the Chinese Red Army Choir was recently added to the music store. If you don’t have iTunes, you can listen to every track here in MP3 or RealAudio. Authentic stuff, Cannot Bluff!
Check out the track names from the album:
01 Sweet-scented Osmanthus
02 Song Of Guerills Forces
03 Three Clauses Of Discipline
04 Cross Snow Mountains And Grass
05 Song Of The Women Soldiers Com
06 On Songhua River
07 March Of Liberation Army
08 No Party, No New China
09 Sing The Praises Of Our Mother
10 Workers, Peasants And Soldiers
11 The Shining Zunyi Conference
12 Paean
13 Song Of Join Forces With Armie
14 Jing Gang Shan
15 Ten Songs Of Border Area
16 Liberation Army Occupaied Nanj
17 Orchestra ‘The Good News From
18 Army And Common People Are Fam
19 We Are The Successors
20 The Fellow Soldiers Of Red Arm
21 The Autumn Harvest Uprising
22 Report Succecss
23 Permanent Friendship
24 Get To The Home Front Of Enemy
25 Training Dance
26 Rosy Rays Of Sunlight Are Shin
27 Liberation Go Forward
28 The Brilliance Of Chairman Mao
My buddy, Chris Barr, first spotted this on a commercial billboard along Elmwood and Hertel in Buffalo, New York… upon checking it out, I had to blog it! “Kleen Scene” appeared like any other innocuous advertisement along the street until you take a closer look at what the company does via their advertised URL:
Kleen Scene – “We Clean What The Others Won’t”
CRIME AND DEATH SCENE CLEANING + BIO-HAZARDOUS CLEANING SERVICES
As seen on their About Us page:
A traumatic event such as a homicide, suicide or unattended death can leave a family or business owner devastated. Kleen Scene has recognized that after such an incident, those involved are left with the all to common question, “What do we do next”? It is a general misconception that the police or coroners are responsible to clean up the aftermath at such a scene. In all actuality, the responsibility falls upon the home or business owner.Kleen Scene provides regulatory on site cleaning and decontamination of all items involved at a death scene. We ease a burden and provide peace of mind to the community at a time when it is needed most. No family or business should bare the burden of cleaning a bio-hazardous death scene. Not only are there many legal issues involved in the cleaning and disposal of medical waste, but often, the trauma involved can be too much for any untrained individual to bare. Let Kleen Scene bare that burden for you.
Kleen Scene’s web site even features zoomable “Before and After” photos of cleaned up bloody killings. With a neat photo of Buffalo’s City Hall on their homepage, Kleen Scene must really have competition taking care of the thriving homicide market in our fine city. Whoever said Buffalo was going downhill was way wrong… :P
