gqshen.com

On April 18 1995, I said good-bye to my parents and went to Hong Kong alone. This is the first time I took a flight and also the first time for me to leave China because at that time Hong Kong was still governed by United Kingdom. On that day, I was very excited more than feeling sad to leave my family. Maybe that’s because I was seldom at home since I went to high school. And another important reason is I was young and always longed for the world outside. I had the best dream in my heart and never thought about fear or defeat.

Many years later when I left Hong Kong, I began to realize this is a crucial turn in my life. I worked, studied and lived there. I know lots of friends there and they taught me a lot about everything. I began to learn lots of stuff about computer and internet in the university. I bought my first set of SLR camera gears and started to take photos. I decided to pursue PhD degree and years later I got it. I stood by the Victoria Harbour and saw the handover of Hong Kong. Also there I knew my dear girl friend and thereafter she became my wife and now she’s the mother-to-be of our first baby.

I stayed in Hong Kong for four years and nine months and that spanned seven years. This is probably the most beautiful time of my life and I feel life favored me a lot too. There are many precious moments in my life deserve my cherish and those years in Hong Kong are among them, for sure.

Currently Yahoo! 360º is still in beta and only users via invitation can sign up. Drop me a line if you want to try it out before it’s officially released.

Now you can use your huge (2GB+ now and growing) Gmail mailbox as a remote hard disk to store your files (10MB size limit for single file). This is cool!

Download:
viksoe.dk – GMail Drive shell extension

BlogJet is a very handy blog client software enables you to post to almost all kinds of blogs. You can download a trial version from the homepage. I tried it and found it’s pretty good but the big drawback is its support of Chinese title is too bad. I tried with Blogger, Blogware and WordPress and ends up with no luck. If you only write English posts on your blog, you gotta try it.

I tried several weblogs powered by different blogwares and here is some of my experience.

WordPress: Very powerful if you have your web server supplied with PHP and MySQL database to run it. But I found very few free ones powered by WP and Blogsome is one of them. If you want to test drive or want to apply for a free account, try here.

Blogware: Very powerful and easy to configure. Myblogsie is the one provides free blogware based weblog service. I would highly recommend Blogware based weblogs because it’s as powerful as WordPress but you need more knowledge about HTML, CSS, etc to play around the latter very well. To edit the layout by drag and drop style, RSS headlines, web pages generation, and user management etc are very cool features come with Blogware.

Blogger (blogspot.com): Very easy to use but short at features. It’s suitalbe for entry level bloggers to warm up. The features I like include the possibility to edit template and publish blogs to external FTP server. And now you can post photos from your computer to blogger directly with Hello and blogger provides unlimited (?) image hosting space. This is very attractive to users who are seeking an easy way to establish their photoblogs.

Here is a very good blog about blog, How to Blog.

Attended a small traditional Chinese music concert tonight. Seven pieces of classical and one newly composed episodes were performed by Music from China Ensemble of New York. The artists performed very well by various musical instruments including erhu, yangqin, dizi, pipa and guzheng.

Seems our baby likes some of the pieces too.

Flickr‘s slideshow is a neat feature to display photos of your selection and “tags” is another cool extra of Flickr. I found it’s a good way to combine tags and slideshow to show your selected photos on your own web site very flexibly because you can set any number of tags to a photo and to classify photos by tags. What you need to do is to put the following HTML code into your web page where you want to show the photos.

Replace “12345678@N00” with your user_id and “foo” with the tags of the photos you want to show. Other possible parameters are “nsid=“, “text=“, “tag_mode=“, “favorites=“, “group_id=“, “contacts=“、”frifam=“, “single=“, “firstIndex=” and “firstId=“.

Becky! 2 is unquestionably one of the best email clients you can find up to date. I have been a happy Becky! 2 user for years. One of its numerous great features is that end users can write plug-ins to expand its functions. You can find lots of very good plug-ins on the net for free download. And here is another great plug-in I just found out, RSS reader plug-in for Becky! 2. You can download it from the author’s website. This plug-in enables you to read updated news or entries from weblogs that provide RSS feeds right in Becky! 2.