“The most significant enhancement to the world’s most popular music jukebox and online music and video store since it debuted in 2001.” Has something in common with Tiger.
What might that be? I’ll get to that a little later, right now I’d like to try writing a review for it.
My friend Aki just posted about a new service called “Think Pocket“, and it’s looks more like Mac OS X’s dashboard that comes over your webpage if you click on the bookmarklet.
I personally didn’t like it that much. The GUI was very nice. But I didn’t feel the features were that useful.
Two things that I use instead are Google Bookmarks, and Google Notebook.
Google Bookmarks is of course a bookmarking service. If you have a Google or Gmail account you can easily access it (I think you need to have Search History enabled though, I’m not sure).
And I have it setup with one bookmarklet that opens up my bookmarks list, while another is an easy “New Bookmark” bookmarklet. You can categorize them using tags, and there’s a specific one that lets you show whatever is in that category on your Personlized Home Page for Google.
Google Notebook is very useful if you are doing research. The Firefox plugin that comes with it pops up in the bottom right corner of the window, and you can just add a link to a “notebook” (like a category), or you can even copy text and images to it to view later.
I highly recommend both.
I’m sure the Japanese youth will love this, if it gets into production. It’s a lotion that changes your pigmintation (Just like a real tan does) while providing protection from ultra-violet rays that are harmful. Interesting huh? I wanna try it. 
Clinton recently said Blair’s government was a “stunning success”. Here are some parts of the story I thought was interesting.
“I think one of the biggest problems right now is that people take your achievements and your ideas for the future for granted.
“The reason is we have produced prosperity and social progress for so long it’s easy for people to believe its just part of the landscape.”
-Former President Bill Clinton
I thought I understood that saying pretty well, that “you only realize the things you took for granted after they are taken away from you.” But I found out, after coming to Japan that I didn’t understand it as well as I thought I did.
When you live many places, and start to settle down in one. You start to get tired of it, don’t you? Well, I did. But after I moved to Japan, I realized all those things I might have hated, or disliked, I miss.
I think the same thing may happen for the UK.
An article published by the Guardian helped publicize the fact that papers were uncovered to prove there was a secret group within British government that investigated UFO sightings.
I was, excited to hear it. I mean, wouldn’t it be cool if we already are in contact with aliens? If you took a moment to think about it, their civilization would have to be much more advanced to be able to have that much technology. And my opinion is they would also be peaceful.
Why? Well, if we, as a human race are able to maintain peace and work as a whole without conflicts between nations, we could spend much more money on research to improve technology, and we wouldn’t kill each other off.
There are some private companies that are trying to make space tourism possible by 2020 (ie. visit a space station in orbit around earth), and I think this would be a great step to our future.
Some things that may come up though, is when permanent residency comes around, it will be like creating space colonies. And like all colonies, they want to part, or at least have more voice, in their home governemnt.
If there is a world governemnt by then, hopefully they will have a way of voicing the space colonists. If not, there may be some conflict that arises.
One of my dreams is to be able to travel and live in space in my lifetime. Hopefully it will happen. Maybe it wont.
The owner of the Virgin Group pledged to donate $3 billion to combat global warming.
The world right now is too selfish. A lot of people just want money, to be rich, and get whatever they want. They don’t think about the future of mankind, let alone the world… But the few who do, like Mr. Branson are going in the right direction.
When you have the power and wealth to help stop a global problem, you should put it to use. And that’s what he’s doing. Kudos to him for doing so.
I just took a quick peak at the preview for .Mac’s new webmail service. It look awsome! Just like the Mail application I have on my desktop.
I have two .mac accounts, one which is just mine, and another which is part of a family plan. I admit, .mac had faster service when it first came out. After that people abused their bandwidth and now the service is actually pretty slow.
Since I am paying $100/year, i wish they could increase the limits. For the same amount I could get my own hosting account and setup a similar but more messy setup!
Apple really has brought .Mac into it’s operating system very well, and sometimes it just feels essential. But I’m sure many members are upset with the poor quality of features. (I mean, Gmail has 2.7+GB of storage for free!)
I haven’t received an invitation to Soapbox, nor do I want to. Some people, like me, have a bias against Microsoft. So whenever I hear that name, I tend not to get close to it.
Not to mention, have you seen their Intro Video??!?!??! IT SUCKS. That’s all I have to say about it.
But, even though I’m against MS. I still give them a chance. My friend said “I love google, but MS’ new Live search is pretty good”… So I gave that a chance. And the results might have been a little better, but the interface sucked, was slow and slugish. Thus, I continue to use Google.
And same with Soapbox… I’ll give it a chance when it comes out, but I think I’ll stick to YouTube or my own hosting when it comes to video in the future.
Microsoft has always been a so-so copycat. I wonder how they’ll do with this move.
I know Japan has had a magnetic train for a while now, and I thought because of the time multiple countries have spent developing them, they would be pretty stable and safe.
But it seems Germany wasn’t too lucky on that front. There was even 1 death and about 21-25 injuries involved with their accident!
Death is a sad thing, but we need to improve our technology at a faster rate, and accidents do happen. Nothing we can do about it, except work harder and make sure there are no mistakes in what we do with the work, and in life.
For the first time Forbes’ top 400 of the world richest people have over $1billion each. Totalling to $1.25 trillion! Just wanted to say this interested me, now that more and more people are getting that wealthy, I want to see how they use the money.
All of the major search engines are trying to find a way to improve their search. Google uses it’s Personalized Search to help get better results.
But one company I thought took an interesting approach was ChaCha. Normally you would register an account with the search engine, provide some details so that the engine can give you better results, right?
But with ChaCha, they hire people to ‘guide’ you through your search. Basically, they do the searching for you, and give you the results. (Which actually turned out to be very good when I tried it).
But, in the end, they use the same resource we all do. Google. (I’m sure they use a lot of different other sources too). I did the same search I asked them to with Google, and found the same links (though there was a lot of stuff between them).
I don’t see this type of search succeeding though. It takes too long and you want to be in control of your own search right? Well, I do.
Sony cut the prices by 20% in Japan for the PS3. I’m excited, but I’m not going to be getting one any time soon.
I have an xbox and a ps2. And until Halo 3 comes out I have no intention of getting a xbox 360. Until a decent first person shooter comes out with a good storyline for the PS platform, I doubt I’ll be getting a PS 3 anytime soon.
One feature I really am interested in is Blue-Ray. But I think the whole HD media thing is going to take a couple years before it becomes mainstream…. So I’m waiting on that for now.
For the last 3 weeks we had some studen teachers from the Gakugei University be our teachers. Personally, I think they did a much better job than most of our normal teachers, and I was able to pay attention better.
I don’t think it’s because they were ‘guests’ and it would be rude to sleep or anything. But more because their teaching habits haven’t become dull. Most of the teachers in Japan just lecture, nearly no groupwork! (Same with the student teachers, but it was different).
Hope they turn into good teachers in the future.
I bought some new Hard Drives the other day. And, well, they are CHEAP! By far the cheapest way to get storage is to put it together yourself.
We found these HD cases that are really nice, about $40, and the casing is made out of aluminum. It has 2 FireWire 400 ports, and one USB 2.0. Then the 500GB hd’s by Hitachi were about $200 each. So for $240 you get a 500GB external HD. Nice deal huh? LaCie’s external 500GB is around $400-500!!!
And to those of you who are thinking of getting a LaCie, don’t. My dad and I have spent over $1000 in LaCie produts, all of which have died within 3 months of using it. NEVER use LaCie. A waste of money.
My external HD setup is like so:
I love what I’ve got, and all of them are very reliable. The Hitachi and the Maxtor are ones I put together, the other two are ones I bought as external HD’s.
I definately recommend building your own external HD if you need one, and I also recommend building one just to backup your important data. Because I know, that you DO need backups. From personal experience.
