Internet & Technology | Eastwood Zhao dot COM

Happy B-Day to My One-Year-and-a-Bit-Old Blog!

Happy birthday to you,
happy birthday to you,
happy birthday dear… uh… Eastwood-Zhao-Happenings-in-a Nutshell,
happy birthday to you!

My blog is one year old!

Blogging for a whole year has been quite a journey. I’ll let the rest of this post do the rest of the talking:

The Past Year… In a Nutshell!

There are certainly highs and lows of my “blogging career” . When I first started blogging back in March of 2007, I was pumped with blogging-juice and produced some quality content. For a while, I was producing quality content and enjoying it all. I even got some short-lived fame ‘n glory when my blog was listed as a “Hot Community” in MyBlogLog, along with The Thinking Blog (they actually were doing quite well back then… no hard feelings, Ilker ) and ProBlogger. Ahhh… those where the days!

However, things took a turn for the worse as I battled with the tempting forces of evil. My blog dipped big time in quality and creativity starting from April 2007. During that “dark period” , I wrote a whole ton of cheap, low-quality reviews. My readership practically dropped down to zero, and my blog was getting pretty darn close to becoming a “splog”. Though I made a couple hundred dollars, I have to say this: the experience was definitely not worth it!

My love for blogging really started kicking back in starting Jan. 2008. I simply told myself this: write about whatever you feel like writing about. If you don’t feel like writing, take it easy, be kind to yourself. Don’t write for the sake of “ahh I gotta keep the posts coming or else I’ll loose subscribers” (not like I have a lotta subscribers anyway ). So along with my change in attitude came some really good posts. I started writing what I am really passionate about: driving (or, what I call defensive eco-driving — ooo I really want a Prius nowadays), music ( — the effortless mastery of), among others.

Another major change I made was removing all advertisements. It was clogging the blog up — making it look like a chicken market. Besides, I wasn’t any money that’s worth my while anyway. Surprisingly, not too long ago, after I made my changes of removing all the junk from my blog, there were offers that came in requesting text-link placements of $50/month. What did I do? I stayed cool and flatly refused .

107 Published Posts in Total Eh?

Out of the huge pile, I’ve picked out half-a-dozen or so of my favourite/most controversial/most commented posts. Check ‘em out:

Creative Writing

Life (Blah blah blah… )

Defensive Eco-Driving (Oh believe me, this section’s good )

While you’re at it, check out my “Top Posts” also. Maybe you noticed that I’ve left all the nasty political stuff out. For a good reason! I’m not exactly into these things nowadays. I prefer more to have a nice walk on the seawall on a beautiful, breezy day, then to point out the wrongs of our world (there’s simply too much to list)

You Are Here Because…

You are here because… I’d like to thank every single one of you for the support — no matter how much, or how little — over the last year. But… hey! I have a PR 4 blog : Spiderman’s uncle Ben once said (if I can remember this correctly), “with great powers come great responsibility” . Where I’m I going with this? The link-lovin’, of course! Listed below are some of my favourite bloggers:

Do you have any blogging experiences that you’d like to share?

16.Apr.08 Blog Updates, Internet & Technology Comments (16)

An Overview of the Failing Fight Against P2P “Piracy”

P2P file sharing (aka “piracy”), ladies and gentlemen, cannot be beaten. I say this not because it is the logical thing to say, not because torrenting movies makes sense, not because almost 20% of internet traffic accounts towards Bit Torrent. P2P file sharing, “piracy”, torrenting — whatever you would like to call it — cannot be beaten simply because fighting against it is impractical, illogical, and not the progressive way to go in this ever-so-technically-savvy world of ours today.

I’d like to share a very interesting article with you, written by Portfolio.com, that outlines the failing fight of the MPAA and RIAA against file sharing: The Pirates Can’t be Stopped.

“A teenager hacked into the outfit charged with protecting companies like Sony, Universal, and Activision from online piracy — the most daring exploit yet in the escalating war between fans and corporate giants. Guess which side is winning…”

16.Jan.08 Internet & Technology Comments (0)

How to Make Wordpress Smilies

Do you use smilies in your posts?

To include smilies in Wordpress is actually quite easy: simply type out the punctuation marks !

Ooo… so that’s how John Chow does his twisted evil smiles!

02.Jan.08 Blog Updates, Internet & Technology Comment (1)

Halarious Analogy of Various Operating Systems

If Operating Systems Ran The Airlines…

UNIX Airways

Everyone brings one piece of the plane along when they come to the airport. They all go out on the runway and put the plane together piece by piece, arguing non-stop about what kind of plane they are supposed to be building.

Air DOS

Everybody pushes the airplane until it glides, then they jump on and let the plane coast until it hits the ground again. Then they push again, jump on again, and so on…

Mac Airlines

All the stewards, captains, baggage handlers, and ticket agents look and act exactly the same. Every time you ask questions about details, you are gently but firmly told that you don’t need to know, don’t want to know, and everything will be done for you without your ever having to know, so just shut up.

Windows Air

The terminal is pretty and colourful, with friendly stewards, easy baggage check and boarding, and a smooth take-off. After about 10 minutes in the air, the plane explodes with no warning whatsoever.

Windows NT Air

Just like Windows Air, but costs more, uses much bigger planes, and takes out all the other aircraft within a 40-mile radius when it explodes.

Windows XP Air

You turn up at the airport,which is under contract to only allow XP Air planes. All the aircraft are identical, brightly coloured and three times as big as they need to be. The signs are huge and all point the same way. Whichever way you go, someone pops up dressed in a cloak and pointed hat insisting you follow him. Your luggage and clothes are taken off you and replaced with an XP Air suit and suitcase identical to everyone around you as this is included in the exorbitant ticket cost. The aircraft will not take off until you have signed a contract. The inflight entertainment promised turns out to be the same Mickey Mouse cartoon repeated over and over again. You have to phone your travel agent before you can have a meal or drink. You are searched regularly throughout the flight. If you go to the toilet twice or more you get charged for a new ticket. No matter what destination you booked you will always end up crash landing at Whistler in Canada.

OSX Air:

You enter a white terminal, and all you can see is a woman sitting in the corner behind a white desk, you walk up to get your ticket. She smiles and says “Welcome to OS X Air, please allow us to take your picture”, at which point a camera in the wall you didn’t notice before takes your picture. “Thank you, here is your ticket” You are handed a minimalistic ticket with your picture at the top, it already has all of your information. A door opens to your right and you walk through. You enter a wide open space with one seat in the middle, you sit, listen to music and watch movies until the end of the flight. You never see any of the other passengers. You land, get off, and you say to yourself “wow, that was really nice, but I feel like something was missing”

Windows Vista Airlines:

You enter a good looking terminal with the largest planes you have ever seen. Every 10 feet a security officer appears and asks you if you are “sure” you want to continue walking to your plane and if you would like to cancel. Not sure what cancel would do, you continue walking and ask the agent at the desk why the planes are so big. After the security officer making sure you want to ask the question and you want to hear the answer, the agent replies that they are bigger because it makes customers feel better, but the planes are designed to fly twice as slow. Adding the size helped achieve the slow fly goal.

Once on the plane, every passenger has to be asked individually by the flight attendants if they are sure they want to take this flight. Then it is company policy that the captain asks the passengers collectively the same thing. After answering yes to so many questions, you are punched in the face by some stranger who when he asked “Are you sure you want me to punch you in the face? Cancel or Allow?” you instinctively say “Allow”.

After takeoff, the pilots realize that the landing gear driver wasn’t updated to work with the new plane. Therefore it is always stuck in the down position. This forces the plane to fly even slower, but the pilots are used to it and continue to fly the planes, hoping that soon the landing gear manufacturer will give out a landing gear driver update.

You arrive at your destination wishing you had used your reward miles with XP airlines rather than trying out this new carrier. A close friend, after hearing your story, mentions that Linux Air is a much better alternative and helps.

Linux Air

Disgruntled employees of all the other OS airlines decide to start their own airline. They build the planes, ticket counters, and pave the runways themselves. They charge a small fee to cover the cost of printing the ticket, but you can also download and print the ticket yourself.

When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy of the seat-HOWTO.html. Once settled, the fully adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plane leaves and arrives on time without a single problem, the in-flight meal is wonderful. You try to tell customers of the other airlines about the great trip, but all they can say is, “You had to do what with the seat?”

Credit: Zyra

20.Nov.07 Internet & Technology Comment (1)

How To Get a Faster Internet Speed - Firefox Browser Tweak - Reduces Page Loading Time

There are settings you can change that would increase the speed of your browser (yes, seriously!). It doesn’t actually change the speed of your internet connection, but you can configure it so that the browser renders a page before it is fully loaded. To do that, we need to enable pipelining.

Step 1. Load the Firefox Config Page

Load up the Firefox configuration page in your browser by typing about:config in the url path.

Step 2. Use Search Feature

At the top of the page, you’ll see a search feature. Use it, by typing in network.http, to find the pipelining options.

Step 3. Modifications

network.http.pipelining: Set this to true, to enable pipelining.
network.http.proxy.pipelining: Set this to true, to enable pipelining to the proxy server.
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests: Set this to 8, to have a maximum of 8 pipelining requests at once. Possible values are from 1 to 8.