New Background for Fall
To reflect the passing of the summer, here's a new background image. The days have gotten shorter and will get an hour shorter soon. Besides, with school during the day, the night life is where it's at. 
If you wish to get a clearer view of the 1680x1050 image, right click and choose something like "View Background Image" (depending on your browser's capabilities). It's me at a concert giving the peace sign with my characteristic right middle finger that people can identify me by. Special thanks to A.Y. for taking the picture at the spur of the moment and D.Y. for the awesome camera that produced such a workable night shot with minimal noise (nothing that a little Photoshop-ing won't fix).
Here's to another busy year. I'll do my best in taking on a more active role in keeping in touch this year. Just so you can't say I didn't try. Maybe.
Background Image
Open my Twitter in a separate tab. Switch between this and that. Cool, no? Well, I think it is and it didn't take long to do. Difference here is that I modified my Wordpress theme so you can see through it a bit and into the middle of the background image. I can't do that on Twitter. And unless your screen resolution is greater than 1680 x 1050, this shouldn't look odd. And if it is and it bothers you, shrink the window.
I guess I'll change the image with the changing of the seasons. The one right now has always been my favourite summer image both visually and sentimentally.
Observation: Blogging about recent TV show songs, current issues, and new releases = septupling to octupling your site traffic thanks to Google.
Fixed Some Bugs
There were some bugs and foolish mistakes left unseen by me on the site and I went ahead and fixed them. Comments should be working properly. So should the wall ('cept it still brings you to a separate page with weird formatting after posting a comment). The links page should be fixed.
In my attempts to secure the website further, I accidentally introduced some bugs. Now, my site should be secure against the typical script-kiddies, noob hackers, and typical bots. I obviously won't say what I did.
It's funny how many people land on my site looking for the "Andrew Chow" they know. Or those looking for random song lyrics.
I don't know how serious I want to take this site but if traffic keeps growing, it might just be worthwhile to put some Adsense or what-not to make some money on the side. Pfft.
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Blue Jays continue to disappoint (see today's game as an example). J.P. says he's open to taking offers for Halladay though it doesn't mean he'll accept any. If J.P. wants to keep his job, he'll do his best to keep Halladay or the trade for him better be damn good for the team. Wells' overvalued contract is already his fault.
But Halladay says he wants to win and play in the World Series (duh) and come 2010, if the Blue Jays don't turn around that season, he'll leave no matter what the Jays organization offers him. He'll most likely will go to the Yankees or BoSox or whoever can afford his current market value.
MLB needs a salary cap. Not only because the same teams are reaching the playoffs (though some argue there's been enough variation) but because the richer teams are essentially using the poorer teams as "farms". The poor teams develop the players to stardom and they leave for bigger paychecks while the poor teams are compensated with lame 1st-round draft picks.
Meh, the players' union will fight tooth and nail to prevent such a cap from happening. And I guess one could argue that teams are "poor" because of the fans (and lack thereof). It's hard not to see the contrast between sellout crowds in New York and Boston vs. Toronto.
Back Online
After getting my DNS listing hijacked and redirecting to an annoying "Power Acai Berry" scam, I'm finally back online and running after a quick back-and-forth with tech support. Turns out they were running outdated DNS servers leaving my site vulnerable to such an attack. Though, none of my files were harmed or touched at all rather, the attack basically changed what IP address "andrewchow.com" redirected to.
Good thing I have my entire blog posts backed up. Woot woot.
For those who are computer illiterate, I'll draw a parallel: Just as viruses and bacteria evolve to adapt against our anti-biotics, vaccines, and treatments; computer hackers work ever so diligently in finding new security holes while the developers work quickly to patch those security holes up. Thus, it is important in both cases to be at the cutting edge and up-to-date to stay ahead of the game.
To prevent this from happening again, I've blocked probably 95% of IPs from China from accessing this site. It's unfortunate but necessary since China is one of the cyber-crime safe havens in the world at the moment (many spammers/hackers/etc. come from there and waste bandwidth). The recent influx of Chinese visitors according to my site logs and subsequent DNS hijack is no coincidence. The list of IPs I have used were obtained from countryipblocks.net and if you run your own site and wish to do the same, the list is there.
"China is currently leading the world in malicious activity and botnets, followed by Brazil, Russia, India, Korea, Viet Nam [sic], Ukraine, Turkey, Italy and Argentina." -countryipblocks.net
I don't know see how andrewchow.com is worth the effort in terms of size and traffic when there's juicier targets for hackers to attack. Though, most of these are automated bots.
Under Construction
So, yeah, things are going to be looking very different over the next few weeks. I don't know when I'll finish this mini-reorganization.
I'm basically going to modify a suitable Wordpress theme, put in a light Flash slideshow header of my adventures over the years, and have the music player pop-out as a separate window (there's no other way to keep the music continuously playing without using frames). Of course, the pop-up will NOT be automatic - you'd have to click a button.
As our lifestyles become busier (for most people I know and including myself), creating long Flash animations and what not is pointless after the first viewing. So, I will be moving towards a very lightweight and quick style of web design where fast information flow is the priority. As a netbook owner, I don't like pwning my Intel Atom CPU (and yours) on a Flash animation when I just want to update on the happenings in my life and you just want to stalk me - haha.
EDIT: Ok, I don't know what the heck is going on with Internet Explorer 8 when viewing this site. I have yet to try Google Chrome and Safari. Bah, getting all the browsers to agree is going to be annoying.
EDIT #2: Ran my site through Browsershots.org and came up with an interesting result. ONLY Internet Explorer is having trouble rendering my site properly. Wtf Microsoft? What kind of special interpretation of standard code are you running? This is why IE fails.
On the Lack of Updates
I guess it's hard to sit and write longer blog entries or update the song of the week when there's such fine weather and more free time to do more enjoyable things. I'm spending time on things I've been putting off during the heavier school year.
It doesn't help that I don't travel between cities much with the heavier main laptop I use to update the site. After three and a half years of heavy service, it's on its last legs. The LCD panel has begun its death throws of random screen flickers.
Maybe after May, when I probably settle out of vacationing my mind and body, I'll get back to the hobby of web design. Priorities right now are abolishing the use of any <IFRAME> code anywhere and redesigning the site to fit within 1024 x 600. Those are major problems for the links in the sidebar and for netbooks respectively.
For now, I'll stick to micro-blogging on Twitter on things that don't really deserve a full entry. Being able to tweet anywhere I want is a plus.
I have my Wordpress to automatically post a weekly digest of my tweets. Or just follow me on Twitter (theandrewchow) if you are so intent on "stalking" me. I mainly micro-blog on my everyday average life.
I'll admit that I wrote a lot of sociopolitical and scientific stuff (coupled with my own anectodal evidence) as it kept my mind sharp. It certainly kept my mind from turning into mush from the standard memorization exercises of academia. And it's good writing practice.
I want to see Up. Just throwing that out there.
Redesign
Seeing as how I left my main workhorse laptop back in a city far away while I'm back home, I have no means of updating the site other than with blog posts.
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Yup, I'm already thinking up ways to redesign the site. There are far too many flaws working with this layout over the past month and I think the simplest solution is to have the music player pop-up in a separate window or do away with XML playlists and have each SOTW post include a little player.
I need to streamline updating and managing the gallery as well.
Also, technological trends these past few business quarters have shown an explosion of netbooks and the use of the low-power Atom processor. Most of these netbooks have a small 1024x600 resolution. As such, I need to redesign the site to be less CPU-intensive and to be more accomodating to the lower resolution. I myself use a netbook so I'll know how to go about doing this.
I might make an "intro" movie highlighting the past chapter of my life. The theme will be "change" - 'cause so much has changed and it sure as been tough surviving it all psychologically, socially, and physically. But there is a strong possibility I won't have time for this as much as I want to express myself.
Plus, I'm on the hunt for a laptop that can handle all the multimedia publishing I want to do (or won't have time to do regardless, haha.)
Integration, Interconnectivity, and Identity
Wordpress, Gallery, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and everything else. I think these are things I'll be using a lot in the future and having them all in one place for updating will make life easier for everyone and make it easier for me to maintain an online identity.
We're already seeing signs of integration as one can make a blog entry and have a story crossposted on Facebook and Twitter at the same time. Facebook Connect aims to do that kind of integration. Instead of commenting on the site, comment on Facebook and it'll be seen in both locations.
If I am to seriously maintain an online presence and keep in touch wherever in the world life takes us, across the multitude of social networking sites, the current layout needs some major fixing and additions. Flash is cool but not a great medium for effective communication and I've made far too many concessions just to make it work. With netbooks and cell phone browsing on the rise, less flashiness and more simple and clear delivery is crucial.
About the Gallery
I'm looking for a good web-based gallery manager. The one I'm using, Gallery2, is bloated, slow, and tries to do too many things at once. (Every image in the current gallery requires 25 to 30 database queries. Very slow unless I rent my own private server.) And the software I install on to my computer doesn't let me manage captions and it can't seem to properly handle apostrophes. It's also running on slow-ass Java that crashes on the slightest hiccup.
Did you know I could sell pictures using Gallery2? Will I ever use that feature? No.
If I could find an easier and more efficient way of uploading pictures, then the gallery wouldn't be so slowly updated nor would it be so annoying to navigate. It also was recently messed up when I upgraded my blogging platform, Wordpress, to 2.7.1.
I've been looking at Google Picasa, Flickr, or MyPhotoAlbum but I still prefer hosting my own images and movies on my server - not with some other company. The method must have software I can install onto my computer to "sync" photo albums between my computer and the web server. I still don't know how it will be incorporated to this site's layout. I might have to overhaul the layout again this summer since I'm still not too keen on using <IFRAME>'s.
Inline frames prevent me from using AJAX pop-ups. You know those blogs that have a full version of the picture pop up and the background darkens when you click the thumbnail? I can't do that with the way things are here. Going to a separate page puts it in the frame or stops the music. And opening up a full new window is annoying and often blocked.
Upgrading to Wordpress 2.7.1
Today, I'm in the process of manually upgrading Wordpress to 2.7.1 so you may see some anomalies. But at least this will be the last manual update I will have to do.
I hope all the plug-ins and themes I've set up remain intact.
