Now a Blog

What better way to end this year and decade but with a hodgepodge post consisting of three completely unrelated topics?

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Having not bought a video game console for more than seven years, my family finally caved in and bought a Nintendo Wii two months ago. Originally it was my mother who wanted the Wii because of the good things she heard about it, but as expected I ended up being the one who uses it the most. We only have the console and Wii Sports for now, and here are my impressions after playing for two months.

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I’m on winter vacation right now, and I don’t plan on going anywhere. Therefore, there’s no better things for me to do but to pay some attention to my oft neglected personal website. Over the last four or five days, I have been busy converting TJ Online from Xoops to Wordpress, and the website you now see is the finished product of that effort. Xoops is a nice piece of software, but over the years I’ve discovered that it’s a bit overkill for a personal website. I chose to convert to Wordpress because… everyone else is running Wordpress. It is the most popular blogging platform out there for a reason, so it seems like a good choice. Converting my site into a blog also will help motivate me to write more… or at least I hope ;). I’ve also chosen to convert this site because it gets very little visitors, so screwing around with this site won’t really affect my total traffic by much.

Since Wordpress didn’t have an automatic import tool for Xoops and that I wanted to keep as much of my old data as possible, I manually moved every article, download, and gallery picture from Xoops to Wordpress. By manual, I meant manually copying and pasting posts, uploading photos, and modifying the database via PHPMyAdmin. It’s boring and time consuming work, but I am used to doing this stuff. Compared to moving my data, installing Wordpress and plug-ins was pretty easy. I really like the fact that Wordpress has integrated a plug-in search into the admin panel. It makes finding and installing plug-ins so convenient. Compared to Xoops, Wordpress is simpler. There are definitely some areas where Xoops is stronger, but thus far I have found that Wordpress is meeting my needs for this website.

Anyways, this is more or less the completed website. I might add some small things here or there, but the look (modified from the understated but elegant “Piano Black” theme from mono-lab) is here to stay. Since the theme itself is primarily black and shades of gray, I will try to use bright backgrounds to liven up this place, and as a start I’ve employed a photo of some of the fuchsia in my family’s backyard. Anyways, hopefully all the changes will make this site more user friendly and attract more visitors.

Lastly, I hope everyone will have a happy holidays.

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My family recently bought a new point-and-shoot digital camera and I decided to write a little article about it. We decided upon a Canon Powershot SD890IS which met all the requirements my family had within the right price range. This is not a review of the camera since I don’t know enough about photography or camera technologies. Rather, this is just an article for me to show off a brand new gadget and write some initial impressions from the viewpoint on an uneducated consumer, so here goes nothing.

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Here is another short article analysis I wrote for one of my university courses last term. The artilce is “Can Technology Replace Social Engineering” by Alvin Weinberg. Just in case your didn’t know, Alvin Weinberg is a famous (at least in the academic world) nuclear physicist who writes articles from time to time, and below is my take on his article.

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Last Christmas I decided to give a little gift to myself, and so I went out and bought a Wacom Bamboo Fun graphics tablet. I’ve been eying a graphics tablet for a while, but I waited until the Boxing Day Sale to pull the trigger. Here is my experience thus far with the product, and a teaser of what I might be capable of producing with my new tablet.

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It’s been almost four years since my family has gotten a new computer. Usually I’m the one who gets the fastest computer in the house, but this time around the new computer is for my dad. The old computer that he was using was getting unbearably slow even for web surfing and word processing, so it was finally time to get him a new computer. After considering all the factors, we decided to get a 17 inch laptop, the Compaq A900 series (model A939CA). This article is not a really a review of the laptop, but just a short document about setting it up and my first impressions of the laptop (and also Windows Vista), plus a couple of pictures of the machine for people to see.

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The original Total Annihilation is one of my favorite strategy games. I spent a lot of time playing it back in the days when I still had the time to play games. TA is pretty famous for its large number of units and support for user created content. I originally wanted to create a website dedicated to this game but that plan kind of got sidetracked. However, I did create a walkthrough to the single player campaign. Since I don’t want my “hard” work to go to waste, I decided to post this walkthrough up for those people who are interested. TA might be a pretty old game, but it can still be pretty fun.

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Like many people, I own an iPod. A few weeks ago, my two-year-old iPod broke down, and this is an article about my attempts to fix my iPod. It was fairly clear from the beginning that the problem was hard drive related, but I tried some “alternative therapy” before replacing the hard drive myself. Read on to see if I successfully fixed my iPod or have I failed miserably in the attempt.

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This is my second Photoshop tutorial. This tutorial is even easier than my last one, and it allows you to create some gooey slime in just a few clicks. The whole process shouldn’t even take half a minute. Keep reading to find out how.

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