The personal blog of a regular guy

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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It’s been three years since the inception of the tonyjiang.com domain. In the last year not too much has been happening to my websites as my efforts were focused on work, school, and something else. This doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to write about though, so keep on reading for the inside scoop into tonyjiang.com’s third year on the world wide web.

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I feel like writing today, so I thought I would share my GRE experience. For those who didn’t know, the Graduate Record Examination is a standardized exam prepared that students have to take if they want to apply to certain grad school programs (mainly in the United States). This article is basically my experience taking the GRE general test, starting from when I started studying and ending with me getting my scores. Unfortunately, there won’t be much useful studying tips in here since I tend to study the “dumb” way, but hopefully this article will at least be an interesting read.

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It’s time again for another yearly reflections article. This is actually my fourth year as a college undergrad, but because of co-op I was still doing my third year courses. Just like last year, I only spent four months in school and spent the other eight months working as a co-op student (and am still working at the time of writing). Unlike last year however, I didn’t become very ill and therefore there are no emergency room visits to speak of. This probably means this article won’t be as exciting as last year’s, but I’m glad not to have that kind of excitement. Anyways, read on to find out what I’ve been up to in the past year.

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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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Yes it’s true: tonyjiang.com and its core websites (the crabbing guide and smash bros. guide) has received their 200,000th unique visitor today! Okay, there are some websites out there who get 200,000 visitors every month, but it’s still quite an achievement for my humble little sites. A big thank you to all of those who visited over the last six or seven years. I have free time to spend on these websites as I grow older and have more responsibilities, but I’ll try to add some quality content whenever I can.

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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