We the people in Oregon are fortunate enough that we don’t really have much disasters except forest fire. Please, donate to help the victims of this tragic event. They have lost everything.

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I can’t tell you how many times I read a great tinycouch comic and say to myself, “I sure do wish I could tell the creator of this great comic what I think, and have my comment posted live on the interweb for the entire world to see!” I’m sure you’ve been there – you know what I’m talking about.

Most of the comments I would write would probably be like this:

Interesting.

Once in awhile, I might write one like this:

Hmm. Interesting.

And occasionally, a great comic will come up and I’ll be like:

Woah.

It’s obvious how much value can be added by my comments. This is what virtual communities are all about: sharing input with each other and adding value.

Picture posted:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/changjoe/sets/797299/

taken from Straight Hill Rd – overlooking Hood River Valley, Oregon.

IMG_0727, originally uploaded by Joe Chang.

and I think he enjoyed it.

• Must have two navigation menus – what’s the point? Make readers confused?
• ALL images have to be less than 20KB – What’s the point? My photo gallery will now feature five hundreds 75×75 px thumbnails.
• The TA took 50% off of my project because he can’t find the “include” statement via view source. (Later got the points back)
• The professor took off 10% off of my project because one of the image that’s listed 19.7KB on Firefox shows up as 20KB on her IE.

CS 275x was lame, but this one is coming up pretty strong.

My theory is: BETA.

It is true, that GMail is still under developing and testing, features and security issues are being added and solved. But I think another key issue for keeping GMail in beta is to keep allows the maximum amount of people to use GMail that the server can possibly provide.

When one person obtained a GMail account, that’s already 1GB of space assigned to him (whether he use it up or not, that’s a difference issue), and when Google gives him six invitations, that is another 6GB given undirectly to him. To make sure that Google’s server doesn’t crash from the initial registration and gives away thousands of TBs of spaces, making GMail a beta product and requires invitations was a good strategy for it. Instead of millions of people demanding Google to add more harddrives, this strategy allows Google to upgrade their servers, and then allow more people to register.

By making Gmail beta also discourages people from registering more than one account, not that it’s impossible, but it makes it harder for them to do so.

Now a day, Gmail invitations are everywhere and it seems like everybody is got one, Gmail has almost successfully allowed everybody who wants a Gmail to have a Gmail account, and the quality of the service didn’t go down, and the reliability of the servers didn’t panic either. I’d say it’s a job well done.

* Free in terms of $$$, but the over filled screen with computer ads sure is annoying. Actual cost of brain cells wasted to filter them out is priceless.

Taiwan has not been invited to a summit of major donors to the relief operation in the wake of the tsunami which devastated countries around the Indian Ocean on Dec. 26.

This is in spite of Taiwan’s being one of top 10 donors of aid, having pledged US$50 million to the relief effort.

While the Ministry of Foreign Affairs told the Indonesian government which is hosting the summit that it would like to attend, Jakarta didn’t even bother to reply.

Not to be mean to Indonesia or anything, but what the heck are they thinking? For so long Taiwan has supported a lot country that’s in need of aids, but all they get is talk-to-the-hand. Why must everything be politics? What about humanity?

NWR Top 100 Internet Users October 2004 – Top Users by Web Pages
RANK: 3
Uniname: JCHANG1
Full Name: Chang,Joe
Site: CVO
Web Pages: 90,454
Percent: 1%

http://media.adshadow.net/diesel/preloader_bear-1.swf

If anyone knows what its for, please comment.