I've seen a lot of my friends using the blog site Tumblr. It's a less serious version of Blogspot, Wordpress, and other blog sites. Not only can authors publish rhetoric, they also are able to post visual media and quotations. Tumblr combines blogging and social networking: if a user sees an interesting item on another registered member's Tumblr, the user may "reblog" it (hence the "via ____" tags). Unlike on traditional blog sites where you can't instantly reblog every interesting thing you see on another blog, on blogspot you have to copy-and-paste and link everything manually.
There also seems to be much more decorative freedom on Tumblr, see Kathleen's for example. Compare that with my blog (and others hosted on the traditional hosts) and notice how more artsy and simple Tumblrs can be.
And celebrities seem to have taken on Tumblr too: for example, actress Dianna Agron, who plays Quinn Fabray on the TV show Glee. Responding to a rather risque photo shoot for GQ magazine that the Parents Television Council disliked, Agron apologised and elaborated on Tumblr.
What Tumblr can do is hardly new to the Internet: blogs have been around since the late '90s, and if you want to share videos or photos then Blogspot already has the hosting capability to do so. That's why I'll never use Tumblr. If I wanna share my thoughts or cool Web junk, I'll keep posting 'em here.
Showing posts with label blogging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blogging. Show all posts
22 October 2010
23 February 2008
When I was gone...
So this is pretty much my first blog I've written since August 2007. New year of 2008 has come, with only 10 more months of the wicked presidency of George W. Bush and the predicted entry of good old Barack Obama, the first semester passing me by with sand and fog, the writer's strike coming and going, the death of Benazir Bhutto, the upcoming 2008 Summer Olympics in my beloved Beijing, China (I have extended family there), the sequel to Virginia Tech over at Northern Illinois University, the winter storms in China, and loads and loads of other things I could write a lot of blogs a day about that I don't want to include here.
In the past week weird things have come up on my cell. For some odd reasons I've been getting odd calls on my cell phone. I went on google to look 'em up. One of 'em was from a Vietnamese woman living in Milpitas who dialed the wrong number I guess.
But things get worse. I've been getting calls from places like Phoenix, AZ and Newton, MA about "car warranty expiration" when hell, I don't even own a car! Google this. Found a site 800Notes.com that led me to this. Look up suspicious phone numbers there.
The reason why I haven't been able to blog? Due to the fact that I take 3 AP classes...as I've repeatedly mentioned ( I guess in my humble memory) Calculus AB, English Literature, and US History. So far I think I am dong better in them, after a pretty unstable first semester. Lately I've been getting tutoring for Calc AB after struggling with Applications of Differentiation, and since then my grades have improved. I will take the SAT test in May 2007, a couple weeks or so before the AP exams. I have also gotten tutoring in that class, specifically for the writing section and speculatively in the critical reading. I just took a practice SAT today and got 2050. Some genius I am! :) My goal is at least 2200, or if I kick a lot of ass, then as far as 2400 I can go. Well all I can say for myself is to be more careful with the problems and make sure I check every single damn word they say.
I know that the SAT has been criticized a lot due to it's "anti-intellectual" attitude and lack of scope within the brain...that's why some American liberal arts colleges have dropped it in favor of bigger and better things (a.k.a. Your Brain). As far as the Essays go, Massachusetts Instituete of Tech writing diretor Les Perelman has claimed that common "cheating" techniques to get a high scores on the essays like 10 or 12 (the scale is 12) include making your essays uber LONG. Plus, Perelman has a valid point that the writing in the SAT essay pretty much defeats "good" writing you do in AP English classes or wherever that makes you polish it like a shiny new car. But I defend the SAT essay, while I do agree that it ain't as great as, say your AP Lit analyitical essay, at least it tests your ability to make a good argument, through good evidence and structure and proof. I think I'll be able to do well on it, since my tutor recently commented that my writing has greatly improved since the first time we met back in January 2008.
In coming months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds, microseconds, and specks of dust, here's a list of topics I will be writing about:
- Politics as I hear from theliberally biased news media...from both the Democratic/Republican sides of course...or at least i HOPE i stay balanced.
- The upcoming agenda from moronic self-appointed "morality" groups like the Parents Television Council and American Family Association to destroy the first amendment in the name of fundamental 1960s family values that many of us can think beyond. You'll be seeing in the coming times how cranky and foolish these hypocrites are, with the EVIDENCE of course (I promise not to spin)
- Of course, my own life, including my dreams, favorite TV, books, movies, friends, school, and the whatnot.
Now excuse me when I go back to watching PBS' presentation of the BBC's adaptation of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice"...
In the past week weird things have come up on my cell. For some odd reasons I've been getting odd calls on my cell phone. I went on google to look 'em up. One of 'em was from a Vietnamese woman living in Milpitas who dialed the wrong number I guess.
But things get worse. I've been getting calls from places like Phoenix, AZ and Newton, MA about "car warranty expiration" when hell, I don't even own a car! Google this. Found a site 800Notes.com that led me to this. Look up suspicious phone numbers there.
The reason why I haven't been able to blog? Due to the fact that I take 3 AP classes...as I've repeatedly mentioned ( I guess in my humble memory) Calculus AB, English Literature, and US History. So far I think I am dong better in them, after a pretty unstable first semester. Lately I've been getting tutoring for Calc AB after struggling with Applications of Differentiation, and since then my grades have improved. I will take the SAT test in May 2007, a couple weeks or so before the AP exams. I have also gotten tutoring in that class, specifically for the writing section and speculatively in the critical reading. I just took a practice SAT today and got 2050. Some genius I am! :) My goal is at least 2200, or if I kick a lot of ass, then as far as 2400 I can go. Well all I can say for myself is to be more careful with the problems and make sure I check every single damn word they say.
I know that the SAT has been criticized a lot due to it's "anti-intellectual" attitude and lack of scope within the brain...that's why some American liberal arts colleges have dropped it in favor of bigger and better things (a.k.a. Your Brain). As far as the Essays go, Massachusetts Instituete of Tech writing diretor Les Perelman has claimed that common "cheating" techniques to get a high scores on the essays like 10 or 12 (the scale is 12) include making your essays uber LONG. Plus, Perelman has a valid point that the writing in the SAT essay pretty much defeats "good" writing you do in AP English classes or wherever that makes you polish it like a shiny new car. But I defend the SAT essay, while I do agree that it ain't as great as, say your AP Lit analyitical essay, at least it tests your ability to make a good argument, through good evidence and structure and proof. I think I'll be able to do well on it, since my tutor recently commented that my writing has greatly improved since the first time we met back in January 2008.
In coming months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds, microseconds, and specks of dust, here's a list of topics I will be writing about:
- Politics as I hear from the
- The upcoming agenda from moronic self-appointed "morality" groups like the Parents Television Council and American Family Association to destroy the first amendment in the name of fundamental 1960s family values that many of us can think beyond. You'll be seeing in the coming times how cranky and foolish these hypocrites are, with the EVIDENCE of course (I promise not to spin)
- Of course, my own life, including my dreams, favorite TV, books, movies, friends, school, and the whatnot.
Now excuse me when I go back to watching PBS' presentation of the BBC's adaptation of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice"...
24 March 2007
My First "Real" Blogging Experience
Wow...my first blog entry outside of my regular Myspace account. Wow. I hope that more people will take my blogging seriously if I post here, as one of my friends recommended me to. So now it's a Saturday in late March, after I've done piano lessons, the library, dentist, and dinner, and I don't feel like really doing anything now. I hope you enjoy reading my blogs, which I do post if anything remotely interesting happens in my life or current events now, and I hope I'll have fun as well.
Now, regarding Myspace, I began using it in the middle of my freshman year in high school after I heard a lot of my friends were using it. I used to be a total addict to it, using it like every day infinitely, but nowadays I use it just to keep in touch with friends in the simplest manner possible, not to do all that other [...] like surveys, hardcore designing, attention grabbing, etc. I have a lot of other [...] to deal with in life given that I have to take the AP World History Exam in 17 May and may take Math Analysis this summer. However, as technology continues advancing as time goes on, I began noticing weird [...] in the bulletins and comments section in MySpace. At first, I thought people were doing that [...] on purpose, but then I learned that it was all done by hackers. That had been going on since at least August 2006. Spam on bulletins and comments promoting the most perverted [...] on Earth: pornography, fake free gift cards, fake free iPods/electronics, you name whatever junk you can find on the Web these days. It starts when people seeking free enhancements for their Myspace profiles encounter "Myspace login pages" that are outside the actual Myspace site, and people think it's for real, so they log in with that, and that's how spam gets transmitted. And then some other clowns believe the spam is true and thus their profile gets corrupted as well. Today, when I logged in Myspace, finally, the admin stepped forward with this:
"Latest Update: Mar 24, 2007 3:00pm, PST
I know a lot of you are seeing spam comments on your page. sorry about that! The super nasty ones block your other comments. They also may not be easy to delete. Here's how to get rid of them: from your home page, click "edit profile," then click "safe edit mode" in the top right corner of the edit page. next, click the "comments" tab. from here you'll be able to delete the comments individually.
just fyi, we are in the process of taking legal action against the losers behind this comment spam. bad news is that's going to take awhile because courts are slow, good news is we won some recent cases which is going to make it easy to punish the beejesus out of them. also, we're working on a filter that will stop it from happening altogether.. that should be done in a few days."
Wow, I hope when all this is over with I'm sure at least 95% of the spam on Myspace will disappear.
In other news, find me in Battle of the Classes on Friday 30 March during intermission. You will be surprised.
Now, regarding Myspace, I began using it in the middle of my freshman year in high school after I heard a lot of my friends were using it. I used to be a total addict to it, using it like every day infinitely, but nowadays I use it just to keep in touch with friends in the simplest manner possible, not to do all that other [...] like surveys, hardcore designing, attention grabbing, etc. I have a lot of other [...] to deal with in life given that I have to take the AP World History Exam in 17 May and may take Math Analysis this summer. However, as technology continues advancing as time goes on, I began noticing weird [...] in the bulletins and comments section in MySpace. At first, I thought people were doing that [...] on purpose, but then I learned that it was all done by hackers. That had been going on since at least August 2006. Spam on bulletins and comments promoting the most perverted [...] on Earth: pornography, fake free gift cards, fake free iPods/electronics, you name whatever junk you can find on the Web these days. It starts when people seeking free enhancements for their Myspace profiles encounter "Myspace login pages" that are outside the actual Myspace site, and people think it's for real, so they log in with that, and that's how spam gets transmitted. And then some other clowns believe the spam is true and thus their profile gets corrupted as well. Today, when I logged in Myspace, finally, the admin stepped forward with this:
"Latest Update: Mar 24, 2007 3:00pm, PST
just fyi, we are in the process of taking legal action against the losers behind this comment spam. bad news is that's going to take awhile because courts are slow, good news is we won some recent cases which is going to make it easy to punish the beejesus out of them. also, we're working on a filter that will stop it from happening altogether.. that should be done in a few days."
Wow, I hope when all this is over with I'm sure at least 95% of the spam on Myspace will disappear.
In other news, find me in Battle of the Classes on Friday 30 March during intermission. You will be surprised.
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