Buta no Ie

I’m thinking I’m going to take my pent up frustrations and go on a weekly rant Friday evenings. Here’s my thoughts on the upcoming Sony Playstation 3 vs the already available Microsoft Xbox 360.

So I get home and have some leftovers but I’m feeling not feeling quite full. No worries, there’s always the old stand-by, buck-a-slice pizza downstairs.

I’m not sure if the term buck-a-slice is universal, so let me elaborate. In downtown Vancouver, you can find an abundance of cheap, in terms of both price (usually $1Cdn/slice) and quality, pizza joints. This is especially true in areas with a high concentration of either ESL (english as second language) schools, bars or night clubs.

Downstairs from where I live, there are two of these pizza places side by side. The one on the corner serves a tastier pie. Everyone goes to the joint on the corner. So much so that they raised the price a bit last year and everyone, myself included, still went there.

So you might be asking, what the heck does this have to do with the next-gen console wars?

Everything.

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Via ArsTechnica:

If you want to try out the latest and greatest from Redmond, but missed out on the limited release of the pre-RC1 build last week, now’s your chance. Microsoft has made RC1 available to the public in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors. You can download it straight from Microsoft or via the Akamai Download Manager.

A quick list of a few must have additions for WordPress:

• Sandbox; a self-described theme for themers. It produces semantic and valid XHTML 1.0/Transitional markup, is widget compatible and has the ability to be easily skinned via CSS.
• Sidebar Widgets; makes it dead simple to add and order your sidebar content with drag-and-drop administration. No need to hack away at the sidebar.php code for the timid.
• Flickr Photo Album; this plugin will pull in your Flickr photosets and display them as albums on your WordPress site. It will also allow you to easily insert your Flickr photos into your blog posts with just a couple clicks.
• Ultimate Tag Warrior; allows you to easily tag your posts inside the Write Post page and display your tags in many different ways.
• Search Everything; did you know that the default WP search doesn’t search pages and comments? I didn’t know that either but this plugin adds that functionality.

I had the pleasure of being the MC for my friends’ wedding yesterday. The whole event seems to have been a hit, my MCing include, if comments from the guests can be believed.

Rich and Phuong, congratulations once again and enjoy your honeymoon!

Unfortunately at the very end of the night, I somehow managed to drop my camera and not notice it AND then proceed to run it over with a car.

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Just read this great article on SEOmoz on how to increase your blog’s traffic.

A must read if you’re just starting up a blog and want to actually have some people viewing it.

The default installation of WordPress that my ISP provides is 2.0.3. As I was entering my links, I noticed that single (‘) and double quotes (“) weren’t being displayed properly no matter what I did. I tried replacing them with their appropriate hex entities and HTML entities but no dice.

Turns out this is an issue afflicting the 2.0.3 release. Upgrading to 2.0.4 resolves this issue and I many others. If you’re a WordPress user and haven’t already upgraded, I encourage you to do so.

You never want to be up at 1:00 in the morning, bashing your head trying to figure out why your quotes don’t work.

First post!

Roll out the red carpet… I can’t believe I’ve been in the industry for almost a decade and have never started a blog.

A bit about myself. I’m an User Experience Developer (client-side development) with the Habañero Consulting Group.

I’ve recently been tasked to research how best to get our User Experience Group’s blog up and running. We’ve pretty much decided to go with WordPress. If it’s good enough for Jeffery Zeldman, it’s good enough for me.

Through the WP website I found BlueHost, an inexpensive hosting service. Can’t go wrong with $8/mo for 30gigs of storage and a huge gob of bandwidth. Hopefully they may finally give my website a proper home.

Over the next few weeks, and probably going into months, I’ll document the trials and tribulations of developing and designing a blog from the point of view of a guy who’s livelyhood depends on the web.

So welcome to SingChan.com… more to come.