Category: Services & Products

It’s really scary … I forgot how many times I upgraded my blog engine (you know from version 0.32 years ago to now version 1.2.1) but this time the installation procedure or myself screwed up. After upgrading the engine to the latest version last night, and ran the so-called “installation wizard”, all my blog posts were gone !! All disappeared … A dead website.

And because the upgrade is a minor one (from version 1.2.0 to 1.2.1), I did not backup the blog database before the upgrade … stupid me I suppose. All I got is a database backup in end March, even before the version 1.2.0. What could I do ?

• Install back the old version (version 1.1.6);
• Import the old data;
• Search the latest blog post in Google;
• From the result page, click the “Cached” link;
• Found the web page cached image (with the latest blog posts’ text and pictures), and
• Recreated all the blog posts from end March to mid April … one by one, from the Google image to the blog engine.

Now as you can see the site is back online … and Google saves the site.

“Apple® today announced Complete My Album®, a groundbreaking new iTunes service that allows customers to turn their individual tracks into a complete album at a reduced price by giving them a full 99 cent credit for every track they have previously purchased from that album.”

Interesting. It’s interesting that it:

• Turn individual tracks into a complete album,
• At a reduced price

But let’s see it from user experience angle … if you want to do it before the launch of this service … you need to do searches about the album, buy the rest of the songs in the album (as you don’t want to buy the songs you already bought), and all with multiple clicks and screens.

Now … you can finish the whole task with only one click. I love Apple.

Since the design of Wii is so innovative (e.g. the remote), one obvious challenge is to educate the consumers about all the new stuffs … even before they buy the game console. What approach is better than video clips ? And of course with the help of Internet, the cost of distributing these video clips to potential consumers is practically zero.

You can find dozens of Wiideos in Internet, some by Nintendo, some by other professional animators / graphic designers (e.g. www.super78.com). Here are some clips I really really like:

Work, work and more work … what a boring weekend ?! There are couple of things that cheer me up though. First, after months of waiting, the Samsung BlackJack is finally shipping here in the city and we should be able to buy it before end of the month. Two things come to my mind immediately, how can I protect the phone properly and how can I use my Shure headphone with it ?

So I surfed to my favorite PDA / Mobile phone jacket manufacturer … Vajacases.com … ah, there is a good one. Done deal … and now for the headphone adapter since Samsung uses a non-standard headphone plug for their phone. Couple of searches and I found this headphone adapter in eBay. It comes with microphone as well. Not bad, not bad.