Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Thanks. No.

Have you ever received an email from a friend or family member and really dont care too much for the contents of the email? Are you on a mailing list that someone that you know put you on without your permission? How do you tell a person, especially a family member or friend not to send you anymore weekly jokes or stuff that you dont really flooding your inbox?

Nowadays, I think we all need to be educated on email and internet ettiquette. Have you seen what teenagers are posting on their blogs lately? But that's another story. I want to talk mainly about emails that you dont want to receive.

There really isnt a way to tell the person that I dont want to receive your emails without offend them. So most people just ignore the emails or set up a filter. I found a "nice" letter that might help a little.

So let's turn things around. What if you want to send out email to a bunch of people that you think might be interested in what you have to send?
Bad - You send emails out to them, without any capability to unsubscribe or subscribe.
Good - You make sure that people can unsubscribe to the mailing list anonymously.
Better - You tell them that you want to send out stuff to you, and if they want to receive it, they'll have to subscribe to the mailing list.

So in otherwords, use a list server to manage your mailing lists. There are plenty of free ones out there. Please repect others privacy.

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Video on the Web

As you may have noticed, video on the web is exploding. There are websites popping up left and right (ie. Google video, YouTube, ourmedia, vsocial, sharkle, clipshack, grouper, vimeo, revver, videoegg), where you can store and watch videos. Im currently looking for a place to store my videos of Caden. Its too much work managing and handling videos on my website on my own. Why do so much work when I can let a third party site do the work for me? All of the sites have many different restrictions, formats, rules, etc.

For my videos, Im looking for 4 key components:
1. Flash Video - the format of video when played should be using Flash technology. This makes a clean experience. The video should load and play right into the browser. There is no need to download or open a separate player.
2. Quality - The quality has to be somewhat decent.
3. Sharing - I need the ability to embed the video right into my blog. And I also need the ability to share my library of videos publicly on that site.
4. Free - Of course and no upload limit.

The sites that I really like is videoegg and sharkle. Videoegg is really easy to use and the quality was good. The only thing they did not have is the capability to share a library of videos. Im only able to post to my blog.

Still testing out sharkle. But check out the music video below.

Nintendo Wii

The new Nintendo game console is coming out is called "Wii". Its pronounced like "We". It was named like that because they are gearing the console for more team-like and multiplayer games. Also, the two i's is suppose to represent two persons.
Anyways, I dont get too excited about video game consoles because I dont play that many console video games. But this video got me excited just because of Wii's controller. It takes video gaming to a whole new level.

Super Mario Brothers Live

Im getting addicted to watching videos online. Here is a good one that we'll probably use for puppetry some day.

Monday, May 15, 2006

rogerchew.com version 3.0

As you may have noticed I redesigned my site once again. I think I over complicated my previous design by having too many sections and having 2-tier navigation. Now I combined my entire site into just 3 pages. The design is completely done using CSS. There are no html tables whatsoever. Let me know what you think, while I try to think of more things to add to my site. Im also still trying to figure out what kind of blog content I should post. Should I post deals or some of my thoughts or computer news or daily life stories?