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I don’t cross-post between Idiot Wind (Reprise) and China Doll. This is my 2nd test using Windows Live Writer - great stuff!
But there seems to be one drawback - I don’t seem to be able to add/define ‘Category’ of my post using Live Writer?
If I were to name one dish that would transport me to my childhood, this would be the one - Scrambled Eggs with Tomato:
This is probably one of the most common dishes in a working-class family back then. Mom used put it on top of some rice with a little bit of soy sauce to get the flavour out.
And to get our protein, she would substitute the tomato with some tiny rice fishes, also with scrambled eggs. We didn’t have the large rice fishes shown on the photos below. They were too dear and unavailable locally. The ones we had were all tiny ones, not longer than half an inch. And even then we could probably afford them once or twice a month.
As for breakfast, a typical day would begin with Congee. We ate only plain congee (sorta a traditonal passed down from my grandpa’s county) and didn’t mixed it with any meat.
And if we behaved, we would be rewarded with this once in a while:
I missed these dishes and I missed my mom!
The Image Rotator is from Jeroen Wijering. I have used it to display pictures from the Flickr’s group ‘Food Porn’ above. One of the ‘gotchas’ when testing the player is the path name used in the xml playlist. It is best to stick to the absolute path name. The confusion arises because the file location for mp3, xml, etc is relative to the page embedding the player, NOT relative to the player itself. However, FLV file is an exception and it is called relative to the swf.
Trying to figure out how the ‘Add Media’ features work in Wordpress. This is an very old video taken back in 1994/95 when I just installed a webcam. It was in avi format but converted to flash using SWF Video Converter.
I have used Jeroen Wijering’s FLV Media Player for the playback. The player supports a wide range of playback format including FLV, MP3, H264, SWF, JPG, PNG and GIF.
Did a couple of web pages using phpFlickr a long while back but after Flickr tightened its security and changed how it’s API could be used to authorize access to an user’s account, all those pages were broken. I had forgotten them until they re-surfaced during my recent move to another hosting account.
Here is my a page for ‘Interestingness’ and here are my ‘Subscribed Groups’.
These pages are made using phpFlickr and Lightbox (not sure if there are Wordpress plugins for them) but installation is fairly straightforward. The authorization had to be done to obtain a token not previously required - as I am viewing my own account, I have simply authenticated these web pages to one specific account so that all visitors will be able to views those pictures (if access to other user accounts were required, they would need to go through the authentication process as detailed in phpFlickr’s documentation).
To step thro’ the authentication process I had taken:
(auth.php) supplied with phpFlickr.auth.php and getToken.php in an editor and fill out the ‘API key’ and ‘Secret’
$api_key = "[your api key]“;
$api_secret = “[your api secret]“;
'getToken.php' to get the token string from Flickr.
$f->setToken("[token string]“);
Coming up on Fabchannel, Ane Brun’s concert at Paradiso, Amsterdam, Hollandon on April 18.
Arghhhhhhhhhhhh finally moving from MT to Wordpress!
Tried Wordpress a couple of times over the years but didn’t like it enough to make the switch as I had been using MoveableType since 2002 - didn’t want to give up all the familiar plugins and MT tags.
My recent move to a new web host prompted me to rethink - either take the opportunity to upgrade my current version of MT3.2 to ver 4.1 or to migrate to Wordpress. MT4.1 did the trick and here I am with Wordpress.
For many of us, blogging has become an integral part of our lives. Apart from the arts, the insights, and the creativity, the obsession has likely sprang from the fact that in a faceless community, we can write about anything, be it as substantial as the American Foreign Policy or as trivial as a snorting spouse – there is no fear of being identified. Mask off. We can be what we really are. There is no need to put on a pubic face.
The blogging community’s exponential growth in the last couple of years was, I thought, due to the opportunities it gave to us to interact with others with real feelings. No inhibition of our individuality. No pretense.
But human nature gradually prevails, even in this supposedly faceless community, many of us still prefer to putting on a mask. We try to be unique in expressing our views and our feelings on the Internet for all to see and yet despite the absence of identity, every entry we make is unconsciously censored. We tend to write about what we think may interest others to read and in the process creating yet another self that is not exactly what we are. We tend to link to others so that we would be perceived as if we were within the same group. We spend hours in front of the computer to come up with a web layout to complement the lousy content in the hope that it will be unique although it involves nothing more than changing the colors of a standard template. Even the anonymity of Internet cannot defeat self-deception.
Blogging let us experience the mind, the creativity, the ideas and genuine feelings of others while doing away with our bias about the cultural background and ethical origin of the writer. But once we start imposing artificial border on an otherwise borderless community and begin to operate in the shadow of reality, blogging will become less fulfilling an experience.
As in real life before we interact with a stranger, the tendency is to first read his face and listen to his accent, then form a view about the person’s character based on a certain pre-determined group in our head. And more often than not, the first impression is wrong.
We would have easily eliminated this bias in the blogging community but in our pursuit of make-believe uniqueness and self-deception, we not only impose artificial classification on others but self-imposed a classification that we wish other to perceive us to be.
When we read a good poem, we should derive our appreciation from the content - the identity of the author is almost irrelevant, be it Benjamin Zephaniah or Li Bai.