Archive for the 'Project Ideas' Category

Hey Look! It’s “Delicious Monster” Online…! Kinda…

Published
by
Josh Kim
on April 18, 2007
in Content and Media, Project Ideas and Web Applications
. 1 Comment

Wil Shipley’s Delicious Monster taken online.

The thing is that with Delicious Monster, you have the bar-code scanning feature, which is amazing. That way, you don’t have to do as much work as typing in all the metadata on the books, CDs, DVDs you want to input. AND all the prettiness that makes it a beautiful Mac OS X application. What more can some who’s bought all types of media “products” (not content, mind you… oh, the post ideas floweth: Difference between product and content).

With yoursharade though, you get the niceties of the social networking features of the Facebook API. I can definitely see this growing to be an advertising-powered web app, including leveraging (I’m using it again… uh oh…) the data stored about the user’s items to create focused advertising.

Of course… we all see what the next step is: putting the two together. Earlier, I had the idea/concept like yoursharade, but never really decided to follow through with it… but man, it’s quite clever they’re employing the Facebook networks.

Which brings me to another point: Has facebook become the de facto standard for keeping “in touch” in the college community?

And why the heck did I cancel my account?

All these things… answered soon…

Category Tweaking

Published
by
Josh Kim
on April 17, 2007
in Project Ideas, Site News and User Interface & Design
. 0 Comments

I took an hour trying to tweak the categories on my site. This is how I’m taking my break today. Nerdy, no?

Realization

I realized my “Industry Commentary” category was mostly about content and media. I mean, seriously… what was I thinking when I labeled that category… half of my stuff on this blog should be commentary, anyway.

Added a “Gadgets” category. I know I’m going to be needing it…

Removed “Blogging and Writing”. I wanted to post on things about how to write essays and little grammatical things I picked up along the way… but seriously, me? Write? Please.

I started adding descriptions to every single one of my categories. It’ll help me keep on top of what goes where… and when I need to start renaming/splicing/merging categories.

I swear, there was a time when I was stressing how I needed to lay out the foundation for every single category I would cover on the blog. What a waste of time that was.

But I think there should be a tool… with a really nice UI that can help me with recategorizing and tagging of multiple posts in Wordpress. I’ll get searching on that. Or better yet… it’s… another project idea?

Lessons From Yet Another Reformat

Published
by
Josh Kim
on March 29, 2007
in Project Ideas, Web Applications and Web Development
. 0 Comments

As I’ve discussed earlier, I love reformatting my computer… At face value, it might seem like a waste of time, but in the end, lots of lessons are learned. That, and, you get faster every single time… and you get a squeaky clean computer.

Let me just go through where my data lives, and how it made my life so much easier to get back on track after my reformat.

  • Email

    • Gmail: I think I’m going to start using Gmail as my sole email application. It seems like for some reason, this time around, SMTP doesn’t want to work in Mail.app. Also, since I’ve already gone Google for RSS feeds as well as my budgeting/documenting/spreadsheet-ing, might as well commit to… er… submit to the Google overlords.
    • I have to go and somehow find a way to match the folder structure I have on my desktop to Gmail’s labeling structure.
    • Is there a way to move all your mail from one service provider to another? Is Yahoo really going to provide unlimited storage? This really isn’t a selling point, though, since I don’t think I’m even hitting 10% of my storage space yet.
      • But, of course, through the wonders of gDisk, I’ve begun backing up my most important documents, like blog post rough drafts and such.

  • Contact Information

    • Plaxo: I love it. It’s free for us normal users… plus, there’s a little bit of the social magic built into the app: you can send “eCards” to people with their information and such.
    • I don’t use Plaxo much, but I do use the synchronization tool with Address Book, and you know how I love to think that syncing is going to be one of the many killer web apps.

  • Calendar

    • This is next… to go with Google Calendar? How about Plaxo? How about something completely new?

  • Bookmarks

    • What? Delicious? The only thing I needed to reinstall to get back into bookmarking was the bookmarking extension for Firefox and Safari.
    • I’m satisfied with delicious to even think about moving to ma.gnolia.

  • Feeds

    • Google Reader: I love it. I think I might start integrating the “Starred Items” on the blog like Alex Argo has done.

After all… they’re all bits and bytes. It’s the application that brings that information to life. With web apps, though, you get a handy method of not having to deal with keeping track of your own data: the system does it for you.

Actually, more like… the system administrators of the web applications are doing that management of data for you.

Hey, it’s less work for me! But… alas, advertising revenue for them…

Time to Change the RSS Reader: Google Reader

Published
by
Josh Kim
on March 18, 2007
in Project Ideas and Web Applications
. 0 Comments

I’ve decided to ditch Vienna for my RSS feeds. It’s been getting on my nerves with a lot of little bugs (double downloading, “recent post” count problems), and I decided it’s time I should make the web app jump for this type of application.

I’ve written before on how a problem encourages me to move and try something new. Here’s what’s relevant from that post.

Feeds

  • I dislike most online feed readers. I love Vienna, because it’s free and open source and fast and responsive and does EXACTLY what I need.
  • I can go through feeds in very quickly, by being able to delete articles that are completely worthless (about 90% of which are Digg crap stories that link to the blogs I’m already subscribed to…)
  • I still want to be able to set it up so that OPML file is still saved somewhere…

Looks like I’m going to be going against my own words. I still don’t like online apps for certain things, but for feeds, google reader is quickly becoming something that… just works.

Short-cut keys for Google Reader

Only a subset of the advertised short-cut keys work for me, since I turned on “start searching when I type” feature in Firefox (BonEcho for the mac users). But these seem to work:

  • s: Star an item
  • n: Navigate to next item without opening it
  • p: Navigate to previous item without opening it
  • j: Open next item
  • k: Open previous item
    • Oh sweet vi keys…
  • o: Open / Close item (In list view, doesn’t do anything in expanded view)
  • r: Refresh
  • t: Tag it

I think there might be more, but this is more than enough, I think.

What would be really nice is if I had the ability to scroll down an article using a shortcut key also. For example, if the post I’m reading is longer in height than the window it’s in, I want to be able to scroll down on just that story. I’d much rather have j and k be the “scroll key” and have l and ; be the “next/previous post”… thereby solidifying Google’s love for vi. I’m probably asking too much.

2/12 Of A Year

Published
by
Josh Kim
on March 2, 2007
in Asides, Foreign Languages, God and the Bible, Investing & Finances, Project Ideas, Site News and Web Development
. 3 Comments

More like… 1/6, no?

Already, 1/6 of 2007 has gone by, guys. It’s insane how fast the time goes by when you’re having fun. Actually, the funny thing is it wasn’t all just fun… it seems like time is just out of control at all times, regardless of if you’re ready or not.

While I’m writing this, I have my January’s Month in Review open, so I’ll be able to see where I’ve met my goals or fell short on them.

I want to keep this post as short and to the point as possible. Let’s do this.

On the Blog

I’ve begun to use images quite liberally, thanks to the Markdown plugin and the TextMate Blogging Bundle. Gallery hasn’t even been touched, and I don’t think it will be for a while: Pictures aren’t what I’m going for with this .com, anyway. Same goes with videos and such.

I’ve been giving splitting up the blog into two some thought… and while I’ve been back and forth on this issue, I think it’s best to keep it going in this manner. We’ll see in a month…

Goal to double traffic wasn’t met, but I get to blame the hosting company for that (they were down twice, and once for more than five hours on a saturday night/morning)… kinda. For next month, I just want to beat my last month’s traffic. That’s all.

Traffic for February

In terms of a design change, it was supposed to come this past month, but we’ll see how things go this month. That… and I still have to post my old entries up. I also need to restructure the categories… retag… ugh. So much work to do, just for the blog…

On Finances

Looks like the normal for groceries for me is around $150/month. I guess I should still shoot for $100/month, but I really do believe… food isn’t something you should skimp on. Eating out, however… that’s something I can still cut down on.

Discretionary spending should have been $100/month, but this past month, I went out to eat quite a few times. seems to also hover around $150/month. This month, though, I started to “live it up”… like buying furniture (exercise ball/chair) and electronic goodies (earbuds)… this is probably why I exceeded my budget. Darn.

In terms of total spending, it comes out to about $300. Anything left over has been sent into savings… By the end of this month, I hope to start up my Roth IRA… I’ll post when that happens. I still have to finish my federal and state taxes. This, too, will be done by the end of this month.

Investments… will start… soon… dang it. Lots more to learn in this field before I start.

On Spiritual

Initially, for Lent, I had given up things like YouTube, TV shows, and movies. Then I started to play Quake… ONE. Oh man, how much fun. I think I must have sunk a good chunk of time into it. Well… I’m going to say this here: All forms of electronic entertainment is forbidden until Easter.

This includes: ANYTHING Flash, ANY passive media… It’s quite hard, seeing how almost EVERYWHERE I go, there’s a TV on or a browser open to YouTube. Time to strategize how to avoid those situations…

Bible reading is going well. Kinda getting behind (I think… I’m not sure…), because I’m really trying to learn Philippians before Easter… but that’s only an excuse. By the end of this month, I want to be fully caught up. I need to do some math in terms of how many chapters I, then, have to read to catch up. We’ll see, at the end of the month.

On Code

Ruby is definitely coming along. But lots to accomplish before I launch a service with it being the main language of choice.

Work is great. The work that I do for the College of Education is so perfect for me. It’s got a lot of flexibility in terms of hours and when I can work, as well as how applicable some of the things I’m doing for them are. For example, I’m administering Subversion for Network Applications Group. I’m going to be using that skill to start subversion-ing my entire /jk/Sites directory, or even possibly my entire home directory. It’s like getting paid to learn and learn and learn (just like you, consultants).

While I lack the “benefits”, like health and 401(k), I like to think my benefits for leading this kind of freelancer/personal consultant lifestyle are flexibility and freedom.

On Business

So hopefully, by the end of the month… I’ll have a company started. Not sure how to even go about doing this 100%, but I guess something like this… is just meant to be learned as one goes about doing it.

On Foreign Languages

I’m almost done with Pimsleur’s Conversational Japanese I started… last… summer. I only really got into trying to go through the system at the beginning of this year. I should be done by the end of the month, easily.

I’ve also finally finished downloading this 10GB torrent of a Japanese Language Learning Pack. I ended up throwing away about half of it, but man… there are some good stuff here. They even have TV lessons! Whoo hoo!

Hanja, I’ve kinda given up on. I guess that 5 characters a day rule went out the window. Let’s hope I can get some kind of system in that lets me continue in this area.

On School

For the MBA, I’ve decided to not go for this upcoming year. Period. Maybe the year after, but not this year.

On Health

It’s becoming very hard to run for my usual 30 minutes, even though I only run every other day. I think my exercise routines are becoming more and more “weight”-heavy now… but I need to start cardio again.

My back is killing me. I think it might be because my back is so weak… more deadlifts for me!

In the past month, I think I missed WIMPE a couple of days: A few due to the snowstorm and a few due to laziness. I hope to go six times a week, minus one rest day somewhere in between.

In terms of diet… Mike Cho told me something about the Boxer’s Diet: Chicken and Broccoli. Period. This scares me a little bit, but I get the point: Very little carb intake, with a humogenous protein intake. Of course, I’m not going to do it like he did for 3 straight days… but I’ll be trying this out, replacing maybe one meal a day for this craziness.

I’m going to give up carbonated drinks again… for like the 30th time. I’m not sure when this started back up again, but it’s been creeping back into my life. It’s time to go cold turkey like before, and stick to water, orange juice, and milk. It doesn’t matter if I have to do an all-nighter… I think I’m going to go caffeine-less, too, like before.

Ugh. I feel so vain talking about physical goals… it’s strange though, I don’t feel so vain talking about intellectual goals…

My my, how judgmental I am, of even my own self.

Closing

This post was supposed to be done on the 28th of last month. Ugh. I feel like writing on my blog is quickly becoming a chore. Also, I feel like I don’t even know who I’m writing to. That issue of splitting up the blog into two plagues my mind every time I start to write an entry…

“Who do I write this to?” This is what’s stopping me from writing endless entries about either myself or about other things. I mean, I want to write about how I pulled two all-nighters at Wardall lounge with the freshmen, but that doesn’t appeal to everyone. I want to write about how things are going in my life, but who wants to read that garbage. I want to write about how RSS feeds aren’t being adopted by the mass public and how to mass-adoption a reality, but no one wants to read that either.

AHHH!

Well, here’s to another month of living! So exciting, so filled with unknowns!