Albert Tanutama

I do not usually visit dailykos (that’s one of very popular political blog) But this Billmon: Blogging sells out post catch my eye:

It’s certainly tough for new blogs to break through, but those that hit unserved niches will always have an advantage…But I don’t think Daily Kos represents the ideal of blogging. I think bloggers with 100 daily visitors are the essence of the blogosphere — and those guys, collectively, reach a lot more than Daily Kos does

This reminds me of Shirky’s Power Law where weblog with very high audience will make it to become “a broadcast outlet, distributing material without participating in conversations about it”. While, the smaller weblogs with few readers will still engage in conversational style.

View image

I have made my own water fountain - a simple one. The water pump is easily obtained from local aquarium store - just find the smallest one without any filter. Place it in nice bowl, fill some water, and in my case, I add some stones. Voila. My own ‘zen garden’ (plus 2 gundams which previously stayed at my PC monitor).

If you wonder why there’s no thumbnail… well, my image:magick module used by mt to generate thumbnails is suddenly missing. My hosting provider said that it was installed. Still crossing my finger…

I think Cameron’s Screen Grab confab is pretty interesting activity. He has gotten more than 200 people who respond to the post. Given that kind of task (simple but might take some time to crop and upload before posting comments), I’m impressed with the respond rates. Well, I’m currently looking at social capital issue for my project, and I think this sort of activity could be a great example of how blog could engage people together in an activity. This might also show how weblog could be really influential perhaps as compared to other media.

Anyway, he’ll soon got his 226 comments from me

Last Monday and Tuesday I went to FTP Digital Media Conference @ Le Meridien Singapore. A pretty small conference with the audience around 20-25 people. The event was quite inspiring, despite most of the topics have been discussed many times. Some of point that I think worth for me to ponder:

Johnny Lau from Vasunas (he created Mr Kiasu, a popular character in singapore) talked about: “Understand the current, create the currency, making the currence”. He shared about his business strategy as IP company, in his case, character based company. Quite interesting to see how the company move and expanding their footsteps from japan, korea, taiwan, singapore, then china.

Daniel Koh, from Rajah & Tann Advocates & Solicitors, talked about some IP legal issues in the Singapore Context. Seems that Singapore is pretty lacking (in the sense that there’re quite a number of gray areas that have not been protected yet) tho it might change soon. He highlighted number of cases - tho in the end, I was kinda thinking beside protecting rights (for the benefit of the company), we need to listen how to make these rights benefit users as well (like from Creative Common people).

I was most impressed by Adrian Cheok’s work tho (He was the last speaker - really engaging). He works in mixed reality area and his works are really impressive. For example: Communicating with other person in 3D is technically feasible (you need to use special google tho), We can enter a “magical” world in a book - and interact with the character as well (Wow. That might be a really wonderful bedtime story - tho it’s questionable if I could fall asleep by then), or making real world as your playground (They play human pacman in NUS)! Amazing!

Celebrating Montan’s day. Uhm… Not exactly today, but yesterday :$ It’s one of my favorite weblog - every post is full of insights about life etc. Through her blog, I kinda see her other side from what I’ve known in our “offline world”. Really interesting to see how technology could be used to improve relationship. And for today? I think I’ll dedicate this post to her ^-^. Happy Birthday.

I’m playing around with Opera browser and noted one of its nifty features: “Notes“. When you highlight a text and press right click, you’ll find “Copy to Note” option, which will paste what you’ve selected into this window. I found it really useful, especially knowing that it stores the original URL. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to copy this URL back And there’s no export as note file… However, it’s good enough for me. I’ll use it to highlight interesting stories and citation for my research. I must remember to regularly back up this note document manually tho. It’s a good thing that Opera has pretty good documentation to find where this note files are actually stored. IE will still be my default browser - but I guess, I’ll start using Opera for research now. And Firefox for developing website… (They have great WebDeveloper extension)… More about Firefox later once they officially release ver 1.0.

I’ve received mail from Scoble that my design is up (for a while only tho, pending other design as well). Wow! That’s cool.

In this design, I highlighted the date and the post title so that it is easier for readers to scan them. I tidied up a bit on the right navigation and make it appear 3D - more techie. CSS line height property really useful here, so that it is more spacious and easy to read.

I attempt to do something like Paul Ford is doing in Screenscraping the Senate, hopefully more efficiently. There’s promising HTML scraper code that I found. Too bad, I got this message after running the code: Fatal error: Call to undefined function: curl_init()

3 good hours were spent without any good :s - seems that Apache, PHP, IIS, and Curl would not work together on my PC… Something gotta be wrong and I’m still lurking in the ‘dark’… Yikes.

I’m 24! yay! Thanks for everyone who made this day special through well wishes and sms - family (indonesia and singapore), friends, colleague, and special one from japan ^o^ Thanks for the blessings and pray ^-^

Went to Changi Airport (few hours ago)… Left with ’strange’ feeling. I guess airport is a place where one can get pretty emotional - and it reminds me of one particular quote from the movie “Love Actually”

Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion’s starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don’t see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it’s not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it’s always there - fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge - they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaky feeling you’ll find that love actually is all around

Meaningful. Tho the departure hall is not as exciting as the arrival hall, the message of love is still there. Wish you a safe journey - Bon voyage, dear.