Archive for the About Me category

I’m Missing In Action for November

You can probably guess why I’ve been MIA for a while. It’s because of school and other stuff. But it’s Thanksgiving today and I just wanted to wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving. I’m currently staying with my friend in Nyack, NY.

Some of you may be heading out to Black Friday events. Be safe and dress warmly!

This is a nice website for Black Friday deals!

Podcast Episode #1 for Stony Brook University

Welcome to my first podcast! I had some time this afternoon and all the right tools so I decided to run a podcasting trial. I’m sorry that I sound a little tired, it’s because I am, future recordings shouldn’t be that bad. I am going to have to take some caffeine pills or something. :) I’m new to podcasting and never did one before today but I hope this becomes successful!

So I will do a podcast every week recapping on my posts for the week, I will give a brief summary of each of my posts and add a little that I might have missed. So without further ado, here is my first podcast.

Podcast Episode #1

Podcast Notes
- Podcast Intro Music by Jeremy Goun
- Chat with SB Bloggers & Admissions
- 7PM-9PM EST Wednesday 3rd, October 2007
- Special Thanks to Perry Goldstein & Alan Inkles
- Stony Brook v.s Hofstra Football 28-33 FINAL

Saturday To-Do-List Dilemma

Stony Brook is amazing! Not only are we playing our rival school on Long Island, the Seawolves v.s Hofstra football game this Saturday but Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra is also performing at our Staller Center for the Arts. The problem is that I want to go to both events however both events conflict. The football game is an away game so I would have to hop on the bus at our stadium and take a ride to Hofstra at 5PM or I can wait and attend the Wynton Marsalis event at 8PM.

Now both are great events but I think clearly one is more worth it to attend. Wynton Marsalis by far the “once in a lifetime” event to see. For those of you who don’t know who he is, Wynton Marsalis is one of the “most prominent jazz musicians of the modern era and is also a well-known instrumentalist in classical music”. I have contacted Perry, our director of Undergraduate Music for tickets. I can go to a Stony Brook football game any other time but, Wynton Marsalis to most of us would be a once in a lifetime event.

I’ll take pictures when I get there and post it on my next post! Peace out!

My Sunday Project – Personal vCard Webpage

Many people go to church on Sunday’s, I spent an hour designing my own vCard contact page. Of course that’s not all I did today, that would be ridiculous! I was able to get some of my work done in the library today and came back and had some fun. But let me tell you more about what a vCard is and maybe you’d be interested in making one yourself. Questions can be asked and posted in the comments area. :)

What is vCard?
Wikipedia defines (so does the rest of the world) it as “vCard is a file format standard for personal data interchange, specifically electronic business cards. vCards are often attached to e-mail messages, but can be exchanged in other ways, such as on the World Wide Web. They can contain name, address information, phone numbers, URLs, logos, photographs, and other optional fields.” It’s occasionally used with Microsoft Office.

So, it’s like a rolodex and a vCard is just one entry in someones rolodex. Simple right? Well yeah it is! A lot of people also like to create a simple personal webpage to tell people a little about themselves and their qualifications. Things that would go on these pages may include a résumé or a.k.a curriculum vitae (CV) and a vCard so one can download it and add it to their personal rolodex address book.

There’s two easy parts in this, the first part to is to actually make the vCard and the second part is to make the simple webpage that goes with presenting your vCard.

If you want to create a page like this, download my vCard creator package.

I’m Considering A Shiny New Apple MacBook

When Apple OS X 10.5 comes pre-installed with the shipped MacBooks — Will be the time I will purchase it with the Stony Brook University discount. Under the university discount, I’m able to get it for a small -$100. I hope by the time it, OS X 10.5 comes out pre-installed on MacBooks, the hardware would be upgraded as well. That means increased clock speeds on the Intel Duo Core CPU, more RAM or faster RAM, a larger hard drive and maybe a better integrated graphic chip. Anyhow Apple has always been good at surprises so I will keep my fingers crossed.

I’ve always wanted a Mac but never made that final decision because of software incompatibility issues but new features will make that problem non-existent. Some new features of OS X is the Time Machine feature which is similar to System Restore on Windows but would be much more user friendly. Another new feature would be BootCamp coming out of beta which allows you to install and dual boot with Windows on Intel based Mac’s. Improvements would be done to Spotlight, the system on-the-fly search tool.

This is a chart of improvements that I would like to see in the next MacBook.*

So if you’re ready for a Mac like me, get a discount through someones academic voucher. Save $100 and use it towards more RAM.

* Of course these specifications are just my hopeful predictions. :P

Random Ramblings! What Am I Up Too?

Okay, it’s about time I blogged to push Vanessa Hudgens down a slot. Over the past 4 days or so, blogging about Vanessa Hudgens and including pictures was a great hit, not only did I made $30 a day via Adsense but I got over 4000+ hits in that period of time. So enough of that! A little update about Vanessa though, generally Vanessa’s fans support her all the way and accepts that she made a mistake. Okay so next story…

A couple of days ago, I went to a photo shoot for my Stony Brook Blog and the pictures finally came in today. I personally wasn’t too happy of them. I initially thought that they were going to be great because they were taken by professional photographers but I guess it doesn’t make that much of a difference.

Here are some of the pictures:

104866_20070910205118561137.JPG 104866_20070910205307757026.JPG 104866_20070910205442077019.JPG 104866_20070910205623875145.JPG

So moving on, I went to the NYPIRG office in Stony Brook University for the first time today. For those of you who reads my blog knows that I’ve been canvassing for NYPIRG since May. I love the organization so much that I signed up to volunteer to work on the campaigns at school! I’m going to do voter registrations soon! Watch out! :)

WOOT: Google Adsense Owes Me $100

I haven’t checked my Google Adsense account in a while but more recently I’ve been re-introduced to SEO tricks and tactics so I checked it today. Whao! $100.38, It’s time for them to pay me! This amount was made in about 2 months time on just my blog domain. I’m looking into SEO (Search Engine Optimization) again to increase traffic and click through rates on my blog. I believe my blog has a lot more potential than it does currently and can make a lot more money. I’m just not doing a good job of placing the ads in the right locations.

There are plenty of people out there who blog for a living. I don’t happen to be one of them but it would be nice if I was. If you want to start a blog and learn how to make money, just leave me a comment and I’ll be glad to help you get started!

Me… Addicted to Blogging? NoOoo

Addicted to BloggingI saw someone take a quiz titled “How Addicted to Blogging Are You?“, he scored 75%, and I said to myself, oh I’m probably a lot less than that. So I thought it would be fun and interesting to know how addicted to blogging I was so I took this little quiz at Mingle2.

The results took me by surprise! I’m 80% addicted to blogging! Gee, maybe I am addicted, I only have 5 blogs that I author and spend about at least an hour reading different blogs a day. What? Thats not normal? You guys don’t do that too? Oh, I’m sure you do… No? Crap! I am addicted! Ahhhh :) HELP!

Well to think of it, its not all that bad, I’ve almost replaced everything I use to do to get information from like watching TV or reading newspapers to reading blogs. I don’t even watch the news on TV anymore, all I do is go to Digg.com and get all my news. Is that so horrible?

Here are the questions I answered on my quiz:

Q: Where is your blog located?
A: My own domain (for example: www.tonycai.com)

Q: How often do you update your blog?
A: Several times a week

Q: How many blogs (actual blogs, not individual blog entries) do you read a day?
A: 6-12

Q: How much time do you spend reading blogs?
A: 1-2 hours a day

Q: How many different blogs do you post entries on?
A: 4

Q: Have you ever ‘live blogged?’ (where you blog about an event as it’s happening)
A: Yes

Q: How do you stay up to date with all your favorite blogs?
A: I visit each one individually and read it

Q: Have you ever blown off an important task, such as studying for an exam or making a deadline, because you were blogging?
A: No

Q: If something interesting happens to you, do you immediately think about how you’re going to write about it on your blog?
A: Sometimes

Q: What do you usually blog about?
A: Anything and everything, including personal issues or something funny you saw at the park the other day

Q: What kind of blogging do you do?
A: Professional & Personal

Q: Have you ever tried to convince a friend or family member they should start a blog?
A: Yes

Q: Have you ever come up with a great blog idea while doing something completely random, such as taking a shower or watching a movie?
A: Yes

Q: When this quiz is over, do you plan on blogging about your blogging addiction?
A: Yes

Go ahead and take the quiz and post me your results! I’m interested! :)

Finally SBUGuide Says Hello World ;)

SBUGuide LogoSince I left my summer job, I’ve been developing a website that my friends (Andi and Joey) and I have come up with. SBUGuide.com. It’s short for Stony Brook University Guide. I’m doing this because I realized that there was no centralized location for prospective students to get information about the university and no website to help current students out. That’s why we’re taking the challenge to bring all those missing tiers together in one website. Yeah Stony Brook’s website is great but isn’t perfect so here’s where we come in a fill in the gaps.

Everything is currently in it’s ALPHA stages, development started only a day ago. Currently Andi is working on a logo prototype and I’m working on integrating user databases for MediaWiki, WordPress and bbPress. After that’s complete, the most difficult task should be branding and customization. Joey will fill in most if not all of the contents of the website.

Visit SBUGuide’s Blog to see development notes.

See our website at http://www.sbuguide.com.

Podcast  by PBS News Hour about USA TODAY’s college  rankings:
[audio:http://www-tc.pbs.org/newshour/rss/media/2007/08/20/20070820_rankings28.mp3]

TONYCAI.COM Is Now A GoDaddy Certified Domain

I got a email in my inbox the other day from EV1Servers.net. A company where I first registered TONYCAI.COM with, they have been recently acquired by The Planet, the company went along with all it’s clients (me). I was not notified of this acquisition. The email told me that my domain would expire in 90 days. So I quickly went to renew it because I knew how devastating things are when you loose ownership of the domain.*

tony cai godaddy certified domain certificate

When I logged into The Planet’s domain manager and tried to renew, it told me that I had to do it manually with the reseller. So I knew this renewal was going to be a pretty long process. Decided not to waste my time and transferred and renewed it with GoDaddy. They have a good reputation for domain products. So I renewed it for 2 years total of $14 and I got the GoDaddy Certified Domain add-on which is awesome!

* When one looses ownership of the domain, you’d either have to pay a high rate to reinstate the domain or some domain company might have bought your domain to reap the benefits of your visitors so they can make money off your visitors through advertisement parked pages. This happened recently with my friends domain he failed to renew. JHENDI.COM use to belong to my friend Chomell, but now it belongs to “TBD eNom Customer“.

The lesson about domains is renew it way before it expires because once it does, there is a high chance someone will buy it before you do!