What’s a Ph.D student’s life like? Dull? Frustrating? Despairing? Kind of, ‘coz s/he has to deal with homework grading, dating odds, qualifying exam, grad student etiquette, job hunting, beating over-enthusiastic new master’s students, and the terrible [but very normal] idea of quitting Ph.d. Keep your chin up! As long as s/he masters Newton`s Three Laws of Graduation, graduation is no longer a mission impossible. Anyway, life is tough.

Piled Higher and Deeper, a must-read comic strip for every student who is or wants to be in grad school. Check it out!!!

100 Photographs that Changed the World by LIFE [28 pics are available online].
The 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century by Random House & The Modern Library.
The 100 World’s Most Powerful Women by Forbes. They are businesswomen, humanitarians, media mavens, and politicians. To my surprise [and disappointment], nobody from academia?

Rebecca MacKinnon introduces the University Channel, “a collection of public affairs lectures, panels and events from academic institutions all over the world — for you to view, listen to, stream or download.”
The University Channel reminds me of another online repository of academic lectures: the Research Channel. Different from UC, RC claims itself “the C-SPAN of scientific and medical research.” Acutally it’s more than that. RC offers a huge collection of audio and video clips in a variety of disciplines: Arts and Humanities, Business and Economics, Engineering and Computer Science, Health and Medicine, K-12 and Education, Sciences, and Social Sciences. I think that’s the cool thing about it: whatever your area is, you can find something useful here. Plus, those contributors include those world-renowned research universities, organizations, and corporate research centers. You can’t miss it!

Firefox can crash at any time–the worst timing is when I almost finish a new entry in Movabletype…BTW, any desktop blogging tool to recommend?
My computer is not invulnerable even though it’s under the umbrella of NAV–Checking account can really be hacked and some guy as far as in Romania might try to steal my money!!!
Life teaches good lessons.

It is really a sad day. We went to Chicago for haircut while on the way back it started to pour. When getting closer to Milwaukee [actually it was near General Mitchell International Airport] we ran into a terrible traffic jam–we thought an accident might have happened. That’s true. What’s worse, three accidents indeed. Fortunately we saw two drivers and two passengers safe. Not sure about other people. Hope they got it through. Bless.

The video clip we took. Click here.

Via digg [thanks to Kevin for telling me about the Web site! ]:

I Like You Colors:
Type the URL of a page below and submit it to see what colors it uses

Some people complained that the idea is lame. Admittedly, it does not require rocket science to extract such information from CSS files, but it’s a neat idea to simplify the process. I wish I had known this before I did a lot of dirty work to list “colors used” on my credits page.

I still can remember how curious and excited I was when surfing the Web for the first time. It dates back to mid 90s, maybe 1995. Back then Google wasn’t born yet. No blog existed but personal homepages blossomed. ICQ dominated and chatrooms were crowded all the time. Everything seemed crude but full of fun. I had such a strong feeling that the world is right under my fingers.
Now going online is becoming a routine activity [it was something stimulating ten years ago]. I check emails [I checked emails too]. My MSN messenger is on all the time but seldom I talk with anybody [I used ICQ instead then].I read blogs [I visited home pages]; sometimes I follow those links of interest [I clicked hyperlinks in others' collections]. I log into MT to check new comments and delete junk comments/trackbacks [I edited my webpages and FTPed them]. I read del.icio.us/popular to know what’s hot [I followed headlines to know what was going on].

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In the past few weeks I’ve been working on rewriting templates for the blog. I didn’t make a lot of changes on appearance since I sort of burn out recently. But I did try to make it look similar both on IE and Firefox. It used to work fine for IE 6 but somewhat messy for FF since I didn’t pay much attention to the nortorous “box model bug.” Hopefully my Firefox guests will feel better about that.
Added features:
1. Improved compatability for IE and Firefox.
2. Previous 5 entries on home page.
3. Archives page added.
4. Contact form added.
5. Links page added.
5. Credits page added.
6. Colophon page added [I'll fill in the content later].
7. Technorati tags supported.
8. “Add to my furl/del.icio.us” added on individual entry page.

It’s hard to believe that my oral defense was done only 13 hours 30 minutes ago. Now I’m proud to claim I am a Master. Just call it a day. Time to pay bill now.

Jonathan Carson wonders “Is BLOG going to be an industry term?” His concern is based on a Nielsen//Netratings study on blog readership. A question was asked to measure readership: Do you…
a) Read blogs every day
b) Read blogs occassionally
c) Know what a blog is but dont really read them
d) Have heard of a blog but don’t really know what it is
e) Never heard of a blog til right now
The result might let blog researchers down: only 6% of the general population claim a) and b). As Carson said, the numbers “totally don’t line up with the Pew research on blog readership that is typically quoted.” In Pew study, “9% of internet users now say they have created blogs and 25% of internet users say they read blogs.”

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