I love the ridiculously warm Thanksgiving in Twin Cities!
We set off Tuesday afternoon. On the way I took American Pop Music 101 lectured by Ms. Glover. The final was fun: the grade was positively correlated with the extent to which I burst into laugher when hearing “Weird Al” Yankovic’s parody stuff. Unsurprisingly, I got an A.

In return I taught Katherine to count 1 to 99 in Chinese. In light of her unique Chinese learning curve “practice makes worse,” in the following days we practised in the morning and evening only. Now she can translate Chinese numbers into English and vice verse. YAH!!!

I got so many things done in the six days. To make a laundry list:

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If you choose the last answer, well, go to Google.com, click “Preferences,” scroll down and change the number of results per page you want.

Can’t believe this is the third entry I post today…Sorry for the awkwardly-worded title. Sigh.
Five weeks ago I switched to Google reader because of the mishap of Bloglines. So far so good. I was wondering why Google toolbar does not include Google reader as a built-in subscription reader. It has Google personalized home instead. But I’m not a huge fan of personalized homepage.
I was about to email Google to ask for this feature when I found a fresh [ YAH, very fresh. Released today! ] Greasemonkey script which enables us to subscribe with Google reader in Google toolbar. I just tried it out and it worked very well.

With the new Google Toolbar for firefox, they included a way of subscribing to feeds from a link in the toolbar to a number of services. They did not however, include the Google Reader in that list. This script will allow you to subscribe to a feed using the toolbar by selecting “Google Home” as the service you use.

Google Toolbar add to Reader OR ig by Mark Husson. His other Greasemonkey scripts can be found here.
You need Greasemonkey for Firefox to run the script, which can be downloaded from Firefox add-ons. Having installed the add-on and restarted your FF, you then navigate to the script page to click on “Install this Script” link.
You can click the orange “Subscribe button” on Google toolbar and choose the feed you like. You will be directed to a web page that asks you “add to Google homepage” or “add to Google reader.” Then you get it!

This is the second part of my reaction to Steve Maich’s Pornography, gambling, lies, theft and terrorism: The Internet Sucks. Part I is here.

Whether you’re after stock tips, or parenting advice, or movie reviews, it’s all out there, free of charge, and generally worth exactly what you pay for it.

A Pew study on health information search has echoed Mr. Maich’s concern that more and more people turn to the Internet for health advice without a critical mind. However, I can’t follow his logic that free information equals to valueless information. Since I don’t charge you for reading my post, does that mean what I write is bs?

in an era in which we’re supposed to have universal access to more information from more varied sources around the world, there are fewer and fewer reporters on the ground digging up original information. And the companies in the business of providing credible, original reporting are finding it more and more difficult to survive.

Well…I don’t know what to say about this…If those companies are getting out of business, who are staying? Oh, he answers. The amateur commentator. After laughing at the digital utopianism, he fires at bloggers.

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Read this article first and tell me what you think. A top story on Macleans: Pornography, gambling, lies, theft and terrorism: The Internet Sucks.
The headline is very eyeball-grabbing. I followed the link from Mícheál Ó Foghlú’s post in hopes of reading “a different view from the norm.” I expected it to be an insightful and objective critique of the Internet hype. I was wrong. The article should be more than a list of “Seven deadly sins” of the Internet. It can be more fair and less disturbing if it makes the argument in a more balanced way. It will be more convincing if the author addresses the issue in a way like “the Internet rocks, but let me tell you how it too sucks” instead of shadowing the bright side of the Internet and telling us “the Internet sucks because it sucks.”
In case you are too busy to read through the 5000-word-long bash at the Internet, I highlight some points of view worth pondering upon [ or cracking up with].

Try going back to doing the family’s laundry by hand for one week, and then see if you’d gladly trade your Internet connection to get your washing machine back.

Mr. Maich is resentful at the fact that the Internet is ranked higher than household appliances as one of the 20 greatest engineering accomplishments of the past century. I agree more caution is needed when hyping the Internet. But I won’t trade my broadband connection for a washing machine/microwave oven/toaster or whatever.

Google is pressing ahead with a project to scan and store digitized copies of millions of books that would be searchable on the Web. It will undoubtedly be an amazing research tool. It’s also a potentially crippling blow to publishers whose businesses depend upon selling books to thousands of libraries around the world.

Before the quote he talks about pirated music. This is an undeniable dark side of the Internet. However, is Google’s effort to make acknowledge accessible to a broader audience comparable to stealing music? Hmmm.

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