I have never been a fan of Motorola mobile phones, mainly due to my bad experience. My first mobile phone was a CDMA from Motorola, it had a terrible user interface and ran out of battery very quickly. Its menu system just puzzled me for every single simple task, very soon I got a Nokia. A few years later my sister got a T720 and I could tell that the UI has improved a lot, thanks to competition. This new mobile, V3 “Razor” is likely to become a spiritual successor to the legendary StarTac, and we’ll see them conquer the streets in Hong Kong very soon.

Meanwhile, Motorola and Apple are partnering to bring iTunes to Motorola’s next-generation mobile phones, I guess it does not include V3 though. Read review at Gizmodo.

As a Mac user, it is not uncommon for me to encounter various forms of discrimination on the web. I am not saying that only Mac users are barred, it’s just more obvious to Mac users because we tend to have a more diversified choice of browsers, in short, we do not always use IE.

There are sites that pop up a javascript window saying “Please use Internet Explorer to view this site” upon entry (like Netvigator) but I could click and continue to surf around. There are sites that clearly not supporting anything but IE/Win (like HSBC and HangSeng eBanking) and sites that completely fail on Mac even they advertised themselves using a stylish Mac on TV or magazine (like ESDLife). But the most irritating cases are sites that never tell you that something on their sites won’t work on other browsers until you discover that you must use it. I don’t know whether the people who developed these sites have no ideas that there *are* users not using IE/Win on this earth or they just didn’t bother to test their sites thoroughly.

This is the problem, if you don’t use IE, you are like travelling to a country without a VISA. When I surfed to U.S. Consulate General to make an appointment for a VISA application interview, I felt discriminated again. There was a very simple form that I had to fill in, the first field was “Date”, pretty obvious, I tried to type in the date in the suggested form YYYY/MM/DD, oops! It wouldn’t let you type. So you must push the button “Date” besides and choose a date in a pop-up. Cool, I clicked a date, oops! It didn’t respond at all, I tried every available day on the calendar and still it didn’t work! I was using Firefox, then I tried Safari, Mozilla, IE for Mac… all didn’t work!! I gave up, I turned on my PC and surfed to the same page using IE 6 on Windows, it just worked. Damn!

I am going to compile a list of popular websites that don’t support Mac (I am sure someone has done this before) to cool down myself - because it would take so long to compile.

Since my friend William invited me to Gmail, I have been using it happily on a daily basis. At first I found it troublesome to login a dozen times every day, thanks to my “properly logout any site as soon as you’re done” habit. For once I closed the tab (what, you don’t have tabbed browsing?! Get FireFox!) too quickly before logging out, when I got back there, I wasn’t logged out by Gmail! Cool! From then on, I don’t logout anymore. Out of my 6 invitations given, I only got one left, anyone out there wants a Gmail account?

Finally Gmail added Safari support, it’s good news but comes too late for me. Since last week I switched to FireFox as my primary browser. There are a few reasons: First, my Safari hasn’t been very stable, it crashes occasionally when I give it more windows to load and becomes quite slow generally. It’s just my Safari, I am convinced. Second, my Safari does not like Flash sites a lot, it takes 2X time or more to load the same Flash than on a PC. Third and most importantly, I have been doing a lot of work using web standards (CSS/XHTML) lately and it becomes a real pain to use Safari as the default browser. If a layout looks good in Safari, it doesn’t necessarily look good in Mozilla/Netscape/IE. Then I figured out that Mozilla-based browsers’ rendering engine is the most “correct” of all browsers on the market. I now use FireFox for initial testing and it really saves me a lot of time.

By the way, if you know any quick-and-dirty method to migrate bookmarks from Safari to FireFox, let me know. I am just manually adding all my bookmarks again now…

My favourite athlete, the ever greatest tennis player Steffi Graf was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame last Sunday. Graf was presented by my other favourite player, her husband Andre Agassi, with a touching tribute. Details at the official website or read Agassi’s Speech Transcript, absolutely touching …
Den ganzen Beitrag lesen…

Usually once in one or two months, I need a day to switch off my mobile, remain offline and reflect on my life in a quiet place. Today happens to be a day for that, and I think I’m done with the task. Living in Hong Kong is like fast-forwarding one’s life, you hardly have a spare moment to stop and think deeply on anything, as much as an impatient person I am, I tend to enjoy taking my time in these moments to “talk to myself”. I wish I have this habit on tennis courts.

There is something mom told me and always helps me - There is just one “you” in this world, don’t expect others be like you. It’s simple but very useful in many situations. I’ve learnt to be more considerate, forgiving and open-minded over the years with this helpful tip.

Portugal just beat Holland 2-1 in Euro 2004’s first semi-final match, they played brilliantly and well-deserved the win. After visiting Portugal last month, albeit only 3 days, I feel like supporting the home team (unless England is still in). Portuguese people gave me a good impression: they are cheerful, helpful and enjoying their lives. Portugal has always been considered a small nation on the European continent, but they also have their history and pride. To see small nations like Portugal and Greece beating the traditional powerhouses, I feel excited for them too. When you are small, you’re usually underminded by others and it becomes a really big thing when you win.

That of course reminds me of the first and so far the only Olympic gold medal won by windsurfing queen Lee Lai-shan in 1996. Every one was boosted tremendously, lots of confidence and hopes were developed for the future. How would any one predict that it was just the beginning of a downfall?

Seven years ago I just finished the A-Level exams, fancying university life and my future ahead; six years later, I took to the streets with some other 500,000 and puzzled at my future in this place. This year, I have a much clearer picture of what I am and what I should be doing now and then. So, what are you doing today, the first of July in year 2004?