Lauren Wu dot com

In the beginning, I used usa.net for personal email (I did have a Hotmail account but at least I was smart enough not to use it). From there, I migrated to Oddpost.com (back when it was an independent company) which I liked so much that I paid $25/year for the service. The things I valued the most from Oddpost was the (1) lack of advertising and (2) nifty drag and drop features. But since it was a startup, I was always worried about the company's viability so I was thrilled when Oddpost was purchased by Yahoo! - this meant that the Oddpost email service would live on indefinitely, allowing me to use the service forever and ever without fear of the company going bankrupt. Not only that, Yahoo! would be able to invest the resources required to add sorely needed features like Firefox support (yay!) Sure, I had also opened a Gmail account like everybody else, but there was no way I would ever switch.

Until now.

Why? My once clean, beautiful and peacefully AD-FREE email environment is now cluttered with ads. Don't get me wrong, Gmail has ads too, but they are far less intrusive and take up less real estate. Here is my current list of Yahoo!Mail gripes which I may add to over time:

• "Home" screen default. When I login to Yahoo!Mail, I'm not presented with my inbox (as I would expect), but a "Home" screen filled with information such as weather and news. I know Yahoo! is trying to be helpful in providing this information, but when I'm going to Yahoo!Mail, I want to check email. I don't want to waste time taking a detour into pseudo-personalized page land, otherwise, I would have gone to my.yahoo.com instead. Actually, even that's not quite true anymore since I have switched from My Yahoo to Netvibes.
• Graphic ads. When viewing the inbox, the rightmost 20% of the screen is taken up by graphic ads. For some reason, graphic ads (especially flash) bother me much more than text ones. Even though I use Adblock so I don't actually see the ad, blank space is used as a placeholder so I still lose 20% of my browser's real estate.
• Ads from Yahoo! email users. When I open up an email sent by somebody who uses Yahoo!Mail, 20% of the rightmost part of their message is taken up by... you guessed it... advertising! From a business perspective, I appreciate the fact that it is quite genius of Yahoo! to make ad viewing unavoidable, but as a user, it annoys the heck out of me.
• Insufficient Blackberry support. I was intrigued by the functionality promised by mobile.yahoo.com (including Yahoo!Messenger) on my Blackberry, but I couldn't get it to work. Now this may not be a fair complaint since I think the problems are due to restrictions placed by my cellphone carrier, AT&T, and not technical issues with Yahoo!, but since mobile.google.com applications work, I still blame Yahoo! for not getting their act together and negotiating an agreement with AT&T to solve this problem.

Having said all this, Gmail's ad targeting is quite creepy, and it may also start to spam me with incrementally more advertising over time, but they at least claim to make user experience a priority so the ad spam will come later rather than sooner.

indexed.blogspot.com is a fantastic site that my friend Jenn recommended. It consists of simple, self explanatory and funny venn diagrams and graphs depicting humorous social theories. I'm not doing justice with the description so just go visit it!.

P.S. I'd love to buy a T-shirt but the graphic on the shirt appears a little small plus I have way too many T-shirts as it is (from various running races I've participated in). It appears that the author, Jessica Hagy, has a book version coming out in February. Perhaps I will purchase that instead when it is available.

Labels: fun

While I was traveling in Korea, I made a point of trying out Red Mango which is a frozen yogurt chain. I hear there's a similar chain in the U.S. called Pinkberry and the two franchises are duking it out in the States. I really enjoyed Red Mango because it's not as sweet as regular American fro yo. Imagine my delight when I discovered a new yogurt store in downtown Palo Alto called Fraiche Yogurt. A coworker forwarded me an excerpt of an email describing the product written by the owner:

FRAICHE is a homemade organic fresh yogurt and frozen yogurt cafe located in downtown Palo Alto (644 Emerson, same block as Gordon Biersch). We make our yogurt on-site in our mini-dairy plant. We believe in the goodness of pure, simple food. Our yogurt is made with Clover organic milk --we do not use additives, preservatives, colorings, gelatins or even sugar.

If you've never had homemade yogurt, you're in for a treat. It's quite different than what you might find at the grocery store or at a typical frozen yogurt place. Jessica, my business partner, and I even had to pass an exam to become licensed pasteurizers.

Our offering includes:

• Organic fresh yogurt (whole milk, low fat, and non-fat plain) and
• Organic frozen yogurt in natural, chocolate and soy flavors
• A full toppings bar with your choice of fresh strawberries, blueberries, mango, kiwi, almonds, toasted coconut, honeys, granola, etc.
• Organic Blue Bottle coffee (yes, we're the first to bring this awesome brew down to the peninsula!)

I went to try Fraiche's fresh yogurt but there wasn't any available since the store had recently opened and they were using all the fresh yogurt to make frozen yogurt. I ordered a cup with two toppings: mango and strawberries. It was DELICIOUS! Unfortunately, it's a little pricey, probably because of the exorbitant rental prices in downtown Palo Alto. Fortunately, another reviewer on Yelp.com pointed out that there's a similar (and cheaper) store in San Carlos called Harmony Frozen Yogurt. That will be on my to do list this weekend and I'll be sure to drag D a long!

I've been trying to figure out how to improve my Mandarin Chinese for a long time. David has some CDs but they're too basic. I did some searching on the web and I found a site called ChinesePod. As the name suggests, they provide a series of podcasts in Mandarin that you can download from the website or iTunes.

I like it because the podcasts are broken out into different levels from Newbie to Media (which is the level above Advanced). If you're unsure of your level, you can use their online listening test to find out. Each class revolves around a topic. At the beginning of the class, there are two people who discuss the dialog and introduce some of the more complicated vocabulary. Afterwards, you hear the dialog. Finally, the initial two people break down the dialog further to explain what transpired. It's very well done because on the website, you can read the dialog in Chinese to follow along, download the transcript (written in Chinese, pinyin and English) in PDF format, look at a list of related vocabulary, see expansion sentences and even see comments from other users about the class. The comments section is surprisingly useful because some of the users provide helpful suggestions, including supplemental vocabulary. Also, when you read the dialog online, as you mouse over words, it shows you the pinyin for the phrase as well as a translation in English

I've only listened to a couple of classes: "Losing Weight", "DVDs" and "China's Supergirl", but I really like what I've seen (heard!) so far. The topics are contemporary, and are geared to assist you if you were to engage in a real conversation with a Chinese person. I'm eager to work on the one about the stock market since it's related to my job, but that one was pretty hard (Upper Intermediate) so I'll have to spend quite a bit of time on it. I'm theoretically at the Upper Intermediate level (according to the online listening test), but I've been bouncing between Intermediate and Upper Intermediate classes. For the Intermediate classes, the introduction is narrated by John (who switches between Mandarin and English), and Jenny, who speaks Mandarin exclusively. In the Upper Intermediate classes, both John and Jenny speak to each other in Mandarin only, and at a slightly faster pace. I tried listening to a Newbie class for fun, and it was mostly in English and at an appropriately slow speed.

I told D about ChinesePod, and while he was interested and curious about the concept, he refrained because he didn't want to sign up. {As a general rule, he is averse to providing his email address to websites unless he absolutely has to. Meanwhile, I'm his defacto web service tester, so I end up signing up and trying a ton of stuff. I hope it doesn't catch up with me - I'd go ballistic if my computer ever became infected with a virus or spyware.) I also told my father and brother about the service, and I think my brother will sign up since he's learning Mandarin now as well. He says he's even going to give dad his old iPod which I think is a great idea.

My two-week trial for ChinaPod has just expired, and although I can continue to just listen to the podcasts for free on the web, I bought a paid membership. There are several types you can choose from with various services offered for the different packages. I went with a Premium subscription which costs U.S. $30/month, US$150 for 6 months, or $240 for 12 months. Given the discount, and the fact that I'm serious about picking up Mandarin again, I selected the annual subscription, especially since I have the option of getting a full refund with 30 days if I'm not satisfied with it.

My next step will be finding a method for inputting Chinese characters. I need to find an actual program inputting pinyin. I'm told Sohu has one, but I've never been able to get it to work. I'm also worried about messing up the fonts on my computer since I'm sure I'll need to download Chinese fonts to make all of this happen.

Labels: chinese, mandarin, pinyin

One of the reasons why I have trouble keeping up with blogging is that even though I have ideas for writing, I forget most of them once I(eventually) get to a computer. I'm going to try posting via email. The problem is I am in China right now, and upon logging into Blogger, I have discovered that Google has "helpfully" recognized my location and has translated all the Blogger commands and headings into Chinese. Despite this minor setback, I will attempt to give this a shot and see how it goes.

Note: It worked! It's great for sending drafts but I won't be able to actually publish directly from email since the system automatically adds tags like <br> which I have to remove. It's a great start though and much more reliable than scribbling on scraps of paper or even in my Moleskin notebook.