Back to Blogging

I have decidedly made action towards my blogging. I decided to start two blogs.

This is one of them, which I’m restarting. The other one will be on Tistory; a Korean blogging site.

So… today, I was feeling inspired to write a post on my blog that has been long forgotten. It’s true that I haven’t updated anything in a long while. In fact, I think that’s all I’ve been writing about in the recent posts; no updates.
Readers! (if any to begin with) I assure you that now I will start updating this site as often as possible!

I started to feel emotional in the past weeks after starting classes and decided to write blogs again. It keeps me busy from thinking of other bad thoughts and it helps me keep track of myself in life.
My first blogging experience, or any type of web experience for that matter, all started with the introduction of xanga. People in the states probably know what I’m talking about. Xanga… Getting around HTML coding and using CSS style sheets in the “about me” section to make it all look pretty. Joining site like blogring.net or createblog.com in order to find layouts that other people made and put it on your site. It was a similar experience to the myspace phenomena that happened a few years back.
Then again, now we have facebook. It’s such a shame that the play on HTML doesn’t work anymore; all profiles look the same, save the subtle differences created by crap 3rd party applications that feel the boxes of other “friends’” profiles…

Talking of friends on Facebook. I just found out that I have over 500 people registered as “friends” on facebook. To be honest with you, I don’t think I have that many friends. In fact, there are quite a number of people that I don’t even really know; they are friends of friends who decided to become my friends. Weird, eh? I was met with true happiness when I found my 3rd grade teacher or when I got a friend request from my 7th grade best friend that I lost contact with, yet I must say… It is saddening that friendships has gone online to “what are you up to?” on a virtual wall with people that you see everyday. The small talks that go on online. The wall posts or e-mail or IM for that matter, has lost its true beauty and purpose.

It is with much regret that I confess my numerous amount of e-mail accounts. It all started with nackchoon[at]daum.net. All Koreans have one of these; or shall I say hanmail. Then I figured that hotmail was the thing that was “in” and made myself a nackchoon[at]hotmail.com. Sadly, I didn’t use it much and got way too much spam in it and changed it to ncjung[at]hotmail.com. This e-mail address is probably the longest lasting address. I still use it today; not for personal mail though. Official information kind of a deal. I also made a nackchoon[at]yahoo.com e-mail address because IMing was a big thing on Yahoo Messenger for quite a long time. I was pulled into Korean sites again and I needed a naver ID in order to log into the “Cafes.” Hence nackchoon[at]naver.com, then soon found out that a service named empal gives you a lot of storage and also made nackchoon[at]empal.com. Then came the gmail fever. nackchoon[at]gmail.com came. The only problem seems to be that I get waaaaaaay too much spam in there and the filter doesn’t work well; it almost certainly puts my genuine e-mails in the junk folder and gives me all the things I don’t want in my inbox. I was recruited as a beta tester in the windows live wave 1 and I got myself a live.com address. nackchoon[at]live.com. That’s my current personal mail. When live address became official, I also made ncj@live.co.kr for those random sign up things. iTunes account, amazon account, apple web store, random web signups etc. The most recent event, however, is mobileMe. Apple apparently killed its .mac accounts and started mobileMe.
Oh, by the way. I have two school e-mails: njung[at]cng.edu and nackchoon[at]cmu.edu
After a week into school at CMU, I noticed that being notified of e-mails coming into the “Andrew Mail Account” is a smart move. I tried to synchronize my iPhone with my e-mail addresses. The problem is that Apple and Microsoft hates each other. None of my windows live account would work on the iPhone. Gmail would work, but as I mentioned earlier, gmail is crowded of spam. My decision? Open a mobileMe account and forward all nackchoon[at]cmu.edu e-mails to nackchoon[at]me.com.

So here’s the verdict on e-mails and Nack:
official things? ncjung[at]hotmail.com
random things? ncj[at]live.co.kr
personal things? nackchoon[at]live.com
urgent things for me to get during school time? nackchoon[at]cmu.edu or nackchoon[at]me.com

Wow… this blog post was horrible. I started to talk about one thing and moved into a completely different story. Whatever the case is, I simply want to say that I’m starting to blog again and e-mail addresses are annoying and facebook is only useful to a certain extent and social networking has lost its true meaning.

If you read the whole entire post and understood it, your IQ is probably something in the 10000000 range haha. Thank you for listening to my babble! ^__^

Web Services

Did you guys hear???
WordPress now offers 3gb of space! Yay!!!
I can finally stop looking for some web server to host my files (as long as I don’t use the 3gb soon)

This is how Cyworld probably beat all other services in Korea. First off it’s free, as long as you don’t buy “acorns” to dress up your avatars, decorate your miniroom, show originality in your story room, or change “skins” for your “minihompy.” In fact, this is exactly how Cyworld mainly makes money out of the users. They make people pay to decorate their homepages to supposedly express themselves (the word supposedly because it is more of an image you want people to see of you). On the bright side, Cyworld does not impose any limitations on file space for movies/pictures/blogs etc. You can have a homepage that looks dull, but full of content without limits.

Facebook has similar characteristics… Only that having the option to only upload 60 pictures per album seems rather… stupid… Oh, did I mention how much I despise the stupid 3rd party apps such as “superwall,” “zombie,” “Hot or not,” or “Texas Hold’em”? The good news in this area is that Facebook plans to make a link in everyone’s profile that “expands.” This basically means that 3rd party applications are hidden from your profile from others and there is a link for “extended profile” which is basically “show all the 3rd party crap.”

Social Networking

Lately, there are so many social networking sites emerging (and sadly fading away). I visited myspace in a long time and noticed how it was “dead.” No “friends” of mine use the service anymore… (despite the fact that they upgraded many parts of the service) In blogging, xanga was my first ever blog, but apparantly no one uses it anymore so it seemed useless to update it often, yet I still do. It’s more like a public posting site for Grace to read. Yet I decided to keep both xanga and myspace updated. 
In the new emerging networking sites, the main one seems to be Facebook. I liked the fact that there is finally a networking site that is US based used by all my “western friends” that offers unlimited photo space. However, with the much poking (and one should poke them back for proper manners) and different applications that seems to be flooded including useless “zombie” applications, it is annoying the heck out of me.
The one that I’m most loyal to, it seems, is Cyworld.

Cyworld, for those who don’t know is:

a South Korean web community site operated by SK Communications a subsidiary of SK Telecom. Literally translated, “Cy” can mean “cyber”, but is also a play on the Korean word for relationship, so it could also mean “relationship.” It pioneered the concept of personal virtual space in 1999. (wikipedia)
They also launched a US version which is: us.cyworld.com

Cyworld is used by a lot of Koreans to post pictures, videos, blogs/diary, and leave comments like the wall function in Facebook. For the few possible Korean readers, I hope you become my “ilchon” in my cyworld. The address (if anyone is curious -_-) is cyworld.com/nackchoon.

Anyway, what I try to say here is that I hope there is a worldwide social networking site that everyone uses so that I can communicate and keep contact with everyone that I’ve met in my life…