Kiss From A Rose - Seal
I can’t get enough of this song right now! Trying to practice it up for my next karaoke night out :)
Sartalics: 2012
Users can use sarcalics to finally be able to convey sarcasm on the internet to prevent either party looking like complete assholes. They’re like italics but leaning the other way.
The further they lean back, the more sarcastic the statement is.
just found this gem while surfing random tumblrs. i love it when people make stuff up.
Although moths can be pests, they are quite beautiful and mysterious aren’t they?
via nezartdesign taken by Bart Wursten
The meaning behind my new middle name
Today, I officially changed my name from “Annie Wang” to “Annie Chandler Wang” :) At right is the court document declaring my new legal name!
Why the name Chandler?
I felt that the opportunity of giving myself a name was of once-in-a-lifetime significance. So I’ve been looking very carefully for names that would capture my personal aspirations and embody the truly important aspects of my identity:
- Faith (especially significant now that I’m an adult and my faith, like my new name, is more than something conferred at birth — in contrast to my baptism in my youth and my given name at birth)
- Excellence and Light (my life motto/favorite word/previous email address is “arete” — a Greek word for “virtue and excellence.” also, my favorite symbol is the star — a shining beacon among darkness. I was initially drawn to celestial-related names like “Celeste” and “Stella”…but then we named our new puppy Stella, so that didn’t seem appropriate anymore)
- Art and appreciation for beauty (my calling, passion, work)
I started doing searches for names that meant “artist” or “maker” to capture my identity as an artist and my aspiration toward excellence. Unfortunately, the same result kept coming up: “Fabrizio” meaning “artisan.” No way was I going to call myself Annie Fabrizio Wang.
Luckily, I found one website that generated this great list of names that incorporate the “maker” meaning. Do you see the clutch-ness that is the name Chandler? In a sea of male names, this one was happily unisex. (I would like to take this opportunity to debunk the myth that I named myself after that Friends guy. I don’t even watch Friends, thank you very much.)
When I saw that Chandler meant “candle maker” I knew this was the one! It pretty much captured everything that I wanted in a name. The theme of candlelight throughout the scriptures as a metaphor for goodness, truth, and excellence, as well as light’s central role in art, made “Chandler” an absolutely perfect name I could aspire to. I definitely still have miles to go in living up to this great name!
my thoughts about Google+
reposted from my email to a discussion group i’m a part of.
1. it seems that google is not leveraging its full tech prowess with (the current version of) google+. i want to see an entirely new type of social network that harnesses google’s strengths. i don’t want to see a social network for the sake of being a social network. for example: google is amazing at search, and widespread adoption of google products means it owns a ton of information about us, our preferences. so why is google+ just a “simpler (or, at its best, improved) version of facebook”? it is problematic that this very statement was made over and over again as users’ gut reaction to google+ when it came out. it seems there’s huge potential for google+ to redefine what it means to be a social network as a holistic internet experience. more stuff like +1’s around the net, please. (i guess sparks is sort of supposed to do this, but there has been pretty much no buzz about that feature. and it’s mad clunky. and not automatic.)
2. i’m not sure how much internal testing occurred before google+ was released to the public, but there are key lackluster areas that make the google+ experience suffer for users, and platform adoption itself suffer as a result (such as the circles page, which is ridiculously—really shockingly—clunky and painful to deal with. again, why is google’s amazing search ability not in play here???). if google really wants to go up against facebook, it seems to me this is a one-shot opportunity. if people get turned off now, it will be a massively difficult task getting them back.
3. google+ has so much more potential than facebook, but facebook has such a huge head start in implementation. it will be interesting to see how this plays out. the possibilities of web-wide integration through google+ are staggering, as i mentioned before. already, ads are showing up tailored specifically to me because google remembers my browsing history. google+ can do scarily awesome things, but the key will be to catch up with and then outrun facebook’s extremely visible omnipresence on the web, what with facebook connecting, the host of facebook developer tools, etc. again, though, the fact that google’s plan for doing this is not completely clear in the launch version of google+ is regretful.
4. random something to share: i heard someone explain the whole circles philosophy as a way to (eventually) phase out email. an email, essentially, will be a google+ post shared with only one person rather than a circle. this seems like a pretty fun exercise in futuristic thinking, and if this really is what google’s thinking, they well may be hitting on something profound and game-changing (like apple’s macbook air launching without an optical drive, which got people in a furious tizzy initially….now optical drive-free devices are commonplace). this is cool stuff, but i’m not sure the public is ready for it at the moment. maybe some of the quirky features we’re seeing on google+ are paving the way for an inevitable future we just don’t understand quite yet.
