“The Photo Time Capsule digs up your photos on Flickr from a year ago, choosing the ones that are most interesting (most views, comments, and faves), then sends them to you a quick email. I’ve been using it for a while, and it’s amazing how nostalgia-inducing getting a little time capsule every couple weeks has been.” — Amit Gupta, Photojojo

I immediately received an email and was pleasantly surprised by the photos.  It really jogs your memory as to what you were doing a year ago this week/month.  Last year during this time included Pocky sticks, Myeong-dong with Allison, chicken on a stick in Itaewon, and grilled chicken in Chuncheon.  Boy, I was busy!

• I switched the registrar for my domain, lao-ocean.com
•  signed up for a new web host
• migrated my blog to the new webhost
• my webhost deactivated my account because my credit card information was for the U.S., but my ISP was in Korea
• had to call and reactivate my account
• upgraded to WordPress 2.3.3
• spent hours and hours reading about WordPress themes, plugins, upgrading, blah, blah, blah

Initially, I had considered opening up a WordPress.com account and just redirecting my domain there.  There were two main reasons I didn’t go that route.  One, I couldn’t customize my theme or install plugins.  Therefore I couldn’t even use my current theme (brown and red with the dragonfly).  Second, I’m hoping to make my blog more multi-media rich in the future, and needed a little more elbow room to stretch my wings.

More work needs to be done tomorrow, but for now, I’m going to relax and enjoy tonight’s episode of Lost.

Then I wondered if this could be my cousin:

TIME: Is Facebook’s popularity connected to its focus on authenticity? On your site, misrepresentation of your real self is a violation of company policy.

Zuckerberg: That’s the critical part of it. Our whole theory is that people have real connections in the world. People communicate most naturally and effectively with their friends and the people around them. What we figured is that if we could model what those connections were, [we could] provide that information to a set of applications through which people want to share information, photos or videos or events. But that only works if those relationships are real.

TIME: With more than 40 billion page views every month, Facebook is the sixth most trafficked site in the U.S., and the top photo-sharing site. What are your international expansion plans?

Zuckerberg: Right now a lot of our growth is happening internationally. We have more than 10% or 15% of the population of Canada on the site. The U.K. has a huge user base.

This month, I’ve been watching a lot of movies.  Two weeks ago, I added the “Flixster” application on Facebook, and am going to list and review all the movies I see from this year on.  So far, all 16 movies listed have been everything I’ve watched since arriving in Oregon for the summer.  The best so far were: Born into Brothels, Transformers, and Hard Candy.  The list of movies to see in the next two days include: Ghost World, Grave of the Fireflies, and The Devil Wears Prada.  At the end of the year, it’ll be interesting to see how many movies I’ve seen from the second half of 2007.  Yesterday, brother rented a Japanese movie that came out this week called, “Yo-Yo Girl Cop.”  Besides the funny title, I can’t decide whether I want to watch it or not.

It takes about a minute to download, but it’s here.  Someone took pictures of the pages of the book, up until page 495.  How can you possibly dispute this?

It seems like a pain in the butt, just to read it four days before the release.  I’ve already pre-ordered my book from Amazon and will probably take it back to Korea with me to finish.  Once I do, I’ll most likely re-sell the book on Dave’s ESL or some place like it.  Anyone interested if I do?

Gravatars are Globally Recognized Avatars. An avatar or gravatar is an icon, or representation, of a user in a shared virtual reality, such as a forum, chat, website, or any other form of online community in which the user(s) wish to have something to distinguish themselves from other users. Created by Tom Werner, gravatars make it possible for a person to have one avatar across the entire web. Avatars are usually an 80px by 80px image that the user will create themselves.

A Gravatar is essentially the same thing, but they are all hosted on a single server and are called up by encrypting the users’ email address via the MD5 algorithm. So instead of having one avatar on one forum you visit, and another at a blog you visit, you could have the same avatar at both.

Basically, you can choose a picture for yourself that is associated with your email address.  Whenever you post a comment on my site (or another site), with that email address, your avatar will display.  You can sign up for a free gravatar at: http://site.gravatar.com/

Can I pay to keep more of my photos on Flickr?

Absolutely! Upgrade to a Pro Account for just US$24.95 a year. Here’s what you’ll get with a Pro Account:

• Unlimited uploads
• Unlimited storage
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Unlimited photosets (albums)
• Permanent archiving of high-resolution original images
• The ability to replace a photo
• Ad-free browsing and sharing

Compare that to what you get with a Free Account:

• 100 MB monthly upload limit
• 3 photosets
• Photostream views limited to the 200 most recent images
• Only smaller (resized) images acessible (though the originals saved in case you upgrade later)

Plus, I love that you can now share photos with non-Flickr members, not have them see the rest of your photostream, or expire the photo link you share with them. Flickr is near perfect now. Now, we just have to wait for the #1 requested feature – subsets!

• Koreans having sex on top of a car after the Korea/Togo soccer match?  It was initially shocking to see, but when you think about it, it’s not.  Many of the Korean girls that act prim and proper are just pretending.  They’re not as innocent as they look.  This comes from hearing the sexcapades of numerous foreign men who’ve had "relations" with Korean girls. 
• Chung Ahn is really dumb.  She punched herself in the face to fake a mugging so that she wouldn’t have to perform live on a radio show.  Chung Ahn forgot about CCTV.  She must have been desperate because why else would she damage her face?  Looks are so important in Korea.
• Dominique must be happy about the Holland win.  Ras and I will be seeing him in Kangneung next week.
• How to cancel anything.  There’s some good advice there.  I remember trying to cancel AOL for my mom.  It was an absolute nightmare.  I had to finally say, "Look, I know you’re trying to do your job, but I want to cancel.  There’s nothing you can say to change my mind, so don’t waste your time."  There was no way my mother would have been able to cancel AOL by herself.