Posted by Linda Wang on Apr 12, 2010 in
To Do 
This list is proving easier than I first thought! On Saturday, Brit took me to see the Harlem Globe Trotters. I’ve wanted to see them play since Brit got me into watching basketball. Whenever I see them on TV, they seem to be having so much fun that you can’t help but feel their joy.
For the most part the show was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed the tricks they did with the basketball, the cute little kids that got asked to participate and there were even a few unexpected but hilarious moments. However, there were also moments that made me want to groan (and groan I did). There’s only so many ways you can tell the same bad joke and there were moments they more than exceeded that amount. Their show was definitely geared towards families, but it did make for a fun date night for those who are kids at heart (we weren’t the only couple there on a date). While I probably won’t go back to see them again, I’m really glad I got to experience it.
Tags: Basketball, Date, Fun, To Do
Posted by Linda Wang on Apr 12, 2010 in
To Do Having recently passed my mid-twenties to officially be in my late twenties (scary thought), I have really began to realize how fast time goes and how many things I still want to accomplish. After seeing an episode of The Buried Life I’ve been inspired to start my own to do list. My goal is to complete all the items by September 30th, 2010. I might not be able to cover all of it, but I’m sure I’ll have a darn fun time trying! Over the next few months I’ll be blogging about the stuff I got to accomplish and the obstacles I’m sure I’ll encounter along the way…
Got a suggestion? Leave me a comment!
Tags: Goals, Summer, To Do
Posted by Linda Wang on Mar 30, 2010 in
Design This time last year, I was up to my eyeballs in planning for my trip to Europe and Asia. Planning a trip that lasted over 107 days, 7 countries and 20 cities was no easy task. Luckily I was able to find some few tools that helped make the planning and trip easier. I definitely want to share those tools and some tips here, in hopes that it might help other fellow backpackers, and soon to be new grads who are also hammering out their summer travel plans.
Tool to Keep All Your Travel Plans In One Spot:
Keeping track of travel details can be a hassle for just one destination. Keeping track of travel details for 20 different cities? A total nightmare. Between hostel bookings, flight booking and events invites, I easily had hundreds of emails scattered in my mailbox. Luckily, I found Trip It relatively early on in the planning process and it definitely made my life a lot easier both when applying for my Visas and on my trip.
Tripit.com is a website that consolidates your travel itinerary in one spot. My favorite feature was the ability for the website to parse confirmation emails and automatically added to travel itinerary. Instead of having to go into TripIt each time I booked a hotel or flight, I just forwarded my confirmation emails to plans@tripit.com as I got them. TripIt keeps track of the cost, location and contact information of each booking and it also takes into account the various time zones. It also contains the average temperature of the city on the day you’re suppose to travel to help in planning what to clothes pack.
Trip It also have an iPhone app, which meant that I had all my travel information at my fingertips most of the time. I say most of the time because sometimes (~once a day) the app tries to sync with the server when I did not have internet access (I only had an iPod Touch), and when it couldn’t sync it will display an error message and delete your information until the next time you sync up successfully. One way to improve the app would be to have an option to only sync manually.
With anything that has to do with technology, it’s always a good idea to have a backup just in case something fails. I always like to have a backup and fall back plan. Backup being a printed copy, tripIt’s does have a nice print format, to take with you on the trip. The fall back being, the ability to access your itinerary anywhere that has internet should you lose the printed copy.
Tags: Advice, iPhone App, Tools, Travel
Posted by Linda Wang on Mar 30, 2010 in
Uncategorized When I first started this blog, my goal was to discuss various designs that I’ve seen around me and critique it. Soon I realized that I was doing more venting regarding my personal life than critiquing designs, being less than happy with my own blog design and generally distracted by my (then) upcoming trip to Europe and Asia. Since coming back from my trip, I’ve gotten engaged and with all the bustle of wedding planning this website have somewhat fallen to the way side.
Now I’m back! With a new design, I’m ready to tackle some of those pesky usability issues found in everyday things! Stay tuned…
Posted by Linda Wang on Mar 20, 2009 in
Design When I first started with this blog, I wanted the design to reflect my tastes. I wanted it to be easy to navigate, stylish and sophisticated. It was also important to me to have a very “clean” design. It would not do to have a blog about design when the design of the blog is poor. So I scoured the internet to find the perfect theme to compliment what I feel like a well designed site.
My first attempt, I found the Second Thing theme:
Original Blogger Theme
I really liked the color and pattern in the background, I also thought the rounded corners was a nice touch. The theme itself is neutral enough to be applied to almost any kind of blog, but it has a touch of feminity that I found appealing.
What I didn’t like about this theme was the fact that “il primo” and ” il secondo” are in fact part of the image that could not be changed. I also thought that the blog heading was way too close to the top, making it seem somewhat disporportioned.
I still figured this would be a good starting point and I can learn to modify it to my liking. So after importing it to blogger and fiddling around with it, I came up with my blogger page.
My blogger Page
I was able to push the title of the page down as well as get rid of the il primo and il secondo headings. Overall, I was quite happy with this design, it was clean and stylish and the sidebar provided links that made filtering my blog posts easily. I really liked the fact that all the basic information like my profile was displayed on the main page.
Despite how pleased I was about the new design, there were still a few problems with it. In terms of customizability, I was unable to specify exactly what kind of information I wanted to display in my profile. I also had no control on creating subpages on the blog, since I wanted blog to eventually showcase my portfolio the ability to have subpages was very important. The kicker that really caused me to look for another solution though was my inability to get the comments to work. After a couple of hours, I decided the best way to fix it is to find another solution all together. And that’s when I went towards wordpress.
Tags: Evolution