Personal Blog of Carl Pei

The Wordpress timestamp is an awesome tool. As you read this, I’m probably somewhere on the beach in Barcelona, Spain.

Can you travel and maintain a regularly updated Wordpress blog? Sure, why not?! Wordpress’ inbuilt tool, the Timestamp is invaluable if you want to maintain a steady post rate. It allows you to write blog posts beforehand and specify exactly when the new post should show up on your front page.

To use the Post Timestamp tool, login to your admin panel and enter the Write tab (wp-admin/post-new.php). There, you will see a widget called “Post Timestamp”, which should be at the bottom right corner of the page if you haven’t changed the default order. Finally, just specify when the post should show up after you write it, and you’re done.

I’m going to Barcelona, Spain on Monday with my Geography class. The problem is, we have to meet up at 3:40 AM in the city in order to take a buss to the airport. It will not be the main airport, as we have booked budget tickets, hence the uncomfortable times.

We’re going to stay there for six days, and meet a class of students in Barcelona. Hopefully, I will be able to make a few new friends and have a good time. The last day is unplanned, which means free time for us to do what we want. In total, there are around 20 people from the Geography and Spanish classes going.

My plan is to arrive in the city around 9:00 PM tonight and wait in McDonald’s with a few friends until the bus leaves tomorrow morning. Because at one point in the night, public transport will stop, and I wouldn’t want to be left stranded missing my trip. The airport is several hours of driving away from here, so getting a ride from the parents isn’t such a good idea either. Wouldn’t want to mess their circadian rhythms up.

This blog will still be updated, regularly. I’ve already made and timestamped a few posts, so they’ll be showing up like clockwork. Some day in the week I’ll try to squeeze in a post with some photos while I’m in Barcelona, if I can find a computer and internet.

I haven’t been to Spain before, so it will be an awesome experience. Although I’ve studied Spanish for three years in junior high, I don’t think I’ll be able to maintain a conversation in Spanish, but we shall see.

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Finally, the moment we’ve all been waiting for is upon us. Google is making a move and updating Page Rank. Currently, the new PR can be seen on a few data servers. To check, you can use the tool here. Below are some of my changes in PR.

• Carl Pei dot Com: PR0 - PR4 / This was more or less expected and achieved through reciprocal blogroll exchanges and promotion in forum signatures.
• Meizu Me: PR4 - PR5 / Google is finally showing me some recognition, but one of the competing sites has gone from PR5 - PR6 with this update.
• Meizu-MusicCard.info: PR0 - PR3 / Pretty unexpected, but all thanks to around 100 directory submissions and links in forum signatures.
• Meizu-MiniOne.info: PR0 - PR3 / Same as above.
• Site 01: PR1 - PR2 / I seriously don’t understand why this site performs so poorly, it’s a good site! I’ll consider selling this after a tune-up and a contest.
• Site 02: PR0 - PR3 / Great! This is the new site mentioned when I sold a few sites. I haven’t spent more than 2 hours promoting it and it receives thousands of unique hits daily. Oh, and I just remembered that I need to talk how promotion was done here.
• Site 03: PR0 - PR0 / Launched close to Site 02, but definitely less successful. Haven’t spent more than 20 minutes on promotion, but still slightly disappointed.

Now it’s time for me to evaluate what worked and what didn’t in acquiring PR, and hopefully learn to then get better Page Rank faster, in the future.

Although I have held and participated in many contests on the internet, this is the first one where I’ve actually won.

A few days ago I was checking the Chitika Blog and read about a contest they were running. All you had to do was take a fun quiz called Financial Projection and post the results in their forum. There were 3 Chitika t-shirts to be randomly picked for winning contestants. What do you know? Today I log in and realize that I am one of three winners. There were around 10 eligible participants and 3 prizes, so I’m still pretty lucky.

Now I can finally join the ranks of Schoemaker and Chow wearing corporate branded t-shirts. YIPPEEKAYAY!

When I saw the contest I thought “Hah! Perfect for a lazy guy like me. And I need some t-shirts too.” So I entered the contest, and because I had to sign up to get my score, I did the IQ test as well. Below are my results. I don’t know about the reliability of the results, but it sure wouldn’t be bad if these were true.

Finally, I just want to recommend everyone to Chitika. They are a good company with a very nice and personal staff. I’ve got one of their guys on MSN who is very helpful. Also, I asked for a picture of what the front of the t-shirt would look like, and got a reply within 20 minutes from their admin.

Tired of reviewing products and taking pictures with a crappy mobile phone camera, I’ve been looking for a new digital camera for quite a while. Initially I looked at the Samsung NV10, a very nice retro styled camera but then settled for its younger and cheaper brother, the Samsung NV3 - which still is a nice camera. It features a 7.2 MPx lens, a MP3 and video player and all the regular features. The NV3 is very slim, sleek, sexy and has two speakers to playback your MP3 music, or sounds from the videos you record. In this price segment, this is probably the best camera you will find.


Below are a few photos and a video taken with this camera.

Graduation Hat

Called Student Mössa in Swedish, this is what we wear when we wreck havoc in the city after graduation. On mine it says Carl Pei -07 on the left side and Sthlm Sweden on the right.

Meizu Music Card Hands On

A video of the Meizu M3 Music Card digital audio player. The quality was pretty good, but once uploaded onto YouTube it’s a whole other story.

Macro Mode

Something I really like about this camera is its macro mode (ability to take pictures of objects close to lens). See for yourself in the below pictures.

I think I’m gonna spend a lot of time with this camera in the future since I’m going to do a lot of traveling. If you’re looking to buy a compact digital camera, have a look at the Samsung NV3!