The best part is: more than 2000 pageviews in the past 9 days! And that’s without much publicity yet! Insane!

P.S. Btw, yes, the post title has ambiguous grammar (well not really, if you are speaking formally, but in informal speech, it is kind of ambiguous).

Didn’t take long before a few of them got the invites soon afterwards. I think it takes the Wave team at least a day or two to send an invite once you nominate your friends. Anyway, now we have more interesting stuffs to do.

The first wave: I started a wave on the recipe of the chicken katsu my girlfriend and I cooked last weekend. I might not look like it, but I do cook often enough, and the katsu was really good! Even my girlfriend’s sister, who has a high standard for food, liked it. Well, back to the point, it was kind of fun to write the recipe in Wave. But wait a sec, I can do that just using Google Docs, can’t I? Or even this blog. Well, let’s put that thought on hold for a moment…

The second wave: my girlfriend went online and she started playing with her Wave account. She was initially confused. So we both started a wave (oh, and I shared the katsu recipe wave with her) and started experimenting. This is where Wave really shines. We were able to edit any of the sub-waves together and the changes appear live on the other person’s Wave account. I can see exactly where she’s editing and can even reply to her post before she finished writing. We also played (well, I did) with the playback function. Really cool!

The third wave: well, I am supposed to write an article for this small blog-based publication that my friend is running. Since she has a Wave account too (and, like me, has no idea what to do with it), I suggested that we might want to try writing the article as a wave. My idea would be to write the article (outline and the actual article), brainstorms, and have her editing the article as necessary. Thought that is a neat idea, but we’ll only be able to test that next week since I’m still kind of busy this week. Seems fun though! Imagine live collaboration on an article, bouncing ideas through a wave or gtalk, while writing the article at the same time. Plus, I’ll be able to see her edits appearing live on my wave.

Well, anyway, back to the thought that I put on hold some moments ago: Google Wave equals Google Docs? Is that true? Well, yes and no! Wave can indeed work like Google Docs (well, right now minus the spreadsheet/presentation stuffs, but I bet there will be a gadget to take care of that soon). And that is indeed the point! Wave is Google Docs + GTalk + GMail + wiki! It’s like this all-in-one, all encompassing collaborative solutions. Cool? Hell yeah. Will it work? Only time will tell.

Well, I had fun waving today. But I shall stop here. Still have a presentation to write for Monday and I need to get a draft of it by tomorrow. ):

Anyway, this one is the cutest! Shit! The cat and the video is just so cute!

(Watch the other 10 videos from YouTube’s Chrome channel.

Happy Valentine’s day btw (this is one of the reasons why I wrote this today).

P.S. Heck, I completely forgot to publish this one.

Enough on the rant. I have been working on quite a few interesting things. I’m also taking several advanced courses that should help me with my weak maths; though, on the other hand, I’ve been pummeled by the difficulty as well. I hope I’ll survive.

So expect to hear more from me on things I’m working on now: webapps performance, general performance modeling, static analysis, concurrent programming, and more C++. Hopefully I will have more time soon and I can restart my nascent blogging habit. Wish me luck!

Seinen ranges from utterly comedic to deeply psychological. Some of them still scars me to this day when I recalled the story. Indeed, it is not a genre to be taken lightly. So today, instead of discussing the usual programming stuffs, I shall be introducing some of the seinen manga I’ve read recently.

1. The Lucifer and Biscuit Hammer (Wakusei no Samidare) by Mizukami Satoshi

This manga shocked me. I was laughing uncontrollably after only the first two pages! It was an awesome introduction (read it here: page 1 and 2). The story revolves around a college student who woke up to find an… err… talking lizard. Hilarious! Oh, not to forget that he later on swore allegiance to a princess who wants to save the earth from being destroyed by a… biscuit hammer. Did I say that the princess does that just so that she could destroy the earth herself? Gosh!

Read it here.

2. Angel Heart by Hojo Tsukasa

The first thing I noticed about this manga is that it has a unique drawing style among manga. It looks more like an older American graphic novels than a Japanese manga. After several chapters, it matters no longer. The story revolves around an assassin who committed suicide only to receive a stolen heart transplant and ending up becoming the “daughter” of the guy who is the fiance of the dead girl from whom the heart was stolen. It’s a heartwarming story of redemption of an ex-assassin doing good deeds as a city hunter.

Read it here.

3. Binbou Shimai Monogatari by Kazuto Izumi

The story revolved around two sisters who are incredibly poor and living alone in a meagre apartment rented from a fierce landlord. They constantly had to skimp on food. It tells the tale of the two sisters coping with their lives with a smile everyday. A truly slice of life story, it amazingly sticks to the premise up to the end. It’s as if you’re looking at two real sisters in real life and not in a manga. There is no happy ending and I didn’t expect it to have one. After all, the two sisters are already happy from the beginning just by having each other’s company.

Read it here.

4. Real by Inoue Takehiko

This is a deeply psychological manga. It provides a looking glass into a world of handicapped basketball through the eye of a school drop-out (who used to be a darn good basketball player), an ex-sprinter who had his leg amputated, and a popular basketball captain who lost all his friends after being involved in an accident and was paralyzed from waist down. It is a perfect twist to other basketball manga like Slam Dunk or Cross Over.

Read it here.

5. Skyhigh by Takahashi Tsutomu

Do you believe in afterlife? This story brings you into the gate of heaven, where a lone girl becomes its guardian, offering each spirit three options: one, to go through the gate and be reborn; two, to stay as wandering spirit on earth; or three, to curse (read: kill) one person on earth and go to hell afterwards. Each chapter portrays the decision each spirit made and the consequences. I was captivated. I read the continuation: Skyhigh Karma, but I still think the original Skyhigh is far more amazing than the second.

Read it here. (Read Skyhigh Karma here.)

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There were several other seinen I’ve read recently, notably Hot Milk, Bitter Virgin and Lucu Lucu; but I forced myself to limit the list to five. I was really torn when I was at #4. I decided to put up the two that are most different from the rest. But these three are pretty awesome as well.

Seinen is a refreshing genre because it’s so diverse. There is no common plots among many of the popular seinen manga. I’m glad I read them. Though I think they contribute to my headache. Imagine working 10 hours in front of an LCD screen and reading manga on another LCD screen at home. Surely, there is a limit for my eyes… :(

This has got to be the stupidest news I’ve seen in awhile. Not to mention the stupidest public persecution in quite awhile too.

Oh and it doesn’t stop there…

A prosecutor says Licking County authorities also considering charges for students who received the photos.

Okay… (Probably no wonder that the county and the school has, well, you know, the word licking in it.) I’m still half-hoping that this is an “onion”-news[1].

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On unrelated note, Stoyan Stefanov from YUI blog has just posted a pretty neat article on pngcrush (among other things, like jpeg metadata stripper). This should really be made a common practice nowadays. A friend of mine has even written a short script to automate CSS spriting followed by pngcrush recently. He told me it helps reduce the file size of the sprited PNG by twenty something percent. Not to mention a lot less HTTP requests.