I was the WordPress guide for template designing tonight. Those pages are too long to finish in one time because I give myself about one and a half hour to do this self-learning. So when I stopped half way through a page, a service call ‘look later‘ give me a great help.

It’s pretty straightforward. What I did was select the part of contents that I was up to, and clicked ‘Bookmark this page’. Those texts will be saved in your account for further use. So when I start again, just select those texts I saved in that site, press F5 Ctrl +F and do a copy-paste, and then I am back to where I was!

Most bookmarks can save the page but not the contents within it, which is very inconvenient for a long page like that WordPress one. But now I got a good solution to make it happen. By the way, the other functions there are useful too, at least I can save some private sites that I don’t want to publish in my del.icio.us.

Last night we went to ‘Dynasty’ (previously named ‘China Joe’) for a buffet dinner to celebrate Megan’s birthday. I promised that would be my last time to have a Chinese buffet in England, no more, seriously no more!

I have had Chinese buffet in England only several times since I came here. For a normal Chinese meal is ok, but the greasy buffet food just made me sick afterwards. Obviously last night wasn’t an exception, I felt sick again and couldn’t enjoy the bar crawl very much after the dinner.

There are three Chinese restaurants in Durham as far as I know, one is ‘Dynasty’, and the other two are ‘The elephant’ and ‘Gui Lin’. I haven’t tried ‘The elephant’ yet but don’t have a good impression on it according to my friends’ comments. ‘Gui lin’ is near market place but quite hidden, it’s in the second floor. I don’t think they do buffets, but the food should be good there.

Most English people who haven’t been to China may think those in Chinese buffet are really Chinese food. No! We won’t have that kind of greasy stuff normally. If you really want to have a proper one, try Chinese town in London, which is the only place you could a nice and proper Chinese meal in England I think. And remember the more Chinese people there, the more proper food they have inside. The ones in Newcastle or Manchester might be good too but haven’t tried before. Another way of having real Chinese food is, of course, visit China :-)

The typical images of Chinese food here seem to be ’sweet and sour pork’, ’spring roll’ and ‘prawn cracker’. Yes, we do have those in China, but normally they are not anything special and I hardly have them once in a year, whereas here they seem are the most three popular you can find on most tables in a Chinese restaurant. Another interesting one is ‘ucky cookie’, which you can get in most Chinese restaurants in the US I think. Surprisingly, I haven’t seen one in China before. My friends were shock when I asked them what ‘lucky cookie’ was.

In China when you go to a restaurant, normally there will be more than 50 different kinds of dishes on the menus. Also different regions have their own representative dishes. I can’t go into too detail here otherwise it will become an essay. Although I would like to appreciate different dishes wherever I go, but I think Chinese is the best.

First of all, a big “Happy 21st Birthday” to my housemate Megan! Because most friends are preparing for the oral test on Thursday (I’ve done mine today), we are going to celebrate for her on Friday night!

I clicked on her blog in my bloglines today. Apart from reading her interesting posts, I randomly looked at the subscribers’ number - “5″. It has been “1″ since I subscribed it last year and I know I am that only one. Not that her blog is not interesting, well, you can probably tell its popularity from the number of comments in her blog, but I guess most of her readers don’t use bloglines to subscribe it. Then I clicked on that number and there are three of them published their feeds. What surprised me is that three of them are Chinese, and they are also in the list of my Chinese blog’s subscribers.

I remember that I have mentioned Megan’s blog several times in my Chinese blog, and I think these three people followed the links to her blog and started subscribed her blog. Other than that I can’t think of any connections of this can happen.

This is interesting! I am pleased that I kind of built up a little readership and influences of my blogs. There are about 23 readers through feed, and about 100 visitors of my Chinese blog and about 200 to 300 page views everyday. That’s not much compare to other popular blogs, however, just for normal casual blogging it is already quite a satisfactions to me.

This is one of the reasons I like blogging and reading blogs, you can build up influences easily on the net without any complicated tools. Lots of people even published their books in their blogs. Many companies’ CEOs and directors also have blogs. By blogging certain limited news or events of companies, they managed to build up a closer relationship with customers and maybe attract more potential ones. For examples, when I saw these photos from Skype’s blog I wished I could work in a company like that in future. Also, blogging is good for company’s internal communication. I would like to read my boss’ blog if s/he has one and I think managers would like to their subordinates’ too.

PS. I went to apply a credit card today, because the yahoo domain is so cheap and I am thinking to get one to try a podcasting blog. More influences? Not, just want to have a try first. :-)

While I am trying this post in Word now, the spelling check seems not recognize the word ‘podcast’ and automatically put a red line under it. I guess this won’t happen in the next version of Word as the word ‘podcast’ had been added into Oxford American Dictionary and announced is the word of the year.

I gave a try on recording my very first podcast with my housemate Arata today. I used Audacity to do it and here I would like to say it’s really fantastic free software! However, unfortunately, it was used by a careless person like me. Right, I was careful enough to save the file right after finished recording, but I was also stupid enough to press Ctrl + S while I was editing a bit theme music for it. So…our 18 minutes record was replaced by a 15 second nice tiger solo, I meant to put it just at the begging, not overwrite :-(

Thinking positively, it was a good try. I am sure when the next one come it will be much better than the one we did today, I meant my nervous voice will get less tensed. I am thinking a name for my podcasting. The theme will be culture talk and daily student life, basically everything but not too serious. Please let me hear that if you have any good suggestions.