(C) RichardHong.com / Getting ready for the BIG night out

I went to Van Mildert College’s Ball last night, it was a nice break for me in this particular busy time. But of course, the main reason was Jenn :)

It was nice to meet her college friends and we had a little friendly Asian table, mostly from Singapore. After the dinner we danced, drunk and played some games. While hanging out with these nice people, I got to know more about people from Singapore. Jenn lived there before so know a lot about this country. To me, although I had a couple of Singapore friends, but I knowledge about this country is little, but I am really interested to get to know about its people, they looks smart and fun.

Work is still busy, but part of my business is organising parties and attending them. The next BIG one would be the annual AJS banquet. We’d spent a lot of efforts on it, hopefully hopefully everything will run smoothly. Then the week after next will be the Christmas party organised by Chinese Society and joint with AJS and Singapore society. It’s going to be fun, I’m sure! But before that, still need to deal with one more essay and the exam next weekend. To be honest, not sure about that (-.-ll)

Finally, share some photos from the dinner. I didn’t take my cam with me, so mostly are Jenn’s photos.

(C) RichardHong.com / Taken in Shantou, China

Although it wasn’t a common thing in my home town (Shantou), but occasionally you can see some people (maybe farmers) selling fresh milk on the street. There is no doubt about the freshness, but the cleanness is more like to be a concern to me. I didn’t try, but was luckily enough to catch this photo. I like it a lot!

I’ve to let you know first, this post is an advert and I’m paid :)

Well, as you can see there are a few ad link on my blog from Adsense. Basically I can earn money if you click them. I can’t ask you to click them, but if you find them are useful, please feel free to hit. The problem about Google’s Adsense is that I can’t control what to show in my blog, although the ad is showed based the content of the each page, but still it’s not flexible.

I just found a new blogger ad site call Review Me this morning and I’m loving it (they don’t pay me to write this sentence though) ! If you see their Why page, it’s all straightforward. I submit my blog and tell them what mine is all about, then they will place it into Advertisers’ section and let them choose me according my blog’s profile. If the advertisers found my blog is suitable for their product, they will send me a require and ask me to write for them. But it’s totally up to the bloggers (Me) to decide whether to write or not. If I don’t like the product, I can just refuse.

I’ve been dreaming this kind of ad platform for a long time. I enjoying writing blog, but meanwhile if I can earn a little bit pocket money, why not? My adsense account’s income number does increase from time to time, but still not even close to that $100 (you can’t receive payment until reach $100). And the main disadvantage is I can’t control what is exactly showed in my site. Whereas review me is largely depends on the bloggers, I write about the things I like.

This kind of advert has more value and it’s great for Word of Mouth or creating buzz. Blog is a better platform for advertisement, because each one has its loyal readers and there are high creditability between blogger and readers. Like this one I’m writing now, you know me as Richard Hong, and if I said it’s good, maybe worth to have a try.

But don’t worry, this won’t be “only-write-for-money” blog. I can still earn some income from my part-time job. Here is still my blog, I write whatever I want to say, and whatever I want to share with my friends.

Update: My review is approved! :)

A few months ago many delighted voices were surrounding in Chinese blogsphere about the opening of Blogger.com. As you might know, Blogger.com was not accessible in China before because of a wall or something like that. At the beginning many people were still waiting to see if it’s really re-opened in China, because Chinese Internet is like English weather - you never know what’s gonna happen the next day. But after a few weeks, people started confirming that blogger.com was indeed became accessible in China and many signed up for new accounts.

I like blogger’s publishing platform, especially the beta one they launched no long ago. So I encouraged Jenn to give up her MSNspace and use blogger.com. I had one for myself as well, just to wrote some daily random stuff. But when I invited some friends in China to read my blog yesterday, they said they can’t open it. After confirming with other friends, they told me blogger.com is blocked in China, and it’s a few weeks ago.

However blogger.com is not alone, the newly launched Vox, seems also blocked in China. Why? Everybody knows, but I still like to put the question - “WHO KNOWS?’

There are also rumours about some major email like @163.com and sina.com can’t received emails sent from Gmail. It’s not proved yet, but quite a few people try to test it and also a few other people said they can’t received emails from Gmail. I sent an English email to my friend’s 163.com account a few weeks ago, but not yet received any reply yet. But I guess this is more like a business related blocking rather than political one. But again, who knows!

Guess I need to learn how to use proxy when I go back for holiday.