Site Content

This is a repository of my writing since 1990. Each post is tagged according to its topics.

My main profession is software engineering; my side profession is music composition; I was immersed and trained in literature and linguistics in higher ed; later in my life I have also undergone profound transformation via meditation. Therefore, the topics I share the most are technology, music, cultural observations and commentary, and personal introspection.

In addition, years of writing and sharing have also prompted some meta-thinking regarding interactions across media, platforms, and communities.

Keeping Up with the Times

Early versions of the site reflected the internet ecology of their times, both in content and meta-content: what I wrote, what I wrote about, why I wrote, how I presented it, and how my writing interacted with the world—all of these have changed over time.

For example, in the infant era of the internet, much of what I wrote was to disseminate information that was not easily accessible to the general public. When the internet later became slightly more widespread, full-text search engines were still not yet mature, and online resources had to be manually compiled into directories. During this period, my content also included curation of useful web links.

While the web technology kept evolving, I also aspired to contribute to user education in those early days. For example , I wrote about blocking spam emails, solutions for specific computer viruses, my discussion on plagiarism issues with teachers, and my exchanges with students.

Once the full-text search engines became mature enough for the public to find raw information, the focus of my sharing shifted to more complex, integrated content that was harder to find online. For instance, solutions for early Chinese character encoding issues, a driver I wrote for multiple keyboards, how to allow two local users to use the same computer independently and simultaneously, or the sheet music preparation tips for composers.

Today, as AI can directly solve many problems, I am re-contemplating on what, how, and why I share.

Site Design Philosophy: Preserving History

These evolutions have been recorded by the site. It witnesses the changes of the world as well as records my personal growth.

This site preserves this history through a post-centric design—everything is a post with a date. For example, this "About" page you are reading is a dated post; if I write a new "About" page, the old post will still be preserved, and the menu will simply link to the new one. The "Contact" form is a post, and the "Help & Usage Guide" is also a post. Posts like these are mostly tagged with the Meta-Blog topic.

Realistically, my preservation efforts can only cover my own site; many external resources referenced in my posts have long been gone. Fortunately, Archive.org has preserved quite a lot (though not all) for nostalgic archaeologists to dig through.

Therefore, dead links are preserved as they are.

Older posts have gone through different editors, systems, platforms, and formats, so they inevitably suffer some loss of form; I am less insistent on preserving this aspect. I also try to correct typos in my own posts whenever possible.

However, the immature content and clumsy writing of my early days are preserved as part of my personal history.

The Completion Project

Over the past decade or so, social media has become the primary mode of public communication. I moved most of my intellectual exchanges to social media, resulting in a long hiatus on my own blog.

There are also some articles that I never published.

I intend to gradually migrate those, and keep their actual authoring dates. Such newly collected old articles will be marked "✨ Recently Added" and show up in a recent slot in the post list.

Interaction and Moderation

Early on, readers wrote directly to me, and I would re-post our exchanges. In later iterations of the site, readers could leave comments directly, which appeared instantly, making interaction much more convenient.

Over the years, however, this convenience was abused -- spams, scams, and malicious links for password theft filled my comment section. One countermeasure is to require readers to log in with real names before commenting, but such friction would discourage some readers from speaking freely.

Therefore, for this new generation of the system, I ask readers to use a contact form to leave comments. I will moderate the messages before making them public.

I hope such necessary evil is only needed in this transitinoal phase of human civilization when we are still learning to respect and care for one another.