Have you ever noticed this option in Google Calendar?

I guess this is more helpful for those who use a flex time for their work. I wonder what will the warning message look like.

As you see below, this was how my blog header looks like before I write this post. There was no differece between top page(or home page, landing page) and the post page. If put into rails term, these are the #index and #show page, they’re sharing the exactly same header partial.

<img src=”https://images.kinopyo.com/images/my_blog_header.png) alt=”old blog header” class=”image_with_border”>

Thinking About My Target

Based on the data from Google Analytics, around 85% of the access are from search engines like Google or Yahoo, so for them the contents I provided should be most important.

But for the direct access to the top page, they could be my friends, could be the headhunters, my future boss or colleague, or just some random strangers, anyway these people are my target who I really want to pay more attentions to, make them impressive, show a little different things from the other audience.

A Good Example

Ryan Singer from 37signals, one day I happened to visit his blog, the moment I saw the page I knew this is one thing I also want to have in my blog!

Let’s take a look.

<img class=”image_with_border” src=”https://images.kinopyo.com/images/ryan_singer_blog_index.png) alt=”Rayn Singer’s blog, top page”>

<img src=”https://images.kinopyo.com/images/ryan_singer_blog_show.png) alt=”Rayn Singer’s blog, post page” class=”image_with_border”>

As you can see, the header in top page and every post page is different. Yes it’s low techy techy, easy to implement, not challenging at all, but it still matters.

Time for Action!

I’m sure every web developer understand this and every product they built must have a more beatiful and well designed landing page to catch people’s eyes. But do you apply the same principle to your own blog? You may use Wordpress or Octopress or any other blog generate tools to build your blog, and perhaps you even made a good About me page, but did you take one more step further to care about this detail? If you were aware of this and chose not to do it, it’s perfectly fine but to me, I don’t like to miss this detail.

Anyway here is my new blog header, just a simple introduction, I may add some more info later.

<img src=”https://images.kinopyo.com/images/new_blog_header_for_top_page.png) alt=”New blog header for top page” class=”image_with_border”>

I guess this post may be nonsense to some of you. But if this is one thing that represent myself, at least I’d like to put more efforts to make it a little more “me”.

If you browse amazon reviews chances are you already saw this Amazon Verified Purchase label. This is not a new feature, I think it’s been there for a while but I just want to point that out.

It’s easy to understand, it means the reviewer purchased that item at Amazon, could highly increase the credibility of the review.

I think it’s easy to implement, the logic is simple but it’s a good indicator for users to decide if they should follow or trust the review.

Also I tried it myself. When I click to write a review for the book I bought on Amazon, I get this option to choose if I’d like to label myself as purchased the item.

When I was reading book this afternoon, not directly related to the its content but somehow it inspired me to realize some of self improvements I’ve accomplished through past couple of months or the past year. Most of them were changed subconsciously, like a good “by-product” thing.

Improvements

• Taking stairs(mentioned before)
• No more junk food, do more cooking
• Sleep earlier, resist to temptation
• Reading more often(thanks to Kindle Paperwhite)
• No games at all(I’d like to have some)

No More Junk Food

I can’t remember the last time I grabbed a burger at McDonalds. Maybe for you it doesn’t sound like a big deal, but for me it’s totally a different story.

When I was still a poor student in China, having a McDonalds burger is like a “highs in the month” event. It was quite expensive compared to the salary, or the pin money I could get from my dad. Plus it was, and still is so so delicious, way better than Japan. So at that time, my image of an ideal life was I can at least afford to have McDonalds every day.

Then after graduated from university, I came to Japan to work as a full-time software engineer. My salary was good enough to have as many burgers as I want. Even though I knew people call it junk food, but for me it was not. I could eat McDonalds for one week straight.

I enjoyed it, I was happy. It seemed like that this was one thing impossible to change, not to mention I was not willing to change at all.

But what really changed me was after I joined cookpad, my current company. The company’s goal is to make cooking more fun, make people healthier. So more or less I got the point of why processed food is bad, then one day my boss sent me a link to Jamie Oliver’s talk in TED. That 20 minutes talk was amazing. Then I searched him in Youtube about his “Food Revolution”, and I watched all of them. That thing really changed my mind.

So from that moment, I started to review my pst, I found myself willing to change the habit of eating junk food.

Do More Cooking

But change is never easy. Even though I wanted to do more cooking, work fatigue, working overtime and a failed relationship made me feel extremely drained, exhausted and frustrated. Every time I got home I felt so powerless that I’d rather just skip the dinner. Shopping ingredients, looking for a simple enough newbie friendly recipe and cook it felt so unreal.

But thanks to some good books I’ve read, I adjusted my attitudes toward work and relationships, I managed to keep myself stay positive and made some changes in working environment. Now I go home earlier than before, rarely any overtime, I’m still a little tired after I open the door but I get the energy to go shopping and cook. Even though my cooking skill is not good, I can only cook several recipes and sometimes the taste is awful, I enjoyed it, I’m happy to serve myself, understand more about foods, balance diet nutritions from various ingredients, try out some new recipes in the weekend, etc. I feel content.

And what amazed me is that this change was much easier than I expected, especially judging from my past diet habit and “dreams”. I didn’t track my activities and mark them on a calendar. More like happened subconsciously, so, congret to myself! (But I’m still uncomfortable to cook with someones else cuz I’m clumsy and slow in the kitchen >_<)

A Must Watch Video

OK I’ll stop here today but I want to share a very touching video with you. I’m 100% sure it’s worth watching so don’t miss it! You won’t regret! No spoiler here~

When my friends and I went out for lunch today, I was asked about these 2 Japanese kanji: “炙り”, “挽肉”, since I’m Chinese and I’m supposed to be the “Kanji Reader” in the Gaijin group.

Hmm, but I let them down.. What I said was “I don’t know because we don’t have those kanji in Chinese”. But I was wrong! We do have “炙” and “挽” in Chinese, it’s just these kanji have highly fixed usages so I couldn’t recognise them in when they combined with Japanese Hiragana.

Any here are the meanings:

• 炙り(あぶり) - grill
• 挽肉(ひきにく) - ground meat

Even though I’ve lived in Japan for over 5 years, I still find myself rarely know any Japanese vocabularies related to cooking or food.

Off the topic

Sometimes when I find something in the internet that is really interesting and inspiring, normally I’d like to write a blog post about it, but then I may get lazy and just somehow give up or totally forget it. That’s one thing I want to improve.

So from today I’m gonna try this “light weight” post, just share a link and perhaps plus one phrase of my comment. Sure it could be done in a tweet, but I just wanna keep it in my blog.

The first step is to start

The first step is to start by Jason Z. of 37signals

Many times the reasons we don’t start something have nothing to do with lack of skills, materials, or facilities. The real blockers are self-criticism and excuses.

Totally non related to the quote above…but if you read the link you’ll understand what am I talking about next..

When I was a child I used to draw a lot, I still remember an afternoon in Summer I just sit there and kept drawing for 5 hours, I was completely in the “flow”, if I put it in the current popular terms, and totally forgot how could time pass so fast. I also organized an event to get my friends together in a weekend to draw together, at that time I was trying to draw my own manga story of Doraemon. But when passing into adolescence I didn’t remember why but somehow I stopped drawing.

Oops that is more than “one phrase” =_=;;

Recently I added photo uploading feature to quoty.me, then yesterday after I watched a Chinese movie 一代宗师(The Grandmaster) I uploaded some quotes with photos. It looks pretty good!

Here is a screenshot of it.

The movie is directed by 王家卫(Kar Wai Wong), my favorite director, his movies are always full of deep, inspiring words. It’s a movie, but taste like a novel. I’m so glad that I read Chinese so that I could fully enjoy the good work.

Another thing is, I was a little confused about how to make quoty, what it is, where it goes. But this experience, after watching a great movie then upload those quotes and photos, I can really recapture all the great moments in the movie, feels so good. Besides, be capable to improve the tool I’m using is another way to enjoy the life.