[EDIT (February 28, 2007): I have now decided to consolidate all of my writing on one blog: http://franklaflamme.blogspot.com/ This is a post that used to be on "Frank's Tech Ramblings" but was moved here once I became a bit savvier with mixing search and RSS feeds.]
This will be my tech blog. I will use it mostly to discuss stuff that is of relatively direct interest to me, so it might not appeal to everyone. Hopefully, however, some of you will discover a few cool things every now and then on this blog, and I will get some feedback from you on those questions where I am absolutely clueless.
I installed Firefox and a bunch of extensions tonight. I can't say that it feels particularly fast, but then again, I probably slowed it down a bit with all the extras I installed. I'll probably uninstall about half of them after I've played with them a bit. In general, I must say I am impressed (except for speed, as I already mentioned). Extensions can be easily uninstalled, and the search field in the top right can use an incredibly long list of search engines. I'll probably try to make a customized search engine to use as default when I have tried them a bit more and know which ones really work well for me.
As an ESL teacher here, in Busan, South Korea, I've been trying to provide students with as much cool English content as possible. I already have tons of anime with English voices, so I will use that as educational material. I also have a lot of English music as well. However, I would like to use more proper ESL tools as well to give my students the grammar and vocabulary explanations that they need. Anime and songs will be more fun, but they'll also be more challenging as they are not intended for lower-level ESL students.
I therefore took a look at the iTunes Music Store's podcast section. It has a decent selection of educational podcast - many of them ESL podcasts! - so I will encourage my students to take a look at the selection and to try a few to see if they like them or not. However, as I do not want to discourage them from using podcasts before they even really start using them, I'll listen to some myself and try to suggest them a short list of podcasts that they are likely to enjoy. With my most advanced class, I might even try to get them to create a podcast, but that sure won't happen until I'm much more comfortable with all aspects of the technology.
Earlier today, I emailed many people to ask them to register for a free account at box.net. The service offers 1 GB of online storage for free. They offer account upgrades for free whenever you refer 5 people. If you want to help me, please e-mail me and ask me for a registration link. I'd to get a few upgraded accounts to use as shared storage spaces for a variety of projects. By registering through the link that I send you, you'll help me upgrade the accounts that need it. Thank you in advance for your support.
EDIT: After using Firefox for a few hours, my whole system started slowing down to a beachball-happy crawl (Mac OS Xtm). Looking into the various extensions, I realized that the weather extension was a bit too zealous in its job of telling me that it rains and that it's 22°C out there. After uninstalling that particular extension, Firefox's performance was much much much much much better. I'll try to find some utility to test the various extensions' use of my computer's resources so that I can better judge which ones are worth keeping.
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