Website Registration: I’ve used GoDaddy and Namecheap in the past and they are both really good. If you have to be anonymous, try International Alliance Privacy Services.

Website Hosting: I’ve tried self hosting, as well as many different online hosts. If you have a good technical person on board, and REALLY have the need for something advanced (cron jobs, RoR, significant processing needs), try either dedicated hosting or colocation. For dedicated hosting, I really like Softlayer. For NYC based colocation, I really like Pilosoft. For most website hosting needs, all you need is a good shared hosting provider. I highly recommend NearlyFreeSpeech. They are extraordinarily cheap for low traffic websites, and I have yet to see them go down. I do NOT recommend GoDaddy, or NameCheap for web hosting.

DNS Hosting: Normally I just use my domain registrant, or my webhost, for DNS hosting. However, if I really need to be anonymous, I will use FreeDNS.

Email Needs: I used to use my own mail servers, but now, I completely rely on Google Apps. If you are a registered 501-c3 organization, you can also get GoogleApps Education and Google Checkout for free. Therefore you get the hyped up version of Google Apps, as well as free payment processing!

Actual Website:: I am now a total Wordpress convert. It started as a blogging software, but has grown to become a very very stable content management system. I’ve tried other CMS like Joomla and Drupal, but they are really really complicated to work with.

Internal Website: Mediawiki, the software behind Wikipedia, is great for internal websites. Any member can just click on edit and then add or remove information. I’ve tried other wiki installations, but none are easier to maintain than MediaWiki.

UPDATE 1: I’ve since tried out “Google Sites”, an app that’s part of the ever expanding Google Apps, and found it even superior to Mediawiki. Here you’ll also be able to easily manage spreadsheets and files!

Phone Service: For those who simply need a phone number, but don’t necessarily want to answer it all the time, I highly recommend the currently freeGrandCentral if you can secure an invitation. If you can’t secure an invitation, you can use RingCentral.

Fax Service: For a great fax to email service, definitely try RingCentral.

Conference Call Service: Unless you really need a toll-free number, I highly recommend FreeConferenceCall. There is a short message in the beginning of the call saying this is a service provided by freeconferencecall.com, but do you really mind?!

Forms, Spreadsheets and Documents: I really like GoogleDocs (part of Google Apps mentioned above) for simple spreadsheets that are shared between multiple people, i.e. financial projections between executive committee members. However, if you need to construct a nice looking form to accept information, Google Spreadsheet really sucks. I’ve found Zoho Creator to be absolutely amazing in that respect though. They even allow for scripted actions like automatically sending an email using data you just collected as acknowledgment. For example, at the New York Interscholastic Mathematics League, we use it to collect registration information.

Business Banking: I am starting to really like Chase Business banking. They have a pretty high monthly service charge, but one that can be waived if you open a business credit card and charge any amount on it each month. So simply have your credit card make 1 dollar monthly payment onto Paypal.

Newsletter: I’ve tried out Constant Contact and they are a great service provider. Unfortunately, they are also decently expensive (15 dollars a month) for organizations starting out. I’ve tried open source solutions like Dadamail and Phplist and they are both too difficult to use for any normal human being. If anyone knows of any good newsletter provider, hosted or not, I would LOVE to know.

Project Management This is an area I’ve tried many tools and just can’t quite get used to any of them. BaseCamp seems to be the best at the moment, but they are REALLY expensive. Also, I STILL don’t know the difference between milestones and tasks. Ever since Activecollab betrayed the open source community, it has started to really suck even as a tool. I have found Collabtive to be a really good imitation of BaseCamp, but not nearly as polished. So if someone knows of a good project management tool, I would love to know.

So there you go, my years of trying out different tools boiled down onto one blog post!

Conflict of Interest Statement:

• I’ve been dating Contestant #1: Shali Zhang for 7 years.
• The opinions expressed here are purely mine, and do not express the views of Shali, or any organizations that I work / am affiliated with.

1:05 - All the girls are on stage doing a very odd dance routine in aerobics outfits.
1:15 - Wow, the emcees are very un-attractive. The guy’s name is actually amigo??!! They started speaking in English and Chinese, but then somehow decided to drop the English translations two sentences in.
1:20 - The Chinese emcee is going to sing? The program has switched from Cantonese to English to Cantonese to Mandarin. Wow, the bitch of an usher is ridiculous. She keeps moving people around well after the event has started.
1:25 - The contestants are now doing a cat walk.
1:30 - Thanking another group of sponsors… this is the third group of people they’ve thanked tonight.. and apparently they are all consultants.
1:32 - The 5 girls who won the talent show are now re-doing their bit. Contestant number 8 is first and is singing a Chinese song. Her singing’s actually quite good, though her hand motions are quite awkward. Contestant number 9, Stephanie Huang (sp?), apparently is going to sign a song? She actually looks quite graceful doing this “song” that very much resembles a dance. The next contestant will be doing a modern dance. The emcee is actually telling the audience that all the male will be having a good time? Contestant 11, Melody, is also doing a dance, spirit of the peacock. Her dancing is quite graceful and calming. So nothing much to add here. Contestant 13, Vicki Pon, is apparently also doing a dance. There is now a chair on stage.. so this should be quite hilarious. haha.. they even did the red light thing. This is totally a strip tease. She really really likes to swing her hair. This is like a shampoo commercial gone wrong. I totally fail to see how her dance is a talent whatsoever. She’s basically just walking and swinging her hair around… Wow, she left without taking a bow.. she just left..!! This reminds me of what I did in 6th grade…

Wow, this competition seem extremely rigged. Time for swimsuit competition! w00t.

1:51 - Swimsuit competition begins… with the Q&A at the same time. Shali is sporting her swimsuit quite well :-D They just asked Shali why bears hibernate and humans don’t? What kind of question is this for a beauty contest? wow. They just asked Contest #3 to pick an object to represent Chinese’s culture. Contestant #5 just did some of the weirdest laughing ever. They totally threw her a weird ass answer.

Apparently the beauty pageant has never reached black in all these years.. even with all the sponsors et al. That’s really quite sad….

Wow, Vicky just got asked whether she prefers taller or shorter guys. Instead she said I prefer money, and shorter guys like the em-cee. Why you ask? Apparently, if she’s mad at him, she can step on him. She can carry him around like an accessory. She can kick him around. She’s absolutely hysterical… omg.

2:21 - The special guest is now coming on stage. Some dude from HK who I’ve never heard of. He’s apparently causing quite a bit of excitement in the room. I wonder if this is the principle of scarcity at work.

2:36 - The presentation of the award begins now! How did Vicki manage to get a high score on the Q&A? Are you kidding me. This is totally rigged.

2008 Miss Congenality - Contestant 7, Loviena Liao
2008 Miss Photogenic - Contestant 3, Angie Chen
2008 Best Evening Gown - Contestant 13, Vicki Pon
2008 Miss Talent - Contestant 10, Shelly Yang
2008 Miss Popularity - Contestant 13, Vicki Pon

2:45 - Wow, they are doing some retarded shit. Each contestant gets an envelope stating whether they are in the top 5, and then they forced each contestant to reveal whether they are in the top 5 in real time on stage. This is some demeaning absurd shit.

So the top 5 contestants are apparently contestants 8, 9, 10, 11, 13. (Jessica Yang, Stephanie Huang, Shelly Yang, Melody He, Vicki Pon).

Hahahaha the skits they are doing with the top 5 contestants are so hysterically bad, but still hysterical.

Wow what a surprise. Vicki Pon won…

My response to the comments so far (07/23/2008)
I have nothing against Vicki Pon personally, and I think she’s quite gorgeous as well. However, I don’t believe her talent show was either appropriate or really a talent. Her answer in the Q&A portion was also quite inappropriate given her venue and position. Regardless of what she might think, she is being held up as a representative of the Chinese American community, and a potential role model for young girls. Her answer of “money” was entirely inappropriate.

I am particularly disappointed at the Miss Chinese NY Beauty Pageant organization and its CEO, Mr. William Yip. As one of the organizations that’s more prominent, and thus outwardly representative in the Chinese American community, they are in a position to generate a lot of good will for the community. Instead, it has bungled the opportunity and has instead generated a great deal of ill will from both inside and outside the community.

I understand that the goal of the pageant is to generate the best candidate possible for the Miss HK pageant. Having said that, they can better accomplish this goal by changing the rubric and format of the current Miss Chinese NY Beauty Pageant competition and still be fair the all the contestants. Instead, they have chosen to bury the process in deceit and corruption.

I am personally very active in Asian American political representation and it’s incredibly frustrating to see events like this undoing a lot of good will built overtime through the arduous work of many others.

Anyway, a friend and I have started exploring the idea of a new campus based venture. Many of you who are students are probably familiar with the few awkward minutes that you spend every few hours in an elevator traveling to and from class. While you are in the elevator, wouldn’t it be nice to have a nice LCD displaying current campus events that might be of interest to you, or perhaps an ad telling you about the discounted food at Chipotle down the block this week?

Our idea is exactly that, we would like to create a network of LCDs in campus elevators that would stream both campus events as well as advertisements. A well established player, Captivate Network, currently does this in the office building market. We would like to stay away from office buildings at the moment, and focus purely on college campuses (Facebook vs LinkedIn analogy?).

Since both of us are current Columbia students, in fact both BME PhD students, we have decided to use Columbia University as a pilot site. I haven’t had time to put together a powerpoint presentation yet, but I will definitely post it in the next few days. For now we are tackling several thorny issues:

• Is it even possible to do it in NY? We are currently checking the New York Fire Code. Safety code for elevators and escalators : an American national standard by the American Society for Mechanical Engineers will be our guide. Looks like I won’t need sleeping pills tonight.
• We have done some back of the envelope calculations to see whether the idea is sustainable and scalable. If we intend to get more funding, we will have to produce a full financial projection. The projection itself is of course of no great importance to either investors or us, since reality almost always deviate significantly from the projections. Though it’s important to have one anyway, if nothing else than to show that due diligence was performed.
• To start campus based businesses that depend so much on campus infrastructure, we are clearly going to need a faculty champion. We have started approaching various members of the engineering faculty, the business school faculty, as well as Columbia’s Science and Technology Ventures group to begin soliciting feedback and buy-ins. We’ve had a lot of success getting people excited about the concept, but haven’t found a champion of the project yet. If you know of a Columbia faculty who might be interested, please let me know!
• I will also begin to approach NYU and CCNY about the idea as well, in case Columbia falls through as a pilot site.
• We will clearly need a powerpoint presentation down the line. I’ll put up version 1.0 of the presentation in a few days.

Since we are still very early in our planning stages, we are open to all suggestions and ideas. Let me know if any of you have any feedback or have seen existing implementations on college campuses! If you happen to be a college student / faculty, and are interested in joining our team, shoot me an email: mail @ jackpo dot org.

For the moment, and probably for the foreseeable future, I will be absolutely swamped with multiple academic and non-academic projects. As part of NextNY’s open movement, I will be announcing a few of my projects publicly in the next few months and would love to hear any feedback that you all have!

I however, just had to take some time out and write about how awesome the PHX international airport is. They bill themselves as the “friendliest airport”, and it really really is. They have really fast, and yet completely free internet access PLUS plenty of outlets! um.. now back to my fellowship essay.. be back after quals.