New 30 days challenge: NO RED MEAT!

Believe it or not, I am actually very proud of myself for completing my first challenge. I didn't consume any alcohol for 30 days!  I still can't believe I made it thru after all those phone calls from people asking me to go out on Friday and Saturday night.  But anyhow, one thing I learned from this challenge is the realization of how much freaking money I spent out partying and buying alochol in the past!  My credit card balance this past month was the lowest ever!  My beer belly is turning into a six-packs too :)
 
Although the first challenge was tough, I think this new one is going to be a lot harder for me.  To me, not eating any red meat for 30 days (and yes, that means bye bye to pork too) is like asking an Asian person not to eat any rice for 30 days. Not possible!  But hopefully with the support from my housemates, I will make it to the finish line easier.  Lastly, someone better be treating me to a nice steakhouse after I completed this challenge :)

Check the group permission on EC2

I finally got a chance to play around with Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for the first time.  I was able to get it up and running with Firefox's plugin Elasticfox, but I did run into one problem.  After I installed Apache on there, I wasn't able to access it on the web.  I tried to ping the IP, but there was no response either.  Hrm..  Well, after digging around on the web and asking my friends what could be the cause, it turn out that I had to change the default group permission setting. 

You can change the group permission setting by going to the "Security Group" section.  Inside there you will see a list of "Allowed Connections", just make sure you add a HTTP method, add port 80 and set the Source CIDR to 0.0.0.0/0 (allows all IPs).

So yeah, for those EC2 newbies (myself included) out there, if you are having problem accessing the server, make sure you have the correct protocol set up!  Hopefully, this tip will save you the time I have wasted today...

My first iBook on iPad - "Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing"

I have to admit, I really enjoy reading on my iPad.  iBook is such an awesome application.  The built-in dictionary and bookmark features are very handy.  The only downfall with iBook right now is that the books selection is limited, but I am sure this will change in the near future.  For now, the Kindle app will be my backup.

I am still on the first chapter of the book, but have already gained some practical tips, such as "a" versus "an", when to use "e.g." and "i.e.".  Some of these tips might be common sense, but you will be surprise how many people don't know about them.  I highly suggest the book to those who are interested in improving their grammar.  I will also be blogging about some of these tips as I am reading through the chapters.