tumblilarius lukhnos

The Afterbuzz

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 18:28:11 +0800

Jacqui Cheng of ars technica, my emphasis:

These swift and widespread changes to Buzz’s automatic-everything behaviors are certainly commendable, and it’s clear that Google does listen to user feedback in ways that other companies don’t. However, the sheer extent to which the company had to back off from its initial launch functionality goes to show how delusional Google was when it came to its assumptions about user privacy.

Just because I share something somewhere else on the Internet doesn’t mean I want it auto-linked to something else I use, and just because I choose to use Gmail doesn’t mean I even necessarily want to be involved in Buzz at all. Those should be choices that are left up to the user, not Google on behalf of the user. End result: Google is left cleaning up its messes when it could be moving forward.

Reblog: A conversation Dan Wineman has every month or so

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 10:05:00 +0800

mrgan:

Even if Flash were the world’s best-engineered animation and interaction technology (which, lol, it’s not) scorn would be heaped on it for what it has allowed people to do to restaurant websites.

That said, I recommend that you write a nice email to your local Flash-webbed business and suggest to them, as nicely as you can, that they offer a one-page summary of what you need to know: hours, location, menu if possible. My favorite restaurant in the world has an eye-gouging website which nevertheless tells you all you need to know in the first three seconds of browsing.

I can’t agree more. So many times I had to pick a random place to eat because the one I wanted to go had, darn, a Flash-only website. Flash is even more entrenched in Taiwan because business owners find it flashy, and flashy things mean they’re getting the money’s worth.

What restaurant owners don’t realize is Flash-only websites actually hurt their business. Responsible designers should remind their clients that. Although I’d say the exact opposite is at work here. It’s the incentive thing.

Imagine If Your Bank Did That to You...

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 02:36:00 +0800

This is from the leader article, “Who’s Afarid of Google?”, of The Economist, August 30, 2007, my emphasis:

Google is often compared to Microsoft (another enemy, incidentally); but its evolution is actually closer to that of the banking industry. Just as financial institutions grew to become repositories of people’s money, and thus guardians of private information about their finances, Google is now turning into a custodian of a far wider and more intimate range of information about individuals. […]

[…] That said, conflicts of interest will become inevitable—especially with privacy.

[…] The answer, as with banks in the past, must lie somewhere in the middle; and the right point for the dial is likely to change, as circumstances change. That will be the main public interest in Google. […]

One obvious strategy is to allay concerns over Google’s trustworthiness by becoming more transparent and opening up more of its processes and plans to scrutiny. But it also needs a deeper change of heart. Pretending that, just because your founders are nice young men and you give away lots of services, society has no right to question your motives no longer seems sensible. Google is a capitalist tool—and a useful one. Better, surely, to face the coming storm on that foundation, than on a trite slogan that could be your undoing.

I think many of us in the tech industry, who are supposed to know better, are actually confused about the multiple definitions of the term “openness”. Promoting open source technology and openness in tech standards is usually a good thing. Crossing the border to make your life open, without qualification, prior notice or warning, is not. Imagine if your bank did what Google Buzz did to you, making your account history open and trackable by others (say, those you recently wired money to, or received wires from), what your reaction would be? I’d say the bank would be in big trouble.

Google has improved Buzz’s privacy settings for the past few days. Still, there are questions on how the whole thing happened at all. I’m also troubled by the fact that Google’s PR machine doesn’t sound a bit apologetic—so the inconveniences and confusions (to say the least) that many users had endured for the past few days were whitewashed.

Counternotions, a blog that often raises sharp questions on big players’ strategies, comments:

Yes, someone at Google […] thought it was alright AND excellent business practice to graft Buzz over Gmail simply for expediency. Now, we hear they may separate the two. But not only the damage is done, but we also know that there’s not enough deep thinking about and appreciation of the customer experience at all at Google. It’s naive beyond belief, for a $150B company.

If a company starts to think it’s beyond reproach and its customers accept whatever new thing it gives them, it’s a bad sign indeed.

Thank You, Google, for Wasting One Hour of My Precious Working Time Rescuing My Friends' and My Privacy, for Making Me Unable to Sleep Well from Now On.

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 04:43:00 +0800

As I said in a previous post, I turned off Google Buzz immediately when it was enabled onto my gmail account. I was annoyed by the fact that I was not asked to opt in, shocked by the fact that many of my email contacts were automatically added in, and deeply troubled by the fact that, from a quick glance, I have absolutely no control over the whole thing: access control and privacy level settings.

I turned off Buzz by clicking on the very small text link at the very bottom of my gmail page. Who would have thought that it is put in the very sheepish place where privacy policy and other legal prints are? And that’s not even the end of the story.

A few friends have reported that many of your online traces are still there even if you turned off Buzz. I had a hunch that it was going to be bad. So I re-enabled Buzz and did some experiments with other friends. It was worse.

A quick summary of a few very troubling facts.

People can see who you are inadvertently following. That mostly includes contacts you’ve recently writing to. Good luck if you were writing to an old flame, to a competitor, to a potential client that asks to remain confidential, or to a potential new employer.
You’re inadvertently added to people’s follow list. And you have absolutely no control over who can see you and who can add you.
People can see who you’re inadvertently following and who are inadvertently following you.
Blocking people takes you away from people’s follow list. If I block Alice, I’m now gone from Alice’s follower list. So when Bob looks at Alice’s follower list, he won’t see me. But,
You have to re-enable Buzz to block people. If you don’t block people, they’ll stay on your follower list forever.
Even if you have turned off Buzz, people are still able to find you—and as a result are able to comb through your “social network”—through other people’s follower/following lists. I’ve heard that if you have ever created a Google Profile, or is sharing your Google Reader feeds to Buzz, the situation is worse.
If someone disabled Buzz, you can’t block them. Because there is no longer a profile link for you to click into, and that’s the only place to unfollow people. And they’ll stay in your “following you” list forever.

Confusing? I’m as confused as you are.

The damage is already done. Evgeny Morozov of Foreign Policy has written on the political ramification of Google’s careless rollout of Buzz, especially in oppressive countries.

What deeply troubled me is that I had to learn about how Buzz worked in order to thwart potential invasions to my privacy, over which I used to think I’ve had good control with Google’s trusted mail service. And now I start to worry, even start to fret if I have missed anything to plug the holes.

I had spent an hour unfollowing everyone that I was “following” and blocking everyone that Buzz said was followed me. I assume this is for now the only way to keep my friends and I from the mess.

But now I know I won’t sleep well and have to come back to check (by re-enabling Buzz then turning it off again) to see if I’ve missing anything, or if another place catches on fire, another item of my private information was inadvertently leaked. And the entire world might still think if such information is revealed with my consent and authorization.

"Because in the business also known as social network, he who asketh not users’ consent, careth..."

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 13:55:00 +0800

“Because in the business also known as social network, he who asketh not users’ consent, careth not if they resent.”

- My reply to a friend’s comment on my tweet that I turned off Google Buzz. She asked, “Why can’t the world be simpler?” Above was my thought.

Social Network and Email Don't Go Together

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 13:37:00 +0800

I turned off Google Buzz the moment I saw its advertisement blocking my gmail page. And I had to google it to learn how to turn it off. And I thought only Yahoo! and Microsoft did stupid things when it comes to email.

People, your email is not your social network. Just because you own a phone number, that doesn’t mean you have to invite everyone you ever called to call you to say hello, nor does it mean you are interested in hearing other people’s calls. The worst thing is, what Google Buzz is doing is to equivalent to publishing the names of a few dozens of people you’ve recently called to the entire world.

A few weeks ago, I logged into my long deserted Yahoo! email account to see if there was still anyone I knew emailing to that abandoned address. I used to do that every few months. To my horror, I discovered I was enrolled in many social networks I didn’t care about without my prior consent. I could even saw updates (equally inadvertent) from some contacts that I really only contacted once in like… what, 10 years ago? I immediately cancelled my already disused Yahoo! email for good. Microsoft does similiar things if you happen to use both its whatsitsname Messenger and its Live Mail.

Google’s email used to work for me very well because that was the only service that didn’t try to be a sucker. For all its good reputation on thwarting email spam, this is the biggest surprise I’ve had from them yet.

Update: What annoyed me was how Buzz was deployed. It was opt-out by default, not opt-in. I can understand the rationale Google wants to do this. Books like Nudge show opt-in and opt-out can make huge differences. Also, the nature of web app means new features are enabled automatically to everyone. The problem lies in the fact inadvertently joined social network can disrupt your ongoing design to compartmentalize your communication channels.

iPad's Traditional Chinese Question

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 06:51:00 +0800

Many Taiwanese users, and I believe many Hong Kong users too, will wonder how iPad could be a useful device at all. Apple states on its tech specs that the initially supported languages include English, French, German, Japanese, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Simplified Chinese and Russian. There is no Traditional Chinese.

Language support is a topic on its own in modern operating system. It is mainly about three things:

Text display and localization (font, layout support, system and application messages)
Input method (keyboard layout, keystroke-to-text conversion)
Natural language processing (text correction, text-to-speech, voice recognition, information discovery, indexing)

When an Apple device supports a language, it’s mostly full support of 1. and 2., and varying degree of 3. On Mac OS X 10.6, for example, Traditional Chinese is supported with fonts, localized menus and messages. OS X also has a few Traditional Chinese input methods. It doesn’t have spelling checker for the language, but it has some natural language processing capability on which the input methods and system-wide indexing (Spotlight) rely.

It’s curious why iPad does not come with Traditional Chinese support in its current version while it does Simplified Chinese. Perhaps it’s not yet fully localized, or perhaps the input methods are not ready yet. Curious, then—since Simplified Chinese is there, and Apple can just use the same code base that is used in iPhone and iPod touch. But on the other hand, iPhone did not come with appropriate Traditional and Simplified Chinese until OS 2.0, and a lot of other languages now available on iPhone (Korean and Hebrew, to name just two) are not supported on iPad yet.

Psychologically, however, this gives iPad a bad impression to Traditional Chinese users. Many American companies made this terrible mistake assuming that Traditional Chinese can make do with Simplified Chinese interface. It’s true that most of us can read the latter without any problem, just like an American English user can read the original British edition of Harry Potter with hardly any difficulty. But being able to read is different from wanting to read. Simplified Chinese has a vastly different vocabulary, especially in computer terms. Font and rendering preferences differ, too.

I sincerely hope Apple does not think that way, although Apple’s track record is not stellar. It messed up its new Traditional Chinese font, Hei TC, that practically renders the font unusable in design and publishing. iPhone is also shipped with that defective font. You can bet that many of us do not feel confident in Apple’s way of doing things, let alone its perceived priority, when it comes to Traditional Chinese.

Even if the next version of iPad’s OS supports Traditional Chinese (and hopefully with the Hei TC problem repaired), a bigger question looms: Which input methods will it include? The Traditional Chinese landscape is not like the Simplified Chinese one, where Pinyin is taught in school and covers 95% of the user base. In Taiwan, pupils are taught the Bopomofo phonetic system, a kana-like set of symbols that represent Mandarin Chinese sounds. About 80% of users in Taiwan use that. There are a number of other input methods. In Hong Kong, where (so I’ve been told) only college students take elective Cantonese romanization classes, component-based input methods like Cangjei is more popular.

The iPhone has three Traditional Chinese input methods: handwriting, Pinyin and Bopomofo. All three are finely implemented but not outstanding to say the least. The problem being this: You don’t write much on the iPhone. You tweet, send SMS, keep some notes, compose one-liner emails, and that’s pretty much all. I can live with slow input methods on the iPhone. But imagine using that with Pages on iPad? It’s going to be like having your fingers chopped.

The biggest problem, though, is that there will be no alternative to iPad’s built-in input methods even if comes with what iPhone has now. If you aren’t satisfied with Mac’s input methods, you can install a third party package. On iPhone OS there is no such thing. Yes, there are jailbreak input methods, and I know many people who jailbreak solely for the damned input method, but jailbreak is never mainstream and not a reliable way to solve a problem that Apple should tackle.

When I say “a problem that Apple should tackle”, I don’t mean that Apple should try to solve everything. It excels in the fields it knows the best, but it has weakness in others. As much as Apple does not make every app on the App Store, it should let other developers solve the problem for the platform.

I can see why Apple might not love to open up input method on iPhone. I’ve actually had discussions with many people in this field since late 2007. Text input component can exercise a lot of control over the system, especially if it lives in your app’s address space. There are inherent security problems too.

But, once again, Mac OS X has shown us that the problem can be overcome, and even iPhone OS has a solution for providing a limited kind of third-party service. Since Mac OS X 10.5, the new input method architecture is based on Objective-C Distributed Objects (DO), which is a high-level mechanism of inter-process communication. Input method modules are no longer attached as a loaded plug-in and can only receive what the OS allows them to know. Suppose there is a kind of “Settings” bundle that functions like that. Mac OS X also employs some watchdog mechanism (which is vastly improved in 10.6) to ensure that those special processes do not block or crash the system, and a similar kind of watchdog can be put into iPhone OS to make sure that input method modules behave.

The question is whether Apple is willing to do it, or does it really think, like many multinationals, that Traditional Chinese users can make do.

World Average Number of Days to Start a Business: 35 Days

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 04:52:00 +0800

And Taiwan’s average is 23 days. Its overall economic freedom is ranked at the 27th in the world.

This via the 2010 Index of Economic Freedom.

I currently run my own company (as a corporation as defined in Taiwan business code) and have experience of having started a partnership (later helped its conversion to corporation). All small businesses (or “micro” businesses if using EU definition).

One thing the experiences have taught me is to understand the significance of operating as a business entity—that you can work with people as an organization to provide your services to the market. There are several importance differences between providing your service as an entity and doing that as an individual, even for many small businesses the content of the work is much the same. That you’re able to handle risk better as a corporation (which is also one of the reasons why corporation is one of the most important, yet often undervalued, organizational innovations in modern history) and that you’re able to provide service to both other entities and other people and issue invoices (compared to individual work-for-hire contracts, one at a time) are just two advantages among many.

Setting up and running your own company, however, always involve more work than just working as an individual. And that’s how I come to appreciate the friendly business environment in Taiwan. It still has lots that need improving, but the quality of a system is always a comparative matter. Red tapes exist everywhere. In that aspect, there is hardly any hidden cost in setting up a company—for example there’s no favor you need to ask for. I’ve learned that it’s not so in many other places in the world.

Different economies have different compositions of big and small companies. Taiwan is geared towards many more small and medium-sized businesses. But even big corporates do lots of business with smaller ones that supply things and provide services. It’s an ecosystem thing at work, and many such companies are world leaders, as Japan’s chūken kigyō (中堅企業) and Germany’s Mittelstand attest.

Many of us live in countries where business freedom is taken as granted, just like other types of freedom we enjoy. In fact it’s not necessarily a given. Interventionist measures, protectionist regulations, restrictive zoning laws, complicated tax codes, obscure accounting rules and filing requirements, lack of flexible payment gateway, insufficient intellectual property protection—they can stifle many aspiring companies. It’s not a cliché to say that we want to cherish what we have and work to make it better. We also need to understand the importance of a good supporting structure and be wary of changes that could discourage entrepreneurism.

In Taiwan’s case, I think the supporting structure had been strong and helpful when ours was more a manufacturing- and export-oriented economy. Doing service on an international scale and providing service beyond Mandarin Chinese-speaking markets are not our strongest thing—yet. I met a Swiss company owner at WWDC ‘09, and he could use a representative office in San Francisco set up by some Swiss government organ that aims to help specifically software startups get literally a foothold in the very competitive Bay Area. As I don’t believe in big government that does everything (mostly badly), a TAITRA equivalent in service sector might help business owners in Taiwan better. And that is one thing that I as a software company owner care about.

I don’t watch TV, and I don’t have access to...

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 13:10:00 +0800

I don’t watch TV, and I don’t have access to services like Hulu, but it’s hard not to run into tweets on the latest Leno-Conan spat. With the help of Taiwan’s NMA News (動新聞), anyone can understand what has been going on in well under 2 minutes. (Via @kerim)

Yes, the same animated news that featured Tiger Woods.

Disruptive journalism technology at work. In some unexpected ways…

You use nil, I use NULL It’s just zero, it’s just naught But if you think a 0 is a NULL,...

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 17:43:00 +0800

You use nil, I use NULL
It’s just zero, it’s just naught
But if you think a 0 is a NULL, you never heard something called SQL

The Remote Desktop Envy

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 15:32:00 +0800

For all the advantages of Mac OS X over Windows, there is one thing that my IT friends always sneer at: That OS X has the inferior remote desktop protocol.

Apple makes remote management quite easy. Its Apple Remote Desktop, although expensive, has great user interface and is indispensable if you manage over a bunch of machines. Since OS X 10.5, it has become even easier and cheaper if you just need a quick access to another box—the screen sharing feature is built-in gratis.

This being said, OS X’s core performance of remote desktop management itself has a bad reputation. If you compare it to that of Windows, OS X’s remote desktop is slow. If you use Microsoft’s own client software to talk to a remote machine, it uses its proprietary protocol and only requires essential drawing commands. This is why the remote desktop is stripped of any theme when drawn in the client side (and many people like it). OS X, on the other hand, builds on the open VNC protocol and transmits lots of raw pixel information. That OS X has far more visual effects and its UI is more sophisticated is of no help. It seems that when OS X’s window system was designed, remote desktop was never taken as a high priority, even if the window system is also client-server based, like most modern desktop GUI systems are.

Another interesting consequence when all those design decisions got lumped together is that you can never have more than one person using the desktop remotely. That is, if someone is logged into the local desktop console, it is impossible for you to login remotely and have your own desktop served to you. Programmatically it has also limited the usefulness of OS X as a graphics server, as window-backed drawing processes must either be under an actively logged-in user (and that has to be in the local desktop console) or root, which is highly undesirable if your graphics program powers some web service. My experiences show that Quartz, when being used with higher-level abstraction layers like Cocoa, is far superior to any graphics package out there (e.g. ImageMagick), especially with its supported range of formats (especially PDF) and excellent graphics model, but that graphics server permission thing limits its usefulness.

On the other hand, the decline of the desktop—if we can term the trend as such—is evident in the way that not much has been changed in the basic design of modern window-based GUI, and remote desktop is among the laggards. And when laptops are so cheap (but bandwidth still a problem), it’s easier to build a service architecture around client-rendered web pages and server-provided web services. Serving desktops remotely is out.

That Reblogging Thing

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 03:12:00 +0800

Tumblr’s reblogging design says a lot of its peculiarity.

I find it fun reading my Tumblr dashboard everyday, in an age where blog seems done and RSS in decline—established media and writers make it a norm, whereas the rest of us have moved on to “microblogging”. I find truly insightful writings and excellent blogs on Tumblr. It has a light mix of social network, like the elements of following, but only a very light mix. It’s largely anonymous, like a masquerade ball: Many of its default themes don’t even show your own intro, and that is if you bother to fill in that info at all.

Then there’s this no-comment thingy. Not that you can’t do it, as there are definitely ways to extend, but it’s just not there as a built-in. Instead, reblogging is made insanely easy. Almost too easy that it could have become a retweet soup that deluged much of the Twitter scene, but apparently it doesn’t.

I’d say that reblogging to Tumblr is what comments have been to “traditional” blogging. By allowing comments, each blog entry becomes a forum and a point of attention on its own. Tumblr, on the other hand, makes easy adding your own words when reblogging. And this is important: Because it’s you, the one who reblogs, that is the center of the game, and you get a voice of your own. At the same time the original author also knows your existence. It is unlike the entry-comment design, in which comment is relegated to a secondary, albeit supportive, role. I’ve followed a number of interesting tumblogs by following the reblogging history of an interesting post.

augustinus: summersnows: (via loveyourchaos) I thought...

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 13:47:00 +0800

augustinus:

summersnows:

(via loveyourchaos)

I thought “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer” would annoy them even more. ;)

Buying a code signing certificate for Mac OS X requires Internet...

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 17:11:00 +0800

Buying a code signing certificate for Mac OS X requires Internet Explorer. Good job, Thawte.

Judgment of Plagiarism

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 04:17:00 +0800

I’m at the beginning of Richard Posner’s “The Little Book of Plagiarism” and I ran into this passage (locations 138-145 of the book¹, emphasis original):

A judgment of plagiarism requires that the copying […] induce reliance by [the intended readers]. By this I mean that the reader does something because he thinks the plagiarizing work original that he would not have done had he known the truth. […] If [the reader is] a teacher he gives a bad student a good grade, to the prejudice of other students in the class (if the students are graded on a curve), thinking the student’s paper original.

I’m citing this passage because I believe many of us, in our early student days, had this experience: you wrote something that the rest of the class copied, but you got a mediocre grade, if not the worst.

Many years ago I helped someone write her Fortran 77 homework (which was taught in her department of some engineering school, using g77), and many of her classmates copied her homework, some by copying the built executable, some by copying the printout of the source code, which carried errors. Surprisingly all those copiers got better grades than she did (some 90s, some 80s, out of 100, and she only got 70 something).

It was a very comical experience, not least because I was the ghostwriter. I tend to think I never became proficient in Fortran (or decided not to be) because of that episode.

How do you cite a Kindle book? ↩

Logo in the Age of Instant Communication

Sat, 02 Jan 2010 02:56:42 +0800

Ignacio Vasallo, on logo and branding in our age:

It was the first time any country had created an abstract logo to brand itself but today everybody thinks that all you need to do to rebrand a country is make a logo.

I think that’s out of date. Logos are old fashioned. These days, you can communicate almost instantly with the world. And the internet means that message has got to be verbal. How many logos do you ever notice when you’re surfing online? If I were in charge of making a new image for Spain now, or a new nation such as Montenegro for that matter, I would not be thinking about a logo. All you need is to be clear about what you’ve got to say. In this age of mass communication in English all you need are a few carefully chosen words.

His comment is definitely worth reading as he also talks about how Spain Tourism’s logo was created by none other than Joan Miró.

FreeDOS… Why? Was in Kuang-hua Market (or Guanghua Market, or...

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 17:52:00 +0800

FreeDOS… Why?

Was in Kuang-hua Market (or Guanghua Market, or the so-called “Taipei’s-Akihabara-that-is-way-smaller-in-scale-than-the-real-thing-in-Tokyo”), saw this Lenovo laptop. 320 GB hard disk drive, 13.3” LCD, 2 GB RAM, all is well, but the bundled operating system was… FreeDOS?! Why? What do you expect people to run on DOS these days? Lotus 1-2-3? dBase III? Ultima 5?

Late Start, Late End

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 01:45:53 +0800

In an interview (via @gruber), Scott Hansen a.k.a. ISO50:

What is a typical day like for you?

Late start, food, long bike ride, food, coffee, design, music, coffee, design, food/bar, music, late end.

The world would be a better place if more people did that, and people who already do that were more unapologetic about it.

New social networking rule

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 17:01:14 +0800

mrgan:

dwineman:

No one, under any circumstances, for any reason, is ever obligated to defend his or her “following” list to anybody.^*

^*Especially people who aren’t on it.

I don’t know what people expect to hear when they ask me why I don’t follow them on whatever website. The answer is simple and obvious: I don’t find what they’re saying interesting.

How I Choose a Blog Theme

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 06:22:00 +0800

When I choose a blog theme, there’s really one thing that really matters to me: block quotations.

I discovered that the criterion alone can filter out about 95% of the themes offered by a blog service or a theme chooser. Previously I attempted to use criteria such as font family (sans serif typefaces for blogging in English; serif ones for blogging in Traditional Chinese) or overall design (one-column, minimalist, high contrast). But those are vague ones.

How one theme lays out block quotations, on the other hand, is very easy to judge. It either works or doesn’t.

I use block quotations a lot. It’s a habit I learned at graduate school, where you learn how to appreciate the fact that your idea seldom comes out of nowhere—there are always precursors and you always learn something somewhere that becomes the foundation of your idea. Block quotation is the writing tool that expresses such appreciation.

And in HTML we have the blockquote element. Tumblr happens to make block-quoting freaking easy by choosing Markdown as its default syntax¹. So there’s no reason not to block-quote people when you should do.

That’s where so many blog themes fail. They fail to present a functional block of quotation. Sometimes the indent is not right. Sometimes they just bother to put a big quotation mark, with CSS tricks, beside the block text. Those don’t work. Some of them are not even visually acceptable. They hurt my eyes.

So I’ve got a better filter the next time I want to choose a new theme. Just first test if it handles block quotation well.

Even better, Tumblr extends Markdown a bit so that endnoting is also freaking easy, which is why I think Tumblr is so cool. ↩