The Two Pillars of Learning

November 19, 2006 · 2 comments

Melchor Hall: U.P. College of Engineering

I’ve been riding the Ikot jeepney most of my life. Sometimes, when I manage to get out of the University and then come back in through a UP-Philcoa or UP-Pantranco-Highway-MRT jeep, I ask myself whether I should get off at the University Avenue checkpoint since it’s the first stop and along the quickest route to my home, via jeep.

But whether it’s dark outside or still early in the afternoon, I tend to hesitate getting an Ikot there. Most of the time I prefer the longer “tourist’s route” starting at Vinzons. I spend as long as forty-five minutes on Ikot rides and I tend to relish the time I have on it. (As well as the 6.50 I paid for.)

Last Friday evening I was glad I didn’t get off too soon because of two things.

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Don’t get a job.

November 18, 2006 · 8 comments

Someone has listed ten reasons why, all radical, to say the least.

While I totally agree with his discussion on the following—

  1. Gaining experience: This is a major item on my things-I-think-about-at-night list. It’s been bugging me ever since I took a not-so-conventional job. In any case, I want to experience things and milk life for what it’s worth.
  2. Social brainwashing: It’s a conspiracy! Related to gaining experience, we have been conditioned, sculpted, and caged by our work.
  3. Risk, security, cowardice, freedom: You have a choice.

—the problem is clear to a number of people: finding a good job is tough, much less one that “works” even while you’re asleep. The rest may already know this, although only subconsciously.

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WYGIWYG

November 16, 2006 · 6 comments

What you give is what you get could be the spelled out version of an acronym that’s much catchier than “The Golden Rule.” And if I’d have to rename TotallyDeserved.com, I’d probably use that. (Hmm, WYGIWYG has potential; I wonder how to use it without being a copycat!)

I happen to be amused by sites such as Intention Cloud and Totally Deserved because it’s not really an ambitious exploit, just the type of website you need to get off your chest.* It lets you do that as well.

Pick a name, state your case, and send him/her a slap, pat, punch, kiss, or hug through the site. Nothing fancy; it’s somewhat meme-like and the creator compensates for the costs using trusty ol’ Adsense—as one would expect these days, perhaps to the dismay of web startup analysts out there, but who knows? The site is just a few steps away from a new-flavored social network! It’s community-driven content (how Web 2.0!) but the catch is you don’t have to be as righteous.

Curiously, all I’ve seen are pats on the back and slaps; no punches yet.

* November seems to be the month of registering new domains and launching new websites. You’ll see what I mean in a bit.

Do Laptop Coolers Work?

November 13, 2006 · 18 comments

I hadn’t bought a notebook cooler for Risk just because I never felt the need to, but like most laptops out there, Risk gets warm too.

Suck or blow?

Antec NoteBook Cooler S

Most cooling pads I looked at had the same basic look: a rectangular pad with two or three fans inside, hooking up to the laptop’s power via USB. Some were obviously some cheap plastic, while some allegedly had the perfect cooling materials in aluminum and ceramics. But the Antec NoteBook Cooler S looked like nothing else. It blows the cool air in rather than suck the air out and claims to lower the temperature by 15 degrees Celsius. I was sold.

Then the lady at the shop that sold this Antec product convinced me not to get it and asked me how quickly my notebook warmed up.

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My First Spam Comment, Bow.

November 8, 2006 · 7 comments

I have absolute faith in Akismet. All the spam that piles up under that submenu feels much less annoying because Akismet’s there.

My First Spam Comment

And although I, like her, am usually ticked off that there are hundreds of spam comments that plague Qwerky ever so often, the first spam attempt at Stellify made me smile. And I’ve never needed to try any WordPress anti-spam plugin since.

Just a reminder, though, Akismet is free for personal use only. Commercial uses include problogging (ha!), but only if you’re the really rich problogger-type.

Just to re-iterate, if you don’t fall under our pro-blogger or enterprise uses, Akismet is totally free for you to use on your blog… The lines of commercial and non-commercial personal blogs are hard to draw, so we’re saying if you’re making more than $500/mo from your blog we ask that you use a $5/mo pro-blogger Akismet API

Speaking of plugins, I’ve just held a WordPress plugin installfest on this site. Over half of them I tried out to see if they were any good, only to be ripped out after a few minutes. I pity my database. It’s not that they were horrible plugins; they just didn’t work for me. Only two remained: Jerome’s Keywords and Marekkis Watermark-Plugin.

The first one implements a tagging system onto the blog. Yes, the categorizing issue haunts me still, but the more tags the better. SEO-wise, at least. All that’s left for me to debate upon (with myself, of course) is whether the categories are still useful or not. From a UX perspective, it’s nice to have a bunch of larger, general buckets to catch all that rain (tag clouds, get it?). Anyway, as I’ve mentioned, this site is very Beta, and I’m very flaky.

The second plugin supposedly generates a custom watermark on every image uploaded, but it doesn’t seem to be working. Talk about hit-and-miss ratios.

Three Deathly Treats

November 2, 2006 · 4 comments

Death Note: Just As PlannedI got a great Halloween treat from an amusing IKOT jeepney ride last night. The driver was playing eerie horror ride music and sound effects. It might have been the radio; it might have been his twisted humor. It wasn’t particularly scary, just amusing. But it makes for a cool, “makeshift” horror ride if you’re looking for some “cheap” fun: perhaps with a friend that gets scared easily! No, I wasn’t creeped out by commuting around UP at such an ungodly occasion, with hardly anyone out on the road then.

Anyway. Take a look at the Typobituaries by Daniel Mall, a list of typefaces that are dead to the stylish graphic designer world. I don’t think Impact is as awful, although I do agree that Brushscript and Mistral as well as their cousins are overused. Of course, Comic Sans MS is there.

Finally: the pic in this post is a little Photoshopped thing featuring Yagami Light (Raito) of Death Note and, uh, his live-action movie counterpart. Kidding. Some notes:

  • I hate it when Light has those eyes. Too obvious.
  • Yes, I’m still hooked on Death Note. I intendhave to finish the manga. Soon.
  • I knew those headset shots would be useful for something. Very prophetic: In a certain Death Note personality test, Phillip got Light. See?
  • In the personality quiz, I got L, Light’s arch-nemesis. Sugoi!

Kudos for Qwerky!

October 30, 2006 · 6 comments

Technopinoy Dis(cus)ses Eskwela

The Philippine tech blog scene has started to comment on Eskwela. Technopinoy wasn’t too impressed by it, but a holler over to Qwerky makes me grateful nonetheless:

As one has to be “invited” to signup, I can’t really comment on Eskwela’s functionality. Qwerky provides a more in-depth look, much much more than what Inquirer provided.

Dashmedia is Live

Mike Villar has just announced that Dashmedia, perhaps a local 9rules in its infancy, has officially launched. About a month ago, I tried entering Qwerky just for the heck of it, and ended up being on their shortlist of chosen blogs.

I was surprised that Qwerky somehow got in, as it seems to be sticking out like a sore thumb in terms of the “type” of blogs that surround it. However, I am pleased that Dashmedia cited Qwerky for its, shall we say, innovativeness:

Take for instance Qwerky, one of the blogs included in the pioneer batch of blogs we are including in the network: There’s an assload of sites out there which talk about Web 2.0 but exactly how many sites are out there that actually analyze the etymology of Web 2.0 web app names?

I think the “differentness” of Qwerky is also a sign that people in the Philippines may talk about tech things and stick to blogging about it as much as they can, but filterblogs—much less ones that are not techie—remain rare. I’m very thankful Prof. Manalo introduced us to it and kept pushing us to post no less than fifty entries in thirty days. I wonder about the feasibility of a filterblog network here.

Dashmedia said it would open another round of submissions this November.

Cross-posted.

Birth, Death, and Withdrawal

October 29, 2006 · 9 comments

Birth

First, the unavoidable: I don’t know the precise time Firefox 2.0 was released on the 24th, but as far as I know, they released on time and gave their homepage a makeover as well. Many people reported Mozilla sneaked in 2.0 onto their servers a day early, but the developers got a bit irritated they didn’t trust the promised release date and proclaimed otherwise–a minor matter of snooping around the FTP folders.

Sidenote: I downloaded IE7 last week, and a few hours before getting the new Fox, I thought of running Opera, which prompted me to download the latest version, “90.2″. And yes, it previously asked to update to “90.1″. Will anybody fix that dialog?

The icons and the shade of gray used in the browser both feel bleak compared to 1.5.x, but the tabs look better. Lots to love-or-hate, lots to tweak, lots to still wait for. The thing about Firefox and other software like it is it makes the wait a little less painful. Maybe it’s the “release early, release often” mantra.

Death

Another unavoidable, yet unspeakable: I’m currently reading Death Note, specifically its manga. I’m currently at Chapter (they call it Page) 53. The premise: what if you were given the power to kill somebody, would you do it? And how far will you go?

I don’t really read scanlations and instead watch anime, but this is one manga I can’t put down–or, remove from my browser tabs. I think I can scrounge up a few hardhitting reasons:

  1. the protagonist is not necessarily good and the antagonist is not necessarily evil; heck, it’s up to you to decide whether one is a villain or not;
  2. the topic is highly controversial; and
  3. the battle of wits seizes you, grips you, and never lets you go.

The series is very recent: the anime started on October 3, with 4 episodes so far while the manga 108 chapters long was finished just this May. A live action movie was released last June and another one is coming this November. I hear the anime is less mature than the manga, so I reckon you should first check out the scans. As for the movie/s, they could’ve picked more fitting actors.

Asian shows have never caught my fancy–though My Sassy Girl surprised me with its ending–but I want Death Note things to reach the Philippines. Even America, so they can turn it into a Hollywood blockbuster.

Withdrawal

I have a good number of friends who want to be great writers someday (that sounds like they will never be, but no; right now, I believe they are already). I think almost everybody dreams of being a great writer. (Especially with the popularity of blogs. Hah.)

I don’t remember when I stopped having the same aspirations, but what I’ve been feeling lately is clear proof I can’t be a great writer. When a certain topic is thrown at me, a psychological battle ensues: I need to write, but I am keeping myself from doing so. The thought of having to write it already, dammit! feels so tedious and miserable that I distract myself for as long as I can resist my conscience nagging at me. Perhaps the topic isn’t interesting or the act of writing has been forced upon me instead of having sparked something in me. That only means I would never have made it in journalism, then.

I don’t think writing is supposed to be this way: wrong.

The lack of entries the past week might be a withdrawal in itself; it might also be OC-ness—you know, in category-consciousness, or the mental debate on whether I should allocate things I want to post about under some lesser incarnation of a post.

It was also my birthday a few days ago but I didn’t feel too excited to even write about it. (He did.) Maybe because I’m not a guy and you don’t really find the number 21 that special.

But I’ve also been busy battling the symptoms at work; as I write this bit I’m resisting doing my last assignment for the current batch and instead of saving time by getting it over with, I am prolonging my misery.

Yes, I procrastinate knowing the pain shall last longer. But, like dreaming of being a great writer, it’s practically normal to cram, slack off, and procrastinate. Why must we put ourselves through excess, unnecessary pain? Have we become this bored from our degraded attention spans?

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