Enchanted Excursion

Posted on April 30, 2007 at 6:14 pm | 20 Comments
Filed under Amazing Adventures • Daily Dose • Tube Talk

Sorry for the lack of updates and I’m sorry that this one is pretty short.

Recently, I got addicted to Grey’s Anatomy. I’ve been downloading every single episode of the third season. And I really enjoy it. Currently, I’ve already finished the first 13 episodes, so please, no spoilers, eh? But there’s one thing I hate with it, the surgery scenes. I don’t like watching those scenes. Gross.

More recently to that, we had an unplanned trip down south. We went to Tagaytay City and went to EK. I’m glad that we went to Tagaytay, memories from my day trip with my classmates back in high school flooded my mind. It was my first time to go to EK, I thought that the place was good, but I was wrong. I find the park boring and small.

Well, I suppose, there will be less updates in this site for the next few weeks. There’s just nothing to write about and I’m missing so much things. I need to recollect myself.

Uh, yeah, I reckon, I need to use the “H” word… hiatus.

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From Dial-up to DSL

Posted on April 23, 2007 at 11:41 am | 27 Comments
Filed under Internet Insanity

During the turn of the millennium, I had my first taste of internet. I don’t really care if my internet connection is slow, as long as I can view sites with reasonable amount of time, it’s fine with me. I don’t care if some of my classmates are enjoying the super fast DSL while I’m on dial-up, scratching the protective coating on the internet cards that I buy every week and waiting for a long time just to connect to the internet.

To me, the slow connection is still bearable. As I’ve wrote, as long as the websites that I visit load with reasonable amount of time, it’s fine with me. I’m not somebody who would go for the faster one if I can tolerate the slower one.

The biggest downside of being on a dial-up connection is that you can’t use the phone. You can’t create an outbound call nor nobody can call you if you’re connected to the internet. For the past years, this really makes my parents irritated. Especially when family relatives from the USA are calling here at our home but can’t connect because I’m busy surfing the internet.

I’ve been a pain in the ass. Yeah. Whatever.

*****

Late last month, I’ve seen an advertisement of PLDT’s newest DSL service in the newspaper. It’s the Plan 888. I’ve told my dad1 about it. I’m just glad that he agreed. I’ve told my dad about it not because I want a faster internet connection but because I don’t want to be a pain in the ass anymore. He called the effing customer service of PLDT and the customer service representative said that their line man will go to our place within the week. A week has passed and we haven’t received any news from PLDT about our application. So my father decided to ring PLDT again. Whoever spoke to my father don’t know the services that they offer. That person told my father that the Plan 888 isn’t available here in Pampanga yet. How come their advertisements clearly state that it’s already available here and there is even a big billboard of their newest product here? Don’t you call this stupidity?

I decided to forget about it. I thought that PLDT made a big mistake. Two weeks ago, I was surprised when somebody from PLDT called here at our home, asking me if they can install the device that they’re giving so I can start using DSL.

When they went here in our house, they found out that my computer still doesn’t have a LAN card. Curse my old computer for that. Two Sundays ago, I’ve bought LAN card. I let the sales man in the store where I bought it install it at the back of my CPU because I’m too scared to do that work. When I got back to our house, it looked like my computer can’t find the newly installed LAN card. And that’s when I started to troubleshoot my computer alone. Since then, I’ve opened my CPU numerous times just to find out what seems to be the problem.

Monday last week, I had my first taste of DSL here at home. I was online the whole day. But when night came, the DSL connection we have doesn’t like to work. It continued to be like that for about three days. So I was forced to dial 173 (PLDT’s effing customer service) and I found out that our application was not yet activated by that time! :phwoar:

Last Saturday, miraculously, our DSL connection came to life once again. Dunno if our application was already activated. But until now, I’m enjoying it.

And because of this, I can now enjoy and abuse YouTube (which is now owned by Google). Any short films that you want to recommend? And look at this! This is so cool. The newly released international trailer of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and hey, mind you, it’s not just the teaser trailer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLud6yM47u8

  1. Who went to Singapore last week, yeah, off-topic. [↩]

27 Comments

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Stinks and Sells

Posted on April 18, 2007 at 9:18 pm | 23 Comments
Filed under Random Realities

Sorry, I neglected this blog for the past four days. I wasn’t visiting it much within that period. Why? I got some problems with my PC and I troubleshooted it alone. Thank God it’s normally working again. And oh, I got addicted to O2Jam. Haha.

So lets go to the topic. Back in high school, in our official publication, the Chimes, we have this write-up in our features section called “Ins and Outs.” I was one of those few people who contributed in that item. You might think that doing it is easy, but I tell you, thinking of what is “in” and what is “out” can be really time consuming.

And since my life is not that interesting lately because I’m just stuck at home (okay, I’m not saying that I’m bored) and I miss doing “Ins and Outs,” I’m gonna do one… my own version. And I’m calling it “Stinks and Sells.”

Dora the Explorer (negrang lakwatsera) stinks
Dora the Exploited1 (negrang GRO) sells?! Eek! Yeah, she sells her body.
Political ads stink
Makisig’s Lucky Me ad sells
Yahoo! stinks?
Google sells!
Summer sells
But because of the hot weather, I take my word back, it stinks!
School will stink forever
Rejoice for vacation sells!
O2Jam sells
But Audition sells better
“Pichay, itanim sa senado” stinks
“Pichay, itanim sa semento” sells
Amazing Race All-Stars really sells
But I still don’t know which team I’ll root for
Harry Potter sells
But does nude Daniel Radcliffe sells either?
Spams and spoiled hams2 stink
Hams sell
Ball pen stinks
Mechanical Pencil sells
Dial-up connection3 sells
But DSL4 sells even more
Maria Flordeluna stinks
Will Rounin sell or stink?
Robinson stinks
SM5 sells
WP 2.1.3 will stink soon
WP 2.2 will for sure sell

I want this to go on, but I’ve ran out of things to include in here. Oh, well, I’m off to read your blogs.

  1. It was one of my high school classmates who created this. [↩]
  2. Spam comments from legitimate users [↩]
  3. As long as the pages that I want to view load in a reasonable amount of time, it’s tolerable to me [↩]
  4. I’m just waiting for the activation of my DSL. Thank you, God! [↩]
  5. They’re constructing another annex in SM City Pampanga. It’s the third annex. [↩]

23 Comments

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Abused Web Applications

Posted on April 14, 2007 at 10:30 pm | 22 Comments
Filed under Internet Insanity

No, this is not a meme. I’ve decided to make this entry so I can share to you, my dear readers, some of the web applications (or simply webapp) available for free usage that I’ve been using. Dunno if you’ve heard of them, but still, let me write about them.

Google Analytics

This is one of the services available in the internet that stores your web statistic by just inserting a script on your code. But I don’t think it’s reliable because the script that you’ll add is JavaScript powered, so if your visitor has deactivated JavaScript, he or she won’t be recognized as a visitor. Oh, well, this service is for free, why not abuse it?

GMail

After I’ve got an invitation to join it, I left Yahoo Mail forever. Why? Gmail has so many features available free of cost. What’s more, it offers a whooping 2.8 GB (and counting) of storage. You would surely not need to delete anything for a long period of time.

Google Reader

This is my favorite service that Google offers. So what is this Reader? It’s a web-based feed aggregator. That means, when I subscribed to your feeds and when you publish a new entry, I’ll see and can read it in Reader without visiting your site.Great, hu? It helps me to tract those blogs with new posts that I still haven’t read. I really recommend this to all bloggers. You can subscribe to my feeds by clicking the “Subscribe to RSS” link that you can find at my footer.

Google Maps

No, I’m not a real user of this service. It does not give me any help as of the moment because the Philippines is not completely mapped. You won’t be able to see even just the main roads here in the Philippines. I hope in the near future, the Philippines is fully mapped so I can use it to get directions. That would be very great!

Flickr

This one is owned by Yahoo!. I’m new to this service. This web application is best if you can get a pro account (the paid one). Nevertheless, there are so many cool photos there (you can even do derivative works with some). This is must-subscribe-to if you’re a photographer or even photographer-kuno. From now on, I’ll get there the photos that I may need to use to create my layouts.

del.icio.us

Another web application owned by Yahoo!. This enables you to bookmark any page in the internet. Because of this web application, you can now see your bookmarked web pages anywhere, just be sure you have a computer with an internet connection :P .

FeedBurner

Oh, I really like the services that they offer. Because of this, I can save a little of my bandwidth. It gets my feeds, and then, it’ll do the rest of the work for me. It sort of republishes my feeds. That’s why if you have subscribed to my feeds you would see extra links below each post. It also gives me a statistic how many people have viewed my feed and my site.

DeviantArt

You’ll find great works here. From photography to painting. If you need some inspiration, this one is a great site to start with.

Friendster

Have you heard of the news that Filipinos have dominated Friendster? Lol. When it was still new, that was in 2004, I really got addicted to it. But now, it has lost it’s magic. The whole concept is now boring. But it amuses me that some senatoriables uses it, like Chiz Escudero, Trillianes, and Sharon Cuneta’s husband, Kiko Pangilinan for campaigning.

Technorati

I’ve been visiting this site more than the usual lately. Basically, for the sake of bloghopping. It’s also one way to tract what is the hottest topics in the blogosphere. It also tracts your blog’s rank but Shari says it’s not reliable.

That are just only ten of the numerous web applications that I’m using. If I would put all of them here, this might get really long and I don’t want you to get bored with all of these1. Do you know any web application that you may recommend to me?

  1. And if you haven’t noticed, I haven’t included WordPress. But do I still need to include it? [↩]

22 Comments

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Reading List

Posted on April 13, 2007 at 6:49 pm | 10 Comments
Filed under Bulky Books

So I was not able to attend iblog3 today. I hope I can be there tomorrow (it’s a two-day event). And here I am, stuck in our house.

I was bloghopping this morning, but there were only a few blogs that interested me so I decided to read some of the articles published in the PDI under the column Youngblood that I’ve been able to bookmark but wasn’t able to read until now because I was very busy at school. I really enjoy reading these articles. Last March, finally, I was able to finish the second Youngblood book (Youngblood 2.0), it’s an anthology of essays lifted from the column counterpart.

Now, I’m looking for the prequel of it, The Best of Youngblood. It looks like it’s not available in the market anymore. I’ve been looking for it in bookshelves, stands, and in our library. But I was not successful looking for it. My cousin reckons she have seen a copy of it in a branch of NBS somewhere in Metro Manila. Can anyone tell me where I can get a copy of it? Or if you have one, could I buy it? My cousin confirmed to me that she has seen one. And I won’t tell you where. Haha. Okay, ask me in your comments if you want to know. Lol. Youngblood is driving me insane! :lol:

Lately, I’ve been supporting Philippine Literature. Aside from the two Youngblood books that I’ve bought, I also bought Luis Katigak’s The King of Nothing to do. It’s yet another book of essays. I’ve read two or three of his essays and it looks like it’s a great book.

Okay, enough of Youngblood. I have this book called The Prestige by Christopher Priest. It was adapted into a movie last year. But I wasn’t able to catch the movie. It’s not magic that caught my attention1. It was the amazing trailer. I love the special effects! Currently, there are less than 70 pages left that I have to read and I’m really enjoying it. I bet I would just go downtown and look for a pirated copy of the movie. The DVD of it is pricey and sorry, I’m currently broke.

Moving on, I’m targeting to finish rereading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (and if I can, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix too) before the end of summer because — I think you already know it — this coming July, the fifth Harry Potter movie (Order of the Phoenix) and the last book in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will be released. This is surely one great July to remember! Cool isn’t it? And oh, I don’t like the cover art of the last book. How I wish Mary GrandPré, the illustrator of the US edition books has used monochromic color scheme like what she did with the last two books that were released.

*****

Off-topic

Even though I’ve read an article regarding the criticisms against Ajax, I’ve still implemented it in my comments. Yeah, I’ve installed another plugin. No, not the one that posts your comment without reloading the page, the plugin that I’ve installed lets you edit your comments for a limited time without reloading the page.

*****

How was your day? If you haven’t noticed, it’s the Friday the thirteenth today. As I don’t believe in such crap, nothing bad happened to me today! :lol!:

  1. Oh, it’s not the same kind of magic that you see in Harry Potter. It’s more of a stage illusion. [↩]

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