came across this picture just now and realized i had been wanting to post this for a long time. this was taken at mine's view in baguio when gammy came to manila and wanted to go farther up north. i'm not sure what the guy is thinking . . . he stepped over the waist high concrete barrier in order to stand on the top of the slope where the 'mine' begins so that he could take a picture of someone looking out a the view. he's still in the gene pool as far as we know. and if you'll notice he was counting off with the hand that kept him alive. good for him the counting convention is to count up to three when taking someones photo . . .

side note i think it was lyn who noticed that past the trees below we could make out what looked like a cemetery, how appropriate!

this is more like going to be a bunch of updates all at once; maybe i'll elaborate on some of these things later.

lighthouse went to enchanted kingdom a couple of weeks back:



and it was boss (i'm, not sure if people still use that to refer to utterly cool)!!! more pictures here. i still haven't gotten around to asking the rest of the team for pictures they got. the ones i have i stole from ferm's digital camera.

miguel is still beating me at basketball and it seems like a hopeless cause. while i try to get rid of the basketball that i have grown through years of personal neglect i am glad to know that at least i am boost my brother's .

i have moved to the day shift and am finally a daywalker again. the problem? the shift is from wednesday to sunday; can't have everything. kiko has reached out recently and invited that we go rockeoke next monday. i dislike and refuse to understand anything with "oke" and involves participants in singing. i think it's a confidence thing: i know i look like a fool playing 0ne-on-one against my brother but it bothers me less that singing. can somebody offer me explanations why this is?

and why is it so hard to upload pics here? crap . . .

been trying to find new stuff to do on the home pc and had a breakthrough from an unusual source: fm radio. i had taken to playing fm radio at the office with my mobile phone once the ipod owners had left for the day. as a joke i had been playing pop stations like Love Radio (DZMB 90.7) or Energy FM (DWKY 91.5). And it has steadily become a staple occasion that as they were leaving or their ipods ran out of juice with no way to plug in; the room would be filled with the cheesiest songs known to regular commuters.

there would be the nuggets of wisdom offered by the tandem of "ang balasubas at ang balahura" (i think i have that right). there would be, recently, those direct translation/tagalized (or whatever chosen dialect) renditions of pop songs. there would be the screaming bumpers:"naka-love ka pa ba? kahapon pa!" or "hi pangga; may energy ka pa ba?" there would be us giggling, brows furrowed, complaining wildly and eating up every bit of it. as a side note; i've heard that drivers listen to music that they don't care for when they are sleepy on the road because recognizable music is too comforting. i believe that is true. the number of threats levelled against my person if i don't switch stations seems to be directly proportional to the amount of work completed at this time. to help promote productivity in the workplace i usually switch between those two stations.

anyway, i had been neglecting listening to The Home of NU Rock (DWNU 107.5) since the reception with my phone sucks. it takes forever to try to find the right position for my phone where the sound wouldn't scramble if someone moved around in the room. yesterday around midnight i tried it again and found a great position for both the speakers and the phone. the Rock Jock mentioned that it was Remote Control weekend and that they were our slaves. calling in requests was offered as well as sending them in through sms. then the dude mentioned sending it through messenger. i gotta tell ya; that was a huge light bulb moment. i had to try it (nurocktalk@yahoo.com). when i got a response that my request would be played i shared it with everyone left on shift and we went nuts.

when i had the time at home i just had to figure out how to get the stream through the net because that was the only hitch. i found out that opera wouldn't play it "out of the box" or without a bit of tinkering. i remembered how much trouble i had getting audio and  flash to cooperate and decide against rooting around the app. firefox could play the stream through eradio portal with the totem player plugin but i didn't like the idea of having ff open all the time for only that; i already kept rhythmbox open for music and wanted it to run through that. right-clicking on the embedded player gave me the option to play the stream on the standalone app. when that worked i created a playlist file on the desktop. now  all i had to do was double-click that and everything worked. it took some rooting around with the source of the nu page on eradio portal to find the .asx link. with that i could add a new internet radio station on rhythmbox.

listening to the music i do have on my computer is okay but stepping out to listen to new stuff or music i never heard before can only happen with the radio. i let my parents have my old radio player because they like listening to the news on am stations while they worked around the house. that left me with the pc which has become my entertainment center by now.

i guess the big pit that linux has for gaming is all that's left. maybe i expect too much for free stuff to be up to snuff with for-profit developed games. but things have been looking up. the linux games are looking more and more polished with story depth. wine is improving compatibility when running windows based apps. i've got virtualbox running xp for my brother, the windows slave (although he swears its to run the windows native productivity apps for files that they need to present at school). and there is always the option to go dual-boot. not just confident with that because it entails re-sizing partitions and i've had bad experiences with that.

a comment that nerveending had about plurk has changed my mind about microblogging. he said i should start adding friends so that the service would "come alive". not too keen on that, i guess. it made me question why i bothered posting up there when he was the only friend i have. twitter is the same; i have a few followers and nerveending is the only person who replies. i had to rethink the fact that i have this blog and why i haven't posting here in a while. now as i type this out i can't figure out why i don't post here more often.

what i do figure is that i'm probably going to close my accounts on both plurk and twitter. it would have made more sense i suppose if i knew more who were into micro blogging. it is a really great idea however i think i'm using it the wrong way. or even worse, had the wrong set of expectations using the service. i can't decide. i'm still on a high from the archers pulling out a win against the tigers earlier. that and the sugar high from the soda i'm drinking is making my thinking all fuzzy. either way, it has stunted instead of help develop my writing. well, back to this old thing then.

come to think of it. i don't know that many people who send long sms messages without cutting the words short. i kind of equate microblogging to typing out sms messages; and the main reason i hardly put anything up there on twitter or plurk is that the charachter count freaks me out, getting closer to zero before i'm done. then i get too lazy to type out on my main blog (another one is up on my friendster account which is just a mirror of this). time to shake off some bad writing habits. time to stop making excuses. time to start barfing out ideas to this blog.

yes, i do have an account on friendster.

that is for another post.

Opera 9.5 has been released! Get your copy of thi samazing web browser at http://www.opera.com/

gaaaaah!!!!

and so kiko decides to upload his wedding video online . . .

http://nerveending.wordpress.com/2008/05/25/five-years-later

and so i get a glimpse of the past me, before the weight gain . . .


cheers bro!

switched to ubuntu; windows has failed me for the last time

about a couple of weeks ago my brother woke me up after having had only two hours of sleep to tell me that the computer wasn't working. i grumbled while trying to get my eyes open long enough to register that it was still light out. i asked him a few questions to figure out what had happened. he had just tried turning on the pc and it wouldn't go into windows. i tried and couldn't get into any of the options at start-up; why do they call it safe-mode? maybe because the full on windows experience is like wearing a target for an attack of one kind or another. before this i had prided myself in keeping all the security software that i used up-to-date and that the only virus i encountered was screened ahead of time and came from a friends mp3 player. i had gotten windows xp home (sp 2) working exactly as i wanted. i had tweaked everything and downloaded everything until i had gotten everything to how i had wanted them.

i had gone through this once before; windows turning my computer useless until i had re-installed it. the last time, my product key had 'expired' and i had to get a new one. when i called up tech support i got someone from singapore to help me out. he gave me a new product key and i was able to continue with the installation. then there are the updates; that was a good day of downloading the appropriate drivers and other third party apps to keep my precious windows box from getting the latest bad boy, malware out there. after i was done i told myself that i would never go through that again.

right before that last windows install i had received a copy of ubuntu fiesty which i had requested through the mail. i asked for 3 copies and that's what i got. i still can't over the fact that someone sent me an os through the mail. i asked for and got a legitimate, working copy of an os through the mail. i got three copies too. one of which i gave to a friend at the office who was interested in this 'linux desktop' movement we kept reading about. the other two stayed in the back of the desk drawer, seeing light once in a while so i could check out what the live cd had to offer. i tried wubi at one point and dual booted the pc but gave that up because most of the things i did on this home desktop was windows based and switching everything over would be too much work.

well, sink-or-swim time came around when i couldn't figure out how to save my windows installation. the oem cd that came with this computer was utterly useless. i never thought of making a recovery cd because i never thought something i paid about five thousand pesos for would fail so badly, several times. after about an hour of rooting around, i had given up and slipped in the live cd to install fiesty. after clicking through all the usual questions and the not so usual ones (partitions, which i didn't understand) i explained to my brother that i was wiping windows out of the computer and that we were going linux. we got into it because he reacted after realizing that yahoo messenger wouldn't be on there. i had been using pidgin for a long time and am very comfortable in losing the bells and whistles, he had grown up on windows and everything else was of lower quality. everything else had to be. my concern was we both needed the computer up and running but i didn't have time to spare working on a windows install. my cousin and my brother needed it more than i did since they do their schoolwork on this machine so i figured i could get the internet connection up and some productivity apps in there so they could get some work done while i tried to figure things out. i thought maybe some weekend i would go into getting windows on this box. i thought it was inevitable.

about two weeks now and i haven't picked up my xp installer except to put it back in the cd wallet i have for apps on cd. i have found a suitable freeware version for everything i need to do. i have not missed out on anything like email or feed updates since that day. my brother balked less after i installed the advanced desktop settings manager. wobbly windows beats smileys for him. and i have found wine, a Godsend. who needs windows when there is a compatibility layer like wine on the job? so after going through all the settings i could possibly think of tinkering with (without messing with the terminal) and applying configuration changes; what do i think so far? my pc is doing great! its going at a speed i didn't observe when running windows apps. maybe in part to all the security i had to have running. i thought it would be a geeks world here to get a linux distribution to run but it has been relatively easy. i upgraded to gutsy since i read somewhere that the read/write access to ntfs partitions was improved. and as a previous microsoft zombie, my second hard drive has partitions in ntfs. i'm not much of a gamer so i don't really miss that part. it is a shame that cedega (wine's proprietary cousin optimized for playing windows games on linux boxes) isn't a freeware program, however i have read that wine can handle most of the challenges thrown at it. i thought my world would slip into chaos after the switch but this os has been more accomodating than what i am used to. which leads me to the last point . . .

my concerns about the product stem from being a windows user. there is a disturbing lack of documentation on virus security and maintenance available out there. i haven't been searching long enough but i have picked up a pattern on both topics. i don't know if it is conceit on the part of the writer's or my own ms paranoia. people who have been answering n00b questions about security and maintenance are of the opinion that there really is no need. i still don't know what to make of that. they suggest virus scanners and firewalls but they explain that there is no 'in the wild'/real threat to a linux user at the time. if ever i am attacked to the point of a broken box, they suggest slipping in the live cd and run fsck or somthing that sounded a lot simpler than i expected. besides, (i have read) that at the worst my box would be a carrier for windows disease. there was even one opinion that said i shouldn't even bother screening even for friends on windows. just in case i pass them something bad. it should be there own responsibility to check for it when i give them the media with whatever they needed from me.

that is what i am currently having a problem with in terms of using ubuntu. i still have to be convinced that there really isn't a bad man around the corner with a worm or trojan out to cripple my system because i'm not wearing the windows logo anymore. is it true that this runs so much better than windows in terms of file/space usage that defragmentation is now a thing of the past? i remember reading somewhere that microsoft suggested defrag and disc check at least monthly if the computer was about 3 years old. i felt the need to do after a year; if my install of windows lasted that long. i don't feel too good about being a carrier for malware, but there have been virus scanners suggested that i can take a look into as a final screener when passing along data.

would i suggest it for anybody? yes. definitely. i no longer see the point of shelling out a large amount of money when there exists so many free options to get a pc up AND running. installing ubuntu was simpler than i thought, after upgrading to gutsy i have had to use the terminal less to get things changed. gamers may have to wait, i hear cedega hasn't been moving much for linux distros since they are focusing on apple users (more money i guess). for my simple uses, this fits.