Tuesday Jitters

It’s one of those Tuesdays, I guess. There’s not much to talk about as not a lot of stuff happened. I just went to work early. Got back home to pick up gf and went to Body ‘n Sole for a massage. She got for herself a full one while I only went for foot reflexology. It did hurt but it wasn’t much like the first time.

As I was out on the road with her, I thought global warming was starting to get real ugly. I mean it was so hot around here as early as 9AM–ran through noon time and temperature (+humidity) only dwindled down around 2:25PM when it started to rain. Man, if I was on the field the whole time today I would’ve gotten sick, that’s guaranteed. Imagine what I would’ve to go through if I was a field worker. I would have worked through sweat only to get wet under these crazy little mid-afternoon showers. I know it’s not good news but I had to share it.

Anyway, more to the tech side now, OK so I actually resetted my MacBook Pro’s SMC today. Thanks to this tip from Apple. I hope doing that would at least fix the screen issue I have experienced since I updated to 10.5.3.  My brother even saw the phenomenon for himself when he tried to use the Mac late last night–that’s after he woke it up by opening the lid. Oh BTW, I got the idea about resetting the SMC from Apple discussions specifically in this thread. It is very clear that I am not the only dude who has a Mac with this mess. At least I know I’m not special.

Sports-wise, I could only wish the Lakers are going to win Game 6 in Boston to push the Finals to a dead-end. That would be fun rather than tuning in to Game 6. But with the Celtics having their crowd behind, I guess it won’t be that difficult to stuff the trophy in the bag. And KG would be all smiles for sure.

Updates from the BlackBerry world? Sure. Here it is–photos about the demo unit of the Javelin (the 3G-less BlackBerry Bold variant) have surfaced online. Check this feed from BlackBerryNews.com and enjoy reading.

So I’ve finally decided..

In the last few days or so, I was all trying to figure out which site I would choose to blog on to. It was just between Blogger and WordPress. There’s just two choices. You know I have actually started with Blogger around May 31st and posted a few. Then I deleted everything I wrote a little after I imported all of them over to WordPress. The “Magic Button” was just tempting. It was that quick! But now I’m back to Blogger. At least I was able to figure out the differences.

Both are really fairly simple to work with. Here are the items that have helped me decide between the two top-notch blog sites:

1. You can control your blog’s text font on Blogger, at least it’s readily available on the post box. This is not available on WordPress. You would have to edit the HTML tags for that or change the template/theme.

2. Upload space-wise: WordPress readily provides 3GB. All I know about Blogger’s is that you only get 1GB of space for photos due to its integration with Picasa. Although there is a workaround to this by uploading your photos somewhere, i.e., Photobucket or Flickr, and then link them into your blog, it is clear that WordPress has this feature in the bag.

3. There’s lots of widgets available on Blogger and that’s good. There’s even the nice newsreel feature that lets your visitors read the latest news articles for a particular subject or topic listed on the sidebar. They just have to click the topic of interest and they get the news. WordPress I think doesn’t have that.

4. And this last feature, amongst a slew of other useful features readily available on Blogger, is the capability to blog from a mobile device. They call this mobile-blogging or blogging-to-go. This is perfect for me as I am out and about most of the time. All I’ve got to do is just send an email to the address I have nominated, and boom–the email gets published as a new article. I think I have mentioned this before that Blogger and BlackBerry are made for each other.

Having said all those things, I guess I’m staying with Blogger even if I had deleted the initial page I have created last May 31st (sorry!). At least I’m back now and I should be better than I used to be a few weeks ago. There’s going to be more updates soon as I will be working on this full-time now. With Blogger and as I have said, I can even post from my BlackBerry and send it from there. So much for push-button publishing and mobile-blogging.

White Water Rafting

Have you guys ever gone white water rafting? If so, then I guess you’re familiar with those classes of rapids everyone talks about whenever they get past all of them on any given course. We’re talking about the more difficult class 3-4 rapids… Are we? Well I guess if you haven’t tried the advanced course YET then you have a lot to read about on here.

Just fyi, I’ve actually (and successfully) just gone on my first rafting adventure last May 15th, on a Thursday if it matters. And yeah, I pushed the limit (along with my cousins) and signed up to go advanced. That trip covers around 30 or so rapids ranging from class 1-2 to the more adrenaline-pumping and exhilarating class 3-4s. The duration: 6-7 hours of nonstop white-water wet-glory… All I could say is that it was so fun and you’ve got to love every minute out there especially when you’re like risking your life in exchange for one hell of an experience. No pain, no gain. Now how’s that for a late summer thrill? I love outdoors!

The whole time I was out there, I was feeling safe even with the odds that we had to go through which I had no idea what they were going to be like (remember: it’s first time). Good thing the word safety came in and was introduced even before pre-raft because we chose to raft with the Kagay guys who have such an established resume in the rafting business in Cagayan de Oro and in the rafting world, in general. So if you plan on going rafting sometime later, I would consider going out there with them. I’ll be going rafting again soon especially after a day or two’s worth of rain would hit the city — that would surely bring up the “danger” (and fear!) factor. It would be all perfect to blog about by then.

Just drive, don’t text

I couldn’t believe I’ve been through a car accident and survived to blog about it — the photo above should help me put everything into words. That all happened about 23 months or so ago, July of ‘06. I wrote about it on my old message board and here’s what the whole drama was:

i survived a rather really ugly car crash. that was back on the 17th of jul 06. oh yeah, everything happened like in a blink of an eye. i was driving on my way to work and it just happened. in full detail, i woke up early – the usual routine. drove my pops to the airport before i was gonna get to work. then downhill, i was checking the mirrors, applying not too hard on the brake pads. the last thing i remember was when i was trying to change a song on my iPod mini – which of course is what i use to serve as the car accessory – then boom it just happened. i hit something. “houston, we’ve got a problem.” i am so sure i never spent like a great deal of 2 seconds looking at the iPod mini screen. if that was my fault, i for sure have learned from it the hard way. check out the photo of the sentra above. it should at least tell you what i’ve been through. when i got the hit, all i heard was silence. all i’ve thought of was home – what have i done? good news is that i’m still alive. i always put my seatbelts on when driving. i made a couple of phone calls – good thing i had full charge. t’was a shocker. of all people, why did it have to be me? i guess i had to learn stuff about driving the hard way. after i got cleared by traffic authority and was driving it home, the only line that ran through my mind was this: “driving is a privilege, not a right.” that said, i guess my driving days are doomed. i was so scared. good news is that i was able to get through it. learned a lot. never text while driving. i never texted that day though, i was switching songs on the iPod mini for like under 2 seconds and i crashed. i had better texted that day. even if the result was still the same. well i think i did text someone just right before it happened. so there. there’s a lot to learn. at least, we should learn from the mistakes of others for we cannot live long enough to make ‘em all our own.

So that was it. All I’ve got to say now is this–don’t ever forget about the title I tagged this old update with: just drive, don’t text. If you do otherwise, you would ultimately become a liability on the road and might tremendously affect the lives of others, along with your own. Think about the risk.

Top Blogs in the Philippines

I just found out about this while heading over to read some tech news and reviews on the YugaTech blog. Apparently, the country’s top blog spot belongs to someone who offers some really cool and nifty friendster layout designs. You can find the running list over at TopBlogs. I am just unsure if they update that real-time or daily. I could only guess but I think they have set a default minimum delay, like 60 sec. I can only be certain about one thing though — a lot of our folks around here really visit Friendster a lot too often. Now, whether that gets a lot more hits coming from the Philippines than hits to Google coming from everywhere else, could be anyone’s guess at this point.

So I’ll let you in on a secret: this blog’s objective will be to get on that list soon. Hopefully. But I would need an audience first and would need more work to get it done. No pain, no gain. So good luck to me.

Hello from WordPress!

So I’m welcoming myself to WordPress.com. I just tried importing my other recently-launched blog on blogger.com and t’was too easy. All I did was just hit the Magic Button and that was it. I hope the photos came with the posts too. Now I really have no clue which service is better or not but one thing’s for sure, blogger is part of Google so that should matter a lot. But here I am on WordPress and I think it looks clean. Plus, there’s like 60 other template designs that I could choose from. I think that’s a lot. So let me try to remind myself to be here often. I also hope I can finally get that ricpac.net domain, soon.

Love is a temporary madness

Check out what I had written before about love being a temporary madness. I think I wrote this circa-2005 and this was on my old tripod page as well. 

Love: temporary madness > love is a temporary madness. When you fall in love, it erupts like a volcano, then it subsides. When it subsides, you have to make a decision, you have to work out whether your roots have become so intertwined together that it is so inconceivable that you should have to part from it. Love is not breathlessness, it is not a desire to make every second of your lying moments of the day imagining she is kissing every part of your body. Love is just being in love which any of us can convince we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has been burned away. Love is love after all the excitement, the fun and everything. Doesn’t seem interesting, does it? But it is the truth.

Work, work, work…

Work’s been ugly these past few days. That’s because something was up with the numbers and they were nowhere close to the desired levels. I just got off from work today after spending way too much time analyzing the trend that involved a dip in a very important metric that defines cost. But oh well, work pays the bills so I’ve got to deliver and make some adjustments in the other life.

I’m almost going into my rest days so I should be able to continue moving the old stuff to here by then and delete the webpage I had created a few years back. Once I have moved all that’s needed to be moved, I should be able to keep up with the updates to this blog whenever I can. So until then…

Getting some good progress…

I think I’m on a roll. That’s like 3 posts in the same day? This will make it the 4th. Not trying to kiss-ass or anything but yup, blogging on blogger is pretty easy. It’s like sending an email or an SMS. Totally effortless. I think I’m going to be addicted to this especially that you can add a new post just by sending an email. I guess blogger and the BlackBerry are made for each other.

Anyway, I will continue to move things from the old page to here before I will completely rest it in peace. Now I just have to rework some lines and retouch some of the photos before I could post ‘em all here. Next up: SFO. I just love that place.

Stay tuned…

Moving Stuff Around…

I have this really old page on tripod.com that I need to move. I have had it since ‘04 or ‘05 I think, I don’t know. I just forgot. One thing’s for sure, I have not touched nor edited it in years. I did spend a fair amount of time doing it but I just got lost in translation all along. I had to have a life I ought to live, that’s why…

So the deal right now is, I will be moving all the stuff I discussed there. Move it either here or on my .Mac page (which BTW would cost some $ to maintain for a good year). I am still undecided if I need to carry on with the .Mac subscription (I am still on the trial version and I have about 57 days left). So you must have figured out I have a Mac and it’s really very easy to do web pages and everything else with the integration of iWeb (the app) and .Mac (the service). But I think I can publish my own serious site employing .Mac and then I would just blog on here –anyway, blogger offers push-button publishing and it’s FREE.

I think I need to start moving the things that are supposed to be moved. I am on rest day but time flies and I could now smell the fragrance of work. We’ll see what happens. So later…