coffee break

i have been eyeing a new way to kill time. they always say to get a new hobby, though truthfully i have to finish at least 7 books at hand, i decided to be out there and buy myself a new hobby. it’s more than a hobby if you ask me, but it will do and serves the purpose so i’m calling it a hobby. it is so in-line with my creating the possibility of me being happy.

i call her hobby#1. my new nintendo ds lite. this also serves as my advance birthday gift for myself, so advance like a month advance. i don’t know this shade of red, it’s more like a metallic wine red finish that you see in cars but i call it kotse red with matte black. it comes with the ds-tt  cartridge contrary to the popular r4, so i need just to download the games to a micro sd card and voila! i can play it on my ds. free games on the internet, i think they are free though. i can play with other ds people via a local wireless connection or through the internet via wifi connection. yes, this little gadget packs a wifi connection. sweet!

i love this game! i play this with my officemates during breaks at the pantry since the kill-joy people at the office always hush us during game time. but we couldn’t help it when we shout and groan after successfully bombing each other. same typical bomberman however the ds version is capable of hosting up to 8 simultaneous players connected either local wireless connection or over the internet. neat huh? even neater is the fact that it has a download play (geek alert!) capability. simply means that only 1 ds needs the bomberman game, all other ds-s can sorta-kinda temporarily download a copy of the game from the host ds. we’re planning to host a bomberman tournament with other floors of the building. hehehe.

mario kart is another favorite game. this is not your ordinary racing game. still the objective is to get ahead of the pack to the finish line but this one has surprises along the way. you get to open a box with random items, could be a star, a shell, mushroom, a banana peel or even a fake box. you get to use it at any time you think you’ll need it the most. you may knock your opponents out of the track by bumping them on the sides or using your items to course them off track. like for example, a red shell is a homing shell you can use to throw to your opponent. the banana peel is something you can leave behind for others behind you to slip on. it will build your strategy as well on when and how to use each item you find. there’s an on-going war between the 11th flr people (SAP guys) and us 18th flr (web guys). need to polish those power slide so i can kick some serious SAP butts!

i’m being a kid again i know, but it’s so much fun that i don’t care. even if the kid beside me is playing the same game. at least i have the limited edition one, and the color alone is something only of discriminating taste could appreciate :-p .

listening to:
Elliott Yamin – Elliott Yamin: Movin’ On

and so i scour the land for that hsdpa phone. after 24 hours of research and ogling on display windows of mobile phone stores, non-stop asking the sales assistants i finally decided what phone to buy.

i got the black one of course to match my black p1i. although the w910i is a walkman phone, it boasts of an HSDPA 2100MHz connectivity which is a major requirement for the new phone i am to buy. i’m planning to use it as a modem for my globe visibility which operates at that protocol. enough geek talk, it’s cool, slim, it has 2gb of memory for your music and it can give me high speed internet and that’s the bottom line.

-oOo-

i’m planning to spend the holy week in hongkong, kowloon side. it’s all plans as of now but most probably it will push through. richard will be in hongkong at that time thus saving me the trouble of booking a hotel which will be at peak by that week. i think it’s a good place to spend the holy week. everyone in manila will be in boracay and puerto galera that it’s not an option for someone like me who’s claustrophobic. and i want to break my tradition of just staying at home in the company of oh so many books. i need something new in my life, and might as well start with an age old tradition. hopefully this would cascade new things happening to me. crossing fingers here…

listening to:
Songs from Ally McBeal – Vonda Shepard: It’s In His Kiss

i recently purchased/gifted myself a sonyericsson p1. i figured with  my new role, i need to a business phone that’s email on the go as well. i’m happy with with the phone, i can ready my office mail as well as my gmail account. the phone is feature rich that is right to the alley of what i’m looking for. however i  have a predicament. by specs, the phone is only UMTS capable. i put the sim of my globe visibility in this phone. although it connects seamlessly to the internet and i can still use it as a phone modem,  the full hspda speed would be utilize as i would want it.

for me to get the hspda speed, i need to buy this, the k850i. so far, it’s the only sonyericsson phone that is 3.5g (hspda) capable. it boasts of a 5 megapixel camera but i don’t need it. i rarely take pictures and i have a good digital camera to do that. oh yes, i can use the usb modem that globe gave me, but i rather not. the damn thing is not something i am fond of and it’s sticking like a sore thumb when i plug it in in my laptop. something that i am so offended seeing. and the fact that someone offered to buy it, the usb modem. see, a colleague lost her visibility and she’s still in contract with globe. she knows that i am not using my modem as i have used the sim card with my p1.

so if i do decide to but this one, i’ll use my personal line with this phone and the visibility with p1 so i can google and mail all i want without paying extra. but if i need to use it as a modem, i need to swap it so i can use the hspda speed. that turns me off. the mail client of k850i is no where near that of the p1. the thing that bugs me the most is that why sonyericsson decided to have the hspda connectivity tied to a camera phone and have their business phones still in the old ages of umts. really, i don’t get it.

am selling my not so old and not so used n80 internet edition. if you’re interested, shoot me an email. it’s bought from an authorized nokia retailer and still have the receipt, the box, cds, everything. and it’s black!

listening to:
Trip The Light Fantastic – Sophie Ellis Bextor: love Is Here

being a geek and admin powers have its draw backs. warning: geek ranting here.

i was tweaking this blog just this morning trying to make it support the open id framework. geek overload, open id is an up and coming open technology that will allow you to have a consolidated account, so it’s less username and password. anyhoo, i was successful in configuring my blog for open id. i was now trying to support open id in comments and hook it up with gravatar so that all of you who have gravatars and open id will be more than welcome in my blog.the plugin requires that the existing comments table in the database (table where the comments are being saved) have to be altered to support a new column called openid_login. however that activation script wasn’t able to create the new field, or i think it created the wrong one. so the geeky me connected to the backend and altered the table, tested it and kablam! didn’t work. missing files in the plugin. being freakishly obsessed with performance and table normalization, i deleted the new columns i created. i was using the PhpMyAdmin in doing this which i am relatively new at. very familiar with MySQL admin and query browser but not this one, but i decided to use this since it has icons and pretty colors. so i selected the new column and click the X icon, which asked me if i want to delete it.

i said yes.

tweak, tweak and then i saw another X icon in one of the tabs. i figured that it’s like a commit, similar to any SQL browser. fyi, sql browsers will alter, update, drop, create and manipulate databases without commiting. you have to explicitly commit your changes. so i carelessly press the X and disregarded the message.

now all my comments are kaput. all gone, a lifetime of comments.

listening to:
Trip The Light Fantastic – Sophie Ellis Bextor: If I Can’t Dance

i remember earlier in my career as a corporate cubicle slave that microsoft and bill gates are 'evil.' yep, microsoft was monopolizing the market with, first, their over super 'user-friendly' operating system and then branching to productivity tools and groupwares. this had boosted the company as a front runner in NASDAQ and to the fortune 500 list. him and paul allen of course in the richest men in the world list. there was even a law suit before that made microsoft fine a cool us$1 million per day while the law suit wasn't finalized. they did pay the us$1 million keeping their stand that it isn't monopolizing if they bundle their internet explorer with their operating system. they won of course but at a steep price or shall i say, fine. these and many more reasons have gained microsoft as the evil in the i.t. world. everywhere you go you'll definitely see an MS logo somewhere.

today, have you ever stop and take notice of this 'small' internet based company slowly creeping in our daily lives? its name is now part of our vocabulary without even knowing it. i googled you yesterday. yes, google is part of our lives, believe it or not, not one i.t. professional doesn't use google. even my mom of 58 years googles. see!, google is now synonymous to search. well that's who they are, the #1 search engine in the planet. yahoo! in the effort to be the #1 search company even tried buying google. but you see, google nowadays is more than that, it's an internet solution. big words…

when i say internet solution, i mean that google have broken in to the world wide web seamlessly that everything internet is google. blogger the foremost blogging site is now a part of the google company. picasa, a freeware image viewer and editor even integrated blogger for your photoblogging needs. this of course has taken a lot of work from you and me to photoblog. and of course, google is very much happy to do so provide you with these kind of solutions. traveler friendly google map and google earth have made it easy to get by to your destination. even suggesting where to eat and take a rest, even the nearest 6 flags. froogle is trying to breakthrough as their e-commerce/online shopping solution. it's no amazon.com, yet. google even partnered with symantec and lavasoft via google updater to make you online experience safer and more secure. suggesting solutions to your need in one little neat package. dandy. and many, many more.

when microsoft did this a couple of years ago, there was a big commotion in the industry. law suits left and right. we saw bill gates as the new evil, ready to take over. now that google have finally done it (sheepishly in the cold of the night), no one is crying foul. not even a small cryout. why?

f.y.i.

• microsoft and google are part of the few who made it to the fortune 500 list whose market value is higher that its asset value

to set the record straight, i am a BIG google fan. i am everything google. it’s just healthy to question things once in a while.