Archive for April, 2008
Wearing eyeglasses
penny April 28th, 2008
I’ve recently needed to wear glasses. Towards the end of high school I was prescribed correction lenses but I rarely wore them [I chose green frames btw 
] Vision seemed fine. I’ve had my eyes checked every now and then and often get cleared for problems. But now, I need the correction lenses again.
I do fine without them, but I noticeably squint my eyes when I am reading or doing something that requires focus. So I was told to wear them [I have red frames this time] as much as I could so my eyes don’t get strained.
The general dislike for wearing the frames comes from the following…
(1) the extra chore of remember to wear them,
(2) thinking of whether to bring its protective case or not,
(3) its sliding off my no-bridged nose, (yes, pango ako, bow)
(4) getting smudges on it from touching it when it slides,
(5) fogging when you walk from a cold room to where it’s warm,
(6) fogging when i unknowingly aim my breath towards it (pag nagpapalumbaba),
(7) messing up the view transition between the lens frame and my peripherals, (this makes me lose my balance when walking, especially stairs!!)
(8) forgetting to bring them when i need them.
(9) [addendum] light refraction when you’re in a funny angle from bright light
Contact lenses? Unnecessary at this point. But I don’t like sticking things into my eye either.
Shirts, boys, Tulad ng Dati
penny April 26th, 2008
I’m envious of boys. The fact that they can get away with wearing just a shirt and jeans, and still manage to look good. Which is probably why for the longest time I thought it was true for girls. Face it gals, we need to wear girly clothes to feel girly.
Have we mentioned we’re getting married at the end of the year? I guess we haven’t been subtle about it anyway. ANd hey, look! There’s a countdown for “vows” on the right sidebar.
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You know that you have taken too long to have your wedding, when you hear of news that Karl Roy– of POT and Kapatid fame– suffered a stroke (or two).
No sense?
Well, Ajay and I toyed with the thought of having Karl Roy as a wedding singer, years ago.
Anyhow, the news was brought about by the usual blog-hopping and googling, following me watching “Tulad ng Dati”, the indie film featuring The Dawn. Ajay told me to watch out for Raimund’s cameo towards the end, which wasn’t hard to miss. What surprised me was Karl Roy as lead singer of the anti-band. Cool and dirty.
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Tulad ng Dati was a film released in 2007. Twas a fun Saturday afternoon watch. The acting was nothing exceptional, but while watching the film, I felt that the intention was pure and true. Music from the old The Dawn albums were nostalgic.
I was not aware of Teddy Diaz (founding member, lead guitar) and his death. I was a 10-yr old when he died so I must’ve not cared to know. What retained in my memory was the smoke (and sleek haircuts) in those music videos. Plus Jett’s voice. Oh, I also found out now from googling that Teddy ‘mentored’ the Introvoys. Now that’s a reason why they sounded a bit alike, eh?
I have a soft spot for guitarists, and Francis Brew did not disappoint. It was strange and funny seeing him and Buddy playing pretend in the film, which shows they should stay in the music arena and not crossover hehe.
I love Pinoy bands of the 90s. Nothing beats.
Rakenrol!
Yahoo Messenger on MS Vista
penny April 26th, 2008
Reporting my findings on Messenger testing, another episode on my woes on Vista. Hope it helps other troubles souls of Yahoo messenger users as myself.
Yahoo is beta testing a Vista version of Messenger. I had used it on occasion, but since it does not have webcam capabilities I am unable to use it all the time.
The current Messenger 8 does not work for me either, because the sound is just not working. It doesn’t report any issues, but I don’t hear anything. No sound alerts, no voice in audio calls.
So I decided to check installations of older YM versions, starting with 6. YM 6 worked, but it did not have the “Call” feature in YM 8, but instead the Hands-free voice chat (I forgot about that PTT feature in old YMs.). This prevented me to establish audio calls. But, the sounds were working. Even YRadio was working.
So I went on to YM 7. There are 3 builds (subversions) available for download, and v7.426 is the one that hit the mark. The two most recent v7s failed to produce sound.
Anzac Day.
penny April 25th, 2008
[I remember having pictures of things I am talking about here, but I couldnt find them at the moment... ]
Many countries have learned the lessons of War the hard way. In the Philippines we had our share of bitterness. Maybe we even had a tad bit too much, eh? Yet at one time we drew strength from these tastes of defeat. If we would take the time to look back in history, we’ll remember there were people who drew their swords to fight for our freedom, those who flourished with their great minds with plans of grandeur and showered hope for our nation. We can be reminded of how great we can be.
Okay, off the soap box now. Let’s talk about Anzac day.
ANZAC DAY
Today, April 25, is a national holiday for Aussies (and presumably, for Kiwis), as it is Anzac day.
ANZAC is a catchy acronym that stands for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. As I see it, the holiday commemorates the sacrifice of these two nations during a time of war, strengthening their bond as the “kindred spirits” they are.
What happened then was in WWI, the ANZAC had a group of soldiers set to advance in Gallipoli (Turkey), comprising the move of the Allied Powers towards the capture of Istanbul. The Turkish forces proved a worthy match to theirs, which dragged the campaign for almost a year. This brought about many deaths of soldiers from both sides. [Read about the diggers here!]
Any country that suffers defeat in this manner would be shaken in grief. To honor the efforts of these brave men, Anzac day was born.
One year na ko
AJ Jorge April 25th, 2008
My official last entry from Pinas before I moved here and my first entry here in Singapore.
The first year is not a rollercoaster ride that I expected it would be. Surprisingly, everything went fine. Much thanks to my cousin Nandy and wife Cia for adopting me for two weeks while I was waiting to transfer to my condo.
So for the record, I stepped foot into Singapore since Apr 29 and started work on May 2 2007. I have been in the same company and just renewed my work pass for another year. The only thing that saddens me is that I haven’t been able to save as much as I have hoped for. That goes without saying, that I have been spending and enjoying life. I’ve been to Australia, brought Pen here twice, went back to the Philippines once, brought a DSLR and some lens, paid off loans and some other things that needed money to enjoy. No regrets though.
A view of our condo.
Been staying in the same condo for a year now. Friends keep on telling us that we have a great deal with our current condo. With the rents going up with no end in sight, we are currently secured with a 2 yr contract at a ludicrous cheap price. Housemate and I are praying and hoping that we can finish the contract and the owner won’t sell-off.
Pen and me walking off towards the rear exit of the condo compound.
Cheers to me that I have secured a spot here in the IT outsourcing country.
Latest Vista rant
penny April 24th, 2008
You’ve been warned. Es ist yet another Vista rant.
I just had another episode of frustrating network problems with Vista today.
(1) The network was insisting it was Unidentified.
(2) There were multiple networks found.
(3) “Local Only” it says, and the internet just won’t connect.
I’ve tried every trick I know, and looked some up online.
(1) Disabled wireless so it knows I only want the Ethernet to be found.
(2) Windows firewall settings.
(3) Disable IPv6.
(4) Toggle between DHCP and Static IP. This takes a while to set-up depending on where I am.
(5) Restart.
I did a couple of restarts before the configurations I wanted actually applied to the system. What else can I say but… ARRRRRRGH!!!!
I’ve been finishing up a couple of projects for the longest time, and I don’t think it a good idea to be reformatting my work machine should I need something vital that I forget about, and accidentally chuck out!! I’ve configured the system to work “normally” for me. By that I mean that things work to some extent, albeit crashing once or twice a week. What I really dislike is how the RAM gets eaten up by some invisible process(es) that I have no control over. I’ve stripped everything to a bare minimum at one point, and realised it had improved but a little.
Yeah yeah, downgrade to XP, I know, I know. I’ve also been set on setting up Ubuntu 08.04. I’m afraid that if I can’t make things work as they should (they work now, just not efficiently as I want it to), then I really won’t get anything done. The ******* problem is there was no Vista CD provided if you wanted to reinstall it should you be in a situation like mine, or something similar. I have a product key, which should be sufficient right? I don’t even know the answer to that question. Does anyone?
And there are those days like today when I can’t set-up my network (coz I moved from workplace1 to home to workplace2, I need to reset routers, configure IPs etc etc), can’t get decent running speeds for Mathematica or get bogged down by compiling TeX documents. It’s hard to get real work done when 70% of my time gets polluted with troubleshooting and tweaking. What about my time for procrastination browsing the internet for crying out loud!?
Here are some tweaks I do with Vista:
(1) ReadyBoost. This works by attaching a USB flash disk or SD/MMC and telling Vista that you want to use it for “speeding up your system”. I’m not sure how it works, but it seems to use the space allocated as a page file. At first I thought plugging the 2GB memory was helping speed my system up. But I don’t notice the difference anymore.
(2) Disable sidebar. It’s fun to have the Windows sidebar, as it has widgets like the OSX. But I don’t really use it all the time, so I shut it off whenever doing something needing memory.
(3) Use the most basic theme (disable Glass/Aero) with the least effects possible. Too bad. When Microsoft really endeavored to make Vista pretty with all these flashy visuals.
(4) Uninstall Office. It’s this big chunk of nothing that I hardly use. Replacements are a-plently. To me, what I used in Microsoft before were Word, Powerpoint, Outlook and Excel. Now just OpenOffice for Word, LaTeX Beamer for Powerpoint, GoogleDocs for Excel (sheets online, stats in R-cran) and Mozilla Thunderbird for Outlook.
Temple
AJ Jorge April 21st, 2008
Photo set was taken last year with shooting friends here in Singapore.
Sergio before and after
AJ Jorge April 20th, 2008
Ang balbunin na taong ito ay isa sa nakatuwaan namin ni Pen nung nag-aabang kami ng fireworks sa Opera House. Binansagan namin syang Sergio. 
Nagsusubok ako ng mga iba’t ibang klase ng itsura gamit ang photoshop. Feeling magaling lang.
