Rare experience from a rare entity.
So I went to Gwen’s birthday bash today. Before I actually went there, Kelly, Eda, and Steph got a plan set up for our dramatic entrance, so some of us met at Glorietta’s activity center. This was the plan: Eighteen of us will each enter the restaurant, and we bring with us one orange balloon, with one letter in them. So when we’re done, the balloon lettering should say, “Happy Birthday Gwen!” Yes, even the exclamation point is included.
And so we entered in that restaurant. It was fun basically. Oh, and being the tech-savvy guy that I am, I got my phone out to take some pics. A lot of my blockmates were there, then people from other blocks too, then high school friends. And then… I think she got almost everyone to attend. Nice. Yeah, everyone was happy, talking, laughing, holding hands (sorry, couldn’t stop observing) and stuff. The food was great — I’m a sucker for Chinese food, so I got a second helping, and a full dessert. I didn’t drink champagne, though; it’s not my doing to be an alcoholic at an occasion such as this. There was even a magician! No, not the David Blaine-ish type of magicians, just the simple casual one. It was pretty nice, though. The magician’s got a great audience. Hahaha.
Gwen’s got lots of presents on her birthday. The penguin-shaped cake is the definite attention-grabber, in my opinion. And she’s got a Canon EOS camera! That’ll be my object of materialistic envy for a while, until I see another gadget as cool as that one.
We also got to watch Max Payne after that. It’s been almost a year since I’ve watched a movie in an actual cinema. Quick review: It’s great as an action movie, but it’s not great as a port from a video game. I’ve played the two games, and it’s pretty obvious that they’ve changed some parts, but there’s just something wrong with it. But I love the bullet-speed scenes — I love how the scene becomes silent, and suddenly everything’s in super-slow motion.
So that’s that with my first-time-since-last-year birthday party experience. While I’m fully aware that I skipped three or four crucial debuts and birthday parties this year, but this one was the easiest to attend to because the venue was at the right place at the right time. I mean, with a place I can literally walk to and a time when I can get my ass off the chair, it’s the perfect combination. So thanks, Gwen, for letting myself get off my busy self and watch Max Payne. 
A blockmate was spot on when he said that I was a rare entity in such occasions. To be honest, I don’t usually attend to occasions simply because I’m too busy (or lazy, depends on the kind of day). If you want me in a party, it better be near our home, and exactly when every member of the family is outside. So, ’til next year again, I guess.
[Google] Chrome shines for me.
Ever since last week, I’ve seen this sentence looming around the Internet. At first, I thought it was a pun for an old April Fool’s joke that I’ve never heard of. (I’m obviously a fan of Google’s April 1st webpages — remember Google Gulp?) After reading some articles, I learned that Google Chrome is actually a real web browser, and it’s initially available as a beta software for Windows. As an OS X Leopard user, I kinda held back because there’s no Mac version, until I saw a couple more good reviews. And so I restarted my computer and booted to Windows, just to try it out.
For a beta software such as this, it works well, honestly. Wait, so that’s why they say it “shines for them!”
It’s been my default browser for Windows, and it’s like a new experience all over again. Most visited webpages (just like Opera’s, except more practical for me), Gears integrated (great for doing WordPress posts and pages while your Internet connection craps out on you), Incognito windows, and more things that you would likely see in other browsers are in here.
It’s fast too. I’m not going all scientific here, but it definitely feels faster than the Firefox I have in OS X. Even if Chrome has its tabs as separate processes, and that would probably mean more required memory, it’s still smooth as silk. Maybe it’s because of their new Javascript engine — yes, I’m a sucker for Web 2.0 apps.
Okay, so if you are open to other perspectives of web browser religion, or if you’re just curious, then give it a try.
Oh, some fun facts:
- For some reason, it always crashes when I opt to shutdown while Chrome is open. No biggie, though; you can just ignore it.
- There are fun “about” pages in Chrome. Try about:internets and admire the view.
- There was a controversy concerning the EULA of Chrome. A part of that agreement says that they will own everything that you create using that browser — blog posts, forum replies, documents, everything. Fortunately, they’ve fixed that part hours after the discovery.
Hundreds, but not thousands.
What you are looking at right now is not a mosaic of a blue-green-colored watermelon, nor is it a large pit of death of words. This is simply a word cloud, kinda similar to the tag/category cloud you see at the very bottom of this page, and its purpose is to highlight the words that are frequently used in a selection. The selection is - you’ve guessed it - everything in this site. I’m feeling narcissistic already. (Not the disease, but I really wouldn’t mind if I had one.)
This graphic is made on Wordle. (I’ve attributed you and your service now, so don’t cry - or run to your lawyers - about it anymore, okay? So we’re good?) It’s quite easy to manipulate the colors, text, things like that, so thank them for having the blue-green text of awesome right in front of your faces. Oh, and have you noticed the most frequently used word I’m using? Yeah. Now I can prove to others that I can sound like an L.A. dude, without being an L.A. dude! Like, it’s not obvious that I’m doing this for, like, a lot of times already. So interesting.
Going off topic here - but I’m doing this in the middle of a final examinations week. Who in the right mind, or with the [rare] common sense, would do such nonsense? That’s right - me. I’m born to do things with perfect timing. Or lack thereof.
And I’m taking back my first statement. It does look like a blue-green-colored watermelon.
Rhetorical eloquence.
First of all, I’d like to start this blog entry by a simple conversation I’ve had with Gwen minutes ago, while I was thinking of what I’m supposed to be writing here. She told me what my intro should be; the four-liner chat log says everything about it:
8:41:36 PM Foster, Gwendelyn: i really don’t know what to say
8:41:39 PM Foster, Gwendelyn: but i want to blog
8:42:52 PM JMacalinao: tapos… (Translated: then…)
8:45:25 PM Foster, Gwendelyn: then say random things
Then random things I shall write! Although my Twitter basically says everything about what’s happening in my day-to-day living, including my replies to other people’s actions, there are also things I haven’t included there.
Like this site, for example. First off, I’d like to thank Mallory for changing my link on her site, without even telling her what my new site is! It’s either she has meticulously psychic powers, or she basically looked at her comments, where coincidentally, I posted one. Second, I got Janine to post my link on her blog, because I basically told her to. That’s three links in total now. Come on, guys, I need a lot of your websites — and traffic — on my site! Heh. (I’m thinking of putting up my host’s link here too. I really have to thank Jonathan for hosting my sites.)
I haven’t thought of how I would implement my portfolio page, but I do know WordPress is going to do the rough job for me, setting up all those page. Structure, and as always, content are the big problems in this portfolio.
Things haven’t been going so well with our software project, EASE@Haven, mainly because of the bombardment of documentations and the lack of development man-power. The interface is almost done with their main functionality intact, but the other part of functionality that we all love, the error checking part, is so difficult to implement in the system, that I had to force myself to use plugins along with the already easy jQuery library. I hope we get everything ready by this Thursday.
Other projects have been bugging me lately, too, like the microprocessors/microcontrollers project. We had to do a bicycle speedometer using a sort of old-ass microprocessor (M68HC11). Since I’m doing all the programming (in freaking assembly code), I shouldn’t have the problem with how I’m supposed to work the program with the circuit. But it seems we haven’t done anything about the circuit itself, which is a bummer.
Oh, and don’t forget all the papers we have to submit in the coming days! They’re falling on us like hailstorms!
As for my iPhone updates, I’ve upgraded it to the recent 2.0.1 firmware. Nothing new. What’s new is the extraordinary theming you can have when you’ve jailbroken it and installed WinterBoard. It’s basically like SummerBoard on steroids, because its theming capability is so amazing. Who knew that you can make a theme that changes — no, animates — your wallpapers in your homescreen! Definitely blown away on this one.
Hmm… Looks like only tech and academics are the only stuff I can brag and/or rant about for today. Other stuff have been full of dullness and false alarms in the past month, although I can’t complain about them now. I’ve already done that in the past five years, and I can’t afford being a broken record. (Yes, being one is a waste of time and money.)
The 8th of August of 2008 is a lucky day, can’t say anything wrong about that. It’s just the case of where the luck is going (or went, since it already occurred to you).
Edit: It’s officially 11:11PM while I’m writing this. I wanna greet my cousin Jacque for her twenty-third birthday today (August 11th). I almost forgot it until my Friendster birthday e-mail alerted me. Hurray for unsolicited e-mails!
I’m back!
Well, not really. I wasn’t even away in the first place. Just busy with school stuff — microprocessors project, several reports and presentations, and don’t forget EASE@Haven too. I was also busy with preparing my mom’s school into IT goodness, and we started by getting more computers (computers that are actually faster in processing than mine). To add things up, if you’d see one of my previous posts, I posted an update to that, telling that I’ll be barely posting here if this thing happens.
And thus the title. I’m back because it failed.
Yeah, and it happened just now. Look! It’s just the requirements elicitation phase! And I already failed there! Unbelievable. I’m having this feeling that I’m supposed to be laughing hysterically to what just happened, and the feeling of the need to spiritually die, all mixed up in one gigantic package. Of course, I wouldn’t consider the latter; laughing like you’re one crazy guy in a mental hospital might make me more of an idiot, but at least it’s harmless. And I won’t have to do anything stupid after that, like, deleting this site from the depths of the earth Internet. And to think that this happened every year since the last five years. It’s really interesting, to be honest.
I really wanted to talk about stuff like this, but before I go ranting off about how insanely happy I am right now, or blog about whether that statement has sarcasm or not, let’s just stop it right there. Not because it’s interesting, non-boring stuff that would make me the laughing stock of all the lucky guys out there, but because I just don’t feel like posting stuff like that. Let’s just try not to turn this one into a dating blog, okay? Okay. (Oh yeah, someone named Enrico posted a comment in one of my posts concerning my previous situation. Well, I’ve done it, and I got the consequences. You don’t have to sympathize over my failures, but thanks anyway.)
For the site front, all I did is the About page, for now. As you can see, my life is uneventful as it is. I can see the hint of schadenfreude across all of my visitors’ faces right now. Hahaha.
Update: I’m not mad, angry or anything at all. I promise. I’m the most resilient person in the world.
Update 2: Just a follow-up on the site front — I’ve upgraded my WordPress to the latest version, 2.6. The added features are great, although I probably won’t be enabling the Turbo thing here.