Word Dump

Planning to go malling today or this weekend? Don’t forget to swing by the SM Mall of Asia (just “MOA” to many) in Pasay City, and head over to the SMX Convention Center. Why? The very first Consumer Electronics Live! (CEL) Manila begins today and will run until Sunday, October 26.

It’s your opportunity to take a look (ogle is more like it) at the latest and trendiest gadgets and gizmos from top brands like Apple/ Senco, Canon, HP, LG Electronics, Nokia, Samsung, Sony, as well as Alpine, BMW, Bose, Creative, Fuji Xerox, JBL, Lucerne, Mazda, Myphone, Sennheiser and Western Digital. How often do you get all these brands exhibited under one big roof? (They’re occupying Halls 1-4 of the SMX Convention Center — if you don’t want to get lost, check out the exhibit layout plan.)

Not only that, if you’re an early Christmas shopper or if you’re simply browsing around, you can get up to 70% discounts on selected items as well as a chance to win in the daily gadget raffle. Not bad, huh? And if you bring a copy of the October issue of T3, you’ll get in for free! (Entrance fee is PhP50.)

Summit Live!, the events arm of Summit Media Philippines, publisher of popular magazines T3, FHM, Seventeen, Entrepreneur, and several other titles, is behind this premiere event.

To know more about this event, you can go directly to the official site: http://www.celmanila.com/

Update:

Here’s the link to a short YouTube video of the CEL Manila 2008 opening day:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OB3cAgT34G0

I also wrote about this event here.

I got annoyed when I couldn’t fix the sidebar in the previous theme (Oceanwide 1.0). But hey, Friendster is really trying to please us. And tadaah! A whole new assortment of themes for your blog (browse through them under “Design”). In Blogger terminology, it’s called templates, in others, it’s skins. It’s anything that will change your blog’s appearance.

Give your blog and neighborhood a new look

These themes may come with different built-in functionalities. Some themes let you add a lot of widgets (or those add-ons to put on your sidebars, footers). Some will even let you change the header image. Others have fancy CSS styling that will let your theme change colors and backgrounds as fast as a crazy chameleon (try the Vistered Little theme). Some will even let you find your perfect match, the guy or girl of your dreams—and a rare few will turn your words into gold as you type them…

Okay, just testing if you’re paying attention. (But if anything like that gets invented, let me know.)

I am such a geek to be making a big fuss over these things. And, for the life of me, I have other blogs to write for, those with even better or more powerful user interfaces…meaning, I get to mess with the code and play mad (computer) scientist with it. (All hail WORDPRESS…)

Here’s my greatest discovery of the month: with some coding know-how (to  keep you from totally messing things up and setting off a catastrophic meltdown of your host’s servers) you could turn the much-underestimated Blogger into a very good platform for creating stunning, professional-looking blogs. Yes, your very own free Blogspot account will do, if you have one. (Blogspot is Blogger’s free service—this I also just discovered.) With Blogger, you won’t have to pay to change your template or to tweak the CSS. But in WordPress.com, the free version, this is an extra that you’d have to pay for.

I sense a Blogger vs. WordPress feature match…hope I can finish the article in time for Pacquiao vs. Dela Hoya. Heck, I’d be glued to the TV, I won’t have time to think about blogging, oi. If crooks can use this as a good reason to take a break, why shouldn’t I? (Boss Kingpin, Among Tunay, pls. sign my leave form, can I postpone the bank heist for Monday? It’s the Pacquiao vs. Dela Hoya fight tomorrow, Las Vegas time. Dela Hoya es muuuy guapo even if he’s portlier, ayayay! **giggle giggle swoon**)

banner I borrowed without permission from TeamPilipinas.info
(so pls. go to their site to appease their wrath)

So going back…I feel I’m wasting my time writing on this Friendster blog. No one’s reading it anyway, aside from my cronies—just one or two, actually, and they do it under duress. I can’t even see my traffic stats and I wonder if Friendster will ever let anyone use the plugins feature.

I guess I’m writing because of that warm, fuzzy, pinkish feeling called hope. Hope that Friendster will get even better, sniff sniff. You see, Friendster has turned into a seedy neighborhood, full of dilapidated houses that have seen better years, and smelly thugs who smoke pot in alleys and indiscriminately fire unlicensed guns at poor passersby. But if a lot of your old friends and acquaintances are here, will you just leave it altogether for newer, fancier upscale communities?

I have faith in the ability of people and things to improve. This online community is no exception. And with periodic additions of interesting new features, I’m encouraged to linger.

Mental note to self: add these to my ever-growing loot-list—

• The Earthsea Trilogy by Ursula K. Le Guin (hardbound)
  Read the first few pages and you’ll get hooked. That to me is a real test of whether a book should merit few more hours of my waking life.
• Exploring the Matrix: Visions of the Cyber-Present edited by Karen Haber & Howard Zimmerman (hardbound)
  I know, it’s so early 2000.
• The Great Train Robbery by Michael Crichton (paperback)
  A rare find. Most bookstores—whether spanky clean Powerbooks shelves or the dusty bargain bins of Booksale—are littered with Mr. Crichton’s other novels: Airframe, Sphere, The Andromeda Strain, Congo, Jurassic Park, The Lost World (the last two seem to be everywhere).

All these three great books for only PhP250! I got one for only PhP20, and this is not the paperback. I’ll tell you where I find these little treasures next time. I am too sleepy now.

The widgets on my blog are misbehaving.

You see the sidebars? That’s not really how they’re supposed to look like. Some of the elements, like the meta and the extra pages widget, aren’t supposed to be there. And since I can’t get to the code behind all this, it’s hard to remove those errant page elements. Ah, the limitations of a free blog!

What is a widget? It’s a really cute sounding name, rhymes with midget, applet, tiny gadget and anything cute that ends in -et (like dyoonet). It’s a handy little sumthin-sumthin’ that adds more function and fun to your blog or site, and in the process, makes your dreary life a bit more interesting.

You may have an idea—maybe a better idea—of what it is already and you want me to stop now. But if you must need a definition, you’re the sort that can’t tolerate vagueness or an unresolved matter leaves you sleepless, try this nifty trick on Google: type define:widget on your Google searchbar or on Google.com and see what you get. (Psst, if you find that trick useful, read my old post about using Google as quick dictionary.)

My answer to this is: yes, if you already have an idea what a blog is.

Or if you can competently navigate any website—any website at all. Or if you already know what commands like right click, select, copy-paste mean and what teeny muscular acrobatics your right hand performs throughout. Can you also absorb new information in minutes and follow directions very well? (If you’re like me, you’d tend to be drawn out of the page by every colorful button or piquant text and find yourself on another site a dozen hyperlinks away.)

The truth is, it depends. When they make claims about a particular product or service, of course they have a certain user in mind. I was able to set this new Friendster blog up in 5 minutes because I’m already very familiar with the WordPress interface, that I could do it while asleep (nah, not really). But when I was just starting out, it took me days to publish a decent post.

Granted, I’m obsessive-compulsive and have letting-go issues (you know, like hitting the publish button but not letting go), so it takes me forever to finish anything at all. So maybe I don’t qualify as an example.

But what about Manong taxi driver? Or the girl who brings us pre-ordered lunch at the office? Try: “Manong, did you know you can set up a blog in just a few minutes?” “Miss, check this out, you can start blogging right away!” They must think you’re out of your mind. If you do this you are out of your mind.

I used to share an apartment with a well-educated technophobe (a corporate lawyer), who’d think that the PC would explode if she presses the wrong button, and would jump out of the chair whenever she hears any odd bleeps. I think she’s been cured of technophobia after noticing that the PC hasn’t blown up in her face all these years—but I bet you she still won’t be able to casually start a blog from scratch in no time at all.

I think it’s more accurate to say that you can set up a blog and start blogging in a few minutes if you’ve reached a certain knowledge and interest level as mentioned earlier, and if the conditions are ideal, such as:

• you have reliable Internet connection
• your blog host isn’t down
• you’re not distracted by the hottie nearby
• there’s no typhoon or hurricane about to tear your house down
• you’re well-fed and secure about your meaning and place in the whole scheme of things
• etcetera (happily, there are lots of things that could make situations ideal)

I am splitting hairs.