Drafts, Part I

I've been wanting to do this...

A collection of unpublished posts. I don't know a similar meme already exists. But here's the idea. Find all your posts never got past the "draft" stage. Take the title, and the date on which it was supposed to be posted. Add the first line (or few words) of the original post, then comment on what the post was about, to add more context to your drafts.
Here we go:

• Neko No Kimochi (May 6, 2004)
• "i am not good at"
• it's supposed to be a post about a favorite japanese song (sang in a very cute way by a little japanese girl) - Neko no Kimochi. The lyrics is actually as cute as the music. :P
• Google's Next Step? (July 16, 2004)
  
• "I was pondering over the possibility of Google eventually delivering an instant messenger client..."
• pre-Google Talk talk. :P
  
• Google Flavored Search (July 26, 2004)
  
• a post about Google's early efforts on personalized search back then, you have to manually "teach" the personalized Google search engine about your preferences and interests. Now it does that for you...
• MSN News Bot (August 3, 2004)
  
• "if you have been watching closely the developments in the technology landscape, it is not new to you then that Microsoft has turned its eyes to Google as its new target."
• a post about MSN News bot, a Google News copycat from Microsoft. Back then, people actually believed that Microsoft can easily topple Google (just like what they did to Netscape, or Apple).
• The REAL deal (August 18, 2004)
• "Here's the thing, as Real wants you to see:"
• a post about Real's pathetic attempt to make the world believe that all they really wanted to do when they cracked Apple's DRM is to make this world a better place by "opening up" the iPod, and not gain market share for their own profit...
• Sound the horns... (again) (September 2, 2004)
• "Microsoft launched the beta version of the MSN Music store today, a day earlier than everyone expected"
• Before the Zune Marketplace, there was MSN Music store (and a couple of other microsoft technology-powered music stores) that tried to stop the store that would eventually become the most popular and most succesful (so far) Digital music download store: Apple Itunes Store

I'm too sleepy, this is shorter than what I originally intended Part I to be, but you get the idea. :). Till next time, for the continuation.... (hint: they're not all tech stuff, so they are actually more interesting than this)

The BlackJack

If there's a smart phone that I'd love to have before i get an iPhone, it would be the Samsung 1600, also known as the BlackJack. This phone is not perfect (for one, it doesn't have wifi), but there's something about its design that makes it really attractive to me. I am all for candybar and medium-sized phones, and Samsung seems to have hit the sweet spot with this baby. It runs Windows Mobile 5 (i'm hoping that by the time i can afford it, a version running Windows Mobile 6 is already in the market). After a trip to my favorite bad-english (but great and comprehensive) mobile review site mobile-review.com and reading their review of the BlackJack (still in bad english), i fell even more in love with this phone.

The thing is that I like it not as a smart phone (though it really is) but because to me it feels like it's an excellent feature phone. I couldn't find a better image so please bear with the one below. And btw, a working unit is on display in Glorietta right now as part of the BPI Madness sale (their booth is near Mercury Drug) and you can play with it. I will.

The Samsung I600 (BlackJack)

Knowing that Samsung and Microsoft are not really my favorite brand names :p, picking this phone as my favorite is saying a lot.

Rare dolphin goes extinct

Rare dolphin goes extinct-Health / Science-NEWS-The Times of India:

"The baiji would be the first large aquatic mammal driven to extinction since hunting and overfishing killed off the Caribbean monk seal in the 1950s. For the baiji, the culprit was a degraded habitat — busy ship traffic, which confounds the sonar the dolphin uses to find food, and overfishing and pollution in the Yangtze waters of eastern China, the expedition said."

It feels weird to hear something like this happening in your lifespan. Really sad. Hannah put it in way that really made me empathize with what they may have gone through:

Naaawa ako to think that they're blind na nga and they can't find anything with their sonars until they died. That must have been scary lalo na't they probably never understood what's going on.

...

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

Wonderful...

Mount Wandering Geek, and A Wedding

First off, this deserves the first line of my post:
Congratulations Frank and Ria!
(sorry we didn't make it to the big day, both mommy Han and Sam were sick)

Mount Wandering Geek: It's a pretty steep mountain to climb, but I'm going on anyway. See you at the top!

First, a few milestones:

• Starter template. Hope i can improve on this along the way
  
• Powered by feeds! Two things to note: My linkblog feed and the Recent comments feed.
• LinkBlog - this is an agreggated content of the top 5 recent items in my Link Blog, powered by Google Reader's Shared Items. For those interested in my recent gold finds in the intarweb (hi angel) this is where the action is. Link to the whole link blog is also provided.
  
• Recent thoughts - from the most recent comments in my blog, so that you will know where the conversation is happening.
  
• A blog roll that is 80% done. Just the pisay contemporaries for now, the rest to follow.
• Ah, a link to my info page (powered by Google Pages). That page is already months old, now I'm putting it to use, though notice that the URL is still a remnant of my emelgeek days. That would change as soon as I get on working on the new one. For those who are interested in my current commitments, you can find in in my Info page. And that's all I can say for now.
  
• A link to my Link Blog, for the whole shebang.
• And the most important part of whole. One post a week. That's all i can commit for now, taking one step at a time.
  
• That's all. Happy New Year!
• Oh, one more thing, Just so you know, the whole time this blog is dead, I was lurking around your blogs, so i'm up-to-date with the recent happenings. Thanks to Google Reader.
  

Google acquires JotSpot

Hah! Now this is an acquisition that I'm really excited about....
Google just acquired Jotspot!

The Acquisition FAQ is available in Jotspot's website.

Jotspot is a company that provides a collaboration platform that is hinged on the concept of wiki. It's a very welcome addition to Google's growing arsenal of web applications for office and collaboration.

If this doesn't send the message loud enough that Google is serious in the web-native Office, i don't know what will.

[update: added a brief summary bout Jotspot]

Lesson #1

In migrating your gmail identity.

Autoforwarding.

My currently active Gmail handle has been with me for a while now, but i use it merely for professional / formal correspondences. So the way I did it is to set up my multiple email accounts in emelgeek to be able to send using my (mark.gamis) identity. I then setup the latter's (mark.gamis) email forwarding to forward everything to emelgeek.

Then when i decided to start dumping my emelgeek account, i also set it up to forward everything to mark.gamis. But i forgot to turn off the forwarding settings in my mark.gamis account, so in turn i have set both inboxes to forward to each other. TF!

Now that answers the question that has been bugging my mind: Why on earth did people stop emailing me on the day that i decided to change handle? I was starting to think that changing handle was a bad idea... Sigh. I feel like an ass.

Pumpkin Sam

From Halloween 2006

emelgeek

It was originally emelgee, a derivative of my name's initials (Mark L. Gamis = MLG ="em" "el" "gee")
then Jasmin added playful twist to it - emelgeek, to somehow describe my then starting enthusiasm in technology. I think it was on her phonebook -- when i first saw emelgeek.

So emelgeek stuck, and became sort of my universal handle.

But things change, and sometimes you want to leave things behind and just move on. Nikki said in our conversation this morning (thru google talk, using my new handle of course, :P )
"sayang yung 'emelgeek' :P"

He was right, pero oh well.

The new handle? nothing could be more boring: my firstname and lastname separated by a dot.
(jumping in the bandwagon?) .

It's just my first day and it's not easy. The first thing i did was invite people again to my google talk. Nikki (of course) was one of the first to respond. But nothing can be more virtually depressing than an empty Gmail inbox and very few green dots on your Google talk friends list.

Anyway, why the change? Hmm. I was trying to think of something less destructive than deleting this blog (which is, btw, bound to be transformed anyway, when i have made the necessary things in transferring my blog) which is what i'm always tempted to do whenever things are not doing right..

But it's just hard to find the guts to delete a blog with posts that dates back to 2003. It's a part of my life's online history now, and it just didn't feel right deleting it.

So what's the next best thing to do? Create a new blog, select a new handle. Drop the old one.

How sure am i that this won't screw up my online identity for a while? 0%. Change has always been difficult. And no matter how much it sucks, it has to happen anyway.

So there, my little (but incomplete -- i feel so sleepy) story about my handle.

I will certainly miss it like hell, but it has to go... bye emelgeek. :) hello, boring handle.

A Story

Image from Gaping Void

Last...

There are wrong things thatI wish I never did,
and there are things I did that I wish were never wrong.

iTunes 7... Where's Piles?

Okay jut so we're clear, this post does not criticize the Cover Flow view of the new iTunes, but rather, the Album art list view. I think th Cover Flow UI is slick. The list view with Cover Arts is not.

I don't get it. Apple owns the patent for the Piles UI concept (demo, description) , one of the more novel ideas in UI that i know of, and they just let the perfect oppurtunity to showcase it slip away by not using some part of it in the newly-added Album Art View in iTunes 7.

Cover Flow in iTunes 7 - Cool



List View - Not Cool

And what adds to the weirdness is the fact that it's Microsoft (of all companies) who seems to be the one who's more serious in using piles (or at least a variant of it) in the form of Stacks in the upcoming Media Player 11.

Stacks in Media Player 11

In fairness to Apple's User Interface experts, i have no idea how the concept fared with the users in actual usability tests done by Apple.

Just wondering... why my list of songs are soo widely spaced when viewing artworks in iTunes 7 when i think that it could have been implemented differently...

Otherwise, iTunes 7 rocks, so far. :)

(Not So) Smart Mail

August 22, 2006 - Took a leave from work to process my Police clearance. Proud that i still get to enjoy the power of email with my state of the art nokia 1100 phone, i emailed my boss using smart's mobile email feaure to ask for permission to leave.

"Sir, i won't be working today because i have to process... blah blah"

August 30, 2006 one week later - In the office:

Boss: Sinong absent? May nagsend sakin ng email galing ata sa cellphone...

Holy shit Smart. One week? WTF! Dapat nagsnail mail na lang siguro ako.

Handle this...

I thought emelgeek is geeky enough for a handle...

This is what Gmail offerred me when i tried to create a new Gmail account:

emelgeekenator@gmail.com (cue music)

OMG... it's the emelgeekenator! Run!!!

Google Reader

For those who haven't discovered yet....

Google reader has a very slick way of navigating through your labels. Just type G and the starting letters of your label. :D Enjoy.

Bawal tumakbo sa Walkway

Last thursday, hinahabol ko yung closing time ng Bank ni Han, so tumatakbo ako sa Walkway (from Rufino papuntang Enterprise) nang biglang may guard na tumawag sakin...

Guard: "Bakit ka tumatakbo?"
Me: "Ummm, hinahabol ko bangko eh (glances at my left wrist kahit la akong watch, to gesture the time)"
Guard: "Bawal tumakbo sa walkway eh"
Me (in my mind): WTF? Bakit bawal tumakbo sa walk...? Oh.

Anyway tumakbo ulit ako after namin mag-usap.

Bookish Bimbo: Bring back the books

Bookish Bimbo: Bring back the books

:) It's nice to see this post, knowing that you haven't read a good one in a while. It's even nicer because now I know what to give you. heh.

Sam video

Sam....

Writer, Blogger and a few other stuff...

I am currently using Windows Live Writer to post this...

My blogging life is in chaos right now. There are many things that I have been wanting to do(change), like moving to wordpress.com, using my immortal handle as my blog url, making a new original template, promoting world peace, setting up a regular posting schedule, etc... But it's so hard to get started, and the fact that I have a regular day job now doesn't really help either. (I am not even supposed to be blogging right now, according to the guidelines i personally set..)

The fact that most of my friends (well, at least the blogging ones) are here in Blogger, and the mantra "if it ain't broke, don't fix" held me back from moving to WP. Though some people complain about how Blogger sucks, it surpisingly fits me just right. It's not perfect, but it's something that I could live (blog) without.

Which brings me to my next point: new blogger version!

Google is about to launch a new (and improved) version of Blogger, along with move to integrate users' Google and Blogger accounts.

At this point, only a few existing Blogger users are allowed to migrate to the new version, though if you really want to try the new bits, you can sign up (or just use your Gmail/Google login account ) to beta.blogger.com

Blogger buzz lists some of the notable new features here.

Back back back

Back from the dead,

just to vent out my frustrations (and one good reason at the bottom of this post) on my screwed up blogger template. Blogger has this annoying bug of clipping off the blog's template while you are saving/publishing some changes to it. I was trying to fix the botched up nav bar this morning when, during one of my save-publish routine I realized that my template got messed up, this time pretty badly. I don't know if i'll restore the old template but since I don't have it with me now (i'm on cel's pc), i will just use a new one. Stale content I can take, not a bastardized template.

And oh, it's Italy for World Cup 2006, but the real highlight was Zidane's headbutt(video). Wtf was that?

Btw, I stopped watching the matches when Brazil got dropped. Damnit...
--

And i finally got Google Browser Sync to work (dialup sucks). Ah... the convenience of not having to enter passwords again and being able to retain your history, cookies, and even opened tabs and windows, even when you're using another pc. (and the risk of someone else taking over your online persona. hehe). Seriously though, the idea of your browser's data (firefox) data following you wherever you go is much more convenient than it sounds.
--

Thanks for those who greeted baby Sam on his first birthday, and for those who came. :-) . Every birthday is special, but Han and I both agreed that next year's would be the first of many birthdays that will be very meaningful for our little family. As you know, when they first diagnosed Sam, the longest time that he was expected to live was 18 months. So next year we'll be celebrating the first of the many extra birthdays that he was given . Truly a milestone, truly a miracle of life. :-)

(Updated: added Google browser sync link)