Apolskis...

Aargh !

2009-03-01T20:30:00.000-08:00

OK so here's the deal, I do not have any inspiration to write about anything. In between being super busy at work and the little time I have left for life, I am just not inclined to write. And I have lots of things I want to write about. Remember my hype about the "People Series" thing that I got so excited about? Well I still want to do it and I have a list of people to research about, but I just can't get myself to sit down and do it ! I have no idea what is wrong with me from that point of view. Thing is when I get home all I want to do is eat something quick, shower and settle in bed with a book, oh yes I am overly obsessed with reading right now and wish I could just stay at home and read ! That of course is impossible. Which brings me to my next complaint.. I have lost all interest in cooking, I can't believe it ! My poor food blog, I haven't had anything to add to it in ages, which is why I have decided to take it down for now. And yes that means I'm back to eating microwave junk and take-out food. Ugh. But then I'm perfectly happy to do that, as long as I can get my ass to bed early and spend a good couple of hours reading. At the moment Shelfari has been my addiction, who knew interacting with other people about books could be so much fun? Oh and addicting. I have never had the opportunity to have discussions about books with anyone, ever since high school when we had to read books which we then discussed in class, but this is different, you can choose which books to read and heck you can even make suggestions, what more could you want. So now you know the reason behind my lack of posting. I am however pleased that I have been keeping up with my book blog, so far, and I have no plans whatsoever to drop it, like say the food blog. Still I have not been writing reviews as soon as I finish a book, but that's OK because I actually feel like I want to do it, and it's not because I keep putting it off and make up excuses to make myself feel better.

This is what, the fourth or fifth time that my blog has gone into an unexpected hiatus? Some people have been blogging for years, and they have dutifully done so without going blank for periods of times, but that apparently doesn't seem possible for me. You would think I have some problem with commitment, seeing how I get excited about it and then a couple of weeks down the line all the excitement has died down, until the next spurt. I wish I could understand this part of me !

Let's just hope that in the coming days I will get my motivation to blog back, and until then I will just continue to read, read and read. I even have lists of books to read, except the problem is my TO READ list keeps growing and growing much more than I can read. My lists include, the 100 Classic Books List, 1001 Books to read before you die, the Complete Stephen King Books list, and I can't forget about my Wishlist on Shelfari which at the moment has another 15 books, and the books I own which I have still to read. Aaaa why are there so many books in the world !!

Barcelona !

2009-02-14T11:15:00.000-08:00

I have been back for two days but dang I haven't had time to do anything. The few days I spent in Barcelona were great ! Thanks to the nice people at the reseller where I was doing training, I managed to see some places because when I told them it was my first time in Barcelona they really wanted to show me around. That was a major plus. Barcelona is known as the city of Gaudi, and rightly so since there are so many of his architectures. There is so much to see, I only wish I had more time ! I have to say that from the the [few] cities that I have been to in Europe, Barcelona is the one I liked the most so far and I attribute that to the fact that its a modern city but at the same time intertwined with rich cultural heritage.

I'm in the process of uploading pics to Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/apolskis/sets/72157613783347783/, still got a long way to go though to filter all the pics I took. This is my favorite picture of the bunch, taken from Poble Espanyol, which is an outdoors museum representing different locations in Spain.

As usual after every business trip, I have been super busy at work but it should tone down from next week. I'm really looking forward to that so I can get back on track with everything, including my blogs.

Vlad Dracula

2009-01-27T13:29:00.000-08:00

The first installment of the People Series is about Vlad Dracula, also known as Vlad the Impaler because of his chosen way of killing people by impalement or simply Dracula. My interest to find out more about him was stemmed when I was looking for ideas of what books to read next and came across Bram Stoker's novel "Dracula". I have heard before that the character of Dracula was based on a real personality and I was curious to find out if this was true and if so who was this person. What I found out was not what I expected.

Intro...

Vlad Dracula, a.k.a. Vlad the Impaler, Vlad Tepes (Tse-pesh), or Vlad III, was born in the citadel of Sighisoara, Transylvania, in 1431. Transylvania, Moldovia and Wallachia are today joined together as Romania. His father, Vlad II, was a member of the Order of the Dragon, a secret fraternity sworn to to uphold Christianity and defend the empire against the Ottoman Turks. It is said that at age five, young Vlad also become a member of the Order of the Dragon. Undoubtedly Vlad III is most commonly known for inspiring the character of Dracula in Bram Stoker's 1897 novel with the same name.

Vlad Dracula's Names

"Drac" is the Romanian word for dragon and "ul" is the definitive article and thus Vlad III's father came to be known as Vlad Dracul, or Vlad the dragon. The added "a" means the son of, so essentially Vlad III was known throughout his life as Vlad Dracula, the son of the dragon.

The word Tepes stands for impaler in Romanian, this name originated after his death and it came from Vlad Dracula's preferred method of execution, impalement.

Vlad III has also been referred to as simply Dracula in a number of documents of his time, including the Transylvanian Saxon pamphlets and "The Annals of Jan Dlugosz".

Historical Background

In 1431 Vlad Dracul (Vlad Dracula's father) was named the military governor of Transylania by King Sigismund. Vlad Dracul was not satisfied with being a mere governor and so he made a plan to seize Wallachia from Alexandru I. In 1436 his plan succeeded and after killing Alexandru he became the prince of Wallachia. During his reign Vlad Dracul tried to remain neutral between his powerful neighbors, the Hungarians and the Turks. In 1442 the Turks invaded Transylvania and were defeated but John Hunyadi of Hungary forced Vlad Dracul to flee with his family. Essentially Vlad Dracul betrayed the Order of the Dragon and in 1443 he regained the Wallachia throne once again with the support of the Turks. To assure his faith to the Sultan, Vlad Dracul sent his two younger sons, Vlad Dracula and Radu, to Adrianople as hostages to insure that he will not plan to strike against the Turks.

In 1447, John Hunyadi orchestrated a coup to assassinate Vlad Dracul because of his pro-Turkish policy which Hunyadi, having devoted his life to fight the Ottoman Empire did not approve of. Upon receiving the news of Vlad Dracul's death, the Turks released Vlad III but Radu decided to stay behind. With the help of Pasha Mustafa Hassan's Turkish cavalry, Vlad Dracula seized the Wallachian throne at the age of seventeen for a brief period of time. Only two months later, Hunyadi forced Vlad Dracula to surrender his throne and flee to his cousin, the prince of Moldovia.

In 1456, Vlad Dracula invaded Wallachia and defeated Vladislav II. Thus he became prince of Wallachia, his native land, where he instituted his strict policies, stood up against the Turks and thus began his reign of terror by impalement.

The Reign of Vlad Dracula

Vlad Dracula's reign of terror began almost as soon as he gained the throne. Early on in his reign he had a feast for all the boyars and their families to celebrate Easter. During the feast he had all the nobles arrested and those who where old an weak were impaled on the spot while those who were healthy were condemned to slavery and put to work on the rebuilding of his Poenari Castle on the Arges river. According to records the slaves labored until their clothes fell off from wear and then they were forced to continue working naked with most of them dying in the process.

One day Vlad Dracula wanted to cleanse his Kingdom from the people he considered lazy, who suffered from an illness or disability or were simply impoverished. He announced that nobody will suffer from hunger in his Kingdom and invited all the poor and unfortunate souls to a banquet. When his guests were all fed, and not to mention drunk, Vlad asked everyone how they would like not to feel hunger ever again and not to have to worry about anything. The crowd's reply was enthusiastic so he ordered his men to board up the hall and then set it on fire. Nobody escaped alive from this ordeal.

Rumours exist that Vlad Dracula also ate the flesh and drank the blood of his enemies, as well as held dinner parties next to people that has just been impaled. Vlad felt proud of his work and anyone who showed dislike when looking at the corpses soon suffered the same fate. He liked to arrange the stakes in various geometric patterns, most commonly in a ring of concentric circles in the outskirts of his target city. The length of the spear indicated the rank of the victim and the corpses were left to decay for months. Apart from impalement, Vlad also had people decapitated, skinned alive, burnt, dismembered, had their eyes gouged out and sometimes just physically disfigured.

No one dared break Vlad Dracula's laws for fear of being punished or killed. He especially enjoyed torturing and killing women, maidens who have lost their virginity, unchaste widows and women committing adultery. Such women were punished by cutting off their breasts, mutilating their sexual organs and impaled on red hot stakes.

The End

Although Vlad Dracula was a feasome enemy, in 1462 finally the Turks succeeded in forcing him to flee to Transylvania. Not wanting to leave anything for the Turks, Vlad destroyed his Kingdom by burning every village to the ground and poisoning the wells. In Transylvania Vlad met King Matthias Corvinus, but the King had heard of Vlad's inhuman ways and he had him imprisoned in the Hungarian capital of Visegrad. As time passed, Vlad was allowed to come and go as he pleased as long as he reported to King Matthias.

For nine years, while Vlad Dracula was in King Matthia's custody, Vlad's brother Radu occupied the throne of Wallachia. When Radu lost favor with the boyars and King Matthias, the latter and Prince Stefan Bathory of Transylvania joined forces with Vlad and after months of attacks he returned to Wallachia to occupy the throne. The boyars, knowing the possible pitfalls of Vlad's reign opened to the idea of Basarab's return, thus Vlad found himself in a precarious situation where his army was undermanned and left with only a few thousand men to combat the Sultan's ever growing army. The battle was difficult but Vlad Dracula fought against overwhelming odds a refused to accept defeat, but eventually they would meet their doom. Vlad Dracula is thought to have been killed during battle near Bucharest in December 1476, and it is claimed that he was accidentally struck by one of his own men. Ultimately the Turks decapitated Vlad's body and his head was sent to Constantinople to be displayed on a stake as proof that Vlad the Impaler was dead.

Sources and further reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vlad_the_impaler

http://www.vladtheimpaler.com

http://www.donlinke.com/drakula/vlad.htm

Craziness

2009-01-25T12:23:00.000-08:00

Yep once again I have decided to change the layout. It's crazy how when I make the layout I like it, and in a couple of months, weeks or even days I start hating it. This is what now, the third layout change? I think it has a lot to do with getting fed up of seeing the same thing over and over again, after a while I need something fresh. In the coming days I will change the layout for the other two blogs too, you know so everything is in sync.

I have also decided that I will go ahead with my little project of learning about new things and getting to know more about some of the people which, in some way or another, left a mark on the world. For now I will be starting with the latter to see how things go, and mainly because I already have some ideas for it whilst I need to put more thought in the other. I will be calling it the People Series and I will be posting the first one in the next one or two days. I'm really looking forward to start this, I hope the excitement doesn't die down after the first few posts, as is the case most of time.

Updating my food blog has been a bit slow lately, but that's not because I lost interest in it, far from that, but simply because I haven't been cooking anything worth mentioning the last week. Frozen food and eating out has pretty much taken over my life, but I will try to make more effort to cook. That's not just to keep up with my blog either, it generally makes me feel better when I actually cook instead of heating food in the microwave, apart from being much more satisfying.

Knowledge is power

2009-01-22T13:05:00.000-08:00

Some times I get this realization that there are so many things I don't know about, so much that I could learn, and when thinking about the vastness of it I start to get this feeling of anxiety, like I really need to do something about it. There are so many topics and areas, it's impossible to know everything, but I feel like I need to make more effort to learn new things outside the subjects I'm more familiar with. Science, history, economics, and so many more, but how do you go about it effectively?

While thinking about this I got an idea, two ideas actually. Number one is to make it a point that every week I will choose a random topic which I come across and do some research about it, then blog about it here. The blogging part is for motivation, and to make it more interesting. The second idea is along the same lines, but instead of a random topic I will choose a random famous person and get to know about him/her. Different people from all walks of life, people that in some way or another made an impact in their life. I already got some ideas of people I want to know more about. Again I will blog about it. This is still an idea and in the end I may or may not really do it, but right now it seems like it will really help to broaden my knowledge, about everything. Apart from that it will also help the blog, because usually I don't have a whole lot of things to talk about, and when I do most of the time I have a hard time saying much about it, so I end up not blogging about it. The thing is that I like the idea of blogging and I think it's fun when you have a topic to write about. My writing abilities are not too spectacular, but I would really like to improve that too. I admire people that can write so eloquently and express their feelings in such an articulate manner, if not even jealous of them.

I get so excited thinking up these little projects, even though not all materialize in the end, but I really want to try this out, and hopefully be able to keep up with it.

Such a beautiful horizon...

2009-01-13T15:10:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I just learned that next month I will be going on a business trip to...Barcelona, Spain. I haven't been on a business trip since last September and I was sort of relieved that I didn't have to travel so much anymore. Especially when my business trips involved going to the UK every month just for three or four days. It was fun at first but after a while it became tiring so I was glad when this series of business trips came to an end. Now that it has been a while that I've been on a business trip I am excited about this, even more so because I have never been to Spain before. I will be staying there for five days and apart from the usual presentations and training for the reseller I am hoping that I will have some time to look around. You know there are lists like X places to visit before you die etc.? Well I want to see as much of Europe as possible before I die ! I am still way behind but these kind of business trips help too, heh.

I made a quick search about Barcelona and it looks like there are many interesting places to visit. Apparently there are a lot of buildings by "Catalonia's favorite son" Antonio Gaudi and from the pictures I've seen Gaudi's works are pretty awesome. One place I decided I'm going to have to visit is Parc Guell, I fell in love with it just by reading about it and seeing the pictures, so one way or another I am going to make time to go there. I'll have to check it out more and see which places I can visit while I'm there giving the time I have. If I ever have doubts about my job, something like this is what keeps me motivated. I love traveling, my dream is that one day, sometime in the not so near future, I will be able to take a couple of months off work and spend it traveling. That would definitely be the coolest thing I did in my life. However for now that's pretty much impossible, because apart from not having the funds to do that, it's impossible to take that much time off work. Ah well, but hey I can dream !

Until then I will have to satisfy with going on vacation, preferably to Europe, once a year, and going on business trips. Which is not so bad after all !

Reading 1001

2009-01-05T15:05:00.000-08:00

I have always loved reading and unless I am going through a super busy time I read every day. Since joining Shelfari however I am realizing how much there is to read, and I want to read all books I see ! Being on that site gives me all this energy to read. For the first time in history I am reading two books at the same time, one book I'm reading when I'm at home and one through DailyLit when I manage to sneak some reading at work. In fact last Friday I stayed in for lunch hour since I had my homemade lunch and spent it reading.

I joined a group on Shelfari called '50 Book Challenge' where basically you set your own number of books you want to read throughout the year and keep a record of it. I set my goal to 20 books and if I kept at this I will be able to reach my goal with no problem, but who knows with me. Another group I joined is '1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die'. Althought it would take me more than a lifetime to read 1001 books I think it's interesting and it's great to get ideas of what to read next from it. I have only read 12 books from the list so far so there's a lot for me to choose from. You can see the complete list of books at http://www.listology.com/content_show.cfm?content_id=22845.

I just wish I had more time to read, but there are so many things I want to do during the day that I don't have enough time to fit everything in ! Such a bummer. Some people read over 80 and some even over 100 books in a year, how do they manage that?? I wonder if you can have a full time job and still be able to do it, because even if all I did was work and read I don't think I could read so many books in a year.

End of 2008

2008-12-30T14:32:00.000-08:00

I can't believe 2008 is coming to an end already ! It seems like it was only yesterday that it started and all of a sudden it's ending.

So many things happened this year. After a slow start to the year I managed to get back on track and did much more than that. My personal life has been ten times better than previous years and I'm quite pleased about that. Work, eh not so much, but that's something I'm choosing to ignore for the time being. It's probably not the best approach either but I have given it so much thought and didn't come to any conclusion that I just want to leave it alone for now and see how things go, like going to bed at night and hoping that in the morning everything will be fixed.

I thought about making a list of resolutions for 2009, God knows I am the queen of lists, I got to have a list for everything. This time though I decided not to make a list because I will never get anything done from it, and I will feel bad. Case in point, last June I made a list of things I wanted to do/achieve by the end of the year. How many of those did I manage to do? None. Nada. Zip. It doesn't mean I wasted my life away doing nothing, but I didn't do anything from that list and it makes me feel like I could have done more, but didn't. So there will be no list this time. The only thing I am planning to do for 2009 is to start taking lunch with me to work. I used to do this and it worked great, but I stopped at some point and went back to eating out for lunch every day. This is not good neither healthwise nor moneywise, so for 2009 I plan on making homemade lunches every day. I even thought of using the Bento box again, which I purchased for this very purpose, it might help to make it more interesting. I hope I can keep this one resolution !

This will probably be my last post for the year. I hope everyone has a good end of year and I can't wait to see what 2009 will bring !

Addicted

2008-12-22T14:49:00.000-08:00

Since I started putting my camera on manual to take pics I found out how much more difficult it can be to take pics that are not blurred. I'm still not quite there with taking good pics but at least they're decent, kind of, and they're much better than the pics I used to take so I'm improving. Yesterday I was talking to a friend of mine that owns a huge SLR camera with all sorts of lenses and cool equipment, so needless to say he takes some really leet pics and he suggested I get a small tripod for my camera. By the end of our conversation I had ordered this Joby Gorillapod Original.It looks quite neat and just what I need, nothing complex just a little tripod to put my camera on and take pics of food I cook, because that is the only reason I'm using my camera at the moment, which by the way I am enjoying. Now let's just hope it serves it's purpose well.

Oh and I ordered it from Ebay, because that is the only logical place to buy stuff from. Seriously I think that I have just recently got addicted to Ebay. Apart from the Gorillapod I also just ordered sheets and cookie cutters, besides the other five or so items I ordered the week before as part of my new addiction. I already know what I will be ordering next too ! I know it's crazy...

Updates updates...

2008-12-09T13:17:00.000-08:00

Behold the very exciting news that my new Random Food Blog is up and running. I have also posted my first random food since yesterday I made cookies. This is only the first post so I am still excited about this blog, we'll see how I feel about it in a month or two when probably the excitement has died down. Now wouldn't it be cool if people actually read that blog and posted their ideas/suggestions/experience. Right, but not happening. I decided that I will be posting pics of the food too, otherwise it would be kind of boring wouldn't it? See the pic I have on there of the cookies, not that bad is it ! I am being a little more adventurous with my camera and found out that if I put it on manual I can take pics that are way better. Who knew? Well I knew, and my friend has been telling me since forever that if you leave it on auto you can't expect much from a camera, but I just ignored him because I thought it was more complicated than it actually is and I don't have much patience. Now if I play with some of the settings I can at least take decent pics that don't make you want to puke your brains out. Sometimes it is good to listen to your friends.

In other news I have updated the layout for all my blogs. They are all the same but in different colors, because that's how I like it. They look pretty neat if I may say so myself. I think they are closer to looking like the 'real' blogs now. I still have to fix the Blog Archive for all of them but I just discovered that it doesn't work like it should on this blog and Book Archive, and its kind of ugly on the new Random Food Blog. I'm not really sure how it turned out the way it did so I have to look into it but right now I don't feel like wrecking my brains over it so it will have to wait a bit more. Oh and is it becoming hard to find the name you want for your blog on Blogger. I started with something completely different when I was creating the food blog and ended up with that. Not really what I had in mind but it's the best I could come up when every other name I tried has already been taken.

Why hello there !

2008-12-07T13:23:00.000-08:00

I haven't posted anything on here in ages. In my last post I was contemplating if I should keep this blog or forget about it and just post on Posterous. As it turns out I haven't been doing that very well either. My excuse is that I took up a little job of helping my friend set up his website, but what was supposed to be a little help became creating the whole darn thing from scratch. And after the website came other things, and right when I though I was done with it he got another bright idea. Gotta love friends !

So today I was pondering this blogging business again an I decided to keep this blog, or I will be trying to because really I like writing on it. Sure I don't always have anything interesting to say but nobody really reads it so if it sucks it doesn't really matter ! That's my theory anyways.

The first thing I did was change the layout because as soon as I opened it this morning I thought "Shit that's one ugly layout." I'm not really sure what I was thinking when I made it but I thought it was pretty cool back then. In a couple of months time I will probably be thinking the same thing about this layout, but at the moment I'm liking it.

My poor book blog has also been abandoned because I have not been reading anything at all, shame on me. In fact the last book I read is the one I last posted about and that was in August ! Hopefully I will be reviving that blog soon as well. Yes the first thing to go is the layout, again what was I thinking?? I am thinking of making it similar to this one but in different shades, I like to have some coordination between my blogs. The more important thing is to start reading again, so I actually have things to post about on there.

The other thing I'm thinking about is to create another blog to post about things I cook. You must think I'm crazy right, I can't keep up with the ones I have let alone another one. True, true, but lately I have been cooking quite a lot and I think its fun to blog about it. It will be just another unread blog, there are so many of those in the world, what's another one going to do?

We shall see how this goes the second time 'round...

Hmm...

2008-07-14T13:40:00.001-07:00

Right now I have a dilemma, to keep this blog or not to keep this blog. Since I found out about Posterous it seems the obvious thing to do, it's just what I need, somewhere to post absolutely anything I want without having to think too much about the words. In reality I could do the same thing here on my blog, but Posterous is so much cooler (and simpler to use). Besides when I think about blogging I always think that when I post about something I need to go into more detail and not just post something completely random because, well it doesn't seem right to have a blog full of bits and pieces. That's why I'm loving Posterous because in my mind I can post about aything on there and I don't have to make it long. Is it just me that is making this distinction or is it actually like that?

I will definitely keep my book blog, but I just don't know if I will be keeping this blog too.

In other news yesterday I deleted most of the pics I had on Flickr, because once I again I thought they were total crap and they were making my Flickr account look ugly. I know I'm that unpredictable. Last weekend I got to take some pics using my friend's spiff camera, one of those big cameras with different lenses and an extra flash, I don't know anything about it except that it's a Canon and that it takes awesome pics. I actually took pics that looked nice, that had this sort of depth in them, I was thrilled that I was able to take pics like that. So I realized it's not entirely my fault that the pics I take look lifeless and dull, it's the camera too ! Except I'm not willing to spend so much money for a good camera, although it would be uber cool to have one like that. Now if I just come home one day and find a package waiting for me containing a leet camera, wouldn't that be the neatest thing? I can dream...until then my Canon PowerShot SX100 IS will have to do.

Posterous

2008-07-04T15:34:00.000-07:00

I just discovered Posterous from someone's blog and I think it's a totally rad idea. I just put up my first post on there, check it out.

Why is it so cool? Well sometimes you think about something but you don't really want to make a whole blog post about it, but you would still like to share it. Posterous is the solution. It's somewhat like Twitter but you could post anything on there. I don't use Twitter myself as I don't have friends online to keep updated of my doings, so if I did use it nobody would read it. But this Posterous thing is different in that regard. People are coming up with all sorts of things for the web these days, some I actually really like, like Posterous for instance, and some are just not for me, but these kind of sites are definitely what's in right now. A good, innovative idea is what you need.

I added a link to it on this blog, to your left side under my Blog Roll. You should really sign up and subscribe to my blog. It's extremely easy too !

Oh and I removed some of the links I had in my blog roll, namely Dooce, Blurbomat and Death by Children. Those are the more leet bloggers and I'm sure they don't need another link to their blogs, especially from a site that (probably) no one reads.

Space Invaders !

2008-06-30T20:48:00.000-07:00

Today I had to stay in during lunch hour, on stand by, just in case some nitwit that was doing a conference call with a customer ran into some problem like if the customer got aggravated by his lack of intelligence and inability to handle people, then I'd have to come to his rescue and save him from the call from hell. Isn't that just the most awesome thing to experience? Trying to calm a customer down after your beloved colleague, ahem, I'll call him that for the sake of not being anymore disrespectful, managed to drive him off the edge and his every other word is 'refund'. Fun stuff.

Well while I was eating my homemade mac and cheese, waiting for my phone to ring any minute with a panicked voice at the other end, I got on wired.com, everyone checks that site right? The first article that caught my eyes was Space Invaders Remake Takes Retro Gaming to the Limit. Oh my God I love Space Invaders ! You just got to read that article, it explains word for word how I feel about retro games. I'm not some hardcore gamer myself, in fact I haven't been playing much at all the last year, but I like to play games every now and then and that's enough. But nothing beats those retro games I used to play when I was younger. Simple, cool, games.

Games today are different, all so very complicated, and while I like today's games, some I might even love, I miss my retro games. Reading that article today made me want to buy a PSP or a Nintendo DS, just to play Space Invaders Extreme. The last hand held game console I got was the Nintendo Gameboy Advance SP which was a Christmas gift from my mom. After I went crazy over it and played it nonstop, I eventually put it to the side and didn't play with it anymore. That is the reason why I held off buying a Nintendo DS or a PSP, but oh have I been tempted.

I am so aching to buy a game console, an Xbox or a Nintendo Wii, but I know I don't have much time to play games so it will probably be a waste of money. And since seeing that article the Nintedo DS or PSP are also on the radar. Ack if I could justify it so I won't feel so guilty about it...

Shaolin Monks

2008-06-23T13:38:00.000-07:00

These guys are just amazing.

See what Wikipedia has to say about this: Shaolin Kung Fu and the Shaolin Monastery.

Bloggin'

2008-06-21T13:56:00.000-07:00

There are many blogs that I read, different kinds of blogs, from a variety of people. Moms, dads, college students, artists, globetrotters, geeks, anyways you get what I mean. What I'm always wondering is how do people get so much to write about? Especially on personal blogs. It's either everyone has a super interesting life and I'm stuck with a boring one where the most exciting thing that happens in my week is going to Mister Tiki Mai Tai Lounge with a bunch of friends after work, or else I'm crap at writing about an uneventful day by writing an essay about the little things, like my thoughs on going to the bathroom or how pissed off I got driving home from work stuck in traffic. So which one is it? Or maybe it's a combination of both.

See, I spend most of the day at work, like everyone else that works full time I would suppose, I get home, cook and eat, sit at the computer doing various things (like reading blogs for one !), occasionally watch some TV while I'm on the computer, then shower and get to bed, where I spend an hour or two reading and then sleep, most of the time not because I'm tired but because it's late. What's there to write about? I mean my days aren't always so predictable, sometimes instead of going home after work I go out with a couple of my friends, and then by the time I get home I'm too tired to do anything so I just shower and sleep, which means there's even less to write about. Weekend are different, I'm out most of the time and they aren't so boring as the rest of the week, but still nothing to rave about in a blog post. There are people that do a lot of ranting and complaining on their blog, about how this sucks and that stinks and the other is unacceptable, but me? There's not much I could complain about. In general I'm not one to complain much, I usually accept anything and go with the flow, at work, with friends, anything actually. Unless something is really bugging me, then you will hear me complain alright, but that happens once in a while, and I'm very thankful for that. I could write about everything that happens to me, from when I wake up to the time I go to sleep, but wouldn't that make for a big boring blog? And I don't care for that anyways, I never meant to write about every little thing I do. My purpose to start a blog was to write about my thoughts rather, of which I don't seem to have much !

Well I did go to a shooting range this week. And want to know what I thought about that? It was freakin' AWESOME ! I got to use a shotgun for the very first time and I didn't think I'd like it so much, but I actually loved it. I hit like 2 of the 25 targets, but that's not important, what's important is that I used a gun. You got to agree that it's cool right? We plan to go again soon and I want to try with the handguns, I think I'd like it even better than the shotgun. They had rifles and bows too, maybe we'll try them all one by one. They all sound fun, but I still think I'd like the handgun best.

Oh and because I read www.dooce.com, I caved in and bought her book "Things I learned About My Dad". Mainly out of curiosity, but if it's as witty as some of her blog posts are then it should be good. I'm hoping on that. I got it in the mail yesterday and I can't wait to start reading it, but because I always have to finish one book before starting another I got to wait a couple of days more.

How's that for a blog post on my uneventful life?!

So much to do...

2008-06-11T10:51:00.000-07:00

But so little time ! I have so many things I want to do but before I know it it's midnight and I need to get myself to bed to wake up decent for work the next morning. I feel so frustrated when there are so many things I could be doing and I have so much motivation, but instead I have to go to bed. As if having a huge list of things I need to do in the upcoming days is not enough, I have another list of things which are not really that important but I want to do them nonetheless. I decided to make a separate list for these things, to make sure that I do get to them eventually. When I have a list I want to cut out things from it so that motivates me to do more. I am hoping that having this list will help in actually doing these things sometime. Oh and it will definitely help with the fact that I keep forgetting about these thing too. Here is what's on my list so far.

- Organize all the data on the various hard drives I have
- Set up a backup system because if one of my hard drives dies I will go insane
- Read "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" books
- Read "His Dark Materials" books
- Become a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS)
- Put up that website I've been meaning to for a while
- Watch all the movies that I have, that's a lot I'm talking about
- Clean out my car from the inside, any volunteers?
- Clean out my place, it needs it

I know I'm missing some other things but I just can't remember what right now. See what I mean? If I keep going on with these lists I'm going to need a list to remember all the lists I have, heh !

Of planes and kids

2008-05-31T12:46:00.000-07:00

This week I had to go on a short business trip to the UK, which means about an 8 hour flight both ways. I usually don't mind it, I've done it so may times that I've pretty much got used to it. This time however? It was a total different story and if I had to spend another minute on the plane they would have dragged me out unconscious and mumbling crazy things about how I didn't mean to kill the kid but he was asking me to do it.

BOTH WAYS.

The flight over there was a nightmare, or so I thought. I had no idea how worse it could be. I had this nice little family sitting on the row behind me with their two boys, maybe 5 and 3. The youngest one was sitting on his mother, right behind me and he just wouldn't stop messing with the seat in front of him, i.e. my seat. Punching it, kicking it, pulling at it, and there I was sitting in my seat feeling like I was on a ship sailing on stormy seas. At one point I was starting to feel nauseated and if I was going to throw up I would have liked to turn around and do it on that kid. Fortunately for the kid and his mother no such thing happened though. The good thing about it all? You wouldn't hear the kid whine or cry or anything like that, he was as good as a pea playing with toys and talking to his parents about their trip, it actually sounded really cute and that's probably what kept me from hating him. Finally he slept and I was so relieved, for all but half an hour ! I felt like telling him kid you got a long way to go don't you think you should consider sleeping a bit longer?? It didn't seem so. Lets just say that when the plane landed and they opened the door I was out in the blink of an eye.

The flight back home, now that is a real nightmare. Out of sheer luck I had another cute family sitting in the row behind me, again with two boys, this time around 2 and a baby just a few months old. What do you think the 2 year old did as soon as he was buckled up on his mother? Start kicking and pulling at the seat of course ! A couple of minutes in and I was thinking why oh why did they have to be placed behind me? Why couldn't someone else enjoy such a lovely experience on their flight? But wait that's not what made the flight a nightmare. It's the 8 hours of whining and begging from the 2 year old and wailing and screaming from the baby which made everything so darn frustrating and made my flight three days before seem like a breeze. Seriously, don't kids get tired at all? And that baby, his throat must have been burning by the end of the flight, I'm surprised he could still make noises with his mouth. I thank God for my iPod in times like these, it let me sleep when the kid wasn't wrestling with my seat. The two guys sitting near me were huffing and puffing, I thought one of them was going to turn around and wrangle those kids any minute. Now I'm not the kind of person that would turn around and say anything to the parents, because really what can they do, I actually felt sorry for them because it must have been even worse for them. I wouldn't like to imagine what a trip with two small kids would be like. One lady thought differently though, and she wasn't sitting near enough for the wailing to get into her head, but she went up to the parents and went tsk tsk tsk you young parents don't know how to control your kids. When I heard her I thought whattt?? Would anyone really think of doing that? It's not like the parents where enjoying it all and as irritated as I was I still thought that was uncalled for. Who was she kidding? I seriously felt like telling her to shut up and go back to her seat.

Flickr Game

2008-05-30T15:17:00.001-07:00

Flickr Game, originally uploaded by Apolskis.

The Concept

a. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search.
b. Using only the first page, pick an image.
c. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into fd's mosaic maker.

The Questions

1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One word to describe you.
12. Your Flickr name

Neato?

As life goes on

2008-05-17T12:32:00.000-07:00

The energy and craziness that filled my brain a little more than a month ago is starting to tone down a bit, phew. I'm not back to my old self where I did absolutely nothing and just had no motivation, but I think I'm in the normal range where you do what you need to, have fun and go to bed at night feeling that it was a productive day. At work things are moving on nicely and I've decided that I'm going to stick around for now, which is good and I don't have all these uncertainties which seemed to eat me up.

I still love cooking, that is one thing that has stuck. I have lost interest in taking pics of the food I cook though because I'm just crap at it so I end up with a pic that doesn't do the food any justice, which sucks really because the food would be awesome. I also have given up doing a laptop lunch everyday for work. While the idea was great and I was liking the fact that I was eating somewhat healthy, I say somewhat because I can't go without having some type of candy during the day, nope that's impossible for me, but I thought it was time consuming and instead of making a laptop lunch I throw the food in the first container I find and keep a stash of random snacks at work. Although not as healthy, because I have cut down on the fruit for example, it is working so I'm not going to worry about that and it's still way better than the junk food I used to eat everyday at work.

The other day I went over to my friend Rachel, which had another friend over, Heather. While there Heather was on the computer playing Neopets, and I said man I used to play that ages ago. At that instant she was like OMG why don't you play it anymore it's the coolest thing on the internet. I used to play it when I was 16 or something like that and eventually lost interest in it, partly because i didn't have time to play it anymore, and she managed to get me to play again. I had to make a new account because I totally forgot the password and what email address I signed up, and I ended up playing Neopets again, see me here. The site changed so much I don't even recognize it. Now in the evenings you can find me on there making Neopoints to try and make my pets leet again, and trying to figure it out all again. I might be getting hooked on it again, pooh on Heather. Meet Bjorn86 and Pizu60.

Right now I am planning a vacation in September. Most likely it's going to be a trip to Amsterdam, Holland, to start my attempt at touring around Europe. I'm actually really excited about this and can't wait ! I want to plan everything right, that's the part of me that needs to have everything planned out speaking, so I'm looking at all the places to visit while I'm there. It's fun planning a trip !

I heart Firefox

2008-05-08T14:10:00.000-07:00

I just love this...

Direction

2008-04-30T11:57:00.001-07:00

This last week I have been wondering, wondering where I am headed to. All the shit that's been happening at work, it kind of threw me off track and I'm left wondering what I should be doing next. It turned out that talking to my manager was a good idea in fact and things actually have started to change, in less than a week ! I never expected him to agree with me on everything I brought up but he did and told me that I was absolutely right. What the heck? If you know about these issues already then why are you keep doing it? Do you really need someone to tell you before you actually do something? So I went in strong and ready to fight for my point, and I got an apology instead. I was astounded because lets just say it's not the behavior I was expecting. So far so good.

For some reason though I still feel like I don't know if I want to stay or look elsewhere. They blew my fuse and every morning I wonder what I'm still doing here. A colleague of mine, that doesn't know anything about my situation, told me that you shouldn't get attached to your job, just go in 9 to 5, do your job and when it's time to get out forget about it. I always thought there was more than that to a job. I'm committed to my job, I put in more time when there's that need, I go home and get on email and do work things and I travel nearly once a month to our office in UK. I would expect that all that would gain you some respect and recognition, but I'm starting to have doubts if any of that really matters, and if indeed you should treat it as a job that you do from 9 to 5 and that's it nothing more.

I am relatively young and still a baby in the work field. I've had experience with one other company and that was only for a few months. I still have so much to learn and I'm scared shitless of doing the wrong move. I need some direction, all this thinking I'm doing about this is distracting me from doing anything else because that's how I am, before I settle a situation and I'm sure of what I'm doing I won't be able to rest. I hate the way I am sometimes, some people just seem like they don't care about anything and are able to take risks without knowing what the outcome will be but I am so not able to do that.

Take one

2008-04-19T12:47:00.001-07:00

I always see these things on blogs which I figured are called Meme. I like to read them and see what I would answer, so I decided to post on my blog if I see one that I like. Kinda cheesy? I've been seeing this one on quite a few blogs so I'm giving it a shot.

1) The phone rings. Who are you hoping it is?
My brother to tell me he's coming over, I love that kid.

2) When shopping at the grocery store, do you return your cart?
Oh yes every time, I hate it when people don't.

3) In a social setting, are you more of a talker or a listener?
Definitely a listener. I don't talk much when I'm around new people but once I get to know them it's fine. In any case I'm more of a listener though.

4) If abandoned in the wilderness, would you survive?
I really don't know. I would panic and be scared for sure. I'm quite the survivor but in the wilderness, that would be different.

5) Do you like to ride horses?
I never rode a horse in my entire life and I would love to. I think I would like it.

6) Did you ever go to camp as a kid?
No I never did. I always thought it would be fun though.

7) What was your favorite board game as a kid?
I loved board games when I was kid. My favorite were Scrabble and Monopoly. I also had this board game called Cops and Robbers that I liked.

8) If a sexy person was pursuing you but you knew he/she was taken, what would you do?
I don't think I would take that in consideration. If they were pursuing someone while they're taken then something must be wrong, right?

9) Would you date someone with different religious beliefs?
I don't think I would mind. I'm not a religious person at all so it wouldn't make much difference. Unless they had some extreme beliefs which I didn't agree on.

10) Are you continuing your education?
Not at the moment, but I hope I will one day.

11) Do you know how to shoot a gun?
No, I'd like to learn though, just for fun.

12) If the house was on fire, what's the first thing you'd grab?
Oh my I don't know I would probably try to grab as much things as I can.

13) How often do you read books?
I'm always reading books, I try to read every night.

14) Do you think more about the past, present or future?
I think a lot about the future. In fact everything I do I'm thinking about the future and how what I do will affect it.

15) What is your favorite children's book?
I don't really remember, I know I had a shitload of books and I'm surprised I can't remember any of them right now.

16) How tall are you?
Short, some 5'3".

17) Where is your ideal house located?
My ideal house will have to be big and in some poshy area of town. I want to move to California one day.

18) Last person you talked to?
My mother, she came over for a 'lil.

19) When was the last time you were at Olive Garden?
Can you believe that I've never been to Olive Garden??

20) What are the keys on your key chain for?
My car key, house key and FOB for work.

21) What did you do last night?
I stayed in and watched TV.

22) Where is your current pain at the moment?
Pain? I don't have any pain.

23) Do you like mustard?
Yes ! I love it with pork, yum.

24) Do you like your Mom or Dad?
I haven't seen my dad in a long time, it must be nearly 10 years now. I don't really like him either, it's probably best if I don't see him. I love my mom, don't know what I would do without her. We argue and fight sometimes, but we just can't live without each other.

25) How long does it take you in the shower?
About 20 minutes or so usually. Unless I'm in a hurry.

26) What movie do you want to see right now?
The Kite Runner. I'm just reading the book and I'm loving it, so I want to see the movie next.

27) Do you put lotion on your dog or cats?
Not usually no. The only time I put lotion on my dog was when he got this allergy and the vet gave me a lotion for it.

28) What did you do for New Years?
I went to a party at a friend's house. It was a small party with just a few friends, but it was fun.

29) Do you think The Grudge was scary?
I haven't seen The Grudge yet, that might be a movie to watch soon.

30) Do you own a camera phone?
Yes my cell phone has a 3.2MP camera, it's pretty good for a camera phone.

31) What is the last letter of your middle name?
A, I know I have so many As in my name.

32) Who did you vote for on American Idol?
I didn't vote, ha !

Dilemma

2008-04-17T14:46:00.001-07:00

Right now I feel confused and I don't know what to think. I've been at my job for nearly two years and I have always loved it. It was challenging, exciting and I was learning new things all the time. Every day was different and after a day at work I went home feeling satisfied and happy that I have this job. So the fact that for the past weeks I haven't been feeling anything like that is bothering me a little, or a lot. I go to work every morning thinking ugh I have 8 more hours in here how am I going to survive?? Nothing is fun about it anymore and everything just seems so boring. The people in my team are ok, but sometimes I just feel out of place, like I don't belong in this team. I hate feeling this way, because I used to love my job and can't really understand how I ended up in this situation. Things have changed so much, and I don't even want to talk about how people act in this team. I used to be in a team with some awesome people, I still work with these people but we are not part of the same team, and that's mostly the thing that's keeping me from just plain quitting. I don't like working in such a competitive environment where people just do things to get credit for it and have their name up there, who gives a shit about the rest? I used to be in a team where we all worked together, worked hard to make sure we excelled at our job and had fun doing it. Now it doesn't matter if you do a crappy job, its more important if you finish 5 shitty tasks than finish 3 good quality tasks, because the person that does the 5 tasks is going to be patted on the back and everyone else is going to be told see that's how we need to be? And when I hear something like that I'm thinking excuse me?? You mean that we'd rather finish a million shitty tasks than actually concentrating on doing things right? Because I can do that very easily but what the heck? Sometimes I can't even believe that this is the same company that I joined nearly two years ago. Yesterday I was so fed up with everything that I updated my résumé and was looking at job vacancies. Today I was thinking, why was I even thinking about that? My problem is that I keep thinking that things may change again and one minute I want to run away from that place and the next I think it's not really that bad if you learn to deal with it. But how do you know when it's time to move on? Is it normal to have doubts about your job? If you feel that nobody appreciates anything you do anymore, is that a good enough reason to start looking elsewhere? If it is then why am I not certain that it's time to find something new, somewhere when I can be happy with my job again and don't have any doubts about it? Should you try to voice concerns such as these to your manager, or is it best not to? It's so frustrating having all these questions and nobody to answer them, or at least someone to help you to come to a conclusion. My head feels like it's going to blow up with all these thoughts. Partly because I don't think I want to accept it either.

No, I'm not crazy...yet

2008-04-13T11:50:00.000-07:00

I don't know what happened but since I have been up on my feet again I feel like I have changed radically. My outlook on life for instance, everything seems exciting right now, even little things like going grocery shopping. What's up with that? Besides that I have a list of a close to a million things that I want to do. Hopefully I'll get to do all of them before I die, but it's so long I wonder if I will have enough time, ha ! I also keep thinking that all this energy is going to trail off and everything will get back to normal, i.e. spending all my free time doing nothing, going to work every morning wishing the day would end already and basically just wasting my life away. It somewhat scares me that I would go back to my old ways, because all I want to do is enjoy life at this point, think positive and get out there and do everything I want. A relapse would just mean that I failed, and I sure as hell will be trying my darnest not to. It's like I owe it to myself.

I have gone on a shopping spree too and eBay is my best friend at the moment. I swear I love that site. I'm in the middle of throwing all my old stuff away and literally changing everything I own. And I do mean everything, from my clothes and shoes to the smallest things such as the key ring that holds my keys. Yesterday I just received my new wallet in the mail, isn't it purty?

Right now I'm waiting for a new backpack, a watch and a sleek cover for my iPod Touch. I'm loving this change, and it's about time too !

Yesterday I came across a blog and when I started reading the first posts I realized, am I imagining this? This blog belongs to a 40 something year old woman who wants to find out the things that he likes doing, just like I want to do. There is an age difference between her and me, and her reasons may be entirely different, but knowing that people do find themselves in the same situation was kind of comforting. At least I know that it's not just me, because I actually thought I was half-baked and didn't know what I wanted. My initial thoughts were that at 21 it was a bit late to start discovering who I am because it seems everyone knows their hobbies and what they like to do and I just didn't have a clue. Hopefully taking this step in my life will be worthwile.

Free

2008-04-06T14:39:00.001-07:00

I am *finally* free. No more hopping around on one leg, no more crutches, I can walk ! Oh how I love putting on my shoes and bounce around. You never really think about it but being able to walk is a blessing, and I realized that since I have not been able to walk much for the last couple of months. It's so restrictive and it makes everything a hundred times harder. It sucked out all the motivation from me and I just didn't have any energy to do anything. The few days that I have been walking I feel like I was reborn, literally. I have all the energy to do things and it seems like there aren't enough hours in the day, because before I know it it's midnight and I don't even feel like sleeping.

In less than a week I've been catching up on the things that I absolutely hated doing because I couldn't walk. For instance I've been shopping, that's got to be one of my favorite things to do, I just need an infinite amount of money to make it more fun. I have been really enjoying cooking, I never really did cook much before but now I'm on a roll and I'm actually being more creative with my meals. I have even been doing extra cooking, like baking cookies that came out absolutely delicious. Doesn't it feel awesome when you cook something and it turns out great? Something that radically changed is that I want to get out of the house and I jump at every opportunity to go out. Ha all I wanted to was sit at home and going out used to be such a big deal ! Not anymore.

I love this feeling of being free, being able to do anything I like, and most of all this energy that seemed to have accumulated and now needs to come out. It just feels great.

And don't ever break your leg !

To-Do List Software

2008-03-31T02:08:00.000-07:00

Next in my series of reviews is To-Do List software. As I have posted previously I recently started keeping a list of the tasks that I needed to complete to help me get things done and most of all make sure that I don't forget anything. Having a to-do list made me more productive because I actually got things done, which in return made me feel much better. This inspired me to look at software to help me manage my to-do list, since eventually my Excel sheet was going to get too big and become too difficult to manage.

FruitfulTime TaskManager

Version: 1.0
Price: $29.99

- Download

Very easy to download, no questions asked and a download button is available on the front page so there is no need to click around the website to find the download link.

- Installation

The installation was done in 3 clicks, all you need to do is accept the license agreement, choose the install location and you're done. You can try the product free for 10 days, after which you will not be able to manage your tasks until you license the product.

- Features

The first thing you'll notice about FruitfulTime TaskManager is that it is easy to use and the UI is pretty straightforward. When you run the application the first time you are asked to set a password which you will need to enter every time you open TaskManager.

Each task you create can be assigned a priority of high, medium or low as well as a start date and a due date. Other properties that a task can contain are notes, reminders, and the progress which starts from 0% up to a 100%. One of the features that I really liked are the subtasks. For a task you can create as many subtasks as you like, so if a particular tasks is broken down into multiple tasks you can easily manage it with the use of the subtasks. Each subtask has all the properties of a task, so you can set individual properties for each subtask. Tasks can be categorized by assigning tags to them, which you can later use the filtering feature to filter out tasks by choosing which tags you want to view. Otherwise you can filter tasks by date and you will be able to view tasks due today, tomorrow, this week, this month and next month.

- Miscellaneous

There is no way to view all your tasks but group them by category. Once you have a lot of tasks on your list I can see the UI getting cluttered. I'm personally not a fan of checkboxes and this one seems to be filled with them, tagging, filtering, tasks, subtasks, I would rather be able to select multiple items from a list as I find that easier. I also ran into some bugs while reviewing this product, for example when I removed a tag from a task, and then filtered by that tag I could still see that task until I closed the UI and opened it again. Anther glitch was when I deleted some tasks and then created new ones, the new tasks had notes from the tasks I previously deleted. The UI is simple and quite easy to get used to, however it is lacking some features compared to the other products I reviewed.

- Rating

Dextronet Swift To-Do List

Version: 6.96
Price: $44.95

- Download

Easy to download, again no questions asked and no forms to fill.

-Installation

The installation is quick and it was done in 4 clicks. When the installation is complete a Quick Overview Wizard is displayed guiding you through the first steps you need to take to start managing your task list. It runs for 21 days in evaluation mode before you need to buy the product, when the 21 days were up it started throwing fatal errors when running the program.

- Features

With Swift To-Do List you have the option to create multiple databases as well as multiple to-do lists which you can assign a different icon to. I would be inclined to create a new database for certain periods of time, for example every 3 months. This will help in keeping your to-do list as manageable as possible. Every database can optionally be password protected, so more than user can use Swift To-Do List each having their own database(s).

Creating tasks is fairly easy and each task can be assigned a priority, type, due date, notes, reminders as well as attachments. I like the idea of being able to attach files to tasks, so if a task involves writing a document or you have references for the task you can easily locate your resources. Tasks are colored depending on the priority, and the colors can be customized to your liking, so you don't need to keep the red, green and orange/yellow that is usually assigned by default. Finding your tasks is also made easy, either by the search feature where you can search for the text in the tasks themselves and the task notes with the added bonus of filtering the search results by state, priority, due date, date created and type, or else by filtering all tasks by the aforementioned properties.

- Miscellaneous

In order to change the priority, type and due date from the main view you need to click on the task and edit its properties. It would be nice if you can edit these from the main view in an easier manner, such as a combo box to change the value.

- Rating

VIP Simple To Do List

Version: 2.9
Price: $29.95

- Download

Another easy to download product and it downloads as a compressed ZIP file. I think companies are starting to realize that nobody likes to fill in forms to download a product and most of the time people enter invalid data anyways.

- Installation

The installation is fast and easy, it only took about 5 clicks to complete. You are able to evaluate the software for free for 30 days, the longest period of the three products I reviewed.

- Features

The thing I liked the most about Simple To Do List is the extent to which you can group tasks to view. Tasks can be grouped by any of the tasks properties, which can then be further grouped by said properties. For example I like to group my tasks by category and further grouped by the due date. Additionally you can create filters to view the tasks you want only, and the filtering available is by due date, status, priority, task name, date created, las

General options include minimizing to tray, automatically load Simple To Do List when Windows starts and optional password protection. You are also able to change the look and feel of the UI, that is change the color scheme used and style of the UI to your liking. If you fancy everything pink, there is even an option for that. Each task can have notes and the notes can be minimized so they aren't displayed or maximized so when you select a task the notes related to it will be displayed. Reminders of a due task can also be configured, either by playing a sound or by receiving an email.

- Miscellaneous

To create a task you need to click on the 'Create Task' button and fill in the task info in the dialog. I would have liked to be able to cerate a new task on the fly by creating a new row and entering the values in the cells.

- Rating

I personally chose VIP Simple To Do List for the fact that you can view your tasks grouped by category. This made is very similar to my original Excel sheet, but with added functionality !

Etsy

2008-03-18T15:45:00.000-07:00

I recently came over a site called Etsy and OMG I fell in love with it. Basically it is described as an "online marketplace where you can buy and sell anything that is handmade." There is so much neat stuff on that site that it makes me want to buy things and if I spend too much time on it I can make some real damage. The coolest part of the site is where you pick the color you want and it will search items containing that color for you. The search is actually based on the colors that the image of the product contains, so it's not just entering a color like "blue" and you get products that has been tagged with "blue". It is much more sophisticated than that, you get to choose a color from a color picker and images which contain that color are displayed, see what I mean here. Of course you might get an image where the background is blue and the actual item is another color, but it's far more accurate and fun in finding items in the color you want. I'll give you an instance where this comes in useful. I have decided that I want to redo my bedroom, and I want the colors green and pink. I know that I have a while before I actually get to redo my room but I tried using this fun feature on Etsy to find neat things for my room. And oh boy did I ! There were so many things that I liked that I just wanted to start buying things, but fortunately I managed to control myself, because I know that by the time I redo my room I might have changed my mind on the colors. I guess I'm unpredictable that way, the good thing is that I know it. I *had* to buy something to make myself happy though so I settled on a Wristlet Keychain which I will post a picture of for you.

Click on the image to go to the seller's store on Etsy ! I had a hard time picking one because that seller has plenty of different designs and they are all so spiff. Oh and I have a reason for buying a Wristlet Keychain. I like to have these kind of key rings to hold my keys so it isn't hard to find and not easy to lose, here is my current key ring, I found one exactly like it on eBay.

I have had it for a while and by now you wouldn't recognize the color, so I thought it's time for a new one. That way I don't feel guilty for buying something that I absolutely don't need. The seller contacted me and told me that they will ship it on Monday, and I can't wait to receive the first item I bought from Etsy ! I'm pretty sure it won't be the last time either.

I know that this is pretty random, but I loved this site so much that I had to share it.

Book Archive

2008-03-15T07:36:00.001-07:00

I introduce to you my new blog : http://bookarchive.blogspot.com.

I have, for a while now, wanted to have something where I can document the books that I read, but I didn't quite know how I would do that. I thought about creating an application, a website more like with a content management system that I could easily update. That would take some time though, time which I didn't really have so nothing ever came out of it. I detest handwriting, so I wasn't even going to attempt to keep something like a journal, besides who uses a pen to write anymore? Crazy people maybe. All I use a pen to write with is when I have to sign on something. Keeping a million Word documents or a huge document with all my reviews wouldn't really be ideal, that would be a bitch to manage. My idea was something where I could easily write a review when I finish a book and then be able to get back to it later on without having to manually search through all of the reviews.

Since I started this blog I realized how much I love reading, and that is where the idea cropped up. Make a blog ! And voilà I got what I wanted. Somewhere to dump my thoughts on the books I read which I could later easily get back to, with the added advantage that other people can read them, and even post their own opinions perhaps. Ok so that is a little far fetched because nobody would be reading the blog, let alone post comments, but there's always the option !

Now to make things clear, the aim isn't to provide deep insight about a book, but only to keep a record of what I thought about it and my feelings about the book.

Because I want everything in unity an structured, you will notice that the layout is similar to this one, because really if you have more than one blog their layouts should be the same style, in my head it sort of defines who that blog belongs to, if you get what I mean. I know it might sound crazy to some people, or most.

Now will you head over there and check it out?

Short Term Memory Loss

2008-03-10T15:57:00.000-07:00

I have been trying to start writing this post for the last half an hour. I just have one word to say, Vista. That's the answer to my anger and frustration right now, because precious (or not) Vista has decided that all it wants to do is crash, crash and crash some more, especially the accursed explorer.exe. It crashed when I tried to sign on Windows Live Messenger, it crashed when I was opening Mozilla Firefox, it crashed when I tried to open Windows Live Writer, it crashed when I was saving an Excel sheet, and amidst all this it would not bring up Task Manager. Oh and have I mentioned that issue every time I open Control Panel, explorer.exe crashes. It's so frustrating when you just want to get something done but you can't because your OS just isn't letting you. I did a brief search about this Control Panel crashing explorer.exe and apparently I'm not alone. It is probably some *.cpl file in the Windows\System32 folder that is causing it to crash, and I have to check each and everyone one of those to see which one is the culprit. I want to like Vista and I want to use it, but geesh it just makes me want to run away from it when it acts like this. And you thought XP was bad.

Now on to what I wanted to write about, but I had to let that out before I got on to anything else.

I just finished doing a TODO list. There are so many things that I need/want to do that I keep losing track. I remember something that I have to do and then completely forget about it, until a week later when I remember about it, and then forget about it again...it's an infinite loop. That is why I decided to list all the things, and when I remember something I will add it to it right away. I have 15 items on my list right now, and I know I'm missing some others but I can't remember what at the moment. I am hoping that with this list I can actually get more things done, keep myself focused if you will, because sometimes I know that I have things to do, but they're just floating around in my head and I end up doing something completely different, and useless most of the time. The thing with having a list is that when you complete something and you get to take it off your list, you feel like you have accomplished something and it keeps you motivated.

I wonder how people deal with all the things that they need to do. Do they keep lists? I'm talking about day to day things here, nothing more, not some big project or anything like that. I wonder if people normally just remember things that they need to do, and don't need to write anything. Or I might have short term memory loss, because really, if I get ideas or thoughts or anything that I *need* to remember I have to write it down, otherwise it will be lost in a few minutes when I have other things on my mind. But then I can remember things that happened when I was 3 and 4 years old, so I really don't understand how my memory works. Maybe that's just another abnormal thing about me, but it intrigues me.

And before I forget....someone put me on their blog roll ! Wow I'm on Mack Your Mouth ! Sweet.

Blog Publishing Editor

2008-03-06T17:41:00.000-08:00

For my very first review I will be reviewing Blog Publishing Editors. I cam across Windows Live Writer a couple of weeks ago and thought that publishing posts to you blog from your desktop was a great idea, it saves you from having to log on to the website and you get some additional interesting features, in other words it makes things easy. I liked Windows Live Writer, however I wanted to test others and see what features they include, and here is what I found out. My criteria for trying the software was that it has to:

1. Be free, as good as it is I'm not paying for something like this.
2. Work with Blogger, because that is where my blog is.
3. Work on Windows, because that is what I use.

So here we go, below are the three Blog Publishing Editors I chose to review.

Qumana

- Download

To download the installer you are asked to enter an email address. I naively thought that I will be getting an email with a download link or something along those lines, so I entered my email address. It turned out that the download starts right after you hit the 'Download' button, so now I hope my inbox won't be getting spammed.

- Installation

Installing Qumana was a breeze, it is very easy, took only about 4 clicks and the installation ran fast.

- Configuration

Configuring your blog is done through a wizard. In this wizard you need to enter the URL of your blog, the username and password and choose the blog you want to add. Nothing too complex, even my mother could probably make it work.

- Features

The first thing I liked about Qumana is the Blog Manager. From here you can see all your blogs on the left hand side and when you click on each one the posts for that blog are displayed. When you click on each post it is then displayed in the bottom. This is pretty useful when managing multiple blogs.

What I would have liked to be able to do is edit the post when you select it. There is plenty of white space in the UI so it can be easily added without making everything look cluttered. To edit a post you need to double click on it and it will open in the editor. One advantage of this is that you may open more than one post in multiple windows.

The editor itself is also easy to use with the toolbars on top and the fancy buttons give it an attractive look. From me it gets credit for that. It's true that you would rather have something that is useful rather than look good, but I choose both, I like things to be functional as well as pleasing to the eye. In the editor you have two views, WYSIWYG and Source View. I found the Source View to be a little disappointing. Basically it's just a block of text which also includes the HTML tags. I would have liked to see something more structured, since as it is it would be a nuisance to find anything. The WYSIWYG editor on the other hand is decent, with an option to enable inline spell check.

Other features includes a *very* simple search in the Blog Manager, where you can enter a string of text and it will display all posts that contain the same text. You are also able to save your posts to your hard drive in HTML format. A little feature that I liked is that you can keep it minimized in your tray, which makes it very easy for you to open the Blog Manager or start a new post.

- Miscellaneous

The thing that disappointed me the most in Qumana is that the categories do not seem to work, at least for Blogger. This is the main reason that I would not use it, I need all my posts to have a category, and if I have to do it through the website each time I make a new post I might as well not use a Blog Publishing editor in the first place. Another factor would be that you do not have the option to upload pics that you use in your post directly to your weblog. I find this to be inconvenient, I don't want to have to keep uploading pics prior to adding them to my post. Something that would be nice to have is the option to add videos from the WYSIWYG editor, just the way you can add pictures.

- Rating

Windows Live Writer

- Download

You do not need to enter any info to download the installer. When you open http://writer.live.com you will see two big orange buttons that say Get It Free. Click on one of them and the download starts.

- Installation

During the installation you are asked if you want to install other Live software like Messenger etc. I find this a little annoying when installing software, because I just want to get the software I want installed, I don't want to know about your other software at this point. The installation also took a couple of minutes to complete, in fact I left it running and carried on doing something else while it was installing.

- Configuration

Adding your blog to Windows Live Writer is very easy, you need to enter the URL, username and password in one dialog and you're done. Lately I have been preferring this method much more than wizards, because while wizards are great, having one dialog where I enter everything required without having to keep click 'Next' is much faster.

- Features

The amount of features Windows Live Write includes are quite impressive. First off you have three different views to choose from, the Normal WYSIWYG editor, Web Layout, HTML Code and the Web Preview. I especially like the Web Preview which lets you preview your post in the context of your blog before publishing it. For someone like me that wants everything to look perfect, this is a great feature. You also have the option to use a single window, or else multiple windows for each post you open. I personally like to to keep everything in one window.

When creating/editing a post the categories are displayed at the bottom, with the ability to easily add new categories. This is one of the important features for me, as I want every post to have a category. Another feature that is, in my opinion, very important is that you can upload images directly to your blog. Additionally you also have the option to configure your FTP server so images are uploaded there automatically.

I also like how saving drafts works in Windows Live Write. You can save drafts locally which then you can easily manage. Drafts are displayed in the menu on the left hand side of the UI, where clicking on a draft will open it for editing and clicking on the 'x' beside it will delete it. Apart from that you can also turn on the option to automatically save drafts every N amount of minutes.

You can also find other plug-ins for Windows Live Write, so if there is a feature that you would like to see you might want to check the plug-ins page.

- Miscellaneous

If you manage multiple blogs in Windows Live Write, you have to select the blog you want to view from the menu on top. This means that you cannot list all your blogs in one window and you are only able to view and edit one blog at a time. In other words you can only edit one blog at a time, it is not possible to have more than one blog open in a single view. You can always have multiple instances of Windows Live Write for each blog you want to edit, however I would find it more practical to manage my blogs from a single instance.

- Rating

w.bloggar

- Download

When downloading the setup you have three options, the full version - Internet Explorer, the full version - Mozilla Firefox and a portable version - Internet Explorer. The portable version is meant for USB drives to allow you to blog from anywhere, where you can use a USB drive at least. I chose to download the full version - Mozilla Firefox.

- Installation

The installation is both easy and fast with an option to install w.bloggar in five languages: English, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish.

- Configuration

Adding a blog is done through a wizard where you need to enter the blog type (Blogger, TypePad, etc...), an alias for the blog, your username and password. An interesting option included in the wizard is the ability to create a completely new blog, which will guide you in signing up with one of the thirteen providers supported and creating your blog.

- Features

I found the layout of w.bloggar to be quite limited. You have two views available, the Editor tab and the Preview tab. The fact that it does not have a WYSIWYG editor bothered me and its Editor displays the HTML tags when you format text, plus there is no option to enable inline spell check either.

Your list of blogs is displayed in a drop down list, and you just need to select the blog you want to publish your post to it. The main thing that I didn't like about w.bloggar is the way you manage posts. Viewing previous posts you made your blog is not really practical, in my case it didn't display the title for the posts, so search for the post you want would would pretty much be a nightmare. I don't know if this is an issue with Blogger or all blog types, but Blogger is one of the supported services so it should not have this problem.

With w.bloggar you can save your posts locally in a location that you choose, and it also has an import feature where you can import a text file to the w.bloggar editor. When adding an image you can upload it to your FTP from the application, which also works with other file types apart from images, however you are not able to upload images directly to your blog.

- Miscellaneous

I though it was quite strange that I was not able to add a title to my post. I still find it hard to accept that this is not possible, so I am not excluding the fact that I might have missed it. If there is a way to add a title though it definitely isn't straightforward. This was disappointing for me as I don't like the idea of having posts without a title.

- Rating

Can you guess which one of these Blog Publishing Editors I'm posting from?

My aim was to write a review that covers the basic and main features of Blog Publishing Editors in a way that is both helpful and interesting so I hope that someone out there would find this review useful.

Major Rehaul

2008-03-02T08:15:00.000-08:00

A big change just occurred to my blog. When I started this blog, about a month ago, I didn't really have an aim for it, I just wanted a place to post whatever I like. Well, it happens that I wasn't liking the idea too much, it just seemed like one big mess. Now if you knew me you would know that I need everything to be structured, aligned, matching, tidy, so my blog being a mess just wasn't working out. First thing I did was completely change the layout. Yep I just spent 2 hours or so trying to understand how this Blogger XML layout works, so now it looks better, nicer, neater. At least I think it is. I also deleted all previous posts, because they just didn't make sense. I left the one post from yesterday because it is actually part of what I want to achieve with this blog, and when I really decided I wanted to change my blog. I could have left all the posts there and started to write things that made more sense, but the way I am is that when I'm doing something and I'm not liking how it's turning out, I don't try to fix it but start over again. That's part of me wanting everything to be perfect.

So hopefully from now on there won't just be nonsense blurbing on here. Each post I make will have a label, which mainly will be under Blurbs, Updates, Gadgets and Reviews. Blurbs are random posts about whatever, Updates are posts about any updates to the blog, for Gadgets I will be posting pics of the various toys I own, and for Reviews I will be posting about anything that I find interesting i.e. websites, software etc. I have plans to add more but for now I'll just leave it at that. As long as it's not one huge mess that doesn't make sense I'm at peace.

The next thing I will be redoing is my Flickr account. I only have some 15 pics on there so that will be easy. I can't take pics to save my life, but I still want to post pics that I take on there. The point is that I still don't want to have ugly meaningless pics, so I will remove those pics and continue with the moderate pics.

Identify Me

2008-03-01T13:25:00.001-08:00

Some weeks ago I decided that I want to start doing things that I like. This might sound easy enough, but I had a problem, what do I like?? I always start doing something then get bored in a *very* short period of time and drop it. This always makes me think what is wrong with me? Who doesn't know what they enjoy doing or who doesn't have a hobby? Starting this blog was one of the things towards this step, finding out what I like. It feels weird, like I am getting to know myself, except at 21 I think I should know already? I think it's what you're supposed to do while you're growing up, during your early teen years? Well I suppose it's never too late. My problem mainly is that there is no 'me'. I'm whoever people want me to be. If I'm around people that like anime, then to them I like anime. If I'm around people that like gaming, then to them I am a gamer. But in reality I am not really any of these things. And it's even scarier because I don't know myself what I am. I've realized that I spent half my life doing nothing. It seems the only thing I do well is daydream. It makes the time go by. When I'm bored at work for instance, or stuck on a plane for a few hours, or when I'm at home with nothing to do. I don't know if it's even called daydreaming. I make up whole stories in my head, with people that don't exist, or exist but modified in my own way, how I like them to be. I can make up whole lives thinking like that. Some people might even think it's warped. I don't like this fact, so that is why I have embarked on this mission to find me, myself, who I am, what I like.

So far I have learned this much.

I love reading and books. I sort of knew this because I always read a lot, but I never thought of it as a hobby or something I liked doing, I thought it was another thing you normally do, like eat and sleep. So I like reading. And I'm enjoying this DailyLit thing.

I love food of all sorts, and I enjoy cooking. I'm by no means a pro at it, but it's fun. Right now cooking is a big deal, I am walking with crutches and have to hop on one leg, so that makes things ten times harder, but that should be fixed soon and I will be able to get back to normal. Cooking is fun when you don't have to do it, when you absolutely need to cook so you don't starve, then it's not so fun, but other than that it's great. I am hoping that I can actually get better at this.

I made a Flickr account and started taking pictures. While it is fun to take pictures and post them on a website, I am just crap at it. I don't get the lighting business and I don't really know how to use my camera. I don't get what all the settings are for, for instance ISO 800 or 1200? What is ISO and what does it do? That's just one example for you. When I put my camera on Manual all I see is a dark picture, no matter what settings I adjust, light, color, nothing. That is the reason I leave it on Auto, and that doesn't really work. I know if I really wanted to learn how to take pics I could find out a load about it, Google would probably really help, but I don't, so I'll continue to take pics just for fun.

Well that's a start isn't it?