Let me tell you I’ve been searching for something like this for the longest time and I’ve never found it until now. Actually, I didn’t find it. I’d given up searching. It found me.
What am I talking about? A Places Bar Editor!!! Yay!!! Okay, let me explain.
Usually when you do a “Save…” or a “Save As…”, there are shortcuts on the sidebar. Usually these are “My Computer”, “Desktop”, “Network Neighborhood”, “Recent Places”, etc. etc. etc. It’s the default and you can’t change them.
There are tweaks for those using XP. But none so far for Vista. And that’s what I’m currently using. (And I love Vista, it’s the most stable Windows OS I’ve experienced, it’s perfect once you learn how to remove all the annoyances, and none of you XP lovers can ever convince me to go back hehehe!)
Anyhow, I was browsing LifeHacker when I read a post about a tool for editing the places bar! OMG! I downloaded it right away!!! Then edited my Places bar so that everytime I do a “Save As…” I can go straight to my most used folders.
(‘Coz hello, who ever uses that Network Neighborhood shortcut??? And if you like saving to your Desktop, I’m pretty sure that’s the reason your computer loads so slow. And the Recent Places shortcut? Ugh. If it’s gonna take forever to get to my recent places I’ll go find them myself! ;-P)
So anyway. I’m in a happy mood right now. I have a customized Places Bar! Yay for ADDers! Hehehe.
So. The latest development on the Internet is the birth of Cuil – a new search engine. Cuil is an Irish word that means “knowledge”, or so says their About page, heh.
Cuil’s self-proclaimed claim to fame is this:
Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.
Hmm, really now. Wanted to test it out myself, so I went over and the first thing I tried to search on Cuil was — what else? My name! Hahaha. Oh come on. Tell me you won’t do the very same thing!!! Hehehe. (On a sidenote, how many times a week do you search for yourself? ;-P)
On Google, my website usually comes up first, followed by my other profiles. And this Chinese site for bathroom equipment that decided to name their company “Flisha”, of all things!! Wonder what it means in Chinese?
Anyways, so I type in my name on the search box and waited giddily for the results. Guess what comes up on Cuil? This!!!
What the…??? Are they serious??? Not a SINGLE return? I try for “Flisha Fernandez” and other variations I use. Nada. Or if there are any results, it’s not relevant. Hwattt?
Hmph. Fine. Maybe my site is so remote they haven’t found it yet. So I tried in a search for “Philippines”. Here’s how the search results come up:
Hm. I kind of life how they show off the results in a table-like manner. It looks nice. But I still prefer the no-nonsense list from Google. I like that Cuil incorporates a thumbnail per site. But it’s just a picture picked up from the website. I think a screenshot of the website would have been more appropriate.
Oh and the results don’t seem that relevant. Although the Philippine tourism website is up there, the main Philippine government website isn’t, while a very unknown and unfinished website shows up in the top ten. Cuil needs a lot more tweaking I think.
The next thing I do is find out how to include my site(s) to the Cuil directory. There seems to be no form for submitting a URL. All they have to offer on the matter is a brief line buried reclusively in their FAQ. It leads to a link for webmasters (the same link is on the bottom of each page, I just realized). It says:
If you would like Cuil to crawl your site and have it included in our index, please let us know.
So, that’s what I did then. I emailed Cuil to have them crawl my two sites RandomDetox.com and JunkFoodHeaven.com. It took Google less than a week to crawl my new sites, so hopefully Cuil can match that timeframe. We’ll see, anyhow.
Okay, so I’m browsing BoingBoing (one of my favoritest websites in the whole wide web evarrrr!), and they have a post on a Japanese sunblock commercial featuring a fembot. (Their beef is that it’s creepy, but I don’t think she is, then again I’m biased.)
The screencap looks familiar so I clickthrough to watch the video. Here it is, have a watch.
The first few seconds confirm my gut feeling. I’ve seen that robot! I’ve seen her and I’ve touched her!! Have I told you guys the reason I went to Japan earlier this year? It was for a tour of the Computer Science laboratories in NAIST, a university in Japan.
We were introduced to a robot in one of the laboratories. The lab geeks named her, but I forgot now what she was called. Those boys were really attached to her. You could tell by the way they affectionately looked at her and how tenderly they fixed her hair before us, haha. I’m serious!!! (My friends and I later wondered what her true relationship with her boys were hahahaha.)
The lab didn’t create the robot. They bought her for experimental purposes. It was the Robotics lab, by the way. So they did have a legit reason. Hahaha. The robot is made by Sanrio, the same company that makes Hello Kitty and Kerokeroppi (my favorite brands from childhood hahaha).
She’s quite pretty, that robot. Her skin is made of silicon, and the boys let us touch her, and her skin really did feel eerily real. Her hair is made from real human hair. But her makeup is painted on hehe.
We had a few burning questions for the lab geeks. First off, was she anatomically accurate??? Yes, they answered. Hehehehehe. We didn’t ask any follow up questions from that, but were they burning in ours heads? Oh yes. Hahaha.
We jokingly asked if she could be pieced apart like a mannequin, since she’s just a pretty computer. Maybe change her arms, or change her head. We really were just joking. Guess what we were told??? She can change her boobies!!! Hahahaha! I think the lab had a few sizes stored somewhere. Hahahaha! Now you see why we were wondering what she truly meant to the lab hahahaha! A lab that made up of all men, for your information, hahaha.
The lab could control her actions, like eye blinks, or head turning, or voicing out something… I’m saying that BoingBoing video is NOT creepy. The fembot in the video is actually likeable. They should have seen the fembot at the lab, hehe. Now SHE was creepy.
The fembot had a range of emotions. She could look happy, look sad, look angry, and of course shift from one to another in a blink of an eye. Scary hehehe. And it seemed that from the angle we were looking at her, she was staring back at us!!! Doubly scary hahaha.
The lab showed us how they could control the fembot. Of course, at times they would stop showing her off to talk to us, and at times like that sometimes her head would just suddenly fall, or her face lose all expression… hahaha.
It was really one of the most interesting tours we had at NAIST. :-)
I’m not good at night shots but I think I did this one justice… What do you think?
One of the most famous temples in Kyoto. Argh, I wish I could tell you the name, but Japanese names are just too hard to remember! But if you’ve been to Kyoto, you’ve probably been here, because it’s at the end of the famous street where all foreigners go shopping for Kyoto sweets and souvenirs, hehehe.
A majestic view from the temple too, as it sits on the top of a mountain. But ah, that is for another post. :-)
I thought üMobile had forgotten about me. I applied for it over a month ago but never received word back until a few days ago, when someone texted me she would be delivering my SIM on my doorstep.
üMobile is a new mobile service in the Philippines, capital of mobile text messaging. It’s free for the first six months of usage. üMobile will give you P100 ($2) worth of text credits a month for their right to send you sponsored text messages. A peso is worth a text message so that’s a hundred free messages a month.
Personally, I think the mobile user pays too big a price for free load here, especially with another competing carrier Sun Cellular giving unlimited text and calls (Sun-to-Sun only though) for less than P500 a month ($11), no ads of course. I really hate advertisements coming though my email, and I probably will appreciate them less on my mobile phone.
But obviously there’s a market that’s willing to try this, and I’m sure people will want to use it, maybe as their third line. It’s free and that’s always an attractive option. Many people here already have at least two lines, with their main line being either Globe or Smart, and their second line Sun. Some people have all three. So they’ll probably adopt this line too when it goes on the market.
What can I say, Filipinos just love to communicate! Hehehe.
Anyway, I had to try this service, see how many ads I get and how reliable the system is. Here are some pics of the SIM package I received yesterday.
The first message I got from this SIM was a welcome message. The second was an offer to receive their MMS (multimedia messages) settings, which I promptly replied to with a YES. Recieved the settings and installed them.
The third message was the WAP settings, and I installed those too. Got a couple of help messages too. So far, no ads yet. Will use it for a few days and I’ll update you on whatever ads I get. :-)
I’ve got 9 invites to give away. All it takes is a blogroll link on your blog (Please? I need to build up some rank here hehe!). Then comment here with your email address, mobile phone number and I’ll give them to you. If you want the codes for free, go do a search, I’m sure there are still lots of invites available. :-)
I’ve finally gotten my own domain name for this blog. RandomDetox.com, yay! :D
I decided to keep the name Random Detoxification because I’ve used it so much, seems a shame to lose all that name recognition right?? (Haha, dream on, Flisha!)
I foresee all my blog statistics going berserk in the next few days, haha. They’ll probably all vanish into thin air and I’ll have to start building from scratch. But better now than later, right? :D
So anyway, help me out here guys. If you previously linked to my blogspot address, kindly update your blog rolls!
Had a bit of trouble setting up the domain I impulsively bought last night so I decided to create a tutorial for all of you who might be thinking of setting up a GoDaddy domain with Blogger.
First, log in your GoDaddy account. Then, hover your mouse over the Domains tab and click on My Domains.
That will bring you to the Domains page. Click on your domain name. That will bring you to the page below. Click on Total DNS Control and MX Records.
You should now be inside the Domain Manager. You will be modifying one and adding another CNAME here. Do not delete or alter your A Record (Host). (Some tutorials will tell you to do that, but it will only cause trouble later on.)
Modify the CNAME for the host (alias) named www and point it to ghs.google.com. This means that if a user types in www.yourdomain.com, Google will dynamically point the user to any Google server that’s available and loads your page fastest.
So now your www.yourdomain.com should work fine upon publishing in Google (it won’t yet, you haven’t set up Blogger yet). But what if a user decides to just type yourdomain.com, without the www prefix? It will probably load up the GoDaddy parked website. So you have to add another CNAME with the host as yourdomain.com and point it also to ghs.google.com.
And that is all we have to do on the GoDaddy front. Let’s now move on to your Blogger account. Login to your Blogger account, select your blog, and go to the Settings tab and then click on the Publishing subtab.
Right now you’re publishing on Blogger, but we want to use your new domain name so go ahead and click on Custom Domain.
Okay, that will bring you to the page below.
On the same page, click on Switch to Advanced Settings, like in the screenshot below.
On the Advanced Settings page, type your domain name in the box. Don’t forget the www prefix. Then press the Save Settings button.
Now your domain which is www.yourdomain.com should be working. However the URL yourdomain.com is probably still parked at GoDaddy. Let’s remedy that, shall we? Check the checkbox that will allow Google to redirect yourdomain.com to www.yourdomain.com, like in the screenshot. Then Save Settings again.
Voila! Now both ways of typing in your URL are working! Yay!
Okay no. It might not work RIGHT away. Or maybe it will. This one: www.yourdomain.com will probably work right away. But this one: yourdomain.com might take a few minutes to an hour or maybe more, not sure. So if it’s not working, give it a couple of hours.
Don’t go tweaking all your other settings in vain. Don’t listen to people telling you to delete your A record, forward this, redirect that… Because I did and it caused me a lot of headache last night! Until I figured out the meaning of patience. Hahaha.
I’ve been sparse on the updates lately, sorry for that.
It’s just that I’m working on a new blog. :-) I’ve put it up in EntreCard already, wonder how it will fare? :-)
I received so many comments from the biscuits post so I thought, why not do a whole blog on junk food? Everybody loves it (don’t deny…) so it seems like a good idea. Plus, it gives me an excuse to buy and eat all those bad foods I shouldn’t. For the sake of art, right? Hehehe.
