Gim has just left for Dapitan again, and I am all alone in Zamboanga. I hate when Gim leaves, because all my friends are always so busy to go out. Right now I wish I were practicing my swimming, but I would never do that alone. (Read: Can’t deal with wearing a swimsuit without anyone to hide behind.)

Gim left before I could hand him cash so he could get me the Montano sardines I asked him to buy for me in Dipolog. (I in turn will bring it to Manila as pasalubong in April. My uncle likes them.)

There aren’t any credit card machines in Dapitan, not that I know of anyway, so it’s a good thing there’s BPI Expressonline. I have an account there, and since I so often transfer funds to Gim’s account so he can buy me stuff (LOL am I a demanding girlfriend or what!), I’ve actually had my bank add his account in my Transfer Funds list so I can automatically send him money whenever I need to. (My mom is in that list, too, because I constantly have to pay her for stuff I charge on her credit card hahaha.)

He’s coming back in a few days, though, so I really shouldn’t feel this antsy. Still, I miss him. And in two weeks, I’ll be leaving him again. :(

I want to be permanently attached to his side. Is that possible? Or am I turning into the psycho girlfriend he never wanted?

Time for another round of Cebu Pacific promos. This time it’s valid for travel during the second half of the year, from June 1 to December 31, 2009.

All fares below are one way and Go Lite (no baggage allowance except for carry-on).

Jump in to check the prices and destinations!

Domestic Seat Sale

Seats for P188: Manila-Busuanga (Coron), Manila-Cauayan (Isabela), Manila-Cebu, Manila-Iloilo, Manila-Laoag, Manila-Legaspi, Manila-Naga, Manila-San Jose, Manila-Tuguegarao, Cebu-Dumaguete

Seats for P488: Manila-Bacolod

Seats for P788: Cebu-Siargao

Seats for P1,388: Manila-Davao

International Seat Sale

Seats for P799: Clark-Bangkok, Clark-Hong Kong, Clark-Macau, Clark-Singapore, Manila-Kota Kinabalu (Sabah), Manila-Kaohsiung, Manila-Taipei

Seats for P1,299: Manila-Macau, Manila-Hong Kong, Cebu-Singapore

Seats for P1,799: Manila-Bangkok, Manila-Singapore, Manila-Ho Chi Minh, Manila-Guangzhou, Cebu-Hong Kong

Seats for P2,799: Manila-Shanghai, Manila-Jakarta, Manila-Kuala Lumpur

Seats for P2,999: Manila-Osaka

Seats are on sale until March 31, 2009.

Technology is utterly amazing. These days I’m playing around with ShoZu, a mobile phone app that I’ve had on my Sony Ericsson W960i since last year, but I only got around to exploring it last week.

Basically, it finds images and videos in your phone and allows you to send them to different destinations like Facebook, Blogger, Twitpic, Multiply, Friendster, LiveJournal, Youtube, a random email address or wherever, really. (Maybe even your Slingbox one day.) ShoZu supports most blog and social networking sites in the Internet, so it’s really convenient to upload stuff from your phone to the web – instantly.

Let me show you how it works on my phone.

Once installed, the icon shows up in your Control Panel or your list of applications. Here I just made a shortcut to it on my desktop. (It’s the orange O.)

Open up ShoZu, and you’ll see this. It can save your phonebook to your ShoZu account so if ever your phone gets lost, you still have a backup of your contacts on the web. You can ZuCasts, which are feeds from your friends, meaning you can see what they have uploaded. To upload stuff yourself, select Share-It.

I see I have 40 files and 10 destinations. My files can be photos or videos, anything that I’ve taken using my camphone will show up here. Destinations means the places I can send my media to (set when I created my ShoZu account). For some reason, the Commens tab shows only comments I get from Flickr, but not the ones from Facebook or Twitpic. So, anyway, to upload something, I select All Files.

Now I can see all my latest photos and videos. I see I’ve already sent my Bulb of Garlic photo awhile ago. It has the orange ShoZu logo which means it’s been uploaded at least once already. (You can upload again, especially if you want to send to other destinations.) I can upload one photo at a time, or many at a time. I check the boxes of the photos I want to upload.

Of course, I don’t want my photos sent uncaptioned or untitled. So I select a photo, click on More >> Add Details. And I get to this spot, where I can add a title for my photo, and below, a description, and even tags.

Time to upload my Bananas photo. As you can see, the first button says Send to Twitpic. Since I love to use Twitpic, which automatically updates my Twitter, which then automatically updates my Plurk and Facebook accounts, I set it as my One-click photo site. (You can set this in your ShoZu account. Best to do it on a laptop instead of a mobile phone.) Anyways, this time I think I want to send this photo straight to my blog. So I click on More >> Send to other >> destination >> Google Blogger.

After some time… ta da!!! Here is my bananas post!

There it is up on my blog! :-) ShoZu adds the posted by ShoZu graphic, which I don’t like, so when I have the time later on, I edit it out of my blog post. I didn’t add a description awhile ago, so this photo only has a title. But if I had, it would have been placed below my photo. Here is an example of my post of the Astoria Regency Pool.

And it’s that easy! Cool, huh?

P.S. ShoZu connects to Internet (duh) so you have to make sure you have Internet access on your phone. At home, I connect to my wifi router. And when I am outside, I make sure to visit wifi hotspots so I can upload my photos on the go.

Its where I go to swim! Ü Im testing ShoZu. This is totes fun! From the camph0ne straight to the blog. Wowz. Ü

I used Shozu. :)

Earlier today I was deciding on a specialty in medicine for myself, suppose I were a doctor. I thought maybe neurosurgery would be perfect for me. Every day I could roll my eyes and tell someone, in a totally disparaging sort of way:

It’s not *brain* surgery.

But I mustn’t be hasty. I did consider other specialties. I thought oncology would be so cool. It totally wouldn’t be my fault if my patient dropped dead, plus I could concoct all sorts of experiments and maybe I’d find a cure for cancer. I’d have time to splurge on regular shopping sales too.

I told Gim (my doctor boyfriend who wants to specialize in orthopedics and say Dude feel my biceps! all day long) this and when I got to the oncology part, his brow furrowed and immediately he replied:

Bun, I don’t think that’s for you. Oncologists have to be really generous and unselfish.

FML.

So then we proceeded to discuss neurosurgery. Hypothetically.

Gim introduced me to these videos of parkour, sort of an extreme sport that resembles martial arts but is more focused on the flight rather than the fight. It was founded by David Belle, a French guy who stars in this BBC footage below.

Amazing, no? He reminds me of Spiderman, except that he doesn’t have any web strands. So I guess that makes him better than Spiderman. :) While it’s stunning how the man can jump over steel buildings so effortlessly like that, I can just imagine the horrible and fatal injuries he could get if something went wrong.

Jump in to see a cute David Belle commercial and some more videos. Even women are getting into this urban sport!

It’s true. My dream come true!

Dreamhost is offering free hosting with DreamHostApps. You can create a free subdomain on dreamhosters.com so your blog will look like yoursite.dreamhosters.com. You could also use a domain you already have or register a new one with DreamHost ($9.95).

You get WordPress, Drupal, phpBB, ZenPhoto, MediaWiki, Google Apps and Gmail totally freely hosted by DreamHost for life. (They said it on their blog so it’s their word not mine.)

DreamHostApps is in beta stage so they might start charging a fee once it’s out of beta, but only to new users. Or this could be a big publicity stunt, and they’re not really going to charge anything for it, they just want loads of people signing up thinking it’s some exclusive opportunity that’s expiring soon.

Who cares? It’s free hosting! Sign up or you’re totally missing out!

P.S. Eh. I spoke too soon. Hosting is limited, there is no file-level access so you can’t actually upload your own themes or plugins. In time, it may rival Blogger (DreamHostApps offers subdomains, free apps plus unlimited content, storage. It’s awesome). But for now, it’s best they keep it free. People start creating themes for DreamHostApps!

Yay! True Blood will finally make its way to the Philippines via HBO Asia’s Max Channel, on April 9 at 9pm.

This will be True Blood’s first showing in Asia, and if you cannot wait to see the entire series an agonizing week at a time, you can download the series from Mininova. (As I did, right after reading the Sookie Stackhouse books.)

If you’re a fan of Twilight, I am not sure you will like True Blood. There’s a lot more gore, sex and gritty reality to this vampire fantasy. But if you’re one very disappointed vampire fan (from the overhyped book, and the terrible movie), then give True Blood a shot.

I swear this is one case where I think the screen surpasses the novel. But, read the book first. You’ll be able to appreciate how Alan Ball, the director of True Blood, takes the book and transforms it so elegantly to the screen. The plot and story are perfectly intact, but nothing is spoonfed from the book, the series even examines some characters more closely than the books ever did. The actors fit their parts to a tee and can actually act (Anna Paquin won a Golden Globe for her performance), the shots, the scripts, the scenes are utterly amazing, and if the Southern Vampire Mysteries couldn’t get real enough, True Blood will certainly deliver all the grit, the gore and the glamour you can devour.

Trust me, you don’t want to miss this show.

Hot on the heels of the Globe Visibility rebranding comes the newly minted “Smart Big Bro”, previously named Smart Bro Prepaid.

It has been repriced from P2500 to the lower price of P1995. It comes with free P100 worth of load (5 hours of Internet usage).

The device uses a 3G or HSDPA (high speed data packet access, if I remember my Network class lol) signal, whichever is available.

HSDPA speed is up to 2Mbps, but HSDPA is very limited in the Philippines. I don’t think it is even available outside of Manila (and even in Manila it is spotty at best), so other cities will probably just get 3G with a top speed of 384Kbps (or worse, GPRS).

Of course, published speed is never the same as actual speed. Actual speed depends on how strong the signal is in your area and how many users are tapping on that signal. If you want to know how fast 3G in your area is, try surfing the web using your cellphone (make sure it is on 3G and not GPRS). That’s the speed you get. If you want to know how fast GPRS is… well, I think dial-up is comparable to that.

Internet surfing on Smart Big Bro costs P10 for every 30 minutes. The kit comes with the USB wifi device and a Smart SIM which you can load up like regular SIMs, except this one will pay your Internet charges and not your phone bill.

Smart Big Bro is not available for international roaming so if you’re on your Sydney or Paris or Orlando vacations, you’re out of luck.