We’ve been in an LDR (Long Distance Relationship) for the past three years now. Whoa, has it been that long already?

And yeah, it gets hard at times.The longing and the missing sometimes gets soo bad that it feels as though my mediastinum is ripped into tiny pieces, like it were made up of flimsy urban clothing.

And to think this organ used to pump blood

It was worse back in the day when we first started going LDR. Not a day passed that I didn’t wish that she were beside me. It was as if there was a sudden void, a vacuum that couldn’t be filled except when she was physically with me. But we soon learned to cope.

We found ways to keep in touch. Text messages, MMS’, the occasional phone call. But mostly it was through Skype and Yahoo! Messenger that we were able to spend time together. I remember one Valentine’s Day date that we spent through Yahoo! Messenger. We bought dinner, sat down in front of our webcam’s and just chatted the night away being all silly and stuff.

Lately, we’ve been having a blast with Smart’s Unli Calls Promo. At Php 100 for 5 days or Php 500 for 30 days, you get unlimited free Smart/TNT calls. The drawback though, is that the calls are done in 5-min. pulses, which means that you get 5 minutes of airtime after which you are cut off. Then you’ll have to call again.But still, it’s sulit enough that we got to sing along to youtube karaoke’s and have ice cream dates together.

I shudder to think how much that bill would be without those unli calls.

By the way, to register to Smart’s unli calls promo, just text TALK100 or TALK500 and send to 6400.

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I created my first website in 1999. That was the year the Internet was introduced to me. The very same year I fell in love with the Internet. I poured my heart out online through static pages. I drafted my HTML through Notepad. I crafted my graphics through downloaded image tools.

The butterfly and the Medusanity mask were pastels on paper, scanned and edited for my Medusanity portal.

I’m so gonna miss this space, these memories. I wish someone could save Geocities. I wish I could. Not just this one. But all of it. All of the world’s first foray into online expression. All of the glitter and the blinking. All the tables and the marquees. All the memories.

Goodbye Geocities. Goodbye.

(Hear my heart break into tiny little frames.)

My First Website

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Zesto Wrappers

What can you do with leftover plastic wrappers, the wasteful by-products of an industrialized generation?

Burn them? Bury them? Throw them into space?

You’d be surprised. Zesto does none of these. Instead, Zesto Corporation donates all their (clean but) excess doy pack materials to Gawad Kalinga, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing shelter and livelihood to financially-challenged Filipinos. In turn, GK produces beautifully woven bags from these donated scraps right in their local chapter in GK Sunshineville, BF Resort Village, Las Piñas City, Philippines.

Their product include woven handbags, laptop bags, lunch bags, envelope bags, purses, bed mats, coasters, table tops, place mats, picture frames, storage cases and more.

Last week, I and my fellow bloggers, in coordination with Nuffnang and sponsored by HSBC, got the chance to personally visit GK Sunshineville.

We met up at Starbucks Bonifacio High Street early Saturday, and rode a van towards GK Sunshineville. It was half an hour’s ride away from Makati, and upon getting there, we immediately saw the GKers hard at work weaving strips of doy pack, sewing up bags, making envelops and creating all sorts of wonderful knick knacks.

Project Director Bong Ragojos and the GK Beneficiaries

We met Brother Bong, the project director for the Gawad Kalinga Bayong ng Kabuhayan livelihood project. (Bayong in Filipino means large bag. Bayong ng kabuhayan means livelihood bags.)

He, with the help of his wife, voluntarily manages the Bayong project, as part of  his responsibilities towards Couples for Christ (CFC). The men and women of Gawad Kalinga Sunshineville choose to work for the Bayong project, as most of them are unemployed and with children.

I asked the women how many bags they produce in a day, and they said that on average, they could finish 5-7 each. They are paid about 7 pesos per bag they create. Each bag sells for about Php200-300. (But more when sold via retailers.)

Bayong ng Kabuhayan Samples

Here are sampler bayongs from the Bayong project. Lovely, aren’t they? From afar, you can’t even see that they’re made out of Zesto materials.

The generic silver bags are Bayong’s best seller. They’re a hit locally. Interestingly, foreigners and Filipinos overseas prefer those that show the Zesto labels. I completely understand. Who wants to walk around carrying a bag that matches your buddy’s snack? However, a local product is certainly something unique abroad.

I was enamored with the silver bag as well, but I’m not a fan of the handbag. I wanted a laptop bag, but the one they currently had on display had a black strap. I wanted the earthy brown strap they used for the other bags. They were only too happy to oblige, except that they couldn’t find a long enough strap to hold my laptop bag. Aw. However, they said they could do it, I’d just have to follow up. GK Sunshineville, I’m holding you to your promise!

If you are interested in purchasing these bags, they do accept orders and even customizations. You can contact Mr. Bong Ragojos via mobile phone 63.2.9173907861/63.2.9196120202 or email him at ljragojos2002@yahoo.com.

My thanks goes out to Nuffnang, especially Patty, for inviting us to this event, and Abby, for buying us lunch. Thanks to Gawad Kalinga as well for giving me a bag! (More on the next post!)

To see more photos of the trip, see the gallery below.

[View with PicLens]

12►

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It’s happened to the best of us. Things happen, flights get delayed, transferred, postponed, or worse, canceled! I recently read about this woman who booked a whole slew of seats for her guests a full month before her wedding. But a few days before the big day, one of the planes flying the route crashed and the airline had to cancel all the flights for the week to give way for runway repairs. So this girl who was about to get married had to find a way to book tons of extremely cheap flights at the last minute! Poor girl!

Story short, she was able to rebook some of the flights with the help of the airline, but for the most part she had to make new arrangements with other companies. And since it was the last minute and all, the flights didn’t come cheap. In fact, she lost quite a bit of money.

If she’d only made use of the Internet instead of sticking to phone calls and travel agents, maybe she could have saved some dough. There are a lot of Internet companies that she could have used for free to look for cheap last minute flights, such as Kayak [link], Travelocity [link] and even Yahoo Travel [link]. She could have even made fare comparisons, if she had found FareCompare [link] or PriceLine [link].

There are so many resources on the Internet these days, it’s a shame not to use them, wouldn’t you say?

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I’m lucky I have a not-so-common nickname. Flisha, as my father invented it. I get to have a simple username unlike my sister Tricia and Melisse, who often have to use numbers to claim a unique username.

Still, there are a few other people with my name so I’m OC when it comes to signing up for new services. I’ve gotta claim my name first. I’m sure I’m not the only one with this new age disorder, so teh Internet geeks have found a way to help us cope.

UserNameCheck.com checks whether your preferred username is still available or already taken among the many Internet websites they have listed.

I found a lot of new sites I’d never known about and started registering like mad for an hour or so. Haha. Now I have like 20 new accounts that I don’t what I’m going to do with.

The list of services is a bit lacking, though. I would love for this tool to incorporate more searches for social networks. Where’s FaceBook and OpenID? In the Philippines, Friendster trumps all other social networks, although Multiply (listed) is fast gaining ground. Ning is also an emerging player that’s not on the list.

A lot of the included searches are for start-ups like Kwippy and Jaiku, invite-only sites. Flickr and Picasa shouldn’t be part of the search, I think, since these services use e-mail addresses as usernames, so they’d probably be eternally available for the username one prefers.

Still the major sites you’d expect to find are there. The very useful ones are Blogger, Digg, eBay, Gmail, Yahoo, Multiply, MySpace, Stumbleupon, Technorati, Twitter and Plurk.

So if you’re username-obsessed like me, go visit the site.

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Sound familiar? Maybe you’re looking for Youtube.

Youtube is one of the most popular websites in the world. In fact, Alexa reports it as the third most popular website, behind only Google and Yahoo. It’s also one of the most misspelled domains, and many people regularly type in the terms yotube, youtub, yutube, yuotube or youtbe in their haste to get to the popular video site.

I compared these five terms (five is the maximum number of keyterms allowed for comparison) in Google Trends and you can see the result below. The term “yotube” leads the pack by a large margin, and is followed by “youtub“, “yutube“, “youtube” and “youtbe“.

Obviously these are not the only misspellings that people search for, but these are the most popular.

The next four most popular misspellings begin with Youtuve, while the third set begins with Yputube. Click to see them!

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There are hundreds if not thousands upon thousands of search engines in the world wide web, but only a few is regarded to be very good; and which gives you the information that you really need – very quickly.

Google makes it to the top of the list. Google usually is the safest search tool, and you can usually find what you need or want on the first page – and on the very first try. Yahoo! comes next, although sometimes there are a number of things that do not appear in Yahoo!, but which appear in Google.

Meanwhile, factual questions can be answered adequately in search engines such as Ask Jeeves, Factbites, Answers.com and Brainboost. But if you’re working on an academic paper, then FirstGov, EducationWorld, CompletePlanet, MagPortal, Scirus, National Geographic Map Machine and Yahoo Reference are just the sites you need.

You need sounds, music or movies? Then try Loomia, Torrent Typhoon, The Internet Movie Database, SingingFish and Podscope. If you’re still in doubt, or if you simply want to try as many search engines as possible, then try 20search.com, a pretty cool website that simply provides search services of 20 different search engines.

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I haven’t seen the bastard in almost five months. Hmph. I’m in northern Philippines and he’s in southern Philippines. We’re 7,000 islands apart.

I haven’t had a kiss, a hug or a cheek pinch (the wholesome cheek) in forever! The only time I get to see my Gim is during our Yahoo video chats.

Here’s what we do online.

Fli-fli: Gim-gim !!!

Gim-gim: Fli-fli !!!

Fli-fli: Hey I have an idea… Lightbulb lights up!

Fli-fli: Let’s pretend we’re kissing each other!!! Hee!! Giggles.

Gim-gim: Like this??? Puckers.

Fli-fli: No. Passionately. Like this. Closes eyes.

Gim-gim: Ohhhh I see… Mmmmwww–

  

Fli-fli: No Gim-gim! Chuckles, giggles. You look like a monkeeey! Like thiiiiis!

Gim-gim: Like this??? Laughing uncontrollably.

  

Fli-fli: No! Natural! Like this! See?

Gim-gim. Ohhhh. My neck is starting to ache…

 

Fli-fli: Just one more time Gim-gim!!

Gim-gim: Like this???

Fli-fli: Oh never mind!!!

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Internet Explorer 7 is officially out of beta. I must say I like the new features – especially tabbed browsing.

The first browser I really liked was Maxthon, back in the days of IE versus Netscape, since only Maxthon offered tabbed browsing. But Firefox came and took my breath away with its useful functions (Ctrl++ made my life so much easier ), multitude of extensions AND tabbed browsing. IE 6 never had a chance.

Now IE’s bouncing back and I likey. Here’s my opinion.

My Favorite Features…

1. Tabbed Browsing

   Yes, I’ve mentioned it like, only four times now. (Tabbed browsing! Tabbed browsing! Oh god, sometimes I feel like a child.) I like that you can move the the tabs around in any order you like. I like that each tab has its own close icon (in Firefox sometimes I close the wrong tab because the x icon is at the far right, for all tabs). I like that there’s a new tab icon on the tab toolbar, if you’re not the type who remembers most keyboard shortcuts and hates incessant clicking for a simple and oft-used procedure (fortunately, I’m a keyboardie). There’s also a Quick Tabs icon that shows you all the tabs on one page like slides in MS Powerpoint. And a dropdown tab list. Why would you need those when you can see your tabs right in the toolbar? Unless you open a LOT of tabs. Which I normally don’t do since I close a tab when I don’t need it anymore. Besides, too many tabs weigh down your browser.

2. Much More Readable Text

   I don’t know what they call this feature, but it resembles how text is rendered in Adobe Reader. It’s just much clearer. And I spend a lot of time in front of the PC. Around 5-6 hours at work, straight. Then when I get home, another 5-6 (or more!) hours just surfing or watching movies or editing my blog. And my eyesight really suffers, which is why again, I love the Ctrl++ from Firefox. (Incidentally, Ctrl++ also works in IE. but a slight disadvantage is that the page dances while you do it. Weird.) Whatevs, any program that attempts to help me read is A-OK in my book.

3. Customizable Search

   LiveSearch is the default search engine. But you can add others like Google (like anybody uses any other) and Yahoo and Wikipedia. Obviously, Firefox has introduced a lot of indispensable features.

What I Don’t Like…

1. Tiny important icons

   And they’re distributed all over the place too. I had to find where the refresh button was. And the stop button looks more like a close button – which is confusing. It’s nice that there’s more space for viewing the page but, like I said, my eyesight is kinda poor, so I really don’t like having to search around for a tiny icon every 20 seconds.

2. Not enough options

   One thing I like in Firefox is that I could set it in such a way that whenever another program tries to open a website and I already have Firefox open, the link shows up in a new tab instead of a totally new window. Or I could say that every link I click must be opened in a new tab, even if the link is HTML-set to open in a new window. The reason we want tabs is that we don’t want extra windows of the same program, right? But IE doesn’t seem to have those options, so a lot of the times I still get my taskbar cluttered with IE windows. Sorry! I realized it was just under Tools -> Settings -> Tabs.

Overall…

Well, it’s only been an hour of browsing so I haven’t really made up my mind. I think IE’s really good at copying Firefox. But except for the nicely readable text, I don’t see anything that makes it better than Firefox.

So, Firefox’s still my default browser. But all that nicely readable text from IE is really trying to lure me away.

Hm. Who says they can’t coexist?

Uh-oh, I Spoke Too Soon!

Using the Blogger editor with IE 7 is making my head ache. Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y don’t work, ekkk! And what you see, you don’t get!

Back to work, IE. Pronto!

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Don’t you just hate Blogger sometimes???

It has so many limitations.

For one, it can’t host pictures. So you have to use Flickr or Photobucket. (I tried to use Blogger’s own Hello + Picasa but it takes forevah to load!)

Second, you can’t have categories. How helpful are archives by month, or worse, week, really??? I’d rather categorize my posts by content rather than by date, wouldn’t you? It would be so much easier for viewers to find the posts that they were interested in instead of browsing through your endless rantings that had no connection to one another except that they’d been written continuously.

For another, you can’t upload additional HTML pages. I know, I know, it’s a blog site. But *still*, there are just times when you need some extra space! Like when you’re a devoted HTML fan and you just looove editing your page. And you can’t put an iframe on your blog because where will it point to when you can’t upload another file on your server?!?

See, I’ve been talking about redesigning my blog. And I have created a design already — it’s been in my PC for weeks. I can’t host my background on Blogger so I put it up on Geocities, my favorite free server before it was acquired by Yahoo. Now I use an iframe in this new design and it’s supposed to point to the page where I will put my blog posts. Ok, so I also upload this to Geocities. Now my Blogger post tags are on this page hosted by Geocities. So when I load my page on Blogger the template tags don’t work. Ok, so I change my base tag to point to my Blogger subdomain, not to my Geocities subdomain. But it still won’t work!!! Arrgghhh!!!

Which brings me to my last observed limitation:

Blogger’s support *sucks* !!! I click on almost every page of Blogger Help and I can’t find an answer to my problem. I scourge the web for enlightenment, but nothing!!! Just found ex-Bloggers who have moved on to better hosts! So I *finally* decide on my last resort. Email Blogger Help.

So I email and tell them, hi, can you help me, I need to know how I can solve my prob, blah blah blah, and I get as detailed and as humble and as helpless as I can possibly sound on paper, and I wait and *hope* for a response.

Next day I open my Gmail, and look, there it is! A reply from Blogger. Wow, that was quick, I thought, so happy to hear from them. I read my email, and what do I find??

AAAARRRGGGGHHHHHH!!!!

It’s an automated reply which redirects me to Blogger Help and tells me to email them again if I don’t find an answer to my question.

AAAARRRGGGGHHHHHH!!!!

And so I am giving up on *ever* using an iframe with Blogger.

If anybody wants to see what was supposed to be my new layout for Blogger, here it is, still in very very raw form, as you can see all the Blogger tags are there, and I hadn’t edited my sidebar or my header yet, and so, ugly as it is: (Might put this up in Tabulas, though, I’m starting a new account there.)

If anybody else has had the same experience as I have, please email me. Misery just looooves company.

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