Janette Toral is holding the Influential Bloggers Writing Project, which you can access at http://www.influentialblogger.net/2008/04/top-10-emerging-influential-blogs-in.html, and I have decided to write an entry for it. I’d written an entry before, but turns out most of the blogs existed well before July 2007, so here’s a spanking new list of blogs that have influenced me, listed in no particular order. Continue Reading »
Remember your high school teachers? Oh, those curious creatures. They were either the reason for the smiles on students’ faces or the bane of their existence. They either made your school life easier or made it a living hell.
We love our teachers. No, no, don’t try to argue with me. Trust me, you love your teacher. You just can’t admit it.
I was checking my measly Technorati rank today and found out that Ratified.org had listed my blog in Batch Nine of their ratified list. I sadly have a 626 ratified rank, but I am confident that I will rise through the ranks. Sooner or later.
If you haven’t been ratified yet, submit your blog for ratification now! Ratified.org is a project by Andrew Dela Serna which combines Technorati, Alexa, FeedBurner, and Google stats, takes all of those factors into consideration, and then coughs up a Ratified Rank for you. Only Filipino bloggers are eligible for ratification, although the website says that international versions of the project are coming soon. In addition, your blog must be indexed on Technorati. And, yes, it’s free.
If you are eligible for ratification and have not submitted your blog yet, do so now at http://www.ratified.org/contact.
College.
I’ve been told so many things about it, and what I’ve been told gives me mixed feelings about it. The prospect of freedom and independence are enticing, but the thought of terror professors and five-kilometer-thick books to read scares the shit out of me.
But you’ve got to go through college. (Well, you don’t necessarily have to. You could do it like Bill Gates, but I’m not that smart.) So, I’ve got to contemplate on my college life. Never mind that I really don’t have to concern myself with it since I still have, oh, around two years of gunk to waddle through, but I’m thinking about it anyway. Continue Reading »
If you’re a lurker of this blog (in which case, OMG!!!), you’ll notice that over the past few weeks, its theme has changed a couple of times. Today, I finally settled on Misty Look by Sadish, a fine theme used by many, many bloggers worldwide, as well as people on self-hosted WordPress-powered blogs.
I changed a few of the theme’s elements. You’ll notice that my blog’s name and description does not appear above the image header. I removed that from the header.php file. No biggie. I also edited the notfound.php (404 page) a bit. Just a few lines of text, no biggie as well.
The credits due Sadish are maintained in the footer. This really is a fine theme, and I encourage you guys to at least try it out. Sadish’s blog can be found here: http://wprocks.com/.
Good night!
If you’re like me, you love finding and pouring all your time on good reads. Be it classics such as George Orwell’s 1984 or modern works like Dan Brown’s (in)famous The Da Vinci Code, I simply love immersing myself in the alternate worlds authors create within the pages of their work.
The thing is, once you’ve finished a good read, you’re always itching to get to the bookstore nearest you to snag yourself a copy of another book. However, once you’re in the store, you’re surrounded by endless shelves of novels all looking worthy of your purchase. How do you choose which one to buy? The first thing I do is look for a copy without a plastic cellophane cover and leaf through its contents. If I can’t find such a copy, I’ll obviously check out the blurb on the back of the book. Blurbs, of course, are written in such a way that will make the plot sound interesting and thrilling.
But plots aren’t always interesting and thrilling, now are they? To properly and wholly assess the actual quality of a novel (or any other book for that matter), the most logical thing to do is purchase the book. But you don’t want to purchase a book just to find out that it’s crappy after you’ve read it, right? So, how do you know whether or not a book you’re thinking of buying is worthy of your time?
The few people who follow me on my Twitter account will have read that I am in Cagayan de Oro today, buying school supplies and whatnot in anticipation of the coming school year. Well, we happened to pass by an iPod retailer stall, and I was semi-drooling over an iPod Shuffle and my dad asked me if I wanted to buy one.
What do you think I said?
So, we were about to buy the 4GB shuffle, right? Then I went over to the other side of the stall and found out that they were selling iPod nanos, too. Well, they only had the black ones, but that’s beside the point.
So my dad proceeds to ask me to compare the two versions of Apple’s wildly popular music player extraordinaire. I point out that the shuffle gives you four gigabytes of space, and can only store music (because you can’t view videos and pictures without an LCD screen), while the nano could store eight gigabytes of music, podcasts, pictures and videos, and even has three games.
After a little hesitation, my dad coughed up the ~P8,000 and I got myself an iPod nano.
This is my first Apple product ever, and I was excited to find two Apple stickers in the package. I am still debating as to whether or not I should put a sticker on my Acer TravelMate 6291, because it would probably make the computer look weird.
This will also be my first unboxing video ever! 
) Check it out. Pardon the poor quality. It was shot with a 3.2-megapixel Nokia N93 phone with night mode and flash, underneath the feeble yellow light of a lamp in the hotel we’re staying in.
iPod unboxing from Dean Lozarie on Vimeo.
I thought this would be worth a mention on my own little corner of the blogosphere: a certain Andy has started this little project she calls the “100 Project”. This is what the project website (whose layout is strikingly simple) says:
The 100 Project is a personal challenge aimed at improving my art and disciplining myself in general. The objective is to make 100 vector portraits in 100 days. I strictly allow myself only 1 portrait per day (except Sundays). No procrastinating. No getting ahead of myself. The site will be updated on a weekly basis. The individual ID-sized versions with the color backgrounds are posted in my Multiply in case you want larger copies of the thumbnails. If you share/repost/brag about your portrait in your respective Multiply/LiveJournal/Facebook/whatever accounts or even as much as show it to your seatmate…God loves you, and so do I.
Her DeviantArt profile displays more of her artistic works, but the 100 Project really caught my attention. Go ahead, check it out. Prepare for considerable loading time, though, as popular URL redirection service dot.tk screws with sites a lot. Again, I say, check the 100 Project out.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering, I don’t know the person behind this project personally. Promise.
What’s this I hear on Engadget about the UK planning to record every phone call, email and web page sent by its citizens? Says Engadget,
the Telegraph is reporting that Britain’s Home Office is working on database designed to store the details of every phone call, email, and web page accessed by British citizens in the previous year. The idea is to have various telecom providers hand over their records, which will all go into the database and then accessible by police upon receipt of a court order. Of course, there’s no reason why police couldn’t simply ask the ISPs for the appropriate data when they get that court order, since records are required to be kept for a year, but sometimes it’s important for a government to build a massive scary database of personal information with endless potential for abuse by embittered low-level bureaucrats, you know?
Invasion of privacy much? Unjust eavesdropping much? Potential for abuse much? This is too stupid to call. Let’s hear it in the comments section. 
Recently, I wrote a short post about using numerals in blog posts properly. Today, I decided to write a related post showing you how to use abbreviations properly in not only your blog posts, but all forms of writing (such as articles and even letters). These rules are taken from page 31 of the book “Basic Journalism” by Eufemia C. Estrada and Rosario P. Nem Singh, a must-have book for every campus journalist like me. The rules after the jump.
