I’m sorry if my title misled you to think this is going to be one serious post. It’s not. Not really. I’m going to mumble jumble here, sorry.
I was walking up the stairs to my workplace after getting a cup of coffee from the vendo machine when this torrent of people from upstairs rushed towards me that made me almost trip and splash the content of the paper cup all over the place. Or worse, on some officemates (I actually did that once, when I was walking too close behind someone that when this person stepped back, I spilled my brewing coffee on her back. Good thing, it was a friend. Bad thing, it was a friend.). I notice that I sometimes get easily startled even when I’m just walking around, which is not a good thing. I mean I can space out while sitting at my desk but not when I’m climbing a flight of stairs on a (semi)high-heeled shoes. It’s not as if I’m wearing comfortable Dansko Shoes at work. And how many times have I gotten paranoid about tripping and falling down the stairs? Geez, I think that last part was partly caused by too much caffeine. Makes me a nervous wreck and all jumpy all the time. Yet that’s one thing I cannot live without - coffee.
But now that I thought about shoes, I think I’d like to get myself some Dansko Clogs. I haven’t really bought comfortable footwear since, well, I don’t remember really. I’ve not been shopping lately, in my attempt to save some cash, although I may need to soon. Dansko shoes and clogs is probably a good place to start. And now this reminds me of a lot of things I’ll also need to buy – office attire, shirts, pants, bags, and toiletries. I think I may have to avoid the mall for now.
Business is something I don’t understand, although I probably should have because I was brought up to learn to manage one. As it happened, I didn’t fulfill a number of things I was supposed to be. I guess I’m a rebel that way. Friends are always talking about putting up some sort of business together and my contributions to the idea are always along the lines of “Can it be a bookstore?”, “Can it be a coffee shop?”, “I’ll man the place if it’s a bookstore and/or a coffee shop.” Nobody ever listens to me, of course.
As your years of working for a company goes up, you tend to think of alternative ways to earn a living. I once tried to research about stock trading and it gave me nosebleeds. But as they say, you’ve got to learn before you earn. There’s this site that offers tutorial on e-mini trading that may prove useful. It’s actually a course on trading concepts and how to understand the market, be it e mini, S&P 500, swing trading, or any other style of trading. I think it may be a good start and introduction for novices like me, although I can’t really promise that I’ll learn the art of it because to be honest it’s quite a bit far from my interests. It just sounds like something that may be profitable, is all.
My almost 3-year-old, much-used DVD player stopped working recently so I had to immediately replace it . Because we don’t have cable TV, my sister and I rely on DVDs a lot and do marathon watching all the time. Naturally, when it started to work all wonky, I also started to panic and prepared myself to buy a new one. So I did and I’m currently loving my new player. Here’s why: it is very cheap and it is divx capable. Now I can watch my downloaded videos and .avi files without having to convert them to DVD (.vob files) format. The conversion process used to take me hours and I’m limited to a few (mostly just 2) movies in one blank DVD media. Now, the 4.7 Gb capacity of the DVD-R can take up to five .avi movies and I can watch them all using my new player on the same video quality! Yipee!
Now this all fine and good but what’s problematic is if you want to convert your VHS movies into another, more updated format. I don’t know of any device that you can currently use at home to do VHS to DVD conversion, but if anyone knows anything, please drop me a message. I have a few more VHS movies at home, like Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet (the one with Claire Danes and Leonardo Di Caprio), that I would want to try to convert. I remember that when the VCD format started to come out, a lot of people are saying that VHS still provides better video quality. But now, in the era of DVD and Blu-Ray, you’ll hardly see any VHS movie, or players for that matter, anywhere. With commercial films, you can always buy them on the newer formats anyway. But some people have home movies, like wedding footage for instance, that they may want to preserve, and having them converted from vhs to dvd seems to be a smart move to do. Once it is converted, you can even make backup copies easily. Now, I don’t have Blu-Ray yet and it make take a while before it really takes over the DVD market, but those who are already using this technology can also opt for a VHS to Blu-Ray video transfer.
It can sometimes blow your mind to think about how fast technology changes and improves on itself. It’s also a bit disheartening that it doesn’t come without a price tag. The trick here, I found, is to be patient. Do not jump on the latest tech thing at once and you will soon get them on a much lower price when it becomes superseded by yet another upgrade.
I always say that I want a faster Internet connection. I really do. I do a lot of downloads and video watching online, that’s why. My current download speed is supposedly 384 kbps. I heard that for the almost same price I’m currently paying, I can get a 1 Mbps Internet connection bundled with a phone line. Truth be told, I’d rather have a cable Internet and cable TV bunde but apparently, my area of residence is not serviceable. I can’t even get a cable TV because my apartment unit is too far from the main line! Imagine that. But with all the offers of Internet providers out there, I think I may have to review my options again. There may be new promos I am not yet aware about, something that may be at par with a Hughes Net Deal. I’m not sure if satellite Internet is better than cable Internet or DSL, though. What I’m using now is sort of like that and although I do not have intermittent connection anymore, I wish that it could be a little bit faster. I’m sounding so impatient now, am I not? According to the blurb of Hughes Net satellite Internet, they are 30 times faster than dial-up. My current provider says they are 7 times faster than dial-up so I guess there’s no comparison there, really. Hughes Net offers a $50 referral reward, even. Well, if I can find something like that, I’m definitely changing Internet company right away.
I’ve been stacking up my books, specifically the unread ones, because I’m trying to set this goal for myself to finish three books (300-500 pages or so) in one week. I don’t deny that this is virtually impossible, with my job and other life stuff, but I’d like to try. I’ve been inspired by all these people on Goodreads who have, like, hundreds of books in their “bookshelves” and actually have reviews for much of them. Besides, I do have quite a number of unfinished books (and others still to come by mail) in my shelf and I think there’s no better time to give them my, albeit divided, attention.
For this endeavor, I’m thinking of creating a schedule wherein the three books for the week will have to be from different genres or at least must be of different tones. I’m about to finish Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and as great as that book is, I would not want to follow it up with Donna Tart’s The Secret History (another psychological thriller that deals with crime/murder). I was never one to organize my time and although I really don’t think I should start to practice time management on a leisure activity rather than on more important things, like work (*rolls eyes*), I still think it would be fun to actually do it. Although to tell you the truth, if I can finish one in a week, I’ll be relatively happy.
I wish I have a nice sofa, though, or anything comfortable to sit on while reading (like those huge bean bags and ottomans with back support and a foot stool). That would make everything infinitely better! I also like to buy discount bathroom vanities but my bathroom’s all but a few feet wide so it would be nonsense; I guess those stuff, I can just dream about.
This, project, however, I hope I can keep up with until I’m finished with every book I have and too broke to buy a new one. Anyway, for next week, here are my books on queue.
Those who have been blogging for a while or have been around blogs probably heard or read about all these hooplas about SEO, or website search engine optimization. If you have no plans of putting up a Web site or creating blogs and possibly making some moola out of them, then you probably don’t have to worry about this. For those who are interested in search engine marketing, however, it is important to know that SEO is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines. This only means that there are steps you can follow to make sure that you will drive people to your site through search engines, like Google for example. If your site is optimized, then people who enter search keywords in the Internet will find links to your site; the more optimized your site is, the earlier it would appear on the search results.
I must admit I still don’t understand how this works. For free domains such as this one, what I understand is that putting “tags” on posts is the only way to help make your posts and your site highly searchable. People who don’t want to deal with these stuff themselves can look for an SEO firm to do the work for their sites. If you care about your site’s visibility and ranking schemes such as Google page rank or Alexa ranking, which are essentially measures of how “popular” your site is, SEO is something that you’ll have to familiarize yourself with. That’s why I’m ending now this so I can start on my research.
My sisters will be going on a trip (Bohol-Cebu) this March and I’m going to be left behind, yet again. There’s nothing that can make me feel like a less-than-fun-loving person right now. But I’m just setting my priorities straight (said I to myself). It’s not that I don’t like to travel; I *so* want to go, but there are more important things to place my resources on right now. Actually, it has been that way for a while and I don’t see any change in “scenery” anytime soon. Hah, but first chance I get (at any time that is not now), I’ll go on one of those Singles Cruises. What, you don’t think a Single Holiday can be fun? Yeah, maybe not. But it’s something that I’d like to try someday. I’m not really the super-adventurous type. Frankly, I gather a lot of courage from knowing that I have people with me to watch my back if I’m about to do anything risky. I don’t even travel much with friends so it’s quite difficult to imagine how I would fare going on Solo Holidays. Still, there’s a certain excitement, and even charm, that I get from the idea of being brave enough to go some place I’ve never been before, where I don’t know anyone. I’m adding that to my things to do before whatever list (they’re all pretty much just in my head right now).
I know a lot of people don’t like to be spoiled when watching movies or TV shows, or even when reading books. I can understand the motivation for that - knowing what would happen in the story takes away from the experience; preconceived notions are fun to work with and alter as the viewer makes progress with the storyline.
Yeah, I don’t practice that. I’m so impatient that I usually read spoilers first before I watch anything. I need to know if I’ll be spending time on something I think I can enjoy.
So here’s another series I’ll soon watch. Battlestar Galactica is about to wrap up its 4th and final season on the SciFi channel and it’s about time I take a peek on this critically acclaimed and award-winning show. The last series from SciFi that I watched was Steven Spielberg’s Taken, and it remains one of my ultimate favorites along with The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Battlestar Galactica continues from the 2003 mini-series to chronicle the journey of the last surviving humans from the Twelve Colonies of Kobol after their nuclear annihilation by the Cylons. The survivors are led by President Laura Roslin and Commander William Adama in a ragtag fleet of ships with the Battlestar Galactica, an old but powerful warship, as its command ship. Pursued by Cylons intent on wiping out the remnants of the human race, the survivors travel across the galaxy looking for the fabled and long-lost thirteenth colony: Earth.
Note: There are no ‘aliens’ here.
Neil Gaiman’s Coraline is a very fast read but that doesn’t make it less entertaining. I actually finished reading the book in 3 days. Now, that doesn’t sound really fast, no? Well, I used 30 minutes each of those days reading the book while working my legs on this mini-”stepper” I bought from a sports equipment store. Nothing like finishing a book while burning up calories, heh! I bet the best weight loss pills out there cannot top that.
It’s a children’s tale, for sure, and a creepy one at that. It’s the story of a young girl who feels neglected by her parents; Coraline is a bit too smart for her sake and fancies herself as an “explorer.” She discovered this door in her house that leads to an alternate universe that mirrors her real world, where she has a monstrous-looking but seemingly caring ”other mother” and “other father.” The problem is, they want her to stay and never go back to her normal life.
It’s a classic story of good versus evil. Recommended for ages 8 up.
This domain was offline for at least four days. I know because I’ve been checking everyday. Some people who own a blog here were starting to see the exit signs - they’ve been thinking about setting up other blogs to other free domains. Understandable concern. Being someone who has been doing this for quite a while and seeing that I have at most 47 pages worth of posts here, I thought I should also be thinking of the same thing and start to recognize the exit sign myself. However, I also have a blog hosted on a paid server and I know that these things, however frustrating, happens. Once, my other site took a downtime of more than two weeks, and I couldn’t do anything. I have a very cheap hosting plan, so it didn’t really surprise me that the service was just awful. Beggars can’t be choosers, huh?! The thing about free domains, however, is that they rarely have downtimes. At least as far as my experience goes. The downside, however, is that you don’t have control over your database so in case of data loss, everything goes down the drain unless you have a backup of each and every post in your local drive.
Anyway, I’m just happy that this site is back online and that I still have everything as it was. No large EXIT SIGNS for me in the realm of dot ph. Thank you to the powers that be; you did good work here.
