Priorities. No matter how you look at it, it all boils down to priorities. An online life, or a blogger’s life in particular, isn’t rewarding in its entirety. Sure, you get to meet a lot of people and make new friends and stay in touch with old ones. However, the fact of the matter is, there’s still an offline life that everyone has to manage, whether we like it or not.

Putting everything in the cloud is awesome, I must say. But that is just one small facet of a daily routine that eventually has to fill a necessity that comes with the territory of being alive.

Blogging for a living isn’t as rewarding as some might think. Yes, it comes with a sense of fulfillment whenever someone finds one of your posts useful. But the bottomline is that it has to answer one fundamental, metaphorical question: does it put food on the table?

A few birthdays ago, I wouldn’t mind mooching off of my parents to get by. But as time progresses, desires start to overwhelm practicality, and it may not be noticeable, but the hunger for that one gadget starts to eat you up from the inside. The solution is very simple, of course. You get a job.

Once you finally land a job that pays just enough for you to get what you really want, your priorities start shifting. The lifestyle you were accustomed to before starts changing, with or without your noticing it. What do you do then? You get another job that pays better, or you get a second job. Inevitably, with this change, your lifestyle changes too. Before you know it, you’re spending well above your means to pay, and you get sucked into more bills.

Reality checks may be a cliche, but it is a necessity for everyone to do this once in a while, like every month. A lifestyle change will definitely affect your priorities. A marriage, most significantly will. What mostly fails individuals whenever change comes is the inability to stay the same. The problem is that there is an inherent mentality to reward ourselves whenever achieving something. A job promotion compels us to buy a new something: a watch, a car, a wife, etc.

The question we always forget to ask ourselves when splurging is if we need it in the first place. If you said yes then justified it with a very lame, and obviously invalid reason of “it’s a bargain at that price,” then no, you don’t need it. In fact, if your reason has anything to do with its price, forget it. You don’t need it. Only free items are exempt from this reasoning, and those free items should be unconditionally free, meaning you don’t have to purchase anything to get a free item. Only problem is, nothing is free.

Here’s a quick post of a screenshot of the new dashboard of the upcoming and much-awaited WordPress 2.7. The icons, they are new. And well-designed.

New Icons! Yay!

I can definitely smell WordPress 2.7 RC1 in the air. And the final release is coming real soon. So far, it’s smelling very good.

I recently stumbled upon a website that posted a question put up by Albert Einstein. Einstein believed that only 2% of the people in the world could complete this. If you do, according to him, you are in the upper percentage with an IQ over 132.

Here’s the scenario:

• There are 5 houses in 5 different colors.
• In each house lives a person with a different nationality.
• These 5 owners drink a certain type of beverage, smoke a certain brand of cigar, and keep a certain pet.
• No owners have the same pet, smoke the same brand of cigar or drink the same drink.

The question: Who owns the fish?

Here are more clues to help you solve the problem:

1. The man living in the house right in the middle drinks milk
2. The Norwegian lives in the first house (the house on the left end)
3. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house
4. The green house owner drinks coffee
5. The green house is on the left of the white house
6. The Brit lives in a red house
7. The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill
8. The man who keeps horses lives next door to the man who smokes Dunhill
9. The Swede keeps dogs as pets
10. The Dane drinks tea
11. The person who smokes Pall Mall has birds
12. The owner who smokes Blue Master drinks beer
13. The German smokes Prince
14. The man who smokes Blend lives next door to the one who keeps cats
15. The man who smokes Blend has a neighbor who drinks water

I have successfully solved this problem, but of course, I won’t be spoiling the fun by posting it here. So please, don’t spoil the fun by posting it in the comments.

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Here’s yet another screenshot of the new Dashboard of WordPress 2.7 (currently version Beta3-9791). And look, they used Verdana, my favorite font.

Screen fonts FTW!

The release of Ubuntu 8.10, also known as Intrepid Ibex, last October 30 marks another milestone, and probably a more ambitious bid at unseating the most common desktop operating system. Although I have been using Linux for more than just a few years, I still get a little bit panicky when something goes wrong. Thank science, the open source community is all a-bustling with information, a willingness to help, and a number of how-to documents, which makes paying for support a last-resort option for people who bother to RTFM. Ibex has improved a lot of its core features, and I am no longer complaining about sound and needing to reboot just to get it to work from one application to another. Definitely puts a smile on my face.

I have been longing for some time now to switch permanently from a Microsoft world to a Linux environment, even if its only at home since I still need to use Windows at the office. A few years ago, it would have been very difficult, if not impossible, since most of the applications I use are Windows-only apps, and their Open Source counterparts simply suck, both in form and function. However, in recent months, there have been a lot of breakthroughs in the Open Source community. Most Windows-only apps either have a Linux version, or their Open Source counterparts have been improved dramatically.

Take for instance, instant messaging. It was a Yahoo! Messenger world for me, until Gaim decided it is time to shed the AIM connotation and adapt a more generic, Open Source friendly name and made it easier to use and more pleasing to the eyes. Pidgin, Gaim’s new name, took Yahoo! Messenger’s place on my desktop, even when I am using Windows. What made me switch was the tabbed chatting feature, wherein you only use one window to chat with a number of friends using multiple tabs. It saves screen real estate, and most of the emoticons use the same hotkeys, although it doesn’t use the same emoticons. I can live with that. Besides, it’s not the emoticons that’s important in a conversation.

The browser is a no-brainer, since I already use Firefox, and Google’s Chrome browser is not nearly enough reason to stay with Windows since they will be releasing a Linux version of it. But still, Firefox is my weapon of choice on any platform. Their extensions transcend the boundaries of platform limitations, and that’s what makes me a loyal fan. Although if and when Opera gives in and provides native support to CSS-based rounded corners, it would definitely be a very close second to my most favorite browser. But Firefox 3.1 promises to be a lot faster than it is right now, which makes switching to another browser a very difficult decision.

Microsoft’s productivity suite, MS Office, is definitely the best productivity suite…for Windows. However, it is slow to load and definitely bloated with features that will most likely be ignored by the common person. Sun’s Open Source productivity suite, OpenOffice.org, is lighter and faster, and uglier, but with it is starting to look better and more compatible with every iteration. However, it is also becoming bloated just to simply support formats of the MS Office type. Enter ThinkFree and its Mobile Netbook edition that is very light and fast and fully supports other suites’ formats. It isn’t free though, and is not open source, but a lot cheaper and Linux-friendly. I’m lucky enough to be given a free version of ThinkFree Mobile Netbook edition just by participating in their survey. So far, I’m liking it and it has most of the features of MS Office. OpenOffice.org is great and all, but I feel more at home using ThinkFree’s Mobile Netbook edition as its features and usability is more familiar.

iTunes is, or was, also one of the reasons I keep using Windows, for without it, my iPod is useless. Well, not entirely useless since I can use it as an external hard drive in Linux. But with Floola, I can manage my iPod media files and copy media files to AND FROM my iPod. I can even play music AND video files directly from my iPod. An unexpected, but welcome, benefit of using Floola is that MobileMe or Safari will no longer be forced on me whenever there’s an Apple Software Update, because there is no Apple Software Update. Yay, indeed.

The only thing that would make me go back and use Windows is if I would need to make or edit something in Adobe Flash. But since I try to steer clear of tasks involving Flash, Windows is simply taking up space on my hard drive. At home, that is. Adobe’s AIR platform also has a working beta for Linux, making it possible for me to use twhirl. Firefox’s Flash plugin lets me watch Youtube videos, it works beautifully after installation.

I have been spending more and more time using Intrepid Ibex, because I simply cannot find any reason to use Windows, and no reason not to use Ibex. I can do what I need, and want, to do in Ibex what I used to do in Windows. Multiple desktops and a rotating cube to switch from one to another is simply an icing on the cake. A very tasty icing.

Why should I use Windows again?

Here’s a quick post of a screenshot of the new Dashboard of WordPress 2.7 Beta 2. It’s getting prettier everytime, but I think this is the last iteration of the aesthetics upgrade of the dash, that is, until they think of something else to change.

So 2.7 is not bleeding anymore and WordPress developers have finally let the cat out of the bag. A lot of people have been testing it prior to its beta release, and most of the “complaints” are aesthetic-related. I know I’m guilty of some. I’m blaming Jane Wells for whetting my appetite for 2.7 when she posted a couple of articles showing screenshots and detailed descriptions of the new dashboard. But of course, I kid.

Now that Beta 1 is out, it is definitely time to give it a real test drive. I’m not talking about installing it on a subdomain and checking the new features out. I’m talking about real-world scenarios wherein a hundred people try to comment on one of your entries just to test the comment reply button and if it indeed threads comments, one of the new features 2.7 offers. Comment threading is theme-dependent, and it may be as simple as copying and pasting some code, but if you live to customize, it will NOT be a walk in the park.

Take for example, this site’s theme. Customizing the comment form alone gave me headaches for weeks. But I did learn a great deal when it comes to theme customizations and functions when using WP2.7’s built-in comment threading.

The developers also beefed up a lot of the previously offered features. The Media Library is now more customizable. The Comments can be closed if an article is at a particular age. And you can control how deep threading comments will be, which has a maximum of 10 levels, for now.

The new interface, which is a far cry from 2.5, is really a hoot to work with. For me, it basically tells you what you want to know and gets out of the way for you to be more productive in producing your blog’s content. It’s more conducive to writing than before. In other words, I simply love it.

Of course, using a beta version on a production blog is risky, and I know the risks involved. I simply had to do it for the sake of real-world testing and I want to see how it all pans out. I believe the only major hurdle the developers are trying to overcome are the aesthetics of the Dashboard, which is supposedly unfinished and needs a lot of work if you compare it to their target “look.”

Although WordPress won’t be able to release 2.7 on time (November 10th), the progress they show on an almost nightly basis is a glimpse of things to come. I surely can’t wait for 2.7 to be finally released as a stable version.

Cheers to the WordPress developers and their commitment to providing quality software.

P.S.
Comments found on the comments section of the Dashboard were from Ade, L.A., and Carlo. Please don’t sue me.