I’m half of a septuagenarian already but it is only now that I ask myself profound questions that doesn’t force me to think of an answer of the wise-ass kind.

Ten years ago, I think, in a job interview, I was asked what I see myself doing five years from then. I always had a canned response of someday being one of the supervisors or managers of the company I was trying to get into. That, or owning and managing my own business.

At one point, I had this delusion of becoming a rock star playing the guitar in a rock band. A few years passed and a few grand spent, and I got nothing to show for it. I feel embarrassed as I remember what I was doing back then. And this was a VERY LONG time ago.

I also thought I can make it in the digital age by becoming a digital graphic artist, learning the tools of the trade that is Corel Draw and Photoshop. Or become a mountaineer, climbing all sorts of peaks and trudging through valleys for Discovery Channel. Yeah, I want my fifteen minutes of fame. I’m not really sure if I have ADD or something because I easily get distracted by a new gadget or some other weird stuff; I lose interest easily. Also, mountaineering got in the way of my smoking, so I quit mountaineering. I occasionally go hiking at least once a year, though, so quitting mountaineering isn’t really set in stone.

Then, more delusions of grandeur in the digital age crept up my mind by way of becoming a professional blogger. Yeah, the cause of this blog. Unfortunately, I’m a friggin’ introvert, and the only way I interact with other people socially is through the anonymity of a username and an avatar. And that’s basically the reason I don’t attend events and other PR-related stuff. That, and lack of money and time.

Fast forward to today and I take look at what I’ve been doing. I got married. My wife gave birth to a son that I shall refer to from this point on as Willspawn. I get by one day at a time, paying the bills and providing for my family, to the best of my capability, along the way. The downside of my current profession is that I work at nights, effectively killing off any kind of social life. Oh yes, I can make time to go out and enjoy what people-with-regular-working-hours have, but at this stage of my life, sleep is a rare commodity highly prioritized and taken advantage of in every chance presented.

Ten years ago, I basically lied my ass off in that job interview. I lied NOT to the company, but to myself. I should have my own business right now. I should be the boss already. I should be thriving on my own. A lot of should-have’s, but not enough of what-is’s.

Today marks not only my 35th birthday, but also an alarm clock going off telling me that I have five more years left before my life “begins.” I want to know if life truly begins at 40. And I want to be prepared to do anything and everything I want to do when that time comes. That is, if I live long enough past it to enjoy it.

In the meantime, I think I’ll just ramble on… sing my song…

It’s almost the end of the year, and with 2010 looming just around the corner, I decided to give myself a gift for no particular reason whatsoever. Okay, I’m lying. I really want to give myself a gift because I think I did a good job of doing what a family man should. Whatever.

Anyway, I’m asking all of you spambots and crawlers to vote on what I should get for myself by January 2010.

Poll closes December 31, 2009, 11:59PM.

Non-spambots/crawlers can also vote and may leave comments in the comments section. Thanks.

The Apple event, dubbed “It’s only Rock n’ Roll,” just concluded, and the iPod (not Apple) fanboy in me suddenly got a wake-up call. Well, not so much as jump-out-of-bed kind of wake-up, but more of a really-now-let-me-have-a-look-while-I-stay-in-bed sort of thing. A lot has been announced during the event, and this is my way of thinking if I should get a new iPod or not. Steve Jobs was also there to grace the event with his presence.

In iTunes, it gets a bit social by being able to share an iTunes store item. In-store item. Apple seems to have crowdsourced their marketing by letting iTunes users share and, hopefully (in Apple’s mind), convince that iTunes user’s friends to buy the item, song or app, from the iTunes store. But that’s just me thinking out loud. Also, the new version, iTunes 9, will let you copy songs, TV shows, etc., everything you have in your iPod with 5 other computers and lets you copy those items to your library. “Is Apple saying it’s okay to just pay once for an app even if it’s on two devices? – Joshua Topolsky of Engadget“ iTunes 9’s syncing has been improved as well, but what takes the cake is the App management feature as you can manage the apps in your iPod Touch in iTunes and have it synced with the device itself. And there’s iTunes LP, which brings back the lost pride in owning a vinyl copy of an album, complete with liner notes, artwork, etc.

The iPod Touch gets an improvement as well, though it’s not the camera everyone was hoping for. No camera in the new iPod Touch, but the internal hardware has been upgraded to support OpenGL and games that needs advanced graphics. Bottomline for the iPod Touch: it’s going head-to-head with handheld gaming consoles (e.g. PSP, Nintendo DS).

iPod Classics are not going away. Yet. Apple is bringing back the 160GB iPod Classic but with a thinner form factor. And at $249, it’s a great protable media player/external hard drive.

The iPod Shuffle gets new headphones, or manufacturers are now going to release a “for-iPod-Shuffle” line of headphones as Apple has let them do so. New colors will be available also.

As always, there’s the “One more thing” thing whenever there’s an Apple event about to conclude. The one more thing is the iPod Nano getting a video camera, without a price increase. So the new iPod Nano is one of the thinnest video cameras with the most capacity (8GB and 16GB), although I’m not sure if it takes still photos. Apple also added an FM radio and a pedometer that can be synced with Nike+.

And that’s about it from Apple. Since I’m overwhelmed with the options Apple just presented, I think I’ll just stick with the iPod Classic 160GB I have that I received as a gift about a couple of years ago. Until it breaks down or something, I guess.

Images stolen copied from Engadget’s liveblog article.

The past few weeks have been more focused on making my finances a little bit more cost-efficient. Since I can’t do much about the household and familial needs, I decided to turn my attention to my online costs.

Currently, I maintain four domains (will.ph, gormful.com, shutterview.net, and infi8.com). All of my domains are powered by WordPress and hosted with 1and1 Webhosting. I’ve been with my host for more than two years now, and so far, I can’t complain. However, I wanted to find out if I can still cut back on my hosting expenses. Looking at my domains, I can only discontinue one of them, with infi8.com being the most eligible candidate for the axe, but not until I find new homes for my subdomain residents (friends and family, all two of them). The axe gets stayed in the meantime while I collect my thoughts and think about this more.

Also, with four domains to maintain, it’s beginning to eat up a lot of my free time, which is something that is very rare and precious for me. I decided to move the content of gormful.com to Tumblr. I chose Tumblr because I wanted to try out its engine, and that the themes are more customizable than WordPress.com’s offering.

The move was a bit tedious as Tumblr doesn’t support importing posts from WordPress, and vice versa. I had to re-post each and every single entry I had from gormful.com to Tumblr. Luckily, I only have about 19 entries, so it wasn’t so bad. I also found a theme that, with a few tweaks here and there, I was able to customize a theme that suited my taste. All in all, it took me less than a couple of hours to move the entries and update the A record of gormful.com to point to my Tumblr. Now, I don’t have to spend as much time as I did before to maintain gormful.com. I can even reblog entries with a few clicks from Tumblr blogs that I follow. It definitely made updating gormful.com more regularly an easy task, though I haven’t reblogged anything yet.

My photoblog, shutterview.net, may be a little bit neglected, and new entries are very infrequent, but that is caused by my inherent ability to procrastinate. I love taking pictures, but I dislike having to undergo the tedious process of editing/resizing pictures and uploading them. Hence, the lack of updates. I will be spending more time with it in the future, but for now, a lot of my time has been spent in one big juggling act.

As for this blog, I’m kinda stuck in a rut right now and I can’t seem to feel inspired with what’s going on in the tech world that it doesn’t prompt me to write anything about it. Hence, this filler pretending to be a post.

So I’ve been stumbling sites (using StumbleUpon) lately and I came across a website that shares the stupid things people say when calling in for some technical support. Some were insanely ridiculous, others were just downright idiotic. One thing it made me, though, was that it made me wonder if this still happens on a daily basis.

A few years ago, I was also one of the people in the receiving end of ignorance while trying to provide technical support. It’s not pretty, but it was quite enjoyable and very enlightening. You get to meet different personalities, some accommodating, some bull-headed.

Have we grown?
The site I was mentioning earlier made me think if people have grown smarter, technologically-wise, after a slew of very user-friendly Apple products and a plethora of a more intuitive GUI. I can’t believe I said plethora. So I thought about it, and honestly, I can’t really provide an accurate answer, unless I base it on my personal experience, which is an insignificant sampling, all things considered. So there’s not really much to do but speculate.

I therefore speculate that people SHOULD have grown more technically knowledgeable. Recently released versions of operating systems have become simpler and more user-friendly. Cloud computing is well on its way as more companies are embracing the model “software-as-a-service.” Web 2.0 basically is no longer a buzzword as more and more companies are developing, and making great headway in, web applications that are slowly becoming ubiquitous, as is the aim of every web company. Or that I’m just using buzzwords without a clue. Heh.

Trolls are still abundant. The only difference between then and now is that it is easier to be a troll and spread their dickeries everywhere than before. And yes, they have more buzzwords to use without having any sense of their meaning yet they still use it every chance they get. Teh horror, trolls are still with us.

Maybe the then-stupid people are wiser now, but I think they were replaced with clueless cloud users. Facebook may be too much tech for some people. Google Docs or Windows Live Spaces may be too complicated. God help us if people start calling for help to use MySpace properly. I know I’ve been humiliated by online apps simply because I did not read the fucking manual, or in this case, the website’s instructions.

What some people don’t get is that THEY DON’T HAVE TO USE THE SERVICE, unless they need it. All it takes is some effort to get used to the interface, to know its features, to do things simpler. Otherwise, it’s going to be like pulling teeth. Hard and painful, both for the user and the developer.

And with that in mind, to those who are still reading this, if you are using Internet Explorer 6, do yourself and the web developers a huge favor. Upgrade to a better browser.

Ramble on.

Ever since I joined Plurk, it has become a daily, nigh, hourly routine to check if there are new plurks and responses. I start some, I join some. Conversations, which I personally call threads, that is. And now that Plurk lets you customize the Plurk page/timeline, it makes it even harder to make myself not check my Plurk.

This is basically the challenge every developer will be facing if they decide to develop a desktop client for Plurk. Twhirl was a hit because Twitter’s interface, well, let’s face it, it sucks. The level of interactivity of Twitter’s site can not compare to Plurk’s. So the question is, what should be in Plurk’s desktop client?

Form and Function
First, it should be lightweight, and the installation should leave a very, very small footprint. Less than half a meg would be great. But of course, this would limit the features that will go in on this app.

What should be seen by the user must be things that are really, really, really necessary. Plurk’s mobile interface is a good start. And start there, I shall.

Aside from what is currently shown on the mobile interface, I guess it would be helpful to know how many characters are left when I start typing my usual non-sensical banter. So a character counter should be included.

A dropdown menu of emoticons would surely be a great addition, but not required, as some people would have already memorized the code to execute the emoticon.

For vanity’s sake, let’s include karma stats and if it went up or down by how much as of the last update.

I don’t really give a damn about the qualifiers, but it helps reduce the number of words as it doesn’t count against the 140 character limit. I’d say it’s optional, but if it’s going to be put in the desktop client, it should support other languages besides English.

It would also be nice to have the ability to edit or delete your own plurk, mute or unmute threads, control your friends list and cliques, and manage alerts. And a way to add friends and visit the Interesting Plurkers section would be great.

I’ve been monkeying around and testing Plurk It and Plurkair. So far, both have used the mobile interface and didn’t add any notable features. Another thing they have in common is AIR.

Unless these features are incorporated, I don’t see any reason to not visit my Plurk page. There’s Mozilla Prism anyway that allows me to use web apps as a desktop app. The new question is, will twhirl step up to the plate and develop support for Plurk with all the bells and whistles?

One of the ways of killing boredom would probably be to immerse yourself in learning new things, or improving your knowledge in what you already know. And that’s what I actually did over the past few weeks, when I felt I had too much time on my hand.

I looked into the plugin code and compared it with the code of the default options. From there, I found the new classes and id’s of the elements in the page and used them in the plugins that I currently use. The only difficulty I had when I updated my plugins, at least those that were no longer being updated by their respective plugin authors, was rummaging through all those lines of code and looking for the actual code for the displayed elements. It wasn’t really that hard if I opted to use the Find feature of the editor I used, but I also wanted to know how the code was written. This is, IMHO, the best way to self-study programming. I only updated how the plugin displays its options and nothing more. A good thing about WordPress is that when you screwed up the code, WordPress will deactivate it automatically, so it was perfectly safe to play with the code.

There was this plugin that I tweaked according to my requirements. This plugin is the Related Entries plugin by Alexander Malov, Mike Lu, and Jon Bourne. I don’t think I improved the plugin. I just changed it to suit my taste. This made me realize that I’m still living in the past since the reason I tweaked this plugin is because I missed the format of the related posts displayed by Ultimate Tag Warrior. I looked at the code, added an option for a separator, and changed the code to display the separator if the related entries were displayed inline and not as a list. Those interested in this plugin can visit this page or download it directly from here.

There were also a number of WordPress plugin updates recently released by plugin authors and I immediately updated all of my plugins that were affected. However, one of the plugin updates caused my site to load slower. A lot slower. Thru the process of elimination, I found out that the update to Lightbox 2 was causing this slow-down in loading my site. I then decided to deactivate the plugin and those that were dependent on it and noticed and increase in performance of my site’s loading time. I guess it wasn’t just me that was having this issue since there were a couple more updates released by the plugin author. Some people most likely contacted the author and asked for another update to improve loading times. The latest version of Lightbox 2, version 2.6.6 clearly resolved this problem as I have clocked my site’s loading time and noticed that it was faster than when the plugin was deactivated. Kudos to Mr. Rupert Morris for the prompt action regarding this matter. Now, I don’t have to deactivate the plugin. The latest update, version 2.7, sent me back to the dialup age as my site’s loading time was once again affected by the recent changes. I had no choice but to deactivate the said plugin. I don’t know if it is because of my connection or the plugin. What I know is, my site is happier with the plugin deactivated. No choice but to wait for the next update.

Another way of killing boredom, and I believe the most entertaining way, is to go to a theater and watch a movie. Last year was the year of the DVD, in which I, together with my wife, watched a slew of DVDs in the comfort of our home. We watched a number of movies that we weren’t able to catch in the cinema that probably made us more comfortable watching movies at home than with other, sometimes loud and obnoxious, people. This May of 2008, however, we were not really making sure to go to a cinema and watch a movie’s first screening on its opening day. It just happened that we had time to do so, and so we made the effort. Iron Man, Speed Racer, and Indiana Jones and The Kindom of the Crystal Skull were the movies that we saw as early as we can. Harold and Kumar Escape Guantanamo Bay and What Happens in Vegas were showing a week or so already when we saw those films. All the films we saw can not be compared to each other since the genre and target audience of those films varied but they all killed boredom, and entertained us in doing so.

Probably the most enriching way to kill boredom is to pick up a book, sit back, and escape. And yes, this involves you going offline for hours on end. I think I hear net junkies shiver. This would also be a great alternative in case Twitter is down and you don’t have anything to do.

Bored? There really is no excuse. Not anymore.

I’ve written something that may be self-incriminating, and I’m so confused if I should post it. It’s not career-threatening, but it may be too personal, if there’s such a thing as too personal in the blogosphere. Before writing the piece, I felt very sad. Not sad in the sense of me being depressed because my life is shitty, but sad because the people around me seem to be losing the point of growing up.

Should grown-ups be more considerate? Should they be more understanding? Should they take less guilt-trips and not take anyone with them? Should they be more patient? Shoud they have more wisdom?

Anyone who answers negatively to the questions above should be shot if they are older than 21. A bonk in the head would suffice for those below 21. 21 is not really the age that people become mature. Of course it differs with everyone. However, I believe this is the ideal age that people start thinking what the future holds, if there ever is a future for them.

Anyway, these are just thoughts, ruminations, if you please, about the current situation within my personal space. I would ask Benj to help me pray to any deity to grant wisdom to all the peope if he only believed in (a) God. I would ask Tina to help me pray to her God, but I don’t believe in her God anymore. Well, not as much, anyway. What I wrote is, therefore, not published, and will never be, as far as I’m concerned.

So after writing SOME of my thoughts and justifications of what should be and what is, I feel better. Not much, but it’s a start. Tangent a necessity at this point, I then pose this question to all: Where is the Zen?

I’ve heard this one about a few years ago. I thought that whoever said this would be a total loser for not having one. Now, it seems to make more sense than it did before. Indulge me for a few minutes as I try to (dis)prove this notion.

Work, in the sense of employment, is “a contract between two parties.”

In a commercial setting, the employer conceives of a productive activity, generally with the intention of creating profits, and the employee contributes labour to the enterprise, usually in return for payment of wages. Employment also exists in the public, non-profit and household sectors. To the extent that employment or the economic equivalent is not universal, unemployment exists.

So how do you go about working? You wake up in the morning (or night for those who work nights), then you grab something to eat, get yourself ready to go to work, then give eight hours of your day doing what your employer asks you to do. How many hours of the day does it actually take for you to work? It depends, but on average, roughly 10 hours (8 hours for your shift, an hour of lunch, and another hour to commute to and from the office). You’re then left with 14 hours to do what you need to do, like sleep, which takes about 8 hours on average. So basically, in a day, you only get 6 hours to do what you need to do for yourself. Maybe this is why someone thanked God it’s Friday, because they badly needed to do something for themselves that takes more than 6 hours, like drinking, partying, blogging, writing, gazing at the stars, mooning their neighbors, etc. And the wages you get from working lets you do all this. Or at least, some of it.

Now let’s take a look at life and living. It varies from person to person so I’ll just try to generalize everything here. Let us start with the bills. There’s rent, electricity, and water. I don’t pay rent, but those other bills aren’t getting any cheaper. Those are the necessity bills. Then there are the luxury bills like phone (landline and mobile), cable TV, and Internet. Then there are those “use-in-emergency-only” bills, like credit cards. Problem is, we misconstrue “emergency” with the words iPod, or Prada. Emergency would sometimes equate to Impulse. Those are just the monthly bills, without the groceries yet. Have a child? Add vaccination and doctor’s fees. Factor in rising fuel prices, not to mention the cost of maintaining a car, and you know it’s almost too much to take. The question then changes to “can you still afford to live?” I guess it’s time, at least for me, to take a look at my priorities and drop anything and everything I can’t afford.

Some people might get overwhelmed with all their obligations and bills that they forget what it is to live. I guess it’s all about the attitude that you yourself choose when being faced with problems. Attitude is essentially the key to having a great life.

Work should not be a break from life. It should be the other way around. From the time you were born, you are already working. You work your lungs to breathe. You work your muscles to move. You work your brain to answer questions. When you work to live, it’s not much fun now, is it? If you live to work, though, that’s no fun to anybody BUT you. AND you aren’t “really” working anymore. You work your lungs to breathe, but you do this to smell the wonderful scent of freshly-brewed coffee. You work your muscles to move, but you do this to go to the best spot for taking that Pulitzer-prize winning sunset photo. You work your brain to answer questions, but you do this in order to get the million-dollar prize.

So stop being melodramatic. No sense taking to heart what depressed ignoramuses bleat. Don’t be afraid to go to the next level. It is not the end of the world. It only ends when you stop trying. And stop throwing cliches around. It gets old quick.

I noticed the latency since last night when I tried logging in and seeing if there were any new amusing twits to while away my time. And just now, 10:13 AM GMT+8, I get this error message:

So what else is new, you might ask.

Well, I have recently tested and deployed OpenID here in the site. I’m not really new with OpenID since I have been using my own domain as my own OpenID with the help of Sam Ruby’s article and phpMyID. However, I haven’t opened up my site for OpenID users registered with other providers, and from what I hear from the open source community, it’s a lot of work.

Fortunately, there’s WP-OpenID, a WordPress plugin that works for WordPress 2.5 (or at least, its latest version). I just installed the plugin like any other WordPress plugin, edited one of the files according to the steps from the support page (because there’s this bug of an error that appears everytime I click on the settings of the plugin), and it now works like a charm. However, I have no idea if it works as it should since I haven’t done other diagnostic tests besides posting a comment using my OpenID, and I didn’t notice any conflicts with other plugins, so if you notice something out of the ordinary, please feel free to leave a comment.

Feeling adventurous? Want to try it out for your blog? Go ahead and give it a try. However, I would suggest that you read the threads and discussions on the plugin’s page. You might run into some issues that were already addressed there. Or not yet addressed. User beware.

So far, so good. But Twitter is still down. Oh wait. It’s up now (10:23 AM GMT+8). Yay. Now what?!