Priorities!

Yeah, my first priority is studies… but let’s go to the technology side of life, where I almost made money. Let’s say, I’m far away from technology now. There are a lot of releases of new software versions, operating systems, etc. and I’m still stuck in one OS.

Let me tell you what my priorities are: 1) I need a cooling pad for my laptop, the ultra-cheapo ones will do. 2) My laptop’s RAM, I need a 1GB PC2700 DDR333 stick. 3) Hard drive, I’ll upgrade my Mac to a 100GB 2.5 inch IDE Drive. 4) Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, I’m still using Tiger and I feel so left behind already.

I need to work hard in my rakets now, but I should prioritize my studies. Especially the examinations coming up!

Poor Man’s Keyboard. :D

This is the cheapest mini-keyboard out there. The problem about this it takes time to getting used to, especially if you’re a hard-core typer or blogger. I don’t use it if I’m doing intensive typing, like right now. I just use it if my laptop is too far away from me and I need to go near it just to type. I bought it for around Php250, roughly around less than $7.

Want to go abroad?

Parents these days would like their children to work abroad when they graduate. Their solution? Taking up a course in the medical field. For example, my relatives were talking to my cousin, telling her that she should take nursing so that she could work abroad, preferably in the United States.

A while ago, I just read up the news in my RSS reader (just got the time to read news) that it’s now very hard to work abroad, especially in the United States. I think it’s also because of the recession or something like that. That will be a very bad news for newly nursing graduates, especially the ones who just passed their NCLEX examinations.

I’ve heard a story from my Mom that there was one who went to the US. He was looking for a job, maybe he was looking for a job opening in some hospitals. He already passed the NCLEX exam, but no hospital hired him as a nurse. Maybe that’s how strict it is now but there is one lesson you should learn.

The lesson here is, don’t ever go for something that is not your choice. Choose something that you will like and love to do in the long run. You can ask your parents, relatives, or professionals advice or things related to the course you’re taking.

The reason of people taking the course of just wanting to go abroad is pathetic and useless. If you’re still starting to move to your college years, this is what wise people advise me to do: as early as possible, set your goal and go for it. Here’s one thing I can say, going abroad can’t make you rich or successful, it just depends on the person whether he or she wants to be successful.

Anyway, I’m not telling you to quit something and go for something else. My point is, if you’ve found something that you really love to do, go for that field. Even though you’ve encountered problems, you’ll have the effort to face that problem and solve it because you already know that you can do it.

Having Connection Problems!

Most of you guys know that I’m using SmartBro right now. I’m having difficulty connecting to sites like blogger and other sites with subdomains. I also can’t access my friend’s multiply site, which is odd since I can open mine. An hour back, I also had problems connecting to my wordpress blog and my blogger blog. I still had to wait for an hour (you guys know that I don’t like waiting). At the spare time, I did some surveys that I posted.

What’s happening now? Is the connection having hiccups? or are there DNS problems again? I think Smart is having a lot of problems with their connections lately, or maybe they’re doing a site maintenance but hey they’ll come back up again for a while won’t they? I hope they would.

A few months back, I had problems connecting to the AIIAS Junior Academy Website. It always say that the server is not found but my friend who is using another ISP is saying that the site is up. I was suspicious about this, so I called up Smart’s customer care hotline. You know what they asked me to do? IPConfig, Ping, etc. and they had to let me wait for an hour on the phone or so. At that time also, my brother had something to pass in that website (by the way, AIIAS Junior Academy is using an online learning system). It was resolved a few weeks later, so we had to go to a friend and borrow their connection for a while just to upload the project.

Their connection now is kinda fast, averaging at around 30kbps which is considerable. I really needed that kind of speed or even more speed if possible because I’m downloading podcasts from iTunes daily which takes up a lot of bandwidth. I’m even thinking of creating a live video stream through uStream, but unfortunately I don’t have a fast connection. I think the recommendation for that is to have a 1Mbps for streaming a standard resolution video.

So for me, maybe a 768kbps connection will do. I hope that would be possible soon.

A Short Survey.

I’m bored, so I decided to have a little survey. This wasn’t hard, but there are questions that are repeating again and again but answering questions is not that bad, it’s like an editor of a popular magazine interrogating you about yourself. I just searched Google of some surveys that I could answer and decided to share them to you.

I’m posting it here, so you can see the survey after the jump.

Social Networking.

Do you have plenty of friends in the real world? Me, I don’t have that many. I just have a few, maybe around 5 or so. I’m not a socialized kind of person, really. But in my online identity, I have around 200+ friends. I don’t really know them, and I don’t know why I had that many friends.

Social networking websites is very very useful in terms of communication and making new friends. Some even get married through the internet, interesting right? The social networking site that I always visit is either Friendster, Multiply or Flickr. Depends on what feature I use.

The very first social networking website I signed up with is Friendster. It is very popular, especially here in Asia. According to their site, there are almost around 10 million profiles that are currently in their database. Most of them, I think, are Filipinos. Here in the Philippines, if you don’t have an account, it means that you came from the 80’s. Even 50 year olds have their account up and active. Most of them are single, I suppose.

Late 2006, I got hooked up into photography when my dad bought a camera. I signed up to Flickr and Multiply because of that. I uploaded pictures and shared it to other photographers, from newbie to professional and ask them for advice. Because of those photography-social-networking sites, I’ve learned more photography and post processing.

Thanks to the developers, I don’t really know what is it without those websites up here in the internet. It must be really lonely without those sites around.

Flock 1.1

I’m now using Flock as my browser. It’s known to be the social networking browser, because you could log on to your social networking site even without going to their website. The only thing you need to do is configure everything from the start and flock will do the rest.

For example, like this post. It’s posted through Flock’s “Post to My Blog” feature, where you can post on your blogs like Blogger, WordPress, etc. I’m using both services so this browser is really helpful.

I know there’s also a Windows version of this browser, don’t worry it’s using Mozilla’s architecture same as Firefox’s. So you’ll know that they’ll have almost the same security features built-in. So, I recommend downloading this and have fun posting and connecting to other people!

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: technology

Online Banking in the Philippines?

My recommendations — DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT! Why? It’s because most of their pages/websites only supports Internet Explorer, which is, easier in attacks than Mozilla’s Firefox. I haven’t heard people doing online banking here though, but most of the websites here are like that.

I’ve read comments about the Philippine Airlines website not supporting certain browsers like Safari 3 or Firefox. That’s one of the reasons why it’s not secure to do online banking. There are times that you can’t push through the payment step, but you’ve already click the payment button for a lot of times. The result is, you’ll have 3 or 4 times the charge.

At least now there are banks that supports a lot of browsers like Metrobank. I don’t know for other banks and other websites here in the Philippines. It’s still better to use PayPal than putting in your own credit card number. There are also times that you might get hijacked, so make sure that you have a secure connection. One safety precaution is check the address bar, if it’s an IP Address then don’t continue. Make sure it’s your bank’s domain name or subdomain name.

I’m really not into online banking now but I have heard and read cases of this kinds of things going on. I’m just using PayPal, but haven’t bought anything yet. I’ll still save the money I’ve been earning from blogging.

I Won P750k?

A number texted me and said that I won P750,000. I wasn’t shocked, since I know it’s a hoax. Minutes later another number texted me and said that I’ll call in that number and send him/her load of P150. Who the hell would send P150 load for winning P750,000. I know that those legitimate prizes doesn’t have hidden fees, only taxes which will be given to the government since the law states that kind of way.

A lot of people just can’t stop texting random numbers and telling them that they’ve won that kind of amount. I need money, but I’m not that dumb to fall for that kind of trap. I’ve seen it in the news, heard it in the radio and other sources. Come on, you can even load for as low as P20. If you have a job, you can easily get that kind of load and text somebody.

If you’re giving out that kind of amout, how come you can’t even load? What the heck? This is just simply stupid. I’m not a lawyer of some sort, but from that kind of move you can tell that it’s a scam. Yes, I’m just a kid, I know but that doesn’t mean that I don’t know those kind of stuff to. I’m the one broke here, so if anybody will give that kind of amount for a prize, thank you but I won’t give something for you in return. Remember that.

If you have the same experiences as me, you can comment on this or even post the number who texted you and we can report it to the police or other agencies who can help us put out this scammers. As of now, I’ll still keep the number confidential and will reveal it if there will be many who has been a victim of this. This is also to save other people from getting this kind of messages, or if you’ve already fallen from this kind of scam you can post it here as comments.

Internet in the Philippines

As an observation, most of the people who knows the world of internet are from metro manila, Visayas or Mindanao. Here in the provinces of Luzon, most of the people doesn’t know how to use the internet. The people here mainly are just using it for social networking purposes, mostly Friendster.

I’ve talked to fellow High School students in my school and asked them a few questions about Blogging, they have no idea what was it. I told them everything about it, but they don’t really care. In our school, around only 20% of the students knows how to blog. Most of the people also doesn’t use the internet wisely, they end up getting malicious software or codes that came from the internet.

Like for example, I already recommended a person to use Firefox for browsing. I told him that it’s like Internet Explorer but better and secure. I’ve been reminding him again and again. Unfortunately, he just ends up using Internet Explorer. I don’t really know what’s with that, but after a few weeks I see his computer suffering from attacks.

In our community here, people lack knowledge in computer security even the basics of computer security. I’ve been in that situation, but upon researches and studies I’ve learned a lot and most of them came from experience. Here in a campus near our house, most of the people knows how to use the internet. They know the basics of computer security and other kinds of that stuff.

There are a lot of tips that you can find on the internet on how to avoid those kinds of attacks. You can save a lot of money and energy if you just learn and read. If you’d like to learn from experience, then do it but it’ll cost you a lot of time, money and energy. I’ve been in that situation once, and I don’t want to go back again.

If you have more ideas, insights, or comments you can leave a comment and I’ll answer it.