Treo, no graffiti but their is a solution!

I had an old blog posting somewhere here about my Treo on what I liked and what I do not like.

The PalmOne Treo 600 has no Graffiti. Graffiti, aside from what it really means, this is also the name of the writing system software in most Palm PDAs. You learn how to write their way to digitally input real text that can be editable. It is somewhat like a character recognition software to converts what you write into real font letters but you have to follow their proper way of writing.

Being a Palm m100, Palm xeIII, Palm Zire 71 user… the graffiti system was into my way of writing already. For me, it was way faster than the on-screen keyboard or any type of keypad. When I got the PalmOne Treo 600, I was dissapointed they took out the Graffiti software from the whole system and it had a tiny qwerty keyboard instead. That sucked for me. I had my Treo for several months now and just adapted to the qwerty keyboard system.

But I decided to get MobileWrite 3.5, mobile handwriting recognition software. Finally I can run Graffiti again on a Treo! I found this in a promotial PalmGear mailing list I am a member of and decided to get Sudoku and Kakuro since I got addicted to playing Sudoku already.

What’s Wrong with Phenylpropanolamine and Paracetamol?

Where is Paracetamol?

When I was in the Philippines last December, I caught a fever, colds and cough. Commonly for anything related to fever and pain relief, Paracetamol is one of the generic drugs that would come to mind for the common Filipino since these are commonly found in the Phillipines. Some of the popular brands are Biogesicâ„¢ and Tempraâ„¢. I still remember old TV commercials of Biogesicâ„¢ promoting that Paracetamol is safe for pregnant women, people with heart ailments and asthma.

But here in the US, after a visit at the drug store… I went through each pain killer of the shelf and of course the most popular known is Aspirin which is like an everyday word. And this is Acetamenophen having one of the most popular brands as Tylenol. Another popular brand is Advil. But I noticed all of the off-the-shelf pain killers were either Acetamenophen or Ibuprofen. I wonder why there is no Paracetamol based pain killers in the US off-the-shelf drugs? Is it because of some policy the US Food and Drug Authority (FDA) that did not allow this but such ruledoes not exist in the policies of the Philippines’ Bureau of Food and Drugs (BFAD)? In extreme pain, in the Philippines you can also buy Mefanemic Acid pain killers like the popular Ponstan 250.

Phenylpropanolamine

I know Phenylpropanolamine has been banned in large doses since it is used in some rapid weight loss drugs and has several bad side-effects. But in small doses, it is used in medicines for the common colds in the Philippines. Nearly every cold tablet in the Philippines is Phenylpropanolamine, from Neozep to Decolgen, to Ornex to Dimetapp.

And here in the US, not a single cold tablet or syrup uses Phenylpropanolamine. All use Pseudoephedrine. I wonder if the US FDA does not allow to use Phenylpropanolamine even in small amounts why uses that is allowed by the Philippines’ BFAD.

I am a Chemist by profession, but I am not Pharmacist. Generic names are actually nicknames and are not the actual scientific compound names. In chemistry, standardization of naming conventions was done by International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) and from the names of compounds, you already get to know what it is made of based on the name alone. Some compounds have very long names that pharmaceutical companies make nicknames of the compounds to make the name shorter. Phenylpropanolamine is a good IUPAC name since I know it is nothing but phenol, propanol and an amine group stuck together. Phenol is benzene with a hydroxy group attached to it and benzene is a known carcinogen. I know Phenylpropanolamine has many harmful effects in large doses, but so does anything in large doses. Menthol which is in a bunch of candies and ointments is harmful to some extent, and even the ordinary Luffa is said to be carcinogenic.

Well just wondering why…

Disclaimer

– I am not claiming to be an expert in the field of pharmacy.
– I am not stating which type of medicine is better than the other.
– I am not promoting any type of brand of medicine.
– I do not work for any pharmaceutical company.
– I am not a doctor nor pharmacist.
– You may not quote me for scientific or statistical facts. I am not even sure of the spellings I wrote. It is just how I remember them. Thus this is not a reliable source of factual data.
– All brands mentioned are trademarks of their respective owners.

I am just wondering why the predominant drug differs in the US and Philippines.

PIM Software

Way back 1996, when I started shifting to my IT career… I used no software for Personal Information Management. For email, I used Qualcomm’s Eudoraâ„¢ but this was for email alone. And the old pen and small notebook did the rest for my everyday planning. After sometime, I started using Microsoft Outlook®, since it integrates email, contacts, notes, task and the calendar very well.

Being concerned with company expenditures, I was at first against the Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) since I viewed it as another company expense and the pen and paper, whiteboard and corkboard in the office works fine. But as my former partner Terence Teves was persistent in getting PDAs, I was convinced to give it a shot.

So I started with a Palm m100. And I was happy it would synchronize well with Microsoft Outlook®.

After using Palm® m100, I have used a Palm® xeIII, Palm® Zire™ 71 and now I am using a Palm® Treo™ 600. During those times, I have been jumping from Microsoft Outlook® to Palm® Desktop for my calendar, task and notes. I liked the power Microsoft Outlook® offers but seems to have trouble when it gets really filled up. And it was the email that fills up Microsoft Outlook® so much. And I have used the scanpst tool to fix the outlook.pst file many times in the past and there were times I had unrecoverable data. So those were the reasons I would go back to Palm® Desktop and use something else for my emails.

Since the late 1990’s, I would jump back and forth from Microsoft Outlook® to Qualcomm Eudoraâ„¢ and since last year, I was a Mozilla Thunderbird user. For the past year I was happy with Palm® Desktop and Mozilla Thunderbird combination totally departing Microsoft Outlook®, but recently my Mozilla Thunderbird has been very slow. After opening it up, it takes some time before I can display the email messages and it always gives this dialog box that it is still processing the folders. I guess this happens once it gets filled up too.

The new Microsoft® Office Outlook® 2003 looks very attractive and promising as I have seen the new interface on someone else’s computer, but buying Outlook is just another problem to face too. And in the past, I always had the same problem with Microsoft Outlook® that when the outlook.pst file gets so big, that is when problems come out. But then again, I think it happens to all email softwares when they get so filled up.

I guess the best solution is simply go through your emails, and do not archive them all. Delete all those sales emails from all these subscriptions, delete the mailing list emails that are already out-of-topic, and look for some nice way to archive the emails. I wish there was an easy one-click way to export all the emails in a nice way to different database formats for better archiving.

Snail Mails

After being away for nearly month… and filtering out all the brochure type of junk in the mailbox, I got:

  • 8 Credit Card Pre-Approved Applications. All Credit Card Pre-Approved Applications went to the trash except for one since the Annual Percentage Rate (APR) is lower than everyone else. I will start moving some of my bills on an auto-payment scheme from my other credit cards to other cards with lower APR and no annual fees.
  • 2 Pre-Approved Car Loan Letters. Both letters went to the trash. I do not need a new car. As long as my current 2nd-hand hand car still runs.
  • 10 Bills to pay from current bank credit cards, department store credit cards, phone, cellphone, chiropractor bills. All bills due before my payday were paid. Those bills due after payday will be paid after payday.

Domain Selling Tactics

Many people buy domain names and many know about Verisign/Network Solutions and also Register.com who sell domains at $35/year who were the pioneers of domain registrations. You can get lesser prices if you register for more number of years. Network Solutions actually powers the technical backend of the .com and .net domain name extension. Many cheaper and still reputable companies like DirectNIC sells domains at $15/year. To destroy the competition in the early years of 2000, 000Domains.com was a bit popular before since it was one of the first companies to offer domains lower than $15/year. Today there are tons of companies, some are just hard to find while others are easier. Included in the many companies is my own company that sells domains at $8.88/year, OmniDomain.net

And of course, I buy domains from myself, haha and what many people do not know, (but many people also know) is that the owner information of domain names can be viewed in a whois search. All domain registration companies should have it. My own whois search is here: www.omnidomain.net/whois and just type in the domain name and type in the code in the box below it, and you can check out the domain information.

Although there are a lot of spammers that use whois databases to update their spam list, many people do not use there personal email addresses for whois information. Some people use the whois information to send the domain owner some proposal to move over to their domain registration.

Which brings me to this company’s different style of selling. I occassionally get snail mail from this company called Domain Registry of America. Yes, not email, it is snail mailed and maybe they believe if they spam, it will just end up in the trash folder or spam filter deleted.

They are actually telling you when your domain will expire (which they just simply checked the whois information) and is telling you to move over to them. For $40 for 2 years, or $25/year. Obviously, they are targetting the NSI (Network Solutions, Inc.) customer. They are proposing to the wrong person. I buy domains from OmniDomain.net for $8.88/year. Actually I get them even at a cheaper price since I own OmniDomain.net hehehe.

In the Philippines From December 3 to December 31, 2005

I was really scheduled to be in the Philippines from December 3 to 27, 2005, but with my health condition, and a lot of things not completely done aside from shortening the time to be with my family, were all of the reasons extending it a little bit longer to December 31, 2005.

Good thing I was able to talk to Pam Lund, one of our bosses at work who was online and was kind to have a few more days extended during my vacation. Thanks Pam.

After talking to her, I called up Philippine Airlines right away and tried to get flights on January 1 to 3, but all were fully booked and the next schedules were on January 11 and would still be on waiting list. So I opted to get the latest December flight and listed as waiting list for December 31, 2005 at 10:00pm.

I kept calling everyday if I was still on waiting list and everyday I still got the same answer, we were on waiting list, and in the morning of December 27, Marcia woke up earlier and I when I woke up… she was already dialing the Philippine Airlines office. It was hard getting through the phone lines as I continued to fix my things preparing to leave that day, and it was nearly noon when I was able to talk to a Philippine Airlines representative and my December 31 flight was already booked.

It is 2006 already, and one thing I will do is shorten my blog posts. Long posting are sometimes too long to read in one sitting. Although a lot happened when I got back to the Philippines, several stories to tell, I will just break down big stories into smaller chunks making them easier to read in a short span of time.

Happy New Year to everyone!

After working the whole 2005 and was happy to meet my family whom I missed so much… and was with them for nearly a whole month, and just wanted to see them and get away from work for a few hours (few hours, because I was also working during vacation), for some reason… I seem to miss work too. I guess I am crazy.