Thunderbird

I was a long time MS Outlook user, not only for email, but for synchronizing with my Palm, where I started with a Palm m100, then cIII and now a Zire 71. I tried StarOffice, and this other one I forgot the name. I was not happy.

My Outlook crashed twice within a week. All emails were still saved, in a separate file, but all my message filter rules were erased. And from the looks of it, My data might be erased completely soon if another crash may occur.

So I decided maybe it is time to switch to Thunderbird for my email. And even if Mozilla made the Calendar Project and Sunbird, they are not yet synchronizable with a PDA. So for other PDA Sync functions, I’ll use the standard Palm Desktop and for emails, Thunderbird. Fast running, stable, happy.

What laptop to buy…

After thinking on my trip to the Philippines…

I thought of buying a laptop. So I can bring my work with me, and even work on the long plane trip. Be more productive on lost time.

But I really do not have much money, the plane ticket is so expensive. I even searched for the best deal I can get for plane tickets, regardless of airlines and stopovers and not landing at the Centennial airport in the Philippines which is way better than the other terminal in MNL.

So I searched online for a good laptop deal with some low monthly payment. My first decision was if I will get an iBook/Powerbook or a Windows Notebook. I’m totally sold out with the power of the Mac, but after thinking of it, I will settle for Windows and will just start of with a MacMini for my use at home. But I’ll buy the MacMini when I come back from the Philippines. The my other desktop will run Linux.

Now that I have decided to get a Windows laptop, where do I buy it? What brand? I first searched on the websites of HP, Dell and Sony.

Initially, just by looking at the displayed packages, Dell has nice deals, good prices, low monthly payments. But all three websites had a “Customize” option. You choose the parts you want and the site computes the price along with the monthly payments. It tells you anyway if you are putting things that are not compatible so you can fix your options.

After customizing, making the options as similar as I can on all three brands, guess what’s the result? Dell, the one with the cheapest advertised prices, suddenly became the most expensive among the three. And the best deal was on HP.

I chatted with John on his views of the matter… Although he is a Mac advocate, he said since I am a PC guy, buy a Windows laptop and not a Mac. Which I agree, and I’d just buy a MacMini when I get back to the US.

He shared his views on using credit. And low monthly payments on a long term makes you pay for something for so long, until your laptop is old already and there are new ones out and you are still paying for the old one you have. But he also knows my concern of building up my credit history, since here in the US, no credit history, it is like you are unknown when you will buy a house or car. So he suggested to ask them if using credit will really help my credit history.

I am still studying all my options. I’ll let you all know what I got in my next posting.

Time to Upgrade

My PC has been running on Homesite 5.1, Dreamweaver MX, Photoshop 7.0 that had problems and used Photoshop 5.0 instead. GoToPdf. But I do have Homesite 5.5, Dreamweaver MX 2004, Photoshop 8.0 CS and Adobe Acrobat Standard. But I just feel that I do not have time to upgrade everything since every time I am chasing a deadline.

But I just could not stand working in Photoshop 5.0 anymore, so I decided to work on the upgrades. I started uninstalling an installing. And during the whole process, I am just watching and waiting for every step to go on. And in the meantime, bloggin.

Old School BMXers, where are they?

I just spent tons of hours not working! What a waste of time, I got tons of pending projects.

I am one BMX guy that has been riding seriously since 1986. Tried freestyle, ad played around and competed in local races in BMX and mountain biking. Influences are actually high school classmates, like Arvin Casanova and Jefferson Arrangorin. They learned earlier and I always felt I needed to catch up. When I started to finally learn, they stopped already.

I may not be as competitive as I was before, but I still have a few freestyle tricks under my sleeve. At least I still have something to show my children. There is just a time that you stop because you have to, but when the opportunity arises to still ride, even with less skills, I still ride.

That made me think, what happened to all the pros during my BMX days? I started searching and came across this website, notfreestylin.com. All I can say that this site is really good if you are one of the old school BMXers. Being a webmaster, all I can say is the website looks real bad, even how information is presented. But the information is really really good. New school BMXers may not appreciate it if they do not know the people they are talking about. Find out what happened to Eddie Fiola, Woody Itson, Martin Aparijo, Mike Dominguez, Jose Yanez and the hot Krys Dauchy (she is still hot) and more. And the pros find out about the website and actually gives in updates themselves.

One nice thing I see is that they still find time to bike, even if they are not a good as before. And another nice thing is Bob Haro and Woody Itson who now works for GT still gives free bikes to the old pros once in a while even if these old pros may not be biking in the same way they used to. They just know that they will be happy riding a new freestyle BMX bike.

One funny thing to read, if you have watched Rad over and over again on your old Betamax, there is a funny interview of Cru Jones on the website.

So to all old school BMX Freestyles, notfreestylin.com is a recommended site that you need to read.

I spent like 2 hours just reading stories on this website. Well back to work…

Cleaning Up

Mama told me if I wanted to vacuum my car since the vacuum cleaner it there. I said nope, not today Mama, I just something to do. Which is cleaning up too. 😀 But cleaning up a computer. One of my computers was used for playing around. And a few things here and there were installed.

-Uninstalled all unnecessary softwares
-Ran AVG, Updated and Full System Scan
-Ran AD-Aware, Updated and Full System Scan
-Ran Spybot, Updated and Full System Scan
-Check msconfig, Disabled unknown start up items.
-Updated SpywareBlaster
-Check for unwanted files manually on the hard disk.
-Removed browser toolbars.
-Made Firefox the default browser.
-Removed homepage settings.

And this time, before I forget, I need to create a separate user profile and just delete it everytime and recreate it again so it is much easier.

Now back to work.

No time to blog… but still finding time to blog…

Just a few quickies since I need to sleep already

– Secondary IDE Port of my Motherboard is not working well, it can’t detect anything even with a new IDE cable and new hard disk. And both IDEs are enables in the BIOS.

– Got a new ATI Radeon 9200SE 128 DDR 8X AGP so I can move my old Riva TNT 64MB to the other computer so it can handle higher resolutions and hopefully get to install Xadros Linux this time.

– Billing is starting to be time consuming without an automated system, but I don’t have enough time to create one either. I’ll probably look for a ready-made opensource alternative.

– Moving accounts from server Moray to server Quezon for server Morays retirement.

– US Based hosting clients like drukelly.com, meredithvictor.com, kabalikatnec.com are cool. ericma.com is moving, jasonfinleykent.com under negotiations. Persuading infatex.com. I see it growing. natassia-malthe.com was cool.

– Marcia and Amor has a meeting tomorrow, good luck, I hope you bring home the bacon. Marcia might be meeting with a company president, marketing manager and IT head.

– Work is a lot at Einstein, but my builds are nearly all done. Thanks to John who has been doing like 20% of the total number of sites. Without him, I’d be still working on that 20% more sites.

– My company had employees and partners, then partnerless, then employeeless, for cost cutting reasons. Now I am going back to having an employee. I hope this is a sign that business is doing good.

– New phone, new numbers. Landline still not working. Will check it out well tomorrow. Salary is near, need to save up for plane tickets if ever I get a vacation from work.

– Room still a mess

– Dot.ph domains still need to be transfered.

– Personal Vault is cool.

– Did not see the previous comet since San Diego had cloudy rainy nights. 🙁

– First time I saw a humminbird in action yesterday.

– Trillian 3 rocks

– Set aside my Mac Mini dreams since I need money to go back to the Philippines. If the company does not grant me my vacation, I’ll buy that Mac Mini to make me feel better.

– That’s it, I’m out… Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz….

What’s my belt?

In the Philippines I have trained in Taekwondo, Aikido and Jeetkunedo. That was way back 1991 to 1996. Those years were the years of my peak performance. Maybe some of you have seen my pictures in Friendster or elsewhere where I’m in a Taekwondo uniform wearing a blackbelt. That was right after a fight in one of the competitions I joined in the Philippines. But I am not a Blackbelt.

In the Philippines, during competitions, everyone is allowed to fight wearing a blackbelt, even if you are a blackbelt or not a blackbelt. As long as you are willing to fight and know you can fight, the only rule in the Philippines is if you are bluebelt and below, you need your instructor’s approval to compete. There are no age categories nor belt categories. Only weight categories. The belts in the Philippines are:

White
Yellow
Blue
Red
Brown
Black

Where each colored belt in between white and black has a high and low ranking. In the Philippines I am high redbelt, but always competes wearing a blackbelt and has won several matches against real blackbelts. But I never reached the finals though in all Philippine competitions I joined.

The colors of the belts in the States, specifically here with the member schools of the San Diego Taekwondo Association are:

White
Yellow
Orange
Blue
Blue Stripe
Purple
Purple Stripe
Brown
Brown Stripe
Red
Black and Red Stripe
Black

When I got here in the States, I was accepted as a brown stripe belt. Like in the Philippines I was two belts away from blackbelt. So I basically have the same rank.

But one difference here is I never compete against blackbelts here since competitions are by age, by belt and by weight. Which is a good thing for me especially that I am already 31, and the last time I did Taekwondo was in 1996. Until I started Taekwondo again when I came here to the States last July 11, this year.

Today is my promotion test for Red Belt, which is low brownbelt in the Philippines. Promotion test here are different, I do punches and kicks, self-defense techniques, forms and breaking. In the Philippines, promotion test are concentrated on sparring. There is no breaking though in the Philippines, but I am pretty confident I can break the blocks of wood today. Especially the kick I’m going to do for my test is a flying side kick. And a flying side kick has a lot of power in it so breaking should not be hard. Wish me luck!

Although I won 2nd place in the 10th Annual San Diego Taekwondo Championship, Master Min still wanted me to join the California Open which I think I am not prepared for yet because I need to build up my endurance again. But when I said I am not sure I want to join, he has not reminded me to join again. Sergei, one of my friends here at the taekwondo studio wants to join and has been inviting me join too, but I really think I will build up my endurance and is working on a three month program with 24 Hour Fitness to develop peak sports performance level to augment my taekwondo skills.

Amateur-Made Video Starring Me

Last September 11, 2004, I was caught on tape. I was with someone in a very tiring act. We were both going full blast but I ran out of gas earlier.

The cameraman, Mr. William Pintos was filming something else but when he saw us, he took a video of us too.

What I did in this video is a lot more tiring than what Paris Hilton did in her videos that are circulating in the Internet.

I may not be victorious with this video, but you will see in the video that I am *ehem* the second best in San Diego. Nyhahahaha

You will need Windows Media Player by the way. I uploaded a small 2.7MB video, if you want to see a clearer copy, I got a 9.3MB version of the clip too.

I actually just captured this video from a VHS tape and if you watched the whole tape, there is actually many of us, all doing it at the same time.