Fried

I don't know how it happened, but somehow, one of our automatic voltage regulators (AVRs) at the office melted one of the prongs right off of the plug of my laptop power cord today.



One of my officemates nearby was the first to notice something wrong -- she said she could smell something burning. The AVR that I use is actually a couple of desks away, so I didn't notice the smell at first.

Anyway, she followed her nose and finally realized that it was the AVR! We turned it off and unplugged the power cord. As my camphone photo shows, one corner of the rubber insulation on the plug had melted away into a black ugly mess. A quick check showed that the missing prong is still stuck inside the AVR socket.

I can only conclude that something went wrong with the AVR, which is really ironic, since the whole point of using an AVR is to protect your equipment! Thankfully, the laptop itself appears to be unaffected. Now I just have to get myself a new power cord.

Twitter Wishlist: Addendum

Around four and a half months ago (after a month of using Twitter), I came up with a Twitter Wishlist with three items, none of which have materialized so far. * sniff! *

Now I've got two new items to add, although frankly I consider these to be even lower in priority than the items on my original list.

1. Finding out which of my posts have been starred, and how many times. I see this as a way for followers to give feedback. After all, each star means someone took the trouble to explicitly mark a 'tweet' as something that they liked. That seems like valuable feedback to me.
2. Getting a local (i.e., Philippine-based) number to send Twitter updates to. Most of the local mobile content providers charge P2.50/message for value-added text services, where the revenue is split between the content provider and the telco. Since I'm used to that charging scheme, I frankly wouldn't mind paying that kind of money to send a Twitter update. It sure beats the fee I'm charged right now each time I send an SMS to the UK server!

Still on Twitter, I'm eagerly awaiting the day Jazzbo finishes setting up his PhilMusic Twitter feed. Once he gets it up and running, PhilMusic will be the first Philippine-based site I know of that uses Twitter to send updates, and it would be free of charge to 'followers' too. * Thumbs up! *

Update (March 4): PhilMusic's Twitter feed is now officially up.

Worrying about the Fragile Web

I have to admire Jason Goldman for the passion that he feels towards his work.

In a recent blogpost, he asked the question, Does working on the web truly matter? and immediately answered with a resounding Yes!

And you know what? That got me thinking.

Deep down inside, I believe that working on the web does matter. Perhaps that's why I'm always surfing the 'net, forever adding new blogs to my RSS subscriptions, and endlessly creating one more account on yet another new website so I can explore the features for no real purpose other than the intellectual stimulation of having my curiosity satisfied.

At the same time, however, I can't help but worry about the fragility of the web. Perhaps living in a newly industrialized country such as the Philippines has made me more sensitive to how easily bits and bytes can be destroyed or rendered inaccessible. Heck, in the past few months alone, I've experienced losing all the basic utilities (electricity, water, and Internet access), sometimes for extended periods. When you have no 'up time' guarantees for the basic stuff, well, the web by necessity takes a back seat.

Perhaps that's why so few of my friends here have even heard of 'Web 2.0' or 'User Generated Content.' Frankly, most of them will have to work to stifle their yawns if I try to explain the idea. They're more concerned about balancing their budgets, raising their kids, managing their businesses, and doing other things out in the real world.

Add to all this the fact that anyone with a web browser can easily find the location of Google's mega-data center in Oregon, and well, you have to wonder how susceptible this blog is to getting blown up in some freak terrorist attack.

I know, I know... I'm sounding delusionally paranoid now. But that's the direction that my mind naturally takes when I realize just how many of my eggs have (over time) been moved into this single basket called Google.

Having said all this, I return to the original question: does working on the web matter? My answer is still Yes... but (and there's a but) the work is simply too high up on Maslow's pyramid to benefit the Filipino everyman, and frighteningly far too susceptible to damage and sabotage in our increasingly unsafe world.

Recent Sidebar Updates

Made a couple of updates to my blog's sidebar this week.

I updated the Twitter widget so it now displays the three most recent 'tweets' instead of just one. Also changed the display order somewhat by putting the time before the text. It was fairly easy to do, thanks to this great blogpost from Jon Aquino, which I found via Twitter's FAQs.

What I'd love to do eventually is to restyle the display to look like the Twitter widget in Brad Kellett's blog, Pantsland. He groups his entries by day and displays the actual time, rather than the relative time after each text blurb.

Also added a Google Reader widget to the sidebar, under 'Recent Reads'. This widget displays items that I've opted to 'share' while reading through my various RSS subscriptions using Google Reader.

It does not yet look quite as nice as I'd like... but I'm fairly confident I can prettify it once I've got some time on my hands, since it just takes a bit of CSS.

I can't help but feel happy when I look at the sidebar now, because these two recent changes really complement my existing Flickr widget, which displays my most recent public photos.

_______

Update - Feb 16:
Finally have my 'Recent Reads' widget styled, thanks to bits of CSS from the Google Reader Blog.

The Machine is Us/ing Us

Found this little gem of a video via Evhead.

It blew me away. Will blow you away too.

Firefox Crop Circle

It's been up for a while, but it was only today that I stumbled across this blogpost about a bunch of guys who decided to make a Firefox Crop Circle.



It's pretty amazing what lengths passionate people will go to. Kudos to everyone involved!

Sign-on Consolidation

Interestingly, I had to do a couple of sign-on consolidations this week.

• Merged a Blogger account into a Google account
• Merged a Flickr account into a Yahoo account

Both were rather painless procedures, although I did have a bit of a hiccup with the Flickr merge.

Turns out I had a forgotten, fairly unused Flickr account already associated with my primary Yahoo id, and you could only associate one Flickr account with each Yahoo id.

Fortunately, it was fairly easy to delete the forgotten Flickr account from Flickr. Once that was done, it was a straightforward exercise to associate my pro Flickr account to my primary Yahoo id.

Embedded

I freely admit it... After two months of regular use, Twitter is now very much embedded in my life.

Twittering Anew

Twitter has released yet another round of updates and of course I immediately took advantage and tweaked my settings so that the color scheme on my Twitter home matches my blog.

Some thoughts:

• Statistics. I like! It surprised me to realize that I am just one more post away from making my 100th "status update" using Twitter. haha! Obviously, I'm addicted.
• Mini-thumbs. I like the fact that the avatars are all shrunk down to mini-thumbnails in the sidebar. Efficient use of space, especially for the uber-popular people who have 4,000 friends (mild exaggeration there).
• Tabs. I like the faux-tab interface. Simple but snazzy.
• Sleep. Had a laugh when I saw the new "Sleep Time" option. I used to wake up in the middle of the night when Twitter updates arrived. haha! But that stopped being a problem when I changed my incoming message tone to something less intrusive.

Anyway, I really liked the new updates, which is why I felt motivated to use the invitation feature today to invite a few more people -- mostly folks in the Philippines whom I don't see often enough. Since it's free for us to receive text messages, I figured it was about time I spread the good word around.

Unfortunately, no one has responded yet (it's been over 12 hours!), which makes me wonder whether or not the invitations even got sent in the first place! And the main reason that I'm wondering is this: I had added one of my own email addresses to the list of invitees and I haven't received the invite email yet. :-(

None of the items on my Twitter Wishlist have made it into this round of updates. But considering how quickly they're putting new features out, I have reason to hope. :D

Untag Me, Please

I couldn't help but laugh out loud when I saw the corporate write-up for Tagged.com:

Tagged provides a fun, safe, and exciting environment for teens to showcase their personalities and talents, and to connect with friends and meet new ones. Tagged maintains this great environment by only allowing teenagers to register on the site.

They've got to be totally kidding about that last statement! I've received four or five "You've been tagged" emails already and they're all from people who are either in their 30s or older!

Anyway, if you've tagged me and you're wondering why I haven't replied, please don't take it personally. Until I see a compelling reason to sign up, I'm staying untagged.

A parting thought: if you really want to 'play tag' with the unwired generation, you're better off signing up with Twitter.

Podcasting hits the mainstream

According to an IT Conversations podcast featuring Doug Kaye, podcasting has been around for three to four years in some form, even though the term didn't really come into existence in a big way until more recently.

But you know that podcasting has really hit the mainstream when Amazon.com has launched its own monthly podcast, Amazon Wire -- "an original, free podcast about books, music, movies, and those who create them."

A quick look through Odeo also shows a number of channels with several instantly-recognizable names: BBC's Documentary Archive, The Economist Magazine, and Business Week. It's great how the rise of broadband internet connectivity has sparked a revival of old-style communication methods, i.e., audio only.

One of these days (when I finally have the time!), I'm going to have to try recording a sound clip to see how easy it is to go from recording, to editing, to publishing, and finally to actual listening -- without any professional equipment.

Update:

I decided to check out Odeo Studio to see just how much of a no-brainer it would be to use their recording and publishing features with my clunky home microphone. And as it turns out, it was very much a no-brainer! Took me all of maybe four minutes to do everything from start to finish. It helps that all the buttons are large and clearly labeled. haha!

Here's the finished product, which I've entitled Hello, World. If you're a programmer who "grew up" in the 1980s, you'll get the inside joke. hehe.


powered by ODEO

The recording is pathetically simple, but it does prove that Odeo Studio works like a charm. Oh, and I would like to go on the record and say that I find the primarily-pink-themed flash player really pretty.

Recent Movements

I've fallen so far behind on my blogreading lately that I missed a few notable movements:

• Vox has launched (Oct 2006). After being in "limited membership" mode for a few months, this brand-spanking new service has officially launched. I am seriously tempted to move my blog to it, because Vox allows me to flag who gets to see which entry (in the same way LiveJournal does). The only thing that stops me from really switching is my lack of access to the actual template code.
  
• Ev and Biz start Obvious (Oct 2006). In a move that's very much the reverse of a "built-to-flip" mentality, Ev and Biz have set up a new company called Obvious, and acquired Odeo and Twitter from their venture-capital funded business Odeo Inc.
  
• Mark Fletcher has left Bloglines (June 2006). Serial 'net-preneur Mark Fletcher has left Bloglines in the hands of its acquirers, Ask. It's a move that's similar to his own departure from eGroups after it was acquired by Yahoo (and rebranded as Yahoogroups). It also reminds me of Evan Williams leaving Blogger a couple of years after it was acquired by Google.
  

easyPDF to the Rescue

As the sun was coming up this morning, I found myself in dire straits because my Adobe Acrobat trial version had expired and I desperately needed to produce PDFs for the association's October 2006 newsletter.

I visited Adobe.com, hoping to buy a copy of the software online. I was so determined to finish this issue that I was even willing to spend a few hundred dollars just to get Acrobat. So you can just imagine my dismay when I learned that only a handful of countries can buy Acrobat online. Apparently, the rest of us have to go through resellers or distributors.

With the deadline hanging over my head, I couldn't afford to wait until Monday to contact the Philippine distributor. So I did a quick Google search for Word to PDF converters. After less than five minutes of searching and following links around, I managed to stumble across a product called easyPDF Printer Driver.

I downloaded their trial copy and by Jove, it worked like a charm! The resulting PDF was perfectly WYSIWYG, right down to the positions of text boxes, frames, images, headers, and footers.

From there, it was a no-brainer for me to pull out my credit card and plunk down $14.95 for a single user license. The license key appeared on screen right after the card transaction went through, so it was fairly short work thereafter to generate the PDFs with password protection on and content copying disabled (and also without the trial easyPDF watermark). By the time I emailed the files to our association webmaster, I felt like a huge weight had been taken off my shoulders. Whew!

I'm sure Adobe Acrobat has got a lot more features compared to easyPDF, but since I only need very basic Word-to-PDF conversion right now, easyPDF fits the bill perfectly, and costs only a fraction (less than 3.4%!!) of Adobe Acrobat.

Frankly, I can't remember a time when I've been this lucky with an impulse online purchase before... which is why I found the experience worth blogging about.

A few conclusions from this experience:

• It's really true that when you're the brand leader, people will pay (and in fact will not think twice about paying) a premium for your product.
• Even if you're the market leader, you can lose sales when your product isn't available for purchase at the time and place when people need to buy it.
• Given how easy it is to find anything on the web, doing a quick Google search before you buy anything online can save you a whole lot of money.
  

Twitter Wishlist

Have been using Twitter for over a month now, and I must say that I've really grown to love this service. It's such a quick-and-easy way to post an update to my blog, especially when I have no time to post a real meaty blog update. I feel less guilty that way. :-P

I still haven't seen the effect my recent mobile twittering will have on my phone bills, though, so perhaps my opinion will change when the next bill arrives. haha!

I know that less is more when it comes to web applications (I've been reading 37Signals' Getting Real book, so yes, I really do get it). But I still can't help but wish for a few enhancements:

1. Getting messages on my phone with the correct timestamp for my timezone. Right now, I'm getting text messages from an SMS center somewhere in the UK (at least I think I am, since the country code is +44). So when I receive the message, they're timestamped 7 hours earlier than my equivalent time (since my timezone is GMT+8). That's downright disconcerting, especially when I'm scrolling through my Treo's inbox (which sorts the messages by date-time).
2. Sending an MMS (not an SMS) as my Twitter update, so that photos can be attached to the message. The photo should, of course, be different from my profile photo so the latter doesn't get overwritten. I suppose what I'm looking for sounds a lot like photo-blogging, but hey, if Twitter is a form of mini-blogging and each twitter post deserves to have its own permalink, then why can't I use it as a photo-blogger as well, especially since so many phones and phone networks now support MMS? Ev's vacation twitter messages from Marrakech, Milan, and Santorini would surely have been even more interesting if photos came with them. And I could have twittered some photos of the damage wrought by typhoon Milenyo.
   
3. Finding out how many people have actually visited my Twitter page, i.e., knowing which of my friends (and how many non-friends!) have actually been checking in. Think of it this way -- I can add a visitor counter to my blog, but I can't do that with my Twitter page.
   

So there you go. The top three items on my Twitter wish list. I'm sure I can think of more but everything else is of lower priority to me right now.

Google Browser Sync for Firefox

What happens when my top two favorite brands collaborate? The result is one really incredible product (and a very happy user)!

I'm talking, of course, about the Google Browser Sync for Firefox which is...

... an extension that continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers.

It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions.

I found out about this utility a few days ago and for the first time in literally years of web surfing, I found it worthwhile to actually invest some time in organizing my bookmarks.

I'd long ago given up on browser-based bookmarks and had already been using my Google homepage instead, because I needed the same bookmarks on my home PC and my work laptop. But the Google homepage interface is somewhat cumbersome and not at all conducive to organizing tons of bookmark entries.

Google Browser Sync is therefore a godsend. The best part for me is the fact that I can end a session of web browsing on one machine and literally resume it on another. There's no awkward mental shift when you face an empty browser window at the start of a new session.

With the Browser Sync I can easily pick up from the train of thought that I had when I ended the previous session. For this avid web surfer, that's like manna from heaven! Haha!

It also helps that I didn't need to create a new Google account to use this. My current account works just fine and literally took less than a minute to get everything installed, configured, and working.

All software should be so painless and so useful.

So Much To See, So Little Time

Aarrggh. Don't have enough time to check out all the neat new things that have been popping up all over the web!

Will have to settle for making a list here and getting to it when I have more time.

• GroupLoop. It may sound like a cereal, but it's actually a web-based software for small groups. Haven't figured out what makes it different from Yahoogroups.
  
• Blogger in Beta. Had some trouble with page elements last night and haven't figured out why yet. Kept getting a 404 error whenever I try to add a second html/javascript element. Another puzzle to solve.
• 37Signals. All the neat little project management and coordination tools offered by 37Signals, including Basecamp, Campfire, and Writeboard.
• Vox. Haven't had a chance to return to my brand-spanking-new account there to explore the other features.
  

It's days like this when I wish I had a career as a technology magazine feature writer so I can explore these things and actually get paid to do it. haha!