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Hundreds, but not thousands.

What you are looking at right now is not a mosaic of a blue-green-colored watermelon, nor is it a large pit of death of words. This is simply a word cloud, kinda similar to the tag/category cloud you see at the very bottom of this page, and its purpose is to highlight the words that are frequently used in a selection. The selection is - you’ve guessed it - everything in this site. I’m feeling narcissistic already. (Not the disease, but I really wouldn’t mind if I had one.)

This graphic is made on Wordle. (I’ve attributed you and your service now, so don’t cry - or run to your lawyers - about it anymore, okay? So we’re good?) It’s quite easy to manipulate the colors, text, things like that, so thank them for having the blue-green text of awesome right in front of your faces. Oh, and have you noticed the most frequently used word I’m using? Yeah. Now I can prove to others that I can sound like an L.A. dude, without being an L.A. dude! Like, it’s not obvious that I’m doing this for, like, a lot of times already. So interesting.

Going off topic here - but I’m doing this in the middle of a final examinations week. Who in the right mind, or with the [rare] common sense, would do such nonsense? That’s right - me. I’m born to do things with perfect timing. Or lack thereof.

And I’m taking back my first statement. It does look like a blue-green-colored watermelon.

Rhetorical eloquence.

First of all, I’d like to start this blog entry by a simple conversation I’ve had with Gwen minutes ago, while I was thinking of what I’m supposed to be writing here. She told me what my intro should be; the four-liner chat log says everything about it:

8:41:36 PM Foster, Gwendelyn: i really don’t know what to say
8:41:39 PM Foster, Gwendelyn: but i want to blog
8:42:52 PM JMacalinao: tapos… (Translated: then…)
8:45:25 PM Foster, Gwendelyn: then say random things

Then random things I shall write! Although my Twitter basically says everything about what’s happening in my day-to-day living, including my replies to other people’s actions, there are also things I haven’t included there.

Like this site, for example. First off, I’d like to thank Mallory for changing my link on her site, without even telling her what my new site is! It’s either she has meticulously psychic powers, or she basically looked at her comments, where coincidentally, I posted one. Second, I got Janine to post my link on her blog, because I basically told her to. That’s three links in total now. Come on, guys, I need a lot of your websites — and traffic — on my site! Heh. (I’m thinking of putting up my host’s link here too. I really have to thank Jonathan for hosting my sites.)

I haven’t thought of how I would implement my portfolio page, but I do know WordPress is going to do the rough job for me, setting up all those page. Structure, and as always, content are the big problems in this portfolio.

Things haven’t been going so well with our software project, EASE@Haven, mainly because of the bombardment of documentations and the lack of development man-power. The interface is almost done with their main functionality intact, but the other part of functionality that we all love, the error checking part, is so difficult to implement in the system, that I had to force myself to use plugins along with the already easy jQuery library. I hope we get everything ready by this Thursday.

Other projects have been bugging me lately, too, like the microprocessors/microcontrollers project. We had to do a bicycle speedometer using a sort of old-ass microprocessor (M68HC11). Since I’m doing all the programming (in freaking assembly code), I shouldn’t have the problem with how I’m supposed to work the program with the circuit. But it seems we haven’t done anything about the circuit itself, which is a bummer.

Oh, and don’t forget all the papers we have to submit in the coming days! They’re falling on us like hailstorms!

As for my iPhone updates, I’ve upgraded it to the recent 2.0.1 firmware. Nothing new. What’s new is the extraordinary theming you can have when you’ve jailbroken it and installed WinterBoard. It’s basically like SummerBoard on steroids, because its theming capability is so amazing. Who knew that you can make a theme that changes — no, animates — your wallpapers in your homescreen! Definitely blown away on this one.

Hmm… Looks like only tech and academics are the only stuff I can brag and/or rant about for today. Other stuff have been full of dullness and false alarms in the past month, although I can’t complain about them now. I’ve already done that in the past five years, and I can’t afford being a broken record. (Yes, being one is a waste of time and money.)

The 8th of August of 2008 is a lucky day, can’t say anything wrong about that. It’s just the case of where the luck is going (or went, since it already occurred to you).

Edit: It’s officially 11:11PM while I’m writing this. I wanna greet my cousin Jacque for her twenty-third birthday today (August 11th). I almost forgot it until my Friendster birthday e-mail alerted me. Hurray for unsolicited e-mails!

iPhone 2.0

A week ago, Apple launched the App Store for iPhone 2.0, and I must say, it’s really not too shabby. I know, I know, there are those unbelievably priced applications that have pretty much no use for me, or have interfaces that don’t deserve to be part of their apps in the first place. But there are some apps that I would really use (or in this case, already using), or that has really cool graphics (like some very impressive games).

Let me start off with what I’m using right now. It’s called WordPress for the iPhone, and it works like magic. Okay, not really, but it’s useful when you’re offline, but still wanted to blog stuff. Like when you’re in some remote place, and you want to rant about how low-tech the place is, this is the app to use. It’s also easy to set up - just enter your URL, username and password, and let the app do its work. Of course, it’s only for WordPress (2.5.1 or later), but have no fear - there’s also one for TypePad (by the TypePad developers, of course). The only thing I’d request for improvement is rich text editing, since I’m quite stuck to putting HTML tags here, and that alone is tedious. But since it’s also a limitation throughout iPhone itself (I mean, without text highlights and selection, it’s pretty much next to useless), I might forgive the WordPress developers - for now.

Next one is Twinkle. It looks so darn nice, it encourages me to post twits over and over again. Other than the new [purple and gold] graphics, and the separate Tapulous profile - its purpose in Twinkle is unknown, probably for backup - the application is similar to its earlier version (0.75), as it’s supposed to be. While the first one has bugs (lots of ‘em, unfortunately), the next revision is already waiting for approval as of this moment. Well, shouldn’t updates be automatically approved?

Another app that I can approve is Super Monkey Ball. If you haven’t seen games in the old iPhone firmwares, I really hope you haven’t. The only good ones were Pool, Labyrinth, and Neverball (a spin-off of Super Monkey Ball). This game, along with Enigmo, Bomberman Touch, Tap Tap Revenge (well, not so much, but it’s addicting), and other cool games, they bring the next level of mobile gaming into your own hands, and they bring the best of the iPhone capabilities. I mean, compared with the third-party app Neverball from the previous firmware, Super Monkey Ball is fun, it’s fast, and it has quality comparable to Nintendo DS and Sony PSP games - most likely to DS, though.

That, and other useful apps like Remote, Midomi, and Evernote make up about an eighth (rough estimate) of almost a thousand apps in the App Store, because to be honest, there’s a lot of useless apps out there. I can probably forgive apps that are free of charge, but for a paid app that does nothing? I’ll most likely expect those apps to drop their prices to a dollar, if not free. Of course, I’m not the one to complain, because I’m going to be happy with the real third-party apps since the firmware is already jailbroken. Oh, well. Where’s my video recorder?!

I’m back!

Well, not really. I wasn’t even away in the first place. Just busy with school stuff — microprocessors project, several reports and presentations, and don’t forget EASE@Haven too. I was also busy with preparing my mom’s school into IT goodness, and we started by getting more computers (computers that are actually faster in processing than mine). To add things up, if you’d see one of my previous posts, I posted an update to that, telling that I’ll be barely posting here if this thing happens.

And thus the title. I’m back because it failed.

Yeah, and it happened just now. Look! It’s just the requirements elicitation phase! And I already failed there! Unbelievable. I’m having this feeling that I’m supposed to be laughing hysterically to what just happened, and the feeling of the need to spiritually die, all mixed up in one gigantic package. Of course, I wouldn’t consider the latter; laughing like you’re one crazy guy in a mental hospital might make me more of an idiot, but at least it’s harmless. And I won’t have to do anything stupid after that, like, deleting this site from the depths of the earth Internet. And to think that this happened every year since the last five years. It’s really interesting, to be honest.

I really wanted to talk about stuff like this, but before I go ranting off about how insanely happy I am right now, or blog about whether that statement has sarcasm or not, let’s just stop it right there. Not because it’s interesting, non-boring stuff that would make me the laughing stock of all the lucky guys out there, but because I just don’t feel like posting stuff like that. Let’s just try not to turn this one into a dating blog, okay? Okay. (Oh yeah, someone named Enrico posted a comment in one of my posts concerning my previous situation. Well, I’ve done it, and I got the consequences. You don’t have to sympathize over my failures, but thanks anyway.)

For the site front, all I did is the About page, for now. As you can see, my life is uneventful as it is. I can see the hint of schadenfreude across all of my visitors’ faces right now. Hahaha.

Update: I’m not mad, angry or anything at all. I promise. I’m the most resilient person in the world.

Update 2: Just a follow-up on the site front — I’ve upgraded my WordPress to the latest version, 2.6. The added features are great, although I probably won’t be enabling the Turbo thing here.

True: Three is better than two.

I can tell you now: This design has been the best thing that has ever happened in this website since I’ve thought of the first one. The coding and transforming went absolutely smooth, and the output is just — amazing. If you’d see my face right now, you’d already know.

Of course, version three wouldn’t be possible without version two. Although that was one of my biggest mistakes in design, I mean, the design itself is okay, but it just doesn’t look right. So I learned to its mistakes by just getting the ones that I think are the good parts of the design, and somehow improved them. Looks like I did okay with that. It looks like the first two designs combined, right? And yeah, the content. I’m too lazy/busy/[put adjective here]. I’ll do that when I’m not worrying about failing INTROSE or any other course. And for the bottom/sidebar part of the site, I’ll add more plugins. Probably - no, most likely - a Flickr plugin, ‘coz I got some pictures up there. Not graphics or any stuff like that, but real ones. You know, the ones taken by a digital camera.

Edit: Anything newer than the One La Salle blog entry was deleted, due to my utter instincts to delete them. I basically have made version two go *poof.* Hahaha