Wow. It’s been exactly a year since I last compiled a Groovee Playlist™. Well, I haven’t actually actively sought nice songs this past year so I haven’t had time to properly compile lists throughout the year. It’s only the past month or two that I tuned in to various sources to get my music fix. So let this be the extra-long 2009 special of the Groovee Playlist™. As much as possible, I only featured songs that were released or have become big in 2009 and I must note that this is not my Best of 2009 selection—I haven’t listened to as much music as I should have and I deliberately strove to have a diverse set of music to include in this list.

As always, I’ll link to the Wikipedia article about the song (if it exists) as “[W]”, and to the YouTube search (or official music video) for the song as “[U]” so that you can sample the song and see if you like it as well. Reactions, violent or not, on the selected songs as well as other music recommendations are very much welcome in the comments section.

• “I Gotta Feeling” by the Black Eyed Peas. [W] [U] A friend of mine says that this is the worst song of 2009. I beg to disagree. I personally think that it is the year’s best song and I am definitely in love with the song’s optimism, catchy lyrics, and all-around goodness.

• Glee. [W] Glee has certainly turned out to be 2009’s musical hit and its musical numbers are quite a delight to watch. There’s plenty of covers in here to like and my most favorite is their cover of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’”, which is aptly the show’s signature song (as is Journey’s). Their cover of Cindy Lauper’s “True Colors” may have upstaged Phil Collins’ two renditions, which I consider the best versions of this really beautiful song.

• Fame. [W]. There’s plenty of great musical numbers in this movie. I consider Naturi Naughton’s version of “Fame” better than the original by Irene Cara. The R&B-inspired 2009 rendition is edgier and is much more musically deeper than the pretty bland 1980 version.

• “Fireflies” by Owl City. [W] [U] Wow. Just wow. The quirky lyrics coupled with the synth-backed melody is a pleasure to listen to and a sure pick-upper when you’re feeling down.

• “Good Girls Go Bad” by Cobra Starship feat. Leighton Meester. [W] [U] Infectious and a really good song to dance to.

• “Fight For Love” by Elliott Yamin. [W] [U] I just love the earnestness of this rock power ballad from the American Idol finalist. The toned down verses provides a nice contrast to the full-blown accompaniment of this song’s chorus.

• “Down” by Jay Sean feat. Lil Wayne. [W] [U] “Down” is the first American-released single by Indian British Jay Sean and it slowly hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The feat is no surprise to me since this Dance-R&B song has been a very persistent LSS for me. His latest single “Do You Remember”, which sounds similar, is also likable. Also, have you noticed that Jay Sean sounds like Chris Brown?

• “Halo” by Beyoncé. [W] [U] After the exuberance of “Single Ladies” (included in the December 2009 Playlist), “Halo” is a nice change of pace. The “accidentally” similar song “Already Gone” by Kelly Clarkson (both songs being written by Ryan Tedder of OneRepublic) is also nice, but I prefer Beyoncé’s song better. Her other singles “Sweet Dream” and “Smash Into You” are two other good songs.

• “Broken Strings” James Morrison feat. Nelly Furtado. [W] [U] A great rock duet from underrated artist James Morrison and versatile singer Nelly Furtado.

• “Try Sleeping With A Broken Heart” by Alicia Keys. [W] [U] This song doesn’t sound like the typical Alicia Keys songs that I know (though I admittedly haven’t listened to a lot of her songs so I could be wrong). But it’s a great piece of music nonetheless.

• “Home” by Paul Van Dyk feat. Johnny McDaid. [U] I think this is the first time I’ve seen an artist release two songs with the same title. PvD’s first “Home” song was included in the 1996 album Seven Ways but was never released as a single. This 2009 song, which features Johnny McDaid on vocals and songwriting credits, is a much, much better offering. This is a really, really good epic trance anthem though I have trouble deciding between this song or the next as my 2009 best trance song. Too bad I wasn’t able to hear this song when I went to Paul van Dyk’s DJ set last October. I ironically heard it, however, during Armin van Buuren’s visit last December 10.

• “Changing Ways” by Giuseppe Ottaviani feat. Francesco M. [U] I mentioned elsewhere that I consider Giuseppe Ottaviani to be the best epic trance producer. I have actually featured his song “No More Alone” in last December’s Playlist. While this is not as anthemic as PvD’s “Home”, this sounds more uplifting and danceable.

• “Today” by Peyton. This is possibly the most obscure track I’ve ever featured in a Playlist or tried to do research on. I only heard of this song as part of Bigfish Manila’s Track Record Volume 2 compilation. There’s practically zero information about this song on the Web and that makes me question whether this song’s title or artist is correct. But, whatever, I really, really, really love this dance anthem.

• “New Divide” by Linkin Park. [W] [U] I like this Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen track—it has Linkin Park written all over it. Comparisons have been made to another LP song “What I’ve Done” written for the first Transformers movie (and included in the August 2007 Playlist) and I have to say I like the earlier one better. You should check out the mash-ups of these two songs on YouTube.

• “Love Story” by Taylor Swift. [W] [U] I admitted that I love this cheesy song once and I’m not ashamed to declare it again. (This song holds a special place in my heart for reasons I won’t admit, however.)

• “Release Me” by Agnes Carlsson. [W] [U] LSS-worth bubblegum dance-pop goodness.

• “Human Nature” by Billy Crawford. [U] Michael Jackson’s death last June is definitely this year’s (and maybe this decade’s) biggest music news. And while Billy Crawford’s cover predates the death, I consider this song this year’s best MJ remake. BTW, This Is It is a must watch.

• “When Love Takes Over” by David Guetta feat. Kelly Rowland. [W] [U] This dance track hit #1 on the Billboard Hot Dance Club Songs and deservedly so.

• “Permanent” by David Cook. [W] [U] This is a hauntingly beautiful rock ballad by last year’s American Idol.

• “Whatcha Say” by Jason Derülo. [W] [U] I must say that this song’s chorus is very peculiarly sounding, being liberally sampled from Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek”. But the resulting production as an R&B track is very nicely done.

Last December 12, we had a Christmas OpenStreetMap Micro Mapping Party. The previous one was in Davao back in July and the first was in Tagaytay in May. Starting in 2010, we plan to have quarterly Mapping Parties at least in the Greater Manila Area. So if you’re interested to join one, there will be plenty of opportunities next year for you to do so.

For the December Mapping Party, we decided to tackle Cubao, particularly in the vicinity of the Araneta Center. Present were Maning, Neil, and me. Marloue, who was visiting Manila from Davao, was supposed to join us but he had a last-minute change of plans. Neil was accompanied by his wife and kid and Maning and I learned that they apparently map as a team, like the time when Neil practically completed the buildings in the Makati Central Business District.

We met at Starbucks Araneta Coliseum and proceeded to “slice the cake”. This is an OpenStreetMap term in Mapping Parties where participants divide and assign the area to be surveyed. “Slicing the cake” is such a common expression in the worldwide OpenStreetMap community that there have been actual cakes with maps on them that were sliced as homage. Hehehe. Going back to Cubao, Maning took the “university slice”, namely, the portion north and east of EDSA and Aurora Boulevard that has famous world-famous universities as the names of its streets. Neil got Araneta Center itself—the area bounded by EDSA, Aurora, 15th Avenue, and P. Tuazon—so that it’d be safer for his family. I selected the portions east of 15th Avenue and ended up mapping up to J.P. Rizal between Aurora Boulevard and P. Tuazon. See the map below for the cake slices.

Unlike the Tagaytay Mapping Party, which involved surveying unmapped streets using GPS receivers, the Cubao Mapping Party is a Walking Papers-type of mapping. In Cubao, almost all of the streets have already been traced from Yahoo! satellite imagery and so what’s left is on-the-ground verification of road names and updated streets and extensive surveying for POIs or points of interest. This type of mapping has been called “Walking Papers” since there is an OSM-related site called Walking Papers that greatly facilitates such kind of mapping. In Walking Papers, you get a printable map of the area of interest, write and draw on the printed map while doing the actual mapping, then scan and upload the map where the site can automatically georeference it and have it also available for others to add to OpenStreetMap.

Maning had printed Walking Paper maps for his and Neil’s slices, but I didn’t (I have no working printer at home) so I reverted to the traditional pen-and-paper mapping, using my notebook to collect data. See the photo below to see some of my written notes. I have to say that having a printed Walking Papers map is much simpler since drawing the streets on the notebook loses much of the relative scale making it harder to place POIs. In addition, I should’ve used a spiral notebook since it’s easier to fold it to show the active pages. Oh well.

Anyway, I started my mapping the block between 15th and 20th Avenues. It was pretty straightforward getting the POIs in the area. I wasn’t able to go inside the Princeton, Rochester, Trinity, and Monterrey streets since they were really narrow and I was driving a car. But I eventually parked along G.H. del Pilar street and walked a bit to get the names of a few townhouses in the area.

When I tackled the next block, the one between 20th Avenue and J.P. Rizal, boy was I in for a shock! Again, I tried mapping while driving slowly in my car and parking every now and then. But I eventually gave up, parked the car in front of Kalantiyaw Elementary School and did my mapping on foot. I walked most parts of the city block and was utterly flabbergasted by numerous alleys, footways, and streets. In addition I found many alleys and roads that have the same names! There were “Extension” and “Interior” streets there that are perpendicular or parallel to the original streets! If I were a delivery man, I’m sure I would get lost finding a house there if I wasn’t familiar with the area.

I checked various online and hardcopy maps (Google, Mapcentral.ph, Citiatlas, etc.) after the party and saw that not one had all the details that I had found when I surveyed the area. I guess OpenStreetMap now has the most detailed and up-to-date information of that area anywhere! Mind you, I wasn’t able to completely go everywhere due to time constraints so there are definitely still some unmapped alleys, footpaths and POIs left.

The nicest place I visited while mapping was the Camerino Park in Barangay Marilag. I wasn’t really expecting to stumble into a park that has a playground filled with happy kids. If I were living in the area, that park would definitely be a great place to kill time.

Shown below is the before-and-after screenshots of my map slice in OpenStreetMap. See how much nicer it now looks? Go check it out for yourself.

We won! Team Bloggers, which consisted of Benj, Jeff, Hannah (whom I only met then), and me, conquered the 3rd Max Road Challenge, organized by 103.5 Max FM. The Road Challenge happened last Sunday, December 13, and had us traveling all the way from Caltex along Julia Vargas in Ortigas to Leslie’s Restaurant in Tagaytay.

The challenge

Our victory was quite unexpected since you really can’t tell who was leading or not during the event. You see, the Road Challenge is unlike the Amazing Race. It’s not even a race but a game to get the most number of points. Points are obtained by answering questions found in three road books, one for each leg of the event. The first leg ended at Caltex Filinvest, the second at Caltex Mamplasan along SLEX, and the third at Leslie’s. The questions were mostly trivia about the radio station, Christmas, the sponsors, and Tagaytay, while other questions were Tagalog riddles (bugtong). Some of the Tagaytay-related questions could only be answered by visiting the place mentioned, so it’s a bit of a scavenger hunt as well.

Points were also given to very minor tasks (like putting the Max FM car sticker on the car, or buying bottled water from 7–11) and one very major task: to perform a Tagalog Christmas carol in front of the DJs, the other teams, and bystanders at Caltex Mamplasan. What our team did was to put a twist to “Pasko na Sinta Ko”. Hopefully there isn’t a video of our embarrassing performance on YouTube.

I first learned of the Road Challenge when Benj plurked about it last Thursday. I was initially hesitant to join since I would have a busy Saturday the day before and I wanted to rest on Sunday. But I decided, what the heck, I should join since these type of events are few and far between. It’s a good thing that I did since it was awesome winning at something like this.

Interestingly, three of my officemates, Amiel, Homer, and Caloy, also joined the contest. They named their team after another officemate, Gem.

Points for improvement

While I approve of the event not being a race due to safety concerns, I wish that there were more non-trivial tasks instead of it being 90% answering questions. For example, aside from the performance number, the previous Road Challenge had the teams make beaded necklaces for the children at an orphanage in Tagaytay. I also wish that there were puzzle-solving and clues either to get to the next pitstop or to get more points. That would make the event intellectually stimulating. Hehehe.

There was also a quite a few bits of logistical failure on the part of Max FM. They announced in an SMS before the event the expected pitstops. The first pitstop, Caltex Filinvest, was named as Caltex Zapote and this puzzled me since I did an ocular and found that there were no Caltex stations in Zapote. Besides, going to Zapote would be a substantial detour when driving towards Tagaytay from Ortigas. I guess they meant that it was Caltex along Alabang-Zapote Road, but that’s problematic as there are several Caltex stations on that road.

Moreover, it seems that Caltex or Max FM failed to inform Caltex Filinvest about the event. The people at the station were bewildered that the station was a pitstop. Some of the first teams to arrive there were actually instructed by the station attendants to go further west towards Zapote since the teams were told by the organizers to stop at “Caltex Zapote”. In addition, the organizers told the teams to exit SLEX just before the “Alabang Bridge” (this is actually the Alabang Viaduct) but we were all surprised to see that this exit was temporarily closed due to roadworks. Mega fail.

The station, Garmin, and OpenStreetMap

Previously, I only knew of 103.5 Max FM by name and it was only because of the Road Challenge that I learned that the station reformatted a few months ago to be more dance-music-oriented. Being an electronic and dance music (EDM) fan, I actually like it. The station is now a worthy alternative to the pirate (?) station 107.9 U-Radio. I’m especially happy to see that they also air foreign dance music radio shows like Paul van Dyk’s Vandit Knights. And the station apparently also took under its wing the long-standing radio dance/electronic music shows: Party on Weekends and The Blue Room. Consider me tuned in now.

For the race, Hannah brought her Garmin nüvi GPS unit to help in navigation (the game rules never did say that using GPS is not allowed). I’m the designated driver and I actually didn’t need the GPS since I’ve already researched the location of pitstops before the event and I’ve been to the places in Tagaytay where we can get the answers to the questions (like the Pink Sisters chapel). So the GPS was merely for my routing entertainment (much like playing around with YOURS). Hehehe.

Anyway, I was thrilled to see that the Garmin unit had the Philippine OpenStreetMap pre-installed! I was easily able to recognize the roads that I’ve added on the Garmin’s 4.3″ display. Also, I’ve only learned the day before that Garmin distributors in the country were doing this pre-loading. Woot!

Yay! I luckily got a free ticket to Paul van Dyk’s event last October 13 at A-Venue in Makati and which was organized by Bigfish Manila and sponsored by Nokia. The ticket came via a radio promo during the Bigfish Radio show, which airs on Magic 89.9 every Saturday night. The promo question at that instance I joined asked the listeners to name one album by Paul van Dyk. I e-mailed my answer, In Between and that got me one of the complimentary tickets! Thanks Bigfish!

I’m a fan of Paul van Dyk (since 2005) and I’ve actually bought a few of his albums. I wanted to go to his 2006 visit in Manila but I considered the ticket price to be a bit too steep then and I had no one to go with. (I instead got to attend Tiësto’s concert, and that was for free too. ) Paul van Dyk’s event is actually the first music event I attended this year. The last one was in 2008 when the British duo DJ John “00” Fleming and Digital Blonde visited Manila. I also got the ticket to that event for free too! (Thanks Jayvee!)

I unfortunately didn’t get to finish Paul van Dyk’s set. It was a freaking Tuesday night and I had work the next day! So I left at around 2:30 a.m., about an hour and a half into his set, just to get some sleep. But the lack of sleep was definitely worth it. Surprisingly, he didn’t play a pure trance set—I was bemused to hear remixes of the house classic “Plastic Dreams” by Jaydee and even Daft Punk’s hit “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger”. I also heard a few PvD hits, like “For an Angel” and “Let Go”. Sadly, I didn’t catch “Home” and “Nothing but You”.

Shown below are some pictures I took during the event. The rest of them can be found in Flickr. I also uploaded a video on YouTube which has part of “For An Angel”, set to a fantastic light and pyrotechnic display.

Anyway, I’m now looking forward to Armin van Buuren’s event this Thursday (also organized by Bigfish). I’m quite a big fan of this Dutch DJ’s A State of Trance radio show, and it is from that show where I usually get most of the trance songs that I feature in my Groovee Playlist™ posts. I also joined the Bigfish radio promo for free tickets to Armin van Buuren, but they might probably want to give the complimentary tickets to a different set of people now. If I do manage to go to Armin’s set, that would make it three DJ Mag’s World’s #1 DJs (see previous vaes9 post) that I have seen live. Tiësto had the top spot from 2002 to 2004, while Paul van Dyk held the crown in 2005 and 2006. In 2007, Armin stole the #1 place and held on to it ever since. We’ll see if he stays on top of the ladder in 2010.

I’ve had my ASUS Eee PC 701 for over a year but I never did replace the stock ASUS Xandros OS that came with it. That is, until about two months ago. I’ve been pretty contented with the default OS and I especially liked how blazingly fast it booted up and shut down. And just like Markku, I’ve been using it as a development PC for my latest website (still under wraps) and had installed XAMPP on it.

However, around the beginning of October, I tried to install some components and discovered that the Eee PC Xandros OS didn’t have some pretty fundamental development packages, namely make and GCC. These are pretty basic and I really wondered why they weren’t included. So when I decided to install them, I also opted to upgrade all the already-installed software packages on the Eee PC as well. Bad move. In the process of upgrading everything, I ran out of disk space and this left the netbook in an unbootable state. Ugh.

So, I decided to ditch the default OS and go with a proper Linux OS. The choice of going with an Ubuntu variant was easy, and I quickly narrowed my choices down to three: the official Ubuntu Netbook Remix, Eeebuntu, and easypeasy. When I learned that the Ubuntu Netbook Remix had the Intel Atom as its minimum requirement, I nixed it in my (possibly mistaken) belief that since my 701 uses an older Intel Celeron M processor, my netbook wasn’t powerful enough. Between Eeebuntu and easypeasy, I went with the former simply because it was more popular (and thus more tried and tested).

Anyway, aside from the much slower boot-up and shutdown times, I very much love Eeebuntu and would not go back to the default ASUS Xandros OS. Since my main laptop died on me last October (the timing was pretty uncanny since I was able to install Eeebuntu on the netbook before the laptop died), I pretty much had about a whole month to get really acquainted with Eeebuntu with the Eee PC functioning as my main PC. I had a minor hiccup once when I let it auto-upgrade the Linux kernel and that pretty much killed the Wi-Fi. (I since learned that I should not have upgraded the kernel and should’ve waited on the Eeebuntu developers to give the proper go signal. Then again, they probably should’ve fixed the proper Debian software package repositories in the first place.)

Well, I wish I had a Kubuntu-derived (KDE-based) Eeebuntu (which doesn’t exist) over the GNOME-based standard Ubuntu-derived Eeebuntu. I’m more familiar with KDE’s Konqueror file manager over GNOME’s Nautilus, and I prefer KDE’s Kate (or even KEdit) over GNOME’s gedit (the latter doesn’t even have regex search and replace!). And GNOME’s desktop is so uncustomizable compared to the power provided by KDE’s Control Center. Oh well.

I said in my ASUS Eee PC sort-of review that I find the Wi-Fi management of the Xandros OS to be “extremely quirky”. Well, it turns out that Eeebuntu’s is even quirkier. For one thing, I couldn’t reliably force the OS to refresh its list of available Wi-Fi access points and sometimes it doesn’t even detect the Wi-Fi hardware at all, necessitating that I reboot the netbook. It’s a bit of a hassle. Moreover, if I turn the Wi-Fi off, I can’t make it function again unless I reboot. Grrr.

Nevertheless, I’m pretty much contented with Eeebuntu. As I said, I won’t go back to Xandros, and I definitely won’t install Windows on this netbook. This is also the first time I played around with Ubuntu. I quite like it and after using Red Hat and Slackware Linuxes, I can see how Ubuntu can appeal to those people who won’t put up with the geeky do-it-yourself ethos of most other Linux distributions.

The third week of November looks to be an exciting month for Web enthusiasts as there are three Web-related offline events happening within eight days of each other. The first one, targeted to Web designers, is the Form Function & Class Mini Web Design Conference this Saturday, the 14th. The second event, intended for Web developers, is the Google Technology Users Group meetup on November 17. The third, for plain old Web surfers, is the Five Years of Firefox in Manila party on the 21st.

The FFC web design mini-conference will be held on the 14th at at the College of St. Benilde in Manila. This is the first such mini-conference happening after the successful main conference that happened last July 10 at the Asian Institute of Management, and the fifth such mini-conference. I was able to attend the first, third (where I gave a presentation), and fourth mini-conferences, as well as the main conference, and I’ll definitely attend this upcoming one barring any emergencies. For details, head on over to Ed Palomo’s blog post. I’m not sure what the topics will be, and if you want to attend, I don’t think there are any more slots left. This is free, by the way.

There is a Google Technology Users Group (GTUG) here in the Philippines and it is where Filipino Web developers talk about using Google products such as Google App Engine, Google Maps API, OpenSocial, and Android. If I’m not mistaken, there have already been a couple of offline meetups but I haven’t attended any of them. There will be another one this Tuesday, November 17 and I plan to go to that one (finally). It will be held at the offices of Orange & Bronze, a local software development company, in Makati. Check out the sign up sheet—there might be a few more slots left if you’re interested. This is also free.

Finally, there’s the fun and exciting Five Years of Firefox in Manila! It’s been five years since Mozilla Firefox 1.0 was released back on November 9, 2004 (vaes9 blog post) and the party, to be held at AIM in Makati on November 21, is a celebration of this open-sourced browsing goodness. I’ve been using Firefox—including its previous incarnations, Phoenix and Firebird—as my main browser since 2002 (so it’s been more than five years for me, actually). Therefore, I’m definitely not letting this event pass me by, especially when there’s Firefox schwag to be had! Hehehe. This event is spearheaded by the very new Mozilla Philippines Community (which I blogged about recently). (Actually, I think it was Regnard who did practically all of the organizing. ) Go confirm your attendance at the Facebook event page. And yes, this event is free as well.

Here’s one thing that I’d like to claim: OpenStreetMap has currently the best freely-available online map of the island resort of Boracay. Period. You can go see for yourself. It’s way ahead of the others like Google Map Maker and MapCentral.

Google Map Maker’s problem is the fact that Google emphasizes tracing over high-resolution satellite imagery of which Boracay has none in Google Maps. OpenStreetMap, on the other hand, emphasizes mapping using GPS-based surveying and so there is not so much dependence needed on high-resolution satellite imagery (though it would be nice). Users can actually map Boracay in Google Map Maker using GPS via the Overlay feature, but so far, no one has bothered to do it. Certainly, people go to Boracay to relax and have a vacation and not really to go around mapping so the island won’t be mapped as much unless one is motivated enough (and OpenStreetMappers are quite motivated).

OSM mapping in Boracay has a pretty interesting history. The island’s major roads and many of its POIs (points of interests, like hotels and resorts) have been mapped by Mike Collinson back in 2007. Mike is a British national who has stayed for quite a while in the Philippines and has been mapping the country even before there was an active Philippine OSM community. Some other details on the island have been added by Bill Mitchell, an American who retired to Boracay and who also contributes to Wikipedia.

Then earlier this year, the guys at Enthropia, who run Boracay.com.ph, decided to sponsor a 25,000-peso mapping trip to the island. (See my Plurk announcement.) The lucky guy was Jim Morgan, a British expat and OpenStreetMapper, whom I’ve met back in March. He flew to the island and basically filled in the details and verified the work started by Mike. He also added some visual aids by approximating the area of each hotel and resort so that the map will not look empty.

Shown above is how the area around Boracay’s Station 3 looks like in OSM. The one to the left is the default Mapnik map layer while to the right is the Osmarender layer. Mapnik is the more aesthetic layer but it doesn’t show all the labels to prevent text and icon overlapping. Osmarender, on the other hand, shows all labels (for debugging purposes) and easily shows how much data OSM has on the island.

To be clear, the Boracay map on OpenStreetMap definitely needs more mapping. There are plenty of walkways, paths, and more detail that could be added and the approximated shapes could use a lot more refinement. In addition, new resorts and hotels need to be added as well. But because this is OpenStreetMap, anyone can do it!

The nice thing about the map data being in OpenStreetMap is that anyone can now create their own maps of Boracay and even load it into their GPS devices or GPS-enabled phones. You don’t have to become lost looking for that budget hotel in Boracay that don’t have transportation services from the airport. Now ain’t that cool?

Back in the early to mid 1990s, I was already a geeky young man having taught myself how to program BASIC from several books borrowed from the school library. While I enjoyed playing games on the PC (Sid Meier’s Civilization rocks!) and the Nintendo Family Computer (Super Mario Brothers 3 is still the best), I eventually realized that it was more enjoyable creating programs and with it, the ability to create my own (simple) games. I eventually discovered the QBasic and QuickBASIC variants of BASIC that have their own IDEs and it was such a powerful feeling having the power to create your own EXE files. When the World Wide Web came to the Philippines, I quickly discovered that there was a worldwide community of QuickBASIC enthusiasts with plenty of websites containing tutorials, programs, and discussion forums.

It was in this environment that I decided to create my own website to showcase my QuickBASIC/QBasic creations and to provide a resource for the community. So a little more than 12 years ago, on October 20, 1997, I registered for some free web space on GeoCities and selected the Horizon/2586 address under the Silicon Valley category. I still remember liking that particular address number because 586 or 80586 is the code number of the original Intel Pentium processor, and I thought that it was quite appropriate. GeoCities was an easy choice. It was, by far, the most popular service for free web hosting, more so than Angelfire or Tripod, which are two of the popular alternatives.

The website I had on GeoCities was named SEAV Softwares and it was basically my corner of the QuickBASIC online community as well as being my personal homepage. With the website, I was able to build a pretty good reputation as a QB and QB+assembly programmer and it was with it that I learned much of the skills that I use to this day. I learned how to code in HTML 3.2, taught myself some graphic design, studied some rudimentary Perl in order to create a simple discussion board, and learned a tiny bit of CSS and JavaScript. I eventually grew tired of programming in QuickBASIC as college life became quite hectic. My online life eventually drifted to PinoyExchange, then Wikipedia, and then to blogging and social networking.

I feel a bit of nostalgic sadness when I learned that Yahoo! decided earlier this year to close down GeoCities. I practically owe my online life to the experiences and lessons I’ve learned coming from that GeoCities website of mine. So, in order to preserve a large part of my early web history, I placed a copy of my website on my CodedGraphic web space. Go visit it at seavsoftwares.codedgraphic.com. Too bad I can do little regarding the broken links to the old GeoCities site.

I’m also proud to say that my site does not look like your typical GeoCities website that contains animated GIFs and blinking text. I do think that my site had a pretty good design though it used tons of nested tables for layout, <FONT> tags, and spacer GIFs, which were state-of-the-art in web design back then. And take note, everything in that site was hand-coded. Now I try to code in semantic (X)HTML for structure, with CSS for presentation and unobtrusive JavaScript for behavior.

I wasn’t able to watch the TV screening of The Last Journey of Ninoy on ABS-CBN but I heard many good things about the film from those who’ve seen it. So when I learned that it was being screened at Glorietta 4 during the last week of August, I really went out of my way to see it.

The Last Journey of Ninoy chronicles the last days of Ninoy, from his departure in Boston, Massachusetts to his arrival and assassination at the Manila International Airport. Interspersed in between are scenes and stories from his journalistic and political life, mostly told through the recorded words of his wife, Cory. These flashbacks includes snippets from his speech addressed to the Filipino people given while he was in exile, and heartbreaking stories of his family life while he was detained.

Being a late Martial Law baby, I have no recollections of Marcos’ final years or even of Ninoy’s assassination. Even my memories of the People Power Revolution were very hazy. And since those events were quite recent, their historical perspective wasn’t really included in my formative education. So watching The Last Journey of Ninoy was quite an eye-opener for me. The revelations contained in the film were definitely things I haven’t learned about nor have read from boring old history books.†

Ninoy definitely had charisma. I would even dare say that he is like Obama (or that Obama is like Ninoy, except Obama successfully became President and was never imprisoned). Yes, Ninoy was politically ambitious and his love for politics had a negative effect on his family life, but his spiritual reawakening during his detention (I guess that’s one positive thing about Marcos’ dictatorship) convinced me that he would’ve been the greatest Filipino leader had he not been assassinated. So if I was utterly happy when Barack Obama won the U.S. Presidency, I guess I felt an equal amount of disappointment for Ninoy’s unfulfilled legacy. I actually got teary-eyed in the movie house when I look at how low the Philippines have come since the assassination and the People Power Revolution.

This movie is a must-see for every Filipino. I was quite surprised that the movie house was a bit packed when I saw it and it was probably the only time I ever saw a movie audience give an enthusiastic applause during the film’s ending credits, something that is definitely not part of the Filipino psyche. I guess I’m lucky I saw the film together with other people in the cinema because watching it on TV would not have the same emotional impact.

† I generally don’t like history as a subject, not as much as science or mathematics. So it was actually a surprise that I got the highest grade in my Senior High School batch for Araling Panlipunan (Social Studies), which covered World History.

After three and a half years, I was forced to retire my ASUS A6500R laptop. The main problem was that it wouldn’t boot up properly anymore. The symptoms started a few months before but it managed to eventually start up after some combination of jiggling around with the battery, the master reset button, and the power cord.

Then about two weeks ago, those workarounds wouldn’t work anymore and so I had it looked at at the ASUS service center in Kapitolyo, Pasig. The initial assessment of the technician was that there is a fundamental problem with the motherboard. Weighing my options of having it fully diagnosed (with a service fee) and with replacement parts being really scarce (the laptop is 3+ years old after all), I decided to go for a new laptop instead. I’m in the notebook market once more!

I’m holding off buying a new laptop until November so that it would go into December’s credit card cycle for better cash flow management (the 13th month bonus would come in handy there). So until then, I’m going to do research to select the best laptop for my needs. Since I’m not a gamer nor a video editor, my needs are not for the cutting edge technology (unlike Lola Techie ). My knowledgeable colleague at work said that I could make do with the Intel Core-Duo Atom processors. One requirement I need however is that if the laptop comes with Windows Vista, then there must be a free upgrade to Windows 7 which just came out last Thursday. Hopefully, the local retailers have that Microsoft-announced upgrade option available from the PC manufacturers.

Since I’m not using the even older desktop PC due to a crashed hard drive (I was lazy to buy a new one), I currently using my ASUS Eee PC as my main computer. The small screen is getting to be a real bother, but I’m managing quite well so far. (In fact, I’m typing this entry on the Eee PC.) I also managed to salvage the dead laptop’s hard disk and converted it to an external drive. It’s a really, really good thing that Octagon Computer Store had some IDE hard disk enclosures available because these are apparently quite rare due to most hard disks nowadays being SATA. It’s also quite fortunate that the Eee PC was able to have at least read-only access to the drive’s NTFS partition and read-write access to the FAT32 portion so I still have access to all my files.

Expect a blog post in November where I will reveal my laptop choice.