I posted before that I went to the first Form Function & Class mini-conference last October 30. This was organized by the fledging Philippine Web Designers Organization and they have a whole series of such mini-conferences. I wasn’t able to attend the November mini-conference and so I resolved to attend the January 22 event and to muster enough courage to actually give a talk (and I indicated so at the sign-up sheet, though I had no topic at hand then). Unfortunately, one week before the mini-conference, I still had no topic. After wracking my brain, I settled on giving an introduction to Textpattern, the content management system (CMS) that I’ve used on Vista Pinas and Blogenyo.

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Remember the Wikimedia illustration-for-pay project I blogged about last year? Hmmm, maybe not. (So read that blog post! Go on. I’ll wait.) anyway, the first round of illustration requests started last month and will run until early October. There are 50 needed illustrations in various fields such as biology (jellyfish cross-section), mathematics (Császár polyhedron), engineering (airborne wind turbine), and computer science (application virtualization). All but two of the illustrations will have a payout of $40 while the remaining will be worth $15.

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かわいい! Meet Wikipe-tan. She’s the unofficial mascot and moe anthropomorph of Wikipedia. Here, she’s wearing the baro’t saya, the female national costume of the Philippines. Isn’t that cute?

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You should know by now that tomorrow, April 26, there will be two back-to-back bloggers events. The first is the iBlog4: The 4th Philippine Blogging Summit at Malcolm Hall in U.P. Diliman, and the second is the 88DB.com Bloggers’ Night. These blogger events are very good ways of meeting other bloggers that you have only conversed with online as well as an excellent venue for networking and gaining more friends and acquaintances.

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Two weekends ago, I finally got around to creating the locator maps of the municipalities of Dinagat Islands, the newest province of the Philippines that seceded from Surigao del Norte in 2006, for use in Wikipedia. Locator maps are maps that show the where a place is in a larger area. In this particular case, I am showing the location of the municipality within the province of Dinagat Islands. Shown below is a rendering of the locator map for the town of Tubajon.

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Found via Kottke is this absolutely geeky blog showing off science- and math-related tattoos from scientists, mathematicians, programmers, and other academics. I find it to be a wonderful blend of the rebellious and the geek.

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I’m extremely pleased to announce the launch of my new blog, Blogenyo! As you can probably tell from the accompanying illustrations, Blogenyo is a webcomic and its focus is on events, intrigues, controversies, issues, and trends that surround the Pinoy blogosphere. The year 2007 has seen a lot of such things happening and I think it’s quite timely that a comic strip about it is launched.

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In an announcement that’s sure to raise a whole lot of questions, the Wikimedia Foundation (the organization that handles Wikipedia as well as other free-content websites like Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikiquote) has resolved that it has received a $20,000 grant from Philip Greenspun, an Internet entrepreneur, to create various free-licensed illustrations for use on Wikipedia and other websites.

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I did not expect to win the Proudly Pinoy logo design contest that I joined. As I mentioned before, these types of free-for-all contests is like winning a lottery. Almost.

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Well, I’ve decided to join the Proudly Pinoy logo contest where people submit up to three logos depicting the concept of being proudly Pinoy. The winning logo can then be used by Filipino websites to display their Pinoy pride and the winning logo-maker gets a cool cash prize of 10,000 pesos. Shown to the right are the entries I submitted.

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Here’s the second part of the story behind Lakbayan. You should also read the first part or the launch blog entry if you haven’t done so.

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Today is the 109th anniversary of the Philippine Declaration of Independence and I’m celebrating it by launching the beta version of Lakbayan! See how much of the Philippines you have visited! To whet your appetite and give you a preview of what to expect, my personal result is shown below.

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What if we had vehicle signages like this? (You probably won’t get this unless you’re Filipino. )

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Last weekend, I played around with the public domain data obtained by the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission or SRTM. I wanted to use this data to create topographic maps that I can contribute to Wikipedia.

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Check this out. There’s this guy who made his own annual report (like the one’s made by companies for their investors) but this one is about his own life during the past year. The layout, graphics, and color scheme is top-notch. The depth, breadth, and subject matter of information is interesting. And the individual statistical data points border on the anal. (He documented how many times he went out drinking, what he drank, and which bar he went to—can you believe that?—though there is an inebriated disclaimer. Hehehe. )

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Nice. After the very successful Blog Parteeh now comes the first ever Philippine Blog Awards. I think the decision to have a party first before the awards was a really good call by the organizers. This makes it easier to drum up wide sponsor support and media and blog publicity.

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On an infographic whim, I decided to create a map showing the train lines and stations I visited during my last two trips to Japan. Follow the thumbnail link above to see the full-size version.

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I have the lucky timing of being in Tokyo during the time a selection of M. C. Escher’s works were being displayed at an exhibit in Shibuya. The Dutch M. C. Escher has been one of my favorite artists, ever since I saw his work, Relativity, in a Childcraft volume from World Book Encyclopedia. If Relativity seems familiar, it’s because the concept has been used many times, the most notable reference for me being the climax scene in the movie, Labyrinth. In fact, Relativity can be seen hanging on the wall of the bedroom of Sarah, the movie’s lead character.

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If I’m going to put up a café, I’ll name it Coffeeright. And its slogan will be: “You have the right to good coffee.”

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I’m sure most of the readers have read Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons. The novel prominently featured several ambigrams in its story. And those ambigrams were really beautiful. They were commissioned by Brown from John Langdon, a freelance graphic artist that specializes in creating ambigrams, logotypes, and paintings that feature words. It should be mentioned that the character Robert Langdon was probably named after John Langdon. (Remember that Angels & Demons was the first Robert Langdon novel, not The Da Vinci Code).

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I’m planning to move this blog to a new location since it is really just squatting on a domain that really has no relationship to the parent website that’s been dormant for several months now.

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My youger sister bought Kitchie Nadal’s self-titled debut album on CD. I like her songs and I like the design of the album! No, I don’t plan on making a review of the album since I haven’t heard all the songs on it yet but I’ll talk about the songs that I have heard and I’ll comment on the really cool layout of the album liner.

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As may be noticed by the extremely small readership of this blog, I’ve redesigned. The new style is called Airlight because, obviously, I wanted it to feel light and airy (maaliwalas, my sister has commented). The previous style, which I now call Columnar, looked too conventional for me. It looked good and all but it was missing some personality—it looked too much like many of the other blogs out there.

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