Update on Pimp my PC: Help Fight Hunger with Style

I recently saw all the laptops that some celebrities made for Sony Vaio FJ-series.
Goodness! Now I know why Jessica Alba's design was the one on display. At that point, it was the least horrible-looking laptop.

Pimp my PC

Jessica Alba









Mark Ruffalo









Elijah Wood









Wilmer Valderrama








Nicole Richie and DJ AM (bravo to them! They made the least damage to the laptop!)









How in the world will you help fight hunger with these?
With style? What syle?!?!?

Anyway, if for some reason you would want to buy these laptops, here's the link to bid on eBay (bid starts January 9, 2006)

I didn't see this one coming...

Geez, I haven't done an entry yet on my laptop, Cozy (Sony Vaio S460P), and I have found several dead pixels already. Yes! Several. There are around 7-10 dead pixels bunched up on the bottom right hand corner of my LCD screen. It's somewhat annoying.
I don't have worldwide warranty and I don't think my Dad extended the warranty for the laptop. I hope he still has the receipt because I'm returning this when I get there. That's around June-July 2006. My wappie would still be covered by the warranty by that time.
Annoying.

Hot Air Balloon

How true...

A man in a hot air balloon realized he was lost. He reduced his altitude and spotted a woman below. He descended a bit more and shouted: “Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don’t know where I am.”

The woman below replied, “You’re in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You’re between 40 and 45 degrees north latitude and between 9 and 60 degrees west longitude.”

“You must be in Information Technology,” said the balloonist. “I am,” replied the woman, “How did you know?”

“Well,” answered the balloonist, “everything you told me is technically correct, but I’ve no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I’m still lost. Frankly, you’ve not been much help at all. If anything, you’ve delayed my trip.”

The woman below responded, “You must be in Management.”

“I am!” replied the balloonist, “but how did you know?”

“Well”, said the woman, “you don’t know where you are or where you’re going. You have risen to where you are, due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise, which you’ve no idea how to keep, and you expect people beneath you to solve your problems.”

“The fact is you are in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow, it’s my fault.”

Funny Domain Names

You would hope companies would think about possible misconceptions before registering an address, apparently not…

http://whorepresents.com/ - a database for agencies to the rich and famous

http://expertsexchange.com/ - The Experts Exchange, a knowledge base where programmers can exchange advice and views

http://therapist.com/ - Need a therapist?

http://www.molestationnursery.com/ - The Mole Station Native Nursery, based in New South Wales

My favorite:
http://penisland.net/ - Looking for a pen? Look no further than Pen Island

Geek Girls can also have some fun...

Being a female and a geek does not necessarily mean that you are un-cool, un-pretty or un-sexy. There is a steroetype though.

You know, geeks can be sexy too.

Proof? Well, aside from me, there's a calendar, Geekgorgeous.com, which feature women in the hi-tech industry that are not only smart, but also beautiful and sexy. The sample picture at the site shows a model clad in TP cable. Now, how cool is that? :D

The calendar showcases young ladies who are not only beautiful and stylish, but can also fix your computer, normalize your databases, discuss the advantages of polymorphism, and beat you at Doom.

Hmmm..... Maybe I should apply for next year's... :D

Would you ever buy this laptop?

Sony Celebrity Vaio for Charity

It might be for a good cause and it may have great specs (Pentium M 2GHz, 1GB RAM, 120GB hard drive, GeForce™ Go6600 128MBDDR, 17 in. WXGA), but I don't want to own a crappy looking-laptop.

From the ooohhh-shiny... to eeewww... hairy.

I know I won't buy this.
I'm happy with my shiny Vaio, thank you.

My resurrected webcam

I decided to resurrect my old webcam, SiPix Blink II. I bought it around 3 years ago when I was in the US. It cost around $50, if I remember it right. I planned to use it with Yahoo Messenger's webcam feature so I could send my Ozzie some kisses (Unfortunately, their network had firewall, so no Yahoo webcam for us. :( ). When I came back, I used the webcam rarely since the UP network also had a firewall. I just used the webcam to take some random pictures of friends. :)

The selling point of this camera is that it is so small and cute. Measuring at about 0.5x2x2 inches, it's pretty small for a webcam. Another selling point for me was that it could be detached so that you could take pictures without a computer (Camera phones were still waaaay too expensive back then). The camera is powered by an AAA battery and the internal memory is about 8megs. Pictures can be transferred via the USB attachment, of course. Back then, this was little gadget was pretty amazing.


The resolution for images could be either 640 x 480 or 320 x 240 pixels. For video, resolution could be either 320 x 240 (up to an 80-second length) or 160 x 120 (up to a 160-second length).

Picture quality? Well... not that good. I took pictures of Wuzzie when I was at the airport. Will post them later here. They're viewable, but don't expect too much.

This device isn't exactly a "real" digital camera. The pictures taken from this camera are useless as prints, but they're good enough for silly spontanoeus pics, mementos, email pics and even blogger pics, I guess. As with the old camera phones, pictures taken without much light look crappy. No flash, no focus, no nightmode, no nothing, it's just a nifty little webcam you can play with. For me, it's enough for a webcam.

If I want to take quality pictures/prints, then I'd better go buy that Canon Ixus I've been wanting to get.

Everybody makes a boo-boo once in a while.

I borrowed my roommate's PC when I woke up today. I had episodes of Nip Tuck, House, Desperate Housewives, Numb3rs, Myth Busters and other favorite shows stored on my roomie's PC. Since Delta (the PC) was running low on disk space, I deleted some of the files I knew I backed up on Cozy (my laptop). Since I was still quite groggy, I accidentally deleted the whole folder of Myth Busters which I just finished downloading! I always do Shift+Delete when I delete files. This means the file immediately gets deleted instead of going through the recycle bin. Gosh. I was sulking the entire day.

Good thing it was on Windows. As we all know, Windows uses the File Allocation Table (FAT) to keep track of it's files. When a file is sent to the recycle bin, the file is not really (physically) deleted or moved, it's just marked as hidden so that the file management tools do not consider them as files in that particular folder. When a file is deleted (removed from recycle bin or shift+deleted) the entry of that file is deleted from the FAT, but the file is still physically there. It's just that the physical address of the file is not protected anymore, so any time a file gets written, it may or may not overwrite the deleted file.

Good thing Delta is partitioned!

Would have been a problem if not, since I was downloading other stuff. These were downloaded into a different partition. Hard disks w/ partitions are marked off to differentiate one partition from another. So if a file was deleted from a different partition than the Windows directory and other partitions that you are writing into, the deleted files are still safe.

I'm currently restoring all the episodes, I managed to retreive 22 out of 23 files. I accidentally wrote a file into the partition that's why 1 file is unrecoverable. Err... just make sure the files that you recover are copied to a different partition, otherwise the 'deleted' files will get overwritten, causing other files (including the file you're restoring) to be unrecoverable.

Oh well... at least it's better than wasting bandwidth trying to download the whole thing again. At least I only have 1 file missing and an hour or two wasted trying to retreive the files. That's good enough for me. :D

What got me into really loving Sony

We've had Sony TV's, camcorders, playstations, phones and other gadgets. They were all nice, but I never really loved them. Sony wasn't always the first choice in buying appliances and gadgets. I never really took notice until I saw Sony Vaios.

The first time I saw a Sony Vaio was at my Dad's home in Texas. He had a Sony Vaio desktop set. I really can't remember which model it was, but when I used the PC, it was jaw-droppingly amazing.

Fine, the PC could have been cloned (and would have saved a lot of $), but what really amazed me was the screen. I never could believe the quality of the display. It was like something was printed and then placed strategically inside the monitor. The images were bright and sharp. It was even better than our TV at home. At every angle I look, the screen could still be seen clearly. I vowed to get one of my own - it's as if the screen hypnotized me. Years later, I got my own Sony Vaio VGN S460-P.

Sony Vaio's are pretty - but they come with a such hefty price tag. Well, Sony products are of good quality anyway. I think it's well worth it.

My phonie "Peachy"

As mentioned in my first post, Peachy is my current mobile phone, a Nokia 3230. It was T3's (a local gadget magazine) best smart phone a few months back.


But of course, as all fads come and go, a month or so later, my phone ranked only 17th. Gosh.
Here where I live, others think that your phone is your status symbol. Own a flashy phone and they'd think you're rich. Still own a N3210 - they'd think either you stole it or you don't have money.




Anyway, here are some of the good features of my phone:

Nokia 3230 Smartphone

* 1.3 megapixel camera (1280 x 960 image resolution)
* 65,536-color screen
* Expandable memory (32 MB RS MMC card included)
* IR/Bluetooth
* MP3 / Realplayer
* Symbian OS
* Java™ MIDP 2.0

The nicest feature of this phone is the camera (There are other phone w/ 2MP but I'm happy with mine). On good light, the pictures are ok and can be developed as 3R photos. Downside is there's no flash. Without enough light, pictures are grainy.
The phone is a little slow. It might be because the OS is Symbian, but what the heck... there are more advantages than disadvantages for Symbian OS (One of my master's degree reports). I would rather not go into details, just trust me on that one.

I was never a phone person. I just buy the best one on the market - ONLY when I need it. The best phone - so it could last me years.

I only had 4 cellphones in my life. The first was a Samsung Analog phone, which was replaced by a sms-capable phone the Nokia 3210 (which got broken), replaced by a Sony Ericsson T68i (which got 'stolen'), then a Nokia 6220 (which I returned to the office) and my current one, Nokia 3230.