Finally went diving again after a long dry spell. I had no planned activities for the Holy Week so I invited Vinz for a dive and off we– Vinz, his girlfriend, Michelle and I– went. We went to this resort owned by Mike, a friend of Vinz’s girlfriend. It was a small, non-commercialized dive resort. We were joined by Mike’s wife and his in-laws so we had to take two boats to some sites near Dive and Trek where we dived while the ladies stayed on the boats. The dives were nothing spectacular but it was just good to be underwater again. Maybe I’m not ready to swap my dive gear for a surfboard just yet.
The government has this initiative called the “NetTop ng Bayan” which is an effort to increase the affordability of PCs. NetTops are a type of relatively low-power desktop computers designed for performing basic tasks such as surfing the Internet, accessing web-based applications and rich internet applications, document processing and audio/video playback etc. Like netbooks, you can already use office applications and even play some games though you can’t carry them around as conveniently.
But to unlock the full use of nettops, you should have an Internet connection (that’s why it has the word “net” in the first place :P). But, unfortunately, our subscription rates are quite expensive. Typically this would vary from P800 ($16) for a 384 Kbps connection to P3000 ($60) per month for a 3 Mbps connection. So in a year, a nettop with connection charges doesn’t look so affordable anymore.
In Japan, for $60 you can already get a 160 Mbps. That’s 50x the speed! We can only hope for those speeds and prices. Maybe there’s going to ba a “Net Connection ng Bayan” or something otherwise it’s just going to be “Top ng Bayan”.
This morning, my phone’s battery ran out so, on the way to work, I charged it with my car charger. As soon as it accumulated a sufficient charge, I turned it on and continued merrily on my way.
Then when I reached the parking lot, I noticed that fring was on! I checked the data connection counter and found that I had been online without my knowledge for almost 30 minutes. I quickly disconnected. Good thing Globe has recently lowered their wireless data rates to P5 for 15 minutes.
Still, I definitely don’t want a repeat and wake to discover that I’ve been online for hours and hours. I didn’t immediately found a way to turn off the auto start feature. But finally, after a quick search on the net, I found that the switch can be found in fring->Options-> Settings->Personalize->’Automatic Start’. No more auto start!
I needed to make backup copies of some CDs. They are bootable CDs so I couldn’t just copy the contents. Unfortunately, I don’t have those fancy disk burning utilities. Not would I want to use those complex monsters. So what I did is download ISO Recorder.
ISO Recorder is a shell extension for Windows XP, 2003 and Windows Vista, that allows you to burn CD and DVD images (Vista), copy disks, make images of the existing data CDs and DVDs and create ISO disk images from the contents of a folder. It’s a simple, no-frills tool that just works. Best of all, it’s free (for non-commercial use).
I just watching the latest episode of Heroes when it came to me why it is different. My sister had mentioned that the new “rebooted” season is somehow different from the previous season. That was the season when there was so much lovey-dovey going on and everything was shiny and happy (Sylar was goody-goody, wth!!!).
After the reboot, I realized that the series has made a twist to the dark: people are dying, things are turned upsaide down, everything seems bleak and hopeless, and Sylar is oozing pure evil. Much better, definitely much better.