“Office Notes” is my way of keeping track of my discoveries that might be helpful for my work. I prefer to put it here because it’s so hard to keep track of them on Facebook, Google+, and Diigo. These notes are also updated as new versions come in. So it’s possible that this post can go really long.

Today, I discovered Bolt.

Since 2009, I had been a roaming around in the IT industry conducting training and doing development work using JEE and Android. Recently, I was invited to join a company that saw me moving to a new industry: Advertising.

I’ve been having trouble getting Evolus Pencil to generate PNG files ever since I started using Ubuntu 12.04. I thought it was Ubuntu that was the problem. Turns out it was my copy of Firefox. Evolus Pencil doesn’t play well with Firefox18. The answer was to download xulrunner.

I’ve always had trouble studying. Whether it is by learning by myself or through a teacher. But over the years, I found out that the best way for me to learn something is to give something back.

During the last days of 2012, I started to work on the website for Mensa Philippines. After about 24 hours working on the site using Blogger, it’s now just waiting for the thumbs up of the Mensa officers. So I decided it was high time to give my blog a new look as well. The last time I did a reboot was in May 30, 2010.

I have this idea that’s been brewing for the past couple of months. Normally I would work on it using Java but I decided it would be a perfect time to learn new technologies. I ended up learning Go and the Google App Engine. There’s still some other stuff I need to learn, like Angular.js and Twitter Bootstrap.

Recently I upgraded the Ubuntu system on my VirtualBox. That included a correctional upgrade for the kernel. Lo and behold, after that upgrade my display wouldn’t behave anymore. It wouldn’t resize properly to the virtual machine (VM) window. It was either too big or too small for it. I figured I might need to do a reinstall of something.

Just a couple more weeks before my birthday. I figured that it was as good a time as any to have a change of lifestyle. Adopt new habits and break bad ones.

Recently I was lucky enough to win a Sony Xperia P during its launch. It was wonderful to finally own a phone with NFC. I was a bit disappointed to find out that the SmartTags that came with it were read-only.

But that disappointment was short lived as a kind stranger on Twitter sent me a small pack on NFC stickers. Meanwhile, I was also given a couple of test cards from Jollibee’s HappyPlus rewards program.

Now to do some NFC magic!

My netbook has been getting little action since I got my i7 laptop. The netbook was really too sluggish to get any Android work done. Even during my Android talks, I end up bringing the laptop instead. But now I’ve decided to bring the laptop back into use again. April 2012 is looking to be a really hectic month with all the events and talks happening. I’d like to go around bringing along the much lighter netbook instead. I’m now experimenting with using the netbook to connect to my laptop at home for presenting and running code.