The Geekette Speaketh

Sometime last year I received snail mail stating that I had recently won in a raffle. I was quite surprised by the news since I hardly remember entering any contest. Nonetheless, the letter was real and after a month of waiting, I finally got the word to pick up my prize: a new 10.1-inch netbook. It's a far cry from the former 8.1-inch netbook that was loaned to me by my best friend. Finally I have a more decent travel gadget in the form of an Intel Atom processor with 2 GB of memory and 160 GB of hard drive space. The bigger footprint made typing easier. I also started experiencing problems with my touchpad.

I recently decided to take up freelance writing projects again. That said, I wondered if there was a text editor out there that was made for writers. Something lightweight yet still retain some of the features found in word processors. Searching through the net for the writer's text editor, I came upon TextRoom.

I got this from the Philippine Linux Users Group (PLUG) mailing list today. Apparently the New Zealand government is thinking of allowing the unlimited patents of software. If this pushes through, it can be a big blow to the future of open source development. But we can do something about it despite the fact that we don't live in New Zealand. In fact, we SHOULD do something about it.

I decided it's high time I take my Java certifications. Seriously. Sure I could study by myself, but I figured that a group study session would make me even more determined to actually study. Plus I could gather more information from the experiences of others rather than just come across them during my self-review. There's just one thing: the rainy season has started over my patch of the world. The idea of braving the rain to travel all the way to another city to be able to attend a study group wasn't what I had in mind at all. And I'm sure a lot of people would say the same. I'm also sure that a lot would be disappointed at not being able to attend such sessions.

The solution was obvious: Set up a cyber-study group. Most of those who will be attending would surely have some sort of broadband connection either in the office or at home. The first part of this plan is to figure out what would be the best web conference app to use.

Recently I received an email from the community manager of Box.Net. He wanted to talk to me about their product.  I didn't know how he came upon my blog and why he decided to contact me to talk about Box.Net.  Perhaps it was because of my recent post about DropBox.  Nevertheless, I thought it would be great to know more about his product.

But this post isn't about that interview. Actually it's about the challenges I went through in preparation for the interview.  You see, the community manager wanted us to talk about their product.  By talk I would think he wanted to contact me via Skype.  And that's when my interesting journey started.

Having a laptop and a netbook has left me with a slight problem on file synchronization. For a while I was wondering what cross-platform app I could use to make sure the needed files on both computers stay the same. I've gotten used to opening the netbook to write my blog notes whereever I am. But when it comes to actually posting them on my blog, I find it much easier to do that from my laptop. I found out about a neat program courtesy Rom Feria though which allows me to sync files without having to use USB storage. The added plus: I can access stuff online too!

It's been a long, long while since I last posted on this blog. I'd like to say that I've been busy, but for the life of me I couldn't figure out what I've been busy with. I know there's a lot of stuff I need to do and yet I feel like I haven't done anything much. So I decided to call this day my "Get Things Done and Organized" Day. I then revived three items which worked for me long ago, though separately. Yet by putting them all together, I realized that I had gained an upper hand in finally getting things done.

Learning is a lifetime activity. As long as you can hear, see, smell and/or feel you have the capacity to find out about something new every single day. But for some of us (like myself), there's a slight problem with retention of data. While reading Lifehacker I learned about some programs that could help me in reviewing the information I read earlier as well as help me create presentations that might be useful for future conventions and seminars. Welcome to the world of flashcards!

Summer is upon us! For most people, it would be another time for hitting the beach from some sun, sand and surf. But if you're a student looking to get some real-world software development experience while earning some major moolah in the process, then you might be interested in a different kind of summer offered by Google.

Eclipse has always been the popular choice of IDE (integrated development environment) for Java software developers. Besides program development, I've been using this as well to keep track of documents and excel sheets. Recently a new software company has taken Eclipse one step further and turning it into something even non-programmers can use in their everyday work.