Arroyo hosts Obama – Commercial

I find the following commercial hilarious. I though it was really Barack Obama when he is younger.

Dumping Friendster

I’m sooooo dumping Friendster effective immediately. It was understandable if their system went nuts after a huge power cutoff when their data center was affected by the fire in California. But more than a month after the incident, my account is still not fixed. I can’t see my friendslist, the account is totally useless.

So for now, I’m moving to Facebook. It’s sexier, sleek and has the elegance factor. It’s more stable and faster and the applications available are better. Though most of the applications also works with friendster (a lot of the apps are shared through opensocial by Google), you can feel quicker response of Facebook.

Yes, it’s kinda late already to switch over but actually, I’m not really into social networking. A lot of my friends know that I only use it for SEO purposes and the social part of it is just a bonus. But even then, I seldom visit my account. But with facebook, I’ll try not to. I think it has a lot of potential to become a spring board for a number of campaigns. I wouldn’t even mind shelling some hard earned dollar for advertisements. Once I get the hang of it, I’ll definitely the ads feature.

Friendster has been very Jologs already so it’s for the “jologs”. Haha. Sorry for the slang. I’m not really my real self today.

2008 Google Zeitgeist on Philippine Tourism

The 2008 Google Zeitgeist offerred interesting information on what Filipinos are searching for. First, SEX is not in the list. Apparently, more and more people are using google to search information in the web that Sex is no longer part of the most search words. But more than that, I’m surprised to see that tourist destinations is part of what we search most.

The report also showed that it looks like Filipinos are looking for information on local travel destinations. As Google describes it, “Local tourism was also alive and kicking with several beach resorts making the list”. Does it mean that Pinoys are now keen on travelling? Will they help boost the local tourism? What made it possible? It looks like more and more Filipinos can now afford a vacation

Below is part of Google Zeitgeist 2008.
Local travel destinations

1. pangasinan
2. cebu
3. palawan
4. baguio
5. sagada
6. bohol
7. el nido
8. plantation bay
9. tagaytay
10. punta fuego

Interestingly, Boracay is not in the list. I really wonder why. Is the island paradise of Boracay already losing its allure from local tourists? Why do Pangasinan is on the list? Is Bohol going to replace Boracay?

This is very interesting and I’ll definitely run a test on this.

Thanks to Bo Sanchez, I stumbled upon Randy Pausch and his “Last Lecture”. It was such an
inspiring lecture I watched the whole lecture. Yes, it’s more than one hour but heck, it’s more than worth it. Dr Pausch is a professor at the Carnegie Mellon University who died last
July 2008 with pancreathic cancer.

When I checked the entry about Randy Paush in Wikipedia, I found out that he is also one of
the co-founders of the Alice programming language and a number of other things. But of course, coming from a programming background, it is the Alice software that interest me most. So what actually Alice is? Here’s a quote from their website.

In Alice’s interactive interface, students drag and drop graphic tiles to create a program,
where the instructions correspond to standard statements in a production oriented programming languages, such as Java, C++, and C#. Alice allows students to immediately see how their animation programs run, enabling them to easily understand the relationship between the programming statements and the behavior of objects in their animation. By manipulating the objects in their virtual world, students gain experience with all the programming constructs typically taught in an introductory programming course.

So what’s interesting with that? Alice is a fun and easy way of understanding object oriented programming. For people like me who never had a chance to use object-oriented-programming languages, it’s kinda hard to understand. Our mindset is still stucked to the top-down programming that we are used to. The nearest thing that we used is event-driven(think about visual basic) programming which is called by OOP evangelists as simply “object programming” which means you are using objects but not really creating them. And “object programmers” will sometime find it hard to convert themeselves into OOP.

With Alice, it would be easy because the hard part in OOP is done by Alice. You don’t have to memorize gazillions of classes, methods, attributes and programming commands and syntax just to be able to a simple application. And more than that, Alice allows you to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web

And the best thing yet, it’s freakin’ FREE!

Unbelievably Free Hosting

I always turn away from free stuffs in the web especially when in comes to hosting. Man, if there are paid hosting that sucks big time, how much more with free, right? And it’s just too good to be true, it’s unbelievable! And that’s my mentality until I found 000webhost.com. Now, I can’t believe there really are some great things you can get for FREE.

If you wish to have a professional shared hosting quality in a free hosting package, come and host with 000webhost.com and experience the best service you can get absolutely free. It’s F-R-E-E, no strings attached as long as you follow their terms and conditions which is not hard to follow and at the most, will only ask you to put a small link for them.

Founded in December 2006, 000webhost.com has a trusted free hosting members base of over 60,000 members and still counting! Offering professional quality hosting, support, uptime and reliability, they have a great community of webmasters, you’d love to be a part of!

The company behind this free service also offers paid hosting for more than 4 years already. So you can’t say that they are just like the fly by night hosting companies out there who are just renting servers from reknowned and unknown data centers. 000webhost has their own DC that they manage themselves.

Here’s what you’ll get for a free service.
Register now and get it all free:
*** 350 MB of disk space
*** 100 GB of data transfer
*** PHP and MySQL support with no restrictions
*** cPanel control panel
*** Website Builder
*** Fantastico
*** Absolutely no advertising!

Some restrictions
*** NO SPAM
*** NO PROXY SITES
*** NO PORNS/ADULT CONTENTS

What you’ll miss (I don’t use them, anyways!)
*** POP MAIL
*** SSH

But don’t take my words for it. Try it just to see for yourself. Find out more of them and their service here!

What’s in the Name

What’s the meaning of Kwatog? Is it my real name? Of course, it is not my real name, it’s not even my nickname. It’s how I characterise myself.

Kwatog is a name of a boy in an early 80s show in the Philippines.  I think it had a good following that whenever we looked dirty when we were still young, the oldies call us kwatog. Or they say, “you look like kwatog”. It was the time when in our province, there’s only a few households have television. So I associated kwatog to a boy from the province, a vagabond, a strong-willed boy trying to live life no matter how hard it is.

This blog will chronicle my journey in life. This will be a story of a man who was once a boy no better than the kid in the soap opera. A boy who dreamed, strived, succeeded, lost it all and now trying to rise up. With God’s help, I know everything will go back into place.

Rise from Innocence

This is my first post on this blog. I hope I can keep posting here.

If given a chance, I would buy the kwatog.com domain but I found out that it’s already taken. When I searched in the internet for the name kwatog, I found out that there’s a lot of people using the name kwatog already. There’s even a profile on friendster named kwatog.