techiehenry

The past ten days I’ve been unable to put up some updates to this blog. Things have been a bit wacky for me lately, health-wise.

First, I got a cold. For about a week I spent the whole day sniffing and felt feverish at the same time. Then the following weekend, my throat got really itchy and I started coughing. I got a fever for a day, and after a visit from the doctor I was diagnosed with acute bronchitis.

I was asked to take three days of rest — however, those three days fell on the same days when I’ll be attending a 3-day seminar on People Handling sponsored by the company I work for. So, thinking that the money the company spent would be wasted if I didn’t attend, I went ahead. Fortunately the antibiotics the doctor prescribed me took away the fever and colds, but I still have coughs every now and then. Thankfully I can have my three days of rest come Friday (it’s been declared a national holiday).

I’ll try to make up for the lost time by putting up tips again, so keep on visiting the site.

Thanks to everyone who posted comments. It’s really very encouraging when I know that some people benefit from anything I post here.

I can’t help singing Tigger’s tune everytime I read about the name of this microblogging/social networking site.

The wonderful thing about tiggers
Is tiggers are wonderful things!
Their tops are made out of rubber;
Their bottoms are made out of springs!
They’re bouncy, trouncy, flouncy, pouncy,
Fun! Fun! Fun! Fun! Fun!
But the most wonderful thing about tiggers is
I’m the only one!

After several days I got an invite, and immediately I signed up for it, just to know what the hype is all about. What I saw is a site that is in some aspects a ‘mashup’ of Tumblr and Twitter. Like Tumblr, you can post links, messages, events, and files. Like Twitter, it’s more suited to short posts, and you get to network with a lot of people and converse with each other on a particular topic.

Here’s my Pownce page. I just signed up as a fan of Robert Scoble and Veronica Belmont. Maybe I’ll add some more later.

There’s just one caveat. Until the time of writing, you can’t just sign up and start pownce-ing. You have to get invited or you wait in line for your turn to get invited.

I apologize for not being able to follow up on the software development series for the past few weeks. My computer broke down and it took me a while to be able to get enough money to replace it. It has been 4 years since my last major upgrade, so instead of trying to find out the defective part (which I suspect to be somewhere within the motherboard), I decided to just do it again.

What exactly’s happening to my machine? There were intermittent lockups, leading to my hard disk crashing. There was one day that I had to reinstall my whole OS thrice, since the partition where it is installed has been unreadable after several of those lockups. Good thing I back up my data, since there was also a time that even the data partition was trashed. The BIOS would also appear to be reset at times, so I had to reconfigure it as well.

So what, you ask, am I using to post to my blog right now? I’m not done configuring everything to my liking at the moment, and I had to take pictures of it, so I’ll be talking about it on my next post.

‘Till then!

Going to conferences or conventions really is a big plus for people who work in the technology industry. You get to meet other people who are interested in the same things as you do, you get to share know-how, you get some questions clarified directly by those involved with a certain tech project, you get free items (who doesn’t want these?), you get to know prospective companies where you can apply for a job, and you gain a little bit more knowledge as to where the industry is headed.

The 1st Conference on the Role of FOSS in eGovernance I went to several months ago was one of those conventions, and I wasn’t really expecting that one of the companies with whom I registered and gave my contact information would make do with the offer that they made.

Last Tuesday I received an e-Mail from Aileen Apolo, Google Philippines Country Consultant, thanking me for registering at the Google booth that was set up there. The mail also contained a coupon number for Google AdWords which amounts to fifty US dollars (US$50)!

I haven’t really used it yet, but I plan to advertise my blog, just to see whether paid advertising with companies like Google would really contribute to the increase in traffic that comes to the advertisers. It’s still valid until June 19, so I still have time to see which keywords I can use to increase this site’s visibility on search requests.

Thanks Aileen, and thanks to Google.

It seems that there’s no workaround to removing the advertising link to the previous template I’m using so I took it out and switched to this one.

See, the sidebar items are draggable!

I think I’d be sticking to this template for a very long time. Much respect to the people at N.Design Studios for putting up a template with the same licensing as my previous template but not requiring those who use it to advertise any other site.

You can check out their site from the link above and see other splendid-looking templates.