Just Another Blog Out There

What you are reading now is my blog, and I actually do (or in the current case, "did") have a separate website. That website was published way, way back before blogs became popular. The website was shifted from an even older webhost, so you can imagine how long the website lasted. Nothing important was in there; it contained a few articles on digital SLRs, chronicles of my OBS trips and some other personal information. The last I checked—minutes before I blogged this post—the site just disappeared. There was no warning from the webhost, and when I tried to log in, my account didn't exist.

Anyway, it's a free host, and over the years it started adding ads and its performance degraded, so I'm not too bothered by it's disappearance. I haven't decided whether to start another one, so I guess it's OK to let the old one RIP for now.

Thanks to Friendster, I've found a lost contact! Quite a number of posts earlier I've blogged my thoughts on how I was searching to re-establish contact with one of my best buddies in NS, Danny. It was not a direct process: since I don't have his email, I resorted to searching through all the "Danny"s. Narrowing the results were pretty easy since I know his age and possible location, so by looking through the profiles I can roughly know more or less which were the possible ones and which were the outright impossible ones.

Unfortunately, some of the Friendster profiles were quite sparse in details, and that made my search more difficult. There was not a direct score on any of the profiles so I kinda gave up. A few days later, there was this request from one of the profiles I've searched through to be added to his Friendster list (probably because he saw my profile on the "Who's Viewed Me" list—a pretty recent feature added). A message here, a check there, so this person was the one I've been searching for the last few years! :)

These are the little things that brightens up my life, and I can't wait to meet him face to face again!

On a totally separate note, I was thinking of converting to Linux as my main operating system (OS) for my computers; both my desktop and my notebook PC. However, having to deal with existing data on NTFS partitions held me back since I haven't found a way to write to an NTFS partition (apart from using the FUSE filesystem which I've tried and found it unstable, at least on my system).

Another issue is getting WPA on wireless to work in Linux, since there are no direct WPA support for the wireless cards I'm using.

Adding to the confusion is choosing between Fedora Core, a Linux distribution that I am pretty comfortable with and having a high level of flexibility (read: "more difficult to configure and use"), versus the more desktop-oriented Ubuntu that is not so widely used (read: "less community support").

There are other minor considerations like web accessibility: a number of websites are built to render on Internet Explorer, and may break on Firefox to various degrees; playing Internet video in Linux (Real, Windows Media, Quicktime) and finding Open Source equivalents of the Windows applications I'm so used to.

I'll still stick with a dual-boot (with WinXP) system, but I'm thinking of changing my default OS to Linux, booting to Windows only when absolutely necessary. Until the pertinent issues have been addressed, completely coverting to Linux won't be something that will happen in the near future.

Accidentally stumbled onto this when I was just surfing around YouTube.

Came back from Kuala Lumpur eariler in the week - was up there playing a game of basketball friendies with a local church there. Ended up with 1 win and 2 draws. It was a wonderful trip and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Although my role in this trip (other than playing basketball and "visually documenting" the trip) was to help take care of the younger ones, I felt no pressure at all to present myself as a "leader". There was no performance trap to bind me in, and as I was interacting with the boys, I was totally free to be myself.

At age 26, I was thinking I'm too old to start playing basketball, but as it turned out I'm starting to grow interest in the sport. It kinda revived my teenage dream to be able to play basketball. A bit late, but better than never. :)