The second part of the Taste Asia Foodfest (read about the first part), sponsored by SM Hypermarket last Thursday was fun! And like before, people went gaga over the Cliquebooth and dined on the sumptuous food. (I liked the food more this time.) I even got to play around with Gail’s pet dog, Sheero.

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I really try to avoid back-to-back Google posts, but this new feature/product/service by Google is too good to pass up posting about. Download the latest version (4.2) of Google Earth then switch to the Sky view by clicking the astronomy icon in the toolbar or selecting the “Switch to Sky” menu option under the View menu. You’re now presented with a view of the night sky!

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It was inevitable that Google has now made Google Maps much more shareable. It’s now as easy to post your very own pannable and zoomable Google Maps in your blogs and websites as you do with YouTube videos. Just browse Google Maps as usual, find the location you want to showcase, add markers via the “My Maps” tab, and then click on “Link to this page” link beside the upper-right corner of the map. Copy the contents of the second textbox and paste it to your blog or website. It’s that easy! You can find more information and examples at the Google Lat-Long Blog.

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Okay, the Groovee Playlist™, which I started last May is intended to be a monthly (or at least bi-monthly) series, but I forgot to continue it in the past two months. So to catch up, here’s a list of songs that I’ve grown to like within the last three months.

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Despite the special significance of this day, I’ve always thought that it’s just an ordinary day like any other. Well-wishing is always appreciated and merriment is part of the package. It’s not that I’m a prude or a killjoy, but my practical and usually unemotional mind does not attach any sort of momentousness (or portent) that many other people feel when their own annual commemoration comes. People say you should be happy. Others feel depressed. Me? I’m just here blogging and surfing the web as if it were any other day. Nevertheless, I write this entry to pay tribute to that gift of life given to me. After all, while we may not know the meaning of life, it doesn’t hurt to appreciate it, right?

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It’s been a rainy week this week, and it seems the Filipino’s collective prayer for rain to stave of the impending water crisis worked. Well, it did cause a helluva lot of traffic last Wednesday, but at least we’re all safe, right?

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Today saw the worst travel to the office of my entire working life. My sister and I left our home in Las Piñas at 8:30 this morning with the sky bright but promising rain. We normally arrive at our offices in Quezon City by 9:30 after passing through Coastal Road, EDSA, Fort Bonifacio, then C-5. The rain started pouring when we were along Coastal Road and what followed was three hours of traffic hell.

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Many of my readers are not into the so-called local blogging community, so here’s my unsolicited coverage of The Kid Blogger Affair, i.e., the question of the authorship of the Making Money Online with a 13-Year Old blog, which is owned by Carl Ocab, now a 14-year-old teenager.

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One of my mid-term goals is to learn the Ruby programming language and then quickly move on to Ruby on Rails, a web application framework that lets you develop database-driven websites in a fraction of the time it takes to do it using traditional methods (like through PHP).

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I didn’t get to attend the The Top Ten Emerging Influential Blogs for 2007 eyeball dinner since I didn’t participate in the writing project for various reasons. But I did get to make up for that by attending the next two blogger events. The first is the Pinoy.Tech.Blog 2nd Year Anniversary Beer Party (that turned into an iced tea party, might I add), and the Microtel Bloggers Dinner (mentioned by Abe here).

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Woah. It’s been over three months since I last did a movie reaction so let me rectify that by talking about two not too-recent movies. One is about a teen and his phoenix-core wand, while the other is about another teen and his Camaro/alien-robot.

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I’ve heard about OpenStreetMap (OSM) (see the Wikipedia article) maybe one or two years ago and was interested in the collaborative aspects of it. This mapping project aimed to create a free (as beer and in speech) street geodata of the whole United Kingdom and Ireland. While Great Britain already has excellent mapping data care of the Ordnance Survey (the national mapping agency of the UK), the problem is that this data is not free (as in beer and speech). The Ordnance Survey holds the copyright to the mapping data and charges people who want to use it, despite being funded by taxpayer’s money. So the OpenStreetMap project was born.

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