♦ What Can Tons Of Free Stuff Do?

Take a popular gadget/technology blog site, create some Christmas Give-Away contest sponsored by one of the major telcos of the land and run the promo using current available technology or trend to socialize and what do you get? An onslaught of followers posting the weirdest of comments and a barrage of linkbacks to make the site reach even more grounds (and an occasional database error to boot probably because of the looming heavy traffic on the site). A brilliant promo I might say. Sigh! If only somebody would be interested in my worn out socks and underwears, I would be glad to give them away (for that’s all I can afford considering that this blog is not really experiencing any real traffic aside from my friends and love ones, so I bet no major company would be glad to sponsor a promo for my blog). LOL! Well, either that or I could just join in the frenzy and win some stuff myself. These days who wouldn’t want to receive some stuff for free especially for such simple rules to follow.

Here’s the mechanics of how you too can join the YugaTech Great Gadget Giveaway through twitter:

1) Follow @abeolandres and @talk2globe on Twitter.

2) Post a tweet “Just entered to win a Modu Phone. Quick! Go follow @abeolandres and @talk2globe and retweet:http://bit.ly/6e2q7O #thanks2yugatech”

You can also follow the link to the Yugatech site to read about other ways to join the promo like answer a question about being an outcast and having just one opportunity to call (funny most of them think about it negatively in a sense that they’ll be dying soon). You can also post “praises” (to put it lightly) to the sponsor which is Globe by the way. Yup, the one this blog had also been kissing ass since it all started with the now defunct Globe Circle’s G-Blogs. Thanks to Yugatech’s Sir Abe and Globe, we have some other thing to look forward to this coming Christmas. I know I’m just terribly unlucky with raffles and promos (never won any lottery and raffles eversince) but well… hmmm.. where’s my lucky underwear… I’m gonna wear them til the winners have been drawn…

♦ Banco De Oro: Innovating For A Better Banking Experience My Ass!

BDO’s network was momentarily unavailable to its ATM cardholders earlier because of… guess what… an UNEXPECTED SYSTEM UPGRADE?! What the hell is that? Well, atleast that’s what the BDO Call Center agent told me when I called earlier after being exasperated and overly exhausted trying to find a machine (BDO’s and other banks’ ATM as well) that will work with my BDO ATM card. Don’t you guys over there at the BDO ATM network center think you need to announce a system-wide upgrade first (and way ahead) to warn your depositors that their accounts won’t be accessible for the time being? Are BDO’s electronic channels running on cheap servers or something? Seeing the long lines and the disappointed faces of those who attempted to withdraw on BDO machines, in contrast to other banks’ waiting and well-functioning ATMs, I’m just so disgusted with Banco De Oro at this very moment. Based on experience, Banco De Oro’s ATM machines have the worst percentage of availability that I’ve encountered so far among other banks… or maybe I’m just running out of luck. They have so many ATM’s but most of them seemed always unavailable when needed. Sure, they have lots of branches and they’re actually the nearest bank from my residence but I found more inconveniences banking with them than trying to find a wall to piss on. Oh well, I’ve been patient long enough and have suffered on different occasions, time to put more transactions on a more reliable bank which offers REAL CONVENIENCE and not just a showy display of the most number of ATMs (working or not) and fancy partnerships with malls.

♦ An Open Invitation

We’re inviting everybody for the MixMinistry Live! Party which will be held on October 2, 2009 at the Ang Pulo Bar & Restaurant in Ortigas (near Medical City, inside the Autocamp compound).  No entrance fee. No need for any registration.

UPDATE: MixMinistry regrets to announce that due to unforeseen, unfortunate events that have unfolded (massive flood brought about by storms), our MixMinistry Live! event has been postponed. We will announce the new date as soon as we can. Thank you for your continued support.

♦ iPhones 0S 3.1 & iTunes 9 goes live!

Here we go again folks! Off I go for another round of painful updates from Apple. Currently, I still have 70 minutes to download the 241.7 mb iPhone firmware update on iTunes (no thanks to myDestiny Internet’s turtle power!) and I’m already expecting another series of crashes and errors on the upgrade process. I already have downloaded iTunes 9 but haven’t installed it yet because I’m still waiting for the 3.1 download to finish. I’m not all that excited about this release (don’t fancy much about lyrics, album arts, facebook and twitter integration), but I just want a way to rearrange my 10-paged iPhone apps easier (this time via iTunes… Sweet! Hope it’s not sluggish or too much of a resource hug on the system).

It was just about a month ago when Globe sent me a message to update my phone’s firmware to 3.0.1 (they were almost a week late), prompted by an SMS vulnerability that can render your iPhone useless and allegedly attack a carrier’s cell tower (not via exploding iPhones?). In this recent update however, Apple sneaked in some more security patches. Hmmm.. did the iPhone ever had those free 3G internet access hack? Wait! That’ll be useless! I couldn’t even get a stable 3G signal from Globe!

♦ iPhone OS 3.0.1 Update Now Available!

After the SMS-based iPhone security vulnerability was unveiled by Charlie Miller yesterday on a Black Hat conference which would allow arbitrary code to be executed via a malicious text message and do damaging stuff like Denial of Service attacks among others, Apple finally released an update to patch the exploit.

♦ AWOL

Sorry for the absence of post for the past few weeks. I have been bombarded with a lot of pleasant surprises lately. Relatives and friends have arrived from the other side of the world. Haven’t been around my shanty for the week and if ever I was, I didn’t had enough time even just to boot up my computer. Can’t even send a twitter message via SMS since I have to lend my other phone to them. Well, it was worth it I guess. Now that they’re gone, I’m still a little dreamy with the great news I have received lately. Anyway, I’ll be back blogging really soon.

♦ Looking For

Remember when CD’s and mp3’s weren’t around yet and you can either buy a record on a vinyl or casette tape format? I was an avid music collector back then, mostly on casette tapes because they’re cheaper and easier to carry around (and walkmans were the iPod’s before). When the CD’s came, it wasn’t cheap at the beginning, most especially the players. So I have to let it pass and eventually became a late adopter. I had just gained my independence and was working my way through college, plus the fact that pagers and then (later) celphones were gaining more of my attention during those times.

For most DJ’s, casette tapes were only for mixtapes since they’re using turntables and then CD players for mixing. Unfortunately for me during my prepubescent years, I was only practicing mixing through casette players and karaokes (with their pitch control knobs). At some point, I was already being destructive because not only did I broke the needle of my father’s Pioneer turntable (I was curious at scratching too), I also detached the front cover of casette players (those without pitch controls) leaving only the frame to hold the tape and poke pointed objects on the reels to somehow control its speed. Soon I realized that they’re no longer turning and the tape  spews out the thin film from below because the rubber inside the tape deck had worn out and some screws or nuts had gone loose. I also broke the volume knob, followed by the mute button for the speakers because I was constantly rolling the knob back and forth and pressing the button mimicking the effects of the fader.

Anyway, going back to the CD (flashback music fade out). I’d usually go to a record bar first and check what’s new whenever I’m in a mall. In fact, I think there was never an instance that I wouldn’t visit record outlets whenever I leave my house. There was a battle back then between casette tapes and CD’s on record bars. CD’s started gaining ground and dominated the displays where casette tapes ruled before. There were some rare CD’s that I was about to buy but thought twice because during those times, I don’t really know when I could get myself a CD player. Those were one of the biggest regrets of my life. Years later, thanks to some friends plus Captain Jack Sparrow and the internet, I was able to retrieve some records and copies of records that were no longer in production nowadays. But there are still some that I’m still constantly looking for to no avail. Here are some of them:

• Classic Club Cuts (or Hits?), a double CD album (with Classic Club Mix) which features some remixes by DJ Jamtrx (Clair Marlo’s ‘Til They Take My Heart Away among others) but what I’m actually after for are the other hard-to-find tracks in the album like “The Best Things In Life”  by Kim (if I remember it correctly) among others. It has a blue cover with the title on a script font and was released by Galaxy Records under ZYX Music Publishing I think.

• Dance Decade (or something like that), also a double CD with the other being mixed. I think they were released under the same group or company but they feature a bit older dance classics.

• Strike’s “I Saw The Future” album and other AD records & Hooj Choons albums which I have CD’s before but just lost it somewhere.

That’s all I can remember for now (time constraints) but I’ll post another blog for the others if I can remember them. If you have copies of these albums, kindly leave a comment on this post so we can “talk” and “negotiate”. Thanks!

♦ Sega Treat For iPhone Users

Well, what do you know… it’s the 4th of July and we’re not in the US of A but still we got some celebration here last night with fireworks heard (was busy that I didn’t get to see it) around this part of the metro… AND eventhough we’re miles away from the iPhone country, we’re still getting a little Sega love as they celebrate American freedom with a free old school game… without bounds!

♦ Ze Art Of Cooking

First things first: I don’t know how to cook! Well I tried but I guess it’s just not my cup of tea. Don’t have the patience (actually I don’t have that much time either). Can’t stand the heat. Thank God for rice cookers. Scared of oils popping. Frying ends up toasted. This morning though I woke up hungry with nothing on my fridge nor on my bin that I can devour right away except for some wheat bread and canned goods (which I don’t usually eat straight out of the can eventhough their label reads “ready to eat”). So I decided to fry some sausages, atleast the way I know how. While waiting for the sausages to turn golden brown, I was fascinated by how they settled in.
Maybe next time I’ll try to form a smiley out of corned beef.

♦ iPhone OS 3.1 (& 3GS) Coming Soon — UPDATED!

Apple has just released OS 3.1 beta (as well as the SDK) for the developer community and so far, there’s still no info on what’s new with the update aside from fixes and some new features for the devs.

Whew! I haven’t even finish exploring the rest of the features of 3.0 and here comes another update. Well, I would welcome a lighter OS though that would make effects and transition on the interface more seamless and snappier, as I do notice a very small hiccup on flipping to search, the occasional absence of transitional effects upon switching from one app to another especially when iPod is running on the background and a few more seconds to access the settings. No word yet here on who gets the 3GS and when will it be available.

Update after the break!