So the magnetic metal part inside the magsafe charger broke away from the plastic part and was stuck magnetized to the port on my macbook. I was able to unstick what’s left of the charger and run to my parents to ask if I could buy a new charger ASAP.

It was a good thing that the iCampus store and the LS Book store was open on Saturday mornings! I was able to purchase the very last 60W macbook charger on the shelf at the student discounted price!

I’ve gone through Netscape Mail, Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird (my favorite PC mail client so far) and now I use Mail (the pre-installed mail application in mac os x). One thing I can conclude so far is that I cannot live without an email client application.

Though the trend in technology is switching to doing everything on the web (including email accessed from browsers we know as webmail ex. Gmail). I still find the usefulness of email clients to be undeniable specially when you live in the Philippines where wifi access isn’t always possible. This is even more useful if your in school doing a lot of org work/ group work or you work in a field that needs fast information decimation.

For those of you who have ignored email clients for the longest time. Email clients such as Outlook Express, Outlook, Thunderbird and Mail use either a POP or IMAP protocol to get and copy email from your email accounts to your local hard drive. In the old days of the internet this was the only way to check email but now we have email client’s biggest competitor webmail which allows us to access our inboxes from any computer with just the use of a browser.

Most people would think, why should I use an email client when it would use local space on my hard drive not to mention I’d need a whole other application just to check mail as compared to using webmail which is readily accessible through browsers that are pre-installed in our operating systems?

Though this is a huge drawback to using an email client it still doesn’t lessen the utility value of having a local copy of your email. This is specifically even more highlighted when you are an extremely mobile person and may sometimes find yourself without internet access.

Here are a couple of my experiences that can show the notable use of my email client

1. During an EBAM (Editorial Board Aspirants Meeting) the executive aspirants we’re trying to take note of the suggestions of some of the absent aspirants that we’re sent via mail the night before. Most people with a laptop would go to their browsers and log on to gmail to access the previous nights set of emails but the problem was the campus network group was having trouble with the WiFi in our building at the time. Luckily I use Apple Mail and had a copy of their mail already downloaded.
2. Normally checking mail would be a chore that you had to go through periodically (students normally doing it in the evening) opening a separate tab and then logging on to their email accounts. During the different hellweeks in my semesters specially during Marketing and Leadership and Strategy class, I found it really easy as I received and downloaded attachments with probably only a 1-second delay to the time the person sent it. I got updates as they we’re updated and news as it was being written. Did I mention it doesn’t feel like a chore? Thats because I can leave Mail running constantly (with it checking for new mail every 5-10 minutes) while I just browse along facebook or finish my design comissions, I don’t have to open a new tab just for email.

Case number 2 is specifically important to me as a student and as a member of the school newspaper where the rule is to ALWAYS ALWAYS reply ASAP to every email and text message.

But with those big reasons alone why aren’t most students making full use (specially as macs are becoming more and more popular in school and macs have pre-installed email clients) of their laptops and using email clients?

Well one big hurdle so far (within the ateneo) is that the our incampus Wireless Internet security prevents downloading email to clients. This however does not hinder reason 1 as there are multiple wireless hotspots in Katipunan that allow POP and IMAP access.

People usually think of it as hard simply because they have to actually do something before recieving email. For many of you who think this is the case (specially you mac users who never get to use your mail application) below is an image at how idiotically simple for the internet generation it is to set up their Mail applications (the process is actually quite similar in other email clients)

Most email providers with pop or IMAP access will have more detailed instructions. A good email provider that does this that I know about is gMail so check out their website for more info.

If your asking what email clients you should use? For PC users, I highly recommend Thunderbird over Outlook but either is still quite good. For Macs, the preinstalled Mail client is already there so why not use it?

I haven’t clicked the update link on my wordpress admin panel yet (I’m waiting for a compatibility check with my plugins) but a lot of the new features are really worth being excited about.

1. Global Trash/ Undo – I actually have mixed feelings about this. I’ve always wanted an undo feature in wordpress but I never thought it could be implemented in the same way as a trash bin. It does go hand-in-hand with the trend of doing everything on the web.
2. Image editor – This is something really big specially if you work with wordpress as much as I do (and if you use it with newspaper/magazine sites the way I use it with the GUIDON and G).
3. Easy Video embedding – This would be a great help to those who like sharing youtube posts a lot but I wonder if the code will be xhtml valid afterwards?

I’ll probably try this out on my offline installation of wordpress tonight before I upgrade any of the wordpress blog installations I have . If you wanna know more about wordpress 2.9 check WordPress.org.

I finally got to upgrade to snow leopard this week. I have to say its a pretty good value for money upgrade specially if you have an older mac (imagine a technical overhaul for only 29 dollars)! It feels like Anita’s been given new life. All my apps run faster, start up and shutdown is faster as well. It’s a drastic change from what I was experiencing with the last few Leopard updates (slower and slower startup, hotter CPU), now she feels 2 months old again!

Snow Leopard

Here’s some things that I noticed that I really liked.

• Faster and shorter startup
  During the last few updates of Leopard, my startup was probably at 4 or 5 minutes already (like I never switched from windows). Now that I switched to Snow Leopard, startup and shutdown is under a minute! As the gay looking guy in the Sky broadband says “I can barely have time to finish this cup of coffee”.
• Applications run smoother and faster
  All of my applications run smoother and faster now thanks to the utilization of both processor cores sharing the load. Photoshop takes only 10 seconds to fully load and I rarely see the loading ring now. Indesign crashes less as well and even Safari runs faster.
• Regained disc space
  I regained around 6 to 7 gigs of disc spaces from the code overhaul apple did with snow leopard giving me more space for my stuff and lengthening Anita’s life.
• A better Expose
  Expose now shows windows in a more organized manner with a new grid for a less cluttered look. Also if you turned it on in the settings, Expose will hide windows you’ve clicked to be hidden in the same icons for the programs saving space on the dock. You can also now launch expose by holding down the dock icons.
• Improved Stacks
  You can now browse things in the dock if your in grid view which makes so much help to find files and to send files to specific folders!
• Improved Preview
  I don’t need Skim anymore, preview can highlight and add comments on my PDF readings for school natively

What do you like about Snow Leopard?

my new design for flavor of life

After seeing that I’ve been featured on vector tuts, I decided I’d try and get back on my feet on graphic design again. Having lots of time, boredom and anger also helps a lot when your trying to make art. To the left you’ll find the next design that I’ll be using for Flavor of Life (I got sick of this plain design quite quickly). It sort of looks like Avatar meets the Beijing Olympics with Japanese kana. The koi in the header is from this koi art I made that can be seen on my deviant art website (which I haven’t posted anything on for a year).

Speaking of designs, multiply recently revamped its main page. So far, I actually like the functionality that the new dashboard inbox brings to multiply but the design is hideous. I’ll start with the color of the top bar which really is just to strong and bold of a blue for my taste, something that is going to take that much space in a design should at least have a more subtle or more pastel color. The scroll-bars are also quite irritating specially if your a mac user like me who doesn’t like hiding his dock. I seriously think multiply should rethink the design part of this revamp a bit because right now it just looks like some unprofessional 2nd rate social network service.

I was vain yesterday and I googled my name and somewhere around the first two pages I came across this website which pointed me to this article at Vector tuts.

Seems like people are actually starting to enjoy my old (I mean really old) art! It does feel good to finally feel recognized.

I’m actually contemplating on uninstalling Office 08 all-together now as I find that iWork can more or less do most of the things that Office can do. The only thing holding me back is the Word audio recordings and certain Excel functions (that I might never use anyways). I never really liked entourage and the whole package is starting to become just a big resource hog. Any thoughts on Office 08 vs iWork 09?

Recently actually I’ve been noticing a lot of things wrong with WP which I suspect is coming from the rapid growth it has gone through (its not exactly as light weight as it used to take pride in). I’ve been taking a look at other blogging tools to study and I’m seriously thinking of moving from wordpress to another blogging platform, would anyone have any suggestion? Im currently studying up Expression Engine but I would like to learn of a few more.

With what I have seen with Expression Engine, its more versatile when it comes to site design and structure as it doesn’t exactly use the normal header content footer hierarchy that most of us recognize from other blogging software. It is a lot like Textpattern and Moveable type in a sense that you create template and use their codebases. However I find (being used to the header footer thing) that this is what makes it a little bit more difficult as well but it does give you more freedom and it wouldn’t give you too much of a problem I guess.

comments galore

As for wordpress, unlike most reviews I actually find designing for it still very easy but it is easy to mess up as well since the php code is completely out in the open. While I was troubleshooting my theme this afternoon I decided to end my misery and create a basic wordpress structure php file with comments so I won’t get lost again when I’m trouble shooting or creating a new theme. It’s completely filled with comments its laughable but I think it might be useful to others out there who are struggling with creating their first theme since Im really trying to make it idiot proof just incase I forget something. I might share it on this blog later on but I gotta clean it up a bit first.

Flavor of Life's new look

Since school finally ended I found myself sometime to actually get this layout which was created three months ago online! YAY! It isn’t entirely old as I spent most of the morning changing the original design I created three weeks ago cause it just didn’t suit my taste anymore.

I have to thank an old colleague Aislin Kee for the idea on the Fs though, I saw her do some of these great typography artworks and I wanted to be a copy cat and do some crazy art with font. If you noticed as well I added two new things on the bottom, though most of my offline friends already know me from these networks but yeah I added a follow me on twitter and plurk.

I’m signing out pretty quick I have to take a bath and accompany my grandmother at her house tonight cause her maid bailed out on her again. See yeah

My own personal solution to this for people who like the idea of keeping a private journal but aren’t used to handwriting long entries anymore. The solution is MAMP and WordPress. MAMP gives you an easy way to install MySQL APACHE and PHP for your Mac. Once you have MAMP installed you can then simply create a database for your wordpress and install wordpress. You get to blog and rant but still within the comfort and limits of your computer. Your website should only be accessible from your computer or your home network and with simple changes in the port settings you can require visitors (if you want visitors) to enter a password before being able to view any of part of your blog/site