1. Be an artist. Originally, I wanted to take up an art course (Fine Arts). Of course, I was consistently ignoring the fact that I’m no good at drawing, really. Since I love drawing houses (Drafting was my favorite class in high school), I decided to go for Architecture (which is in UST).
2. Get a kick-ass job with a kick-ass title, like Doctor, Engineer, Attorney. Since Engineer was probably the shortest one to attain (only 5 years and board exams), I decided to study Electrical Engineering (I was enrolled in UPLB), and my dad was happy.
3. Do something what I’ve always been doing: Create websites. I was pretty much a loner in high school, my best friend is my PC (I once cried when my dad did a reformat on my hard drive – I felt like my best friend had amnesia). Yes, this hobby of creating websites has long been overdue and I still haven’t grown out of it. It’s funny how I look back at it, but I only knew HTML + CSS + JavaScript back then and I felt like it was all the knowledge I would need in the world. This is the reason why I finally decided to take up Computer Science in DLSU. And it was a decision I never regretted.

I have had numerous websites. My early experiments with websites were hosted on tripod.com, or gurl.com, and I can’t remember my URLs anymore. I do remember my domains, though:

• BlueAmity.com (2002 – 2003) – This was my first domain. The name was inspired by my emotions at that time. It was one of the lowest points in my life, and I was extremely depressed. I tried to live with it, so I tried to see it as a peaceful depression. Peace (amity) and depression (blue) hence, the domain name. I made it during a time when internet was just about gaining momentum in my school. I created a forum for the school (actually it was based on phpBB), which was probably the most active website community I’ve ever built, ever. It was the most visited site I’ve ever had in my entire existence. At one point, I saw my domain name on someone’s cellphone (they used it as a logo, and it said {bLuE aMiTy}, which is hella weird, because I’M blue amity!!!). I found a tool that archives websites from way back, so here’s a few links to reminisce my first ever site:
  • BlueAmity “Enter” screen – Yep, “Enter Site” screens were popular in those days. You weren’t cool (by cool, I mean internet/geeky cool) if you didn’t have the text ‘requires IE5/6′ on your screen. Of course, little did I know that later on in life, I will be cursing that browser forever.
  • Cupid.BlueAmity.Com – As a hobby, I also created sucky layouts for other people to use. I doubt anyone actually used them, though. But it was still “cool” to create layouts that other people can download and use.
  • Aneiki TFL – I created a fan listing for the Australian band, Aneiki (“approved” by TFL! LOL). The Fan Listings was a network where you can register your website to be the “official” fan listing of something. Of course, this was years before “Become a Fan of …” that Facebook created internally.
  • Family Website – The worst idea I ever had. See, I couldn’t stop creating sites, so I just had to do this.
• A-Reason-For.Us (2004 earlier version) – I had my first taste of happiness that year, and, as with the first one, the domain name clearly expresses my emotions at that time as well. I was overcoming depression (actually, I was just trying to replace it with happiness) so I believed that God always has a reason for everything. I still believe this up to know, but I got bored with the domain name so I gave it up in my first year of college.
• Unwant3d.com (2004 – 2007) – Ha, AGAIN it’s based on my depressive emotions. Emo kid much? Yeah I was emo before emo became a trend. This is more of a sad, sad, blog. Really.
• PigLovesCow (2007 – present) – This site. I didn’t really know what to name my new domain. I just wanted to get rid of unwant3d.com since it seems to be so depressive. So I asked Mark to suggest a name for me, and he chose this. Pig Loves Cow. There’s no story behind it, really. I just once saw two cute mini stuffed toys (a cow and a pig) “kissing” (they had magnets on their lips) so I got a pair and gave one to Mark. I gave him the pig cause I was teasing him that he’s a piggy. He told me I was a cow because of my birthmark. Hence…piglovescow.

Fun exercise: count the number of times I said “really”!

1. I find it hard to search through my mail.
   • Ctrl+F (Find) only searches the current folder, and it searches for a substring that matches your keyword on the subject and sender only (there may be other fields but it certainly doesn’t search the content or body of the email). It also just goes to the email of the first email found that matches your search, and all the other emails still show up. If the subject is long, it’s hard to find where your keyword is found. Also, you have to click on “Find Next” to go to the next email found that matches your search.
   • To be able to search the body/content of your emails, you need to go to “View”>”Search This View” (also I didn’t find a keyword shortcut next to the menu, so I assume you need to really hover over that menu and click that to be able to get there). Fortunately, “Search This View” sticks to your page like a toolbar so if you like it, just don’t close it. Sucks if you want flexibility on your UI though since you can’t just hide and show it with one (or two) keys. Oh yeah, did I mention it’s amazingly slow? It takes me ten years to pull up if I have plenty of emails containing my keyword. It’s nice that it just pulls up all the emails matching my search though, and removes the other emails away from my view. But again, you’re going to have a hard time finding where the search found your keyword, as it’s not highlighted or anything. Notes uses the concept of a little check symbol next to your emails to indicate selected documents. It also uses this feature to “select” the results of your search. The bad thing is that once you click on the check symbol, your email gets unselected, and it’s automatically removed from your search results view. Boo notes!
   • I can’t use regular expressions to search. The only options located in the “More” section of “Search This View” are: Save Search, Load Search, and Search in results. Notepad++’s search functionality is way more advanced than Lotus Notes, and this makes me feel that Notes was based on the same concept as Windows’ Notepad.
2. The mail filter just doesn’t do it for me
   • Filters in Lotus Notes is pretty basic. You can create “Rules”. Rules consists of 1) Conditions/Exceptions – “AND”, “OR”, field (ie sender, subject, etc), contains/does not contain, is/is not…and the keyword. You can add or remove as many conditions as you want (or so I think). 2) Actions – move, delete, copy, forward, etc…and another field that satisfies the action selected. Again, you can add or remove as many conditions as you want (or so I think). And finally…AGAIN, you have no option to use regular expressions for filtering. But you have the option to never delete your rules…if you need them to work, just enable them.
   • The filters doesn’t work that well. I’ve had many instances wherein one day, my mail rules just stop working. I don’t know why or how, but it just stops. I had to create another mail rule to replace the old one, and sometimes that works, yet most times it doesn’t.
3. The IMAP/POP feature is disabled by default
   • I know that Lotus Notes isn’t specifically designed to handle just email, and that it is probably a great tool for collaboration for non-IT users, but I find it disappointing that to be able to access my mail using another software, ie Thunderbird, I would need the IMAP or POP option to be enabled. Since I’m not a Domino (the notes server) admin, I have no access to the configuration. And our domino server has disabled IMAP/POP, which leaves me no choice but to deal with Lotus Notes for my email.

The GUI is WTF, OMG, and BBQ

• I don’t know if it would do me any good to explain this. Too many buttons located in different menus? Too many toolbars scattered everywhere? Unconventional icons/images? Usually I don’t read manuals for software when I need to find something since the GUI is user-friendly and easy to navigate. For lotus notes? I’m a developer myself and have trouble locating features. I feel that the user-unfriendliness of the GUI is causing my productivity to be slow. It’s easier if I can locate everything without thinking about it, than being baffled, staring at the screen and trying to find something for 10 minutes.

This is not taken by me. I found it somewhere in the internet, I forget where.

Linux Symposium T-Shirt Sizes

Wow, what a cool way to propose. This makes me wish I was a guy (and Mark was a girl). Then I’d have an excuse to hack a game and propose. I sooo wanna do this. This pwns the 3d animation proposal “Love Letters” bigtime.

Okay, so my boyfriend Mark has been having ridiculous pings on his WoW client. We decided to try tunneling it through my PC (which would serve as the socks server) and check if he gets less latency/lag.

All we needed was the following:

1. My server: A PC that runs ubuntu
   • Socks Server 5 (will discuss later how to install this)
   • A Tunnel Manager (gSTM)
2. The Client: Mark’s PC
   • WoW client installed (of course!)
   • SockscapV2
   • PuTTY

I used this guide to install Socks Server 5 (SS5) on my Ubuntu machine. gSTM can be installed using Synaptic or Add/Remove Applications. I then had to make sure that my socks port can be accessed from the internet, so I set up the Port Forwarding on my router to direct all 1080 and 1890 ports (1080 is the default port for socks server, but the guide uses 1890 to prevent malicious people for taking advantage of your open port) to my internal IP.

On Mark’s side (client side), he installed SockscapV2to act as a wrapper for Wow’s proxy/socks server, and PuTTY to tunnel the socks requests to my computer via SSH.

PuTTY SSH

Putty Tunnel