Memos from August 2005

The Block is Hot!

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random-weather_sf_083005.gif

What is up with the cur­rent weath­er? I went to LA this past week­end and OMG, it was just yucky sum­mer weath­er. I mean, I’ve been there for the past cou­ple of years… but it nev­er sucked that bad. Yah, it was like 90s but it was more humid than usu­al.

Its prob­a­bly because of Hur­ri­cane Kat­ri­na. She’s behind all this weath­er pat­tern that were hav­ing late­ly. I mean come on, you got a fore­cast of high 70s in down­town SF with no freakin’ nice breeze what­so­ev­er. Then, the tem­per­a­ture reach­ing the high 80s past noon—that’s just crazy.

I know what you Cal­i­for­ni­ans are say­ing, “it might be earth­quake weath­er.” Yah, I hear you too, it might be. It was like that in the past, and usu­al­ly around this time. Blah. Knock on wood… hope­ful­ly its not but just a case of Kat­ri­na.

Just need­ed to get that out. Freakin’ weath­er is suckin’ espe­cial­ly here in down­town where its usu­al­ly nice and cool. Peo­ple usu­al­ly wear a light sweater or jack­et. But today, I think I saw more peo­ple wear­ing their office clothes than their reg­u­lar leather and den­im jack­ets.

Seems that its always the female storms that caus­es the most prob­lems. I guess its like PMS. When they feel shit­ty, you just got­ta stay away from them. Any­ways, I just hope that those in her path are okay, espe­cial­ly those in Louisiana.

Don’t Sleep on Late Registration

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Kanye West - Late Registration

I have to admit, Kanye “did it again” (as Jay‑Z would say). Anoth­er one for the record books. A CD that you can actu­al­ly buy and not stress if its worth the mon­ey or not. I had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to lis­ten to it, and was impressed and amazed. Each track… each track, OMG… its real­ly hard to describe the feel­ing that you get when you’re lis­ten­ing to this album. The only solu­tion is for you to lis­ten to it on your own. Bot­tom­line, go cop it in-stores tomor­row.

If you are look­ing for books and order­ing through Amazon.com, its $10.99 there… click here to add it to your cart.

Here’s the com­plete track-list­ing:

  1. Wake Up Mr. West (:41)
  2. Heard ‘Em Say fea­tur­ing Adam Levine of Maroon 5 (3:24)
  3. Touch The Sky fea­tur­ing Lupe Fias­co (3:56)
  4. Gold Dig­ger fea­tur­ing Jamie Foxx (3:27)
  5. Skit #1 (:33)
  6. Dri­ve Slow fea­tur­ing Paul Wall & GLC (4:32)
  7. My Way Home fea­tur­ing Com­mon (1:43)
  8. Crack Music fea­tur­ing Game (4:31)
  9. Ros­es (4:05)
  10. Bring Me Down fea­tur­ing Brandy (3:19)
  11. Addic­tion (4:27)
  12. Skit #2 (:31)
  13. Dia­monds From Sier­ra Leone (Remix) fea­tur­ing Jay‑Z (3:53)
  14. We Major fea­tur­ing Nas & Real­ly Doe (7:28)
  15. Skit #3 (:24)
  16. Hey Mama (5:05)
  17. Cel­e­bra­tion (3:18)
  18. Skit #4 (1:19)
  19. Gone fea­tur­ing Con­se­quence & Cam’Ron (5:33)
  20. **BONUS TRACK**Diamonds From Sier­ra Leone (3:58)
  21. **HIDDEN TRACK** Late (3:50)

Movable Type 3.2 Free from Beta

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OK. So this might sound some­what geeky but oh-damn-well… this involves technology—a part of me. Any­ways, Six Apart’s Jay Allen announced last night that Mov­able Type 3.2 will be released on 8/25/05 in the AM. That was cool.

I mean, for those of you that have been fol­low­ing our blogs (Kel­ly, Juan, Ryan and I), you may notice the “Pow­ered by Mov­able Type…” text-link some­where. I have been using their great soft­ware since 2002. After all these years, through all the hack­ing and cus­tomiza­tion, if I have to do it over again and pick a blog­ging soft­ware… it still would have to be Mov­able Type.

Yah, it might sound bias (I know) but MT has proven itself (IMHO) after numer­ous ver­sions that it adapts to new and un-fore­castable changes in the Blo­gos­phere, and most impor­tant­ly on the WWW. “What changes?” You might say. Well, first of all, I have to give cred­it to Blog­ger for mak­ing me curi­ous enough to start and express my thoughts on most­ly about any­thing, as I was “bored as hell” one day dur­ing a pro­gram­ming class back in UCI. I remem­ber back in the days that I want­ed to do more stuff with my first-ever blogsite. I felt con­strict­ed to what I was offered, and just need a new solu­tion.

So after Yahoo!-ing (no Google yet in my vocab) and con­fer­ring with var­i­ous peo­ple on what stand-alone blog­ging soft­ware, a cou­ple of names came about. I remem­ber James using b2, so that made it on top of my list along with oth­er ones from hotscripts.com. But alas, after a lot of think­ing, test­ing and research­ing com­mu­ni­ty forums of the respec­tive blog­ware… I found Mov­able Type­’s to be the most active, inno­v­a­tive and solu­tion-dri­ven group of invidi­vid­u­als. This was the decid­ing fac­tor in mak­ing my leap-of-faith to switch from Blog­ger to a stand-alone blogware—thank god I made a good choice.

Mean­while, I can tell you a lot more of my his­to­ry with MT and how it affect­ed and helped my career in Tech­nol­o­gy but that can go on for­ev­er. I’ve seen it evolve from a strict blog­ware, to a CMS, to a pub­lish­ing-plat­form, …to who-knos-what with this new release. It has:

  • helped me share my day with friends and fam­i­ly (vice-ver­sa),
  • keep my design-skills stay cre­ative,
  • pushed me to increase my knowl­edge of new web-tech­nolo­gies (i.e. XHTML, CSS, etc.)
  • and… type faster, to say the least =)

So whats in it for you, I don’t know. Its real­ly an open-end­ed ques­tion that has no right or wrong answers. But I do know this, it proves that it is a “small world.” And every nano-sec­ond, new ideas are being thought of to get peo­ple to inter­act with each oth­er more. After all, we’re only six degrees apart.

PS. Thanks to 6A-fam and MT-dev com­mu­ni­ty for their great hard­work in pro­duc­ing anoth­er prod­uct (that I feel) will have an immense effect on the inter­net and how peo­ple inter­act with each oth­er.

PPS. Thanks to 6A-fam for pro­vid­ing us who beta-test­ed 3.2 with this badge haha =)

I beta tested Movable Type 3.2

Money-matters

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While talk­ing about ING Direc­t’s increased inter­est rate (i.e. 3.3% from 3.0%):

me (10:43:26 PM): did­n’t you want my finan­cial advi­sor’s con­tact info?
juan (10:44:38 PM): im good for now, i want to start sav­ing some mon­ey before invest­ing
me (10:45:02 PM): ummm thats an oxy­moron