Went to the doctor early today, about my bouts of vertigo the past few days. Turns out, MSG or monosodium glutamate is the culprit. I ate instant noodles all week long last week and it finally caught up to me. MSG affects the inner ear, hence affects the sense of balance.

I have recovered a bit already though. This morning was the first morning I’d woken up without feeling immediately dizzy upon sitting up from bed. I felt good enough, in fact, to work out again this afternoon.

My workout was the usual 30-minute thing with the really heavy weights and the two-sets-per-exercise, 30-second-rest-between-sets routine. I got rid of the deadlifts and exchanged it for a lateral pulldown. I also put the shoulder press as my second exercise, so I get a little bit more umph on my shoulders. What should have been 30 minutes, lasted 45 minutes though — I repped to failure on my first set on the bench press and I had to get out from under the bar and re-set the thing on our Gold’s Gym smith machine (no worries — the machine had it’s own auto-spotter). Plus, I felt a bit dizzy upon finishing that first set, so I had to rest a few more seconds before doing the next set. I’d increased weights across all exercises, though, so all in all it was still a good workout.

Tomorrow, I should be feeling up to 100% normal, so I should be able to hit the gym without the dizzy spells.

A storm just passed through Luzon today. And what a storm it was! I woke up this morning to the whistling and howling of the wind outside our window! It only grew worse as the day went on, and I had to go to our gym and move our equipment off to the other side of the room, away from the windows. The wind was so strong that some of the rainwater were starting to get blown under and upwards between the jalousie glass slats.

We lost power right after lunch too. Electricity only came on around 6:30 or 7pm. Cable was out so we tuned in to news right away, and — man! I saw a small truck or bus getting blown to its side by the wind! Geez! The wind had been that strong! I know at least one guy died when a pole fell on top of his vehicle, but yeah, things were pretty hairy everywhere for a while.

Fortunately, the storm’s already blown past the Philippines and is on it’s way… where? I don’t know, and I don’t care, so long as it’s outta here!

Good thing I’m on leave for three weeks; otherwise, I’d be one of those guys stranded out on the road, regardless if I was driving an SUV or not.

It’s been a very long time since I last flexed my network-god muscles. My last sysad-duties-inclusive job was three years ago. However, I now find myself having to twitch at least my net-godlike little finger.

My brother abuses our DSL bandwidth at home. Bittorrent downloads of tons and tons of anime constantly slows down everybody else’s connections, myself included. And today happens to be one of the rare times I need/want to download large files from the ‘net — specifically, Java EE 5-related files. Not to mention, just doing ordinary browsing invariably slows down to a crawl whenever my younger brother starts leeching anime of questionable taste.

So.

Time to do some tweaking on our Linksys router, I decided. Blocked Bittorrent, put my brother’s MAC address on low priority and my MAC address on High Priority QOS, and five minutes later, I’m a happy Net God.

I bought the October 2006 issue of Linux Magazine yesterday. The thing that caught my attention and prompted me to buy it was this article on Turbogears, a RAD web app framework for Python. I quickly devoured the article and soon found myself wanting to actually try it out.

Turbogears is supposed to be Python’s answer to Ruby on Rails. To TG’s credit, it really does make coding a web app using Python very, very simple, in a way that’s almost as simple as doing it on Rails. Now while I haven’t made a formal comparison, I’m more inclined to think that I can work better with Turbogears than with Rails. But then again, that’s just my Python bias showing. I love Python, and when I read the article I thought, “well it’s about freakin’ time somebody made this for Python!”

So, I fired up my Ubuntu box and tried it out.

And I didn’t get past the second step of installation. First, the magazine article is outdated already; there’s already a 1.0 beta release, and the URL for the Turbogears preview that the magazine was pointing to wasn’t there anymore. Second, when I ran the install command:

sudo easy_install -f http://www.turbogears.org/download/index.html –script-dir /usr/local/bin TurboGears

I got a whole mess of errors that stemmed from some header file or other that couldn’t be found. From the errors I figured it must be something from a python-dev package or something, so I did an apt-get for python-dev. After that was done, I tried installing TG again — and still with some lameass compile error!

That’s it. I know all these hacker-wannabes would probably say, “hey look at the error, you must need to install some other thing first or whatever”, or something else along the lines of “RTFM”. You know what? I DO NOT HAVE THE TIME NOR INCLINATION TO DICK AROUND WITH STUPID INSTALLATION ERRORS.

Quite frankly, I’ve had it with half-baked open source projects. I’m plenty smart to figure things out myself — got the resume, the 11-year experience, the Physics undergrad and the MS-IT degrees, and one Java cert to prove it — but having your user work out the kinks of what is supposed to be a simple, no-brainer installation, defeats the whole PURPOSE of having an easy-to-use web framework in the first place!

Anyway, so much for Turbogears. I’m sure the stuff is cool. Hell, I loved the magazine article about it! I’m just going to wait a bit longer until they work things out a bit more.

The wife and I went to Glorietta yesterday — well, okay, technically, the day before, since it’s already 12:35AM, Monday — anyway, we went to Glorietta last Saturday, and we brought widdle baby Lance, one of my sisters-in-law to be the yaya, and a brother-in-law and his 2-year-old widdle girl Alex. My wife and I had been meaning to take Lance out to the mall for weeks now, and we finally got around to it last Saturday.

Lance is this little kid that my mother-in-law adopted. The adoption papers aren’t set yet, but the little tough guy’s story is… unusual. Lance was an unwanted baby. The mother got pregnant out of wedlock, and although the Philippines is slowly getting Americanized when it comes to music and to attitudes about sex, a young girl getting pregnant by some guy without getting married is still devastating to most families. Anyway, the young girl couldn’t bring herself to have an abortion, so she still delivered the baby. The thing is, she’s still a student, and apparently her parents didn’t know she’s had a baby, and if they did, they’d probably cut her off from her family fortune or whatever. Anyway, she’s approached several families to adopt the child, and by the time the baby was seven months old, the poor kid had been to five — yes, five — families already.

That’s when the baby finally landed on my wife’s family’s doorstep about a month ago, via a friend of my mom-in-law’s who also happened to be the first person that the young girl had approached to adopt the baby, or at least to help with finding the baby a new home.

My wife and I were the first candidates in mind by my mom-in-law to be the child’s foster parents; we still have no kids of our own, but back then I wasn’t ready financially. Anyway, my mom-in-law took the kid in, and that’s how Lance entered into our lives.

I named him ‘Lance’. It’s a good strong-sounding name. I’m not really into cycling, so the fact that he had the same name as Lance Armstrong only dawned on me later. I figured ‘Lance’ was a good fit for the baby, since he was a tough guy, surviving an ordeal of getting passed around by parents who either did not want him or could not afford to have another mouth to feed.

To give an example of just how tough the little guy is… The first few weeks he was at my Mom-in-Law’s, Lance wouldn’t cry when he was hungry. He’d just force himself to sleep it off. He’d grow all deathly cold, and the top of his head would be really soft, almost convex, caved-in. You can imagine how life must have been like for him before he came to my in-laws, for him to be able to train himself to ignore hunger at such a young age of only seven months!

Another example: To this day, he doesn’t cry when his pediatrician sticks him with an injection. He would tense his muscles and be very still and then before you know it, the injection’s over and he didn’t even let out a squeek! The only time he cried was when he had to take two injections — he couldn’t stand the second one anymore and he cried then. But after it was over, he wasn’t angry with the doctor! He just stopped crying and then was all smiles again, even to the doctor that gave him the shot!

So, Lance is a good strong name for a good strong kid.

Sigh. I could go on and on about what a great kid Lance is. He’s smart, smarter than his age would suggest; at only 8 months old, he already understands what you’re saying to him, it’s just that he still can’t control his speaking aparatus enough to actually talk back to you clearly. He’s also a large baby, and physically strong for his age, almost as strong in body as he is strong in spirit. But if I gave all the details and examples here, I would be at this for hours before I finish telling his stories.

And so finally my wife and I were able to take him out to the mall, as we had promised him several weeks ago. We had lunch; it was funny how he wanted to take a bite at everything we grown-ups were eating. He seems so much in a hurry to grow up! We also took him for coin-operated rides at the cafe in the toy section of Rustan’s; he especially liked the horsie, screaming so loudly with delight that everybody around couldn’t help but take notice (at first you’d think he was crying, but then you’d see him smiling and waving his arms!).

The kid also has a potential to be a ladies’ man. On the way up from the parking lot when we arrived, a young lady and her boyfriend stepped into the elevator, and he smiled at her and made those adorable goo-goo eyes at her — much to the delight of the young lady! The lady was so delighted in-fact, that when the elevator doors opened at the fourth level, it took several moments for her to notice that we all had to get off at that floor already! Her boyfriend even had to nudge her a bit forward, before she seemed to notice we all had to get off already! Lance the ladies’ man, indeed!

It was a fun, fun Saturday. I really love the kid. I’ve taken stock of our finances and have decided to take him off my Mom-in-Law’s hands and adopt him ourselves. My Mom-in-Law’s in her sixties already anyway; my wife and I would probably do a great job — if not a better job — with Lance now. And my in-laws all tell us, he seems to eat better, sleep better, and just generally be more cheerful when my wife is around, than when she isn’t. I think we’d all fit each other very nicely in one happy family. And with greener pastures for me right around the corner; he’d never want for anything anymore — whether it be food, clothes, a nice home, or people who love him.

I’ve never felt so wanted — and confused at the same time! My current employer did a counter-offer. While I can’t say specifics about the numbers, I will say he included an offer to work on a cutting-edge project that’s being done from the ground up. By cutting-edge, I mean Oracle + JSF + AJAX. Tech-wise, that alone was enough to make my inner geek salivate.

Then I go to chat with some of the managers with my future employer later this evening; the meeting was already previously scheduled, and I hadn’t had a chance to tell them I’ve gotten a counter-offer. Turns out, I’m going to have a hand at systems design and architecture! And, I’m going to lead a team, too! Again, I can’t talk about the specific renumerations involved, but I will say that doing systems design and leading a team appeals to my inner senior geek. I have done management stuff in the past, always out of necessity and unofficially, but this is the first time I’ll be doing senior stuff officially. That, and I’ll get to paid handsomely for it.

In the end, the pasture on the other side is just so much greener, and not just in monetary terms, but in actual geek work, that I’m still sticking with my future employer. My resignation stands. I gave my current employer a fighting chance to retain me, just like my boss asked, but I will still have to leave. Sorry, boss!

Ok, so they come out with this anonymous browsing thing. I read this news article, and I think, ‘hey, cool!’ And I go over to their download page, and then — all their installation files are exe’s? All Windows installers, not a linux installer in sight! Heck, even the source code is supposed to compile to a Windows exe file!

Bah. Just plain ol’ Firefox will do for me, thank you very much. At least on linux I don’t need to worry about viruses as much as I’d have to on Windows!

WordPress.com already has two types of ‘top’ lists — Top Blogs, and Top Posts. If you count ‘Fastest Growing WordPress.com Blogs’, then that makes three lists already. I wonder if it would be a good idea to have a ‘Top WordPress.com Themes’ list? I mean, technically, it should be simple enough to keep track of the number of blogs using each theme, right?

Personally, I like Regulus. Tried Contempt for a while, and a couple of others, but I keep coming back to Regulus. Sometimes I wonder what themes other people use, but I inevitably move on to wondering how many people use this or that theme. Now instead of going around asking people, I’m thinking, wouldn’t it be neat if the WP.com guys added a ‘Top Themes’ list?

But then again, this list wouldn’t necessarily drive traffic to individual blogs, like the other existing ‘Top’ lists do. Instead, it might just make some popular themes more popular and some unpopular themes more unpopular. This list might be more useful as feedback to theme designers and to the guys at Automattic.

Still… it would be cool to have, from a user point of view….

Alright. Here goes.

I’ve seen more than one occassion where blogrolling has become such a big deal that people have actually gotten into bitter arguments and fights over it. People getting rolled without permission, people getting taken off someone’s roll without a heads-up, whatever. The thing is, each time, I found the whole thing really childish. People get so worked up over nothing, really.

Lorelle has written an excellent article on the subject of blogrolling here, but I’ll just simply list down my own personal rules for blogrolling. Think of this list as a dislaimer of sorts. Anyway, here they are:

1. I reserve the right to add, with or without permission, to my blogroll any blog that is available to the public.
2. I reserve the right to remove anyone from my blogroll without any prior notice to the blog owner.
3. Adding someone to my blogroll, does not necessarily mean that I want to be added to his or her own blogroll in turn. He or she may add me, but it will not be out of me urging anyone to do so.
4. I treat my blogroll as bookmarks, for my own convenience. Anyone may formulate other profound philosophical meaning to my bookmarks, but that would be your own opinion, not mine.
5. If you wish to be taken out of my roll, then by all means say so. I’ll gladly accommodate you!

Hmmm. I guess that’s it for now. I’ll probably add my rules as text on my sidebar later. Anyway, I’ll be adding more bookmarks soon.

Yup, I got to talk to this managing consultant yesterday. He described some of the projects their teams are working on. They all sound good. I’m not really picky with whatever projects I’m given to work on.

But.

I’m still standing with my resignation.

Why? It’s a job. Java, J2EE (or Java EE nowadays), technology in general, is only a job. I get paid to code, and I code. While I may draw the line at touching VB, and doing  the clerical work of manual data updates for 300+ records, coding is just a job for me. It’s something I do to make an honest living. There really is no compelling reason for me to stay on now, even if they offer me a project that’ll get me to the US or whatever. I could just as well code in the new job waiting for me, as code in my current company.

So why leave in the first place? Long story. Basically I got stuck with no-brainer production support stuff, like bug fixes I can do in one day. And the bug fixes don’t come often either. That and I’m also left to do clerical work, like cleaning up the aforementioned 300+ records.

Besides, all other things being equal, money still talks — and I’m already looking forward to that new and greener pasture I’m set to go to in a few weeks!