Mom who Maps

While I've been receiving quite a number of blessings lately, I never actually thought I'm yet to receive another BIG-TIME BLESSING, on my Silver Year... and it's a Blackberry Curve 3G! I got it by winning from a blog contest at TechPinas . It all started with me being really addicted to Tech Blogs, been really syndicating lots of feeds all in my GoogleReader account. TechPinas is one of my local favorites. I like it because they do give the selling price of the gadgets they are featuring so I won't fly around looking for the price and converting some foreign currency to Philippine Peso. Plus I love the reviews and the way he really responds to reader's comments, that way I know I'm not talking to a BOT or something... hahahhaha... So when I've discovered they're giving away a free phone, I said, "Why not? I'll go give it a try. Anyway it's free... and who doesn't want a Blackberry Curve 3G by the way..." so again, I'm one o...

20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web Good graphics and illustration, easy explanation much like my headstart books. A basic introduction to Internet surfing... and choosing the right Browser. http://www.20thingsilearned.com/  The 20 things: 1. What is the internet? - - or, “You say tomato, i say tCP/iP 2. Cloud computing - - or, why it’s ok for a truck to crush your laptop 3. Web Apps - or, “life, liberty and the Pursuit of appiness” 4. HTML, JavasCriPt, Css and more - or, this is not your mom’s aJax 5. HTML5 - or, in the beginning there was no <\video\> 6. 3d in the browser - or, browsing with more deptH 7. A browser madrigal - or, old vs. modern browser 8. Plug-ins - or, pepperoni for your cheese pizza 9. Browser extensions - or, superpowers for your browser 10. Synchronizing the browser -or, why it’s ok for a truck to crush your laptop, part II 11. Browser Cookies - or, thanks for the memories 12. Browser...

Lately we've been minding some few renovations inside our ride. When we have just purchased a new sound system inside it, we thought of actually having something to view upon. A mobile theater system so to speak. We usually place our notebook in the dashboard then let our kids watch from the backseat, but too bad, it doesn't have some solid state drive so we're afraid it might get damaged because of some vibrations. Then we just decided to buy an APad , a smaller one and something that would fit rightly on top of our dashboard. We grabbed a unit of an aPad ( MID APad M701  7.0 Inch Touch Screen  Android Tablet PC ) because its cheap and its running in Android OS. Android is opensource and there's an android app market installed in it where we can shop for cools apps for free. And for it's purpose as an in-house movie player for our car, it would serve very much beyond our need. I can do my e-book reading (as a colored version of a Kindle ), plants vs zombi...

We gave our ride, a Daewoo GTE Racer, some holiday treat this Christmas season. Since it's a second hand auto, we had it's airconditioning system fixed and we bought a set of interior car mats on it. Next up, is its periodic car maintenance by changing the brake pads, spark plugs, fuel and oil filters, change engine and gear oil and replaced the wiper blades. Finally we've had the auto tint replaced, bought a new car stereo and speaker. Here's a map of our whereabouts regarding our car maintenance. View CAR SOLUTIONS in a larger map Periodic Car Maintenance at CAPITOL AUTO SUPPLY Auto Tint installation Car Stereo, Speaker and Power Antenna Installation Maintaining a car was quite expensive but really the comfort it brings us especially when we have our kids on board is really worth the spend.

 Maps do convey relevant information to a target audience.  Maps, apart from being informative, should be artistic too. Cartography is art. I mean you cannot just combine your violets with the greens or blues with it. A right combination of RGB or CMYK swatches will make it appear more pleasing and more eye-catching. And if you have 12 classes in a thematic map, you wouldn't want it to be randomly picked as if making some sort of lantern decoration for the Christmas season. Color coordination really is the name of the game. My husband who's into creative design is my one true critic when it comes to color combination. He would just peek into my final map for a project or laboratory exercise and then tell me to use this color or another color theme instead of my initial picks. He was such a relief when I am finishing my maps when he's at home. But when  he's not around, hard part comes. Anyways, I have stumbled upon this book last semester and found it really useful...

Latest versions of Microsoft Office and OpenOffice are already capable of  saving your  documents from doc, docx or odt to  pdf format. The reverse is quite unusual. There are trial versions of pdf to word converter with their limitations of course. PDF2Word  can only be used 100 times and allows the first 5 pages only to be converted to .doc format. Fonts change and the layout was a bit different after conversion.  The most useful for me is using the OpenOffice PDF Import Extension . If you have OpenOffice  installed in your pc, just double click the downloaded extension and an installation dialog will guide you through.  The pdf opens in OpenOfficeDraw and lets you do basic editing of text and images in the document. You can save the edited file as another pdf or export as an image file or in html format.  It's free and it's open source so let's see more developments of this extension on OpenOffice. It would be nicer if pdf files can be ope...

Yay! It was my first time to install Google Chrome on my pc. I've had a hard time figuring out  how to change the default language settings which is in Filipino to English (US). The translation was a bit awkward though it's grammatically correct. But you see some English (especially the technical terms) just can't have a "decent" Filipino language counterpart. The tab "Sa ilalim ng hood" was quite obvious to be "Under the hood", but it just gave me a serious laugh. That phrase doesn't make sense at all on standalone conversations. hahaha... Anyways I documented how I did it. Just for fun. It was still an achievement of the day for me .(^_^)

Alright this is my entry for “Why do you want to win the ASUS M4A89GTD Pro/USB 3.0?” for chance of winning a Core Unlocker motherboard, the ASUS M4A89GTD Pro/USB 3.0. Our current Motherboard - Asus M3N78-VM For our desktop computer system repair and upgrade it's my husband who has been the sole authority and ASUS motherboards have always been his choice since then. I tidied the store room and found four boxes of ASUS motherboards there. Since we got married we only had four desktop pc upgrades. The latest was an M3N78-VM upgraded almost two years ago paired with an AMD Athlon 64 X2 processor. M3N78-VM provided us two year of truly satisfying home-theater experience and even off-the-work-scheduled-tasks like photoshop rendering stuffs, video editting , 3d-modeling and animation  right from our desktop. AMD-ASUS team up is really impressive hence we would actually want the same brand pair for our next upgrade hopefully this year. I've read the reviews on ASUS M4A89GTD and got ...

I have just learned that a friend's blog site was hacked and was totally deleted. The incident alarmed me so much that the same thing could possibly happen to my blog hence I tried to look for possible means of backing it up. An easy way to get all the posts in an XML feed. This is a better format if you intend to import it in a database. http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?max-results=1000 You can also backup the comments: http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default?max-results=1000 Another option is to send your blogs to your e-mail for back-up. Ultimately you may opt to use a third party software that downloads an entire site and have it saved in your local disk. HTTrac k is a free ( GPL , libre/free software) and easy-to-use offline browser utility. It allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrac...

I have long been figuring out on how can I integrate my Google Reader shared feeds to my blogs. Fortunately I came accross this link: http://www.google.com/reader/clip-creator/user/-/state/com.google/broadcast Just adjust some settings and  click on the icon similar to the icon below for seamless Reader-Blogger integration. You just have to be logged in to your Blogger and Google account to enable embedding.