LefthandedLayup.com

Category: Uncategorized

  • Free Wifi, Burgoo and Bupkus –
    The myopia of P50.00 / hour outlets.

    I got called over to my client at Galleria early this morning, twice by staff slightly in hysterics about ‘not being able to connect’. When I got there, the issue it turns out, whatever the heck that was, resolved by itself. In other words, I pretty much wasted my day as I am unable to do most of my to-do list. I like using Kramer (my Athlon XP desktop, 1gb. RAM with a lovely 19″ LCD) for webwork and coding, and Karen, the laptop, for just plain watching videos and writing. And by golly do I have a lot to code.

    And so it turns out, it’s just me, an underpowered Karen (for the work I wanna do), Robinson Galeria’s Free WiFi, and a shitload of work today. Going home this afternoon isn’t a good idea as I wanna play in our weekly ballgame this evening. The trip from Ortigas to Cainta and back again is a major pain that’d leave me too wasted to work. And if I do work, I’m sure I’d be too wasted to play afterwards.

    Which leads me then to my main topic: The myopia of restaurants at the ‘tech lounge’ that see it fit to charge P50 / hour to plug a laptop into their outlets, regardless of whether you ordered anything or not. To me, it’s painfully obvious how disastrous that move is in terms of PR. You can show me all the stats, bills and studies made about customers over – using their privilege and so on, but all I have to do is one thing : Tell people (via my blog or whatever) that restos at the ‘tech lounge’ charge P50 / hour whether you order anything or not – and you should get my point.

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  • Everyone, meet Karen. Karen, everyone.

    Funny how, since I’ve not blogged for such a long time, I actually forgot I had one. There I was thinking – man I should blog about this (topic), but how? Then I realized I had good ol’ lefthandedlayup. Shame shame.

    Anyway, ladies and gents, meet Karen. To the world, an IBM X21 P3, 256mb 20gb laptop. To me, Karen Walker of Will & Grace fame, my latest PC in a long line of PCs named after fave sitcom characters.

    x21_400.jpg

    Here are the reason I got it + some observations:

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  • I Am Looking For a Php / MySQL Developer For Contractual Work

    I have a laundry list of things to do on my websites. I do not have the time to do them, and so I am looking for someone with some experience to do them for me.

    Sample jobs are: update wordpress, re-activate some domains, update some plugins, check consistency with Internet Explorer, deal with my host re some mod_rewrite issues, and so on. If you, or someone you know, is knowledgable in WordPress, PHP, MySQL, or any combination of the three, please email me at ghmercado@gmail.com . I will prefer that you live in Manila, and can be paid via g-cash.

    I will hire you or this person just to execute this list, and for occasional jobs in the future.

  • I Am Legend, Stephen King, Transformers and Green Cross Rubbing Alcohol

    Who would’ve known that an ancient book I just picked up randomly from a stack of books here in the house (we have stacks and stacks of books), would turn out to be a Will Smith movie coming out soon?

    A few weeks back I picked up ‘I Am Legend’, which appealed to me since it didn’t seem like heavy fare, and besides my sis recommended it. And so I finished it off in 3 days or so, some of the images still in my mind from the terrific writing by Richard Matheson. The preface had a glowing recount from Stephen King himself, describing Matheson as one of the more pervasive and lasting horror writers. True enough, the book, which is about a man, Neville, being the only one left in the world after everyone else had turned to vampires, is compelling not necessarily because of the idea of monsters chasing after you (although that can result in some pretty heart racing stuff), but because of his utter loneliness, despair, confusion and waning motivation to live (I forgot his first name, but I can’t forget his last because the vampires call his name out outside his house at night trying to get him out).

    So you can imagine how surprised I was when we watched Die Hard last night. Amongst the movie previews was, lo and behold, Will Smith lying in a bathtub, similar in a situation like Neville’s. There are, of course, some marked changes. Neville was very much an ordinary man, but Smith’s Neville is some sort of SWAT officer, always having an M-16 by his side. Then there is the issue of the dog. In the book, the dog is a very important dramatic point in the story, which after months of loneliness, determines for Neville whether we wants to continue with his life. At this point, for the first time ever I’m gonna stop myself from spoiling the story, because I appreciated that part and its important I think others who might want to read it do too.

    You know, stories like these are extremely rare. Stephen King was living in such a different world of entertainment in his autobiography On Writing, when he was describing how he would steal off into town to watch movies with a friend. These movies and countless books of course, turning him into one of the greatest writers of the 21st century that I consider him to be. How can you not be completely enraptured by these absolutely terrific stories that earnestly and sincerely just wanted.to.tell.their.stories? They probably had terrible effects, and even maybe even low editing standards, but all they had was story, and so that’s all they gave to you. Nowadays, especially after watching Transformers and the other week’s Fantastic Four, movies not only want to entertain you, they also want to sell you cars, toys, video games, KFC, t-shirts, downloads, ringtones, and all manner of whatever.

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  • 53.76 Kikays Don’t Mind Using Their Credit Cards Online

    Here’s a screenshot of the results of our 3 month long poll on Credit Card Usage on Kikay Exchange. I’m also reprinting this article.

    july022007_creditcardpolls.jpg

    Apparently, 53.76 people (48%) use their credit cards online all the time, while an even 29.12 people (26%), either haven’t done so yet but are ‘willing to give it a try’, or haven’t yet and ‘probably never will’.

    This is an interesting insight into the mindset of, arguably, the most active consumer type – Women Shoppers – on Philippine internet today, re a terribly important topic – using their plastic to buy things online. Businesses hoping to take their business online would do well to take note.

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  • How I Fixed That Annoying WordPress Permalinks Issue

    I detailed here an annoying issue with Kikay Ex that happened after the Big Server Move a few weeks back. For some odd reason, after the move all the previous internal links were appended with ‘index.php’. For example:

    what used to be

    http://kikay.exchange.ph/2006/10/30/kikay-cams/

    became:

    http://kikay.exchange.ph/index.php/2006/10/30/kikay-cams/

    The problem was that I was using a wp-plugin called ClickCounter which is attractive because if you mouse over a link, a little message will popup showing how many times it’s been clicked, like this:

    It’s not completely reliable (it doesn’t count right-click ‘open in a new window’, for example), but it at least gives a fairly good representation of how popular a link is. A good guess, I suppose, is that it misses approximately 20% more clicks.

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  • Didn’t know it was possible..

    jun282007_gmail.jpg

  • Mobile Ex is no more.

    It has occurred to me that if I were working on only one site, say, Kikay, or Movie, then it’d have probably been a super major outstanding grabe fantastic over hit by now. But then again I’m probably just making excuses, being as I am, not completely happy with the state of each individual site. Oh sure they’re loading and processing fine, but there’s so much, SOOOO MUCH I want to do to each one, I frequently just end up staring at my to do list, which should probably be named ‘wish I could do them’ list, because its become pretty overwhelming.

    Which is why, you see now, I am in that ‘what if it was just one site‘ mode of thinking at the moment, because if it was just one, then everything that I’d want done would be (in theory) done, and I’d be concentrating on just marketing right about now.

    At any rate, today I killed of Mobile.exchange.ph, because of 3 things: 1.) I just can’t handle the workload in maintaining that, 2.) I’m seriously starting to wonder about the feasibility of websites that feature gadgets these days. I’m just not sure that people are all that interested anymore. And finally 3.), it’s taking up valuable server space and resources.

    So that’s it. I’m sad I had to do it. Again, I had SOOOO MUCH I wanted to do with that, but hey there’s only one me, and i’m a very stretched me as it is.

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  • Got Kobe?

    Say your piece on Basketball Exchange. jun252007_kobe.jpg

  • We Encourage you to use Firefox.

    I have made the ff. banners to be installed on the Exchanges:

    I didn’t want to write the usual “Best Viewed by using Firefox”, because I didn’t want there to be any mistake. The sites still work alright on Internet Explorer (well at least I think so), but the term “Best Viewed..” might mean that I have only made them work on Firefox, which isn’t true.

    I also didn’t want to use the standard ‘Get Firefox’ buttons over here, because those tend, I think, to be ignored, or mistaken to be paid promo ads. I always design my sites not for techies, but for the ordinary, non – Internet users out there. I don’t have to worry about techies. If you’re a techie, I presume you should already know that Firefox is the better deal. Its the ordinary user I want to help out, and saying ‘Exchange.ph encourages you..’ means that it supports and recognizes Firefox and would like (but is not forcing!) everyone to use it, whether or not Exchange.ph looks better on it or not.

    Whew. That’s a lot to say huh.

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