Crimson Crux

While aimlessly wandering around YouTube, I came across this three-minute gem from Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach. It plays to the tune of Electric Six’s Danger! High Voltage, which has suddenly found its way into my playlist.

Funny video + funky song = a great way to kill your time. Enjoy!

Fire in the disco! Fire in the Taco Bell! Oops, couldn’t resist…! In any case: Electric Six Danger! High Voltage lyrics.

Whew, that was quite a blogging break!

I’ve been back here in Manila for several days already, though I had to sort out some things first. Hence, upon arrival I had resolved to hide from my blogs for a short time, but one big gaming news forced to me to break the silence (on Gadzooki) — StarCraft II has been announced. It’s a development that is much-awaited, yet still took me by surprise.

For the meat of my thoughts, read my post on Gadzooki. Disclosure: I’m a StarCraft fanboy. I *heart* Blizzard, SC’s makers. And I won’t give a damn if the WarCraft and Diablo franchises magically vanish from the Earth right now. That said, here are some more points:

• Is this all a face lift? Probably yes. I’m hoping that Blizzard adds something new to the gameplay, but if it’s just Warcraft III in space (oops, Artanis* will get angry with me), I’ll still take it. SC’s gameplay was excellent in the first place, and half of my feverish anticipation is for the story and the cutscenes, two things Blizzard excels at.
• Who can forget the frenzied multiplayer SC battles over LAN and Battle.net? I see no multiplayer letdown with StarCraft II. And who knows, we might even see DotA in space!
• I can’t emphasize this enough — come on Blizzard, give us more than three races. It’s not that we’re sick and tired of the Terrans, Zerg, and Protoss, it’s just that, hey, WarCraft III had more races than WC II! (All right, Blizzard wants us to stay tuned until SC III, I guess.)

Here are a couple of vidcaps I took from the StarCraft II cinematic trailer, which you can download from this page:

(more…)

In a few hours time I’ll be leaving for Kalibo, Aklan to attend the wake and funeral of my uncle, who passed away last Monday. (More in my birthday post.)

This will be my first trip to our home province since August 2006 (when I asked if it was safe to let my laptop pass through the X-ray machine). Though I’ll be bringing Corsarify (as well as Mol-eh-skin-ah), I’ll be out of touch for several days and won’t be able to think of blogging or work.

See you in a week!

Shortly after accepting the problogging job at Performancing.com, I was approached by Pinoy problogger extraordinaire J Angelo Racoma to write for four more Splashpress Media blogs. To make a long story short, I accepted two and kindly declined the others (too much food to chew on already!).

Hence, I’m announcing on this good ol’ pseudo-tech blog that I’m now writing for Gadzooki, home to all things gadgetry, software, gaming, and cars, and Blog Tutorials, where you’ll get to pick up some tips for creating a successful blog.

I’ll be blogging alongside some real-life friends — Ia, Mia, Ariel, and my older cousin, Anne. To find out which blogs they’re writing for, you’d have to drop by Gadzooki and Blog Tutorials, as well as their sister sites Travelogger and Froodee.

To send you off, here are my first four entries on both blogs:

• Gadzooks! New Writers!
• Three Games to Watch Out For
• New Blog Tutor, Signing On
• Use Image Attributes to Boost Your Blog’s SEO

Another salvo of Performancing.com posts I’ve written in the last two weeks (yeah, I missed one weekly roundup, because I had nothing much to round up!).

• Problogger: Hate or Love the Title… — For me, it doesn’t matter. ‘Problogger’ is just a secondary job title, after ‘Writer’. How about you? Having trouble explaining to your peers that problogging isn’t about creating ad-heavy spam blogs?
• Blog Content from Article Directories: Evil? — When you rely on free articles and jampack your blog with ‘em, then yes, they’re evil. Get out of the echo chamber and get rid of duplicate blog content by trying out some of the techniques listed here.
• Lessons from an SEO Contest — Our battle-tested Go-Ogle.com.ph SEO team (me, J Angelo, Ia) might not be champions, but I hope our observations from the last two Philippine SEO competitions can help you and your blogs.

Also, some Performancing goodies you might want to check out:

• Blog Reboot — Need free suggestions on how to spruce up your blog?
• Free e-books — E-books that would normally set you back ~$70 are being given away from time to time. First come first served! The latest: Free Adwords E-Book.

“There is no greater innovation that matters more than that which saves lives.”

Nothing really profound; I was just pleasantly surprised to see a Pinoy’s quote deliver the conclusion to the article Open Source Software for Disaster Management written by Currion, de Silva, and Van de Walle for the Communications of the ACM March 2007 issue. The final line in its entirety:

Only in this way will FOSS applications such as Sahana grow and mature to fulfill the real needs of humanitarian assistance, and live up to the expectations that Avelino J. Cruz Jr., Secretary of National Defense in the Philippines, expressed when discussing the deployment of Sahana in response to the Leyte landslide disaster in early 2006: “There is no greater innovation that matters more than that which saves lives.”

Sahana is “a free and open source disaster management information system developed in Sri Lanka in the immediate aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami”. It was deployed by the Philippine government, with the support of the IBM country team, in response to the 2006 mudslides.

Using Gmail has been an excruciating experience these past two weeks.

Consider these approximate loading times I’ve observed:

• Loading Gmail itself - 30 seconds
• Sending mail w/o attachment - 1 minute
• Opening a ‘folder’ (Spam, Inbox, Sent Mail, etc.) - 30 seconds
• Opening/archiving/deleting a message - 30 secs

Anybody having a similar experience? I’m using BayanTel DSL’s 768 kbps plan, and more often than not I’m cruising at higher speeds thanks to their free speed-on-demand feature from 10pm to 10am.

As you might imagine, being unable to reply fast to emails is frustrating when you receive scores of them every day. Sometimes, refreshing the page and re-clicking on links do the trick. Sometimes. And when I do get fed up, I close all Firefox tabs and restart the browser…then Gmail becomes faster. A bit.

Don’t get me wrong — I love Gmail. I’d pick it over Yahoo! Mail Beta (another turtle) on any given day. Gmail has become the ‘nerve center’ of my home office communications, and as such, I just want my fast Gmail back!