Drive, drive, drive, drive with me...

Yesterday night was rather a frightening experience. On an intersection, I signaled going to the right, an I thought the car behind was smart enough to see that as well. But no! the asshole rather decided to also make a right turn in the same two way lane together with me. Worse, he was the one so frackin' irritated and even tried to drive so close to my car while blasting his horns as if it wasn't his fault. Good thing I was able to brake in time. Oh well, assholes will be assholes not matter which place on earth you are in. You really need some patience when you are on the street.

Aside from that, am getting the hang of it. Getting out of the parking lot is the most challenging part of all time. My sense of size needs some practice.

Discovered that I have to get home by 10pm, otherwise I have to go all around the condo to the other gate since the side gates are closed at that time.

As for the GPS, don't have much use for it for daily office travel but it seems decent enough to re-calculate the routing if I go to alternate routes after the software update.

Just look to left and just look to right...

31 years of walking thru the earth and enduring public transport, for the first time ever, I can now go to places on my own set of wheels. Driving really is both terrifying and an exhilarating experience! Just a while ago in the parking lot I forgot to look to the right and thankfully the car on the right was able to break in time. My brain is still uselessly wired with left hand driven instincts. The notion of right hand driven streets is still rather hard to get used to. Driving around KL is really nice, as most of the streets here are wide and well maintained.

For the price of the car, one could get a nice consumer Honda or Toyota back there in the Philippines. Albeit, for a newbie car owner like me the Proton Persona SE is more than enough to satisfy my driving needs. The leather interior is really comfy, and as far as my limited experience can tell, the handling is really top notch. After all, after a hard day at work, a man deserves a nice ride home. :)

As an added bonus, the petrol price in KL is really affordable compared to what we have back home (4-5x less expensive), rumors from my local colleagues that there will be another price rollback coming up. That would be awesome news for every car owner in this region.

Speaking of which, I was able to play around with iTunes latest feature, the Genius playlist. In an attempt to create a morning drive CD, I started with my favorite Eraserhead songs "Ha ha ha" and let Genius figure out what songs in my collection would go well with it. The results are not too shabby at all:

Name / Artist

Ha ha ha / Eraserheads
Shirley / Eraserheads
Yakap sa Dilim / Orange and Lemons
Back to You / John Mayer
Under the Bridge / RHCP
Sexyback / Justin Timberlake
Anything for You / Nina
The Winner Takes it All /ABBA
Mahirap Magmahal ng Syota ng Iba / Hilera
Minsan / Eraserheads
Creep / Radiohead
Cocaine / Eric Clapton
Come as You Are / Nirvana
True Colors / MYMP
Ewan / Imago
Vertigo / U2
Like a Rolling Stone / Bob Dylan
Love Song for No One / John Mayer
Big Girls Don't Cry / Fergie
Basket Case / Greenday


Only Apple can actively innovate on this things. This small small features capture those things makes your digital life a little bit easier.

On another note, I miss my lovey and my kids who are currently enjoying a vacation back in the Philippines. Can't wait to drive them around our new family car.

OS X Running on Lenovo Netbook | Gadget Lab from Wired.com

This thing is really shiny! Saw one for sale in the Cineleisure at 1.6k MYR (around $460).

It looks just as good in person, the availability of a longer lasting battery will make this bugger the king of the netbooks. It can run OS X it seems, and runs open source operating systems like *BSD and Linux a breeze.

Wonder how decent Java runs on this machines. It would make a really nice portable coding machine. No info on the lazy web for the meantime tho.

Rock on IdeaPad S10!

P.S.
To the fine folks of Lenovo, I wouldn't mind if you send me one of these for review and for keeps. :)

IntelliJ IDEA 7.0 Milestone 2 :: New Features

Just gave Intellij IDEA a spin, the last time I tried was around 5 years back I think, it was really slow back then.

Past forward, I was blown away! I can say this is the Apple Mac equivalent of IDE's out there. The handling is just right, you feel this is an IDE made by real developers for real developers. Its really, really nice. Spring junkies will definitely love the tight integration with the framework. And one more thing, the vi plugin comes for free!!!

The downside tho is I can't afford the price, and I'm just using it for my happy coding sessions, a.k.a. personal use. :-(, but I think I won't mind reinstalling every time the trial period expires. Its that good.

We all live in a real world.

In the real world, architecture and software design always looses against business drivers and deadlines.

But there is no harm in trying, with laptops in our hands and design patterns in our hearts.

UsingMac - Leopard - Story of Icons

While looking for some free Pages templates I stumbled upon this site. I particularly liked the TextEdit Icon. It rocks and exactly the same sentiments I feel at the moment.



It reads:

Dear Kate,

Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels.
The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square
holes. The ones who see things differently. They're
not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the
status quo. You can praise them, disagree with them,
quote them, disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can't do is ignore them.
Because the change things.

Take Care,
John Appleseed


Think Different! Apple Rocks!

hudson: an extensible continuous integration engine

This is thing is awesome! Such a welcome relief for us long time cruisecontrol users. It was relatively easy to setup, after the initial gotcha's for the SVN and findbugs settings, everything was smoothly running, like butter over hot pandesal.

Hooray! For high quality open source products like these.

Hudson... we don't have a problem..

Neil’s point-free blog � Blog Archive � What is OSGi for??

By far the best explanation on the lazy web of what OSGi is. :)

On my end am becoming increasingly curious about OSGi. Wonder how long till I succumb and scratch that itch and plunk down and do some happy code.

There are a variety of usage scenarios I can think right out of the bat. Wether its a fat client or a beer-belly server, who would not love upgrading your JAR dependent lifestyle with SOA concept based OSGi goodness?

Hmmmmmmnnnnn....

VisualVM

Its lightweight and good enough for most cases. The only drawback is on OS X the JDK 1.6 seems to have a bug so profiling is not enabled. Bummer!

Lobotomo Software: MoofMenu

Leaving the settings at 40 / 70 makes the aluminum dramatically become more sperm friendly. Lets you sleep better if you are worried that heat might shorten the lifespan of you beloved mac hardware. And its freeeee!!!