‘Android’ on your phone? Google goes wireless

Google this week announced 'Android' - an open software platform that's supposed to turn your mobile phone into a proper mobile computer. The initiative is being done in cooperation with the Open Handset Alliance - a group of more than 30 mobile and technology companies. 

The New York Times has a story about it here.

It's all very interesting. It's too bad though that here in the Philippines there's no such thing as affordable mobile internet. *grumble*

Anger Management

Big, fat and hairy

Yes, by that I meant my cat, Siopao. That's him over there, doing his "do you think I am sexy?" pose.

He gets strange like that, sometimes.  

We got him earlier this year, when we just moved to a new apartment. We were looking around at the petstore when i felt something playing with my cellphone strap in my pocket. Of course, after we picked him up, none of the other cats in the store would have anything to do with us, so we're pretty much stuck with each other. 

So now, after roughly 10 months with us, he's grown from about 2.5 pounds, to roughly 12. 

As a friend of mine said when he saw him: "dude, that's not a cat. That's a polar bear!".

shutter-happy

A couple of weeks back I resurrected my old digital camera. The wife dropped it at work and the casing got bent, so the lens staunchly refused to come out.

Of course, a bit of bent metal was no match for a bored guy with a pair of pliers and no money to buy a new camera. That pretty much voided any warranty it might have had, but what the hell – having it fixed would probably cost as much a new one, so I had nothing to lose.

And a few days later, another idiot with a camera is born.

Actually, I did some basic photography in college but I’ve never really put it to much use, since it is a fairly expensive hobby. The good thing about digital cameras is that you don't really have to worry about running out of film, or having to run over the nearest photo processing place to see if you just managed to mess up an entire roll of film.

For some reason, I like taking landscape shots like this one. Plus, of course that we're living in a high-rise at the moment, and the the sunsets are fairly spectacular on a clear day. This shot, for instance, I took around 6:30 pm. It's not photoshopped by the way, but it took several tries with different exposure and shutter speed settings. It was a bitch trying to find a stable enough spot to lean the camera from outside our window, I have to say .

This was a rather fun shot to do, since i had to do it in total darkness. It's not photoshopped, either, but I think it came out pretty well.

I definitely still have much to learn though.

just moved in

I used to host my blog from home (geekdom.ath.cx), but eventually I realized that its too much of a pain to run a webserver from home with the measly DSL speeds we get out here, so I’ve decided to just move everything to i.ph.

I’ll get around to rooting out my archives from the SQL server, one of these days. I’m just too lazy for it right now