noel alanguilan

i noticed this today. i started receiving bounced mails from yahoo! groups. it appears that spammers are now trying to spam the yahoo! mailing lists. cute. they would invent an e-mail address and add that to my domain name and then use the result e-mail address to try and join a group, send mail to another group, etc.

nice try. but no dice. fortunately those guys at y! groups keep trying to improve the service.

it also noticed something in two or three of the groups i manage. an e-mail address would either subscribe via web or mail and after a few days it would unsubscribe. i would assume that the person was trying to mine the group for e-mail addresses or send out spam to the group. in all the groups i manage, database is only viewable by the owner or moderator of the group. they are also the only ones that can send to the group. no one else.

this has been a long time in coming. finally. i can run photoshop with the help of wine on linux. i would prefer that it run natively — a photoshop version that runs specifically on linux — but adobe so far has been mum about plans to port photoshop to linux.

wine is an open source compatibility layer that helps windows programs run on linux. the wine people (codeweavers) with some google money has improved its support for photoshop — versions 5.0 up to cs2 is supported but not cs3. well, not yet anyway.

interesting times indeed.

earworm — music or song that repeats and repeats in my head. it stays until it gets replaced by another. i don’t get to decide which song or music my head chooses to play. it just comes. it usually lasts anywhere from a few days to several weeks.

come undone – duran duran

yesterday was pretty unusual for me. i had to wake up early on a sunday to help out lito man the rudy project booth at the first leg of the 2008 hitachi national grand prix criterium race in luneta. he rarely asks for favors so why the heck not? that’s a no brainer. its a cycling race after all.

it was mostly cloudy and cool and there’s a breeze every now and then. a great day for racing. we set up the booth pretty quickly (i love these modular things) and had some take-out breakfast from a nearby bee house.

people started to pour in at around 7:00am. the road (maria orosa) was closed at around 7:30 and the first of three races started around 8:00. the route starts from m. orosa, right to tm kalaw, right at roxas boulevard, right at padre burgos and then right again to m. orosa.

bisikletaguy aka raymond was in the first race. i met this guy online at pinoy roadies and i introduced myself as “headless”. i’m glad i finally got to meet him.

i saw two women participating in the race. its great to see women join races and they were good too! lito and i were just saying that judging by the way they ride, they’d drop us five minutes into a race, 10 minutes tops. i truly hope that there would be more women who would take up the sport. cycling is not exclusive to men. you are already winners ladies. sorry guys, no pictures.

there were a couple of incidents in the race. nothing major though. one of the racers hit a cyclist bystander who’s bike wheel was protruding out onto the road. the racer went down and there were shouts from the crowd. it happened near where our booth was. another incident happened somewhere near roxas boulevard so we didn’t get to witness it. although we did see the rider who went down at the registration booth getting medical help. thankfully, he doesn’t appear to be seriously injured.

i was able to talk to vic espiritu for a little bit. yes! victor espiritu. he came back from round 3 of the track world cup in los angeles, california last february 1. i don’t think he’d remember me so lito sort of re-introduced me. okay, i blabbled a bit but hey, can you blame me? the whole team arrived on their bikes during the second race. the picture was taken when they were signing up for the pro-am race.

the first time i saw victor in action was during the baguio leg of the 1997 tour of luzon and i was amazed at his climbing skills. i still have a hard time climbing and its something that i really need to practice on. maybe this weekend. anyway, the next time i met him was when lito introduced me at the rudy project offices a couple of years ago.

this race showed, to me at least, his and the team’s years of experience in racing. i don’t think they were there to win the race but i do believe that if they wanted to they could. i would think that it was a fantastic experience for the amateurs — racing with the pros. its a great opportunity to learn important lessons especially if you’re an aspiring racer.

and then there were the bikes. there were lots of bikes! i got a chance to walk around and drool at these two-wheeled marvels. i got to see a pinarello prince, cannondale’s system six and super six bikes, a colnago dream, a cinelli carbon bike (i didn’t get the name), there were several vellums in attendance (i think the whole philippine vellum team was there), and a couple of italian steel bikes whose names escape me at the moment. giants and cannondales abound too. and of course there are the classic steel bikes. i didn’t get to see a fixie though. the picture shows espiritu’s cannondale system six which he aptly named sixto.

the third and last race — the pro-am series — finished at around 1:00pm. i didn’t stay for the awarding ceremonies any longer as i had to head back home. robin still needed some tutoring for his exams. back to reality.

the next stage is in tarlac sometime in march. i don’t think i will be able to go there.

all in all, it was a great day!

bisikletaguy aka raymond at the start line in the first race.

there was a dragon dance in between the first and the second race.

the rudy project booth was always surrounded by bikes and there was a steady stream of inquiries during the whole morning.

these are pictures of the pro-am race taken at the corner of orosa and tm kalaw.

i was able to get a 21-second video clip at the latter part of the pro-am race taken at the same corner. i took it with my cell so its small and in in 3gp format. you can download it here.

the weekend has so far been very nice. it hasn’t been hot because there’s a thick blanket of clouds overheard. it has been a bit breezy, cool and dry — a perfect day to go out and take a stroll or bike or just vege out.

but its robin’s long exams this coming monday and tuesday so we’re staying in to help the guy study. it hasn’t been all fun but it has its moments.

“dad, can i lie down while i answer this?“, pointing to his math exercise.

no.

“why?”

well, do you lie down in school while you take your exams?”

“yes.”

what?! where?!?

“on the floor.”

you take your exams on the floor?!?

“just kidding.”

recently, i tried embedding a video from youtube into this blog. the built-in editor — a modified version of tinymce — sort of “cleans up” the youtube embed code in such a way that when the post is published the layout of the whole blog looks out of whack. i didn’t want visitors to see that so after a search for a suitable plugin, i found gecko tube.

timbaland, apologize, polydor

today i got an e-mail from someone-that-cannot-be-named in huge (about 2cm high) bold letters, “please stop sending me notices“. or something to that effect.

talking face to face with a person is different when communicating with the same person via e-mail. to express emotion in an e-mail one has to be a little creative with the use of letters and punctuation marks. a normal conversation would mean using the regular form of a sentence with a capitalized first letter, lower-case letters and a period at the end or mostly lowercase letters. a sentence using all capitalized letters means you’re shouting that sentence. then there’s the emoticons.

so the sentence above is roughly equivalent to chewing my head off. the thing is i don’t even know the person. i don’t think i would care to.

i currently manage about five lists and this is the first time that someone requested for something to be done in this manner. most of the time i get polite requests which i’m happy to oblige if i can.

it just goes to show you that getting an expensive education and/or having loads of money doesn’t really equate to having good manners.

so here

2008.02.16
edit: i just added the gecko tube plugin now you can see the video.

a couple of years ago one of my hard disks crashed. it wasn’t a major crash but i lost a good number of files nonetheless. i do have backups but since then i have tried to offload most of my files from my desktop and/or laptop to the internet.

at the time, one of my fast growing files was my e-mail. i used outlook express and it fit my needs then. but as more mail slowly crept in i realized that i was hitting outlook express’ limits and the space being occupied by my mail was getting uncomfortably bigger.

so i decided, off with the pop mail and go with web-based e-mail. there are definite advantages to this move:

pluses

• i can access my mail from anywhere and on any computer with an internet connection.
• i would think that all my mails would occupy approximately 3 gigabytes of space. maybe 4. i get plenty of pictures, videos and documents and i do not delete them. that’s a lot of space for just e-mails and none of that is occupying space in my local system. outlook’s (not the express version’s) default capacity is 2 gigabytes.
• should my local hard drives or system fail my e-mail data is still safe and i can still access them.
• should i refresh or change my system i do not have to worry about restoring my mail setup and files from backup.

minuses

• no internet. no e-mail. i will not be able to access even the one’s that i’ve read already.
• security is dependent on the service provider and strength of the password. so i use several passphrases and rotate them regularly and i got (i think) a pretty good webmail service provider — yahoo!

i would think that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. if you want more info on service providers there is a comparison of webmail providers from the wiki.

i just heard from john (a new friend) that sheldon brown (the cyclist) passed away a few days ago. that bit of news stopped me at mid sentence. oh wow.

sheldon brown was a great help with my bike maintenance education. on cycling circles, if you want to know about bikes, especially the old ones, then he was the guy on the planet to go to.

i did not know him personally and we’ve exchanged a just a couple of mails. but reading his posts all over bike forums and his articles in his site you’d know he’s one of the good guys.

thank you sheldon. you are missed.

my condolences to the family from one of your extended family.

more info at harris cyclery and an article at the boston globe.