Baguio Flower Festival and Cute Purses

The most exciting week of the month-long Baguio Flower Festival had begun. I was out last night with two of my former classmates way back in high school. Unlike most of the tourists, we decided to simply watch a movie at a local mall then we went for coffee (most Baguio residents stay at home to avoid walking from town, unless they have some business to manage in town).

Instead of taking pictures of us, I took a picture of their coin purses. I find it amusing that after all these years, they seem to speak at the same wavelength.

That was again a refreshing break. I am swamped again with work and job proposals last week!

A Series of Unfortunate Events

A series of unfortunate events got me so frustrated last week!

• Monday: Internet was down entire day.
• Tuesday: Internet was still down entire day.
• Wednesday: Internet was okay but electricity was out during the daytime.
• Thursday: I had a lousy internet connection. I could only access Google sites entire day.
• Friday: I had electricity and internet, but my web host was acting up!

I decided to work at night, to avoid those expected rotating brownouts this summer (our poor country the Philippines is now suffering El Niño) and probably internet problems that may result from those brownouts. Last Saturday, I did not have any unfortunate incidents but…

• Sunday: My aging monitor finally got busted!

I was able to replace the monitor after some guardian angel saved me! I’m now back online.

It is so hard to think positive after all that I’ve been through that week. I am still trying that there could be a lucky week for me too!

Lady Gaga Medley by Sam Tsui and Kurt Hugo

I’m sick again, maybe I’m down with the flu. But these duo made me feel better.

Quick Run to Pampanga EB and Doc Z’s Despedida Party

I suddenly dropped everything just to be with this bunch of bloggers and Doc Z, who’ll be leaving for Micronesia as I write this post. He helped me improve my writing skillls as well as correct errors in my existing posts. He also has one of his blogs hosted in my webserver.

Thank you Jan, Bonnie, Paige, Roel, Novz, Jeff, Yatot, JenaIsle and Roy. I’m so happy to meet you all. I hope to meet some or all of you again when the good doctor comes back to the country once more.

Doc Z took this video of me with the famous Roel the Bloggista doing a duet of “Always”.

Not long ago I met Jhong and really liked that sudden meetup too.

I had intentionally disabled comments on this post. Please click the link to visit the post on my main blog: A Night with the Poetic Doctor

Win a Free Boracay Vacation Package by WOW Philippines Travel Agency

Maybe winning this contest would help me feel better this year. I don’t mind going alone or with someone. Wish me luck.

WOW Philippines Travel Agency, Inc. is celebrating it’s 5th year in business during July of 2010, and we would like you to have a chance to celebrate with us, so we have decided to give-away a FREE Boracay Package complete with 5 Star accommodations at the luxurious Le Soleil de Boracay Hotel on Boracay Island. The lucky winner will win the following Boracay vacation package.
Vacation Package Inclusions:

• 5 Days / 4 Nights Luxury 5 Star Accommodations at the Le Soleil de Boracay Hotel
• Flights to Boracay from Manila to Caticlan Airport on Philippine Airlines
• Island Transfers – Door-to-Door from Manila to the resort and back to Manila Domestic Airport
• Three (3) Meals each day, Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner
• Boracay Activities – Horseback Riding, Island Hopping, Glass Bottom Boat
• PLUS – 5,000 peso Spending Cash

Read More Information: http://www.boracay-packages.com

New Year Sickness

I didn’t feel so well the whole day. All the food I’ve eaten from the holiday season made me sick. I made several trips to the comfort room just to relieve myself. Does this mean I get to be sick the whole year round?

Sidebar Changes and WordPress.com Impressions

I made some small changes to this blog. I’ve arranged the sidebar to feature a recent posts from two of my blogs, as well as feature a few of those many social networks I’ve signed up with.

My two-year blogging experience made me a better blogger, which made me understand how people behave when they first visit a blog. One of the things I want to do with this blog is to promote all my other blogs and social networks. The sidebar content was carefully chosen with my aim in mind.

A little better…

As I worked out that sidebar I realized that WordPress.com is now different and better than what I’ve remembered when I first used this platform to write my own thoughts. Even if I have a little of

Although unnecessary, I was able to add this blog in Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Center.

I also noticed another detail but I am NOT really sure if this blog really sends out email replies. I hope that it does!

One thing that WordPress.com still lack is the complete redirection of WordPress RSS feeds. The feed that is displayed on the address bar still uses the old /feed/ address which doesn’t redirect to Feedburner’s feed address. In effect, Feedburner does not show the accurate count of RSS subscribers because people may have subscribed using the old feed, which Feedburner cannot count.

New Theme Colors for The Lady Programmer for Year 2010

I just finished making tweaks on The Lady Programmer blog. Now I’m off to tweak/setup all the other blogs. So many things to do!

On the outside, the changes seemed to involve only the general overall color of the blog. However, the previous theme and set of plugins just have several problems because of tweaks and things I did with that blog over time. Now what I did was a painful back-breaking maintenance:

1. Backed-up everything.
2. Uploaded a fresh copy of the theme. I decided to work out a child theme instead of tweaking the chosen theme so that I could easily upgrade the theme just in case.
3. Picked theme colors. I love working using three colors and more At first I like to work on greens, but instead I’ve settled down on yellow, purple and orange matching hues. I picked lively hues this time, to stand out from other geeky blogs that are typically colored blue or black.
4. Changed the theme colors. I picked a dark color for the comments instead of using white background.
5. Deleted unused plugins.
6. Changed the picture in the About page of the site.
7. Added little things here and there that I could not easily remember.

There are still a lot of database cleaning to do. However, I am happy to be able to make the initial changes that involve the appearance of the site.

So what do you think of the new design? Please head over to the actual site to see its new appearance.

Thanks Zorlone for the grammar check done on the recent posts as well as the ten most popular posts of my blog.

How to Act Around Filipinos

Yesterday, The Lady Programmer blog was under maintenance for almost the whole day – I had been under the hood working on fixing all its issues most of the time.

The PG50 in-house doctor noticed the video I’ve posted on the maintenance splash page. He suggested that I’d share this to others in the group through email, but I thought of posting this here in this blog.

I’ve taken out the maintenance page, but for the benefit of those who haven’t seen it, this video is truly, wonderfully and definitely helpful to foreigners who want to understand the Filipino culture.

Google Not Indexing My Recent Posts

For some reason Google doesn’t love to index recent posts in one of my blogs. I intend to earn some Adsense buck out from my latest headlines news blog, but I have trouble overcoming the first step – that is, to earn good money from it.

I opened up that blog so that I would not be tempted to use my existing blogs for attracting SEO trafficked posts.

I’ve asked around already for help in various social networks. Many replied but no one gave me a great suggestions. Surprisingly other people who are earning lots from SEO-ing their posts are also having this problem.

My knowledge in SEO is just plain basic. The last thing I did now is to bookmark a few posts until I could get the google bot to visit me.