Tadah! We’ve got the cover up on our Facebook page and the blog as well. I’ll post the “cover lines” version soon. In this issue, I wrote a piece titled “How to pick up girls underwater” and this was inspired by actual events courtesy of Benj Espina. Watta guy.
Click for the bigger version.
Nike+ runners will be glad to know that the new sport bands have been upgraded. The new bands come in three colors — purple, yellow, and red interiors and the LCD screen now comes with a white background — this was a chore to use before, especially when running at night, because the screen wasn’t visible. Here is a comparison I made last year between the iPod Nike+ kit and the sports band.
For those of you who purchased first generation Nike+ bands, how long did it take before the screen cracked? I know of two cases, apart from mine, where after taking really good care of the sports band, the screen would crack (I think a better way to explain it would be the LCD would just die and display gibberish).
Hope they fix this for the second generation bands. 🙂
About a year and a half ago I did a PR shoot for Sassa / Barbizon for the broadsheets. It was at this time I became infatuated with huge lenses, and borrowed Markku’s f/2.8 70-200 wonderment (oops that sounded wrong!) to shoot the girls. It was there I met Rosie Unson who did their brand marketing. Here’s a jump shot attempt:
So we’d kept in touch and since I haven’t indulged in a contest for so long, and out of lack for other ideas, I gave her a ring and the conversation evolved into the crazy thought to give out something I’d consider to be so non sequitur: lady swimwear. CRAZY!
OK kids! I’m giving away two things: a really nice rash guard for surfers and a two piece bikini assembled in the traditional elegant fashion of Barbizon. The gallery up there shows how they look. Click on the individual images to see the high resolution version.
This is me venting as a frustrated fashion blogger. Go, leave those comments now!!
Caught up with Gabe Mercado during the Apple Snow Leopard launch. Over lunch, we discussed his latest masterpiece, “Bagong Gising” (www.bagonggising.com)is a daily 2 minute videocast with only one premise:
Posting a video is the first thing I do every morning. Walang hilamos. Walang ligo. Walang sipilyo.
Also, Walang wiwi. This is perhaps the least pretentious podcast on the face of the modern Filipino Internet.
Truth be told I wasn’t into the hype for the Snow Leopard announcement as it seemed more like a ploy to get consumers to shell out 29 USD for what could have been a software update. I’ll tell you why — the very fact that Snow Leopard focuses more on “having a faster Mac” after install channels most of what these other software updates say, from version 10.5 onwards to what is now version 10.6.
So all of the qualms have been put to rest as they gave me a review copy (!!!) of Snow Leopard which I installed, for educational purposes on two Macs — a 2G “Black” MacBook and the first 13 inch unibody, both running on Intel processors. The rumors are true — Snow Leopard does some magic to your files and frees up disk space. The product text says about 7GB of space is freed up but in reality, my black MacBook freed up 11GB while my unibody gained 10GB. Not bad — think of it this way: Snow Leopard pays for itself because its as if you bought an extra 10GB for USD .00
They did a great job with Quicktime — I’ve always wanted to buy the Pro version for the codecs, but this new Quicktime X, complete with new logo, takes the cake. Part iMovie, part Screenflow, and part Quicktime Pro, it again allows Snow Leopard to pay for itself. I won’t be surprised if the new Quicktime will interface with an update to iMovie ’09 as they have similar cropping features. Next — I was bummed with my USD $80 purchase of Screenflow many months back as Quicktime boasts a pretty robust screen recording feature. Junior Tan from Apple however laid my frustrations to rest as he really did show me how big a difference Screenflow was from the screen grab feature of Quicktime.
Ah, Expose is so much better as well. Rather than the “artistic” clutter of all your open windows, Expose arranges everything neatly, just like how Stacks does it. Everything is faster. The UI is more responsive. Javascript loads better. And the spacebar preview for documents works so much better as it zooms into the document to make the fonts readable.
What’s equally interesting is the new 64 bit boot mode. If you restart your Mac and hold down the “6” and “4” keys, your Mac will boot in 64-bit mode taking full advantage of the multi core capabilities. There’s been some debate though with regards the full support of 64 bit. Apparently, my 13-inch unibody isn’t even part of the list — I can boot in 64-bit, but can’t utilize the new 64 bit drivers. Well, Macrumors says this whole 64 bit thing should not matter, and you should not really care at this point.
* If you wish to boot your Mac in full 64 mode by default, you can edit the com.apple.Boot.plist and change the values, allowing you therefore to boot back into 32-bit mode by holding the “3” and “2” buttons. Pretty intuitive.
Overall, my two MacBooks are running relatively faster with Snow Leopard. I guess purchasing this upgrade isn’t going to be a big decision problem as it is indeed cheap. Truth is, you actually do not need it if you’re a regular consumer as a lot of the tweaks are for the developer community (i.e. Grand Central). Nonetheless, if you feel the need to be up to date and want that much needed speed boost — and an extra 10GB of space, Snow Leopard pays for itself even just through the HD space optimization and Quicktime X.
Nota Bene: Some applications may have problems loading. I’ve seen that Plants vs. Zombies does not load, according to Gabe Mercado (his new video podcast is brilliant by the way!). My ultra useful Menu Meters menu bar app also does not load. World of Warcraft has some problems as well when it comes to a conflict with Spaces and shortcuts.