I’ve decided to sync all aspects of my online life together into one blog, and so this site will no longer be updated. I direct you now to my personal hodgepodge of a blog: Entropy. Yes, there will be IT stuff on that site, among other things, and yes, although there will be no more new posts, I will be keeping IT Girl online indefinitely.

Thanks for reading.

In case you haven’t heard, internet giant and our future overlord Google is releasing its new open-source browser Chrome today.

Until then, there’s Google’s web comic explaining Chrome. Huh. Apparently, Skynet Google tested the thing with monkeys. Read more

This year, on October 15, blogs all over the World Wide Web will be joining forces to help fight poverty by opening a discussion on poverty issues. It’s Blog Action Day, and it started last year where the topic was the environment.

Of course, it’s good to blog about the issues around the universal problem of poverty any day of the year, but when blogs are synchronized to do this on a particular day, the message will be much more powerful, and the message much stronger. Read more

So I woke up today to some rather annoying news: No more SMS updates for Twitter users outside the U.K.

Buggerit. Half the fun of using Twitter was getting tweets on my cellphone at no cost. The other half was being able to update via SMS at regular local rates, courtesy of Phtwitters.com. Now I have to go back to using WAP, which isn’t very reliable (thanks a lot, Globe), to read updates.

I’ll probably stay with Twitter, but with this recent development, Twitter doesn’t have much over other microblogging sites like Plurk anymore. Considering how much prettier the Plurk website is compared to Twitter, people who are looking for a microblogging site are now more likely to choose Plurk. Read more

Oh, yeah, non-stop boy band goodness, courtesy of Infinitube.net. And that works for whatever interest you may have. Just type in the keyword/s in the search box and Infinitube just automatically plays the resulting videos one by one continuously. You can skip over any videos you want, too. Or type in infinitube.net/random and get a totally random playlist. Did you know there’s a whole bunch of videos on iPod wars?
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We’re all familiar with e-mail forwards, right? These are e-mails containing jokes, “inspirational” stories, news items, “public service” warnings, among others. We get them from friends, acquaintances, officemates, people in our mailing lists. I hate most of them.

OK, so maybe “hate” maybe too strong a word. It’s more like they annoy the hell out of me. And I say “most of them” because some of them are actually fun to read, especially the jokes. But the majority of them are annoying and, because they are unwanted mail that waste our time, basically spam.

Bless my friends, most of them know what I like. Usually, they send me jokes — and just the really funny ones. None of that touchy feely crap or those tedious stories about some miracle witnessed by a goatherd in Africa. I usually give people grief for sending me forwards about unverified stories, especially those of the goatherd-miracle-in-Africa type. Not that I have anything against Africa, but unless they actually happened, “miracles” are a waste of mailbox space. Here’s a hint about miracle stories in mass-emails: they’re all made up.

To be fair, most serial forwarders are not aware their e-mails annoy us. That’s mostly because generally, we Filipinos are non-confrontational types, especially when the person to be confronted was well-meaning. Also, I do not discount the possibility that there are actually people who are happy to receive crap e-mails because they feel good about the fact that the sender thought of them when composing said e-mails.

So, are you a serial forwarder? If you are, the following rules may help you become a less annoying person of the internets. If you don’t know, read on anyway — you’re already here, right?
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Don’t get me wrong. I love my iPod. I could never get through half an hour on the treadmill without it. And when you’re in a cab and something heinous like the latest remake of an Air Supply song is playing on the radio, you can just whip out your mp3 player and block out the offending song with some Led Zeppelin. What I mean is, you don’t need an iPod to listen to or watch podcasts.

The podcast is a rather unfortunately named. After all, like I said, one does not need an iPod to listen to it, nor is it technically a broadcast. I think this is the reason why not many non-iPod-owning people take advantage of the wealth of information and entertainment available out there in the internets in the form of podcasts.

Really, all you need is a computer with internet connection. You’ll need an aggregator (a client software or Web application which collects podcasts in a single location for easy listening) , but a lot of them, like iTunes and Juice, are available for free. Once you have downloaded your podcasts, you can listen to them on your computer, or burn them into a disc as an audio CD and listen to them on your home or car stereo.

So what kinds of content are available out there? Nearly everything, as a matter of fact. To keep things simple, let’s concentrate on the free stuff. Read more

via JaypeeOnline

The first WordCamp in Asia is going to be held right here in Metro Manila on the 6th of September this year. Read more

Technically, grammar isn’t an I.T. issue. However, I.T. is supposed to allow us to communicate faster and more effectively, which is why I think it’s a good idea to pay attention to language.

Some of the things that amuse me about us Filipinos speaking in English are the instances when we have to find an English substitute for a Filipino word when none is available. For instance, hiya can sometimes be translated as “shame” and can sometimes be translated as “embarrassment”. However, in most situations, neither of the two can actually capture the true meaning of hiya. (If anyone can think of a perfect English equivalent, please let us know.)

So I bring you now the phrase of the day: “until now”. It’s a perfectly innocuous phrase, but we Pinoys misuse it. Read more

Remember the (good) old days when your free e-mail service allowed you five, maybe six megabytes of mailbox space? That space seems almost ridiculously small now, with Gmail and Yahoo!Mail giving us not just megabytes, but gigabytes of storage. It’s a cool deal, actually: all that mailbox space for free.

When using Gmail, the site keeps telling you that there’s absolutely no need to delete any of your mail, except for spam. Despite the fact that I have used only 2% of my allowed mailbox space, I still insist on deleting stuff. Why? Because I just don’t want them around.
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