come, let's join us for a drive!

i got my driver's license yesterday! yay!
the whole thing took me just a little over an hour. it was easy, the supposedly-30-item-exam-but-after-the-24th-item-stopped-and-told-me-to-proceed-to-the-next-step written exam was via a touch screen computer. multiple choice. breezed through it in 10 minutes. the road test was over in about 15 minutes. the guy didn't ask me to go to the freeway, just made some rounds around the neighborhood.

they put the wrong address in my license card! boo!
i didn't notice their boo-boo til the next morning. so i went back to the place. my first real solo flight mission. woohoo! i didn't get lost! haha. if you look at phoenix, you'll notice that the road network is basically a grid. and that's a problem for me. everything pretty much looks like the same. i'm used to the curving roads back home. you never know where you're gonna end up. too organized, that's what they are. plus they give directions using north, east, west, south! i'm more used to the "kung papunta kang alabang sa slex, lumabas ka ng sucat, kanan, tapos kaliwa sa mcdo tapos mejo bagalan mo na kasi malapit na. nasa kanan mo ung lola idangs" rather than "if you're headed west on 101, you'll have to exit at 40th and head north til you see the building at your side. its a just a little past bell rd." oh and they use numbers for their streets. there's 44th st, 44th pl, 44th ave, 44th way, 44th dr. make sense of that! hehe. i prefer pedro bukaneg ave or atis rd, sampaguita st, etc. one thing nice here is that they've got really powerful cars. period.

you're beautiful!
thanks to my prof for this one...



microsoft updates, like them or hate them?

i just upgraded to IE7. personally, i didn't find anything new. back in IE6, i had styler toolbar running which hid the menu bar from IE(cause i found no real practical use for it). so when they removed the menu bar from IE7, no surprise there. in fact, the topmost bar looks very much like the styler toolbar replacement. same with the tabs, i have been using yahoo toolbar so no surprise there as well. so would i recommend you to upgrade? if you don't like seeing the menu bar and you don't want to use styler toolbar, sure, go ahead, upgrade. but if you're happy with the tabs feature the yahoo toolbar provides, stick with IE6 for awhile. there are still some bugs here and there(like some toolbars disappear when switching between tabs).

i upgraded to WMP11 a couple of days back. i've been using WMP(Windows Media Player) ever since Winamp decided to crash after about 30mins of every load. surprisingly, i didn't feel its toll on the memory(when minimized, when restored to full size complete with visualizations, you're gonna feel it a bit)! so, with the latest update came the sleeker black design which i just love. matches my desktop, sorta:

aside from that, i can search for the missing info for my tags, including the album art, for each song! yay! you can also view the lyrics for the song, though its not a karaoke-type-complete-with-the-bouncing-ball display, its livable. so all in all, i'd recommend this upgrade. go get it!

techy stuff...

don't know styler toolbar? wondering what my theme is? check out deviantart for info, or just stick around here. i might post a guide to customizing your desktop sometime in the future.

speaking of guides, i stumbled across this really good walkthrough for installing Apache, MySQL, PHP, RoR, JSP, PHPMyAdmin, etc. for windows! yay! only thing is, i can't get Tomcat to run. its a problem specific to my box. google told me that i belong to 1x10^-15 % of the population who encountered this problem. thanks google. but for you guys, it'll probably work fine. it's probably just something simple, like a conflicting program or something.

visit deviantart here.
visit the WAMP-JR guide here.