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When will the selfishness end?

Where did common sense go from the new generation? Is it ‘uncool’ for the new generation to think rationally anymore? When did, for instance, hanging out with friends till five in the morning become OK? Not just that, but arguing with them about it makes us look wrong and crazy.

You see, I was brought up by parents who had rules for living with them under one roof, and that to me makes sense. They gave birth to me, they provide shelter, they provide food, care, love, etc. They are my parents. Why wouldn’t I obey them? Try convincing a teenager these days using those arguments without them turning the whole argument on yourself and accusing you for making a big deal out of nothing. Nothing!

Personally, I can’t tolerate such behaviors if it was happening in my house, specially from people who aren’t even paying their own cellphone bill and aren’t doing their house choirs. Is it really that hard for teens to open up their eyes just a bit and realize their wrong doings? Why can’t they see that their behaviors might, in most cases, affect other people negatively who live with them under one roof? Are they completely blind to not be able to see their selfish actions towards other family members?

Many people say it’s a phase that every teenager goes through, but some teens seem to take forever to grow out of it and start thinking rationally and taking into account other people’s feelings. Sometimes it simply feels that their selfishness will never end.

 
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Posted by on August 27, 2011 in Rants

 

Tuesday, August 9 2011

As mush as I love the original concept behind Windows Phone’s start screen, I still have a few things to complain about.

There just seems to be a lot of wasted space on the start screen. You will notice there is a quite spacious black empty space at the top and at the right of the tiles. I understand why the top was left blank (for toast notifications) but it just doesn’t look right with all that space left blank.

The same thing applies to the empty space to the tight of the tiles. It just doesn’t make sense to me to see all that wasted space for displaying an arrow.

I don’t know if you also noticed, but the length of the home screen doesn’t fit the amount of tiles it can display. When you first see the start screen in its default position (scrolled all the way to the top) you will notice that your screen will only show the complete length of 3 tiles with part of the 4th tile covered where you have to scroll to see the rest of it. Even though it’s only a tiny part of it that is covered, that still feels like a flaw in the UI design.

Apart from those three design flaws (in my opinion at least) Windows Phone has proved itself to be the most enjoyable experience you can get on a mobile operating system.

 
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Posted by on August 9, 2011 in Microsoft, Rants, Windows Phone

 

Saturday, July 16 2011

Looks like RIM is taking a lot of heat from the press lately. Not just the press, but bloggers around the globe are firing negative opinions at them since RIM’s last shareholder meeting. Personally, I understand why all this is happening. They company have become more of a reactor than an inventor. They went from being smartphone leaders to followers. This makes both shareholders and consumers frustrated.

What’s mostly depressing is RIM’s ever lasting love to their outdated and mostly hated BlackBerry OS. Don’t get me wrong, RIM makes great BlackBerry devices from a hardware side. But when it comes to software, RIM is way behind. You could even say Samsung’s BADA OS starts to look like a better alternative.

 
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Posted by on July 16, 2011 in BlackBerry, Smartphones

 

Monday, July 4th 2011

I never understood why HP called their tablet TouchPad. Don’t they realize that a lot of manufacturers are just appending the word ‘Pad’ to their crappy tablets to lure in unfortunate customers? This is simply bad marketing which isn’t a surprise since HP is now the owner.

What pissed me off the most after reading the first reviews of the TouchPad is the negative feedback about the device’s physical hardware. The bulky heavy plasticy smudge-magnet they call a TouchPad. This is all HP’s non-creative dirty work. I am sure Palm’s team had absolutely no hand in the design of the tablet. This has HP’s crappy design signs that we’re all used to seeing all over it.

Haven’t they even compared the size and weight of their TouchPad to whatever is leading in the market (iPad, Galaxy Tab, etc) while the TouchPad was just a blue print? Who ever managed the hardware team should be fired cause he’s dramatically affecting TouchPad sales.

This is really sad news for WebOS. The operating system, as everyone including me always said, has great potential but the hardware has always been pulling it back.

 
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Posted by on July 4, 2011 in Rants, WebOS

 

Sunday, June 26th 2011

Windows Phones are great devices and they run on a wonderfully unique platform that seems to simply make sense right out of the box. But of course nothing is perfect and no matter how great the operating system is it also comes with its own quirks.

Hardware wise, since I am using a Samsung Focus, my main disappointment is the touch buttons that I keep mistakenly hit whenever I try to rotate the device to landscape mode to view a video for instance or whenever I try to take a picture.

The other hardware issue I am facing is due to the locations of both the power button and the volume control buttons on either side of the device. They are located exactly opposite to one another which causes me to hit them both accidentally when I try to hit the power button to wake up the device. That usually confuses the device or me personally.

On the software side, I can’t complain much since it’s in its first stages of maturity, so there is still a long road ahead before I could state my criticism. Maybe I could start complaining after Mango is released, if there is anything to complain about.

In general, I do like (maybe even love) the user experience and the concept behind combining similar activities in hubs, it just makes sense instead of jumping from one app to another.

I am certain that Mango is gonna make things even better for Windows Phones, not to mention Nokia’s adoption for the platform over MeeGo.

 
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Posted by on June 27, 2011 in Microsoft, Windows Phone

 

Blog post titles should be optional

I always find it hard to come up with a blog title. It’s easy to come up with any content to fill the post, but a title is a bit more tricky. As a matter of fact, I am more than happy for my blog to automatically set the title to the post date.

It’s not like I am managing a company or a tech blog. This is a personal blog where a title is just as less important as the content itself. Plus, if you really think about it, ‘logs’ usually don’t have titles, just dates and descriptions.

You can take this rant as one of the excuses for not blogging a lot lately.

Cheers!

 
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Posted by on June 24, 2011 in Rants

 

What’s New With Microsoft Zune?

Ever since Microsoft shifted focus to Windows Phone 7 there has been nothing new in the Zune department. It’s like Microsoft completely switched all its resources and dedication to marketing and pushing the Windows Phone 7 platform, and I don’t blame them. Windows Phone 7 is the new kid in town when it comes to mobile operating systems and Microsoft needs to prove themselves to phone manufacturers and wireless carriers. But that doesn’t mean they should forget about Zune players completely.

There are still thousands (if not millions) of owners of the original Zune and Zune HD and I believe they would like to know “what’s next” when it comes to Zune. Microsoft seems to release an app in the Zune Marketplace not very often and it has to come from them and not from any third party developer which raises concerns on how will it continue to evolve and gain market share like that.

I believe Microsoft is trying to (and will) build an ecosystem that encompasses Zune players, Windows Phones and Windows 7. Doing so might take time and money to get there. All I am saying is that recently it feels like there is no one working in the Zune department and I am sure lots of people are interested in knowing where Zune sits in Microsoft’s roadmap.

 
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Posted by on March 13, 2011 in Microsoft, Windows Phone

 

My Compaq Presario Got a New Battery

Finally, my old Compaq Presario got a new lease on life with a new 12-cell battery which I bought off eBay recently. My laptop has been suffering for a good year now with the old 6-cell battery which gave me almost 15 minutes of power. The new battery seems to give me a good day of work which is great considering the age of my laptop and the overall shelf age of any new battery I get for it.

My Compaq Presario (V2650CA) still runs Windows XP which I am considering to upgrade to Windows 7 when I give it more RAM. Currently it only has 1GB of RAM and that cause the system to crawl if it ran Windows 7. The RAM type is a bit old (DDR) so it wont be cheap to upgrade.

“Why even bother?” you ask? Good point. I mean it’s an old laptop and probably exceeded its end of life date but, nevertheless, it’s still running and can act as a good backup laptop if I ended up investing in a new system.

 
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Posted by on March 13, 2011 in Computers and Internet

 

Visual Studio 2010 Setup Project Warning

If you’re getting the following error:

The version of the .NET Framework launch condition ‘.NET Framework 4′ does not match the selected .NET Framework bootstrapper package.

..chances are your .NET Framework prerequisite under the setup project doesn’t match one or more of the projects added to the setup project.

Check which .NET Framework you have selected as a prerequisite and if it matches all projects added to the setup package. If that still doesn’t remove the warning, select the setup project, click on the “Launch Conditions Editor” button on the Solution Explorer toolbar, select the “.NET Framework” (probably underlined with a red squiggly line) and check the Properties window to see if the Framework selection in the dropdown also matches all projects.

See this blog post for more information on the Conditions Editor.

 
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Posted by on February 28, 2011 in Programming

 

BlackBerry WordPress App Glitch

The other day I decided to use the WordPress app on my old BlackBerry to write and submit a new post. As a result, there was a double post as well as my previous post’s category was removed. I couldn’t remove the double post from the BlackBerry WordPress app and when I tried to remove it from my iPad it gave me a weird error.

Something is horribly wrong with the app.

I had to go to the main WordPress website to manually remove the double post and fix my previous post. I don’t know what could have triggered such an error, nevertheless, I sent WordPress a message on twitter with the whole story.

 
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Posted by on February 22, 2011 in BlackBerry, Smartphones

 
 
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