Oh. My. God. This has got to be the coolest thing I have ever seen on Google Maps by far. Google has now integrated street-level panoramic views of practically every street in 5 U.S. cities: New York, San Francisco, Miami, Denver, and Las Vegas. The photos only require a flash player, is zoomable, pannable 360°, and it’s interactive! You could practically do a virtual drive around these cities! It’s almost as good as being there.

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Yay! I finally upgraded the feed features of this blog. I’m not sure why I put it off for so long but I’ve now made it easier for everyone to subscribe to this blog in your favorite feed reader or aggregator. (If you don’t know what an aggregator is, it’s a software or web service that let’s you subscribe to blogs and news sites and be informed of new or updated entries without having to visit the actual website.) Some popular online aggregators are Google Reader and Bloglines, and for desktop applications, nothing supposedly beats NetNewsWire for the Macintosh. Mozilla Firefox’s own Live Bookmarks feature is a rudimentary aggregator.

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If you understand the title, then it sounds intuitive doesn’t it? If you have a plurality elections (like what we have here in the Philippines), then the more candidates there are, the lower the probability of the winner getting the majority votes. To interpret that in another way and to put it into statistical terms, there is an inverse correlation between the number of candidates and the percentage of votes that the winning candidate gets.

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You may or may not know that Jam 88.3 (Wikipedia article) is my most favorite FM station by far. I’ve been listening to them since 2004, around the time they were celebrating their first anniversary. Jam 88.3 began airing in 2003 replacing CityLite 88.3, and it’s widely known that the station was instrumental in popularizing acoustic music in the local scene. In fact, if there’s an acoustic version of a song avaliable, then they would play that. They were also responsible for launching the careers of artists like M.Y.M.P. and Kitchie Nadal.

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What if we had vehicle signages like this? (You probably won’t get this unless you’re Filipino. )

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We all know that voting is a right and not a privilege. In a democratic society, we, the people, have a say on how the country should be run. And so we elect people into public positions who we believe are capable of running their jurisdictions the way we want it.

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You might or might not know that I created the blogging software that runs vaes9 by myself. I have my particular reasons why I decided to have complete control over the application layer of my blog instead of opting for the popular blogging systems like WordPress or Movable Type. One particular advantage is the ability to customize and tweak my blog in any way I want. A disadvantage is that it takes a lot more effort to add functionalities that other blogging platforms easily get through plug-ins.

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Since I’ve been creating lists of music that I currently like, I’ve decided to create a name for these kinds of posts. (See the ones for March 2007, December 2006, October 2006.) Hey, it’s difficult trying to find relevant or witty titles for light-reading posts like these so these particular music posts will now be called “Groovee Playlists.” You say it’s corny? As I said, I’m not witty. So on to the list.

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After months of planning and setting up, I am extremely pleased to announce that we have finally launched Vista Pinas, my second blog where I give you a virtual tour of Filipino sights as can be seen from satellite imagery found in Google Maps and Google Earth. It’s like Google Sightseeing done Pinoy-style!

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It’s been a very long time since I last saw a science-fiction film and I can’t even remember offhand the last one I did see. So it was a breath of fresh air that I managed to catch the screening of Sunshine a few weeks ago. Essentially, the movie is about the journey of spaceship Icarus II and its crew of eight to the sun to revive it by igniting a massive stellar bomb. While the film is primarily science fiction (which some have compared to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey), there are large elements of drama and action incorporated into the movie. I pretty much liked the movie.

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