Huwebes, Pebrero 23, 2012

HOW TO TRAVEL IN A STRESS-FREE WAY

Today's trend on budget-friendly and and fast-paced lifestyle makes traveling not only for the rich but can also be an ideal escapade for common people. With the help of travel agencies having sales and promos that's easing out a family's budget, traveling is one of this year's must do.

But traveling can be a sure depressing moment for someone. It takes a lot of time and preparation for all the papers you should sign , all the bills you should pay and of course packing all the things that you need to bring. A big deal in this kind of situation because you are aiming to free yourself from the stress and so you must start in a positive way. Are you ready to learn the what-to-bring tips and tricks that would make your traveling a less burden that before? Then let's start.

Buy a quality suitcase.
At this point you don't want to bring a suitcase that is easily torn or damaged. You are traveling so expect that the suitcase you'll be bring will give you a total protection to anything that might happen. Investing in a quality suitcase is a must because airport staffers tend to throw luggage around and those not-that-good quality ones may end up in the floor having you picked up your items one by one.

Be a girl scout.
Think what you need not what you want. Always assume of what might happen and bring things that are usable in case of emergencies. you will never know what will happen to the destination you are going so better be a girl scout and prepare things that can save you up.


Pack items that you can mix and match. 
Packing items specially clothing that are easy to mix and match will not only save you space but can also save you time in a way that there are lesser items you could choose from your wardrobe. Have the essentials such as jackets, a white tee, a black dress, a pair of leggings and beautiful flats. These essentials can go with almost anything to skirts up to shorts so its nice having them around.

For beauty products less is definitely more. 
If you have a make-up palette that has neutral eyeshadow, blush on and some lipstick it would be really great. Or you might want to bring essential items only since toothpaste and toothbrush are already a part of your hotel's hospitality. Pack sample and multi-purpose products such as lip tint that can also be a cheek tint.

For gadgets. 
Bring the things that you can't leave without but be specific to the use of these gadgets. Also don't forget to the hotel if they have internet connection so as to help you in case.

Don't forget you medicines and first-aid kit.
Bring medicines such as paracetamol and mephenamic acid in case of emergency. Don't forget also to bring your vitamins as well as first aid kit that includes your cotton, alcohol, betadine and agua oxinada if in case you'll get wounded.


Another thing aside from the above is preparing yourself mentally, physically, socially and emotionally into the travel that you will do. This travel will never be successful if you yourself has a hard heart. There is always this thing called peace and no matter where your destination is it's best to keep the peace in mind.

Linggo, Pebrero 5, 2012

Mr. Doob-idoobidoo


We discovered this new website called Mr.Doob where you can use different brushes with different patterns to draw. I’m not a fan of art but this one’s cute. I wish I had a tablet and a pen to draw, though. I recommend this to you, readers, even if art isn’t your interest also. Doodling in this site is just so addicting, I was never the imaginative one but I can say that I can rely to this whenever I’m bored, well aside from tumblr and blogging of course.

Mr.Doob is like a multiuser sketchpad. 


Who’s the Person behind Mr.Doob anyway?



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It’s Ricardo Cabello!

Here are some artoworks of Mr.Doob users.

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Below is the interview from Christian Giordano which tells the story of success of Mr.Doob.


Hi Ricardo, thanks for accepting our invitation. Is there anything you want to add to my brief introduction?
Hello hello! Nope, I think that defines well what I try to do :)
It’s a pleasure to have you here, let’s crack on with the interview. How did you start out with computers?
Back in the early 90s when I was 10 or 11 my brother needed a computer for school and, eventually, managed to persuade my father to buy one — it was a 486 (or 386, I’m not sure). I remember being mesmerised in the shop watching Prince of Persia running on a computer. When I realised our computer came with Army Moves instead I got pretty disappointed though :P Specially because I was really bad at it…
It was my brother that started to learn how to create things with it, he started learning programming and I spent long hours sitting on his side trying to learn something myself.
And as an artist?
Eventually I got my own computer — most likely I got delegated the old one :P — and, as I didn’t seem to understand programming, I opted for graphics instead (Animator Pro, 3D Studio R3, Deluxe Paint, …) My brother also got involved in a underground movement called demoscene where people competed with each other to see who was able to make the computer do the most impressive things. For that they needed graphics, so eventually I got involved myself too. By doing these things I ended up learning a lot about computer graphics. First the authoring side, and eventually the programming side too.
Also, I know many people that don’t put their skills into practice because they don’t have projects to work on, and they are unable to coming up with their own. That’s something I got from the demoscene, you had to come up with stuff in order to compete.
How do you get artistically inspired?
Since I dived into programming I let the code inspire me. I experiment with things and APIs and in the process I come up with ideas. I also follow a bunch of random blogs about arts, illustration, installations, … that from time to time challenge me to see if I can do some of the things in realtime. And once again, more ideas spur on in the process.
How do you keep yourself informed?
Mainly twitter nowadays. It takes some time to find the right people to follow. Usually people tweet about personal things, but some share findings, culture, news and their own works.
Is there any project of yours you are particularly proud of? Tell us more about it, Inspire us!
I will say ro.me. Not only is the project I’ve been able to apply most of my acquired talents but we managed to build it using mostly open source software.
That’s not entirely true though, there was a lot of proprietary software on the process… designers are still tied to Adobe products and 3d modellers/animators to Autodesk products, but we — the developers — were able to use whichever tools we wanted. I personally used gedit for all the programming. We also had some python scripts for converting data to our formats and we setup a pipeline that used Blender for composing the 3d scenes.
Best of all, we released the code of the whole project too!
Ro.me screenshot
Since your work stands between Art and Code, what do you think their relationship should be?
Code is just another tool for the artist. A very powerful one.
How important is programming for visual artists? Do you foresee a future where programming will cover a bigger role in the creative industry?
Programming is becoming more and more accessible (even without losing much efficiency). For example, take a look at the GLSL Sandbox, the code is right there, editable and it goes right to the graphics card. I can see more tools like these being developed and designers hacking some stuff themselves to find new styles.
Do you believe in open source? If so why?
Totally. Specially because I’ve spent many years already dealing with proprietary models.
You see, whenever you work on something, you’re creating value. That value always gets split into different parts, starting with yourself, the skills you’re acquiring, and following by the chain of clients, being the final one the one that benefits the most. After a while you start to care about who benefits from your work and I find it very rewarding sharing the code so anyone on the internets can benefit from the energies spent.
Of course, there is always the risk of getting “Angry Birded” — where someone uses your code to retire early without giving anything back to the project — but that’s ok, I want to think that these people give back to society in other ways. Eventually we will be able to bring an idea into life by combining open source projects and call it a day. That would be a pretty efficient way of using human brains.
For some, the concept of giving away your work for free may sound silly, but there are many good side effects when doing that. It speeds up development and steps up global knowledge. The public gets your thing for free and can learn from the code, anyone is free to contribute — if someone needs a feature they can step in an implement it themselves. If there is a bug somewhere they can also fix it themselves. Also, because anyone can read the code, more skilled people can have a quick read and suggest better approaches and even patches. In exchange you learn a lot of tricks from these contributions.
Do you share your code? And if so, why and how?
Of course! All my code is on github — I know, I know… proprietary platform… :P
How is three.js going? I’ve seen there is a healthy amount of contributors.
I think it’s evolving nicely. The API seems to be finally getting a bit stable now and we’re starting to consider documentation strategies. People is building tools on top of it and seems like there is a new demo or project going out every week that uses it. The community is also mostly respectful and helpful with each other.
To what extent do you use open-source technologies?
I try to use as many as possible. In the past I used to depend on Adobe products that locked myself to Windows and/or MacOS. Now that I got used to Gimp, Inkscape and Blender it doesn’t matter which OS I’m on. Neither I live under the fear that the company behind the application I depend on may decide to stop development because they don’t get enough revenue from it..
Do you use any proprietary software?
Yes. Chrome and Dropbox. Sometimes I have to use Sublime Text 2 because gedit seems to be unable to handle files with long lines. It’s a known bug that has been reported for ages…
What is your favourite software and why?
Uhm, I would go with Chrome. I live on the web and Chrome seems to be improving it considerably. Or at least, allows people like me to help improve it.
Can you tell us about one of your projects where open source was very beneficial, if not crucial?
Well, Google Gravity wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t because Box2DJS. And Box2DJS wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t because Box2D itself. Three.js wouldn’t be half of what it is if it was closed source either.

Google Gravity screenshot
What changes in Ubuntu would make your creative life better?
This may be controversial, but I prefer the experience Gnome Shell offers better than Unity — aesthetics wise and usability wise.
My dream Linux OS would be having Ubuntu’s hardware support, Fedora’s system code (systemd, etc),Gnome Shell desktop experience and Elementary aesthetics. Yum!


Can you tell us what kind of creative or technical challenge you are going to face with your next project?
There are a bunch of projects in the pipeline. But the main challenge for most of them seem to be dealing with (almost) exponential content growth… always a scary, but nice to have, problem :)
What do you think about the evolution of web standards?
It used to be a really slow process which will always be miles away from what proprietary platforms were offering. However, I think WebGL shown that this has changed and the standards can be defined and implemented at a very nice pace.
More and more “native” applications use open web technologies, especially for their UI. Is this gonna have an impact on HTML rendering engines different from WebKit?
The more contents and usage the better the engines will get. When developing for a platform the developers find cases where performance is lacking or implementation isn’t as nice as it could be. So the platform will need to improve. Otherwise other platforms will step in and developers will switch. You gotta love healthy competition :)
How do you see the future of WebGL? Do you foresee any problems Microsoft or Apple could create for its adoption?
I think the future is bright for WebGL. The real issue the technology has is bad drivers. But nothing that content can’t fix. Again, the more content that uses WebGL the more pressure graphic card vendors will get. Eventually you’ll make sure that your next computer or device supports WebGL and that’s something ATI, Nvidia and friends want to be part of. I think Microsoft are shooting themselves in the foot. Being opposed to a open standard while not even have an alternative doesn’t sound like a clever move to me. On the meantime Internet Explorer is losing market share.
Thanks a lot Ricardo for giving us some of your time and sharing your thoughts, keep up with the great work!
No problem! Sorry it took me a while to complete this. I guess I’ve been busy O:) Looking forward to reading more interview like these in the Canonical Design blog!

Sabado, Pebrero 4, 2012

So you want to grow some boobs?

As a student and an entrepreneur, I’m always lack of sleep, that’s why I’m very thin - one more line for being a malnourish. My height is my frustration also, if you don’t know me and you’d bump me in public places, you’ll be mistaken me as a fifth grader. LOL. WTF.


My weight + My height = FAIL.


I’m a voracious person. I love food so much. You can bring me at the street and I will eat everything I’ll see. But despite of being voracious, I always ask myself, “Why in the world I’m thin even if I eat like a pig?”


After reading so much articles on how to have a nice body (not being skinny because I’m already tired of this), the second reason aside from having a fast metabolism is healthy food. It made me realize that I don’t usually eat healthy foods and that majority of what I take is fatty or oily, have lots of acid and cancerous, because of my pure love for grilled steak. Ack!


I used to hate tofu because of its foul smell and disgusting taste. I can’t even move closer to it. Recently, I found out that what I hate is not an authentic tofu. Those that you can buy in the market is not 100% made from soy beans. 

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This is what it looks like.


My forever hate on Tofu ended when I bought a sealed authentic one in the supermarket. It was processed in Japan.

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The packaging resembles to this one. For only 33 pesos!

It was so soft, no hollows and smelled so yummy, also tasted like a milk, so I said I want to have a crispy authentic tofu this time. After 15 minutes of deep frying my tofu, I gave up. I realized that you can’t deep fry an authentic one when I saw mine, because after deep frying for a lot of minutes, it was still soft. Yes, you can’t deep fry it so whenever you’ll go to restaurants and you saw a crispy tofu, I’m telling you, it’s not authentic - maybe it’s also those that you can see in the market.

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Why am I babbling too much about tofu? Because I love tofu and I can’t last a day without having one.


Also because, according to Women’s Health Magazine…


“This is loved and hated by millions, but it has the third-highest concentration of Estrogen in any food in the world. There are a lot of Tofu-based dishes you can make, which makes this one of 
the most effective foods for breast growth.”


ONE OF THE MOST EFFECTIVE FOODS FOR BREAST GROWTH.

BREAST GROWTH.

BREAST GROWTH.

BREAST GROWTH!!!

LOL. WTF?! I LOVE TOFU!!! LOLOLOLOL.

Here’s my favorite recipe of tofu btw.


THE TOFU BURGER

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Ingredients
·         1 (12 ounce) package firm tofu
·         2 teaspoons vegetable oil
·         1 small onion, chopped
·         1 celery, chopped
·         1 egg, beaten
·         1/4 cup shredded Cheddar cheese
·         salt and pepper to taste
·         1/2 cup vegetable oil for frying

Directions
1.     Place tofu in freezer 72 hours ahead of time. To thaw, fill a large saucepan with water and bring to a simmer. Leave tofu in package and place in water for about 20 minutes.

2.     While tofu is thawing, heat 2 teaspoons vegetable oil in a small skillet. Saute onion and celery until soft and lightly browned. Place in a medium bowl and set aside.

3.     When tofu is thawed, squeeze out excess water. Chop tofu finely and place in bowl with onion and celery. Mix in egg, cheese, salt and pepper until thoroughly combined.

4.     Heat a large skillet over medium-high heat and pour in 1/2 cup vegetable oil (oil should be 1/4 inch deep). Drop tofu mixture into pan in 6 equal portions. Flatten with a spatula to form patties. Fry for 5 to 7 minutes on each side, until golden.

I always make sure I drink Vitamilk also. A good substitute for Tofu if I ran out in the fridge.
For only 25 pesos in 7-eleven!

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NUTRIENT CONTENTS OF TOFU
cats