Taking control of compulsive buying

Francis (an office colleague) and I went to Wendy's for lunch yesterday. And then we visited some electronic shops for a quick stop on what's new in the market. Oooh, MP3 players! Small enough to hang around your neck, yet powerful enough to hold 64 or more songs! And with an FM tuner to boot! All under 8K! The red, police car lights were flashing and sirens were blaring in my head (credit card dues! unpaid bills!), but I seem to be magnetically drawn to them, looking over all corners of the box and fiddling with the demo unit, hypnotized by these wonderful devies ... I'm a gadget freak. Guilty as charged.

Whoops! Saved by the bell! We had to rush back to the office. My interrrupted reverie resumed after office hours as I logged-on to this site and started checking how I can compare model stats.

My old N-gage beeped, signalling the arrival of an SMS. Suddenly it dawned on me that I am already holding an MP3 player with FM tuner, and with gaming and mobile phone functionalities built-in! And my phone already has 128MB in it. Whoa. Goodbye MP3 player...

Lesson of the day: Don't buy multi-function devices. :-)

PS. You might have the new N-gage QD in your shopping list: it does not have FM tuner and MP3 player built-in. Good news, or bad news? Good for me; I'm sticking with my old one, never mind the quirky way you have to hold it when making calls.

Blogging in the workplace

We had our business planning a couple of weeks ago. It signalled a fresh slate to run fresh marketing ideas for the company. As our boss said, we need to bring back the fun in Marketing! He wants us to come up with new ideas to promote the company. We are quite lucky to have him as our boss.

Anyways, the group had some meetings prior to the planning, when Pauline said, "I thought about this last night. Why don't we use blogging as one of our communication tools?" Now, why didn't I think of that?!

We talked to great lengths about what the corporate blog should be about, and we communicated with our software group if we can come up with such a concept. And we have a name and logo for it already. The blog will be named blogIT; IT stands for Information Technology, our niche in the industry. BlogIT ... catchy name, isn't it? Only, I later discovered that blogit.com was taken already. So we took the next best thing: blogit.com.ph.

I presented this in the planning session, and this topic got a curious and enthusiastic response from management. One of the many questions was, 'what's a blog?' It was exciting to inform them about something I'm passionate about. I think I earned the monicker "blogger" and some of the people here would remark, "blogadoo!" when they see someone from Marketing.

Blogging definitely solves our perennial problem of coming up with the corporate newsletter, because when we complete one issue, the content is already outdated! It would have been nice if we can dedicate time for the newsletter, but as it is, we have other tasks to complete and deadlines to meet.

The blogsite isn't up yet. It's supposed to be online by this time, but the software guy is still working on it. Thanks to Yuga of ploghost for his assistance in the domain name reservation and answering my questions about the blogging technicalities!

We will be holding meetings with the different groups here to educate them about blogIT, and I'm sure some will even be interested to make their own.

Now this is fun!

baguio-quezon.info

I'm not yet done with it, but excitement's got the better of me, so I hope you would pay a visit at http://baguio-quezon.info. This is a site I've been working on starting around November of last year.

The idea to come up with such a site was actually in my mind since 2000, when I worked with a web development company for 7 months. However, when I saw that baguio.com and baguio.net was already taken, this personal project took a back seat to my work. But it was always there, with some ideas popping-up every now and then. Some of these ideas are:

- a section where a collection of Baguio ghost stories will be placed. What's Baguio without ghost stories? But I was thinking about putting it in a message board instead...
- speaking of message boards, a section of this will be dedicated to comments on experiences with establishments and restaurants in Baguio City;
- a page to put in common Ilocano words to help the visitor haggle prices, or take jeepney rides the local way;
- a section on nice, unique things you can buy as mementos (dare I include the naughty woodcrafts?);
- a section on local traditions? Though this will take a lot of research on my part ...
- a map of Baguio City. This I got with permission from Cunanan Maphouse, and I'm currently working on it.

So many ideas, so little time...


And then I got married. And I liked my wife's province of Dolores, Quezon too, so I decided on baguio-quezon. Unfortunately, my wife hasn't given me much so far to put up for that half of the site aside from its history which her friends sent me.

I'm currently looking for a nice, free message board I can put up to add interactivity to the site. If you have suggestions, do let me know please. Thanks.

The site is still under construction. I did the lay-out from what little I know of html; my objective is to let the visitors see a Baguio in the eyes of someone who was born and lived there. And hopefully the site would eventually evolve to something that will raise awareness in the people for nature conservation. Of course, that's ideally speaking. Easier said than done, huh?

I will try to put in new information as my schedule permits me. In the meantime, I do hope you can give me suggestions for the message board and other things I can include there to make it more fun (hey, what about recipes!). Just don't ask me to change the layout! :-)

[This is cross-posted in http://baguio-quezon.blogspot.com]