Time Flies When You're Hungover

Obviously, I've neglected this blog again. Last time I checked I've been posting an entry here once per month and by my long-forgotten standards, that's a very sorry thing. Years ago, I had been posting at a rate of at least one entry per week. Well back then, I didn't know a lot about a lot of things so I wasn't doing a lot of work.

So what exactly is it that I've been doing since I posted my last entry?

For starters, I decided to rewrite SaWALi to turn it into a Pylons application. That was easier said than done because the reason why I wrote the first incarnation of SaWALi is precisely to give myself the independence from a framework like Pylons— which at the time seemed impossible to deploy on a web host like mine. But I just love challenges... especially when I end up conquering them! Hahaha!

This endeavour took me months— of often extreme frustration— to complete. It's only now that I can write again because I told myself to not complicate matters by adding more content to the site that I might just have to rewrite if things go haywire. Fortunately, my investigations into how a lot of things work in Python saved me from having to rewrite anything, content-wise. And if the time comes that I make another bold move with my back-end applications, I think I wouldn't need to play this safe as to hold back from writing.

Paufest 2010 at Casa Nami, Makati (2 October)
Photo by Bryan Coroza

Between programming, testing, and bugfixing though, there were other things to do. Chief of these "other things" was going to the studio with old friends to learn, rehearse, and polish a set of songs that we promised to play at a friend's party. If I remember correctly, that took two months of weekly sessions— of both music and drinking— that seemed to always leave me with a sore throat and a headache. Then there, of course, were the other occasions as that time of year is littered with a lot of birthdays, which meant more goings-out and hangovers. Now I don't know how it is with other programmers, but me, I hate thinking while my temples throb due to excess alcohol in my bloodstream.

So being a guy who works from home but cannot work, I often spoke with my friend, Google. He told me about this nifty little thing called "Mupen64Plus", which is a Nintendo64 emulator that runs on Ubuntu. He also told me where I can get those things called ROMs— game files for The Legend of Zelda, Ridge Racer, and all that. Indeed, Mupen proved to be a good companion to hangovers.

But hungover or not, I had taken an interest in emulation and that somehow led me to the Android operating system. This interest then turned into a mild obsession with China-made aPads/iRobots and rooting those devices. I got stuck though, since I wasn't able to find a how-to on rooting the device that I was able to get. It didn't take me long to give up (temporarily) my quest of upgrading my iRobot's OS to the lastest Android and learning how to develop applications for it.

What I developed though, is an appreciation for ebooks! While wrapping up development on the new SaWALi, I had been reading a lot using my iRobot. In the last couple of weeks, I've read the four Bardic Voices books by Mercedes Lackey; and some time around last weeked, I started reading The Taming of the Light by my lovely Inez. After Taming... well, there will be more stuff to read, more stuff to write about, and hopefully, more time for writing.