Calling International for less

The last time I’ve been home was year 2005.  I feel homesick at times so I make sure that I’m able to call my family in Philippines ones or twice a week.

I always came prepared each time I call ,asking them only the most important questions as each second counts, starting the moment the phone rings in the other line.  It has always been this kind of situation before until I discovered a cheaper way of calling them using international phone card. 

Talking has never been this clearer and better. Though emails, chats and SMS are pretty much convenient as I am online most of the time.  But still nothing could beat the happiness that I feel upon hearing my family’s voice.  

TMS too! (Too Many Sites)

Indeed Ruben and I are of the same boat.  Maintaining several sites at the same time.  If you might want to ask, well for the record I just have a few…. Mutliply (my active social networking site), Ai-Pod (personal site), DViewFinder (photography & adventures), Flickr (photo presentation), and Simple Pleasures (personal blog). I guess I forgot something, oh yeah! Youtube for videos.

Not yet counting Friendster (inactive), Yahoo! 360 (inactive), photobucket (forgotten password),  etc. etc. etc. I love multiply among the my other social networking sites because of the intensity of closeness that I have developed during the course of time with my close contacts. It’s like having an invisible magnet that lures me to keep coming back to see what’s going on with them. True friends are isn’t hard to find.  

to be continued….

Spoiling Myself a bit

Work could be draining at times.  I tend to feel like throwing up everytime I encounter too much pressure from work.  Pushing myself to find ways to free my mind from worries.  Occasionally I'd listen to music , bloghop or play  computer and network games like starcraft to relax. 

These days online gaming had become interactive via real-time chat like backgammon which have live support.  As published on their latest press release backgammon online players can choose their language of preferences like French, Arabic, Japanese and German upon playing.  Gaming enthusiast around the world chooses backgammon as a place where one could participate in their favorite games without borders. 

During my first job as a sales representative, I use to stay in a computer center to check and write email everyday. With me were young adults—who eventually became my close friends, who spends their time and money over network games.  I somehow missed the fun being with them.  We were carefree and always enthusiastic to be on the top of the competition. This weekend I'm organizing a game session with friends at home to relive the good old days.  The only  requirement would be to bring your own laptop. Refreshments will be served all throughout the game. How's that? 

Of Loosing Calories

I have my cousin Kristine and friend Therese at home.  They’re spending their three days vacation here in AIT.  We planned for several activities and one of which is baking.  Yesterday we’ve done Chocolate Cake and Maja Blanca.  I was glad to show them the talibongs genius ideas in youtube.  His own comedic rendetion of the movies 300 and Troy. All of us experienced the ilonggo syndrome right after watching and laughing over it for several times.

We felt the heaviness of the sweets right after we gorged on them.  And agreed to do some walking late night to loose the excess calories we’ve gained.

At night we attended the block rosary held in Fontanilla’s house. There we learned that one of our community members was rushed to the hospital in the afternoon.  Before going to the hospital we went to Thammasat market as planned.  Then walked back a couple of miles to the hospital to visit Ate Cora.  Last night was totally a great adventure.  We laughed hard on loosing our way and of loosing our calories faster.

Digitizing Your Office Documents Faster and Easier

The front desk of an office is where the initial action is. Doing transaction requires presenting a myriad of supporting paper documents, id cards, passport, credit cards, photos, and many more. Normally the office requires paper copies of this documents for filing and recording purposes. In a modern day office the trend is to make it all electronic. Scanners are used to digitize this documents for storing and retrieval. It’s stored in file servers and databases.

Using an ordinary scanner is cumbersome and needs some degree of technical know how to accomplish it. There must be a better way of doing thing such that ordinary office person can easily have it done without much need to know about the technicalities of settings, alignments, resizing, cropping, color correction and others. It’s a time consuming task.

Medicscan an office equipment specifically made for medical institutions revolutionized the way things are done in the front desk. The program is a space savvy gadget which packs features that will speed up your office digitizing needs. It powers on a USB port and it scans both sides of an ID card at same time. Page orientation, color correction and storing are done automatic. It can scanned images can be stored locally or on a remote server via ftp. It have an auto feeding sensor which operates automatically when a document is placed.

The system requirements for the device is very lean. It comes with a program that will even run minimum on P100Mhz with only 64Mb RAM and 60Mb disk space. The only thing is it’s designed for MS Windows operating system; maybe they’ll have it on Linux systems in the future. Over all the equipment is very useful. It’s not only useable for hospitals but it can be used in offices also which processes supporting documents a lot in their transactions. If you have this kind of environment I think it’s worth thinking about. Digitize your office documents the fast and easy way.

Sidetrip at Siam Paragon

I’ve read a news article in The Nation about the New Zealand exhibition in Siam Paragon which runs from 8-14 October 2007.  Right after the mass last Sunday we headed straight to SP to see about it.  I was with hubby and friends when we went there.  We took the skytrain for a faster route. As we went down in  Siam station many fans gathered outside the mall for a free show of their popular boy group.   

The four of us went straight inside and along the way we saw Audi sports car charity auction, ladies selling some AIDS awareness necklace, a stage for kids activity and ahead was the NZ corner. As we approached the site, there were beautiful photographs everywhere, adventure gears, Thai Airways for tour arrangements and brochures for study opportunities. New Zealand is a very interesting place to travel someday.  I dream of visiting this lovely place in the future. =)

Managing Rooms and Schedules in the University

Modern day universities like AIT have an in house built online management of rooms for lectures and meetings. Currently the program we have is practical and useable but some of the functionalities are missing. So, I was searching for a professional built program and found Meeting Scheduling Software.

This room scheduling is very convenient for people to view online if a room is vacant or not. Everyone can see who’s using which room at what day and time. Thus, there are no double bookings, people gets to confirm the meetings and service providers (like catering, audio/video, etc.) are aware in advance of such schedules. Not only that, bookings can be done on web and via email with MS Outlook; it can also be broadcasted on flat LCD screens on the halls and campus premises.

There’s a whole lot of function which makes managing rooms very easy and timely for everyone. This is what I dream of to have in our university. I hope that commercial companies will somehow consider giving incentives for universities to avail of such a superb product. It will definitely make everyone’s life productive and easy.