Mike Villar: Drug smuggler (sorta)

I have a confession to make: It’s no secret that I have been living a life of reckless abandon recently right? Well, this abandon that I speak of encompasses everything from my worsening alcoholism to my drug addiction. Now let it go on record that when I say ‘drug addiction’ I do so only to make you (especially women) to like me more. I mean, women like bad boy types don’t they? So I use such a term so loosely as to make women think something along the lines of “OMG! He’s a badass internet star! He’s into drugs! And he has the genitalia of an eight year old! I want him!”

But the truth of the matter is, I have been pretty much clean of narcotics for quite some time now. Especially if my bosses are reading this (I heard you don’t get severance pay for getting fired for substance abuse).

Now recently, my friend, whom we’ll hide under the name of Dave Simballa of 269 Hillcrest Village Caloocan City, tasked me to pick up a sizable amount of marijuana. Now this idea didn’t sit in very wel with me. First of all, I have never bought pot; I mean sure, I’ve smoked many a joint in my lifetime but I don’t handle them, and even if I’m addicted to them, I never maintain a stash in my room or anywhere for that matter. It’s just that I feel that with the kind of shitty luck I have, a friend like Dave would come up to me and say “Dude, I just came from Baguio and I have like a bag of pot on me– Can you keep them for me until Monday?” And being the jackass with low self esteem and an even lower number of friends that I am, I’d say yes and then over the weekend, a neighbor who just moved in would come over to my place to borrow a hammer with a drug-sniffing Labrador and would find an assload of marijuana stashed under my bed linking me to a major drug cartel based off Santander, Colombia. And then six months after being convicted, I’d be in the city jail giving blowjobs in exchange for malunggay while my asshole friend who gave me the pot stayed free banging some hot European chick who’d let her tape sex videos which, in turn he’d sell off the internet for major money. So yeah, I guess what I’m saying is I don’t really roll with pot that way.

 

Read more

Update: Looks like you can embed video recorded using Jing Afterall

Dave McCollom from TechSmith emailed me regarding yesterday’s post about Jing. According to Dave, you can embed screen shots and videos recorded via Jing on your website after all. All you need to do is login to ScreenCast, another TechSmith service Jing automatically signs you up for to store your captures:

Hi Mike - I work for TechSmith (makers of Jing) and would like to thank you for
your nice post about Jing. I also wanted to let you know that you can embed
video. Check out the following screencast to see how and let me know if you
have any other questions or feedback.

As a proof of concept, I recorded a video you could watch that should show you how to go about doing exactly that.

Thanks for the info Dave.

Capture and share everything that goes on in your desktop with Jing

If you spend enough time on the internet, chances are you are no stranger to the sometimes elaborately complex task of taking screen captures, cropping/enhancing them using your photo editing software, and uploading them to a photo hosting service before you can finally share them.

Now, I know a lot of you have your own ways to shorten this process. Personally, I use a combination of OSX’s grab, Adobe Photoshop and this handy ImageShack Image Upload Dashboard widget for the Mac.

I’ve been pretty much happy with the aforementioned combination until I found something that does the job in a more convenient, more streamlined fashion. Techsmith, a company specializing in screen capture and recording software has a service that does exactly that. And more.

The concept behind The Jing project is an always-ready program that instantly captures and shares images and video from your computer to anywhere. Aside from providing a simple yet functional desktop interface which allows you to take screen shots, Jing also also allows users to make simple annotations to screen captures before storing and allowing users to share them using Techsmith’s ScreenCast service.

Read more

A stupid High School Reunion, lust, depression

When I attended my High School batch’s 10th year reunion yesterday, I was under the impression that after I get through the entire thing, I’d be able to write a post that would be a funny piece on how to course through the discomfort and awkwardness inherent to occasions involving people you haven’t seen or spoken to for almost a decade. This is especially important to people like me who was known as the guy caught masturbating in the copy room and trying to set the school canteen on fire because the cross-eyed lady who served lunch shortchanged him by 25 pesos, but I digress.

But after attending the reunion, my entire angle changed from writing something like the aforementioned guide to such guides entitled “Mike Villar’s High School Reunion For Dummies: How to squander two years of your life in a call center, gain weight and make sure that when your high school reunion comes around, you’d pretty much be the most pathetic, least successful person in attendance.” Or “Mike Villar’s High School Reunion guide for women: How to lose 50 pounds, get the best deals on plastic surgery and look totally gorgeous so that all the minimum-wager, fat drunkard guys who wouldn’t even give you a pity dance in prom night feel suicidally depressed.”

I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t have a few things I’ve achieved and could be proud of 10 years after I graduated high school. After all, I’m a Rising Internet Star and I have a popular website which, I’d like to think, is a big deal on the internet; I have a job that pays(slightly) more than the median salary of people my age in the country; I have an Ipod, a Macbook, a Cellphone, a Honda Civic and an authentic aboriginal walking stick (or something) my dad bought in Australia for me (Yes I brought all of this to the reunion to make myself look like I’m more successful than I really am.)

Read more

Seriously, did anyone even bother with Pownce?

As a relatively early adopter of Twitter, I am fascinated at how it has apparently reached critical mass and continues to snowball into a networking juggernaut. As to be expected, everybody wants a piece of the action but so far, none has really defined itself as a significant threat to Twitter. Well, except maybe Jaiku after Leo Laporte’s exodus.

Recently though, a lot of hype has been going around in support of Digg Founder and Silcon Valley golden boy Kevin Rose’s startup Pownce. According to the website:

Right now, there are four basic things you can send: messages, links, files, and events.

You might send an event out to a dozen of your friends letting them know you’re hosting a party this Friday. They could easily get the event details you entered, respond with questions or comments and then quickly rsvp.

Say you had a great photo you wanted to share with all of your friends. Just add the file and all of your friends will get it right away. They’ll be able to reply and tell you if it’s cool. You could even post songs you recorded in your home studio to share with your friends.

I’ve only recently been able to fully take Pownce out for a test drive and sans Pownce’s feature that allows users to send updates to a specific group of contacts, I find little to no novelty in Pownce’s touted feature set.

Sure, you can send messages, links, files and events using one convenient interface but it’s not like Twitter doesn’t allow you to do all these innately. I mean, sure, it might take a 3rd party web application (pure volume or even MySpace for sharing songs? rapidshare or DropSend for sharing large files?) to get the job done, but when you take everything into consideration, Pownce’s pretty interface, slightly better usability and what not all fall short of elevating the service as competition in a market segment dominated by twitter.

With that said, and because I am a slut and an attention whore, I am posting the link to my pownce account here so you all can add me and stuff! yay!

← Previous Page — Next Page →