This month saw a bunch of celebrities making comebacks of sorts. The Rock has come back to the WWE, and David Pomeranz and Stephen Bishop also made localized, annual Valentine’s day comebacks

(seriously guys, why leave when you can stay and land gigs co-hosting Sunday noontime shows singing Lady GaGa covers with local celebrities and live like kings? We love you guys! Also, you have no idea how many guys have gotten restroom prom beejes thanks to your songs but whatever right)

What many of you don’t know, however, is that crying somewhere in the heart of Pasig, another former, overweight (The proper medical term for which, as I learned from my company’s recent Annual Physical Examination by the way is “Obese Class III”)celebrity has been plotting his return.

The former celebrity I speak of is none other than myself. Mike Villar, Rising Washed-up Internet Star.

“Why return now? lol and where have you been?” You might be asking yourself. And the answer to your question is because I want to and because I can. So you better check yourself before you wreck yourself.

Where I’ve been? Nowhere really. Most of my time between my last post and now was spent chilling in the barren, cold abyss that is called “being married” subsisting mainly on depression sandwiches and an endless supply of human tears on tap.

I kid! What I’m trying to say is that I’ve been happily married for over a year now and, for those of you who aren’t married yet, the most important thing you need to know is that for most people, deciding to, how does Beyonce put it?  ”put a ring on it”, means biting the bullet as far as all the responsibilities of adulthood would go. This means you’ll have less free time and the little free time you have won’t be spent dicking around in the internet but rather accepting additional jobs so you could pay the utilities and afford those fine decorative balusters you want for your house.

That said, there will be plenty of changes in regards to this blog’s content. Long-time readers of this blog would probably get turned off but come on guys, you have to admit that penis jokes could only be stretched so far. (There are still going to be penis jokes. Albeit, more refined penis jokes. Did you honestly think I could stay away from penis jokes? I love penises!)

To illustrate:

Mikey from 2 years ago: Will write about how he got so messed up at a party that he spat on the host’s Shih Tzu after he got into an argument with it about who the hotter Community girl is: Britta or Annie. Obviously, the answer is Annie because she can be the most adorable thing without being sexualized. You don’t intimidate me with your barking. There’s a perfectly good reason why your kind is the one being bought from stores to keep our kind company. Hell, we put leashes on you and shit. Oh yeah? Come at me then! And put some fucking pants on!

Mikey now: Won’t even dare touch alcohol because the last time he did, the wife caught him peeing in the sink and he ended up sleeping in the car parked in a Shell Station somewhere on C-5.

Mikey from 2 years ago: Will write a poignant, humorous piece that throws jabs at the entire local blogging paradigm and how everyone has “sold out”

Mikey now: Doesn’t care. He’d rather spend his free time during work days catching up on videogames (yes, the wife allows me to play videogames during work days. Provided I wear a shirt while I do)

Mikey from 2 years ago: Will write a gonzo-styled post about how he made a bad financial decision and how he plans to deal with it.

Mikey now: has made all the bad financial decisions he can possibly make. In fact, I park the car in a lot a few blocks away from my house because I fear that the repo man will come to take it away at night while I sleep. (Seriously, you’d think that these guys would let up after you give them a promissory note outlining how you’d pay off your arrears and promising them you won’t have your uncle hide the car in ilocos while you “figure things out” like last time)

So here’s where I am right now. I come to you with my hat in my hand begging you for a second chance. Think of me as the ex-girlfriend you broke up with years ago who’s now trying to win you back. Her body might not be as banging as it used to (5 pregnancies and a hormone imbalance does weird shit to your body), and your bros might be constantly telling you how “you had her at her prime”, but can you look me in the eye and tell me that you won’t hook up with that and squeeze a beej or two from her? For old time’s sake? Exactly.

Mikey from 2 years ago: Will write about how tiny his bird is and how he never gets to use it

Mikey now: Will still write about the same. Sadly.

Welcome me back? Babe?

My app pick for the week is TVShows for Mac OS X: A nifty little app that allows you to stay up to date with your favorite TV shows by “subscribing” to RSS data from tvrss.net

Depending on your settings, TVShows will download the episode which last aired or the episodes that follow a specific episode.

Thanks to Rico for the tip.

[Recorded using ScreenFlow by Telestream]

Daniela’s family, at that time, was living in David’s house after years of domestic abuse prompted her to take her kids and divorce her husband.

The appeal was pretty straightforward: Using ChipIn.com, David intended to raise $5,000 for Daniela and her family to get a decent roof over their heads without worrying about deposit or rent for a while.

To say that the community response was significant would be an insulting understatement. In fact, a mere 24 hours after the appeal was posted, David was able to raise over $15,000 for Daniela and her family.

One only needs to look at the deluge of twitter responses and media coverage (most notably from Business Week and The Vancouver Sun) to see how quickly and phenomenally the virus spread.

After everything settled down, I realized a couple of things: First, the #daniela campaign has got to be one of the most noble ways I’ve seen anybody put their social authority to use in recent memory and second, the campaign is a gleaming example of how a community’s altruism and willingness to extend a helping hand does not get watered down even if its members are connected only by mere wires and fiber optics.

Also, after the proof of concept on how authority can be leveraged to raise funds for a good cause was laid out, I got to thinking about my own authority in the local blogosphere and how I could leverage it, being one of the country’s most prominent bloggers, to pull off my own #daniela.

And so here we are with a little experiment…

Ready?

Wait for it…

And here it goes…

I think you should totally give me money

No, don’t go just yet and hear me out. I know I’m being a douche and you’ve probably decided in your narrow minds that I am, indeed, a douche but that’s not what’s important.

What’s important, bro, is that I’ve written an assload of posts in this blog (and here) since June of 2005 and while you’ve consistently consumed the high art that are my blog posts, I have never really asked you for anything in return. Until now.

To put things into perspective, I am going to run some numbers by you:

• I have written over 400 posts between this blog and my old one
• The average length of a Mike “Fucking” Villar blog post is 800 words.
• Now, using the magic of math, I can safely estimate that I have, in my career as a blogger, written well over 320,000 words
• On the average, a book is about 70,000 words long (I totally made this up. Sorry.)
• Again using the voodoo that is math, assuming that you’ve read every single blog post I churned out, you’ve read the equivalent of 4 books! Written by me!
• A cursory look at Amazon tells me that a new book costs around 7-8 USD but since I am only a “semi-published” writer, I am willing to slash the prices of the 4 “books” you’ve read to $5 each.
• Now do you know why you owe me $20 ?

(Wait, even if you didn’t read all of my posts, you still owe me a little money.)

Let it go on record that I do NOT earn anything from advertising through this site and I am, in fact, hemorrhaging thousands of Pesos yearly because of web hosting bills and my being obdurate.

For those of you who haven’t yet realized the gravity of this, just think of it this way: The thousands of Pesos I blow annually on Web Hosting is money better spent on alcohol–specifically those swanky cocktails I’ve been addicted to lately or on generously helping the local prostitution industry prosper.

If you’re one of those people who like really love this blog and consider yourself affluent, we can make it more “interesting” depending on the amount you are willing to donate:

• For $500 I will give you total access to my hamper and keep 1 (one) article of clothing I recently wore (No underwear. Come on, that’s just creepy)
• For $1,000 I will have an hour’s worth of phone sex with you
• For $5,000 I will buy a Macbook Pro and print a thank you card to be sent to you using it (could be worth a lot of money after I die 3 years from now)
• And for $20,000 Me and my entire family can be your slaves. Forever.

And there we have it my humble plea for a little money. Your donation would be a clear sign that you care for me and appreciate the entertainment I’ve been providing you for four years now.

Remember: Your appreciation makes me all warm and fuzzy inside and your cash, it keeps me drunk. Which is awesome.

Thank you for your time, and below is the ChipIn widget you could use to give me monies!

Facebook

…If I was the CEO of my own company. But for now I have to live with the fact that I am but a program manager encumbered with the fact that I live in a country where most system administrators have a reactive thought process in dealing with IT-related problems.

What do you mean you can’t access your email? Oh I know, let’s reformat your hard drive and do a fresh Windows XP install! Bam! Problem solved!

A virus threat?! OMG! Let’s disable WiFi access on all laptops in the network! THEN do a fresh Windows XP install! Bam! Probllem solved!

Is the Internet slow during office hours? Why, let’s indiscriminately block half of the sites our employees access! Bam! Problem solved!

Twitter

The usual IT scapegoats in almost all network congestion problems seem to be social sites like Facebook, MySpace and their ilk. This is fine–In an assembly line. What IT departments in most companies, especially those who are marketing-driven, fail to take into consideration when doing their capacity planning is that the underpinnings of successful employees are creativity and innovation–hallmarks which a restrictive IT environment fails to and will fail to cultivate.

Some system administrators and upper management types might argue that creating a restrictive IT environment is necessary to sustain productivity.

Well guess what, You’re wrong.

According to a recent report, an employee’s inability to access these same websites you block could also lead to a drop in productivity.

a takeaway from the report:

The report concludes with a note of caution and some practical advice with regards to developing a frame work for a responsible and prosperous network. This should be a group in which its citizens respect the power and realise the mutual benefit of giving and taking. Businesses should consider the following guidelines when auditing and analysing their own networks:

1. Do not separate ‘social’ networking from ‘professional’ networking. Attempts to control employees’ use of social networking software in the office may end up damaging the organization in the long run by depleting its network capital

2. There should be value placed on networks with people outside the firm. Too often, it is only senior staff who are encouraged to build relationships with people outside the organization. The power of horizontal networks across organisational boundaries is clear, and growing

3. Keep in touch with employees that have left the organisation. The temptation during a difficult economic climate is to hunker down; but this risks cutting off flows of network capital. Companies should consider how to keep former employees in the network

4. Do not police networks but consider how they operate and what could be improved. This should be a first step towards collective conversations about the ‘rules of the game’ when it comes to operating within networks

These are things the most successful marketing-driven companies like Zappos (who list Creating Fun and A Little Weirdness and Being Passionate and Determined as two of their core values) realize.

Also, In an HR-retention perspective, keeping top talent means giving them the easel and the canvas to tap into their creativity; an effort which would ultimately translate into new business opportunities.

I for one wouldn’t be too happy if I have spent months researching on how Twitter, Facebook or social media in general could be leveraged as a PR/Marketing tool for the company and one day I come in and see that my access to these sites has been blocked.

So yes Mr. IT Administrator/Upper Management guy, if you’re even thinking of blocking access to social sites, I suggest you think about getting more bandwidth first. Or hire robots.

–

Mikey does Marketing for US Auto Parts, a publicly-traded, Internet 500 top retailer. He is NOT a robot. nor are his brilliant coworkers.

(*lie. I get around 4,000 page views a day–56% of which originate from the United States and 12%, interestingly enough, comes from the Middle East. Also, traffic spikes on my blog determine whether I’d be happy and functional throughout the day or end up skipping work, staying at home to play with this thing between my legs that looks like a cock, only smaller. Usually while watching new videos at iyottube.com)

I do have Web Analytics tags set up on my blog and, about a week ago, I noticed that I have a handful of visitors jumping in from The Philippine Blog Awards site. I noticed that someone* has nominated me for The Blogger’s Choice Award.

(*me)

The Philippine Web Awards isn’t exactly new to me. In fact, if you click this link, you’d know that April Last year, The Man Blog, a site I am co-founder of was a finalist for The Best Entertainment blog. In the end, we lost to a stupid blogger who writes about Pinoy Big Brother, something that resulted in me walking out of the RCBC amphitheater, the picture below being taken, and my place as the sorest loser this side of Asia being cemented in the annals of history after the aforementioned picture was used as the header for the Philippine Blog Awards website:

After the fact that I was, again, nominated in a category brimming with nominees I could so easily lose to*, my initial reaction was something to the effect of “Fuck all of you, my blog is the shiz! Who cares about your stupid award? Suck my balls! What’s the number to Yellowcab’s delivery service? I’m fucking starving here.”

(*not really. I mean ·´`·.¸.» j u l i a ·´`·.¸.» Seriously? Come on. Am I missing something here?)

Days passed and I forgot about the entire thing until I noticed more traffic coming in from the Philippine Blog Awards site–again because I was nominated for the “Blogger’s Choice Award”, at this point, I thought to myself “Shit! I have to win this award. I’ve never really won anything after I won the spelling bee back in grade school. The award sounds like something they’d serve over at Shakey’s so that’s cool. Besides, there might be a prize associated with it. I’m hoping it’s bag of anti-depressants because I’m going crazy here and I need to get high off of something and I can’t afford to see my shrink and ask her to write me xanax scripts.”

Then, I realized that, maybe besides a shiny trophy, winners get nothing. It’s not like I’m not used to getting nothing though. In fact, in last year’s TMB Christmas party, my friend Fritz gave everyone really cool gifts–somebody got an Axe, somebody got a vice grip; while I, got a huge box of nothing.

So I said, Fuck it; I would make no conscious effort to win this award because again, there is no prize involved. If winning this award means winning at least 500 pesos or Ever Bilena gift certificates, I’d be going door to door right now, prepared to offer you the best hand job you’ll ever get in your life in exchange for a vote and a link from your blog. I know, don’t tell me. It sucks for you that’s not the case here.

I did do a perfunctory review of some of the blogs I am up against which wasn’t such a good idea because now, I strongly feel that literacy, the Internet and blog-writing privileges should be limited to a small percentage of the population.

For instance, I read this post from a fellow nominee– a blog called Basta igat, sikat!:

I think I need psychotherapy or rehabilitation. Ha ha! But wait, let me try to justify things first. I have won 2 very exclusive pairs of Havaianas for the past 2 years. You see, every summer, Havaianas Philippines holds a contest. In 2007, I was one of the 50 winners and received the exclusive Take Us To The Nearest Beach pair. Then again, this year I was among the lucky 70 people to receive the limited edition Flipping for the Beach pair. These are among the highlights of my so-called Havaianas addiction.

Good God. Who the fuck reads this shit? Seriously people, at what point in your lives are you that you get entertainment in someone writing about Flip Flops, a footwear fetish or whatever? Am I missing something here? Please tell me.

I know you guys are probably tired about me talking about how depressed I am or how I masturbate as I cry while I watch a 240×300 porn video window on my laptop, but flip flops? God bless you all.

Anyway, if anything good came out of this little nomination it has to be the fact that a lot of people still appreciate my writing and blogging as an art in general.

There’s a shitload of you who actually voted for me. I mean besides my friends whom I know are just setting me up so that they could watch me crash and burn but man, I am genuinely touched by the number of votes I’ve gotten so far. Let’s not forget that this is after I did some terrible things to some of these people:

Lauren’s Vote For Mike Villar

Pau’s Vote For Mikey

Baddie’s I Believe In Mike Villar

Fritz’s My Vote Goes To Mike Villar

Euri’s Philippine Web Awards 2008

Helga Votes for Mike

Jepoy Votes for Mike

Madz for Mikey!

Liz’s vote

Ozy’s Why Mike Should Win

Marcus declares that he votes for Mike “Fucking” Villar

Noelle wants Mike to be a REAL Internet Star and get rid of “Rising”

Juice’s vote goes to Mr. Villar!

Steel thinks that Mikey is Badassery Personified

Ade’s Vote For Mike Villar!

Arc votes for Mike Villar!

Jayvee Sacramento votes for Mike

Nightdreamer votes for Mike Villar

Vote Wisely, Vote Mikey by Penny

Michelle votes for Mike Villar

My Vote goes to Mike Villar by Joel Ramos

Marco dela Torre votes for Mike Villar

A vote by notanotherblog

A vote by recordialfizz

A vote by larry

Mike Villar for President by Anne

Because Villar gets my vote by Joiz

Things I like about Mikevillar.com by CM

A vote from Azrael

From Witz

From Kang

Wow. I seriously don’t know what to say. But let me leave you with something profound: I may not be rich. But if you look at the friends you have as money, then I am the richest man in the planet. And I shall buy a red couch, those fishbowl thingers they fill up with iced tea over at Jack’s loft and maybe an HD TV and a Dakota Fanning poster. And I will pay with friend dollars.

Thank you.

Anytime, anywhere what? Well, anytime, anywhere 2MBPS Data, VOIP and Video that’s what.

I met with Marvin over dinner and I must say that from what he describes the service to be, I’m already creaming my pants in anticipation and I foresee other web workers like myself blowing their loads too once the service rolls out sometime in 2008.

If you’re anything of a web worker as I am, you’ve probably experienced using other mobile data platforms to use VOIP to communicate with clients or send important documents to them while you’re on the road. Everything’s going great until Globe Visibility arbitrarily decides to shift down from giving you HSDPA connectivity to GPRS causing your VOIP connection to get choppy and your file transfers to dramatically slow down. In a moment of utter frustration, you mumble something about wanting to throw newborn babies up in the air and catch them with bayonets–something which your Japanese client overhears. Next thing you know, you’re haunting gasoline stations along South Luzon Expressway, and giving weary travelers hand jobs in exchange for food.

The fact that WiMAX’s Quality of Service mechanism is guaranteed, as opposed to Wi-Fi’ where QoS is relative between packets, pegs your up and down speeds to 2MBPS and ensures that the aforementioned scenario doesn’t happen.

Their product offering also comes with a VoIP service where you’re given a local number from which you can make and receive calls from anywhere. The implications of this are huge. I did Business Development work for beleaguered US broadband phone company Vonage in the past, and I remember one of our salient points being the fact that the service allows making US calls more cost efficient. A person based in the US can send a Vonage box(which comes with a US-based Direct Inward Dialing Number) to anywhere–say the Philippines–and anybody there with a broadband connection can place calls to the US for free.

Happy’s VoIP service is similar to Vonage’s to some extent as it allows people to make Happy VoIP – Land line calls, Land line – Happy VoIP and Happy VoIP – Happy VoIP calls for free.

And because Happy allows you to register up to three MAC addresses with the service(Ideally, you can set up your laptop, home router or desktop, and mobile phone to work with the WiMAX service), you can place and receive calls using your mobile device anywhere there’s coverage.

Aside from data and voice services, Happy’s consumer offering also aims to provide IPTV which is basically a streaming mobile cable TV service which would allow you to watch over 80 channels on your laptop, desktop or mobile device. This is similar to Smart’s myTV service only it’s not a fucking Value Added Service nor is does it feature a paltry 11 channels.

Now, I haven’t had the opportunity to test Happy’s VoIP and IPTV services but the fact that Happy Communications’ management team is composed of Silicon Valley veterans with links to companies and services like Smart, Joost, Skype, and ICQ says a lot about the service’s potential.

How much is the service going to cost? Well Marvin says the price will be in the neighborhood of 3,000 pesos a month or possibly lower if they implement a tiered pricing scheme. This isn’t bad at all considering other mobile data providers’ services cost around that much already.

All in all, I have nothing but high hopes for Happy Communications’ upcoming consumer product offering. The best thing about this, in my opinion, is that if anything, the newcomer’s going to make the mobile data landscape more competitive price-wise.

I mean, really. Come on.

Well:

• A lot of cussing.
• A lot of racist jokes.
• A lot of dicking around.
• Bim, having an emotional breakdown as he regales others with stories of his childhood replete with sexual abuse and incest.
• Some asshole double-fisting drinks all night and eventually throwing up and passing out on the cold bathroom floor.

Seriously though, I had a blast recording this podcast and I hope we can do more of this in the future. Special thanks to San Miguel Beer for sponsoring the event; Jayvee Fernandez for making all of this possible, Lauren and Noemi Dado for letting us destroy their house, eat all their food and steal one of their figurines (Okay I did it. I’ll return it, I swear. Jeez.); and to everyone else who were part of the podcast, the show wouldn’t be half as fun without you guys.

• Juned
• AJ
• The Rest of The Man Blog

TV shows come and go. Every so often, there comes a point when the life of a television series starts to flicker and grow dim. Worse, there is always a putrid uncertainty that comes with wondering if our favorite TV shows will even return as networks, with an insensitive and cruel disregard, toy with our emotions with executives waiting until the last minute to decide which shows live on and which shows drop from the lineup to their certain deaths.

Your show, Desperate Housewives, was one of the shows I wished death upon after its first season. And can you blame me? The inexplicably retarded storytelling, random betrayals and suicidally poignant interpersonal drama, as well as all the twists, turns, flips, flops and flops that happened midway through the 2nd season made the show really painful to watch. A pain which is, perhaps, worse than losing a loved one. Maybe even two loved ones in a bizarre hotel fire.

But still, I continued to watch. And I did so only because of Teri Hatcher and Eva Fucking Longoria.

There was actually a time when I was so obsessed with Teri and Eva that had either one of them asked me to quit my job, I would’ve said “done”; That had either one of them asked me to renounce my fleshly ways and dedicate my life to reading the bible, I would’ve said “done”; that had either of them asked me to embrace people from all walks of life and cultures and maybe give up sweets, I would’ve said “not until you give me a blowjob.” You get the point.

I was pretty smitten; so when I first heard about what many claimed to be a sweeping, insulting remark about medical schools in the Philippines made by Teri Hatcher’s character in one episode, I remained relatively indifferent to the issue.

Showing a modicum of class when you’re not required to is a tough act; so you guys can only imagine my surprise when your network issued a public apology for your little “racial slur.”

I know it should’ve been water under the bridge now but there seemed to be a call for blood and a major brouhaha even after your public apology was issued.

Now, I believe in the power of forgiveness and in the same manner that you apologized to us, I would like to apologize to you on behalf of my countrymen who do not have the intellectual capacity to understand satirized humor.

Since this is a rather rare opportunity for me, let me start off by apologizing for our country’s bastardization of Christianity by creating sects based on the twin principles of destroying other forms of faith and getting a tenth of their members’ monthly income. Oh how I digress.

• I want to apologize for Representative Bienvenido Abante and Senator Rodolfo Biazon for even thinking of banning Desperate Housewives in the Philippines. What they don’t know is that most of us assrape your intellectual property by buying entire seasons of your show on sub $2 pirated DVD’s or downloading the shit out of it from torrent sites. The latter is of course done using Taiwan-made OEM computers running on a pirated version of the latest version of Microsoft Windows.

• I apologize for our dangerous soft-heartedness and more importantly, our hypocrisy. I doubt if any of you watch Philippine Television, but we make a lot of sitcoms based on your TV shows where we invariably make fun of racial stereotypes including but not limited to the Indians being smelly, turban-sporting loan sharks; the Japanese being war shocked WWII veterans and the Chinese being chinky-eyed, greedy businessmen who own junk shops and magic barbels.

• I apologize for Manny Pacquiao. Nuff Said.

• And finally, I apologize for the list of bloggers below. If it’s any consolation, not all of us are retarded and some of us actually get it.

• Desperate Housewives jokes about Med Schools in the Philippines
• Second Class Citizens
• Anti-Filipino Slur on Desperate Housewives?
• Desperate Housewives’ Rather Insulting Remark about Medical Schools in the Philippines
• Desperate Housewives racial slur against Filipino medical practicioners?
• Who’s Desperate?
• Filipino Americans demand for apology from ABC and Desperate Housewives Petition
• Kick That Desperate Housewives Out
• Teri Hatcher of Desperate Housewives Insults Filipinos
• Desperate for Philippine Audience
• Desperate Housewives Maligns Philippine Med Schools
• Filams Protest US TV show – ABS-CBN News
• Reacting and Over Reacting to DH Script…
• Desperate Housewives on Philippine Med Schools
• Bloghopping
• My Take On This Desperate Housewives Shenanigans
• Another Perspective on the Latest Racial Slur Issue
• Of Racists and Slurs
• Desperate Housewives, Philippine Medical Schools and How Many of You Got it All Wrong
• What Did You Just Say, Teri Hatcher?
• About Desperate Housewives, Teri Hatcher and Med Schools
• Pinoys seek apology from ‘Desperate Housewives
• “Desperate Housewives” insults Filipinos
• Anti-Filipino remark on ‘Desperate Housewives’?
• Desperate Housewives’ [Season 4, Episode 1] denigrates Filipino Doctors
• Fil-Am Anger: Desperate Housewives’ Slur vs. Filipino Medical Schools
• Dok, sa Pilipinas ka ba nag-Med School
• Desperate Housewives on Pinoy MDs
• Desperate Housewives’ insulting remark to Philippine Med Schools
• Desperate Housewives Diss Philippine-Educated Doctors
• ‘tado to ah!
• Desperate Housewives Slur Vs The Philippines
• IT’S NOT FUNNY!
• Desperate Housewives Chenes
• Desperate Housewives maligns Philippine med schools
• Desperate Housewives Apparently Insults Filipinos: So What?
• Malacañang responds to Desperate housewives issue
• Teri Hatcher doesn’t want her vagina examined by doctor from Philippines
• Susan Mayer, Back Off!
• What Should You Do Before Condemning Desperate Housewives?
• Do You Really Want to Get Desperate Housewives’s Attention?
• Video Response to “Teri Hatcher Insults Filipinos”
• Filipino medics protest alleged racial slur in US TV show
• Fil-Americans protest ‘racist’ line in ‘Desperate Housewives
• Ermita: Palace to seek apology for ‘racial slur’ on US show
• DFA protests to US TV network over ‘racial slur’
• Touchy Subject | Filipino Americans demand for apology from ABC and Desperate Housewives
• Conan O’Brien Hates the Philippines Too!
• Dismal And Sound Logic: Reactions Regarding The Desperate Housewives Controversy

All told, I would like to urge you to go on and do your thing with Desperate Housewives. Our Television industry lives off your ideas. I mean, who knows, in the near future, maybe we can make a sanitized rip-off show which stars Cherry pie Picache, Zsa Zsa Padilla, Ruffa Mae Quinto and Kris Aquino. Remember Dawson’s Creek? Remember Tabing ilog?

It’s just that we, as a people in general, are very sensitive when it comes to our sense of nationalism. But then again, we can always count on Christian Bautista to work on that can’t we?

The cross-OS platform uses HTML, Flash and AJAX among others to make highly-functional Rich Internet Applications and deploy them as desktop clients.

Currently, my favorite AIR apps include  Snitter, an AIR-based Twitter client for Mac OSX; Airpress, a WordPress compatible blogging client; and of course, Pownce‘s desktop client.

However, AIR being a relatively new runtime environment, applications tend to be buggy and I find myself installing and trying to uninstall apps a lot.

Usually, to make sure that I delete all files associated with the app I am trying to uninstall, I use either App Zapper or App Delete.

The process is pretty straightforward. I go to my applications folder and drag the program I wish to uninstall to App Delete or App Zapper and that’s that.

I’ve been trying out a lot of Adobe AIR-based apps in the last couple of months and until lately, I haven’t found a way to uninstall them as they do not appear in the applications folder.

What I found out was the AIR installer and apps are, by default, installed in your Home/Applications folder rather than your root Applications folder. So for a user named TedGrubb, AIR-based apps are installed in /TedGrubb/Applications rather than in /Applications.

(Also, if you’re anything like me, you have a penis the size of a wine cork and you cry about it at night. Let’s not go there. Thanks.)

Well, Clear Skys came up with a wonderful plug-in for WordPress that helps make the dashboard a little more bearable and actually useful at the same time.

The myDashboard plug-in takes the “Start Page” look from services Netvibes, Page Flakes and iGoogle and takes it to your WordPress Dashboard.

It organizes information displayed on your dashboard into Widgets (which they call “Gadgets”). These gadgets can display the usual stuff on your Dashboard like latest comments, latest posts, statistics and Technorati incoming links.

The neat thing about myDashboard is that it’s open source to some extent and developers can create their own Gadgets to be used with the plugin. Check out this Subscriber widget for myDashboard which displays the numbers of subscribers you have on your posts.

And because myDashboard is filled with sweet AJAX goodness, you can easily rearrange gadgets by dragging and dropping them like you would on your favorite start page-type service.

You can download myDashboard from WordPress Extend and Google Code.