I’ve always had trouble studying. Whether it is by learning by myself or through a teacher. But over the years, I found out that the best way for me to learn something is to give something back.

During the last days of 2012, I started to work on the website for Mensa Philippines. After about 24 hours working on the site using Blogger, it’s now just waiting for the thumbs up of the Mensa officers. So I decided it was high time to give my blog a new look as well. The last time I did a reboot was in May 30, 2010.

Previously, I talked about the speculation that Smart (and not just Jim Ayson) hates me because I have personal friends in Globe. After the post, it so happened that Jim and I had a conversation on Facebook. I can’t post snippets of our conversation. But if you so wish to read it, you’ll have to search for it. It’s somewhere in Facebook.

UPDATE: After this post was written (and before Jim Ayson read this), Jim and I chatted on Facebook and cleared the air regarding matters of affiliation. Read the results of that talk in the next post. I understand that Jim read this after our talk and he has mentioned that he was very disappointed and would write a reply in his own blog. If he does, do go ahead and read it. But that will basically be it. If you’re expecting a blog war, that’s not going to happen.

So there was this event called ‘Appy Birthday Android held by Smart and Google Developers Group (GDG) at the telco’s Smart Experience Center in Megamall. I didn’t know about it. I haven’t been in touch as often as I should with the people from GDG since everyone is busy with Startup Weekend Cebu and Davao as well as our day jobs. I’m not on Twitter and Facebook 24/7 so I will definitely be late in receiving news and will definitely miss on news. I don’t follow Smart and SmartDev either. I only found out about the event on the night itself because I was trying to figure out what was causing last night’s unusually heavier-than-usual traffic.

I have this idea that’s been brewing for the past couple of months. Normally I would work on it using Java but I decided it would be a perfect time to learn new technologies. I ended up learning Go and the Google App Engine. There’s still some other stuff I need to learn, like Angular.js and Twitter Bootstrap.

Recently I upgraded the Ubuntu system on my VirtualBox. That included a correctional upgrade for the kernel. Lo and behold, after that upgrade my display wouldn’t behave anymore. It wouldn’t resize properly to the virtual machine (VM) window. It was either too big or too small for it. I figured I might need to do a reinstall of someting.

Just a couple more weeks before my birthday. I figured that it was as good a time as any to have a change of lifestyle. Adopt new habits and break bad ones.

Recently I was lucky enough to win a Sony Xperia P during its launch. It was wonderful to finally own a phone with NFC. I was a bit disappointed to find out that the SmartTags that came with it were read-only.

But that disappointment was short lived as a kind stranger on Twitter sent me a small pack on NFC stickers. Meanwhile, I was also given a couple of test cards from Jollibee’s HappyPlus rewards program.

Now to do some NFC magic!

My netbook has been getting little action since I got my i7 laptop. The netbook was really too sluggish to get any Android work done. Even during my Android talks, I end up bringing the laptop instead. But now I’ve decided to bring the laptop back into use again. April 2012 is looking to be a really hectic month with all the events and talks happening. I’d like to go around bringing along the much lighter netbook instead. I’m now experimenting with using the netbook to connect to my laptop at home for presenting and running code.

I decided to try again and use git.  The last time I used git was about two years ago. I used to use Project Locker for my projects. The problem is the free account only has 300MB of space and a maximum of 3 projects. I needed more than 300MB since my slide decks were easily hitting 6MB each and my documents were also hitting around 35MB. Then of course I still had to save my code.  So much as I was a Project Locker user for so long, I decided I needed to move. Bitbucket was an easy choice since its free account has no limits on storage and number of projects.