Due to lack of attention, I've decided to stop blogging to this site for a while. Also, mainly because I've gotten used to post blogs through email and the time it takes to publish an emailed blog is too long that by the time it gets publish, the blog is already stale.

I will still maintain my other blog at MSN Spaces and it's custom mirror Caluste.com

I will leave the chat window available at the right; it is always synced with my other blogs.

Free Certifications

What a treat, Brainbench is giving away free certifications until April 4 as part of their annual Bench Games. Register at http://www.brainbench.com/xml/bb/common/login.xml and receive your free account. These are official online certifications issued by Brainbench, an employment testing site.

Within the first hour, I took two exams, Visual Basic 6.0 Fundamentals and MS Windows 2000. I passed both exams and you can view a public transcript here (http://www.brainbench.com/transcript.jsp?pid=5465389).

It is a multiple choice type of exam. There are a total of 40 questions and you are need to answer a question in 160 seconds or less. The Windows 2000 exam is a bit disappointing because I expect more of myself, eventhough the exam is somewhat impromptu in nature and I never really reviewed for any of it. Interestingly enough, I checked my score against others who took the same exam from the Philippines and I ranked at no 2! Unfortunately, my score of 3.98 is not enough to get a Master level certification (I believe the minimum score for this level is 4.0 – I missed it by 0.02 points!!!)

Between now and April 4, I will be glued to this. Let see how many tests I can pass :)

Friendster

I felt cheated.

Since the start of the Friendster “fever”, I never jumped on the bandwagon. I have two reasons. First, it is too gay for me. I said so because most people I know, who are in friendster, are either girls, or are still below their puberty age. Second, I am not the sociable type. I’ve seen ugly exchanges of testimonials from ex-friends and I’m not one who would want to be at the receiving end of it. Nor am I one who would do well in writing testimonials. Don’t get me wrong, I see a lot of good things from my friends; I am just too lazy to write a testimonial of it for them.

It’s been years since Friendster started and I have always maintained my position. I blog, I do online messaging and I can be seen in several forums, but I don’t do friendster. Not until now.

Friendster introduced another feature, the friendster blogs, and my friends are into it. You see, I enjoy participating in blog discussions and when I clicked on “Post a Comment” link, it required a friendster account! What choice do I have? It’s a “make a friendster account or too bad you can’t post any comments here” kind of thing.

So I relented.

Good Friday

It's the time for fasting and penitence. Fasting is out of the picture, and we're doing a dvd marathon the entire day.

And since yesterday, I am too sick to function. :(

Hello PHP!

I am an ASP programmer. I write scripts in VBscript and use a solid line-up of Microsoft products: IIS 5.1, SQL Server 2k and Access 97+. I’ve been doing it for years already and it seems that I could live knowing only Microsoft-developed products.

Or so I thought. Nowadays, Microsoft is not the only entity that develops superb tools for programmers like me. There are alternatives, and sometimes, even bigger companies rely on non-Microsoft products. And sometimes, this is where the money is.

Take for example Linux, PHP and MySQL. It’s a solid development platform and tool used to develop any kind of web projects. The concept is similar to Win IIS, ASP, and SQL Server, only the approach is different. Many web hosting companies provide support for php and mysql; oftentimes, they offer cheaper hosting rates than Microsoft-based web hosts.

So now, I’ve decided to expand my skill set. I know the basics already, I just need to turn hard-core php programmer. On top of it, I’m learning XOOPS, an object-oriented dynamic content management system. Given a good reading material, I am hoping to accomplish this feat in a few weeks. I just need a good project.