May 6th, 2008 by Vienna
Talikogenic is a Filipino made up word that became popular around the time when I was in high school. It consist of “talikod” means “back on” (as in “don’t turn your back on me“) and “genic” from the word “photogenic”. Like Photogenic, which means somebody looking nicer in photos than in reality, Talikogenic is somebody who has nicer looking back view than front view.
May 5th, 2008 by Vienna
These are my farmer’s feet. I call them that because they are not feminine at all. Lengthwise, they’re okay. I never had a problem finding a pair of shoes that will feet them but they’re wide so open toed sandals and slippers do not really look nice on them.
I did this while we were watching some film.
Apr 29th, 2008 by Vienna
It took me a long time to find a suitable theme and until now I haven’t found that which I think is perfect. For now, I will settle with this theme because it looks simple and neat. I already changed the header and I might change the background (when I learn how to do it 
) into something too.
I gave up with the Gallery. The new WP doesn’t have that much options with its gallery. Sure you can upload multiple photos at one time but after you put the gallery code in your editor and set how many columns, rows, etc you like to display then that’s it. Wordpress will just display a thumbnail of all of the photos. Boring! Then if you click a thumbnail, the full size will be displayed in another page—that is so uncool!
Then there are plugins like Lightbox JS and the others for WP gallery but I guess they are intended for coders themselves and not for common Wordpress users like me. I am sorry but I have tried to install this plugin (lightbox JS and the likes) several times following different approaches but all failed. It just doesn’t work.
So I settled with Pictobrowser. It’s neater and you’ll be able to see the photo’s full size in the same page. I wanted to host my own photos but Pictobrowser only works if your photos are hosted by Flickr. By doing so, I am not using WP 2.5.1’s gallery which is so bad because the gallery is supposed to be what WP 2.5 is all about (schade!)!
Apr 23rd, 2008 by Vienna
Photos were taken during a walk around the neighborhood.
Mar 17th, 2008 by Vienna
I am back from Beijing and a few days of not being able to blog left me tremendous amount of work. Updating nine blogs is not exactly a walk in the park so I probably will skip some of them. I got sick for a few days too so that made it more difficult. It must have been the terrible smog in Beijing that gave me a terrible nasal and throat irritation.
For those of you who are planning to visit China, here are some of the things you need to bring other than your camera and things that are normally in your luggage.
A little pocket dictionary: I don’t know how much this is going to help you but just expect the worst. Think that not a lot of Chinese can speak English. If you are going to big cities like Beijing and Shanghai, you probably won’t need it unless you’ll drive with the taxi.
Medicine: In China, there are all sorts of medicines for all sort of sickness but you can never know if you are buying the right one because 99% of the medicines in pharmacies have Chinese names and the dosage instructions are in Chinese too.
Ointment with Eucalyptus or Mint smell: You’ll probably want to dab this on a small part above your upper lip every now and then. Why? Let’s just say… this smells a lot better.
Once, you have these you should be ok. Now, when you arrive there are some things you have to be careful about. China is a shopping haven because every thing comes in a cheaper price especially if you have nothing against fakery. You’ll find just about anything from Old Navy to Chanel. But be careful because they also fake money here. Check the money they give you (change from taxi drivers and vendors) if these are real bank notes just to make sure that it’s real even if the person handling it out to you seems to be the most trustworthy person on earth.
Mar 5th, 2008 by Vienna
To state the obvious, I have not written a single entry for a month and I am sorry for that. ViennaLopez.com along with Blogleafs.com have encountered a bit of a problem sometime last month but everything is back up and perfectly working again. Okay, that is not the reason why I failed to write for more than a month and if you would continue to read, you’ll learn that it is more than technical problems.
Matters stopping me from writing entries
1. I cannot find a good theme. I want this blog to be different from my other blogs. I’ve got too many blogs that are about my personal life already and I want this blog to focus on something other than myself. I want to post articles that could be of help not only to me for but to YOU (this blog’s readers) as well. From the very start, I always wanted this blog to be informative, entertaining, and inspiring so I put so much consideration in what I write here.
2. I have read/heard about it before. Sometimes when a good theme hit me, I normally spend some time thinking of how to write it only to decide not to write about it in the end. Why? Because I usually get the feeling that I have read it before. Though writing about a topic which was already written about by others is not considered copying, repeating a topic makes me feel ineffectual, imitative, and ineffective.
3. I feel insecure. I worry that readers will not appreciate what I write.
4. I don’t have enough time. I run six blogs so you can imagine how much work I have to do in a day to maintain all these blogs and since I want only the best to be published in this blog, posts doesn’t come too often.
I know it is mainly about feeling uncreative. I have contemplated about it for weeks and afterwards decided to shun my reluctance away. That’s right. Posts in this blog will come in a regular basis from now on. Topics will be about anything that I deem worthy of being written whether they’re written about by others already. Of course, I’ll still try to write interesting topics for you but I will not beat myself up thinking whether you like my post or not. I’ll leave it to you to speak up, to tell me why you like or don’t like my post or why you disagree with this blog’s contents. There’s the comment box for that.
And for new (or not-so-new) writers who find themselves in the same situation, here is an advice. Just by living your life, you already have accumulated knowledge about a variety of topics. Think about of subjects you already have some experience with and use that experience to develop articles. Don’t try so hard to write profound articles you have little knowledge about. If you are a mom, write about housekeeping or about taking care of your kids. Who knows, you might be helping other moms by sharing your experience. If you are a storekeeper, share that funny thing that just happened during your day at work. I can continue with the list but I think you got my point but just to stress it, I’ll put it this way—you can be creative just by being yourself.
Jan 16th, 2008 by Vienna
I have noticed the trend of the movies we watched recently and I don’t understand why the film industry is releasing a lot of this kind of movie. The theme is all the same—human extinction.
Take these following films for instance :
The Invasion : The movie starts with a crashing space shuttle. This shuttle then brought a virus to some parts of the United States. This virus is catalysed during sleeping and turns the infected host into an emotionless human or some sort of a half human half alien. Nicole Kidman plays a psychiatrist from New York who got infected but because she know that sleeping will turn her to this emotionless human, she tried to stay awake while trying to save her son from those who have already turned into numb-hearted people. Her son is immune to the virus this is the reason why those infected would like to kill her son.
28 Day Later : This movie started with an aggressive lab money attacking a human being and transferring a devastating virus to her. This virus is supposed to be terrifying because it is easily transmitted in a drop of blood or saliva and it will turn the infected to crazy, murderous, and stupid individuals.
28 weeks Later : a sequel of the latter and pretty much revolving around the same thing except in this movie they imply that people with a particular genetic make up are immune to the virus.
I am Legend : Set in the year 2012 New York. What more can I say? It’s pretty much like the first three movies. It is about an outbreak of a particular virus leaving New York city with about 3 survivors. Mr Neville (Will Smith) is one of them. He is a military scientist who is trying to find to cure to stop this thing you call—yes, virus.
Resident Evil and all it’s sequel : A virus (I couldn’t mention it enough) has escaped a lab turning the infected into hungry and mindless zombies. Alice (Mila J) is part of a group that is supposed to fight all these zombies and mutants to contain the virus and not let it infect the rest of the world.
Children of Men : Ok, this last one is not about a virus (thanks heavens) but it joins the rest because it is also about human extinction. The movie is set in the year 2027 where humans are not able to reproduce anymore. When the heroes in this movie discovered a miraculously pregnant girl, they did everything they can to protect her and bring her to a place to a where her child’s birth may help scientists to save the future of mankind.
Sorry for my lack of effort in detailing each movie properly. I mean what more could I say, most of them is just about these drugged zombie looking and blood vomiting virus infected maniacs.
I wish that the film industry can be a little bit more artistic and original.
Jan 13th, 2008 by Vienna
There is an opportunity in one of the blog advertising networks I am a member of that caught my attention. It is about a particular website that offers to pay webmasters to put voice ads on their websites. Who would want to do that and who would want to advertise about that site? The most annoying thing when using the internet is when a website you are visiting automatically plays music or videos. I believe that visitors have the right to chose what they want to read as well as what they want to hear when they visit a site.
Like the sound of cars honking or the sound from a nearby construction site, Pay Per Play (sorry but I refuse to link to them) is just plain intrusive. It’s internet noise pollution—an extremely distasteful way to advertise to people. The payouts sounds very promising but webmasters should still be cautious about this site. Think about your readers. Maybe some of them are in a quiet office and are reading your blog slyly. Imagine how offensive an audio ad will be in this situation. Do you hate pop-ups? Well, voice adverts is just the audio equivalent of that.
Advertise on your page, why not, but do it in a decent way. If Adsense and other ads are not enough and you still want to place adverts using video and audio, go and put them on the sidebar BUT let the visitor hit the play button.
I hope that before Pay Per Play and the likes become rampant, software developers have developed some sort of a voice-adverts blocker already.
Jan 1st, 2008 by Vienna
As if five blogs is not enough, I started a new this new one. It is a New Year’s gift to myself and this blog will bear my name. I will try to put a more serious tone on this one compared to my other blogs. At least, that’s what I plan. My other blogs namely, My Pink Notes, The Two Geeks, BlogLeafs, Ms. Myla, and Penny Wise are not more than nine months old however I can say from a simple blogger point of view that the collective performance of these blogs has exceeded my expectations so I decided to add another one. For this blog, I plan to do the following things:
1. Write quality content posts: not that my other blogs don’t have quality contents, it’s just tat they are way too personal to interest a wider audience.
2. Avoid writing about extremely personal topics: I suppose to I have to do this to achieve number 1 and my other five blogs should be enough for topics about my personal life.
3. Register this blog to blog communities and networks: It’s a great way to gain visitors that would drive traffic to this blog.
4. Visit new blogs and leave thoughtful comments in them: This is a great way of gaining fellow bloggers and probable loyal readers.
I hope that this blog will take off soon and catch up the rest of the 5 blogs.