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Thursday, April 15, 2010

Taking Smart’s Surf TV for a spin Published by: yuga under: TV and Display , Telecoms. 28 replies posted: March 24th, 2010





Was able to borrow a demo unit of Smart’s Surf TV and was testing how the internet TV box really works. Here are my first impressions on how the device works.

Smart Surf TV is primarily for content consumption rather than content creation. As such, it is more usable in the living room than the office or study.

So, what’s inside the box?


The entire package consists of the following — the TV box, a USB keyboard, USB mouse, a wireless remote, Smart Bro Plug-It, Smart SIM card, and VGA cables. So basically, all you need is a TV, monitor or a projector to hook it up to.

What ports are built into the TV box?

At the back of the device, there is a VGA port (monitor), a TV out, RCA (video in), 4 USB ports, a LAN port. There’s an one extra USB port left after the keyboard, mouse and USB dongle has been plugged. The VGA port allows you to hook up the device to an PC monitor, TV set or projector.










The LAN port is also interesting since it could mean you can hook it up to your wired network at home and get it online as well (I need to try this out for the full review).

How does it work?

There’s an embedded OS (Linux-based) into the device that boots up the system. I’d say it’s similar to the Express Gate and all those other quick boot-up OSes that you find in netbooks and ultraportables. The browser used here is Opera.

The SmartBro Plug-It provides internet connectivity to the device although that LAN port could also be an option.

The wireless remote allows you to do some basic navigational features but you have the mouse as well as the keyboard for data input.

There’s no internal storage built into the device but since there’s an extra USB port, I think it’s possible to plug in a flash drive and use it as storage.

I’ll need more time to play around with Surf TV before I can write anything substantial or conclusive but so far, the device is promising.


Saturday, April 10, 2010

The true reason why do people cry?

You’re watching the final scene in Thelma and Louise, and you’re on your third handkerchief. You turn your tear stained face to the side and look through blurred, saline-flooded vision at your cat, who is staring back at you witnessing the curious spectacle. Why is it that humans can be reduced to blubbering messes, while other members of the animal kingdom don’t seem to let out even a sniffle?

We have tear ducts to lubricate and protect our eyes from dust and other particles. The ducts are under the upper eyelids and produce a salty liquid—a tear-–-that gets spread throughout the eye after each blink. Animals too have the ability to produce tears, but not necessarily for the same reasons that we humans produce them.

Three types of tears are generated by the human eye. Basal tears protect the eye and keep it moist. Reflex tears flush out the eye when it becomes irritated. And emotional tears flow in response to sadness, distress, or physical pain.

Studies have shown that emotional tears contain more manganese, an element that affects temperament, and more prolactin, a hormone that regulates milk production. Sobbing out manganese and prolactin is thought to relieve tension by balancing the body’s stress levels and eliminating build ups of the chemicals, making the crier feel better.

But this minor physiological benefit aside, the most likely reason we produce emotional tears is because it’s a means of communication. Before babies can speak, they can cry. The only way for infants to express frustration, pain, fear, or need is to cry. Adults may use crying to bond with other humans. Expressing sadness can prompt comfort and support from peers. Different languages can provide barriers to spoken communication, but emotions are universal. There are also culturally acceptable reasons for crying that bring people together, such as at funerals or weddings.

Though there is a significant debate over whether animals have emotions and can express them, some animals do appear to cry for emotional reasons. Elephants seem to grieve when a family member dies and will guard the body and travel long distances to view it. Elephant experts at the London Zoo once told Charles Darwin that the animals do indeed mourn. Chimpanzees also appear to cry, but some scientists still insist that the tears released by these animals are strictly for cleaning the eye.

Whether or not animals shed tears for emotional reasons has yet to be scientifically proven. Humans, however, can and do dissolve into tears for any number of reasons. Cleansing the eye, relieving stress, conveying pain, communication, and societal assimilation can all lead to an empty tissue box. So weeping after that sappy movie might not mean that you are a total wuss after all. In fact, it may mean that you are behaving like a perfectly normal human being.

Thursday, April 8, 2010

How to Make Your Wedding a True Family Affair


Step 1 :
Sit down with your partner and make a list of important family traditions you can incorporate into different aspects of your wedding day or pre-wedding day preparations and ceremonies. Ask elder family members if certain flowers, colors, or ornaments have significant meaning or value to your family. Think creatively about family traditions that will add a sense of familiarity and warmth to your wedding day. Find ways to include these traditions in a fun, creative and memorable way! Try to use significant traditions that include siblings, best friends, and grandparents.

Step 2 :
Assign two to three family members to work with the catering company to design an appropriate menu for your wedding day. Impress upon these family members the importance of selecting several key food, wine and dessert varieties that appeal to the greater family dynamic. You can even provide family recipes to help the decision making process. (If you do not want to give executive control to a third party, explain that although you will consider the suggested menu very closely, you also reserve the right to make any changes or modifications you feel are necessary to enhance the menu and satisfy the greatest number of people.)

Step 3 :
Make a song list that includes songs that are especially important to your family, your partner and yourself. Think about songs that were played when your parents or siblings wed, a song playing on the radio in the car on your way to your college graduation ceremony, a song that best describes your partner, a favorite song you sing along to with your best friend, etc. Try to compile a song list that creates a sense of emotion, nostalgia and sentiment. (Aim for songs that will recreate positive shared moments you have shared with the ones you love!)

Step 4 :
Divide tasks among family members. Ask a parent or close sibling to read a passage from your family's religious text, an old love letter, or a favorite poem. Have a younger niece or nephew recite several funny family antedotes. These recitations will inspire unity and connection amongst your guests. Also, having a parent or sibling perform special reading(s) that hold significant meaning for you and your family will allow the wedding to serve as a a celebration of family tradition, values and themes.

Step 5 :
Study video footage from your parents, siblings and other family member's wedding day events. Try to incorporate small ideas that, together with your own unique vision of your wedding day, will create a memorable wedding for you, your partner and your family. Also, consider if you can wear your mother's wedding dress, fly in family members who are not in town, have creative family members help you (or the wedding planner) decide on key decorations, make a memory book of the day for family members to receive in the mail after the ceremony, mix the bride and groom family when organizing the seating chart, ask family members to record special video messages on the day and distribute later as part of a video diary of the wedding, or plan a big family dinner prior to the wedding (separate from the rehearsal dinner). Incorporating all, or just a few, of these tips will help to make your wedding a true family affair!

My true Barkada.


Yes, my beloved barkada. This is where I felt the true “friendship”. Like I said before, my barkada is like a family to me. We rarely see each other, mostly on holidays and we enjoy our meetings so much because of the busy days of college. I am just happy that we get to meet once again, especially during the Christmas season. Although there were a few people missing in the pack but still the fun continued. We miss those people a lot. We celebrate this particular reunion during the Lantern Parade in the University of the Philippines Diliman. This year, we get to do an overnight although only four of us went, and I’m the only guy. Hahah~!

I wish events such as this will continue as I rarely see a chance of finding decent friends in my school, my barkada is the only group of true friends that I have. I remember what my Philo professor said that the true barkada is the barkada that’s only few in number and very close to each other. Close in the sense that we treat each other as a brother or sister rather than just a mere friend.

OoOOh I so love my barkada. and I hope I would see friends as decent as them in my school and everywhere else.

10 Keys to True Happiness

The Set Point
Better living through science is possible. Over the last 70 years or so, researchers have been probing happy and unhappy people, and they're finally zeroing in on the factors that make a difference. What follows are the top ten. By the way, the experts think your genes account for about 50 percent of your disposition; the other nine factors make up the rest.

1. Wealth
Money can buy a degree of happiness. But once you can afford to feed, clothe and house yourself, each extra dollar makes less and less difference.

Whenever and wherever they look, scientists find that, on average, wealthier people are happier. But the link between money and happiness is complicated. In the past half-century, average income has skyrocketed in industrialized countries, yet happiness levels have remained static. Once your basic needs are met, money only seems to boost happiness if you have more than your friends, neighbors and colleagues.

"Dollars buy status, and status makes people feel better," says Andrew Oswald, an economist at Warwick University in Coventry, England. This helps explain why people who can seek status in other ways -- scientists or actors, for example -- may happily accept relatively poorly paid jobs.

2. Desire
How much stuff do you need to feel good? In the 1980s, political scientist Alex Michalos, professor emeritus at the University of Northern British Columbia in Prince George, asked 18,000 college students in 39 countries to rate their happiness on a numeric scale. Then he asked them how close they were to having all they wanted. He found that the people whose aspirations -- not just for money, but for friends, family, job, health, the works -- soared furthest beyond what they already had, tended to be less happy than those who perceived a smaller gap. Indeed, the size of the gap predicted happiness about five times better than income alone. "The gap measures just blow away the absolute measures of income," says Michalos.

This "aspiration gap" might explain why most people fail to get much happier as their salaries rise. Instead of satisfying our desires, most of us merely want more. In surveys by the Roper polling organization over the last two decades, Americans were asked to list the material possessions they thought important to "the good life." The researchers found that the more of these goods people already had, the longer their list was. The good life remained always just out of reach.

3. Intelligence
Only a few surveys have examined whether smart people are happier, but they indicate intelligence has no effect. That seems surprising at first, since brighter people often earn more, and the rich tend to be happier.

Some researchers speculate that brighter people could have higher expectations and thus be dissatisfied with anything less than the highest achievements. "Or maybe scoring high on an IQ test -- which means you know a lot of vocabulary and can rotate things in your mind -- doesn't have a lot to do with your ability to get along well with people," says Ed Diener, a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He speculates that "social intelligence" could be the real key to happiness.

4. Genetics
Are some people born happy or unhappy? David Lykken, a behavioral geneticist and professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, believes our feeling of well-being at any moment is determined half by what is going on in our lives at that time and half by a "set point" of happiness, which is up to 90 percent genetically determined and to which we eventually return after dramatic events. "While our happiness set point is largely determined by our genes," says Lykken, "whether we bounce along above it or slump along under it depends on our -- or our parents' -- good sense and good training."

Lykken found that genetic variation accounted for between 44 and 55 percent of the difference in happiness levels. Neither income, marital status, religion nor education accounted for any more than about 3 percent.

But whether you trudge through life on the low side of your set point or skip along on the high side is up to you. Many studies have shown that extroverts tend to be happier than most people, and a lot happier than introverts. And research has found that putting people in a good mood makes them more sociable. Michael Cunningham at the University of Louisville in Kentucky showed that people were more talkative and open with others after watching a happy film than after watching a sad one. Theoretically, even someone with a low set point can boost his or her outlook.
Let's Get Together
5. Beauty
First the bad news: Good-looking people really are happier. When Diener got people to rate their own looks, there was a "small but positive effect of physical attractiveness on subjective well-being."

Perhaps the explanation is that life is kinder to the beautiful. Or it could be more subtle than that. The most attractive faces are highly symmetrical, and there is evidence that symmetry reflects good genes and a healthy immune system. So perhaps beautiful people are happier because they are healthier.

You may be able to cash in on beauty's emotional high even if you aren't gorgeous -- if you believe you look great. Unfortunately, studies show that women tend to think they are too fat and men worry about being puny.

6. Friendship
It is hard to imagine a more pitiful existence than life on the streets of Calcutta or in one of its slums, or making a living there as a prostitute. Yet despite the poverty and squalor they face, people with these lives are much happier than you might imagine.

Diener interviewed 83 people from these three groups and measured their life satisfaction using a scale for which a score of 2 is considered neutral. Overall, they averaged 1.93 -- not great, but creditable, compared with a control group of middle-class students in the city who scored 2.43. And the slum dwellers, who were happiest of the three disadvantaged groups, scored 2.23, which is not significantly different from the score the students had.

"We think social relationships are partly responsible," says Diener. He points out that all three deprived groups got high satisfaction ratings in specific areas such as family (2.5) and friends (2.4). Slum dwellers did particularly well, perhaps because they are most likely to be able to cash in on the social support that arises from the importance of the extended family in Indian culture.

7. Marriage
In an analysis of reports from 42 countries, U.S. researchers found that married people are consistently happier than singletons. The effect is small, but that still begs the question: Does marriage make you happy, or are happy people simply more likely to get married?

Both answers may be true. In a study that followed more than 30,000 Germans for 15 years, Diener and his colleagues found that happy people are more likely to get married and then stay married. But anyone can improve his or her mood by getting married. The effect begins about a year before the "happy day" and lasts for at least a year afterward. For most people, satisfaction levels do return to their baseline, but the researchers say this conceals the fact that a good marriage can have a permanent positive effect. Furthermore, people who are less happy to begin with will get a bigger boost from marriage.

And it seems there's something special about signing that piece of paper: The research shows that you can't get as much benefit from simply cohabiting. "My hunch is that cohabiting couples lack the deeper security that comes with the formal band of gold, and that is why they are not quite so happy," says Oswald. "Insecurity, we know from all data, is bad for human beings."

Aging Happily

8. Faith
Karl Marx was fairly close to the mark when he described religion as an opiate for the masses. Of the dozens of studies that have looked at religion and happiness, the vast majority have found a positive link.

Believing in an afterlife can give people meaning and purpose and reduce the feeling of being alone in the world, says Harold G. Koenig at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C., especially as people get older. "You really see the effect in times of stress. Religious belief can be a very powerful way of coping with adversity."

Religion also brings social interaction and support. But Koenig believes it is not just about receiving. "Studies have shown that people who provide support to others are better off themselves. They even live longer." This, researchers agree, makes religious involvement a source of greater satisfaction than other socially inclusive activities such as book groups.

9. Charity
Several studies have found a link between happiness and altruistic behavior. But as with many behavioral traits, it is not always clear whether doing good makes you feel good, or whether happy people are more likely to be altruistic.

James Konow, an economist at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, tried to tease apart cause and effect in a lab experiment.

He recruited subjects to answer questionnaires, and toward the end of the session gave half of them $10 and half, nothing. He then told the subjects who had been paid that they could share their money with those who hadn't been compensated. Konow found that the happier students were overall, the more likely they were to share the money. However, being in a happy mood on the day of the test did not make them any more generous, and students who gave did not report any immediate increase in happiness. In fact, they were slightly less happy.

But those who shared their money were more likely to show the personality traits of a "self-actualizer" -- they were concerned with their own personal growth and improvement. Konow thinks that while a single act of generosity did not make his subjects happier, the cumulative effects of being a generous person did.

10. Age
Old age may not be so bad. "Given all the problems of aging, how could the elderly be more satisfied?" asks Laura Carstensen, a psychology professor at Stanford University in California.

In one study, Carstensen gave pagers to 184 people between the ages of 18 and 94, and paged them five times a day for a week, asking them to fill out an emotions questionnaire each time. Old people reported positive emotions just as often as young people, but they reported negative emotions much less frequently.

Why are old people happier? Some scientists suggest older people may expect life to be harder and learn to live with it, or they're more realistic about their goals, only setting ones that they know they can achieve. But Carstensen thinks that with time running out, older people have learned to focus on things that make them happy and let go of those that don't.

"People realize not only what they have, but also that what they have cannot last forever," he says. "A goodbye kiss to a spouse at the age of 85, for example, may elicit far more complex emotional responses than a similar kiss to a spouse at the age of 20."

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

True People Within The World Of Fakers

Everyone knows about the online world. The online world is a vast place filled with information as well as the largest network of people out there. Of course, the online world isn't a place that is full of the truth. Just like some information could be completely false, there are some people who don't show their true selves. Even though, this stuff happens in reality too, the internet is imfanous for that aspect. So what about friends and the people out there? Are there really people that are really truthful?

Of course, there are. Behind each username and montior lies a real person who have real stories and real issues. If there are real people behind those monitors, it is very possible to make friendships with those people. The beautiful of the internet that is that the distance of the network is limitless. Being friends from state to state or country to country is really easy (other than the langauge gap). People don't need to take friends on the internet for grant as hurting someone online can be just as hurtful as hurting someone in real life.

Yeah, I do believe that internet friends are real because those people are real.

True love

In most cases we think: this is true love, when in fact it’s not. But than if this ain’t love than what it is? There are plenty of things that we confuse with love.


It could be just the basic instinct. The feelings can be passionate and crazy, but in fact both people may want only sex. And after it all the misunderstanding starts, and once infatuated lovers will find out that they have nothing in common and sometimes they don’t even know what to talk with each other.


Another variant is when people lack support, care and attention to their person or they just scared to stay single. Being with someone can be a habit when one simply got used to the other. It can either be a sick addiction or some self-interest. People call all these types of relationship love just by mistake or trying to conceal the true nature of it.


But than what does real love look and feel like? Maybe it’s when two people seem to know each other for ages and even in their previous lives. They can go on talking and talking and conversation never lacks topics and never gets dull. Or people don’t have to say anything because they understand each other without words. And those moments, minutes and even hours of silence are never uncomfortable. True love is when partners complete one another, when they’re together it’s peaceful, the whole other world with it’s sufferings and problems doesn’t exist and nothing even matters.


True love means understanding. One trusts another more than him/herself and feels ready to satisfy every little need of a partner. Two people don’t stop for a second looking into each other eyes.

It’s said that two persons truly in love aren’t looking at each other but in the one direction. And this is rather reasonable because they don’t say nothing “this is yours and this is mine” and share everything: friends, enemies, interests, problems and etc. One has his/her own identity but sees him/herself only as a part of the other. Still real love is not a relationship of property. If you really love someone you may say “I belong you” but always be ready to let go if it makes the person you love happy.


Jealousy stands out of the true love. How can one be jealous if there’s so much love and faithfulness? Real love doesn’t long for power, it doesn’t want to hurt, doesn’t want to punish for mistakes, it’s self-sacrificing and ready to forgive other and other again. But it’s wrong to think that true love is always a suffering, it only means that you take a person as he or she is and don’t expect the one you love to be perfect.


True love isn’t supposed to blow your mind, yet it doesn’t tend to get and to possess – it’s a and very special state of a soul.


But the question that true love is still has no definite answer. Do we truly love only once in our life? At what age are we supposed to meet our love? Does it last for a lifetime or just for a while? Probably everyone has his own answers to this questions. The truth is that no one should spend life chasing ideals or building relationships by some model of a true love. One will probably fail and miss the real thing beyond all this.


We should remember that very many things we need to supply our healthy and comfortable living but only the true feeling of love makes life really longer and happier. And this is scientifically proved.

tRue Beaty of nature



Getting There
Going to Anawangin will approximately take 6 hours. From Manila, you can drive or take a bus to San Antonio, Zambales. Upon arriving at San Antonio you can hire a boat at Pundaquit that will take you to Anawangin. It is advisable to leave Manila at night so it wouldn’t be hot while traveling.

true happiness