My Elections 2013 Ballot [✏]

In a few hours, elections for senatorial, congressional and local positions will start in the Philippines. This is the second automated elections of the country. I've been looking at the profiles of candidates on the rappler site and using the information provided, I selected my bets to fill up slots for the senate.

I've selected a bunch of experienced lawyers and those with sufficient public office experience. There are also fresh faces also that I believe can contribute new ideas in the senate. I'm a bit sensitive on where they stand on issues (especially on the controversial RH Bill) so with some candidates, I had to check that one. 

I hope everything will go smoothly with the elections tomorrow.

God bless the Philippines!

Google Glass is the Future [★]

As soon as I saw this on CNN, I knew this is the start of a new era. This technology will take over the "touch technology" that is the trend on mobile phones and tablets of today. I know it's not yet available in the market (I heard it would be next year?) and currently it's still on beta stage among thousands of developers handpicked by Google to do test runs on the device. I bet everyone is quite curious about this new innovation. Limited information about its features are available in the web and developers are still on the works on discovering the boundaries of the capabilities of this device.

The protocol is to say "ok glass" before addressing your command to the device. Google Glass is all about voice commands. Think of all the new possibilities! Everything will be done handsfree! Seeing the videos of beta users on the Google Glass site is enough to make me hyped about it.

Lifehacker Featured Desktop: The Slate Desktop [★]

It's a nice thing to personalize your desktop. It's one screen that you would mostly stumble upon when using your laptop/PC. What you see on it would most likely say something about the owner of that computer.

As for me, I didn't really bother decorating my desktop before. I had the same wallpaper for months and the folders and files were all scattered around the screen. However, everything changed when the featured desktop articles of lifehacker caught my attention. These inspired me to try something new on my desktop. 

And my chosen theme was The Slate Desktop.

This is how my desktop looks now:

  
Pretty neat, right?

You can do that on your own desktop too! There are instructions in the link on how to achieve this look. And if you devised your own desktop theme, you can send that over to the team at lifehacker for them to share it to their readers. :D  

Piano + Vocals Cover: Stay (Rihanna) [♬ ~ #8]

I loved this song since the first time I heard Rihanna sing this in the Grammys. The song is very dramatic and the emotions could really be felt by the way she sang it. It was an easy one on the piano, so I decided to make a cover of it. This will never match Rihanna's singing, but here's my version of the song. :D

Food Trips: Ara Korean Restaurant - A Taste of Korean Cuisine [☝]

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you would have known by now that I love Korean culture. I have come to love their music first, then their dramas, and then their food! I love how their cuisine is so healthy because it consists mostly of vegetables. :D

Together with my friends (who are also kpop fans), we decided to pay a visit to this Korean restaurant that is just within the area of our office. 

After we settled down on our table, we were already served by side dishes, of which is a standard on any Korean restaurants.

Ted Talks: Hyeonseo Lee: My Escape from North Korea (2013) [★]

I am a subscriber of the TED Talks podcast. I find them really entertaining and inspiring. It's very engaging to listen to these people who have such brilliant ideas and experiences to share with the world. Some of the notable talks that I remember are of this woman who made the walls of an abandoned house into a source of inspiration to everyone who passes by (watch her talk here), of this guy who encouraged everyone to document every second of their life (literally) (watch his talk here) and of this techie guy who developed a program of an AI robot using Apple gadgets (watch his talk here). I get so amazed by the innovative ideas that they have and their dedication to make these ideas come to life.

There's this one TED talk that really got my attention and brought me to tears by the end of it. The speaker is a lady from North Korea who shares her story of how she and her family escaped from her country.

The Java Monologues [☝]

I've been programming professionally in the Java Programming language for the past three years, but still there are aspects of my work that seems unfamiliar to me. I would be listing down below some concepts that I wanted to learn more about this OOP language (and if I mentioned something wrong, please do correct me!).

• The purpose of implementing IClusterable and Serializable interfaces in Model objects (and even in forms)

We declare them Serializable because we want to keep the values of these variables in Forms as long as the session is alive. In some web pages when you press the Back button of the browser, the values that you input in the form is still there. What Serializable does is that it saves the values in a compressed file (I'm just not sure where this file is located) and the page just accesses it once the form is loaded again.

As of now, I still have to research the IClusterable part.

• The differences of using protected, public, private, and default Java classes/methods

This concept is best illustrated by this diagram (credits to this):

Modifier    | Class | Package | Subclass | World
————————————+———————+—————————+——————————+———————
public      |  ✔    |    ✔    |    ✔     |   ✔
————————————+———————+—————————+——————————+———————
protected   |  ✔    |    ✔    |    ✔     |   ✘
————————————+———————+—————————+——————————+———————
no modifier |  ✔    |    ✔    |    ✘     |   ✘
————————————+———————+—————————+——————————+———————
private     |  ✔    |    ✘    |    ✘     |   ✘

public - visible to any class

no modifier (default) - visible within its own package only

private - visible within its own class only

protected -  visible within its own package and to its subclasses in another package

These access level modifiers exist in Java to eliminate misuse of variables in classes.