Digital Adventures of Cyril Pauya

I say good-bye to a great visionary, one of my idols in the computer industry.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/steve-jobs/8810743/Steve-Jobs-tributes-to-the-Apple-co-founder.html

Rest in Peace Steve Jobs. Thank you for making the world a better place to live in.

Hi.  It’s been a long time since I have updated my blog and a lot has happened since.  Here’s for a quick post:

• I have switched operating systems from Microsoft Windows XP with SP3 to Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04.  Why?  It’s FREE, it’s open source, it has very minimal threat with viruses and other malicious software, it’s very configurable, and it now supports dual-monitor seamlessly.
• I have uploaded the beta version of myListBoard.com – it’s a website that allows you to create a list and share it with others.  A lot of features are planned but I just can’t find the time to continue development nowadays.
• I have moved back to Midsayap, Cotabato, my dear hometown; where water is out every 5:30am to 10:00am and from 3:00pm to 6:00pm; where electrical black-outs happen almost daily; and where my friends and family are close.
• I have also resumed from being on-leave for 5 months at Notre Dame of Midsayap College – the first Notre Dame school in Asia!  If you can’t access the link, then you know it’s black-out in our area again.  (we hope to fix this black-out problem soon)

Keep posted for many new updates.

Just this afternoon, Ian pointed out that my Custom Google Search does not correctly display under FireFox and Internet Explorer, it looks okay with Opera though.  I checked it out and sure enough, it only looks good with my favorite browser Opera.

It’s my fault, I forgot to test my updates with the other web browsers yesterday.

After fixing it, I did a sample search for “PayPal” to check if it’s working.  To my surprise it did not display any article from my blog with PayPal in it.  I thought something’s wrong with my blog and tried “IMBR” and the articles were displayed.  Now that’s a bummer!  I know Google still does indexing of my pages but this is not good to my visitors.

So for now, I reverted everything to WordPress’ search engine.  Google search results is not important to me for now anyway.  What’s important is that the search functionality works.

Thanks Ian.

When I started this blog I decided not to accept comments.  Why?  Because this is my personal site and enabling comments would just defeat the purpose of saying it’s “my personal site“.  Also, I don’t like moderating comments, identifying spams, removing unwanted links, etc.  In short, I don’t like to manage comments.

However, as I review my previous post about my successful PayPal withdrawal, I noticed realized that I have just reaped the benefits of enabling comments on weblogs.  I couldn’t have used PayPal if I haven’t read thru the many comments by the good netizens out there.

Comments also enable a blogger to create a community for his posts.  Most of the times, the people who commented would subscribe to his feed either for a follow-up or for another round of interesting topics.

Realizing my big newbie mistake, I immediately enabled comments for the whole site, editted my previous posts, and wrote this post to tell you:

You are welcome to comment, pingback, trackback, or personally contact me.

Paypal is the next big thing to being online.  It allows you to do a lot on the net like shopping, electronic payments, sending/receiving money in lieu of Western Union, and others.

I signed-up with Paypal by year 2007 but during that time it only allowed us Filipinos to receive funds.  We cannot do a withdrawal yet and what a bummer that was.

Last December 2008, I decided to use Paypal to receive payments for my remote work.  I searched thru the web and found lots of references of how Filipinos were able to withdraw funds to their credit cards or banks.  But only one was detailed enough to answer the following questions:

1. Which type of Paypal account do I choose?
2. How do I verify my Paypal account to lift my limits?
3. Do I really need to link my account to a bank account or a debit or a credit card would do?
4. Most important of all, How do I withdraw funds?

This post will answer the above questions as I have experienced it.

Read more…

For this week, I busied myself with tweaking this blog to become a more usable website and got the following so far:

• Web site now uses iNove wordpress theme – better typography and layout
• Comments are good, give it to me be it positive or negative.  I have disabled comments for the whole site – sorry but this is my personal web site, please use trackbacks and pingbacks instead
• A contact me page that uses cformsII has been created just in case visitors wants to, well, “contact me”
• To monitor statistics, I have installed WordPress.com Stats

Welcome to the domain of Cyril P. Pauya.

This will be my portal to the world where much of my life’s work will be published.