I've decided to sell the shiny new Asus X58LE that I won in a raffle last week.

Summary of specs:

- Intel T5850 2.16 GHz
- 2 GB DDR2 667 MHz SDRAM
- 160 GB SATA HDD
- 15.6" HD screen
- 1.3 megapixel camera
- DVD/CD writer
- 5-in-1 card reader (SD, MMC, MS, MS-Pro, xD)
- 4 USB 2.0 slots
- WiFi/LAN ready
- Looks really cool*

The machine comes with Red Flag Linux, which is the semi-official Linux distro of the authoritarian Chinese government. I have no idea why the Asus people chose it, but if you have trouble accessing porn political sites, you can always wipe it and install Ubuntu or Windows XP/Vista.

I'm selling it for 32,000 pesos, which is around 5,000 pesos below the normal retail price. If you live in Metro Manila and are interested, please contact me.

UPDATE (20-Jun-2009): Finally sold it for 26,000 pesos. I'm just glad to be rid of it.

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*Will not necessarily make you look cool.

This is not an electric car

I saw a lot of lovely cars at the Manila International Auto Show two weeks ago. You have to take my word for it because apparently, I can't hold my fucking hand still when taking pictures with my camera phone--all the images came out blurred. I fail.

Of course, I didn't get to do anything with the nice cars except look, drool, and take bad pictures. I would have given my left testicle (the smaller one) to take the Ford GT out for a spin, but I wasn't even offered the chance. There was one car available for test drive though: the REVAi, a tiny odd-looking electric car from India.

This is an electric car

On a whim, I signed up for a test drive. I had to fill out a form that basically said I'd be responsible for any damage to their car but they wouldn't be responsible for any damage to me. Sounds fair. After that, a salesman led me out to the parking lot, which was pretty far from the display booth. I was regretting it halfway through the long walk, but I didn't want the effort I spent filling out the form to go to waste, so I soldiered on.

The first thing I noticed after climbing into the REVAi was a sharp screeching noise. The salesman explained that it was coming from the air conditioner and not the engine. I thought he was just bullshitting me like car salesmen do, but he turned the aircon off, and sure enough, the noise was gone. I immediately turned it back on though--I was already sweaty from the long walk, and to drive in the sweltering summer heat of Manila without air conditioning would be inhumane torture.

Being a responsible driver, I did a quick pre-drive check. I saw that the side mirrors were angled too low for me to see anything useful. That was when I found out that there are no power controls for the side mirrors, and I would have to stick my hands out the windows to adjust them manually. Screw that. Who needs side mirrors anyway?

I fumbled with the weird handbrake (confusing), turned a plastic knob to put the car into gear (cute), and stepped on the gas pedal. The car lurched forward, and I soon decided that it felt pretty like a golf cart. No, that's not exactly a compliment.

And maybe I'm just a bad driver, but the car seemed to have the tendency to understeer. I took a left turn too fast and drifted one lane to the right, almost running over a fat man, or rather, almost bouncing off him. I don't think it's possible to actually run over anything larger than a poodle with that tiny car.

The test drive was over in less than five minutes. It wasn't a bad experience overall--at least I didn't wreck the car--but I was underwhelmed. Also, my ears were bleeding from the nonstop screeching of the aircon.

I forgot to ask about the price, but that's not really important. I won't be buying one anytime soon. Reducing carbon emission and obsoleting fossil fuel are laudable goals, but I don't think electric cars are ready for prime time in this country. I just don't see how driving one of those tiny tin boxes on the chaotic streets of Metro Manila would result in anything other than ridicule or death, or maybe both.

But hey, your mileage may vary.

WARNING: Kids, don't try this at home.

I got home late Wednesday night to find my PC showing a blue screen of death instead of downloading porn the latest TV episodes. I pressed the reset button, and everything was fine... until I got another blue screen of death a few minutes later. I rebooted several more times, and got the lovely blue screen within a few minutes each time. I was seeing red, and when the PC died yet again, I lost my temper and gave it a hard kick.

I immediately felt remorse. I could have damaged my hard drives with that! What's wrong with me? I decided to give it one last try before I give up and cry myself to sleep. And guess what? It worked, and I haven't encountered another blue screen ever since. Huh. How did that happen? Maybe a tiny insect got fried on my motherboard, and my kick knocked it loose? I don't know. All I know is that violence works. Ha!

Once again, kids, don't try this at home.

* * *

My pattern of abusive behavior towards computers started back when I was in high school. One day, my old CRT monitor began to show an annoying purple tint. After fruitless minutes of adjusting hue and color temperature and whatnot, I got very frustrated. And what better way to deal with frustration than some violence? I whacked the left side of the monitor. The purple tint magically disappeared.

It came back the next day. I whacked the monitor again, and it worked. Eventually, the ghost of Barney would come back more and more often and would require harder and harder whacks to exorcise. I slapped and whacked the poor monitor constantly for months until it finally died.

* * *

I hadn't posted a new blog entry in the last 10 days. I think chickenmafia.com had never gone this long without updates before. Tsk tsk.

It's not as if I had nothing to write about. I went to a few blogger events recently, and I had the responsibility to announce that artsy fashion brand Volcom has a cool T-shirt design contest and that the California Pizza Kitchen has... pizzas. But I didn't. I was just lazy I guess.

I wonder if violence would work on me as well as it did on my PC. If someone threatens to kick me in the nuts every time I go two days without blogging, what would I do?

Hmm. I'd probably start wearing a protective cup.

I just tried to unsubscribe from a mailing list. How hard can that be, right? Just enter my email address, click submit, and....

"There was a problem"? What the fuck? That has got to be the most useless error message since "Keyboard missing; press F1 to continue." And it's not as if I asked for something complicated. I didn't ask for world peace or a cure for cancer. All I wanted was to never see your crappy newsletters again. How can you possibly screw that up?

And don't you want to at least tell me what the problem was? No? Not even a little hint? Fuck you.

"Rapists???"

That was the strange one-word SMS message I got from a friend this afternoon.

A few minutes before that, I had sent him a geek question about some PHP scripts. That "Rapists???" message sure wasn't the reply I expected. I was about to send a "Huh?" when the leftover text from my last message made me realize that it was my fault after all. I didn't ask about PHP scripts. I asked about PHP rapists... or at least my phone did.

Ever since I got my first cell phone years ago, I've been using T9 predictive text, which uses a dictionary to let you input text with less key presses. For example, if you want to say "chicken," instead straining your thumb to press 22244444222553366 (I feel tired just thinking about it), you can simply press 2442536--one key for each letter. So convenient, right? And if multiple words share the same key combination, T9 picks the most commonly used one for you... so smart.

Some of my friends find it strange that I always text in unabbreviated English, but I don't care. I refuse to learn Txtardese because I absolutely hate it. Plus I lack thumb dexterity, and T9 is pretty much the only thing that allows me to text slightly faster than your grandmother.

Back to my creepy text message.... 727478 spells "script," so adding a 7 should give me "scripts," right? Right? Nope. T9 smartly predicted that "rapists" is the word I wanted. Thanks a lot, T9.

Seriously, is "rapists" really a more commonly used word than "scripts"? The world is such a horrible place.

Have you ever felt like there aren't enough hours in a day for all the TV shows you want to watch?

I've always wanted a way to speed up TV viewing. Windows Media Player does have a variable playback speed feature: press Ctrl+Shift+G when you're playing a WMV or MP3 file and you'll get a faster (1.4x) playback speed. Fun! Unfortunately, the trick doesn't work for other common media file types, so I rarely get to use it. Sure, I can convert all my TV shows to WMVs, but that's just too much work.

Well, my life was stuck at boring normal speed until I found Jesus Enounce 2xAV. It's a plug-in for Windows Media Player that lets you adjust media playback speed on the fly. And it works smoothly for all the file types that I've tried. Hallelujah! (Before you ask, no, I'm not getting paid to plug the product. I haven't sold my soul to PayPerPost, and I never will.)

I've been using the 7-day free trial version for a few weeks now. Yes, I managed to get around the 7-day limit because I'm awesome like that. And no, it's not technically software piracy, so they can't sue me... I think.

Anyway, I now get to watch downloaded TV shows and movies at 1.4x or even 1.5x speed. The little plug-in saves me a lot of time and allows me to work more and be more productive. Yay!

Just kidding, heh. Of course I'm using the extra time to watch even more TV. Hey, CSI: Miami is no longer as painful to watch when you can finish two episodes in an hour.

Four months ago, I got a new A4Tech optical mouse with an extra button that performs a double click. Even though I rarely had the chance to use the frivolous double click feature, I was quite satisfied with the mouse overall. I mean, it's just a freaking mouse. The bar for satisfaction was never really that high.

But last week, things started to go wrong. Very wrong. As I was surfing the Web, I noticed that when I do a mouse click, it's sometimes registered as a double click. Uh-oh, that can't be good.

The problem got worse with each passing day. Now, whenever I press the mouse button, I can't predict if I'm going to get one click or two clicks. This of course causes all kinds of problems, like accidentally closing two windows instead of one, or opening the same file twice and causing Windows to slow down to a crawl. Unpredictability is not good. Not good! Grrr!

I don't know why this is happening. I'm guessing that the wire of the magic double click button somehow got crossed with the one for the left button. If that's the case, then what was once a useless feature has become a source for headache and temper tantrums. That's right, I said tantrums. I've found that slamming the mouse hard against the desk sometimes fixes the problem... for like 30 seconds.

So when I found myself near a computer shop last Saturday, I rushed in to get a new mouse. Being the cheap ass that I am, I asked for the cheapest optical mouse available. (It had to be an optical mouse because, aside from being cheap, I'm also too lazy to clean a mouse ball regularly.) The clerk showed me a white Melody mouse that costs only 170 pesos (less than $4). Why, that's even cheaper than A4Tech! I immediately bought it.

It took me a while to realize that my new mouse is tiny. I guess I was fooled by the unnecessarily big box. I was a bit pissed off, but I was almost OK with it until I found out that it was a USB mouse. Crap.

I wanted to slap myself for not taking a closer look at it earlier. What the hell am I going to do with a USB mouse? My ancient PC has only two USB ports, and I sure am not going to waste one on a freaking mouse. Well, I suppose I can toss it in a corner for now and wait until I get my hands on an Eee PC. Ah, a shiny cheap new Eee PC... now that's a happy thought.

Meanwhile, my stupid mouse seemed to have learned a new trick. Each attempt at clicking now randomly gives me zero, one, or two clicks. Er, yay?

I woke up today a little past noon after about five hours of sleep. On most days, the first thing I do when I wake up is walk over to my PC and switch it on. And that was what I did.

But this time, pushing the power button didn't have the expected effect. No blinking lights. No familiar humming sounds of spinning fans. Nothing.

What the hell? Is it a power outage? Nope, that can't be. My monitor is on. Are the power cables loose? I unplugged and replugged everything then tried again. Nothing happened. I began to panic. Is the power supply dead? Nooooooooo!

When a computer's power supply dies, there's a good chance that it would take something else to hell with it. I know because I've seen one explode before--it totally fried the hard drive. I didn't see or hear any explosions this time, but maybe I missed it because I was sleepy.

I started to felt sick. My hard drives! I'd be in deep trouble if either of them died, because I've always been too lazy to back up my data. I thought about the amount of work I'd have to redo, and I almost threw up on the spot.

What now? Well, how about avoiding the problem? Sounds like a good plan. So I went for lunch. After stuffing myself with comfort food, I came back to find my PC still dead. I took a long nap, irrationally hoping that it was all just a bad dream.

After waking up into the same nightmare, I knew that I had no choice but to face reality. I hauled my machine to the nearest PC Express. A technician there plugged it in, and... it's alive! What the hell?

So the cheap made-in-China power supply is innocent after all. Who's the real culprit then? Maybe it's the AVR (automatic voltage regulator). Or maybe it's the power cord that connects the power supply to the AVR. So which one is it? Unfortunately, I left both of those at home--I only brought the case.

I thought about it and decided to buy a new power cord for 60 pesos. I could have bought both items and eliminated the possible need for a second trip to the shop, but I chose to gamble because a new AVR is much pricier.

Back at home, I was about to replace the power cord when I decided to try pushing the power button first. It worked! What... the... hell? So my PC was fine all along? Was it just bored and decided to trick me into taking it on a joyride? Bad PC!

Now, I'm sitting here with a shiny new extra power cord and still no clue as to what happened. But I really don't care anymore. I'm just relieved to have my life back to normal... and a little pissed that I wasted much of my afternoon over nothing.

Scary episodes like this remind me about how dependent I am on my PC and why backing up data regularly is a good idea. I think I'll start doing backups tomorrow next week soon.

The mouse wheel on my optical mouse broke two weeks ago. Yes, the mouse wheel broke. Don't ask me how that happened, because I have no freaking clue.

I guess that's what I deserve for going with a cheap ass brand like A4Tech. Yes, I just called A4Tech cheap ass, but it's not really an insult. After all, "A4Tech" stands for "A4dable Technologies"... clever, eh? Hey, I'm a cheap ass, and I totally love A4Tech and their $6 mice.

Anyway, when I talked to my mom on the phone last week, I casually mentioned the broken mouse wheel. Luckily for me, she had an extra mouse stashed somewhere, and she sent it to me yesterday. Of course it's an A4Tech mouse--where do you think I got my cheap ass gene from?

But wait, there's something unusual about this one. Check it out. It has a small extra button that allows you to double click with just one click....

Sweet! Sounds like a nifty feature for lazy bastards like me, heh. Everyone knows that double clicking takes too much effort, right? With this mouse, I only have to spend half the energy! Isn't that wonderful?

Well, it would be wonderful... if only I have something to double click! Afer more than 24 hours, I still haven't found a use for the magic button. I spend a lot of time on the Web where double clicking is almost non-existent. And I already set my Windows Explorer to open files with single clicks, so no fun there either.

Now that I've come to the bitter realization that I don't double click anymore, the extra button that was once so exciting has become utterly meaningless. Meaningless! How depressing. Maybe I should go buy a ridiculously expensive Logitech mouse to cheer myself up.

I'll tell you what I want for Christmas.

I want a Clocky! The thing looks quite annoying, but I sure could use some help trying to wake up early in the morning. OK, late morning. OK, OK! Early afternoon! Sheesh! What's your problem? Leave me alone! I need my 8 hours!

And Clocky better be shockproof, because the little bastard will be flying against the wall as soon as I catch it.... I hope it comes with a parachute. No, I don't think Clocky would be something that I can "laugh at"--I'm just not that cheerful in the morning. But yes, I want one anyway.

Christmas is just 323 days away. I can't wait.