Geeky Fashionista

Sony Philippines is having a “29 Things” contest and at stake are three units of Sony Vaio M laptops. Of course I am interested! I actually downloaded the contest sheet, and I just have to find the time to mark my answers. To qualify, participants must be able to identify all 29 Sony things. Just download the contest sheet HERE. Mark the items using Paint or Photoshop and send your entry to 29sonythings@gmail.com together with your name, address and contact number. Deadline of entries is on August 6, 2010 at noon. Click on the image for more information.

I heard that Natalie Portman was at this year’s Comic-con with her fellow Thor stars to talk about the upcoming release. Now I was not able to follow anything about the Comic-con 2010 but seeing her getting featured in one site reminded me how much I admire (bordering on envy, LOL!) this lady. She is beautiful, smart and talented – a mix of genes she got from her Israeli father who is an OB/Fertility Specialist and American mother who is an artist herself. She graduated HS with honors and went on to pursue a degree in Psychology in Harvard! Such brains! She is also multi-lingual. Aside from Hebrew and English which are her native languages, she can effectively converse in French, Japanese, Spanish and German. She was discovered to be a model at age 11 and started her acting career a year later when she starred in The Professional. I’ve only seen this movie in late 2008 and I don’t know why it took me that long before I saw it! Her career as an actress was even more highlighted when she played as Queen Amidala in the Star Wars Series. She received an Oscar nomination for the 2004 film Closer. She considers herself a geek but not exactly a gadget geek. She prefers the Kindle over an iPad

Grace Kelly is probably one the greatest fashion icons in history. A lot of ladies and designers, drew inspiration from this wonderful lady. Her style is both classy and classic.

If you are a fan and have not seen the exhibition of her hats, shoes, gloves and dresses displayed at London’s Victoria and Albert Musuem, then you might want to hurry & schedule a trip soon! The exhibition will be pulled out in September, a few weeks away. According to this article, “the show holds more than 35 of Kelly’s outfits made by famous designers such as Edith Head, Helen Rose, Yves Saint Laurent, and many by Kelly’s personal favourite, Christian Dior.” There are also other mementoes and videos on the life of this Hollywood celebrity turned true princess.

Another sale alert, this time for the book lovers out there!

I haven’t been to a bookstore in ages (except last week when K saw some board books in NBS and my mom bought her one. It made K less crappy ). Anyway, I hope to visit a Powerbooks branch before the sale period ends on August 15 and I hope I can buy a book this time. But I saw a tweet from a local celebrity and he said that the selections are pretty limited. So we’ll see.

Obviously, a lot of people got hooked and signed up for Facebook. Its founder Mark Zuckerberg proudly blogged about how individuals from around the world are members of his social networking site. This milestone is being celebrated by introducing an application that lets users share “incredible stories of the moving and interesting ways they’ve used Facebook.”

Most recent issues the site faced are the privacy settings and the feeling of some that their privacy is violated. But FB peeps continuously do research and find ways to make things better. While a lot of users complain, the membership numbers still increase because people have already realized the powerful tool (to connect with old and new friends at least) that is Facebook.

If you are an iPhone 4 user then you probably heard of the antenna issue when they say phone calls are dropped in some instance. The initial response of Apple was to tell users to hold the unit properly and not with the left hand. But of course, haters would like to hear a better answer. Steve Jobs called for a press conference in Cupertino today and started his speech with “We are not perfect.” He went on to say that after about 22 days of research, the people at Apple found out that the antenna/reception problem is not unique with the iPhone4 because other phones like Blackberry and Omnia have the same issues. And because they love their consumers, they are giving away free Bumper cases!

If you have already purchased your Bumper, you may request for the $30 refund via the Apple website.

If you haven’t yet, Jobs said that they will send you once, failing to say if they will send a Bumper case at all.

I hope this ends all reception woes with the iPhone 4

I was so happy when I discovered Hobbes and Landes in Rockwell before. My geeky childlike self got excited looking at those geeky toys (have you seen their puzzle selections?)! I used to buy toys there until I decided I need to prioritize my shopping list. The items are not exactly cheap, you know? So I am glad to hear that they are having a sale up to 70% off this month. I am also eyeing a pair of shoes for my DD. Must hit one of the branches over the weekend!

The Balenciaga First iconic bag was released ten years ago. To celebrate a milestone, the current creative director Nicolas Ghesquire created a unique and exclusive animal print that is not real animal skin. The same print is extended to City so collectors will have a choice. The two limited edition bags are identified with the unique metal tag inside and engraved with individual collector’s numbers.

Here are the pictures to drool over:

Truly, these are bags for the fashionistas and big Balenciaga fans. But if you ask me, I prefer the ballerina flats with the same print

Available in UK via balenciaga.com

When the husband bought me my mobile unit, he installed it with Gravity, a Twitter app. That was the first time I came across the term “API limit”  (or at least it was the first time I got a bit curious) because I would exceed that limit every now and then. I never gave it much thought especially when I found out that API stands for Application Programming Interface and that it affects developers more than the user. For Twitter, It is the service that limits the use of the application in an hour or the number of times the application is allowed to ‘”contact” the Twitter servers within an hour.

The last few days however, I was in Twitter API hell. I log on in my phone and stay for a few minutes then I would exceed the limit right away. The percentage would just drop each second! And then I go to my Chromed Bird, same thing would happen. I got tired of it and just spent my time Twittering (reading and back-reading as opposed to Tweeting which means actually typing something, well that’s just how I define it) via web and mobile web.

When I found the time, I went to search for answers.

So the Twitter API limit is 350/hour but does not apply for every application but every user. Confusing? Well, let’s put it this way: When my laptop is open, I have a Twitter app for Chrome (Chromed Bird) and Firefox (Echofon), and then there’s Gravity in my phone as already mentioned. So if all three applications are running at the same time, when my timeline updates, that would be three contacts (tweets, replies and messages) times three applications equals nine calls to the servers! And if my applications are all set to update every minute, then no wonder my allocation is easily depleted.

Now here’s the catch, because the big whale kept on showing up (meaning the site is over-capacity) Twitter management decided to do something about it. Their solution is not (yet) to upgrade servers but to send users to crazy land by slashing the API limit to 50% or 175/hour! This is why even if I changed the auto update times and used one app at a time, I’d still exceed my limit. When I found out about this, I stuck with the web version.

This afternoon, I realized the 350/hr limit is back. I am a happy camper once again

We were strolling in Greenbelt on Sunday when the husband remembered to show us the new phone offering from our mobile service provider, the Samsung Galaxy S. This unit is said to be the next big thing after iPhone4. It is powered by Android 2.1 OS that is known to run both applications and smart phone tasks faster. The 1Ghz powerhouse processor complements the OS. The screen is a 4-inch Super AMOLED touch screen which is considered the biggest in the industry these days. This unit’s internal memory is 16gb and the user has the option to expand with the external microSD slot.

Hmmm. Such a promising unit. I was not able to play with it but the husband says this unit is good enough.