Back in the late 1990s, I was known as the girl who broke up with her boyfriend because he was a Mac user. Technically, I didn't: He was really an insufferable human being. But yes, there were fights which involve his strong unwavering (and I think gay) devotion to Steve Jobs.

I was a proud Windows user. I could give troubleshooting instructions point by point without ever looking at a screen. My PCs had the customizations, file organization, & configuration only a freak could appreciate, my backup system impeccable, & my weekends were spent poring inside my CPU to ensure that my motherboard & peripherals were dust-free.

Then last March, the unthinkable happened. For undisclosed reasons, I had to make the big switch. Technically, it wasn't such a big switch since my Windows are still with me:

• Chocnut, my trusty old server
• Carebears, my Fujitsu tablet
• Batman, our multimedia server
• All the other old Toshibas lying around the house
• And of course, Vmware Fusion, which can instantaneously fire up Bill Gates' pride & glory

But it was a switch, nevertheless, as anyone who had followed me on Twitter and read all my anti-Apple-fan-boys-tweets could attest. The moment I let it slip that I was using an MacBook, I could practically hear the gleeful guffaws of AlistairIsrael, rom, and JeromeGotango; the consternation of jeromea, & the abomination from abetsky -- all of whom were kind enough to keep their comments to themselves.

And there were friends who tried to save me from further humiliating myself:

• Leigh Reyes, who tried to stop me from over-thinking, and made me install the cutest and most time-wasting applications on the planet
• Michael Fallarme, who did not hesitate to fill up my Dropbox with all the useful and non-Leigh-type of applications, and simply threatened me with "Basta install mo yan."
• Marco Cabazal, who involuntarily provided 24-hour online & phone support, and assured me that yes, Macs have torrents too

It is already Month #4 since the fateful day when I cheated on Bill Gates. I still miss a lot of things, but overall, it aint so bad.

The increasing cost of gas does not seem to deter (yet) the abundance of vehicles on the road. But rain & traffic do not go well together, as proven by the blasting of horns that wake me up each morning.

I came up with a list which will guarantee to lessen road rage (at least on my part), & make driving a better podcast-listening experience.

Dear government, please ban the following immediately:

1. Full-size SUVs, pickups, & vans. They horde parking & spaces, road space, and are insane enough to carry only 1 to 2 passengers.

A wise man once said "If you want to make up for having a small p*nis, just buy a big camera."

2. Jeepneys. They're not cheap, because FXs fares are already comparable to theirs. But since we are known for using poverty as an excuse to stop the remaining legislations meant to uplift the well-being of our country, we still have those damn jeeps.

The real reason why jeepneys are still around? Because we are lazy. Jeepneys are the mode of public transportation which can drop us off at the very point where we want to be dropped off -- making you forget that there are such things as unloading & loading zones. Kulang na lang, umakyat ang jeep sa elevator.

3. Road constructions. Do it in the summer when there are no rains, no school, & the roads are not congested. Kailangan pa bang i-memorize yan?

4. Sound-blasting car stereos. You just have wonder what child abuse these kids went thru that impaired their hearing capabilities. Hopefully, those poor kids can still understand arithmetic:

College kid/Jobless grad + Car Bought By His Parents + Brand New Stereo System + Volume Turned All the Way Up = Attempted Murder

And that ends the top things to ban this rainy traffic season. Happy driving.

Voice recorders are indispensable tools in storing quick ideas, thoughts, todos, or even in reminding yourself where you parked your car.

But in these times of I-need-to-carry-another-gadget-like-I-need-a-hole-in-the-head, we need to utilize the gadgets we already have, particularly those which we usually never leave home without: our mobile phones.

I am pretty lucky to be a proud owner of various Nokia phones, as the series 60 editions already come with a built-in voice recorder. Operation is a no-brainer: press the joystick key to record, and press the same key again to stop. Ah, if only other mobile apps are as simple.

To make it really usable, it has to be easily accessible from your phone's desktop. Depending on your phone model, this can usually be done by going to Menu > Tools > Settings > General > Personalization > Standby mode > Active standby apps. (Yes, that's a lot of clicking.) Then simply assign Voice Recorder to one of the shortcuts.

You might want to add Gallery to your Active standby apps too, as they are the easiest way to go thru all your sound clips.

It was a choice among DevonThink, Yojimbo, Together, & EagleFiler. There are supposed to be a handful more in that list, but they were immediately junked either because they were primarily note-taking apps or lacked serious organization.

These apps, unfortunately, have yet to be christened with a short & sweet category such as "text editor" or "graphic viewer." No one really knows what to call it -- file managers, archival system, bloated explorer/finder?

Software vendors go the easy route and just refer to them as apps meant to "keep your files together in one place."

And so the name digital filing cabinets. After all, these apps are meant to organize your folders & files, much like your favorite GTD steel cabinet, you David Allen fanboy you.

What you'll get

The standard feature set of digital filing cabinets include:

• Two ways of organization: folders & tags.
• Files or information about the files are stored in some database to facilitate searching
• Previews
• On-the-fly creation of notes (& instantly tagging them thereto)
• Web archiving

And then there were two

The list aforementioned was further cut down to two: EagleFiler and Together. The rest were ditched either because they store files in a proprietary database system, or their interface is something I can really not work with. (I'm a girl. I need something pretty.)

I found myself using EagleFiler more. Sure, I love Together's shelf, it's portrait view, and sleeker interface; but it finally boiled down to speed. Together could not handle the amount of files I had, even when I separated them into different libraries.

Two other things I can't stand with Together: inability to work simultaneously with more than 1 library, and the default .trnote extension for newly created notes. Really now.

After 2 weeks, I uninstalled EagleFiler and ended up with Path Finder.

"But that's not in the list!" you exclaim.

Care ko.

Uzzap is Smart Communications' answer to Globe's now defunct IM Evrywhr. It is an instant messenger that you can run on your mobile phone.

Smart, however, was wise enough to include that one feature which will guarantee at least a couple of days traffic overload: Yahoo Messenger. Yes, ladies & gentlemen, it can hook up with your Yahoo Messenger account, the one IM that we Filipinos can't seem to do without.

It also has built-in chatrooms, and can integrate with your MSN messenger account.

Uzzap also has a PC client, which enables you to use it from your PC. Why you would use the PC client when your computer already has a bloated Yahoo Messenger client is beyond me. But it's there, available for download, just in case you suddenly start growing fond of your Uzzap ID, you weirdo you.

There is something amazing with Uzzap that you usually don't find in other mobile messengers: SMS integration.

You can set up your Uzzap account so that all offline messages sent to your Uzzap ID are automatically forwarded to your mobile phone via SMS.

(Take note that I said Uzzap ID, not your Yahoo or MSN ID. Anything sent to your Yahoo or MSN ID while you are offline is Yahoo's and Microsoft's business. Commenters, you have been warned.)

Charges

Uzzap is free for the time being. This means no internet charges until further notice.

So go ahead and chat all you want, grab all the text mates you can find, and do us a favor and refrain from using text spelling.

Uzzap mo me?

Download

You can download the Uzzap app from the Uzzap website. The best way to download it, however, is by sending a text message with the word UZZAP to 7272. This will automatically send you the download link to your phone.

This is a free download, and be thankful it is, because it is a whopping 915 kb file.

After installing the file, go to your list of apps, and click on the blurriest icon that you see. Now you're ready to start Uzzaping.

Connect to your Yahoo & MSN accounts

To use Yahoo or MSN Messenger on Uzzap, go to the menu. Click on Instant Messaging (the one with the IM icon). Select Connect to Yahoo or Connect to MSN, enter your account details, and save. Your contacts should automatically be loaded into Uzzap.

Interface

If you're having a hard time navigating your way around Uzzap, don't fret: You are not alone.

To put it mildly, Uzzap is not the most user friendly app. It has redundant icons, an overload of textual instructions, menus in all the wrong places, and insists on using your last saved network connection (despite repeated attempts on setting it on manual).

But it's Yahoo IM and SMS integration is enough to stifle the screams of frustration. Or at least for the time being.

Working with Mantis has been sweet. It was a project manager’s delight – full-blown features and a powerful back-end.

However, if you are concerned with usability, it can be a nightmare. Getting Mantis to display the barebones essentials required too much editing. Mantis, after all, doesn’t (yet) have a templating system to make it easier to customize & remove fields.

Task type (bug, feature, task) wasn’t also built-in – custom fields have to be used (which will prove later on to be a templating horror), or maybe recycle the not-so-often used Severity field.

Most agonizing is in customizing the “look” of Mantis. It is bursting in the seams with its sheer number of tables .... probably to make up for its pitiful number of CSS classes?

Enter Flyspray

Flyspray came to the rescue. Well, sort of. All the pertinent fields are in plain view – due date, target version, percent completed, and yes, task type.

It is also highly customizable – numerous classes & ids are meticulously included to make the CSS fanatic in you real proud. In a short amount of time, I was able to transform Flyspray’s horrendous default template to something utterly glorious.

Exit Flyspray

Upon entering more data, however, Flyspray’s weakness started to kick in:

The actual editing of global & project permissions leaves much to be desired. It took a lot of hits & misses before we finally figured out the difference between the project & global permissions (even where & how to edit them, for that matter).

A function similar to Mantis’ My View or Trac’s My Tickets was conspicuously missing. This is a page where users can see all the issues assigned to them, regardless of project. In the forums, however, we were informed that this is not needed, as there is an advanced search feature which can be used to search for tasks assigned to them. Oh … oh okay.

Most painful is the lack of support for subprojects. I’m still wondering if the Flyspray team never realized that people with more than 20 projects will want to use their product. Unfortunately, I am one of those people, and I have to play with prefixes just to get those damn projects ordered right. And did I mention that the project switch drop down is now extending near the end of my browser window? Really.

Meenie, minie ...

If you are part of a small team (maybe 5 people) and handling a couple or so projects … yes, Flyspray would probably perfect for you. However, they are not for developers of medium sized to large teams, those handling more than 5 projects, and for Project or QA Managers who use bug trackers intensively for issue, assignment, and project tracking.

Don’t expect much in the future developments either. Based on their roadmap and posts in the forums, their primary customers are the self-managed developers.

And we are left with no choice but to pray to the highest heavens that someday, somehow, the developers of these bug tracking systems will finally listen to the users who actually use it the most.

Due to uncontrollable factors, I had the misfortune of subscribing to PLDT MyDSL in our condo in Salcedo Village. From the installation to troubleshooting, it was already the worst experience I have ever encountered. And that’s not even an exaggeration: Due to my line of work, I have first-hand experience with all the Metro Manila broadband services.

A summary of my experience in hell:

• It took 3 weeks for the DSL to be installed.
• MyDSL has a newly released modem with their logo proudly stamped on the top. This broke down twice in a span of two days. (It was finally replaced with a Nokia DSL modem, which is fine, thank you very much.)
• Experiencing bad customer service? Why don’t you try calling PLDT DSL’s 172 and experience what bad really means?

  It is easy to forgive ignorance – but it is very hard to do the same thing with arrogance. And that, my friend, is what PLDT’s customer reps are known for.

  A few examples of MyDSL customer rep's famous last words:

  “We know more about the internet than you.”

  “There is no such thing as what you’re saying.”

  “I don’t have to report that because our calls our recorded anyway. Our manager will already know about your complaint herself.”

After two weeks, I thought I had seen it all – until I installed iTunes. I have been wondering why my podcast subscriptions will take forever to download. A 20mb file, for example, was downloaded in 7 hours. Another one was downloaded in 4 hours.

Finally giving up on reinstalling & reconfiguring my network devices, I decided to hook up Smart 3G. These same files were downloaded in 15 minutes.

Don’t bother calling customer service, because chances are, you’ll get the same reply I did: “It’s impossible to change your bandwidth so that’s not PLDT’s problem.”

(And by the way, how are your torrents downloads lately?)

I love you Smart Bro. I will probably stay with you forever.

PLDT MyDSL, may you rot in hell.