met.al: [met-l] noun, verb, -aled, -al.ing or (especially British) -alled, -al.ling. –noun

1. any of a class of elementary substances, as gold, silver, or copper, all of which are crystalline when solid and many of which are characterized by opacity, ductility, conductivity, and a unique luster when freshly fractured.

“You see metals every day. Aluminum foil is a metal. Gold and silver are metals. If someone asks you whether an element is a metal, metalloid, or non-metal and you don’t know the answer, guess that it’s a metal.”

I chose Chemistry 101 for this week’s theme, that of the purest state of metals categorized under the periodic table of elements. Anybody still remember this from Junior High? We had to memorize the entire table along with its atomic symbol, atomic number and its atomic mass- all 103 at that time (I think!). As of 2006, there are now 117 elements. Glad I’m past memorization and I can just google everything! Yay!

According to this photo:

“Chemical elements (comprising the metals and non-metals) are the building blocks of everything. The Sun and stars, the silicon chips in our computers, and all the cells in our bodies are collection of elements.”

It’s kinda hard to imagine that our bodies are made up of metals, isn’t it? It’s because when we think of metals- we think of hard objects, coins, copper, iron, tin, lead, nickel, cast irons, railroads, bridges, wires, sheet metals, brass, alloys, jewelries, gold and silver, etc!

What’s in our Bodies?

Calcium (Ca), Sodium (Na), Potassium (K), Iron (Fe), Magnesium (Mg), Zinc (Zn), Copper (Cu), Manganese (Mn) are just some of the major elements in the metals category found in our body and yes, even traces of Lithium (Li), Aluminum (Al), Silicon (Si) and Arsenic (As) in the metalloids category.

Find more photo hunters at PhotoHunt

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“How did it get so late so soon? Its night before its afternoon.
December is here before its June. My goodness how the time has flewn.
How did it get so late so soon?”
- Dr. Seuss

For some lame excuse or another, I have failed in writing about this. I’m not sure how it got off my radar but it did. I’m sorry for the delay but I am truly grateful. I have very little “online buddies” and to get these awards mean a lot to me. BIG THANK YOU…

Two of the few blogs I do follow and read, check them out sometime!

Amazing Site Award from Bing of Warmstone!

Blogging Buddies Award From Stacie’s Blog!

Keep blogging you guys!

By now all Friendster bloggers must have gotten the memo sent out by the Friendster team, of the sudden migration from Friendster Typepad to Friendster Wordpress in early September. I wrote about it first on September 3rd, in shock that no word was said about the transition.

I didn’t stop there. When I re-visited the Friendster Official blog site on September 9 looking for answers I still didn’t find it so I left an exacting comment (#31) on their most recent post at that time, dated August 12th to express my frustration! Yay, I heard back from them and Ross of Friendster commented back on my Friendster blog the following:

“We’re sorry about the confusion and lack of information. We’ve focused our communication to our most-active bloggers. Unfortunately for you, that meant you were not emailed. We plan to make a general announcement in the coming week or so.”

Hmp! I’m hurt not being considered their ‘most-active’ blogger just because I have not blogged in Friendster for a year! LOL. I don’t know about that lousy excuse because two days after my comment on their blog, they finally announced the new format and sent out the same information to all members of Friendster who owns a blog via email! How much effort did they exert creating that simple post and email? I bet it didn’t take 5 minutes to create! So why they waited for over a week to transmit the announcement to non-active bloggers boggles the mind! In the first place, what’s the difference? Active or not active, when you get the announcement, it’s up for the user to react or not. Why hold the information to non-active bloggers?! Isn’t it as simple as hitting the SEND ALL button?!

Enough said on that.

P.S. Friendster Typepad didn’t have “tagging,” a key feature in Wordpress! So now all my old posts have no tags and I am too lazy to put any!!! Grrrr!

P.S.P.S. Would Friendster add more Wordpress themes please???

I have decided to make September 28 my blogversary. This was the date I bravely shifted from Friendster blog into Blogger blog exactly a year ago (I went live on September 30th). At that time, I knew nothing about real blogging even though I was already into it early 2005 via my Friendster account.

Since this is my first SOBA, I wish to give a background on the simple steps I did to get me started into blogging in my niche and my current position and state. I don’t have bragging rights- I’m not claiming to be anything. I don’t have any official blog awards. I don’t get a thousand or more views a day, I don’t earn much from it and I’m not trying to be the best blogger.

What I do have is decent and consistent traffic and page views. There’s something to be said there. Blogging shouldn’t be complicated. Blog happy and simply! This is dedicated to all newbies- what I was a year ago!

First step: Blog hopping and Finding your niche

For the most part blog hopping helped me a great deal while starting! It’s the best teaching tool for any newbie wanting to start their own blogs. It’s like window shopping for a website with live working themes and plugins and sidebars. As I navigate from one blog to the next, I learned what could work for me or not! There are some really sleek, neat looking blogs out there but there are also tons of crappy, sloppy ones! Sifting each, taking the best and discarding the rest- I was able to formulate what I want in my website.

I wanted a personal mixed bag for this site, allowing me the flexibility to talk on any subjects from family, travels, music, media, entertainment, opinion, photography, TV, the internet, technology, love/dislike of country, etc. I wanted a simple theme layout with black as the main background.

I followed up this site with a hobby blog, showcasing my interest in postcard collecting and then later on with a blog for a restobar I co-own in the Philippines, and then a Filipino Quotes blog to post quotations related to anything Filipino or the Philippines either by Filipinos or foreigners.

The best learning experience is going out there and blog hop! Call it lurking, spying, checking out, snooping- the only way to discover what you want in your blog is by learning from others. That’s what I would call it.

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run back to Blogger platform and hide. Here’s the thing: I have no problems with upgrades or updates. They’re necessary to make our blogging life secure, easier and better. My problem is the constant and I mean constant update we have to do!! Blogger does the upgrade automatically from their end with nothing for the user to do.

I moved to Wordpress end of December last year and have my first taste of upgrade from Wordpress 2.3.1 to 2.3.2. I didn’t know how I did it but it was smooth. In February this year came the next change to 2.3.3 and in March for Wordpress 2.5. Ok, here I’m a little bit complaining because in April there was the 2.5.1 update.

July came and yet another update with version 2.6. This is I think the only version upgrade where I really felt the difference in my blogging experience with Wordpress! I just love the Restore, post revisions option. It has saved my a** a few times because sometimes I put a lot of coding in my post or just write a bunch of nonsense as draft and accidentally delete some paragraphs in the process. With the post revisions, you could retrace your old saved post by the hour and day you’ve made the changes and get to compare your revisions and you can restore the post!! Then it has the Shift gears/ Turbo button where it supposedly hastens your and your reader’s browsing experience. I have yet to notice the difference but every time I log in, I click that Turbo button anyway. Another nifty feature is word count! I tend to type a lot of words!! I really like that I can track them and know when to stop!

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If you’re a blogger, you are probably using one or the other or in my case- both: Copyscape and Creative Commons. I have decided to tackle the subjects after receiving an anonymous comment on my previous post about the two (I am inimical to anonymous comments!! You have a name, for crying out loud use it!). It was an irrelevant note, from (I assume) a blogger with a Philippine IP address who just sort of ‘ordered’ me:

“You can not use copyscape and Creative Commons at the same time. Copyscape goes against sharing which is what Creative Commons is all about. search Free Culture Movement, open source, GPL, linux, IBM, Creative Commons are all part of the movement, copyscape is not because it is against it.”

Aaah, yeah… Nevermind the syntax! Earth calling nameless person! Aside from the fact that your comment was totally unrelated to my post, you have no idea what you’re blabbering about. Your comment is an absolute farce and the arguments totally neither here nor there. But thanks to you, I now have a blog post!

Copyscape is against sharing? You seriously need to have someone translate what you have been reading because your interpretation of the concept is out of this world! You are insinuating that Copyscape is THE bad guy because it doesn’t allow COPYING, STEALING or your term to put it subtlety, sharing. Your comment rather reads that you are talking “sharing” to actually mean copying or stealing as one and the same! By saying that, you are suggesting that Creative Commons is part of the movement that tolerates stealing or copying! Do you seriously believe that?

For the benefit of the lost confused nameless person, let me share what I know on the subject. To quote Bob Edwards, “a little learning is a dangerous thing but a lot of ignorance is just as bad.” I beg your indulgence as this post could get lengthy but I sure hope you will learn something from it.

Clearly I claim to be no expert on this but reading with understanding on Copyright, Copyscape and Creative Commons can go far. This is not rocket science! Some people just don’t “get it” (pun intended!) and that’s all right. I don’t get most things. However, there is more, much more to just copying and pasting the Copyscape and Creative Commons buttons to place on our blogs.

See most bloggers find the buttons, thinks it’s cool, copies the code and then that’s that. That’s not how it works! I know why I placed these banners on my website! There’s no excuse why one doesn’t know the purpose of it on their websites.

WHAT IS COPYSCAPE?

Copyscape is a TOOL.

It is not some kind of law or rule. It is not an agenda or part of any “movement”. It is just like any other BUSINESS website promoting something, in this case it is promoting a service to find duplicates of your content to protect you against online plagiarism and theft. Plain and simple. There have been contentions about its usage, purpose and usefulness because it is only afterall dependent on Google’s API- meaning it’s just the same as typing in keywords in Google as Copyscape uses the same database, therefore you get the same results!!

On the Copyscape website you are greeted with a search bar just like Google’s that says: “Search for copies of your page on the Web.” Half of the time, you get useless results because it does find ALL duplicates regardless if it’s just snippets of your own submission to MyBloglog, BlogCatalog, Technorati and other networking sites or quotes and references you made from other sites. It couldn’t tell the difference on what’s plagiarized or not- just duplicates of anything.

Since it is dependent on Google’s algorithms, it only shows you the latest popular and most recent duplicates it could find. What happens if the ones plagiarized are your posts from a year before that is not too popular? You’re doomed. Of course I wouldn’t know what happens when you get the premium service, how reliable the results will be extending your searches to limitless as opposed to just 10 free. I have no interest in paying $0.05 per search (Premium service) to find out if other people stole any of my articles or not. There are other ways to know for FREE.
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Note: To all Friendster users who are not Wordpress Bloggers and are confused with how to use the new blogging platform, email me with your questions via Contact (on the top right of this page) or leave a comment- perhaps I can help! You can ask me anything at all regarding how to use Wordpress blog in Friendster! Hear from you soon!

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I couldn’t believe it! I just got finished writing my newest post on my Friendster blog, updating this and that on my profile and then came the biggest surprise!

SUDDENLY, without any warning or any sign at all- my Friendster blog magically transformed into a new website!! A Wordpress website!!

CRAP, all my sidebar except for the comments and recent entries- gone!! I just updated my blogroll, added new links- it’s all gone!! All the HTML codes and whatever else on my sidebar- gone!!

How can Friendster do this without alerting its users?? I immediately Googled for news, anything that says about the “merger.” Nada. Zilch. I looked at their Help section, it still covers Typepad blog stuff. I went to Wordpress.com/.org- still nothing there. Is this just experimental? Am I dreaming all this? If I wake up tomorrow, will it return to its old format?!

I really should be happy with this huge move by Friendster. Here I was ranting about Friendster’s lame platform for a long time- the very reason why I moved to Blogger and eventually Wordpress because of its makeup and now, like going full circle, I may decide to actually maintain the friendster site just because it is now using Wordpress.
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