ADAMSONIAN

Sticky:

Adamsonian is looking for hardcore blog contributors. We’re paying Php 500 for every approved blog post [minimum of 1,000 words].

If you are interested, just send me a note about what subject you are going to write about. If I think it satisfies what I’ve set for this site, then I’ll ask you to send your article [with photos or videos, if there’s any], to jblazarte@gmail.com, and I’ll prepare it for publication on the site. Payment to published write-ups will be sent to author via Paypal or Western Union every 30th of the month. Currently enrolled students, professors, administrators, tuknene/cigarette vendors are most welcome.

Possible blog post topics:

- round-up of the university’s technology/art projects, if there’s any [pictures required]

- interview with the loveliest currently enrolled Adamson University students by course [pictures required; at least 3 interviewees]

- well-argued rant/essay on the state of Adamson’s education [must cite present situations; current circulars, rules or memos released by the administration, etc.]

- in-depth treatment of the university’s standing with the UAAP; sports-related article

- “spy photos” [at least five pictures] and related explanatory/background text; this must concern what’s currently happening within the university.

- exposés [must be accompanied with evidence — photos, videos, documents, etc.] that concern students, university faculty or administrators

- a secret administration memo “leaked”, with accompanying background information.

- an exclusive piece of Adamson University-related news.

The above list by no means represents all possible topics. So just email me your idea for a blog post first, then I’ll decide if it’s a go.

However, this new paid blogging scheme doesn’t affect non-paid contributors [e.g., those who only want to share information, personal views, stories]. So everyone’s still free to join and write about anything under the sun as long as it doesn’t break the blogging guidelines.

JB has blogged 101 posts

Sticky:

If this is your first visit here, please read the following “iron-clad” reminders on how you can make full use of this site:

• Read the Blogging Guidelines. Read the Blogging Guidelines. Read the Blogging Guidelines.

• Read this one-year-old greeting-slash-modus-operandi. It’s also important.

• Read how to upload YouTube and other videos.

• Read how to upload images.

• Attach a photo to your profile.

• Usage of this site is your privilege as a member of the Adamson University community. Enjoy!

Now, you can REGISTER or LOG-IN.

JB has blogged 101 posts

I’ve been taking down some posts lately because of their complete disregard for the Blogging Guidelines.

Also, I’ve noticed that most users would only want to leave very short messages and not really “respectable” blog posts. So I’ve installed a new shoutbox on the sidebar, which will hopefully serve a few new things:

• allow registered users to communicate or chat live with one another;

• allow users who love communicating in “txtspeak” to express themselves freely without me hounding them about the very unpopular and so-easily-ignored Guidelines;

• the shoutbox also gives a deeper sense of interactivity for users.

I had been avoiding to install this feature because anonymous f*ckwads love posting steaming piles of BS on these things. As a measure, only registered and logged in Wordpress users can post messages. We’re still observing how “secure” this really is or how effective in stopping spam or BS messages, so there might be problems cropping up later on.

For the meantime, feel free to use it and see if you can find it to your satisfaction.

Tags: Adamson Chronicle, Adamsonian, Adamson University

JB has blogged 101 posts

You can now attach your own good-lookin’ photo to your profile, which appears near your blog post’s title.

• To upload, just log in (assuming you are already a registered user) and click Profile.

• Scroll down till you see the Your Photo section.

• Select a JPG, BMP, PNG, or GIF image about as big as a 10-peso coin, then click Upload. Hope for the best.

Try it.

Tags: Adamson Chronicle, Adamsonian, Adamson University

JB has blogged 101 posts

Thanks to everyone for making this site a richer and richer online hangout. I can’t tell you more how overcome I am of gratitude for your sharing through this site your intellectual, literary, or media-related thoughts and views and for letting everybody know what fine class of people Adamsonians really are.

But I’d just like to remind everyone that we do have some blogging guidelines handed down to us by Moses himself, so it would be for the best interest of this site if we’d observe and follow these blogging rules as we follow whatever our good mothers tell us.

Again, thanks, and I hope we’d see more exciting posts in the future.

Tags: Adamson University, Adamsonian

JB has blogged 101 posts

If you’re an Adamsonian and you have a site/blog, you may join this site’s blogroll (”Affiliates” as seen on the left sidebar) by posting the URL of your blog/site on the comments section of this post. Your site/blog has to be:

1. Well-maintained or at least 3 months old.
2. Belongs to any organization that has something to do with Adamson University (like ACOES).
3. Personal blogs may be submitted and included, but ONLY if we “like” it (”likeability” depends on how much you participate in Adamsonian’s blog or forum, at least not a Friendster or MySpace or Multiply blog, and can shoot straight with some decent language).

We want to know every Adamsonian that has an online life, so if your blog/site is all these three things and more, feel free to join the party.

Tags: Adamson University

JB has blogged 101 posts

I know this is late, but I’ve already installed a new Word Press plugin that makes it easy for you to upload your favorite videos from YouTube, GoogleVideo, and iFilm. Just place the cursor on the Compose page where you’d want the video to appear, then click the appropriate button (YouTube, iFilm, etc), then just provide the video ID.
Click to enlarge.

For example, if you’re uploading a YouTube video, the URL looks like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALYzQHeLXqE

The video ID are the characters AFTER the Equal sign (ID as follows is highlighted):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALYzQHeLXqE

Click the YouTube button, then paste “ALYzQHeLXqE.” And that’s it; your video is clickable on the post itself.

Tags: Adamson University

JB has blogged 101 posts

Two things: one, we’re still having several more weeks of crappy online access; and two, despite that, I’ve snatched up something nice: a stronger “community-building” feature.

First things first. The unbearable crappiness of our present Internet connection. When the telecom guy told me a week ago that large areas in Asia, especially those who’ve had previously enjoyed the bliss of broadband connection, are still going to live in the Dark Ages till the end of February, my knee-jerk reaction was nervous laughter. I wasn’t sure if the guy was just one of those “techies” who love to power trip at the expense of the rest of us non-uber-geeks. So I asked, “You’re joking, right?”

But he said, like one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, that he’s so serious he’s already shitting in his pants.

The other day, I realized why when I saw this update from AFP, which basically details why the repair seems to be taking too long. It also mentions some interesting facts:

1. Fiber optic cables are each merely 21 millimeters in diameter.

2. Those cables are submerged 2.5 miles deep underwater.

3. There are eight separate cable systems in waters off Taiwan, and each of those cable systems take 10 days to repair. I won’t even do the math; it’s already frustrating.

That’s why I’ve been somehow holding out. If it’s too much hassle to even make the site’s page load nicely on the browser, it’s sheer insanity to keep on pushing everybody to make its content rich. So the shining things I said here, they won’t be happening yet at least till early March.

But all these not-very-good-things notwithstanding, we’ve managed to include a little more community-building feature. What you see now on the sidebar is the MyBlogLog community for the Adamsonian. What it simply means is that now you’re no longer invisible — you can post photos, say richer things about yourself, “talk” directly to other members via its “Leave Message” feature. To quickly join, click on View Community on the sidebar, or register directly here.

For the first time, both active Adamsonian bloggers and users who simply read stuff can operate on the same level. Can you imagine this? You can engage in discussion on the blog, also on the forum, but now, you can also get to know more about those you converse with. We’ve just made things a bit more exciting. Register now and upload your photos so that everybody else can see you.

JB has blogged 101 posts

You’re probably noticing it now: it sometimes takes a century to navigate through the site or on the forum. It’s that Taiwan quake again; it turns out only some of the damage have been fixed, and that we’re still largely going through alternative routes that are just a third of our old bandwidth. Sometimes, even less.

Because we’re hosted in the USA, and because much of the damage happened to those optical fiber cables linking much of Asia to the West, those of us accessing the site from Asia have to go that route; hence, the painfully slow access.

But we’re getting big fat promises from our telecom company that they’re working on it day and night. Aren’t they just cute?

If you’ve been following the international press, who loves doing reports such as “a flotilla of repair ships have already rushed to the site and found a heartbreaking extent of damage,” making it all sound like Americans have just landed on Iwo Jima, you’ll understand [like me] that the damage is such a big deal. Yes, it’s that great a fuck-up.

Bigshot sites like Google or Yahoo, for everybody’s information, are served by a technology company called Akamai, making them almost invulnerable to these pesky connection kinks. But we’re not Google [at least, not yet, anyway], so when God stabs a bored finger at a country like Taiwan, folks like us also get it badly.

I’m very sorry for this irritating situation. It happened right when we’re just trying to introduce some new exciting features to greet the new year. But like that customer service girl who’ve been taking calls from irate customers like me, all I can say is “We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for bearing with us.”

Hopefully, all will be settled in three or so weeks.

JB has blogged 101 posts

I’m not sure if there are many Adamsonians who know Carl Sagan, but for those who do, they’ll understand me as I say that I deeply share the sentiments of many who just sort of reminisced the past 10 years without him; he died on Dec. 20, 1996.

Aside from being the author of the book that later became the film Contact (starring Jodie Foster), Carl Sagan was one of the very few guys who’ve inspired me to think — even worry — about the future.

Recently, the British science magazine New Scientist celebrated its 50th anniversary — and its celebratory issue contained selected scientific pieces from the 1950s to the present (the invention of the birth control pill, Gagarin in space, the first time scientists realized they were right about rocket trajectories, the first time the transistor “wowed” everybody) and perhaps more importantly, how the leading thinkers of our day look ahead 50 years in the future. There’s even a write-up on human consciousness that felt right and on target — the one where Paul Broks so beautifully describes the disconcerting nature of human identity (”human nature stinks,” so goes an old song from De-Phazz).

Read more »

Tags: Carl Sagan

JB has blogged 101 posts

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