I’M blogging from the Holiday Inn in Clark, Angeles, Pampanga City, where I’m staying to cover and participate in this year’s edition of Media Nation or MN4.1, “Political Reporting and the Hazard of Compromise,” which is touted as Part 1 of the 4th Philippine Summit for the News Media.

We left the INQUIRER.net office at around 2: 30 p.m. I hitched a ride with INQUIRER.net editor in chief JV Rufino, along with Philippine Daily Inquirer columnist and blogger Manuel L. Quezon III. Our INQUIRER.net reporter Thea Alberto is also here, though she took the shuttle and arrived earlier.

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FINALLY got to meet an online friend in real life, and what do you know, she wants to stab me with a plastic sword. Click on the thumbnail for the full-size pic, which is courtesy of Jayvee Fernandez.

That’s model, FHM babe and girl gamer Sofie Garrucho, who visited the INQUIRER.net office when we recorded Episode 3 of hackenslash: the podcast on Feb. 21.

Our guest for the “Hot Seat” segment was Greg Kittelson, president of Filipino-developed social networking site GrooveNet.ph, and Sofie also joined us to give the perspective of a GrooveNet member.

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IF you’re reading this now, then it means you’re witnessing the soft launch of the new INQUIRER.net Blogs service, with @play the guinea pig, er, first of many blogs that INQUIRER.net will unleash upon an unsuspecting world, heh.

I’ve been blogging for over two years now, but I have to admit I’m excited and maybe even just a bit anxious now that I’m “officially” blogging for INQUIRER.net, and now that INQUIRER.net has committed itself to embracing blogging as a tool for delivering news and commentary, and for reaching out to a new generation of readers.

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WHILE I love my Xbox 360, I hate the bloatware that Microsoft comes out with, which is why my browser of choice is Firefox rather than Internet Explorer, and I use Gmail rather than Outlook or Hotmail.

Now I’ve freed up more precious space on my hard disk by ditching Microsoft Office and switching to OpenOffice.org. For word processing, however, I’m using an even leaner alternative to OpenOffice’s Write application. It’s called AbiWord and you can try downloading it to find out why it’s great.

For more open source stuff for Windows, go to Open Source Windows. Some of my fave apps are cited there, like the VLC media player, while others I’ll still have to test.

Hell, if only they were viable platforms for gaming, I might consider switching my OS to Linux or Mac, heh

(Originally published as a column piece on Feb. 8, 2007)

I DIDN’T go to the Vista consumer launch over the weekend, partly because I had other things to do with my family, partly because all the hoopla that Microsoft is trying to whip up over Vista is starting to smack of desperation.If Microsoft is really convinced that consumers have very good reasons to upgrade to Vista, then why waste all this money and try to ram it down our throats (and get us to buy more RAM, heh) that Vista is something we should love. Now, I’m not going to say that Vista sucks until I try it out — read the articles of our reporters Erwin Oliva and Alex Villafania for their coverage of the Vista consumer launch — but I really doubt that I’ll upgrade to Vista.

Why? Because even now I hate the bloatware that Microsoft saddles us with, which is why I use the open source app Firefox instead of that ton of bricks masquerading as a web browser Internet Explorer 7, and rely on Gmail instead of Outlook or, good lord, Hotmail.

This doesn’t mean I’m a Microsoft hater. I’m technology-agnostic, and if the technology works for me and I like the solution, I don’t care which company provides it. But somehow, the only products from Microsoft I love are the original Xbox (and even that’s with some reservations, heh) and the Xbox 360, which is why I bought them. I’m on Windows XP mainly because I’m a PC user (nope, I’m not part of the Cult of Mac) and I’m a gamer, so until Linux becomes a true gaming platform, that won’t be my OS, even though I’m a fan of open source as the most sensible alternative to piracy in a developing country like the Philippines.

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