A Bugged Life

Though I didn’t win the Philips 5.1 home theatre system or a shopping spree in any Ayala Mall, Monday night was one of the more memorable evenings I’ve ever experienced.

And if I tell you the reason, you’re going to laugh at me. Real loud.

You see, last night was the very first time I got drunk. My 25 years of gallyvanting has been limited to caffeine shots in coffee places and bottomless iced tea in restaurants. Add the few shots of hard liquor here and there to cap the pinnacle of my wild life.

Of all places to get drunk, it was at the year-end Microsoft party at Fiesta San Miguel over at The Dusit Hotel. Now any bar with the words Fiesta and San Miguel put together leaves you with but an obvious clue as to what people do there.

Apparently, Fiesta San Miguel serves their draft straight from the brewery into your glass. They brew their own beer! Damn, no wonder it was like water. I had eight.. or was that nine huge mugs. With bottomless bibingka and puto bumbong.

My Mac is in the shop, waiting for a new logic board to be shipped in seven days. In the meantime, I have resigned myself to reading more, carrying less on my shoulders and enjoying the rest of the Christmas season gadget-less.

It’s not bad. 🙂

Speaking of Macs, I’m in dire need of name suggestions for a blog about all things Apple – more like an objective look at Apple products including the iPod and the Macintosh. This is a co-authored blog written by myself and another friend I will reveal later on set to launch before Christmas (hopefully!) under b5media‘s hood.

One thing I learned from domain searching is that the more popular the topic, the harder it is to find the perfect .com nomenclature you absolutely want. Some of these gems we thought of included The InCider (incider.com) as in apple cider, The Apple Gate, Macintalk, and other less popular yet catchy domains such as therealitydistortionfield.com.

I’m so MacUlit. Help.

Did you know…

That in spite of its life-threatening properties, freshly fried Chicharon Bulaklak when consumed, provides the most sensational sensory experience known to man?

It’s to die for!

I’m significantly poorer but loads happier that I was able to buy gifts for people today. I have officially finished my Christmas shopping. Places I went to include a small bazaar in the Petron gas station on the way to Mt. Makiling, the Ayala Alabang Cuenca bazaar as well as the Alabang Town Center.

I was planning to be a bit Scrooge-ey this Christmas but as Tyke said, “It’s Christmas, everyone deserves a gift, no matter how small!”

Now I’m going to apply my amateur gift wrapping skills. I sucked at arts and crafts back in grade school.

Speaking of gifts, one of the nicer ones I’ve received was from the Nokia people – they usually give next-year planners + something else. Last year, I got a really elegant Nokia bag that was a perfect fit for my iBook.

Now this year, the something else proved to be a 128MB Nokia USB thumb drive:

Here’s the Nokia bag I was talking about:

There’s an interesting topic over at Darren’s Problogger site – it’s a poll:

how much $$$ did your blog make from Google AdSense last month?.

I checked the payload for C9 and revenues are at $3 dollars and 6 cents. Woot!

I can’t believe the survey shows that 9/393 people actually made $10,000.00 from this. That means you can blog abot crap and people still click on your ads. I don’t know how this feat can be accomplished because you’re basically earning income passively. It’s true that blogging content does have weight in traffic, but what makes people click on your ad and not theirs when its all the same?

Registering with AdSense is easy as pie. Earnings however, isn’t that easy. Imagine AdSense as a small classifieds listing posted in every nook and cranny of the blogosphere.

Some people I know who use AdSense:

I just heard Dickoy made 36 cents so far in his blog. I think pasting the code on your blog is much easier if you have a Blogspot account.

Pam has made around 10 cents in revenue. Woot! UPDATE: She’s now made more that $1.00!

Gary has made over $100.00 in total AdSense revenue. But it took him over a year to reach.

Now, I recently applied for an AdSense account for this personal blog but I’m stuck in the page that tells me to choose how the ads will be laid out – just like the classifieds. Decisions, decisions! For what it’s worth, AdSense can give you coffee money when you’re just starting out. But I think payment only occurs after your first $100.00 in earnings. Hehe what a long shot that will be!

If you wanna find out more, there’s a blog that talks about everything AdSense (done by the Google peeps) located here.