Lunatic Weblog

I made the jump again.

My first jump to the smartphone cult was in June 2009 when I bought an HTC Diamond. Diamond was running Windows Mobile 6.1 at that time, HTC masked almost everything that can be masked from the not-so-pretty Windows Mobile interface. They did a great job.

Not so long after, I sold the Diamond to a friend when I was drunk and bought a Blackberry. It’s not that I was unhappy with the Diamond, I liked the hardware and all that, but the fact that it was running Windows made it run unstably.

I was happy with the Blackberry and I thought I was never going to replace it again. I kept myself connected to work 24/7 with the berry so I was very confident that it was THE phone. Oh how I love my Curve 8900.. I brought it everywhere I go, to parties, meetings, road trips and everywhere.

Until I soaked it in saltwater in January first. Ungh. Poor berry’s still in repair now, I hope Berry City can fix her up.

So anyway, I made the jump again.

This time I’m jumping to the Android bandwagon. And no, it’s not a Nexus One, it’s an HTC Hero. Freaking N1 is out of my budget, waaaay out of it. But Hero is awesome too.

A bit worried about Indosat’s unreliable data plan, but I guess I can live with it for now. At least until the berry’s back to prime condition. I subscribed to Indosat’s prepaid data plan with my IM3 number. Indosat’s prepaid users can do this by dialing *777*1# from their phone. I forgot the quota, I think it’s 50MB for the weekly plan.

So far I’m loving the hero, it comes with awesome apps and the entire experience has been wonderful. More technical review coming up when I’m not lazy :D

Some people say that they never want to grow up, childhood is enjoyable.

Being a child, having no responsibilities is awesome. You can do whatever the fuck you want, screw up as hard as you can and someone else will clean up your shit after you.

Come to think of it, it IS awesome isn’t it?

But check this, I actually have a friend who doesn’t grow up and she thinks it sucks. I trust her, but I always tell her that everything sucks anyway whether you grow up or not. So if you’re reading this right now, listen to me (or read me.. or whatever). Chin up, we know for sure that we are not someone to everyone but at least we’re someone for some people who matter to us.

And in the end that’s all that matters, right?

This is awesome. The options/preferences are limited but hey, its expected, this is mobile blogging after all :)

In October 2009, I bought a Blackberry and I was very happy with it. It gave me the freedom of being mobile and the opportunity to stay online and attend to clients in timely manner. When it comes to connectivity, push email and IM services, Blackberry is the best one you can opt right now.

I made the most of my Blackberry, I traveled a lot and stayed online most of the time on work IM. Personal IMs, not so much. Anyway, the point is, I could be reached anytime. Not nomad like before where I move from cafe to cafe, but I can actually do stuffs like eating out with friends and play billiard every now and then while still can response to incoming work.

That’s where I went wrong.

Me and the Blackberry

You see, working nomad is one thing, but working mobile is a totally different thing. I wasted too many times being on the road and doing stuffs without actually getting things done. I always end up responding to a work inquiry instantly but ending up posting a task on my todo list so I remember to finish them before end of the day.

Most of you might (or might not) have heard that I bathed my Blackberry in Sanur Beach’s salt water after the NYE celebration. The Blackberry is in repair now, so I have been using the old SonyEricsson w910i for 3 weeks already now.

Now that I’m not on Blackberry, I have to stay at home to work because I don’t want to work nomad anymore. While it is true that I miss being able to connect at will, I also find this as a blessing in disguise. Now that I’m chained to my desk I get more things done. Take these for example.

So I guess now it is safe to say that I can survive without Blackberry, probably won’t be getting another Blackberry for replacement later.

Oh and working from home is awesome, or this is just me getting older.

Whoa, what an awesome beginning of the year! After recovering from the holiday mood I quickly got to work and had this sudden idea of buying a domain name: my name. So I spent some time to look around to see where I’d register the domain and host the website.

Several options came up, in the end I chose to register in GoDaddy.com and host the website in ASmallOrange.com. More on that later. Anyway, so I bought priapurnama.me. The idea was to build a vcard website where people can quickly get connected to me. A couple of hours spent with Photoshop, Coda, Firefox and Internet Explorer resulting in this website:

Hup, that was simple.

I’ve also setup a laboratory for me to work there. It’s a Wordpress installation with dummy content from the Wordpress Theme Development Checklist and an awesome plugin to preview themes: Wordpress Theme Demo. The purpose of the laboratory is to preview my wordpress themes live, so everyone can try it and look around before (perhaps) downloading.

First theme I developed on the lab was Ronin.

Ronin. (yes, with a dot for the heck of it) is a wordpress theme with dark background. It has 3 columns, one for content and 2 for widgetized sidebars. There’s a theme options page to set the gravatar email and short bio. Here’ have a look at Ronin., live.

Next one was just finished now, it’s called Gridsomniac. This is the theme I’m currently using.

Gridsomniac’s using light background and dark text. I’m not sure if I should call this 2 or 3 columns because technically it has 3 columns but 2 are used for the post content, only 1 is allocated for sidebar. As usual, this one also has theme options page and widgetized sidebar. These are the standard these days. See the theme live here.

Note: I asked my twittter friends of what to name this theme with grid word. Some ideas came up: Evander Holygrids, Aura Kasgrids, Gridsmulat, Brigrids Bardots. My friends are supercute. I finally went with Gridsomniac coined by Budi.

I’ve submitted these themes to Wordpress Theme Directory, I hope they will be approved. I suppose there will be more themes coming up in the future, only they won’t come as fast as this. I’m thinking of one theme per month, pretty realistic, huh?

I learned a lot from developing these 2 themes, like the many things I missed when designing my previous themes. Now I know better thanks to this wplover article and of course, the theme development checklist.

So yeah, very productive month and January’s not even over yet. What about you? Anything interesting you did this month?