Driving Hell

I may sound like a really broken record here but driving in our country really sucks especially of course in our dear capital, the infamous streets of Metro Manila.

As I type this and all of a sudden, a traffic enforcer with ninja powers came out of nowhere and starts giving me a violation ticket due to complaining about the traffic situation through blogging, here are some things I really, really hate in the roads of Manila.

Jeepney headlights set to off at night
I just recently noticed that many jeepneys traveling at night, and I mean many them, had their headlights off and speeding blindly in the dark. I remember almost hitting a jeep when I was attempting to change lanes and all of a sudden, a  jeep with a switched off headlight swoosh to my lane, complete with the patented angry honking. I asked this to a forum and a guy said the reason many jeepneys doing this is to make their slightly lit route signage attached to their windshield visible at night….. that’s stupid.

Swerving Delight
Filipino drivers just love to insert themselves on every possible space, even swerving drastically from one lane to another, sometimes jumping from one lane to 3 lanes. If you are a sane person, changing lanes is simply checking the lane you are about to switch, use signal lights and change lanes if there is no threat. Here, as usual, it will never work and many times it will lead to collisions and more headaches.

Driving on the line, not in the lane
97% of time, I am always in the middle of the lane. in between the designated right marks. If the road has 4 lanes it should stay that way but a lot of drivers placing their vehicles in the middle of road lines and not being in between the white lines, the 4 lanes became 6 lanes, traffic galore. As expected, as long there is a space in the road, the idiots will insert their vehicles in inappropriate areas, which results to more traffic.

U Turn slots and concrete barriers in inappropriate areas
No wonder there are a lot of news of vehicles getting wrecked by concrete barriers with bad reflectors. Driving with care is still the best way to get yourself safe from point A to B but having dangerous obstacles like concrete barriers placed in areas that most likely to get you car turned into a metal pancake is not really a good idea. Almost a lot of them has reflectors that degraded horribly due to poor maintenance and you cannot easily spot them at afar  especially at night and if you are not really familiar with the place. Bam you just hit a concrete barrier.

Deny Changing Lane Lovers
Some Filipino drivers just want it all. Like when you attempt to change lane after ensuring that there is no immediate vehicle, a faraway car from that lane will suddenly accelerate and block your lane, the only thing missing is to give you a douchebaggery smile. It happened to me many times especially at that accident haven called EDSA. It’s like the driver is a hybrid of Slimer and Lex Luthor, wherein the driver just want it all and the concept of road courtesy thrown out of the window.

Lets head on shall we
Counter flowing is encourage if there is no absolutely oncoming vehicles on the opposite lane. Not here in our country, just like what I said, if there is space, even in the opposite lanes, our dear fellow drivers will be in their speed orgasm trance state again, and speeds up to the opposite lane and dodge incoming cars while honking indiscriminately in joy. They do this to cut the travel time, but really, its making you cut your life faster.

Road courtesy is not existent
Major roads in Manila is chaotic packed with dangerous drivers and accident magnet road obstacles, driving around here is really hell. A lot of them does not follow road rules and I doubt they know what some road sign means.

If you are fast driver, you will be most likely be killed in an accident, and if you are slow one, you will also be mostly killed in a horrible accident. Its like dog eat dog world out there, everyone wants to reach their destination as fast as possible, even if it leads to more accidents.

As other say, if you can survive while driving around the Metro you will not have any problems driving anywhere in the world. There are a lot of delinquent and very unqualified drivers, mostly in public vehicles, tearing up the streets while having experiencing speed orgasm at the same time. We got a number of traffic reducing schemes with great premise but sadly fails in implementation. Lastly, don’t forget about poor road conditions that plagued a lot of our major roads that leads more disaster and sadly,  unnecessary deaths.

Combining them all and we got the recipe of driving hell.

Tooling you Computer: The Assorted Softwares Post

On the second and long overdue edition of tools, I will be talking about useful PC softwares and plug-ins I found all over the internet that you can use freely. The most important thing that I can say about the following softwares is that you can trust them, it will not mess with your internal windows OS, it doesn’t even clog your memory, and they will only appear if you need to.

You should have the essential softwares like a decent antivirus like Avast and a splendid browser like a Firefox already so you won’t be seeing some of these softwares here. I will also recommend other software that you may or not heard before that may in some way helpful to your profession.

I am not a certified information technology expert but with the following software plus common sense, will give you a better working computer, even if it is a slow one.

Winpatrol
http://www.winpatrol.com/download.html
Whenever you install new software, there is always a possibility that something you don’t like install itself, usually packaged with the software you install in the first place. This bullcrap is universally known as Spywares and Malwares. Some software, without your knowledge, immediately places himself as part of your Start Up which greatly affects the overall performance of your computer. With Winpatrol, you can now disabled unnecessary Start Up stuff without messing their registry.

Winpatrol also monitors and notifies you if dangerous software that you don’t know running around your OS attempts to install to your main system. You can block and removes these threats with an ease. There are more beneficial features that you can use with it but most of time I only use this to remove those annoying and unneeded software. There is a plus version of it but it involves money spending again, it’s up to you to consider buying the upgraded version.

You may ask what is a spyware. According to one of my time eating website, Wikipedia, a Spyware is computer software that installs itself surreptitiously on a personal computer to intercept or take partial control over the user’s interaction with the computer, without the user’s informed consent.

While the term spyware suggests software that secretly monitors the user’s behavior, the functions of spyware extend well beyond simple monitoring. Spyware programs can collect various types of personal information, such as Internet surfing habit, but can also interfere with user control of the computer in other ways, such as installing other software, redirecting Web browser activity, accessing websites blindly that will cause more harmful viruses, or diverting advertising revenue to a third-party. Spyware can even change computer settings, resulting in slow connection speeds, different home pages, and loss of Internet or other programs.

Spybot Search and Destroy
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/spybotsd/index.html
Spywares, malware and other crap that shouldn’t be invented in the first place and the author of these said crapwares should die by drowning in a pool full of diarrhea powered crap. To make sure that kind of threat will not bother you, just install this excellent anti-spyware software and let it search and destroy those spyware. Before scanning your system again, always update the software because almost everyday, a bastard creates another sneaky spyware. Be sure to shield yourself with this handy software.

Super
http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html
Super Video Converter, is the best video converter ever. There are a lot of shareware around that can convert your video file to another format. But most of the time, they will always cripple your video, by placing a logo watermark on your outputted video, and the only way to remove the watermark, is well, pay them, and you don’t want to do that. Those good guys from eRightSoft did a Lord’s work and provided us with this very reliable software than can convert almost all formats, even the .FLV format of video streaming sites like Youtube.

The process is easy, just drag the video to Super, choose the output format, and customize the main output (size, codec, etc.), and just wait. The conversion speed depends on the original size of your video and the speed of your computer so don’t expect fast results. After finishing the video conversion, you may view got your new freshly converted video, and you may burn it in a DVD or VCD, or if you are a rich bastard, a Blu-Ray burner. Why do I love Super? It’s free.

BitTorrent and the UTorrent
http://www.utorrent.com/
Having problems downloading your BitTorrent files using the original Bittorrent software? Is it too slow for you even if you detect a huge chunk of seeds from that file? Why am I talking technical? what is a torrent? Again, let’s ask google and Wikipedia.

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol used to distribute large amounts of data. The first distributor of the complete file or collection acts as the first seed. Each peer that downloads the data also uploads it to other peers. Relative to standard internet hosting, this provides a significant reduction in the original distributor’s hardware and bandwidth resource costs. It also provides redundancy against system problems and reduces dependence on the original distributor.

It’s like copying their file, no matter how big the size is, from their computer to your computer. It’s like the Napster and Frostwire peer-to-peer clients, but better. How do you use the Bittorrent, just do the following:

1. You should know first on what file do you want to have, is it an old movie? An old album you lost ages ago? A comic story arc you never read but you can’t find a printed copy somewhere? If you finally decided on what file you want to download, lets head to the web.
2. There are a lot of good torrent sites around the net. I recommend the controversial the Pirate Bay because it is one of the reliable torrent sharing sites and doesn’t have annoying ads. Just search the file, and download the torrent.
3. Now, to activate the torrent, you need a good BitTorrent client. I recommend UTorrent client because the download speed is quicker and easy to understand interface.
4. Download and install UTorrent and run your downloaded Torrent there.
5. Wait for the file to complete and enjoy.
6. Just a little tip, always check the number of seeds of the file, the more seed the torrent file has, the download will be faster.

Expectedly, torrent sharing is illegal because of copyright issues and having the file free of charge, so use it with caution.

OPEN OFFICE
http://www.openoffice.org/
The greatest alternative for that slow, horrible and hard drive eating Microsoft Office. It offers everything that any version of MS Office can do, but in a faster, lighter package and importantly, it is free. Open Office can edit existing files made in MS Office and you can open annoying formats without any other softwares to download., like that dreaded .DOCX wherein older MS Word versions cannot open.

Stay tune for more free and useful software goodies from this series.