Caerberu

A friend referred me to a really cool site called LiveMocha where you can enroll on an online language course for free! Yes, I’ve tried it and it really is for free. You can choose the language that you’re interested in, then you will go through their online course. It’s really a good resource, since you can listen to the words and their meanings, and you can track your progress with their quizzes.

Once you complete a module, you can proceed to more advanced modules. Eventually, you will be able to master the languages. It takes time, but it is really fun to learn.

Lately I’ve been working a bit on my other sites:

AW-Surveys.info is about how to earn money from free and paid survey sites. I set this site up using Joomla, just to get an experience with this open source Content Management System. So far, most of the visitors are referrals from my other sites and blogs.

e-Free-Magazine.info provides a large collection of free magazines that you can subscribe to. I did this using Drupal.

e-SEO-Guide.info provides free information and resources on how to do Search Engine Optimization to promote your sites. You can download free ebooks there and begin learning about SEO. It’s still a fairly new site, but it has a lot of articles that I wrote regarding SEO that I transferred from a site that I wrote for previously.

Watch-One-Piece.net is a free streaming video site for One Piece episodes and movies. My eyes are set on this site because currently, this is among my fastest growing sites in terms of the number of visitors.

WorkFromHomePhilippines.com is a site dedicated to teaching Filipinos how to earn money online. It’s also one of my fastest growing sites and more and more people are subscribing on the email newsletter every day. I started it only a couple of months ago, but I’m getting a lot of positive feedback and that keeps my energy level up to do more work on it.

One very enjoyable past time for me is listening to new songs and playing them on the guitar by ear. Learning this skill took me quite a long while to master since I’m a slow (but very persistent) learner, but now all the years paid off and for most songs that I hear the first time I can get their chords in 5 to 10 minutes provided that I have a guitar in hand.

The first step would be to make sure that the guitar is tuned according to the standard (for some bands, you have to tune your guitar based on their tuning, which may be one step lower or higher, or in some cases Drop D or other types of special tuning). Otherwise, you’d end up with okay chords, but at some parts it won’t sound exactly the same since if your guitars are tuned differently, then you could be using a powerchord equivalent, but the actual chord is an open string. I don’t know if that made actual sense, but anyway, just to clarify, you can usually do a single chord (G for example) in several ways. They will be equivalent, however, there is a notable difference between the sound generated from an open G and a powerchord G.

The 5-10 minutes playing by ear is just for getting the chords while listening to the song. It could take longer especially if the band is using more complicated chords (the type like A7, A9, etc etc… I don’t really memorize those chords, most of the time, I don’t know the name of the chords I’m using but I continue anyway because it sounds right).

An important skill for playing the guitar would be to commit the sound that you’re hearing to memory (if you’re able to hummmmmmm the sound with the right pitch then you’ve got that skill). Hummmmmmm that sound and go over the different frets of the guitar on the 6th string (the biggest string on the base) until you get a similar sound.

Depending on the number of the fret that sounds right, here are the values:

fret 0 (open string) – E

fret 1 – F

fret 2 – F# or Gb (Yes! F# equals Gb!!!)

fret 3 – G

fret 4 – G# or Ab

fret 5 – A

Fret 6 – A# or Bb

Fret 7 – B or Cb (Again, B is just equivalent to Cb)

Fret 8 – C

Fret 9 – C# or Db

Fret 10 – D

Fret 11 – D# or Eb

Fret 12 – E

Reading a book can be very relaxing especially if the book is really good. This is the case for Empire by Orson Scott Card. Card is one of my favorite authors, aside from Robert Jordan and Piers Anthony and Jared Diamond (the list goes on, but right now these are the authors that come to mind).

Anyway, I’m still at a third of the book and so far I’m really enjoying it. Nothing less to expect from Card, the author of Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow series of novels.

Empire is a book about a conspirancy in America between the left wing and the right wing, that is, extremists and conservatives. The setting is different than in Ender books, but the mature style of writing and the insightful ideas are definitely here.

It’s really enjoyable to work with shovels, bars, and the soil. There’s something good that comes with exertion and being in the heat of the sun that keeps you in touch with reality–as opposed to living the day on computers, TV, and gadgets. There’s something good with perspiring and relying on the wind to keep your body cool. Clouds that occasionally block the heat of the sun at 12 noon feel like such a blessing.

It feels like spring, though there is no “spring” here in the Philippines because it’s only rainy or sunny in a tropical country. You could also say it’s always spring, and it’s always the season for new things to grow.