I am flattered that I was chosen as one of the finalists for this year’s Philippine Blog Awards. A bit of good news after the tragedy that happened this weekend.

Here are the other finalists in the category: Best Culture & Arts Blog
Art in Action
Bookmarked!
Coffeespoons
magnetic-rose.net: Japanese Pop Culture for Filipino Fans
Perlas Design Studio
PinoyTattoos.com – Filipino Tattoo Source
SA GUBAT NG NAMIMINTOG NA PATALIM
Sari-Saring Sineng Pinoy
The Spy in the Sandwich
Views from the Pampang

Big news abound the internet, Microsoft and Yahoo partner up for 10 years. Yahoo will use Bing search technology while still receiving 88 percent of advertising from its sites. NY Times gives a good review here

I believe that design not only encompasses visuals, in which is what I do most of the time, but also experiences. See this summer hideaway, which looks like it was designed to the minutest detail. It definitely makes you feel like you’re a gypsy living a uninhibited life. My standards for a vacation room is pretty high, and a gypsy caravan doesn’t sound appealing to me. But after seeing these images, you can feel the tranquility and peacefulness of the place. Now I would like to go there!

I’m a fan of the futuristic style of the old Tron movies. I think I even had an atari game of it. I have a dvd of the original that I re-watched a couple of years back, and personally I thought it was a bit slow. I guess movies back then were. Still, Tron enjoyed a lot of cult following… if you google Tron, you’d probably get some fat geek wearing a Tron outfit. But I digress.

When I saw that they were doing a sequel to Tron, the images got me excited. Jeff Bridges is reprising his role as the uber-hacker taking down the big corporation. Olivia Wilde, from House MD tv fame and number 1 of Maxim’s Hot 100 of 2009, will also be in the film. They showed the trailer during comic-con and it looks kick-ass:

Pictured above is not the much talked about Google Chrome OS. It is, in fact, just one of the windows inside the Google Chrome browser. While browsing, I right-clicked inside the screen to reveal a menu and saw “inspect element.”

When the announcement of Google Chrome OS came out, it did cross my mind on how it would look. So far I like the implementation of the browser and as you can see it does look more like a Mac OS interface rather than a Windows one which it is running on. Yey!

Big news on the internets is Yahoo’s brave new look. It is on the rollout globally, but from what I’ve been hearing only some countries can accesses it today. In the Philippines, we can actually click on their “try out our new look” banner which will lead you to the new design, as seen in the screenshot above.

So finally Yahoo! is shedding any more traces of its red logo and going completely purple. I feel the renewed energy of yahoo, specially here in the philippines with its Purple Hunt that is currently ongoing. Although I rarely visit the homepage, I do use some of their products often like flickr, YM, yahoogroups, etc. It’s funny to see that they opened up their homepage to add links to other social networking sites like facebook and myspace.

Below are the “before” screenshots of yahoo.com and yahoo philippines, and while looking at it I notice that structurally it is the same. Same information hierarchy and grid but opting for a “flatter” feel removing the beveled glossy buttons and the quick access to your YM, mail accounts. It is also good that they moved their logo to the left instead of center, although this maybe a big departure from all of their previous designs, the logo was taking up too much valuable screen real estate anyway. It’s not a long shot to say that this may be influenced by their biggest rival. Are they playing catch-up?

A friend posted this as his facebook status, Help Remedies has created a set of medicines and bandages with awesome packaging. The packaging was alluring and drew me in. I found out that it was made of biodegradable material, another plus for awesomeness.

Instead of simply putting a generic name like “acetaminophen”, it says “help, I have a headache.” Or instead of “ibuprofen”, “help, I have an aching body.” More packaging images can be found in this blog lovelypackage.com and at coolhunting.com

I looked at their website and found that they are really approaching the world of medicine with a quirky point of view. For example, I played around with the images in their website to make it all the same color. Once that was complete, the site opened a new tab to Obsessive-Compulsive Foundation, hilarious.

The general tone of their site is really loose and casual, At one of their product pages, there is a link that says – our sincerest apologies, clicking on it popped up a new window with the following text:

“Dear sneeze fetishist,
Sorry. Help remedies does not intend to deprive anyone of the things that they love in life. In order to counterbalance the impact of “help I have allergies,” help remedies hereby provides www.helpihaveasneezingfetish.com. We hope this will make up for some of the sadness we have caused you.”

Drawing was made this July 15th, at 6:21pm

And the winner of the Moleskine Large Ruled Reporter Notebook is…

PETER! :) Congratulations! Please check your email for the details.

Thanks so much to avalon.ph for supplying the prize. Again, you can still get the notebook at 10% discount by going to avalon.ph and buy a Moleskine Large Ruled Reporter Notebook then key in the coupon code: noelperlas

For the others, the Blog-hopping giveaway event is still in full swing. Visit the next blog www.tinazamora.com from July 16-22 to get another chance of winning another notebook!

Thanks for all the comments and ideas. I love it. As I said in my email to you, I’ll try to write more often, give some design tips, and expect a redesign of this blog soon. :) In the meantime, please subscribe to my RSS feed.

It has been a while since I had a contest, during that time I trolled around the internets and found another website called avalon.ph. It too was giving away free moleskine, but their campaign was bigger and involved several different blogs. I told avalon.ph that I would like to join their “blog-hopping giveaways” campaign and this year they have selected my blog to be part of it!

Alongside these other blogs:
Jul 2-8 animetric.blogspot.com – Animetric’s World
Jul 9-15 www.noelperlas.com – Perlas Design Studio
Jul 16-22 www.tinazamora.com – Tina Zamora Photography
Jul 23-29 www.topazhorizon.com – Topaz Horizon

So starting tomorrow, July 9, until July 15 you will get a chance to win a Moleskine Large Ruled Reporter Notebook, right here in my blog! My rules are simple: post a comment in this blog entry, and remember to leave your email address so that I can inform you if you are a winner. Write anything or better yet, please leave me a note telling me what you’d like to see more of from my blog. That’s it! I will pick one winner at random, just like before. Stay tuned as I announce the winner in the following weeks. The winner will get this gorgeous Moleskine notebook:

But if you can’t wait to get one of these babies, avalon.ph is actually selling them at 10% discount. They just sell it online at P680, which is actually half-off the retail price already. Just head on over to avalon.ph and buy a Moleskine Large Ruled Reporter Notebook then key in the coupon code: noelperlas

Wow, that’s actually the first time my name became a coupon code. Kewl! So go now… comment!

While rummaging through my folders… while transferring and backing up files because my hard disk is already complaining, I stumbled on this file. It was the original design, didn’t look like the final product because the printer said it would be too hard to print the gradients.