the henges are complete

the short story i've been working on has now been uploaded. took me a while to finalize the ending. anyway, click here to read. its in my deviant, i decided against posting it here as well cause of its sheer length(12 pages, T_T).

anyway, new template, not the end of my tweaking.

new playlist, so kristmasy, my playlist for the holidays.

and with that, i bid everyone a joyous holiday season. may you find what you're looking for over the next couple of weeks.

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life is life & we're goin to die, trust me on that.

two shows i follow thought it would be nice to have episodes which talked about life. there's one tree hill where lucas' heart stopped and he was met by a guide in the form of his uncle, and there's 7th heaven where eric camden found himself in heaven and was met by her mother-in-law. these two episodes had the uncanny ability to sort of put life under an electron microscope.

what is life anyway? that question, one of the oldest perhaps, still doesn't have a defeinitive answer. and it will never have one for as long as each of us has the ability to think for our own; each of us will always come up with a different answer. but what are we supposed to make of life? well dear reader, welcome to the world. that's what we are here for. hold on, that's the answer to the first question! what is life? to find out what we're supposed to make of it and do it! there! now, i can die...

in our search for that elusive answer, we fall back to basing our definition of life with the world. well, we live in this world after all. but no matter which way you look at it, our life is bigger than this world. its for the simple reason that if you take away your life, then there is no world for you. so to describe or compare life in terms of the world would be useless. what people do is they compare life with life. but once you do that, you find that you will be bombarded by conscience and moralty. or in simpler terms, what's right and what's wrong. and that perhaps may be the key, to answering the first question. so, what is right and what is wrong.

if you are going to fall back to basing your definition of what's right and what's wrong with the world, then your definition of what's right and wrong is 'its nonexistent'. that there is no right and no wrong in this world. there is only what's (socially) acceptable and (socially) unacceptable. this definition is passable, since that is the reality in this world. but you'll never find your answers if you keep on falling back to the world to answer your questions.

lucas kept asking his uncle what difference does being nice meant. he felt that no matter how good people may be, bad things keep happening to them. so what difference does being good in this world possibly have? why does the world seem so unfair? then, his uncle showed him how the world would have been had he not done this or done that. ok, its a tv show, but its a close enough imitation of life.

eric camden, the reverend, was greeted by people, most of whom he didn't know, upon getting into heaven. and each detailed how it is that his actions had affected them or their loved ones who were still living. some even offered glimpses into the future of good things that'll come to pass just because of his living his life. ok its another tv show, but two tv shows? my, its becoming a more accurate imitation of life.

the things we do have a profoundly great effect on our life and in this world. imagine this, as you were preparing to leave one morning, you remembered that your wallet was still in your room so you went back for it. cause of that, you missed the bus and you muttered out loud your exasperation. the girl standing next to you heard you and couldn't resist smiling. the guy across the street thought the girl was smiling at him. she is pretty cute so he decided to cross the street and approach the girl. but at the very moment he stepped off the curb, a car came around the corner and ran over him. traffic stopped on the street, thereby making you even more late than you originally were. more importantly, the president's convoy became one of the gridlock's casualties. a terrorist took the opportunity and assasinated the president. the country was thrown into chaos, and the a terrorist group took over. ten years later, the country became a powerful terrorist stronghold and thus forced the leader of a powerful nation to nuke the country. its amazing how all of us are intricately woven together, how no matter how far a person might be from another, there is a string of events which could be traced back to that person. and that, my friends, is the real internet.

we do not know for sure whether what we do is right or wrong. there is no standard definition for it is something which is defined in terms of life. so with that in mind, how do we do what's right or wrong? we don't. we just do. we just do AND hope that what we do is right. the world doesn't know hope. we know hope. that's why it can't define right or wrong, cause right and wrong is something that's not worldly. right and wrong is something which is related to our butt cheeks. its guts. you do what your right butt cheek tells you to do.

we must always remember to present our best self forward no matter what. no matter what, we are not living this world just for ourselves. with everything we do, someone else is definitely relying on us. even if you think your an unreachable island in the middle of an ocean. but consciously putting your best self forward is one of the hardest things to do. its like holding your breath, your gonna fail to do so every so often. and thats alright, you're supposed to fail doing it for yourself and as a reminder. but what's important is that you're gonna go back and do it again anyway.

persistence. the persistence to do, and the persistence to hope that what you're doing is right. its essential to have faith in ourselves, once we lose that, everything starts to fail one by one. and with each failure, we become less and less alive, til we become machines- just doing- doing without conviction, and acting without belief.

and perhaps thats what i want to share to you my dear reader. in this world, to strive on doing is what keeps us going, but the insistence upon ouselves to do what we feel to our bones is right is what keeps us living- that despite the seeming fruitlesness of putting our best self forward, despite that raging feeling of being unappreciated just keeps on swelling, despite that all the good you muster within you to share around you and yet bad things still happen to those undeserving of such, and that despite sadness, anxiety and selfishness fill this world to the brim, you are still there- doing good, never wavering, still hoping.

and if you are succesful in doing so, i congratulate you. you have acheived what most of us down here, finding our way, could only dream of doing. your help is appreciated, but it will only be in vain. we can't be shown the way, we have to find it for ourselves. but please believe in us, believe in each and everyone of us, that one day we will also find our way, then one day, we will find our way, hopefully before we die.

we too wanna live forever.

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people from the web that i admire

here are a couple of people i admire right now. ohhhh, before i go on, this isn't the next post i promised in my previous post. think of this as a prelude. haha.

here is a norweigan guy who's got wickedly good video editing skills. he's in animation school, or maybe used to be one, i dunno. hindi kami close. so, this is the video which basically catapulted him to "web-dom".

so he's great with video-editing. so what? well, in this next video, he basically used his skill and became an expert with the piano and the drums.

ok you must think i'm a pretty shallow person for declaring to the world that i admire who's great in patching together video. but his next video, which ain't like the previous two, wowed me. not because of his skill, though its still amazing here, but more because of his being a person here...

...and here is a person who is living. and he is living cause he exudes life in a way that a lot of us can't. here is a person who you can feel goodness somehow radiate off him. and here is a person who hasn't lost life to the world. here is a person who's not clouded enough by this world, that he remains a person who is like a vanguard of humanity. everyday, mankind degrades into nonhumanity. becoming more and more mechanical and robotic. where every "life" is just a template we got from those who came before us and which we will pass on to those who will come after us. and yet every now and then there are still some here and there like him. those who understand it AND adapt to it. they're not stupid enough to rebel against it and get crushed. sure, those guys are heroic, but they didn't even make a slight dent to the current world full of unhumanity. you see we all start out in life wanting to do something to make our mark in this world, but at some point we realize that making a mark in this world isnt as easy as we used to think, and so we back off. we lose that confidence in ourselves cause we fell into the template that was handed down to us and we didn't realize it for what it was. template? what template? uh gee, lemme see. you probably had some education. maybe a college degree. you might have a job. the very fact that you're reading this says you are using a computer which you is paid for by a source of income like a job or a business which you got into with some sort of education. now im not saying we shouldn't follow templates. what im saying is we should when we're being already controlled by a template and we should seek to reverse the situation. with this guy, he understood that we need to work, study, eat, sleep, cause thats the way this world is right now. but he didn't let those things rule his life and become his life. instead, he chose to rule over them. and for that, i admire him greatly. its hard enough to realize that we're in that situation, much less reverse it.. now the question remains, how the heck am i so sure that he really is that? im not sure. but thats the aura which i feel emanating from him.

now here is another guy you could visit by clicking here. you might have heard of him before, he's the guy who dances all over the world and uploads the videos to his site. do i have a philosophical reason for admiring him? well, none in particular. maybe same as with the guy above. oh wait, here's one: i admire him cause he actually had the guts to drop everything and pursue his... uh... ok, fine, dream. i was trying to recall the term used in the alchemist, no luck. i guess you could say that some of us do put off chasing after our dreams for later cause we might not have something to fall back on if it fails or because we might feel useless after acheiving it. well here's a guy who went after his dreams. after his first trip, he was broke. but he didn't care. and what do you know, fate indeed sided him(just as what's said in the alchemist) and made a company sponsor his second trip. so now, maybe he's not traveling anymore but hey, im sure he's enjoying being an "internet celebrity", or as being an inspiration to others. so yes, he took the risk. so this guy went after his dreams leaving the familiar. and after acheiving it, life still goes on. it didn't stop for him. now ain't that just nice?

so i better end this post now and pack bags. i just convinced myself to go on a trip. haha. nah. that's why i admire these two guys. i cant do what they did right now, cause if i can then i wouldn't be admiring them, right? sucks... off to bed for me again and prepare myself for the coming work week. T_T

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let me tell you about...

...my job.

all my colleagues are pretty much whites, those that i see everydayy. i cannot be absolutely sure, there might be someone other than thats hiding somewhere. also, i saw a non-white some day back, dunno if he's part of the office or was just droppin by. anyway, i dont mean to sound discriminatory. im not white, and im proud of it.

my desk is in front of my boss' door and the second floor landing, next to the humongously-sized bean bag, under an open air conditioner vent and behind the balcony which overlooks the welcome desk below and the over-sized inflatable snowman. on top of the desk is the only 19" CRT monitor you'll find in the whole office(i think), everyone else's using and LCD. after about 10 hours of staring at the screen, my eyes begin to hurt. i sure am glad i got an LCD screen here at home, that way i can stay up all night without hurting my eyes.

this past week i have been going into overtime. though we don't have overtime pay(i think) since im not in a human-labor service position. its taking me a while to get into the flow of things(programming whole day). and its partly caused by my my brain which is still in "short-attention-span" mode. months of idle living means the brain has to come up with something to keep it from being bored.

so basically a day in the office goes like this:
i come in around 8am. i'm one of the first 5 people to come in. i can't be the first, i don't have a key. colleagues come in around 9, boss around 10.
lunch? working lunch! working lunch time? when you get hungry! workmates usually leave around 12:30 to get some take-out, they'll be back in about 10mins. when you're caught up in work you sometimes forget to eat, which was what happened to one of our project managers who had lunch at 3pm. me? i prepare a sandwich or two, faster and easier to eat=more productivity!
people start leaving around 6. i leave, on average, around 7. i'm not a workaholic. its just that, IM A FILIPINO!!! and filipinos, generally, dont feel satisfied if they leave unfinished work behind. filipinos dont drop everything when the clock hits 5. filipinos... ok stop with the patronizing. ive been going into overtime cause im not yet anywhere near finished with my project which, by the way, was supposed to be due today. still is. i dont know what will happen. gad, its so frustrating!

---start geeky stuff---
i'm the new php guy. im their 2nd php developer. the senior php developer has been into php for like, i dunno, 10 years? the brought me on-board to basically handle whatever tasks my senior has no time to handle, that means pretty much everything php that comes their way cause he's working on a pretty amazing program right now which i'll share later. so my project for now is to expand on an existing website of a client. the website is that of an online shop. the client basically used an open source solution, namely OS Commerce(or open source commerce). its a full-featured website which does a ton of things. all a user has to do is download, install, then put in your settings and products, then you've got an online shop! easy to deploy. a real pain to expand or customize.

editing, expanding or customizing softwares or applications will always be a bummer. its not enough that you know the language its written in, you have to have tons of patience and the ability to connect seemingly unrelated things. you see, when modifying programs, you not only have to know by heart what it is that you want to modify so that you won't lose your focus, you also have to be able to think like the its original programmers. if you fail to make your mind work like theirs, you will most likely fail. each programmer has his own style of programming, and i'm not just talking about indentations and spacing here.

the programmers of oscommerce opted for an object-oriented approach. cool. throw in stored definitions, functions and procedures, you could end up with a nose-bleed if you don't keep your head. its very different from how we used to code in php back in school. you'd find little to no operations in the mixed php-html pages. in fact, it think it was trying to be a java-jsp emulation. of course, it cant do that, java-jsp is much more amazing when it comes to that. anyway, i finally got the hang of it and i'm picking up pace. and did i mention i was working with a live site? i have to make immediate backup restores each time something goes wrong. thats the other thing with modifying program. more often than not, porting it to a development machine won't always work. i tried to, but i had to give up cause it was going to take too much of my time just to set it up.

i also worked on fixing a bug for one of our designers. he was having trouble with the underlying php code cause it messes up the template he was working on. same case as with my project, the client got gallery, an open open source photo album and organizer. only this is much worse! i've never seen php code so unlike php! i had to add a line of code which went like: {if $user.isRegisteredUser} {/if} does that look anything like php to you??

so a plea to programmers out there, just because you're the one building it up from scratch doesn't mean you can program away with no regard to future mods and DOCUMENTATION!
---end geeky stuff---

but im not complaining about my work. i like it there, though i haven't gotten the chance to get up from my desk and get to know most of the guys. by the way, its a woman's world in our office. our bosses are guys, but our project managers are a couple of ladies. they're in charge of pretty much running everything internally(like hiring people and assigning projects). apart from them, the only other woman is our receptionist. the rest are guys. that's why we've got the football table thingy in the middle of the workplace. and that's also why the ladies get to redesign the whole place whenever they want(and as well as place scents in the restrooms and play an ambient background music).

as i said, i like the workplace. its fast-paced and everyone's doing something. its not a workplace where there's always somebody breathing down your neck. and i get to be a part of the office where dizzler was born! i think it was launched last monday, the day before my first day. they're still monitoring it closely cause they've been getting a lot of hits and a lot of emails(some bugs, some suggestions, a lot of stupid 'how come this doesn't work with me?'). so for the past week, whichever is set to autoplay on the dizzler's webpage would play out loud from one of the development team's speakers while they're debugging it. and i(well as everyone else in the office) am glad that its no longer sexyback! and by the way, it was coded using php! my senior is part of the development team and this is top priority, thats why im handling his overflows. probably when my my plates empty i'll go over and study it. its pretty slick, looks like its xml-ized. so, visit dizzler.com here!

lastly, about work...
somehow everytime i leave the office for home at night, i have a bigger-smile-than-last-nights' smile on my face, even though im not yet done with the project. i guess i somehow feel that finally, i feel like i'm doing something which i know is directly affecting someone else(alleviating the headache of the clent, hopefully). which brings me to the topic of my next post...

til my next post tomorrow!

ps. pardon my english, well, pardon my writing, here. if you've noticed, everything are like just phrases separated with '.'s and joined by ','s. i've been sleep-deprived(not really, not just used to it yet) lately and my fingers have a life of their own again.

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the surfer has finally washed ashore

i finally landed a job.

it was my first day today.

i have to readjust my body clock and sleep early, i've been so used to staying up until the wee hours of the morning. that simply won't do anymore.

so, if you see me online in ym, i'm probably in work and busy. though i can't put in a 'busy' status cause that's what we use in the office.

about my work? about 12 minutes away from my place, less time than it used to take me to get to the nearest starbucks back in manila. i'm under evaluation for 90 days so i better not mess up if i wanna keep the job and have good compensation. casual work environment, way too casual in terms of wheeling and dealing.

right now, i have my own project. i need to expand a website which uses OSC(Open Source Commerce). reminds me of my EAZIX days. i have to learn the overall structure and how each action is processed. so far so good. but i have a tight deadline. its due on friday. so, good luck to me!

anyway, i'll probably expound on this sometime in the near future, not now, i'm in hurry to get this over with and sleep.

oh, i'm one paragraph shy of finishing the short story i was writing which i mentioned in an earlier post. i probably won't mirror-post it here cause its way too long, longer than what i anticipated. so you'd have to hit my deviant if you wanna catch it. interesting read i think, i started with a story then it sort of kept on branching off.. hehe

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go hoff into the bitch!

david hasselhoff recently won the Big Comeback award in vh1's Big in '06. i couldn't agree with them more. i'm not a fan, but you gotta love the guy. he's a pervert, he knows it, he likes it, he flaunts it, he makes gazillions out of it and you just hafta love him for that. and 2006 was great for him, a movie(Click), a reality tv show(America's Got Talent), a single(Jump in My Car) and a musical(David Hasselhoff: The Musical, d-oh!).

i saw him guest in 'Whose Line is it Anyway' and they did a skit with a woman volunteer from the audience towards the end of the show. now i can't remember what they did, what i remember though is that at the end of the show, while they(including the volunteer) were waving their goodbyes and thank yous, the hoff had his arm around the woman and his fingers were inside her blouse. in front of the camera. and the girl wasn't enjoying it, you could see it in her face.

so before i close this post hoff, here's his music video(i used to like his car way back in the day, and i still do).

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how-to: download mp3s in web 2.0

the internet is a humongous resource. to say that mp3s could only be found in file sharing networks is a gross underestimation of the collective rectum's capacity.

first was the era of IRC. it was a great resource. but the danger of being infected or nuked was just too high. also, it takes forever to be served especially during high-traffic hours where those waiting in queue could easily reach to a hundred. furthermore, there are also a lot of arrogant operators. so great resource, but annoying to use.

then the file sharing networks took over. napster, then kazaa, then now limewire. i'll admit that these programs were great. but as time wore on and the music industry began to fight back, these programs started failing to deliver. it started with the quality of the downloads not being good. then the music industry, led by the RIAA, started cracking down on the users. So, less resource coming from the US. Then they went further as to flood the network with fakes and dummy copies. again, it became annoying as well.

then came rapidshare. with rapidshare, sharing became a centralized thing again, from being uncentralized with the p2p networks, with file hosters being the central server. of course these central servers didn't allow posting of copyrighted materials, but by the time they take it down, a lot of people would have already been able to download it. sounds great, but the downside is, its hard to come across the links to download the files. a query of '%song's name%.mp3 site:rapidshare.de' in google would usually yield nothing since the filenames of the mp3s are usually incoherent text. so you have to query '%song's name%' mp3 rapidshare' to be able to view pages where those appear. that means digging through pages upon pages of search results, usually forum posts. furthermore, after a month of inactivity, file hosters would usually delete the file making searching for mp3s a race against time. however, some sites still provides a great resource like cameron's blog here.

now with web 2.0, blogs have taken over. and i can assure you, you'll find a lot. this is a lot like the rapidshare thing except that the mp3s are hosted by the blog owners. you can find these by simply googling '%song's name% mp3 blogspot'. you will be treated to a list of a lot of blogs. now, not all of them have mp3s in it, but a lot of them do. thing is, bloggers would always claim that the mp3s they post are for previewing purposes only and that they would gladly take down the mp3s if the artist asks them to take it down. some bloggers also take down the mp3s after a week, but there are a gazillion other bloggers there anyway. so, what's nice with doing it this way? well the quality is often top-notch, you'd also come across a lot of other mp3s from artists you probably haven't heard of,and its absolutely of no danger of being tracked by RIAA. and once you find a blog full of mp3s, check out where that blog links to, chances are, they are music blogs as well. to help you get pointed in the right direction, here are a couple of blogs:
Bow plus Arrows- one of the "central blogs"
My Old Kentucky Blog- one of the oldest blogs
some blogs would also have a nifty flash-based music player like what i'm using in this page. you can also rip off music from there if you like something that's playing. just follow these steps:
1. Right-click 'View Source'.
2. Search for the string "*.swf?playlist_url=http://*.xspf*". for this site, this is an example "http://www.freewebtown.com/fapri/xspf_player_slim.swf?playlist_url=http://www.freewebtown.com/fapri/how_can_i_tell_you.xspf&autoplay=true&repeat_playlist=true" the italicized part points to where the flash player is located, you have no need for that. it will be followed by a '?' to denote a parameter. look for the 'playlist_url' parameter. all like players will have this for this contains the links to the actual mp3 files. the value of 'playlist_url' will always be an absolute path.
3. Copy the value of 'playlist_url', http://www.freewebtown.com/fapri/how_can_i_tell_you.xspf in the example above, and paste it in the address bar of your browser.
4. Your browser would know that the xspf file is actually an XML file and so all it will contain is data and thereby display it in a friendly way. If your browser won't display it properly, download it then open using notepad.
5. Since its XML, you will be looking at the values inside the tags, and all playlists for this type of player would follow the same format. the 'annotation' tag would usually contain the song's name. then the 'location' tag will contain the absolute location of the mp3. Copy that then paste to your web browser's address bar to download it.
this will not work with myspace's player. this also won't work if the player is integrated into a bigger flash animation since it would effectively hide the parameters.

now, if you didn't like either of the two ways to nick mp3s from the web, there is of course another easier way. but that's not the point, you're gonna miss out on the fun of discovering unknown people's blogs which may contain a lot of other info and even more mp3s and resources. to take a leaf out of Forrest Gump's page, "Life is like googling blogspot for mp3s, you'll never know what you're gonna get". ok, ok i'm being melodramatic. the easiest way to nick mp3s from blogs is, of course, to go to the site which indexes mp3s from blogs! d-oh! its located here:
SONICX- for all you lazy people out there who's gonna miss out on seeing all those porn pics from bloggers all the world over. oops, now i said too much. haha, nah, just kiddin. ;-)
i'd recommend that you drop by the sites which sonic indexed cause if you liked what you're nicking from that site, then you'd probably find other more fun and exciting stuff there.

and this concludes my how-to. remember, i posted this guide for previewing purposes only.

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i'm a bloody british...

well, no.

but i'll soon be if i keep on drinking tea at this rate. by my estimate, i'm 4,612 cups of tea away to becoming a bloody british. and why this newfound addiction to tea you might ask? well, the answer is simple really... its the bloody weather!!!

since this week started, the temperature's been droppin steadily. when i got home tonight, it was 48 outside. i mean 9 in celsius(gee, i gotta get used to using the metric system if i'm gonna become a briton). gad, of course its still gonna go down as the night wears on. last night i think we were in the 30s. below freezing. bloody friggin' cold! the only reason its still not snowing here is because this is the desert, and that means no humidity. thank God for that. i wonder how tj's able to survive the harsh winters in his end of the states...

anyway, i just wrote a short story. its not yet finished, about two thirds of the way. if you wanna check how its coming along, i posted it here in my deviant. i will mirror-post it here once i'm done so you can just wait for it here.

oh and lastly, i still don't have a job...

i heard folks back in my beloved homeland's gonna get pummeled by yet another supertyphoon. all i can say is, take care you guys! you're better off with typhoons than me with the cold here. ;-)

...and last of the last, i just wanna plug One Tree Hill. i followed it religiously back in the phils, and i am still following it religiously here. the episode last night was absolutely amazing. if you didn't get to watch it, go dig it up in youtube! it reminds me why i absoutely love the series. and from a guy who's known for his unenthusiastic relationship with the television, this is something which you should have followed and should be following. at the very least, you're gonna like whitey. =D

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how-to: add built-in widgets

i talked about getting a tv tuner from my previous post. when i got to install the software to use it, i was horrified to see that it added a vertical toolbar on the right side of my desktop. it ruined the layout of my icons but at the same time i couldn't just get rid of it cause its dead useful. the solution? i had to come up with a new desktop layout fast. i tried moving around the icons to no avail. thats when i stumbled upon this little known and buggy "widgets" feature of the windows desktop. it doesn't, by any means, comes close to those which you'd find in a mac. nor is it as pretty or as animated as those offered by 3rd party vendors like yahoo. but you can't deny one thing, it isn't a resource-hogger as it is a built-in thing.

the "widget" i'm talking about is just a toolbar actually. it loads with your taskbar at the bottom. and i think it's more of an undocumented and unsupported feature which came about by the windows explorer's loose and open-ended coding. so, here's a step-by-step guide. this is really easy to implement, just watch out where your mouse points to.
1. Create a folder in your My Documents and give it any name.
2. Fill the folder with shortcuts to various programs you want to put in your widget. You can do this by tracking down the program's .exe file in your Program Files directory(or finding the program's icon in the start menu) then right-click> Send to> Desktop(Create Shortcut). You will find the newly-created shortcut in your desktop. Rename it(ie. remove 'Shortcut to'). Then drag it to the newly-created folder.
3. Right-click on your taksbar
4. Select Toolbars> New Toolbar. Locate the folder you created and click ok.
5. What will appear in your taskbar is the folder's name and a superscripted double arrow. Drag the double column of dots preceding the folder's name to your desktop. If you can't see the double column, uncheck the 'Lock the Taskbar' option in your taskbar's properties(right-clicking on the taskbar).
6. You will now see a small window in your desktop containing the programs' icons you chose earlier.
7. Drag it to the upper edge of your desktop until it becomes a toolbar-like thing. Once you release the mouse-button, the title-bar should disappear.
8. Now you have a toolbar at the top of your screen. If you like how it looks, you may stop here.
9. Right-click on it to view the other options available. To create a widget-like feel, unckeck the 'Show Text' and 'Show Title' options and select View> Large Icons. Re-adjust the height accordingly and voila, a widget!
you can also put it on either sides of your desktop. I put another on the left side and set it to 'Small Icons' and Auto-hide.
so now, my desktop only contains 3 icons. its super clean and super uncluttered.
like it? hate it? stuck in a step? lemme know! ;-)

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the whole thanking and buying ordeal

after the rush of Black Friday is saturday, and for me its a sleepy saturday.

wednesday
we were to have a thankgsgiving dinner at my aunt's place so i figured i'd whip up a couple of dishes. first off, i made my potato salad. while the taters were boiling away, i worked on making a pasta dough for a ravioli dish which i just felt like making at that time. cause of that, i wasn't able to remove the water from the taters after they were cooked which resulted into them being a little mashed from too much water absorption. so, take note of that guys. anyway, kneading the dough was tough. and stuffing the filling was tougher. thinking about it makes me tired. the filling was a miixture of tomatoes, onions and bologna. the sauce was made from the chicken and potato stock from the potato salad, onions and cream cheese. too much work, kneading that is. next time, i'm gonna get those wanton sheets so i don't have to make my own dough. geez.

thursday
its my first real thanksgiving here. and as far as holidays and celebrations go, it is at par with major holidays like christmas here. and i have no problem celebrating it with the rest of united states.

thanksgiving may have hadits beginnings as that of a commemorative thing for the first feast which native americans and the settlers celebrated together, thanks giving for not killing each other. nowadays, its still that, plus some more. it has grown from a mere remambrance to that of a real thanks giving. we don't just celebrate that first feast but also the founding of a country, the world's bounty, the fellowship of men and the grace of God.

and so we say thank you to...
...the past, for giving us today.
...the world, for giving us itself.
...the people around us, for giving us their company.
...people everywhere, for giving us the collective force of life.
...life, for giving us its gift.
...God, for giving us His grace.
...ourselves, for giving us ourselves.

anyway, my potato salad won some more fans but the mashed nature worked against it in the sense that the mayonaisse wasn't absorbed as much. then the pepper i got had a hard time going against the taste of the un-absobed mayo. but i was surprised at how my raviolis turned out. it was great, this was my third attempt in making those little critters. the first one was purely tomato based with different kinds of mushrooms. it was nice but not that good. my second attempt was a disaster. made from black-eyed peas and bittermelon leaves. idon't want to elaborate. so this was a real surprise. i liked it, they loved it, i gotta write the recipe down somewhere before i forget about it. lol.

what i like about the thanksgiving feast, apart from the gobble-gobbling turkey, is the stuffing! gad, i just can't get anough of it. sigh. drool... i'd have to attempt making one soon. nyahahaha.

friday
the road to friday is littered with catalogs, ads and more ads. the friday after the fourth thursday of november is called black friday. and its the biggest sale event in america. so, what better way to devirinize a first timer than to partake in the whole conundrum of black friday.

around 5 in the morning, the time stores opened up their doors to let the hordes in, i was still bleary-eyed in bed. got up, then reviewed the catalogs sprawled on the coffe table in the family room. i decided to go for a tv a target, a laptop at best buy and a chair at officemax. so we got on or way around 6. here is the store-by-store account in chronoligcal order:

fry's electronics. our first stop, we got here around 20 past 6. i insisted on this first stop cause generally, this is where the cheapest stuff are, electronics-wise, usually. i couldn't believe that the 1 page ad they took out was all they were offering for their sale. they're the biggest electronics boutique here and their regular prices would pass off as marked-down prices in other stores, so there has to be more. and when we got there, seeing the parking lot full, and everyone coming out pushing a trolley with something big like an LCD tv, reinforced this idea. but sadly, a quick look around the store said that the 1 page ad was indeed exhaustive of their on-sale items. interestingly enough, it was full of people inside, and their really long row of checkout counters are full and with a line which snakes around four times. so we left, gotta keep focussed on what we were really after.

best buy besides fry's electronics. wasn't even 7 and the store was packed like megamall on a mega-sale. it was a little hot inside and you really get to smell the different aromas, you get the picture. the check out line wound its way around the store, attendants were shouting, everyone was rushing around the store. but, me? i went away bitter. the laptop i wanted turns out have been gone long before we got there, they gave out tickets to the stuff inside the store around 4 in the morning so the early bird really did get the fattest worm. the laptop i wanted was from hp featuring a centrino processor, 512mb ram, 80gigs hdd, DVD+-R and a 15inch widescreen, meager by today's standards, but at $380 that's a bargain. normally goes for $750.

target at Paradise Village. got there around 8, it wasn't full. normal crowd, seems everyone's priority was to get to the boutiques first before hitting the one-stop shops. however, the electronics section was still the most popular one. i saw two ladies with the tv i wanted so i had high hopes i'd also get one. of course i didn't, they just ran out. tough luck. it was a 19" LCD HDTV on sale for $180. normally its $400. now i'm really frustrated. on the up side, we were tipped by a guy who works there that a truck will arrive around 2 in the afternoon and it might have the tv. oh ok, our place is just two blocks away anyway so it wasnt a problem.

circuit city near Mayo Clinic. there around 9. same case with best buy. really full. by the time we got there, the gameboy sp my bro was eyeing for was out as well. it was goin for $50. they were also offering at a lot of games and dvds for $5. wow, but its not worth the line for the checkout.

target at Desert Ridge. this is the bigger target. same deal, the tv was out as well. oh well.

officemax at Desert Ridge. hurrah! no lines! fewer than 10 people customers inside! normal crowd! yay! best of all, the $50 chair, which normally goes $130, greeted me at the door! yay! my bro also got a corner desk, wonderful piece for $60 from $180. yay! we weren't bitter anymore!

paradise bakery at Desert Ridge. hungry, gotta have a bite.

best buy at Paradise Village. not the first best buy we went to, this one's near our place. got here around half past 11. we were tying to beat the 7-hour specials or "til noon only" most stores had. my laptop was still nowhere to be had. my bro were luckier than me. they just brought out this pile of desktop PCs which wasn't listed in their ads. we were just lucky to spot it. it was a $375 rig from emachines. P4HT 3.0GHz, 1gig ram, DVD+-R, 200gigs hdd, 15"LCD, canon printer. couldn't get any better. in 10 minutes, all that was left of the pile was the floor. sweet. i didn't walk away there empty handed, i got a 2gig flash disk from SanDisk for $30. a $65 savings.

target at Paradise Village part deux. substantially more people now. waited for 2, watched the attendants restock. still no tv. grunt.

compusa at Paradise Village. normal crowd. no great deals to speak of. boring. as usual.

walmart near scottsdale airpark. it seems they didn't have much stuff on sale. dang. a lot less people outside now. its now 3pm.

best buy near scottsdale airpark. hoping in vain for a laptop... still na-da.

staples near scottsdale airpark. uh, why were we here? oh right, we don't know as well. lol. just felt like droppin by.

home. around half past 3. unloaded cargo and me and my bro were off again.

target at bell towne center. i never give up. and no matter what ido, it still won't magically materialize in thir shelves. sigh.

fry's electronics part deux. much more pleasurable atmosphere now. no more checkout line, but the row of checkout counters were still busy. went around checking out items in more detail. anyway, my bro talked me into getting a tv tuner card for the pc instead of a tv since i already have a 17" LCD monitor anyway. and you know what, it actually made sense. so i got a HDtv tuner card from ati for $100. this way i get to extract the HD signals already being broadcast over the air, watch it, and save it. yay! my pc just became a dvr as well! lol! but, oops. my 3 hdds have a combined free space of about 20gigs. not a good idea if i want to snag videos from the air. and i can't put in anymore hdd cause the ide channels are already full(3 PATAS + dvd = 4 drives = breaking point). then i got this wierd idea to put in a SATA drive even though my motherboard doesn't natively support it. so i searched the aisles for a SATA controller PCI card. yay! it exists! and quite cheap at $30. so now i have to look for a great deal on a SATA hdd. back to the aisles again! lo and behold, a 500gig SATA drive was on sale for $150! yay! more storage! woot! i was ecstatic. and had to leave the store premises immediately for fear of finding another item which i won't be able to reist getting.

home again. after 13hrs(6am-7pm) of shopping, it was finally over. still no laptop though but i'm sure there's something out there. i got into assembling my chair so i'm enjoying sitting on it right now as i type this. no more aching butts from the hard wood chair for me! then i took on my pc again. it was probably as nervous as i was. another surgical operation. here's the technical story:

i opened the flap. i figured it would be safe to remove my highly buggy and unstable video capture card, which i only used for about three times anyway i think, and my modem card anymore since i slapped in a wireless usb adapter at the back when i got here in the states to access the wifi around here. so, with the two recently freed pci slots, my rig was substantially cleaner. those two cards were covered with dust. T_T

i slapped in the sata controller card where my modem used to be. i ran into a bit of problem installing it with the included driver so i went to their website and got the latest driver. that fixed the problem.

next was the hdtv tuner card. it was big, but it went in comfortably where my video capture card used to be. interestingly enough, this tuner card can also capture video from anything since its also got a s-video and the yellow, red, white, input plugs in it. yay! got it working right away, no snags in the installation. although the reception i get in my room from the included antenna is weak, but its ok, i'm working on a fix for it right now.

lastly, the sata hdd. i left this for last since this will be the trickiest to install. when i slapped in my 3rd hdd, i had to disable one of my chassis fans(which rides along the secondary ide channel power supply) for it causes my whole secondary ide line to disappear from the system or worse, a lock up. apparently the power supply is not enough with the fan. when i took out the fan, my rig worked fine. so with an additional drive, i figured i'd have to disable one of my current drives so that my supply won'te get overloaded. so i directed the supply for my 2nd hdd to the new drive using the included ide to sata power calbe included. it worked fine. but i wasn't hapy losing a hdd. sure its just an 80gig drive compared to the 500gigs im replacing it with.

so i was about to close the flap when i noticed a sata power cable sticking out from the tied up bundle of power cables. i stared at it and i couldn't believe it. did my power supply really supported a sata drive natively? how can it? can it handle the additional power requirement? well, only one way to find out. i put the plug back into my 2nd hdd and used the newly discovered power line for the drive. pushed the power and prayed it won't make the long beep which says inadequate power in bios terms. it didn't. it worked. so i guess my supply can hande it. so i guess the additional chassis fan really wasn't overloading the supply, just the line which makes sense i guess. so i now have a 4th hdd! and as this writing, i don't know how i will partition the too-much-space in it. i'm all ears for any suggestions.

i closed the flap and declared the operation a success. my rig is once again breathing without fear.

by the time i finished around 3 in the morning, i was just way too tired.

saturday
i'm going to stay home and rest. period. . . . .......!

appendix:
HD- High-Definition- a digital television broadcasting system which allows for significantly higher resolutions than what traditional formats would allow. from Wikipedia
PCI- Peripheral Component Inteconnect- a computer bus for attaching peripheral devices to a computer motherboard. from Wikipedia
PCI card- a device in the form of a silicon wafer or a card which adds functionality to your computer. pretty much any none-core functionality of a computer is based here. ex: modem, lan, wifi, tuner, etc.
PCI slot- these are the slots in your motherboard where you put in PCI cards. there will be removable flaps in your cpu's casing(usually at the back) that lines up with these slots which will allow cards to "peer" into the outside world.
RAID- Redundant Array of Inexpensive(or Independent) Disks- a data storage scheme using multiple drivs to replicate or share data among themselves. from Wikipedia
SATA- Serial ATA- the successor to PATA(Parallel ATA)s. faster communication speeds and dedicated lines. from Wikipedia
SATA Controller PCI card- PCI card which enables a system to use SATA disks. also features RAID functionalities to hooked up drives. some cards can host up to 4 disks. you can put as much of these as there are PCI slots making for immense scalability.
tech-savvy- glorified way of saying geek. ex: i'm tech-savvy. lol.
knowledge-enrichment- a glorified way of saying "i'm bored so i'll surf the net". ex: what you're doing right now.

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recipe: mike's potato salad

POTATO SALAD
serves 4

ingerdients:
1 lb. chicken breast(bone-in)
5 lbs. potatoes
1 liter mayonnaise
3 tbsp. coarse-ground or crushed black pepper
1 tbsp. basil
salt to taste

directions:
1. peel potatoes.
2. place the chicken breasts, potatoes, and a pinch of salt in a pot of water. make sure the water covers everything. bring to a boil and wait until the potatoes can punctured halfway through with a fork.
3. remove from fire. remove potatoes. dice potatoes to bite-sized pieces. put into a large mixing bowl.
4. fish out the breasts. remove/eat the skin. hold a knife with your left hand and a fork with your right. use the flat side(sideways) of the knife to pin the breast down then with the fork, debone it by doing scraping it. add this to the mixing bowl.
5. add the mayonnaise. mix it with a large wooden spoon or spatula. add the blacck pepper by the tablespoon, mixing it between each addition. before adding the last tablespoon of black pepper, add the basil.
6. chill in refrigerator before serving.

notes:
1. adjust ingredient proportions to control serving size(scalable).
2. its best to age it for a day or so.
3. the leftover chicken&potato stock tastes great! use it for soups or anything else which needs stock like gravy.
4. i'm writing this from memory, proportions might be a little off. yes, it looks like there's a ton of pepper in it when it's done.

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i just wanna die from Pills, Actually.

so yesterday tj, my life partner in multiply(lol), put up an old video in his page. so i got into "reminiscing mode" and i was able to dig up the dump files of our Pills Actually project from about 2 years ago.

for the unacquainted, Pills Actually is the title of the supposed movie adaptation of Paulo Coelho's Veronika Decides to Die. it was our final poject for our Humanities course back in our second year in college. we were just tasked to make the movie trailer for it and some other stuff but not the entire movie. it was a lot of fun, really. and bily, haha, birthday project mo to!

a lot of you probably have seen what it looked like, the finished project that is. but only bily, lianne and me have seen this. that i can assure you. mwahahaha. they are the different versions of the trailer. i included the original version(the first one), which is in english, the other two, well, that came about from staying up too late. i cleaned up the sound a bit, so you should hear the dialogues more clearly. see, i really do not delete stuff in my hard drive! hihihi.

in english


in "japanese"


in filipino

ps. you're gonna have to turn up the volume, uploaded video's sound quality is horrible.

pps. sorry bout that, should be working now. ;-)

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harry potter and the hostel of the phoenix

for those of you who don't know, the teaser trailer for the next harry potter movie came out with happy feet(it will also come out in happy feet's website on monday). i didn't go with my bro and his wife to see happy feet so when i found out, well, frustrated is too weak a word to describe how i felt. so in my frustration, i dug up the following harry potter 5 videos. all i can say is, harry got older, fatter and uglier(the unholy triumverate), hermione looks like she's still the same(which means she's still hot), and ron... is... uh... i'd rather not talk about ron. enjoy! ;-)

LSS, woohoo!


"its pronounced harry, not scared!" woot!


must be nice to be queen eh?


omgomgomgomgomgOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOOOOOOMMMMGGGGGGG!!!!!!!!!!!!


the realest and clearest harry potter trailer here. enjoy!

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how-to: customize your desktop

some posts back, i talked about posting a guide on how to customize your desktop's theme. that time has come my dear friends. come, join me in my dream to rid this world of plain coffee. customize!

the easiest way to radically change the over-all look of your desktop is to use XPize. the latest version is 4.6. its a one-click installer which wll replace your theme, your log-on screen, your boot-up and shutdown screen, your alt+tab screen, some icons, and other minor tweaks. its very stable and safe. it'll eat only 2megs of your memory for the alt+tab replacement. if you're comfortable with the current alt+tab setup, you can choose not to install it anyhow. but i'd recommend that you use it, it looks waaaay nicer. i would, however, recommend that you do not install the boot-up screen replacement. it looks horrible. but the over all package is really worth it. and its free!
click here to get it.

i would recomend that you use XPize. but, if after awhile the desktop theme begins to bore you, then you can easily replace the theme. in reality, its called msstyle. some would refer to it as visual styles. but i prefer themes. you an change your theme even if you're already using XPize. in fact, i'd recommend tweaking your themes manually in cojunction with using XPize. its to get as much customization as possible.

the first thing you should do when tweaking your desktop theme is to run UXTheme Multipatcher. you can get it here. this patches the uxtheme.dll in your windows directry. by default, windows doesn't allow you to change the theme to other than what they give you. and they won't give you any new themes anyway so in my opinion, that's really proprietorial. its a safe patch. click "ok, i don't care" when windows warns you about it causing a system crash in the future cause it won't. if you want to uninstall the patch, just run it again. if you're going to or plan on using XPize, i'd recommend that you run this patch first before installing XPize.

once you've patched and rebooted, head on to this corner of deviantart and take a look at the visual styles there. i'm sure you'll find something you'll like there. you will be overwhelmed with the the amount of "Vista Element" visual styles there. you have been warned. the following pics are examples. i won't give out the exact links for the following, go find your own!

now if you've noticed, the Menu Bar(the one which contains File... Edit... View... etc...), in my My Computer window in the screen captures above is missing. if you want to do that, get Styler toolbar! aside from making the menu bar disappear, it can also replace the Standard Buttons Bar(the one which contains the Back and Forward buttons) to something which you're more comfortable with. and it only takes up 2megs of your memory. click here to get it.

so there you have it, how to customize your desktop theme(or visual style). this is the free and most resource-efficient way. there are other ways to customize it but they use 3rd party software and runs another app on the background. it may not be as slick or as screen-shattering as those which requires you to cough up some moolah, but hey, at least your not stuck with what those guys at microsoft thought as the be-all and end-all design. have fun!

ps. my how-tos will always be long. get used to it. =p

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#403 Good News for People who Love Bad News

"You ever look at a picture of yourself and see a stranger in the background? It makes you wonder how many strangers have pictures of you, how many moments of other peoples lives have we been in, were we a part of someone's life when their dreams came true, or were we there when their dreams died. Did we keep trying to get in, as if we were somehow destined to be there, or did the shot take us by surprise. Just think, you could be a big part of someone else's life, and not even know it."

-Lucas Scott

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spider-man: once again it sees the light of day!

this is not a post about the upcoming or previously released spiderman movies. hit the next blog if you that's what you thought.

a friend of mine, francis, asked me for a copy of a piece which i wrote about a couple of years ago i think. and the piece doesn't really have a title, but it just became fondly referred to as "the spiderman thingy". so i looked for it everywhere in my computer. but, alas! i couldn't find it! that doesn't compute! i don't delete stuff in my computer! i was able to save everything which went in my computer since third year high school! the only item i lost were my logs in irc for i don't know how many years. it was an accident, i deleted the program, it took along the log files. and yes, i have logs. so now i can't blackmail some people out there anymore. huhuhuhu. anyway, i was lucky to find a copy in my mailbox. thank God for yahoo. the file is still probably somewhere in my messy but structured hard drives. so, here goes:

i wish i was spiderman.

i wish i could scale the tallest buildings in makati. i wish im able to lift tons of steel. i wish im able to swing from galleria to megamall to shangrila. i wish i could stop the mrt in its tracks. i wish i could sense when im being pickpocketed upon...

no, i dont need the rush. i dont need the thrill. i dont want the responsibility. what i want is just something simple.

what i want is the simple reason. THE reason.

i want peter parker's reason. i want his reason for denying his love for MJ. i want to be peter parker and you to be mary jane.

why? its cause i want my reason for not loving you to be something noble, not the coward one i have. i want the because to be followed by "i can't risk you getting hurt, im just protecting you", not "i cant risk myself getting hurt, im just protecting me..."

--- "Silent Cries & Silent Pleas to the Cold, Dark
Night", 2004 - Save the Earth

for anyone who wishes to know the story behind the piece, well there is a story behind the piece. really there is. it was supposed to be a part of a "novel" i began to write which i now abandoned. heck, the novel was supposed to be a trilogy! i was that ambitious. but i lost steam after the first chapter. this piece was supposed to be a piece written by Jake, the main character in the "novel", while in class. so there you have it, the story behind the piece. as a side note, Silent Cries & Silent Pleas to the Cold, Dark Night was the collection of pieces i wrote during that time. much of them i can't remember anymore. it was written back in 2004 on a notebook with Save the Earth emblazoned on the back. that notebook i left behind back in manila.

so, writing about the piece now made me hunt down the few pages i wrote of the "novel". amazing, i forgot the plot of the next few chapters which i didn't get to write. though i can still remember the over-all plot. anyway, you'll find the prologue here and the first chapter here. read on and tell me if you think it's still got hope.

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templates shmemplates, widgets shmidgets

i just declared war on my blog. of course i won. now you'll find an ad to the right after all the links. yay! its to complete your internet surfing environment. admit it, you do feel as if something's missing in a page if you don't see an ad in it. you'll also find a tagboard above it. feel free to post anything you like, except an ascii picture of you naked. friends' blogs links are almost complete. if you don't find yourself there, leave a message in the tagboard. i was also finally able to add the MORE/less link on every post so you don't have to be treated to a very lengthy main page everytime you drop by. and for about 15 minutes back there, the sidebar switched from right to left. i decided against, obviously.

like it? hate it? let me know, ayt?

take care y'all!

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little did he know that his 12th post will cause someone to lose his head

has it been 12 posts already? wow.

we just came from the movie house. we watched a movie over at Arizona Mills, big place. 24 theaters, an IMAX theater, factory outlet stores everywhere and a Gameworks. and a Fry's Electronics just across the street. but i'm not writing to rate the theater. we go to movie houses to watch a movie. so here goes.

we watched Stranger than Fiction. if, like me, you haven't heard of it, its probably because it doesn't have an all-star cast. the cast was solid. veterans with big names, like Emma Thompson, Dustin Hoffman, Will Ferell and Queen Latifah. why i haven't heard of it before is probably because i haven't been in a movie theater for over a month. this is my first movie since i got here(i haven't had my first starbucks drink yet as well. i took a vow not to have one til i land a job. T_T).

ok, hands down i'd give it a five out of five. the movie was great. the performance was amazing. the story is probing. the plot was easy enough to follow. really easy. though it could have been told via a more complicated and tricky way, the easy and tragic comedy(lol, such contrast. you'll understand when you get to watch the film) way they took was much more intense and questioning. probably up until half of the film you'd be laughing with the rest of audience. after that, its still quite funny, but it begins to make you think. and all of a sudden, it pushes you to make a choice, to side with just one choice while making you keep an open mind.

the question basically is, do you believe in fate or not? that single question blossoms to a gazillion more questions, depending on what you choose. come to think of it, that question defines how you view death as well. and life. and its mysteries. and the unknown.

and as a final caveat, it also shows a glimpse of what it is to control fate. this perhaps is something leaders should keep an eye out for in the film. in a position of power, the seemingly harmless actions of a person could be really bad for another. our leaders should think about that. a lot of them have forgotten they indirectly wield the power of the angel of death.

dont think its an intellectual film, cause its not. its a comedy. its a comedy which will make you think in some way. its like Click, just lessen the Adam Sandler humor, and put in a more life questioning plot.

its profound, that it is.

i recommend you watch it as soon as you can.

ps. click here to visit the official site.
pps. no spoilers there! i think. and i hope i didn't over analyze it for you as well. i was just so amazed by the film.

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Elephant vs Donkey

...and the donkey won!

yeah, for the first time in about 12 years the Democrats will control the house. they also lead a very, very tiny majority in the senate(50-49, which could still change cause there's still an undecided case left), and the majority of governors just became democrats. the only republicans left are up in the two highest posts now.

so what does this basically mean? personally, i'm a little on the republican side. the ver main issue in aligning to a party around here deal with values and morality. democrats are abortionists, republicans are not. for me, thats the main point aganst democrats. they're also for stem cell research, republicans are not to keen on that. though its not that big a deal for me.

on the other hand, democrats are more or less more against the war in iraq. that's a major blow for bush's campaign actually. and i am more or less against it as well. in fact, a majority of americans now disapprove of the war cause hey, its their fathers, husbands, brothers and sons which get killed there. and, democrats are more liberal in terms of same sex marriage. and personally for me, if two people are meant for each, then they really are regardless of sex. but then if they are really for each other, then a small thing like a ban on same sex marriage won't be an issue.

but, the deomcrat's pro abortion stand really gets to me. whenever it does, i just think that hey, they are environmentalists anyway. and for me, the environment is the next biggest issue after life. i was disappointed with bush for pulling out of the kyoto protocol, so maybe, well hopefully this time, they'd take the environment more seriously. but kudos to shwarzenegger, newly reinstated cali governor, for really pushing for alternative fuel sources despite being a republican.

so to get my mind off abortion, here's a video which attempts to explain why global warming is not hitting as hard as previous estimates. the phenomenon is called global dimming, and up until the turn of the century, global warming and global dimming were at a status quo.

yesterday's election also included whether or not the people will approve the passage of diffrent propositions. its not a nationwide thing, only statewide. anyway, one of the propositions here in arizona is to award a random voter on the 2008 elections $1M to improve voter turn-out. it didn't get through though. hehe.

ps. the donkey is the symbold of the democrats though they never really officially adopted it. the elephant is the republican's official symbol.

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LA vs Phoenix

my bro has been kidding me about staying in cali during our recent trip to LA. he kept telling me he'll live me behind cause he supposedly knows how much i miss manila. tempting, but no. not now at least.

LA is a really big center. its quite hard to discern up to where LA really is. and its cause of this that their freeways are clogged. even on weekends. sure they've got a lot of freeways but if its full, then commute time would climb to more than an hour. add to that the seeming lawlesness of the drivers, that makes for a really dangerous place to drive in. more dangerous than that in manila. back in manila, sure we don't really have laws in the road except for swerving, which is also debatable depending on who is enforcing it(i've encountered a croc in blue who defines swerving as traveling in a straight line), but its not that dangerous, nerve wracking but not life threatening. in LA, it hasn't come to the point where everyone is changing lanes all the time and variable number of lanes in a road. but they do change lanes without warning. while traveling at 60mph. and with their bumper to bumper(meaning close formation driving at 50mph) freeway traffic, using the horn is a must, especially to get the attention of those cars exiting to the right from the leftmost lane. my sister-in-law calls them crab drivers, cause they move sideways with little forward movement.

on the other hand, metro Phoenix is definitely smaller than LA. its got an efficient freeway system. you can virtually reach any part in under an hour. furthermore, the freeways in the city are well-lighted unlike in LA where it isn't lighted at all. the onramps and offramps are spacious, alowing for 40mph entries and exits, compared to the really cramp ones in LA which only allows 20mph. the traffic lights are synchronized so you'll almost always have a green light. but most of all, the drivers are corteous. horns aren't used here its almost illegal to use them. drivers signal when changing lanes. people respect your right of way. all in all a much pleasant experience.

whats also interesting to note in LA is that they go for the bling bling. on the road, you're more likely to be traveling alongside a bmw or a lexus or a chrysler rather than a civic, which is the norm here in phoenix. their malls are also more upscale, you'd find bebe, coach, lacoste, nordstram, neiman marcus and other like them than gap or old navy or wal-mart. everyone is more conscious of what they wear there, compared to the i-don't-mind-if-my-clothe's-got-creases-on-them attitude here in phoenix. i think its more of that being the way of life there and has less to do with bigger pay slips. when you look at salaries, the pay in LA is generally just about $5k more. plus, basic necessities there costs higher. i think people here can live like those over there but they don't cause there's no need to.

my golay, such bonggaciousness!

lastly, there are a lot of filipinos in LA. serously. you won't find a corner where there's not a filipino around. in fact, two filipinos are pitted against each other for the mayoralty position in today's election. chowking, jollibee, max's, red ribbon, goldilocks... all there! though they call the sago(or black pearls) boba. and of course, being the usual filipinos, pabonggahan nanaman pagdating sa trabaho, kotse, bahay at damit. thats probably why cali is a filipino magnet, cause the way of life is a snug fit to their churvaness. even those who were born here inherited the mapangmata attitude. golly gee, pinoy na pinoy! i have nothing against filipinos but if i wanted to experience manila, i'd fly to manila for a genuine experience.

phoenix has its own charm. streets are clean, places aren't crowded, people greet each other, everyone's generally more corteous... stuff like that. that's why i'm not in a rush to move to cali despite the weather and lack of activity. maybe someday i'll move to cali to join in on the chaotic madness, but not now. i'm more into the relaxed way of life at the moment.

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LA getaway

me, my bro & his wife went to LA to visit her relatives this past weekend. left the house around 3pm last friday with my bro behind the wheel and me as the navigator. he got Microsoft Streets & Tips and a USB GPS Tracker for his laptop. so navigating was basically a no-brainer.

GPS doesn't work properly when under the cover of the smog of LA. there were times when the tiny red dot(our car) went off course and over houses.

took us a while to get out of the rush hour traffic in phoenix, but after we did, it was a smooth ride all the way til cali: the road became bumpy after crossing the state line. so we got to their place around 11 local time after some stopovers. we went out again for "dinner" upon the insistence of my uncle-in-law. amazing, the streets weren't empty! i got used to seeing the streets turn lifeless after 9 back in phenix. bottomline is we slept around 4 in the morning. got up around 9 and by a little after lunch we made it to hollywood boulevard and kodak theater.

my favorite cartoon... "tok-tok-tok-tok-tok-tok-tok-tok-tok-tok-tok-tok-tok-tok-tok-tok-tok"

...and my favorite star. T_T

................and... my idol.

oldest block i could find.

jim.

tom.

robin.

bruce.

adam.

this is for you mish!

does this mean i can lift 100 lb weights?

...or be able to swing around pirate ship masts?

LOTR, yay! million dollar baby, boo!

ze exit.

eh, eh... nasa greenbelt lang naman pala ako eh!

after awhile we felt hunger pangs, so we left hollywood and went to glendale to eat in... are you ready? Max's of Manila! haha, they're overprced if you ask me. but then again they're also overpriced back in manila. by the way, according to a friend of mine the secret of max's is they fry their chicken using oil made from pig's fat or something. after that, we went to the newly reoened Westfield Topanga mall near their place. nice upscale mall, would've been nicer if it was bigger(though its already big actually). then off to panorama city to get some more dose of manila.

...actually, nasa sucat lang.

after lunch on sunday, that would be around 4pm local time(5 pm in phoenix), we made our way back to phoenix with me behind the wheel. my mantra: "road so uniform, getting sleepy". got home around midnight.

my uncle-in-law's place. that's what i drove for almost 7 hours. the one on the left. the one on the right is a mirage

our hosts! thank you very much!

all i can say is, LA is very different from Phoenix. more on that in my next post, too sleepy right now.

ps. some more pics in my deviant.

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top 10

so there's this 7 songs post goin around multiply when i dropped by my friends' accounts. since i'm not on multiply, here's my all-time top 10:

01. Chasing Cars - Snow Patrol
02. Such Great Heights - The Potal Service
03. Hands Down(acoustic)- Dashboard Confessional
04. Fix You- Coldplay
05. You'll be Safe Here- Rivermaya
06. For Blue Skies- Strays Don't Sleep
07. The Wold is our Playground and We will Always be Home- Up Dharma Down
08. Destiny(acoustic)- Zero 7
09. Lovers and Friends- Lil John & The Eastside Boys feat. Usher & Ludacris
10. Hear You Me- Jimmy Eat World

yes, tattooed on my mind isn't there.

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come, let's join us for a drive!

i got my driver's license yesterday! yay!
the whole thing took me just a little over an hour. it was easy, the supposedly-30-item-exam-but-after-the-24th-item-stopped-and-told-me-to-proceed-to-the-next-step written exam was via a touch screen computer. multiple choice. breezed through it in 10 minutes. the road test was over in about 15 minutes. the guy didn't ask me to go to the freeway, just made some rounds around the neighborhood.

they put the wrong address in my license card! boo!
i didn't notice their boo-boo til the next morning. so i went back to the place. my first real solo flight mission. woohoo! i didn't get lost! haha. if you look at phoenix, you'll notice that the road network is basically a grid. and that's a problem for me. everything pretty much looks like the same. i'm used to the curving roads back home. you never know where you're gonna end up. too organized, that's what they are. plus they give directions using north, east, west, south! i'm more used to the "kung papunta kang alabang sa slex, lumabas ka ng sucat, kanan, tapos kaliwa sa mcdo tapos mejo bagalan mo na kasi malapit na. nasa kanan mo ung lola idangs" rather than "if you're headed west on 101, you'll have to exit at 40th and head north til you see the building at your side. its a just a little past bell rd." oh and they use numbers for their streets. there's 44th st, 44th pl, 44th ave, 44th way, 44th dr. make sense of that! hehe. i prefer pedro bukaneg ave or atis rd, sampaguita st, etc. one thing nice here is that they've got really powerful cars. period.

you're beautiful!
thanks to my prof for this one...



microsoft updates, like them or hate them?

i just upgraded to IE7. personally, i didn't find anything new. back in IE6, i had styler toolbar running which hid the menu bar from IE(cause i found no real practical use for it). so when they removed the menu bar from IE7, no surprise there. in fact, the topmost bar looks very much like the styler toolbar replacement. same with the tabs, i have been using yahoo toolbar so no surprise there as well. so would i recommend you to upgrade? if you don't like seeing the menu bar and you don't want to use styler toolbar, sure, go ahead, upgrade. but if you're happy with the tabs feature the yahoo toolbar provides, stick with IE6 for awhile. there are still some bugs here and there(like some toolbars disappear when switching between tabs).

i upgraded to WMP11 a couple of days back. i've been using WMP(Windows Media Player) ever since Winamp decided to crash after about 30mins of every load. surprisingly, i didn't feel its toll on the memory(when minimized, when restored to full size complete with visualizations, you're gonna feel it a bit)! so, with the latest update came the sleeker black design which i just love. matches my desktop, sorta:

aside from that, i can search for the missing info for my tags, including the album art, for each song! yay! you can also view the lyrics for the song, though its not a karaoke-type-complete-with-the-bouncing-ball display, its livable. so all in all, i'd recommend this upgrade. go get it!

techy stuff...

don't know styler toolbar? wondering what my theme is? check out deviantart for info, or just stick around here. i might post a guide to customizing your desktop sometime in the future.

speaking of guides, i stumbled across this really good walkthrough for installing Apache, MySQL, PHP, RoR, JSP, PHPMyAdmin, etc. for windows! yay! only thing is, i can't get Tomcat to run. its a problem specific to my box. google told me that i belong to 1x10^-15 % of the population who encountered this problem. thanks google. but for you guys, it'll probably work fine. it's probably just something simple, like a conflicting program or something.

visit deviantart here.
visit the WAMP-JR guide here.

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