Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.
– Peter Ustinov

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aging woes

shit, i'm getting old.

"at some point people should stop celebrating birthdays, it's depressing."

- a bitter remark from an old fart, me.

when you were young, you had a rough timeline of where you'd be at a certain age.
you feel shitty when you realize you are behind schedule or in some cases nowhere near.

planning is relatively easy, it's the execution that's the bitch.



PS.
on a timely note, election just ended. and just as the candidates had their platform for change, i also have mine set for this year. and it's also to the tune of reform for the poor. i intend to amass wads of cash... hahaha. not really, just enough so that i could get back on track.

yes, i'm writing again. my gf told me the other day that i should try writing tech articles on the side as an outlet for my inner geek, might get some spare change in the process. hmmm... not really that good of a writer but i'm pretty stoked i have her as a fan :)


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fuckin 3-way

for the past few months i have been going back and forth with the idea of what to lust for...


... of course it's a gadget. :)

the decision of what my next phone would be.
price is not an issue, this is just a fantasy. haha, just like one of those conversations you have with your buddies over beer (aka if money was not a factor... which car would you get? or who'd you do, scarlett or megan?)

so, mine would be between these three:

an iphone 4G or HD or whatever the bright minds that gave the name ipad decide on as the name of the 3gs successor.

an htc evo 4G, i realize their initial release would be on CDMA hence will not work on the network here. but give it a couple of months and i'm sure a GSM version would appear for the rest of the countries other than the US.

or an [insert future manufacturer here] windows 7 series phone.


of the three i am currently least interested with the windows mobile since as of writing, they have yet to release a working phone (other than the unbranded demo phone) with actual specs and features that would win me over.

so 2 phones, both reportedly due this 2nd quarter are on my shortlist. maybe writing about them would enlighten me on which is better.

of course the details about the iphone4G is still tightly clad in el-stevo's super secret vault. but thanks to the apple engineer 'losing' the prototype that eventually ended up in gizmodos hands to disassemble and flaunt for a gazillion pageviews, we have a rough idea of what might be next 'magical' phone. yes, i'm obviously not an apple fanboy.

honestly the main thing stopping me from choosing android over iphone is the overwhelming support the iphone has. no, i don't mean support via the ironically named apple geniuses, what i mean is support in the sense that the iphone, having dominated the smartphone market for the past few years, enabled them to build a solid app store and just like the ipod, force other manufacturers/services into iphone compatibility. and i have to admit, some of those apps are pretty darn good. life would be easy choosing the iphone (in a sense) since in most cases, there's an app or accessory available for your needs. i just hate apple's way of thinking. the 'it just works' crap. it dumbs you down. it's like buying a dslr camera that is locked by the manufacturer on AUTO. ok, enough with the apple rant.

the EVO is amazing, specs are top notch, features are worth drooling over. but since andriod is still a minority, the playing field is a bit lopsided. their app marketplace is a long way from catching up with the quantity and quality of iphone apps.

i guess the main question (at least for me) is, could the EVO hold up on its own? even without the help of their app marketplace or other third party accessories?

i say yes! now HTC, build that GSM version of EVO and i'd buy it in a heartbeat (by heartbeat i mean as soon as i save up enough money for it, or find a low/zero interest installment deal! hahaha).



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Movie Therapy

"How happy is the blameless vestal's lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot. Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd"

Just had to see that movie again, perfect for when feeling a bit drab, still one of the top movies on my list.

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Beer for Bags

here's the link for the beer currency and promo info.

Link: Crumpler Beer for Bags Promo

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Meet Kit

After months of research, weeks of waiting, she's finally here! (actually she's been with me for 2 weeks already. just upped now)


Soon to join the family:

a bag. -- done. got a $5 mil home from crumps...not too bulky.
Images: front / inside

a thrifty fifty. -- currently on the hunt.


...maybe a hood or filter if there are leftovers. then STOP. Curb the urge to buy more... unless absolutely necessary. hahaha of course there's a loophole!


Kit Contents: Body/18-55mm IS
Freebies: Canon Soft Pouch/4GB SDHC/Tripod/Extra Battery/Stuffed Toy hehe.
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Stereophonics - Maybe Tomorrow

I knew it! While I was playing some unplayed tracks on my music library, I came across this song and thought... hey, I heard this before from a movie and I recall liking it. So after 53 loops of the song and a quick wiki, found out it was from the soundtrack of Crash! Great movie BTW.


Artist: Stereophonics
Album: You Gotta Go There to Come Back
Title: Maybe Tomorrow

Lyrics:
I've been down and
I'm wondering why
These little black clouds
Keep walking around
With me
With me

It wastes time
And I'd rather be high
Think I'll walk me outside
And buy a rainbow smile
But be free
They're all free

So maybe tomorrow
I'll find my way home
So maybe tomorrow
I'll find my way home

I look around at a beautiful life
Been the upperside of down
Been the inside of out
But we breathe
We breathe

I wanna breeze and an open mind
I wanna swim in the ocean
Wanna take my time for me
All me

So maybe tomorrow
I'll find my way home
So maybe tomorrow
I'll find my way home

So maybe tomorrow
I'll find my way home
So maybe tomorrow
I'll find my way home

So maybe tomorrow
I'll find my way home
So maybe tomorrow
I'll find my way home

...another incomplete post here (no dl links, no pics). hehehe. have to get back to my task.
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UP Janitor Gets 92-Cent Retirement Pay

... proves that some people are still intrinsically good. it's just sad that they'd have to put up with the rest of the population which are mostly heartless fucks. I hope this news breaks even further so that at least those that he helped back (and some of the more generous) could come in on his time of need.


A rare coming together of University of the Philippines alumni is taking place in cyberspace because of a man who served their alma mater for 41 years, not only cleaning classrooms but also acting as a lifeline to cash-strapped students.

An e-mail written by UP graduate Mike Rivera about now-retired janitor Meliton Zamora, who signed her student loan application as a guarantor in 1993, continues to be forwarded from one inbox to another.

Rivera, 36, had intended it as a cybercall to all those who failed to pay the student loans that her “hero” had guaranteed.

The e-mail, titled “Paying it back for Mang Meliton aka Mang Milton,” brought unexpected wide attention to Zamora, who turned out to be fighting for the retirement pay he believes he deserves.

Zamora retired from UP in 2006 at the age of 64 with a check in the amount of 92 centavos to show for the four decades of work.

“Sabi ko, sa kanila na yan. Hindi ko na kukunin (I told them they can have the check. I won’t get it anymore),” Zamora told the Philippine Daily Inquirer last week as he showed a copy of the voucher indicating the amount.

His weathered face lighted by a smile, he seemed amused by the irony of it all. His calloused hands turned the pages of the employment records, including approved sick leave forms, that he was able to save from a fire early in 2000 that gutted the family home in Pook Ricarte on campus.

501 days

Zamora received less than P1 as retirement pay not because many of the student loans he had guaranteed were unpaid, as Rivera thought and wrote in her e-mail, but because of 501 sick leave days.

He insists that he did not avail himself of those sick leaves, but the university’s Human Resources Division Office (HRDO) says he did.

Nonetheless, he is thankful for Rivera’s e-mail because he and his family are hopeful that the publicity it has been generating would prompt the HRDO officials to meet with them.

Zamora had been vainly knocking on the doors of the HRDO for the last two years just for an explanation of why the contested 501 days had not been converted to cash, according to his eldest daughter Kit Zamora.

“No one has met with us, or with my father,” she told the Inquirer. “The HRDO head is at a meeting every time we go to her office. All we want is a clear explanation. If they will be able to show us documents to prove that my father did use all those 501 days of sick leaves, we will accept that his retirement pay for 41 years of service is less than P1.”

Kit Zamora said that in response to a letter her father sent in 2007, UP president Emerlinda Roman said she had directed the HRDO to look into the matter. But nothing came out of it.

Zamora wrote the Civil Service Commission in 2006 for assistance, pointing out that a utility worker like himself would not have received a total of 12 commendations from the state university if he was always on leave. But there was no reply from that agency either.

According to Zamora, he did have some of his sick leaves converted to cash while he was working at UP. But he said he was certain that these were not the contested 501 days.

Singing at work

Kit Zamora said the family wanted the matter finally resolved for their “Tats.”

She said it had been a tiring and painful battle for money that her father deserved, especially considering his dedication to his job and his devotion to UP faculty, staff and students, particularly at the College of Social Sciences and Philosophy.

At the CSSP, housed at the university’s Palma Hall, Zamora was popular as the janitor who sang while he worked (this is, in fact, listed as among the things to know in a CSSP freshman survival kit).

But he was best known as the kind soul who signed student loan applications as a guarantor on the sole basis of trust.

Until he retired, Zamora earned P7,117 a month.

Only one unsettled loan worth P5,000, which he guaranteed in 2003, was deducted from his retirement pay. And friends of this student who had read Rivera’s e-mail promised Zamora that they would find her and urge her to pay up.

The man is grateful for the loan amnesty that UP grants every five years. Otherwise, he would have had to pay for the students’ unpaid loans.

Payback

Zamora said he could no longer recall how many student loans he had signed as guarantor, which allowed those students to graduate.

(Ironically, only two of his six children were able to acquire college degrees. He could not afford to put them through school.)

By his account, he began guaranteeing student loans in 1974 as his own “payback” to the kindness shown by a Professor Reyes of the Department of Speech and Drama.

“One day, she praised me for making the classroom very clean. But to me it wasn’t. I knew it was dirty and it was her way of telling me to do my job. The next day and the days after that, I made sure that all the areas I was assigned to were always clean,” he said.

In December of that year, Professor Reyes called Zamora to Room 120, where he found food, clothes and other things, including envelopes with money, piled on a table.

It was all his, he recalled being told. He learned that the professor had asked her students to pitch in for a Christmas gift for him, as a gesture of thanks for keeping their classrooms clean.

From then on, he said, he made sure to show small acts of kindness to others.

But even earlier, during the First Quarter Storm, Zamora proved himself an ally of students.

“I helped them put up the barricades on the streets using benches. I remember [military] helicopters hovering over us and running with the students when Molotov bombs exploded,” he said, chuckling at the memory.

Much later, he would become a walking billboard during the UP Student Council election campaign.

He said Francis Pangilinan (now a senator) and Mike Defensor (formerly President Macapagal-Arroyo’s chief of staff) were among the students who pinned their campaign paraphernalia on him.

First meeting

In her e-mail, Mike Rivera, now a marketing manager, said she met Zamora in 1993. She was sitting on the steps of Palma Hall, despondent that no one would sign her student loan application.

Wrote Rivera: “Mang Mel, with a mop in hand, approached me and asked me why I was crying. I told him I had no guarantor for my student loan and will probably not be able to enroll this semester. I had no hopes that he would be able to help me. After all, he was just a janitor. He borrowed my loan application papers and said softly, ‘Puwede ako pumirma. Empleyado ako ng UP (I can sign. I’m a UP employee).’ He borrowed my pen and signed his name. With his simple act of faith, Mang Mel not only saved my day, he also saved my future.”

Late last year, a friend of Rivera’s who is now a UP professor saw Zamora at the UP Library steps, carrying firewood. (Even after retirement, the former janitor continued to tend to the small vegetable garden beside the library that he started 35 years ago.)

Zamora casually informed Rivera’s friend that he was selling CDs of songs he had recorded in a mall to help make ends meet.

On the first Sunday of the new year, Rivera and her friends visited the small two-story house in Pook Ricarte that Zamora shares with his wife Antonina, their children and grandchildren.

They wanted to thank him for bailing them out in their time of need, but he was not there. That was when Kit Zamora told them of his 92-centavo retirement pay.

Thank you party

On the phone with the Inquirer, Rivera said she wrote the e-mail intending it only for her friends and fellow UP graduates.

She said she never expected it to elicit that much attention, including from a group of UP alumni in the United States who expressed interest in putting up a trust fund for Zamora.

Rivera and Zamora were scheduled to meet last night for the first time since she wrote the e-mail.

The occasion? A benefit party that she and her friends organized at Taumbayan, a new haunt in Kamuning, Quezon City.

Rivera said the party was not so much an “official fund-raising activity” for Zamora as a chance to thank the man who helped a number of students when they needed it most.

“At times we ask ourselves if there are really good people on earth. Meeting Mang Mel, I’d say yes. There’s still goodness in this world,” Rivera said.

INQUIRER article

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X-Men Origins: Wolverine Trailer

Summer movies, here we go.


X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE HD

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Buster Shaw: Quick Draw

Point and Shooter. Response and accuracy could be better.



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Ganguro Girl

the goal of this game is not decent but is a natural time killer.





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Batman vs. Superman

rawr! ahahaha



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Money or Life

...from Ngoms, GOOD JOB! hahaha



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Delayed Gratification

I have an itch... and I have been fighting real hard not to give in and scratch this fucker.


Hehehe.. sabay pasok ng..

The urge to buy and build a new PC is getting harder to ignore. And to further prove that fate has a twisted sense of humor, I have had several people around me buy theirs just this past few weeks. I gave them the specs I had in mind for my build. I even helped them pick out most of the components. And this weekend, I might even assemble one as the parts will be available by then.

Arghh.. I could, but I won't... not yet.

I had a consult with my financial advisor with this proposal hoping for a signoff... the answer was a simple but terrifyingly firm "NO". Quoting the great Oprah in saying that I should clear all debts first before acquiring new ones. Besides, it's not as if I don't have anything to use, there's my 5yr old lolo rig, and a heavily molested work laptop.

So, my HTPC/Gaming rig will have to wait...
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Inner Peace

Get it? In-ear peace? Hahaha. Ok, that was bad... but a good way to start the post.



Tamby auditioned my recently purchased earphones, I know, germophobes look away, we swapped ear waxes! He is currently thinking of upgrading his own set. Asking me for recommendations, feedback, etc..

As with most things, more expensive translates to better quality.

So first order of business, what kind of ears do you have? Are they sensitive enough that even minor sound artifacts drive you insane? Or are they of the average type?

If you have demanding ears (audiophile level), better save up first as you will not be pleased with the mid-range options (mostly priced 3K-6K). Acceptable sets will set you back 10K minimum (Etymotic, Ultimate Ears, Shure, etc...).

But if you have normal ears and if you are on a budget, the not-so-low-end options should do.

I am pretty happy with my set, I tested it alongside other earphones I have (the cheap ones of course), and I was ok with the balance it had. Bass is thumpy, highs are somewhat present but the mids are a bit lacking. With a price tag of 1.6K, I couldn't complain.

My advice to Tamby, line up the cheap ones first... the important thing with noise isolating earphones aside from the drivers are the tips. Make sure it fits snugly on your ears as this eliminates the ambient noise (it should also be comfortable enough for extended use). Then, listen to the sound, being somewhat enclosed, it should have been tweaked to compensate for that natural muffled sound. I know this doesn't help much, but listening is purely subjective... what may sound good to me may sound terrible for you.

Here's what I got:

Philips SHE9700


Specs are HERE

While choosing from the Philips line, this stood out because of the angled acoustic pipe design which supposedly results in better fidelity and less distortion.

Good luck on your hunt for your great sounding budget earphones!
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Bee-Time

Need to take a break from work and wind down before I go to sleep. So here are some viral vids...


Without the music video, I wouldn't have taken interest in this song.

Here's the gay version.. (it's amazing how he timed and mimicked her moves and finished the entire thing on one take, no cuts in a cramped space!)




Here's the original by Gwen Verdon using the trademark Fosse moves.. (mute this and play it over Beyonce's)




Here's the spoof/skit done by SNL...




And finally, since the holiday season is fast approaching and we just did a Timberlake on SNL... (this one still cracks me up, classic!)




Wait, SNL... Classic? Then I'd have to throw this in...



This could go on and on but for now..
Nyt Ü

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Inaanaks

Sample mobile upload heheheh. :-D
hmmm... guess my site has grown a beer belly like me. it's a bit heavy for mobile devices to load. we need to trim down. hehehe

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Mobility

Ahh, the wonders of technology...


Right now, I am currently on a place with no wifi provisions, no LAN cables for broadband, and no phone jacks for dial-up... so this is the perfect opportunity to try out mobile internet using my cellphone. Yep, this has been around for a long time but I have just recently got my hands into one of those phones with 3G plus modem capability... so indulge me. Hehehe.

After setting up the required software and config for both the laptop and the phone,
I just hook up my phone to the laptop (through bluetooth or usb) and hit connect.

Once connected, the first site I visited was...
SPEEDTEST! hehehe.


Not bad... for 10 pesos for 30 mins (that's the Globe rate according to my officemate, not sure about Smart), this is a respectable speed and price.

Another excuse for not being able to work eliminated.
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Water Share

objective: end up with two jars having 10 liters each

good luck!





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Under New Management

Time flies... October's out. I have been preoccupied both by work and personal life and I can't keep up with bloggin' about it..

so let's try this November. :)
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