Just listing down my pet peeves when it comes to public commuting in the Philippines:

• Jeepney amputees – people who for the life of me cannot extend their help in getting the fares to reach the driver. Can’t they see that the people who are handing the fares are already reaching out beyond the normal physical limitations of their limbs? Are these people scared of the germs that are going to be transferred via the paper notes and coins? These people should not be riding the jeepneys, they should be taking taxicabs.
• “Healthy people” – I am not against people with a “healthy” body since I am almost past the medium built. However I am against “healthy” people that do not accept the fact that they have body builds that are enough for two persons. It really gets on my nerves when they try to squeeze to the space for a single person and fail miserably. I know the commuter fares today are very expensive but lets get a hold on reality, shall we? Occupying spaces good for one and a half people still counts for you paying the fare for two people. The fare is not for each head but for the space that is occupied by your ass.
• Mucus marauders – these are the people who find it very entertaining to spray their colognes/perfumes inside contained spaces (e.g. confines of FX or van,etc.). Why cant they apply these strong smelling concoctions when they have alighted the vehicle is beyond me. Strong smells elicit a strong reaction to my body, my mucus membranes shift to overdrive which leaves me gasping for breath.
• Mobile boomboxes – or vehicles that have sound systems that compete with jet engines when it comes to a decibel pissing match. Most of these vehicles are open but even then I can feel the bass make my heart vibrate like it is suffering from an epileptic seizure or something. Usually the bass settings are so loud that I can’t even understand what kind of music being played. And please, trim down on the mixes. Adding bass and drum rolls to any music does not make it sound cool.
• Sardines conductor – these are the bus conductors that will put the sardine factories to shame. They keep on piling the people up the buses even if the people are standing up. More passengers means more income for them but please we are also paying the same amount as the one who got lucky with a seat. Dont treat passengers like sardines because we appreciate some degree of personal space even when using public transportation.
• Sidewalk moppers – bus drivers who developed an affinity for the sidewalk. It seems to me that they could not drive unless the side of their bus is no more than two feet away from the sidewalk. They even engage in a long mooching match with certain sidewalks that they ignore the honking of the vehicles behind them.

I know there are more but I need to get back to work… 🙂

ciao!

I had a dream and it was special.

It was about killing snakes in the bedroom/storeroom in our house in the province…
It was about a large snake that transformed into a human being when I killed it…
It was about me putting the snakes in a bag and taking them to school…
It was about me missing a major exam that I am not aware of, in college, and administered by my high school language teacher…
It was about me failing to answer anything since they were taking off the questions written in sheets of Manila paper as I am about to answer them…
It was about snakes that I assumed to be dead but are miraculously alive…
It was about finding out that even if snakes are dead, they have tiny eggs in them that succeeds in producing new snakes that takes an unbelievable short time to hatch and mature…
It was about killing these new snakes and trying to flush them down the 3rd floor men’s bathroom in the UST College of Science building…
It was about snakes that were maturing to constrictor-size beasts while I was trying to flush down small snakes on the toilet…
It was about me having enough and realizing it was a dream and woke myself up.

Now how many of you have ever had a dream wherein you realize its only a dream and could wake yourself up by just willing it?

Last friday we found a snake in one of the chairs in our dinner table. It was on the seat of the chair where minutes ago I took the towel that I hang there every morning to dry. It was a pencil-thin snake that was about 2-3 feet long.

I didn’t know that snakes could *jump* as well as slither with such blinding speed. After an hour of cautious hide-and-seek I was able to corner it and kill it. My nature tells me to do otherwise but being not sure if it was poisonous or not, I had to err on the side of caution and end its life.

We got home at around 11:00PM and we only got to sleep at around 1:30AM. It was such an adrenaline rush that Neth and I couldn’t sleep even if we wanted to.

Something worth telling infront of friends enjoying a keg of beer. 😀

ciao!

[Note] this post contains a sample of my morbid humor. dont take everything seriously, people get crazy that way. 😀

For the past couple of years it has been a pseudo-habit for my father and my brothers to go on a drinking bout every new year. One perennial topic is the most dangerous song in the land: Frank Sinatra’s My Way.

I find it funny that this crooner ballad has frequently grazed the news when items pertaining to deaths associated with bar/sing-along/videoke deaths. My father has rationalize that because it is easy to sing (minus hitting the correct notes) and famous many people naturally select it if they want to perform in a live audience. Most of the time even if a person has just sung it you will find that the next person holding the microphone will be doing his “own rendition” of the song. This is bad especially if the latest singer has a better rendition and the last one has a short fuse and already had enough alcohol to not think straight. It is a great recipe for disaster (unless you own a nearby funeral home).

With that in mind plus some alcohol to boot, I think I have a perfect hare-brained scheme for instant money, unfortunately it requires you being dead 😀 . Death via suicide is not covered by all insurance companies. However if you get killed by another hand then the insurance policy sticks. All a person dead-set (pun not intended) on leaving this world early but ensuring his loved ones’ welfare needs to do is to get an insurance contract, hang out on videoke bars (the cheaper the better) serving liquors, and keep on belting My Way. It is not fool-proof since that person might just end beaten up. 🙂

I know I will get flak for posting this but readers have already been warned. I dont expect people to take this post seriously, and if suiciders do then adding me to your beneficiaries’ list is thank you enough. 😀

ciao!

After a 5 1/2 month assignment, I am finally going home tomorrow. I have almost finished packing my things but I might leave something behind due to lack of space. The chocolates and Ikea stuff filled 2 boxes. I think I am in the danger of going aboard the 40 kilo limit. 😀

Looking back the stuff I learned during this trip is rather refreshing. I got to learn about Maven, Test coverage tools and continuous integration, as well as applying them. I hope I would be given the chance to apply them on future projects.

One more night and I am finally saying goodbye to my second country (by default since this is the only other country where I spent more than 1 month 😀 ). I barely understand the language but at least I got to experience a real winter. Two more nights and I am back to Filipino heaven, of Jollibees and baluts and every cholesterol-laden gastronimic wonders.

I think I hear my stomach growling, and my mouth is salivating. 😀

ciao!

In this post Clair touches up on the issue of Internet personas. The cardinal rule with Internet communication is that do not take everything at face value. This is especially true for those who think they can use Internet as another means of hooking up. Internet relationships do happen but they are as rare as love at first sights and long distance romances. But forever Internet cassanova wannabe, there are 3 Internet con artists. 🙂

During my first few years of connectivity (around ’96-’97 I tink), I was enganged in IRC. I was fascinated in how I was able to communicate with people around the country and around the world (those were the days that shaped my current Internet handle because frenzy and ramrod keeps getting registered by somebody else, 😀 ). I never did IRC with the intention of hooking up, I was already smitten with the woman who is now my wife. I just liked being in IRC and letting my Internet persona out into the world. The introvert and meek me had a taste of confidence behind the privacy provided by online communication. Some might call it a cowardice but that is your privilege. 🙂 I hanged out in #manilastars and got acquainted with a few midnight chatters. I felt good hanging out with them electronically, even if I only saw three of them in real life (and that was after I quit IRC, and I met them because of my brother who was still into IRC waaay afterI am done).

Anyway, there was a certain chatter who used the nick ‘jing’ with some numbers that I cant remember now. She said she was from the USA, and she even had a homepage. Come to think of it I tried to create my first website on that same provider and there I found out that I have absolutely no skill for web authoring because I am artistically-handicapped :D. Back to jing, she was a looker but I treated her as an ‘Ate’ because she was half a decade older than me. She confided some things and me and although I have little to confid eI did so from time to time. Being a looker a lot of people tried to hit on her, people who are certified Cassanovas and Romeos… wannabes. It was so pathetic I found it amusing that people would do such acts as if it was taken out of a cheap jokebook of bad come-on liners.

Eventually #manilastars disbanded, and I lost interest in IRC as I was then interested in BBS-ing. One day my brother told me a ‘shocking’ news, somebody tracked ‘jing’ and found out she was a he. Some of the wannabes was said to be very angry for being taken for a fool. I did not care because even if jing was a he, he was a good conversationalist and I will always think of ‘jing’ as an ‘Ate’. I already created a persona behind the nick, and I lose nothing if I continue on with the charade. But that was one of the things that taught me to view things in the Internet with a grain of salt. 🙂

ciao!

The unthinkable happened, the redundant storage that holds my site failed and I lost 2 months of blogs. That is around 25 blog posts and I dont remember even half of them. I could get mad at my service provider but I won’t since they had no control on it. It is just my bad luck that I was one of those whose backups were corrupted by the failure.

They wont get a final say from Dell (their contractor) but I am writing those posts off. It is going to be my penance for not finalizing the process for automatically downloading the backup of the databases on my site. I was lulled by the fact that the provider was creating automatic backups but I did not realize that only copies of the 60th day backup is transferred to a different server.

It sucks but you have to go with the flow. In this day of doom I have am clinging to two adages that should give me strength: that which does not kill me only makes me stronger, and it could have been worse. Either way I am not going to write anything up until monday since they might be able to salvage some data up.

ciao!