the day in review (ok. so i'm just bored. :)

I'm bored. I'm tired of playing games on this thing already, despite equipping it with a 9800 Pro back in July just for the purpose of, well, what else--to play games. But no. I did it just as when I already find it tiring and largely uninteresting. I must admit, sometimes, the purchase was wasteful. Anyway, another lesson learned in fiscal responsibility: evaluate and take a good look at things first before going out on a shopping binge. (Ahem. Our politicos should learn like me too :)

Among other things, I sorely need something to do. First thought was the desire to pick up a good book and read. But then, I don't have any money left to get me that good book or two. So, what is a poor college guy like me to do? Go outdoors.

I'm planning to run a few rounds tomorrow at Makati Park. Anyone up for jogging? :)

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adjustment

I dropped by Ma'am Ivy (CED Academic Assistant) this morning for advanced adjustment, and guess what--she is pretty nice. Here's the story: At first, I really thought she was this real snotty, almost snobbish lady. But to my surprise this morning, she was nice. And real helpful too. Prejudging people is baaaad. :)

I explained to her my dilemma: Being a shiftee, I was in a rat race in trying to catch up with other ID103 ENG students. But online enrollment on my.lasalle wouldn't allow me to add a course (LINGUIS, I think.) because of the differences in its pre-requisite courses between the ID103 and ID104 flowcharts, of which I follow the latter when it comes to English major courses. (ID103 had a lot of pre-reqs for LINGUIS, whereas ID104 only expected me to finish ENGLONE. Take that. :D

She added me to the only LINGUIS class (L81) without hesitation and while telling me na makulit daw ako. :)) Don't ask, hindi ko rin alam. Maybe she was feeling hearty today. (Note to self: when visiting offices, try to come early in the morning to avoid facing stressed-out people. :)

I also added a course in general psychology (GENPSYC) with a comsci class (S22). So far, so good, dude. Fully loaded at 21 units next term. :D

Pero okay lang. Here's a glimpse of my schedule and load: (Hahah! Blogger's rich-text editor *can* do tables! :)

	Monday	Wednesday	Friday
09:20 - 10:20	ENGLTWO L82 Y602	ENGLTWO L82 Y602	ENGLTWO L82 Y602
10:30 - 11:30	FOUNED2 L81 Y604	FOUNED2 L81 Y604	FOUNED2 L81 Y604
11:40 - 12:40	GENPSYC S22 J304	GENPSYC S22 J304	GENPSYC S22 J304
	Tuesday		Thursday
08:00 - 09:30	TINTECH S21 G211		TINTECH S21 G211
09:40 - 11:10	EDTECH1 L82 Y602		EDTECH1 L82 Y602
11:20 - 12:50	POLIGOV L81 Y501		POLIGOV L81 Y501
14:40 - 16:10	RELSTWO C37 L318		RELSTWO C37 L318

:)

Rants-OTC

Darnit. Attendance pala yung evaluation sheets last ROTC graduation day. Saan na nga ba napunta yun? :-? We never really didn’t bother to answer those, thinking it was some lame-ass evaluation of a lame-ass activity. J Ang labo naman ng mga tao sa ROTC, attendance pala talaga yun. So kahit nagpunta kami, nagpawis at nagpakahirap, wala rin. Grr.

Anyway, it’s over. No use crying over something that was over more than two weeks ago.

And on the issue of our complaint, well, we all ended up going in the first place, just like how it was expected of us. (And personally, it never seemed like we wouldn’t go.) :-)

Today’s makeup activity, coastal cleanup, was surprisingly perhaps the most significant activity I ever did in the course of two terms being in the ROTC. As a former Lourdes guy, I tend to put much value into the beauty, preservation and protection of nature, and today’s activity showed a stark image of the destruction humankind has inflicted so far on our seas—Manila bay this morning, quite literally, stinks.

Trash is everywhere as flotsams. Rubber slippers, pieces of wood, plastic wrappers, Styrofoam. It was bad as it can be. There were even whole trunks of trees floating.

We started out cleaning the first minute the order was given out in the usual RCG-always-at-the-ready style. I got a walis-tingting and started sweeping for all the trash’s worth. A lot of students never dared to pick up nor even sweep the trash initially, but I think our spearheading efforts made some of them follow suit. It was all good. (At least for those who did their share in cleaning. :-p

I discovered a lot of things too; things that, frankly, I was surprised to learn. First was Chester.

Chester, you see, was the (kind of) usual rich kid. Living in White Plains (or was it Corinthian Gardens?), driving a car to school… mayaman. But he was not arrogant. Nor boastful either. He was as down-to-earth and friendly as moneyed kids could ever be, marked by a special flavour of extra-humility. And the best thing I learned today is, he actually helped a lot with the cleaning, his rich kid background notwithstanding.

A similar thing happened to Mico. Of course, being an achiever in the past, I sort of look up to him as a model and surely had a lot of expectations from him. I was also surprised when he valued much of what we did this morning, even though a lot were cringing at the fact that we would be handling trash.

Proof in itself that Lasallians and more importantly, the youth, are still, despite the usual stereotypes against us, very much concerned about our country in general.

Maybe we do have a bright future after all. If only a good number of young people like me would be like these two, we’ll have a good shot at a big surge forward as a nation united by common ideals, principles and goals.

But I still hate the ROTC training staff for their hair-pulling, really confusing policies. :-p

Hell week[s] over! Sa wakas!

No more exams for yours truly here. Finally.

INTRODB was fairly easy yesterday, but this afternoon's exam on NETANAL was teetering on the brink of a complete disaster. I was expecting my former S11 blockmates to ace it easily, but even they took the full three hours to finish the exam. Damn. Sir Jess surely put his most challenging circuits on this exam for us to analyze and pore over. And to think I quite suck at practical application of theory. :-S

Anyway, fail or no-fail, I'll still be going to CED, so its pretty useless in the bigger scheme of things.

I still need to submit a few requirements tomorrow, so I'll still be Taft-bound tomorrow. There are no good movies in the cinemas these days, but I hear "Collateral" (free registration required) is good for a film set in the City of Angels against a noir setting.

My music wishlist got longer after a trip to Music One/Tower this afternoon: I want George Duke. I'll be putting up an album review within the next couple of days, so stay tuned. (Hint: The artist is soooo 60's, dude. My mom and pop actually likes him :)

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Mozilla Firefox Extension of the Day: FoxyTunes!

FoxyTunes is an extension to our much-loved browser, Mozilla Firefox, that enables you to control virtually any media player currently running (or even not running. :) Don't let the version (0.5.1 as of press time) fool you; its pretty stable and functional. So far, I've personally tested it with Winamp, WMP, foobar and quintessential player, and it works like a charm. This extension puts at within easy access most of the basic functions of any decent music player software.

If you have Firefox and like music playing in the background, get this!

If you're not running Firefox (yet), I'd have to ask you then, "Where have you been?" Download it now!

Joketime! Harhar.

Saw this funny link over while I was doing my daily rounds on the great Intarweb. If you use a browser other than IE, you'll easily guffaw off this one, but if you've been with (gay) IE for a long time, the whole thing might take a while to get to you. Heheh.

Operation Finite Disclosure Retrospect (and a bit of blabber about the beauty of flowers :)

While I was able to deliver and redezvous with the package, some things were left to be desired. For instance, the flower shoppe. They could've had the flowers in stock at their place instead of letting me wait for them. That is the part I really didn't anticipate, and it caused a big blunder as to my plans for this day, as I was forced to drop my plans to submit a paper in FILIPI2 just to make up for the lost time. Anyway, it was all good, as it was for the sakes of doing a good deed for others. :)

The flowers were the most exceptional ones I've ever laid my eyes and hands on. You'd have to see and smell them to believe it. Designer Bloom did a splendid job. While it was a bit overpriced, I still wish I could give the same to a few special people I have encountered in my life, and of course, to my mum. :) I think I've done Aeo a great favor by going for the full monty (read: a dozen! :) of long-stemmed deep red roses... oh, the scent! Ang galeng. I really love flowers, dude.

A dozen, Aeo. Yes, I gave her a dozen. Not half-dozen, not even eleven. Twelve. A dozen.

And don't ever think of paying the entire amount. I did enjoy the experience of purchasing and actually handing it over to her. Teeheeh.

Long-stemmed red roses, with potpurri scent highlights. Really lovely.

The potpurri scent was most special, in my opinion. It wasn't overpowering, unlike typical potpurri you can usually get in jars. This one was mild, yet retaining much of that goodness into it. It also retained its nice, sweet scent that was most obvious as I passed by a group of people *cough*girls*cough* in La Salle. :) As I've said, you'd have to actually smell it to believe it. :D

(Aeo, *big deal* talaga sa La Salle kung may dala kang kahit maliit na katiting ng bulaklak. You get all these sorts of reactions from people you walk past by, like "oh"s and "sino kayang pagbibigyan...", especially if the bouquet is the type you usually give to women and not to Eucharistic Celebrations. If not for that, well, it was good. Don't mind this one. :)

I really want to experience giving a bouquet again. I have been actually planning to give one to ugh, her, but it really never passed planning. The feeling of actually having in your hands a lovely dozen of real quaint roses was elating. I felt like I could strike up a conversation with a real lovely young woman without doubts or even the fear of rejection.

Ah, flowers. Flowers. I love flowers. :)

Currently feeling: Weirded out, dude. This day was most crazy.
Listening to: U Turn's "Suddenly" «« Asteeg na song 'to! :D

Operation Finite Disclosure

"Operation Finite Disclosure is a go. Planning starts ASAP, execution exactly 1000H from now. Recon/Intel indicates SJ as LZ, with package at 3rd & 3rd, at around 1130, perhaps more or less. Expected opposition ID'd as ex-blockmates and froshies. Suave mode is imperative. Failure is, as always, not an option. It is crucial we expedite and establish package."

Aeo just rang me up to inform me of a plan that I never thought I'd do--bring this gift into La Salle. Don't ask; information is need-to-know. If you're out of the loop, you can just forget it. :)

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Pacific is acting screwy today. It just returned me three(!) MAILER-DAEMON failure messages indicating that it cannot send my messages. And these aren't just any message. This is our project. Due tomorrow before 1800. Ack. Dead.

I'll try using Gmail for this; if it fails, then let all hell break loose.

Just kidding. :)

the day in review

i got up this morning with an aching head and back. cursed bed. :)

anyway, things went pretty well today, except perhaps for my condition as a hyperhidrosis positive. I really don't have an idea as to what may have caused it, but it sure bugs me as hell, everyday.

NETALAB was almost a disaster. My calculator was reeling from all the computations i was doing on it, as I forgot to actually get the RMS (root mean sqaure) values for both current and voltage. That was the real setback, as i was forced to re-do a batch or two of calculations just to set things correctly. In the end, it paid off, as I learned a lot today. Never mind that it actually took us a little over two hours to finish the entire experiment.

I skipped netanal today. For no reason at all. No, in honesty, all I wanted to do was catch a movie, preferably in uber-magastos Greenbelt 3. Either Collateral or Garfield, just to get things off my back for a while. I really didn't feel attending my class today. Sigh.

In the end, I didn't see any movie. Or purchased a book, as I have been wanting to do for the past couple of weeks now. Or even a CD, despite my growing wish list. I just dropped by park square 1 to get my phone an authentic Sony Ericsson leather holster (ICE-25) to give it a little more flair and protection from, ugh, rough handling. After all the scratches it's been through, my phone still has an air of exclusivity around it, at least, to me. I dunno. Maybe due to the techie-oriented nature of SE phones. Or perhaps the sweeping clamshell styling. Either way, I still love it. :)

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The Dvorak Adventure

I modded a cheap PhP 200 keyboard (sorry, still gots no digital camera around these parts to show pictures) to comply with the Dvorak layout just this weekend. I'm trying to learn and explore it, as one of its claims was being more efficient and downright logical (at least in English) than the de facto standard, QWERTY. As you may know, QWERTY has been with us for over a century, having been invented for use with the granddaddy of them all, the Remington typewriter.

There's more about the Dvorak layout here.

Will try to post results as I get more free time. :-P

over a cup of coffee

Here I am, listening to Norah Jones' fine album, "Come Away With Me", enjoying a warm cup of capitalist mass-produced, water-diluted-substance-which-actually-tastes-well called coffee, on a cool, rainy night. Bliss, you say? Not quite.

All this is happening while I'm poring over a pretty large case study for INTRODB.

"Burning the midnight oil again, walphy?", my other side asked. "Yes, walphy. I am.", replied my good self. Sigh. It just never ends.

I need to make an logical entity relatinoship diagram for this thing. I figure, if it takes me about two good hours or so to come up with one for a pretty small case study, how much more for this? Ack. Better get started instead. :)

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and the wheel turns yet again

Burned. Again. For the God-knows-how-many-times already in a span of only two years.

To be honest, I'm getting more and more finicky with these creatures you call women. Or girls. Or whatever, actually. Young women seems to be the most appropriate. :)

Sigh. I've asked this question a zillion times already, and here it is again: why do i keep on falling for the [wrong] person at the most definitely wrong time?

Don't answer that.

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graduation day

I just finished ROTC. All fine and dandy. Except perhaps for that sucky experience of being in an APC and actually trying to deploy properly. Ack. That sucked. Heheh.

The buses sucked too. No airconditioning. In a country where humidity and high temperatures run rampant, airconditioning is almost paramount in ensuring passengers get to their destinations in a light mood. You know what I mean. ;)

Anyway, being the final, official ROTC day, I felt somewhat nostalgic, like a real big signage telling the whole world that two terms has already come and gone for me and this course. Being in RCG is a blast. That's one experience I'll never forget for sure. I'm going to miss the PTs. Yes, I surely will. The gargantuan effort needed to bring the DNST's PA system to and from the STRC. The scorching noontimes before dismissal. The quirky instructors. The responsibility of being batch rep. The almost-constant prodding from Kimmie and others to lunge questions at senior and staff officers. The jokes. The wise-ass jokes. The corny jokes. The teasing and everything. I'm going to miss them.

I'll surely miss them all like hell.

I just finished working on the english transcript of our filipi2 project. Two episodes from the first season of HBO's "Sex and the City". After four cups of coffee, burning the midnight oil, a terrible back and set of fingers: Twenty-five gruelling pages, finished in record-breaking time. (started last night, finished this morning.) And I volunteered for this stuff. Heheh.

All there's needed to be done is the translation proper.

Gotta get me some food first, i haven't eaten anything yet since i started this last night. Yes, that includes breakfast. Methinks i'll just get an early lunch. Or something. Before heading up to school for netanal.

Ciao. Catch you guys later.

Or maybe not. I was thinking of catching Garfield later in Greenbelt. :)

Or getting a nice novel.

Or just going home and continue the frag fest against zombies.

* warning: technical blabber ahead. if you find the below almost alien-sounding, I'm sorry, the inner geek in me just can't help it. :)

Geeky Op-Ed: "Bumps in the Road: Intel's Recent Delays in Perspective"

http://www.sudhian.com/showdocs.cfm?aid=576

Joel Hruska of Sudhian.com fame outlines the recent problems over at Santa Clara in that famed semicon corporation, Intel. He also cites the problems not only plaguing Intel, but more importantly, the entire industry with regards to the 0.09 micron process. Remember that even Big Blue, who has been developing their 90nm process with Sunnyvale's Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), also have had problems scaling the PowerPC G5 processor on the latest dual-CPU PowerMacs, requiring Apple to design perhaps the first fully commercial and mass-produced workstation equipped with water cooling on a processor that hardly runs near 3.0GHz. Talk about stretching things to their absolute limits.

The problem is not entirely with the process itself. Intel's Prescott (a 90nm design) Pentium 4, which dissipates much higher heat levels than AMD's once-infamous 0.18 micron process CPUs, while properly scaling with the right amount of cooling, still suffers more-than-acceptable levels of power leakage and heat dissipation, despite Intel's claims to have developed necessary technology to reduce them for at least another process shrink or two. Intel's roadmap page, available as an easy search on Google, is essentially frozen on a single platform until first quarter of next year, largely due to the problems of scaling. AMD's not in a hurry either to increase the clock-speeds on its flagship Athlon64 FX and mainstream vanilla Athlon 64s. Of particular note was Joel Hruska's observation about Intel [finally] downplaying clockspeed as a raw measure of potential system performance; at least, Intel's latest product launches of Land Grid Array 775 (Socket 775), the 925 and 915 chipsets focused more on the newer technologies (HighDef Audio, DDR2, PCI Express) the platform brings into market rather than the overall performance of the platform itself. Proof in itself of the changing landscape in the semiconductor industry.

It is in this light then that we are starting to see designs incorporating dual-cores than clock-speed scaling--AMD's K9 is physically a fused K8 design, while Intel's 2H plans (at time of writing) calls for a dual-core NetBurst design--essentially a dual-cored Pentium 4. This brings in SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) as a crucial feature software slated for 2005 release should have.

Despite all of these problems plaguing the industry, I am confident that things will go forward. In one way or another. It will be interesting to see how things will turn out a year from now.

incessantries of growth, third part.

i was checking out my older blog here for nostalgia's sake...

... and discovered a lot has changed.

I do have a rough sense of direction now in life; now that I've decided that I wanted to teach. Also, I don't do suicide letters now, thank you. :) But the thing is, there's still something missing.

Ah yes, an OS. Err, SO, I mean. (Silly slashdot types; poking fun at the people who are single by choice. :)

Anyway, I wrapped up my netalab report just this morning after working on it since Wednesday evening. Gee, this is good: that leaves me with one less task to worry and pore over the weekend. I must admit, there's some sense of gratification finishing things up earlier than usual. Heheh.

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Reader ramblings

I want to read Noam Chomsky and Isaac Asimov. Sadly, DLSU's library doesn't stack up on their writings, particularly Asimov's fiction. I was curious about him after reading how the movie 'I, Robot' sort of 'distorts' Asimov's original idea of what a robot should be like. As to Chomsky, well, after reading the polemic William Blum's "Rogue State", I was curious about reading more on the ills and failings of US foreign policy, especially on "communist containment" and terrorism. Rogue State, as you may know, discusses the possible reasons for 9-11 and other acts of terror against the US.

Hah. Curious. What a reason. I want to get back into reading so badly...

... that I'm actually planning to pick up a romance novel, either from McNaught or Deveraux.

So i ask: anybody who has good romance titles to recommend? I was thinking of getting 'Almost Heaven'. :D