quaint little rutted bucket



Tuesday, November 30, 2004

Whoa.

It's been a long time since last post, and I've gotten my ass to work on a ton of requirements lately: reportings, papers, exams. Sigh. A couple of weeks more to go... gotta hang on! :)

On an even more frustrating note, my Radeon 9800 Pro just died out on me last Saturday evening, in the middle of an NFSU2 session around midnight. RIP, my R350 wonder, you've served and overclocked well. That fiasco left me bungling around with literally nothing to do on Sunday. (Except spend 2 hours in the Parish Office, study ::ehem:: for genpsyc, read stuff, watch tv and sleep. Woohoo.)

After a tedious troubleshooting session, I was surprised when I discovered it was the culprit. I mean, I even pointed a Papst 12cm fan on it just to keep it cool the entire duration it was there in my rig. But still, it failed, even with only a modest overclock and an Arctic Cooling HSF. Really disappointing.

Anyway, I dropped it off Rising Sun Shaw yesterday and I'm hoping those guys at PC Trends send me a new card with an R360 that runs somewhat cooler and overclocks even better. ::evil:: For the meantime, I've got another slower card that pretty much plays Live 2005 (only that :) well.



Radeons Galore.

I was thinking of getting a 5700LE 128-bit card, but it was too expensive relative to this one (while performing more or less the same with a vanilla 9550). MX440s/4000s, 5200s and 5500s were all out of stock too, so it was either this, or a 9250. The 9250 series doesn't game at all, so it was this one for me. Pretty sweet, cool-running card. :)



Docent Training!

I find docent training fun! Finally, something interesting and new for an extracurricular involvement. Heheh.

We had a lecture under Ms. Judy Sibayan last Friday, and it was great. We were discussing art history and its relation to Filipino artwork featured in the "Moving Art" exhibit. We'll be having another lecture under her this Friday, to be followed by a museum tour on Saturday. (Yippee. Kaya lang, I'll not be able to attend Friday's lecture, as I still need to go back to Busko for my interview with Mr. Tenerife. :)



The Busko Experience

I dropped by Busko this afternoon, and guess who I bumped into?

Ma'am Violy. Of all the people. :D

She asked what in the world was I doing in Busko. I told her that I was doing research on PAASCU-accredited institutions as part of a course requirement in one of my professional education courses (FOUNED2 :D waheheheh.) and I was assigned to this school. And I told her I was an Education major.

She was surprised. Really surprised. (You could only imagine. Scary. Bweheheh.)

She asked what my major is. "English", I replied. And she started recruting me already for a teaching post in DBTI, telling me the need for more quality teachers.

Overall, pretty interesting conversation we had, as it was cut short by the bell. She had a class at around 2:50 or so.

And I wafted mindlessly around campus until around 3:15, when I bumped into my little wonder of a brother.

The entire time I was waiting for Ms. Araneta, I thought to myself how I landed in education in the first place. I said to myself, "Come to think of it, seeing all these young kids gives you a feeling of vocation." And with that, came Bro. Kenneth's (La Salle Brother) words when he was doing vocation talk in my RELSTWO class a few weeks ago:

"A vocation is when the desires of the heart meets the hunger of the world."

Now I know why I got into education. :)

Friday, November 12, 2004

Newsbytes

Is Dell finally going to sell some AMD-based servers and systems? Finally. It could bring further leverage to AMD in R&D and marketing, giving Intel more pressure to finally listen to their engineers and "more-informed" consumers.

Among other things, GamePC Labs has some cool Dothan action brewing here and here. For those not in the know, Dothan is Intel-speak for its latest 90nm 2MB cache Pentium-Ms. And its running on a desktop machine. Sweet. Personally, I think this is what the Pentium 4 should've been, instead of that silly, wasteful, clockspeed-geared, and if you would let me say it, crappy NetBurst stuff they developed. Its cooler, consumes far less power and runs head-and-shoulder better than any Pentium 4 at the same clock speed. How's that for a CPU? :)

(While I am a impressed, keep in mind that Dothan nearly doubles the cache available to AMD's top dog, the Athlon64 FX-55.)



musicOne visit

I picked up Janno Gibbs' "Seven" and Pido Lalimarmo's "Bittersweet" two days ago, and I must say, I'm real impressed by these two.

Janno Gibbs certainly inspires. Much of his music on "Seven" is reminiscent of recent acoustic acts like Nyoy Volante's, but done with a little bit more flair and maturity. A nice album to listen, overall.

On the other side of things, Pido's a wonder. His music is just too good to be passed up on. From "Himala" to "Teach Me To Love", this album satiates the more discerning listeners out there looking for a nice refreshing change from all the pop-fluff modern media bombards us.


Tuesday, November 09, 2004

the week in focus

This is just great: Contrary to how I have felt for this subject, I'm indeed faring relatively well in linguis. (Except for the last midterms, which I screwed up for being too slow when I was answering. Nevertheless, Ma'am Laurilla did give us the chance to have a "make-up" of sorts, as a good number of the class actually got a failing mark. And the highest was just around 75.5 or so, out of a hundred.)

Now for the bad news: Raymund's father passed away. Tradition has always called for calling up the cavalry to pick me up whenever I'm down South, but I'm having second thoughts, as Gino told me about how the hell to get home commuting.

I'm just scared, as it would require me to travel in a bus, late in the evening. (Perfect setting for a robbery. :)



FOUNED2 is cracking me up. Ma'am Lilet just complained and ranted endlessly last meeting about how dismal our papers on our visit to St. La Salle Preschool were. Sheesh, ma'am, cut us some slack. In the first place, she never stated that she wanted a "formal" paper, let alone a comprehensive one, so we, being largely a frosh class, assumed that what she required is just a pseudo-paper of sorts that highlights what she asked of us. As far as I can recall (and based from the notes I had of that requirement) she never stated a specific format for the paper. And thats the problem. Here she was, complaining about the utter lack of decent content on that paper, whereas in the first place, she never really clearly defined what she needed! Gargh.

And she went on to continue how she was planning to not give us a final paper anymore if only we did that right, and that now we have to suffer the consequences of having exerted less effort on that crap of a paper. Double sheesh.

Next week, we're scheduled to do a **comprehensive** tour of San Isidro Catholic School, just around four city blocks away from La Salle. She asks us to literally write about almost every facet of the said institution, right down to its physicalities. From administration, students, services, mission-vision. And get this: She expects us to gather all pertinent information in just an hour. Weeee. Goodbye, genpsyc and hello, hellish requirement.

Though if its any consolation, she did state what she needed now for the final paper. ::sarcastic::

And she'll still be having finals. Roar.



Ano kaya? Punta kaya ako sa wake nung father ni Raymund o hinde? Hmmm. ::thinking cap on::

Friday, November 05, 2004

Well, whaddya know

I got a passing midterm mark for LINGUIS. Wow. Hahah. I was actually concerned about this subject, as I felt I was doing poorly. The same goes for FOUNED2 and EDTECH1.

I don't know about genpsyc, relstwo and engltwo. In particular, the latter's crapping me out lately.



Docent training

I got in the Docent training program. Ms. Curator said that we will be the first batch for the new University Museum. Gee, I'm even more excited. And to think this is just volunteer work.

There will be training for three months, and the remaining seven will be for the practical stuff. This is really interesting. Arts. Wow.

What i really wanted is to develop a sense of appreciation for Filipino artwork. Oftentimes, we tend to neglect the fact that as a nation and a race, we have our own culture too. My desire to learn Filipino art is fueled no less in part by this, as I feel that an artist's creation is a snapshot of the emotion and history at the time it was made.

Anyway, I need to get off the web now. I still need to be in La Salle at nine tomorrow morning.

Ciao!