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Slowly this whole thing is losing life. Work and other stuff are consuming my time for posting things on this site. Well… I’m going back to learning PHP and now this is for real. Starting next week my schedule’s gonna change: I’ll start working at midday – away from the hassle of regular traffic and volume of people travelling from and to work. I believe that will solve the problem cos there’ll be no more spending extra two hours inside the bus stuck in Ortigas avenue or getting squeezed to near-bone dislocation inside the MRT. With the way I update this site, it’s just tedious to do it outside the house that’s why it’s so uninspiring. Another month and all this will change. *fingers crossed*

Do you remember Malu Fernandez? She’s that now-controversial writer who raised a lot of people’s eyebrows when she published nasty comments about OFWs in her article in People Asia Magazine last June 2007. Loads of Filipino bloggers wrote entries condemning her offending piece and, in Malu’s own words, “acerbic wit” and united to boycott Manila Standard and People Asia unless Malu resigned as a writer for tjhe said publications. Chain emails overflowed our mailboxes too containing scans of the said article together with her response towards the controversy that further fueled the angry Filipinos. Now, look at the power of blogging. Malu Fernandez has now resigned from the two publications and even wrote a letter of apology. Do I feel bad for her? Not really. She’s rich so it really won’t affect her big time! Hehe… We all get carried away by our powerful jobs sometimes but going overboard should not remain unnoticed. She has walked away and I think somehow regained some dignity with it by admitting her mistakes. I still have respect for her. Good luck to you and based on your words again, “may this lesson not be lost on all those who through anonymous blogs, engage in bigotry, discrimination, and hatred against overweight individuals, for example.”

In relation to blogging anonimously. That’s one thing about my blog that refrains me from posting “dangerous” stuff up here. Hehe. *feeling famous daw ako* But really, with my face (and whole body) above and the personal stuff I previously wrote, I can’t just be saying stupid stuff that will offend people or I’ll just disappear suspiciously. That’s an advantage of remaining anonymous: you got no real personality to protect. Creating this pseudo- Internet character gives you the nerve to say whatever. Let’s admit it… Today, it’s easy to be famous and earn money through blogs that contain interesting and/or commercial contents. Look at Perez Hilton and BryanBoy. They make loads of cash (and clothes) – although they really didn’t hide themselves because that’s what they really want: be famous for being bitchy and glamorous and we’re really interested in all things obnoxious in some ways. It’s funny. Anonymous blogs, – especially gay blogs – on the same leve, are also a hit for they touch issues that most homosexuals can relate to and not to mention they are ULTRA funny. The humor, the way they’re written and the language are just super! We should all get a daily doze of them to start our day right. These people keep their faces hidden to protect their profession and reputation because a lot of homosexuals are still in the closet these days and it’s okay. Sexuality, for me, isn’t really about how you look outside but how you understand yourself and what you want. So for the meantime that my face, my name and all about me is exposed around here, I’d like to stay in everybody’s good books! Hahahaha! *winks*

And about the news that I posted the other day… No official announcement yet. Although I don’t like the idea because I don’t want some concerned individuals to get hurt but that’s what’s gonna happen daw for the benefit of all so that’ll also be my go-signal to say it here. To all those who sent emails and SMS, thank you. Really, I feel proud because you said you all are. And of course, Bryan – thanks buddy. I never really experienced you brag so much about me and I feel really great about myself because of it. Thanks a lot!

It was a good day. A very good day indeed! I received the news and I just feel so elated right now cos to be honest, I didn’t really see it coming! Yes, I’m that stupid sometimes. Anyway… I’m just happy happy happy!

After the official announcement, I’ll be breaking the news here as well.

It’s Sunday again and this is like one of the moments when I wish I have the ability to stretch out days so I can delay the coming of tomorrow. Nothing much happened during the weekend which supposedly was good but by that I actually meant nothing interesting. I didn’t stop going out of the house (which I hated). I went to RJ’s place yesterday and used her CPU to reformat my hard drive. Something got f*cked up with our system early last week and we couldn’t get it to work so I had to take extreme measures. Well, it’s fixed now and we’re back to XP. Bryan upgraded us to Vista last month even and just when I finally got the hang of it, the whole thing broke down. Well, it’s not that big of a deal actually because most of the softwares I use were still incompatible with Vista so XP’s still the better choice for now. Hehe…

This afternoon I went to Makati for a facial. Yeah, ang layo noh. Bryan was supposed to meet me there after an hour for our weekly trip but for some reason he wasn’t able to prepare on time and it would be too late to move around because we’d have to leave by 7PM to get enough sleep for our work tomorrow morning. So we just met in the supermarket and bought groceries. But one f^cking thing happened that ruined my mood. I used this BDO machine located on the bridge to Greenbelt which was near Ayala Museum and I believe that it had a problem because it kept saying that I entered my PIN wrong. I’ve been using my card for the longest time and I never changed my PIN so I couldn’t understand how I could be wrong. Well, it was too late when I realized that because I’d already been locked out. Argh! Fortunately I had my other card with me or else I would’ve spent the night there.

A hot issue that’s been circulating lately is an article by Malu Fernandez that she wrote in People Asia magazine. I read the article and I wish I could’ve understood how she came up with such stuff towards OFWs. She’s acting like BryanBoy. I mean, I enjoy reading BryanBoy and he’s totally enter-taining but the difference with Bryan’s writings are: aside from the fact that it’s a “blog”, his writings are meant to be taken with plain humor – he offends people to appear funny. Sometimes he even opposes himself to provide comic relief. And with Malu Fernandez, I am not really a reader – I don’t even know her so you really can’t take my word for it but plainly, she’s Pinay and she writes for a magazine that doesn’t only reach Filipinos and for someone who has such powerful way to connect to people to write bad stuff about her fellow countrymen is just disgusting. I am in no way going to defend the actions of others but I believe that if you can’t say anything good about other people, then it’s better you just shut up.

Haaay… This is so random. The stormy week that has just gone was by far my most unproductive week in the office. I hardly accomplished what I needed to do that’s why I was given a deadline on Wednesday to finish writing test scripts for our new release tentatively set mid-September. Tough luck! I really intend to summon all inspiration I can find from the simplest things to the greatest so I can get myself to proper state of mind to work properly on a MONDAY!!! Everybody knows I hate Mondays.

What do you think is the perfect retreat? I’ve been thinking about it lately because I’ve been wanting to take a look at my life from a different perspective. Everyday I go to work and I see the same things and the same things happen and all the noise, the stress and the pressure just make it all more scattered. Don’t get me wrong because I feel blessed and am thankful that I am earning. It’s just that sometimes you get to a point where you want silence so you can reflect and better understand yourself and realize what you really want and what you want to do next.

I’ve heard of a place in Tagaytay which I’ve been doing much research about and how to get there. It’s some sort of retreat house or something and they said it would be much cheaper if you’d go there in groups. Do you know of this place? Or any other good place? Somewhere far, peaceful and relaxing? Hmmm…

Anyway, it’s Friday again and I went home straight from work – skipped gym again. I’m going there tomorrow morning and on Sunday. Tonight, I just want to read and rest. I finished reading Harry Potter the other day and fortunately I bought FHM last week because I thought Christine Reyes was pretty on the cover (how unlikely of me? yeah I thought so – hehe) and I haven’t really gone through those pages yet. For the meantime I’d settle with a light scent that makes me sleep better. And play music that’s not heavy to hear. You know those first batch of songs in Wave 89.1′s Dreamsounds and Quiet Storm playlist like Patti Austin’s “Love’s Been Kind To Me Lately”? They’re timeless.

Waaah! I’m here at home feeling sick and weak. I feel like I’m losing weight again. You know that weird paranoia of fat people towards food thinking they always seem to make them fatter? I have it in reverse. I feel like I’m gonna lose lots of pounds every time I miss a meal or unable to meet my required daily amount of protein each day or failed to go to the gym… It’s mental! I’m supposed to hit the gym today but since I’m too weak to go out, well, I’m gonna pass up on that one, as well as the scheduled pizza-day and bowling tonight at Paeng’s in Galleria with my officemates. Argh! I’m thinking of joining them for badminton on Thursday to make things up for my absence tonight.

Hmm… I’m thinking of re-coding this site and its stylesheets just for the sake of to making its codes look cleaner. Carlo saw it and I felt embarrassed at how organized his codes for his site are. Well, I’m not a programmer  like him but I get his point – hehe… I’ll try to do it this weekend which will take about a day.

I’ve got nothing much to say so I’m gonna post some random things:

1) BHU’S GRANDPARENTS’ EXPERIENCE WITH PHILIPPINE AIRLINES
I’m not an expert with the whole airline thingy but I’ve worked as a reservation agent before and I know how these ticket and fare rules go. It might have been a misunderstanding in that aspect but whatever it may be or whosoever to blame, these are still customers and the issue is customer service. Or even if you overlook that one, we should still count our values that make us who we are! It is NEVER good, in all cases, to disrespect the elders. We learned about it in school since kinder-garten so anybody who forgets is just plain rude and miseducated. Click HERE for the story.

2) LATEST ATM SCAM
Tita Baby sent this over last week. She’s living in the US and sometimes I’m amazed at how more in-the-know she is than I when it comes to what’s happening around here in the Philippines. Well, this is basically some scam that happens in ATMs especially during the weekend when the banks are closed and you won’t have a way to close your account or file an incident report immediately. It transfers your money to an unknown account that the bank reps won’t let you know of due to security reasons and all they can do is “investigate” which may be synonymous to “say goodbye to your savings FOR LIFE!” Lesson here is: DO NOT TALK TO STRANGERS IN ATMs. Read HERE and make yourself aware.

3) CZARINA’S GIFT
Czarina is my cousin and she’ll be graduating next year. I promised her this as a birthday present next month (which I hope will become available here by then):

Yep. That’s Mariah and that’s her perfume which she created it with the people from Elizabeth Arden. It’ll be available sometime on September and I hope it reaches Manila on time. I wanted one but I think it smells too girly. Hehe… But anyway, Czarina looked excited when I told her so I hope she likes it for she’ll be one of the first girls to wear it, you know… Hehe…

4) TRINOMA PART TWO
I’ve been to TriNoMa before and we’ve had dinner there once. But back then it was still barely open. There were only a few stores in operation and its MRT connection was still closed. Last Sunday we stopped by there due to the insistence of Hannah, Me-Ann and Jessie (my former officemates) who still hadn’t set foot on that new mall. And so we did… We went to the beautiful garden (I don’t know what it’s called) on the very top floor which we did not see during our first visit. It was pretty and I think it has the coolest water features among all malls in the Metro. Too bad I wasn’t able to enjoy myself much because Bryan was hungry so we had to go back down and feed him. Hehe…

This is why I hate taking pictures. I’m always not in it.

Oh dear I love this moment. I’m here at home with so much time to rest, read and relax and just let the workweek end with a good night sleep. No thinking about the job, having to get up early and go through the everyday hoopla of travelling to and from work – this is amazing and I so appreciate it. Hehe… I know it sounds silly but this rarely happens so allow me to indulge.

Anyway, what’ve we been up to? Hmm… Due to my schedule, I have discontinued studying PHP for a while. I drop by the gym after work three times a week since last month and will get home really late that I don’t get to get the proper amount of sleep. This week was my first, after a long time, in morning shift so the gym was quite crowded by the time I got there. I asked permission to move back my work hours by an hour so I’ll be able to leave early and hope that there’s gonna be a difference in the number of people working out. But nonetheless, I feel good with this routine. It’s just sad to stop studying PHP because I’ve been wanting to learn it for future projects but I’ll find time [maybe during the weekend] to catch up.

Eric of the famous blog Byahilo.com invited me to attend the press launch of Blog and Soul and also the Second Coming of Mrs. Fields – you know, the famous cookie shop. Well, Mrs. Fields is reinventing herself to attract the coffee-shop crowd. It used to be just a stall with a shelf of cookies that I usually pass by in Robinson’s Place Manila back in high school but now, I think I saw one store in MegaMall which is more of a chill-out place complete with tables. Maybe this is it but, I don’t know… I read from the program that there will be a kitchen tour which I think is amazing. I haven’t gone to any of this before so I’m excited. Eric said there’s gonna be good food too so, I totally look forward to it. It’ll be on August 21st in Manila Pavillion.

Quite recently, there were events that made me seriously consider quitting my job but fortunately they’re over now and no, I’m not leaving. Hehe… I talked to an intelligent person and that person lightened up my mind so I’m staying. And like I said in my last post, I feel productive during the day and I am able to work with focus. I do software testing of our own products at work, I write test partitions and test scripts and for new features or enhancements to be included in future releases, I need to be in contact with our developers real-time to clear up certain issues and get the project going. Being in the office during daytime works perfect not only for my tasks but also for running errands and going/talking to the bank with less hassle. So there, I’ve just given away a big part of what I do for a living (yes I do more things). Anyway, my working life is quite okay now. I should say – to quote Jason Mraz – I’m in the “waiting for my rocket to come” phase in life. I hope it doesn’t take long.

Last weekend Bryan and I watched Ratatouille. We’ve been going to several movies lately. We actually plan to buy an M-PASS now to make buying tickets online easier. Too bad we missed Harry Potter during its first weekend. I really wanna see it in IMAX that’s why we still don’t get seats for it until now. Hehe… We’ll watch it next month with my brothers and cousins. Well, back to Ratatouille – it’s not the usual animated comedy. I liked the whole dream thing with the cooking and the ending wasn’t predictable. I didn’t even realize that it was two hours long. I just wish that one day, like Remy despite of how unlikely-to-come-true his dream was, I’ll realize what I really wanna do and succeed with it.

Haaay… I’ve been keeping so much thoughts since last week that I’ve lost the feeling to write about all of them. You see, that’s why if you feel like you wanna write a blog entry, don’t let that moment pass for you will never be able to regain it. Good night!

This is what I received the other day. It looked very similar to what I got last Christmas, only bigger…

I was able to leave work on time this afternoon so I dropped by the supermarket with Bryan to buy groceries which we both love doing. This was like the only day when I was able to finish my tasks on time and get home early. Since Monday I’ve been getting here at around 9PM due to other things to do. Well, this is what I love about working during regular hours: aside from getting to have variety with my meals, I feel more energetic and more productive at work. Things make more sense and very little time gets to waste.

Anyway, that gift above… Can you guess at first sight what that may be? Hehe… I really had no idea at first. Bryan gave me that last July 31st as an anniversary gift – it’s been two crazy years and we’re still together and I’m very thankful for it. We did not celebrate much because it’s a workday so we just had dinner in one of our favorite places to stay: California PIzza Kitchen in Shangri-La Plaza. I love the entrance – it’s fabulous! Haha! Well, I wish we could’ve made it more grand but that’s all we could afford. Maybe next year will be better.

I don’t have much time to write things here anymore. Bhu, I’ll post your letter tomorrow. It’s almost 11PM so I need to sleep. Belated happy birthday!

The gift? It was the book Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows! I was surprised and almost cried when I opened it. Bryan knew I didn’t like reading the PDF that Vincent sent me because it makes my eyes hurt plus all those parinigs worked! Hahaha! But due to time constraints, I’m still in Chapter 3! Thanks Piglet!