As much as I hate missing a day in terms of my LJ updates, it's usually because (1) I have no access to the internet come blogging time, (2) I'm dead tired and thus slept through the day or (3) I was having way too much fun. Yesterday's missing blog entry was almost due to all three reasons, but mainly because of the last one, hehe.

Oh, and this is going to be a lengthy entry to make up for yesterday, You have been warned.

Things start with a bit too much time spent playing We ♥ Katamari and thus barely getting enough sleep for Saturday gaming night. Some coffee helped me along there in time for Seth, Aldwin and Sam to come over for a long overdue Vampire gaming session. As is the way of such things, we played well into the morning with each of us napping in-between rounds here and there but it was definitely a very productive session indeed. A lot of ground was covered and at least two story arcs completed more or less. My character has gone from being a basic geeky comic book store owner to one of the 666 scions of Lucifer with the ability to command demons. Yay me. It's definitely an odd twist and it'll be tricky balancing this out with my character development. The night (day?) ended with a last-minute trial of the Dragonology game Tobie picked up on sale at SM. It was knocked down to P400 from P1000 so it seemed like a great deal. Heck, even if the game totally sucked, the nice dragon figurines alone were so worth it. It turned out the game wasn't that bad, albeit a little long and I can see us trying to play it from time to time, should the mood hit.

I ended up staying up after we had a little breakfast while Tobie tried to catch up with sleep - I had at least managed a decent power nap before my last round of the game - all because of more Katamari. I swear, that game is dangerously addictive - I definitely need to curb my playing during the week since it eats up so much time, makes me stay up late and has me rather tired at work in the evening. Besides, I have other things to do now, haha.

Things were interrupted by finding out that our internet connection wasn't working. After power cycling all devices as is standard troubleshooting 101, things still weren't working so we gambled with our first call to Bayantel tech support. It went remarkably well with the initial agent immediately noting she couldn't ping the modem remotely and had it escalated to a tech. While at first I was skeptical that I'd get a callback, less than 15 minutes later the call came and the tech confirmed a few details before committing to come over within another 15 minutes. Lo and behold he did arrive quickly and with a few other modems in tow and after testing different ones, found a replacement for our original unit. It seems the modem gave out and needed to be checked but at least we were back up in running. This is the fastest tech support turnaround I've ever experienced and if Bayantel keeps this up, they definitely have a loyal customer for life now, haha.

On the flip side, my first experience with trying to reserve a ticket at Gateway wasn't quite as helpful. By finally making a phone call to their TicketNet service, we found out that tickets need to be claimed two hours before the movie, which is REALLY ahead of time when you think about it and that their agents aren't very good. She spoke pretty fast, was hard to understand especially when she was giving me my booking number and put me on hold for no reason in the middle of her recap. Okay, it technically wasn't hold - she just disappeared from the line and I could hear really rowdy conversation in the background before she came back. Beyond that it wasn't so bad since claiming the tickets were pretty easy although the movie experience itself had much to be desired. We had opted to watch Harry Potter, which wasn't as bad as I feared, but had to endure a running commentary from our seat mates, various cell phones ringing during the movie and on top of it all, a crying baby / toddler. At least we got to see the movie.

Freddie Stroma is wickedly hot, but it sucked he was never shirtless in the movie. Rupert Grint has gotten surprisingly hot but also did not go shirtless in the movie. Daniel Radcliffe is really Elijah Wood in disguise.

What really made my day was the fact that Tobie bought us a copy of Pride & Prejudice and Zombies, something I had been looking for for ages now. I was too much the miser to buy it myself once we found a copy so it was a real delight that Tobie just forced the issue and paid for it outright. We read the first two chapters together while waiting for our food at Teriyaki Boy and it was such a trip! I am re-organizing my time such that I forego Katamari during the week (I finished the game anyway and am now just trying to unlock all the secrets and beat my prior records)and devote a little time before bed to work through the novel. I'm so excited!

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Baa Baa Baa! LMAO!

Before I really dig into things, I have to join the rest of the Maynilad subscribers in complaining about the fact that we still don't have water. The building administration found out about things rather late and announced that water would be out from midnight of Saturday (Friday night) until noon of Sunday, a 36 hour window. The Inquirer website originally reported the outage would last until midnight of Sunday (Saturday night) but that didn't happen. my last check of the Inquirer website indicates that this service interruption is now going to last until midnight of Monday (Sunday night), which is a MAJOR bummer. I'm just glad that the building administration is making good use of the limited water supplies in the storage tank by rationing things and only turning on the water at select intervals. It's kept us all generally functional and decently clean here and there. Yes, I got to take a bath this morning, LOL.

Yesterday I was initially trying to make drinking plans with Joel (formerly Cupkeyk on LJ) and Arvin |benitobeybi| as well. One thing led to another and Joel had to back out but Arvin and I pushed through with things. It certainly made for an interesting evening, to say the least, haha.

I met up with Arvin near the Buendia MRT station and from there we swung by a Ministop to booze up. It felt so traditional, hahaha, raiding the store for beer and him picking up a bottle of Generoso Brandy - of all things! Throw in a few bags of chips and I was pretty sure this was going to be memorable, to say the least. Before last night, I had never had brandy before - there's always a first time for everything I suppose. So there we were, taking brandy shots with Sprite as a bit of a chaser, talking and laughing about the kinds of things that only seem entertaining under the influence. I ordered a pizza as well (since I hadn't eaten dinner) and Brian |kitchengod| baked some pepperoni slices and cut up some Colby cheese to munch on.

Eventually Chris came along, since he was going out to Malate with Brian and Ryan dropped by too. Arvin tried to share the fun with them by passing a few brandy shots their way and generally it all seemed very amusing at the time. Soon the bottle was empty, we were out of beer and Arvin was down for the count, haha. I'm glad I managed to hold my own in the alcohol department - I certainly surprised myself, hehe. I spent the rest of my evening watching over Arvin as he worked off the booze, watched Run Fatboy Run and Legend of the Seeker episodes I had managed to finish downloading.

Arvin left at around 02:30am and I was pretty much awake until the time Brian got home past 06:00am. This was a rather fun evening no matter how you look at it. And luckily my head doesn't hurt either! LOL

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I keep bumping into references to the Fibonacci sequence this week for some reason

First, we need to advertise. A dear LJ friend of mine, Ice |the_cloverleaf| has a photography exhibit that opens tomorrow night called, "IDLIP" Apparently the concept behind the exhibit is all about out-of-focus or blurred images and trying to convey a message that way. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to head down there for the opening tomorrow but it's certainly something that I want to see. Check it out if you're in the QC area!

I just got back from my trip to the bank, which is pretty much a weekly activity given the wonderful timing of Brian |kitchengod| and my pay cycles. During my comfy walk to and from the bank in this lovely weather, my mind started to wander and I ended up thinking about how things had changed in recent months. It seemed interesting enough to write about, so here we go.

Things started with what I was wearing to the bank - a pair of rather dumpy black walking shorts, an old yellow AHS PE shirt (yes I still wear them) and my rather well-used Old Navy flip-flops that have almost lost their entire print. You see, I dress based on function and rarely for fashion. For work I follow the dress code. When I get home and need to run errands, I tend to wear some variation of the aforementioned attire. When I go clubbing or out with friends, of course I make some effort to dress a little better (and the Brian helps me get to the rest of the way).

That generally makes sense except when you think about where I'm walking. Before it was the rather populated (and not so tidy) streets of Pasay City as I made my way to my bank branch beside the Libertad Public Market. It was a fairly lengthy walk that involved rather brisk walking and avoiding making eye contact with the many, many, many people I'd bump into along the way and then hurried walking back. I swear it would always feel like the money I was about to deposit felt stupidly heavy and threatened to burn a hole in my pocket given everyone supposedly staring at me - I was raised to be careful and paranoid, so sue me. Now it's still a somewhat lengthy walk - give or take the same distance. There are still people along the path but I don't feel as worried. I bump into street cleaners more often than not compared to the more colorful citizens of Pasay.

And here's me dressed all dumpy-like, walking into the fringes of the Makati Central Business District. That bank I do business with is rather close to Pasong Tamo, just about a block away from the hordes of office yuppies making their way to their daytime jobs all dressed up while I'm...very, very comfortable. And I don't plan on changing my dressing habits.

It just hit me this morning how much we're really settled in our new area. I've re-established all essential services (albeit to varying degrees of satisfaction), figured out where to go for the essentials and have pretty much established new routines in terms of paths to walk to the bank, routes for getting to the pet food store - generally figuring out the new patterns and cycles of our life in our new home. Housewarming parties are fun, but the real settling in and feeling welcome starts with the little things like this, being able to know where everything is and figure out where to go for this or that. That's when you really know you've found a new home.

But don't knock the parties, I'm looking forward to those later in the month, haha.

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Oh math, you can do anything! XD

Today's the birthday of a dear friend, Anne. It's a shame I haven't been able to see her in like FOREVER - a situation I definitely need to rectify this year. She's so dear to me that she was one of the first people I ever came out to and I definitely need to find a way to meet up with her again despite her ridiculously busy life. Happy Birthday, Anne Dearest!

I'm pretty beat right now. My legs are a tad sore and I clearly haven't had enough sleep within the past 24 hours. This time around it's not because I holed up here at home all weekend and played too much Spore. This weekend was all about friends and actually going out and I think things were definitely productive.

Last night was pretty much for Nico (more or less kyxer when he was still actively blogging). Brian |kitchengod| whipped up some fabulous pasta with all sorts of good things like mushrooms, eggplant and other tasty bits and it was nice for Nico to come over and have dinner with us. Conversation wandered around between really geeky topics to really queer ones depending on who was talking and where things were going. It's was nice to just hang out with him given how long he's been in Canada already. After that, it was off to Bed for some serious partying and general good fun. We even bumped into Al |acid_t3st|, who apparently is back in town after a long holiday in the provinces. We partied pretty hardy along with Ryan and eventually ended our day as the sun came up after breakfast at Cafe Adriatico.

Despite getting home rather late, I forced my peaceful, alcohol-enhanced slumber to end quickly, turning the whole thing into just a power nap. I had to if I was going to manage to meet up with Ly |vanderboi| and Ice |the_cloverleaf| for our meet-up / food trip at Binondo. I haven't been in the area in ages and usually it has always been in the company of family and with the support of cars for transportation. To actually have to commute on my own for the first time was interesting in itself and so I was pretty determined to go through with this. Plus I wanted to be able to meet Ice in the flesh after all these years of talking - it was certainly about time for that. Despite waking up late, checking Google for last-minute tips on how to get to the Binondo area via the LRT and trying to shake off the lingering effects of all the alcohol in my system, I eventually got to drag myself out of the house and all the way over there.

I met up with them at the LRT 2 Recto station after navigating the LRT 1 route and they were together with Wes, who apparently grew up in the area and was our default tour guide for the day. We started with a great lunch at MaSuKe, which Wes stated was sort of a second generation version of Ma Mon Luk. The good certainly tasted like Ma Mon Luk, which had always been one of my favorite Chinese restaurants, and it was a more than hearty lunch. It's funny that this was actually a compromise for us since he really wanted to bring us to Wai Ying but the queue for that place was just insane. For the rest of the day we pretty much walked around Binondo looking for our respective items of interest such as Ly's loose leaf tea and the soy bean paste Brian asked me to get. We also stopped here and there to try new things like fried siopao, which turned out to be really good. We even went as far as Divisoria in an attempt to help Ly pick up some craft supplies, but the stores he needed were actually closed for Sunday - signs of the recession I suppose. All the while we were talking about pretty much anything under the sun with a lot of ventures into geeky things like 80's cartoons, the various incarnations of the Power Rangers and other silly things.

The day ended with all of us pretty tired but I certainly felt that we accomplished a lot in terms of practical tasks while still having a great time. This seems to be a good start to the year and my hopes of actually meeting more friends in person as opposed to never ending online interaction.

I can only wonder who I'll meet up with next for this year.

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The power of thought and belief indeed, haha

Today's the birthday of of a good and dear friend, Mark, whom we haven't seen in far too long. Hopefully we'll get to rectify that situation soon enough, hehe. Happy Birthday, Mark!

2009 is going to be a year of friends and entertaining. With a place as awesome as Vella, we definitely don't need to go out as much to have fun and the thrust thus far seems to be us trying to meet up with more friends. I'm trying to plan out a housewarming party for some of my closer friends (online and IRL), another for my team at work and perhaps a number of other smaller meet-ups here and there.

Tonight we're meeting up with an old LJ friend, Nico, who's in town for around another week or so. He doesn't blog as much (at least within the past year or so), but it doesn't mean we haven't been talking over the years. Hopefully a few more friends will drop by and then we'll all hit up Malate for some fun clubbing goodness. Yeah, I seem to be going to Malate again. Hello 2009!

Tomorrow I'm going to try to meet up with other LJ friends if I can manage to find the Rector station of the LRT 2. Apparently we're going to Binondo and I have no idea what to expect so I'm just going to cross my fingers and hope for the best. I did promise to try and meet up with more friends this year after all.

Gotta run - need to shower and tidy up before any of the guests arrive.

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I'm surprised they actually HAVE an aerospace division.

I will once again rave about the weather. Seriously. Why wasn't it this cold in December, right? This weather is just AWESOME - I don't want to go to work! I don't want to leave the house! Heck, I don't want to leave my bed, hahaha! We should all stay in and just enjoy the snugglecuddliness of the nice cool weather. I don't need pouring rain or even a drizzle - the state of things at this precise moment in time is just PERFECT. Don't move weather! Stay...stay...GOOD DOG! =D

Okay, enough of that.

Fridays are banking days and Brian |kitchengod| are done for the week. Beyond my bare minimum need to deposit our weekly contributions to our savings account, Brian had some additional banking needs for the day, which was out of pattern, and despite how generally sleepy I was, I still went along. It involved going to three different banks around Makati - one for me and two for him - but thankfully they were generally walking distance from one another, so it wasn't too bad a morning. Besides, the really comfy weather made our walk a lot more pleasant and definitely easier than it would have been in warmer times. Have I mentioned how much I love the weather today? HAVE I?

Work was work-ish. Or work-y. What's up with me today? I guess the weather has me in rather good spirits.

I've been running a number of surveys here and there about a possible housewarming party here at Vella for my LJ / Multiply / Blogger friends and since it was taking forever to express interest, I finally started emailing folks directly. With luck, I'll be able to figure out a day, put something together and have a great day for friends whom I haven't seen in a while (or perhaps have never met in person) and try to have a cool night. Luckily, the weather will be something like this. Or better yet, exactly like this. Precisely how things are right now. Yeah, that's the ticket...

The weekend is just around the corner and I still have one more work shift. Bugger. I can do this, I can! I can right? Besides, I have such awesome weather to support me! =D

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You get it, right? I get it. It's cool enough for my brain to get it like more than usual. Right? RIGHT!

Today was a rather ho-hum day in terms of work and things only really picked up towards the end. It looks like I'll definitely be busy towards the end of the month until February. I spent some time today just trying to relax and bring my mind into order. There's a lot of things starting up, as expected at the start of a new year. It's important to know where you're going in order to keep on track.

I also got into thinking along different lines. Maybe it was spurred on by my lack of sleep. Maybe it was because of the meme moki answered that got me starting to think about the past. I tried drafting the meme response and wasn't very impressed - it just proved I was busy at the start of every year because of New Year celebrations. I suppose that's a good thing - at least I have fun when I can.

So instead of taking the first post of every year, I took the first entry of every anniversary of my LJ, which is November 4, for those of you who are curious. LiveJournal does tend to feel like a dying blog site with the rise of other blogging platforms and all the supposedly "controversial" decisions made by whoever presently owns LJ right now. Still, I remain here and I dunno if I'll ever really leave, even if everyone I know moves on. Before I start waxing nostalgic in disorganized manner, the meme first:

Rules: Re-post the first sentences of the first posts per year blog anniversary.

• [2003] 00000: Dry Run - "I finally took the time to get some basic settings decided upon for this livejournal." -- This was just the first entry, which just discussed design tweaks.
  
• [2004] 0008F: Doldrums - "I'm home early today...well more like on time since I didn't have any meetings past my normal shift time." -- A random entry where I discussed various news items. I'm mildly excited about the upcoming Transformers movie.
  
• [2005] 0017A: Growing Pains? - "It seems the changes just aren't done yet." -- A long entry where I talk about me not becoming Training Manager.
  
• [2006] 00328: About Blogging - "It's the weekend again - happy days indeed!" - An entry defining my principles around blog ranking activities.
  
• [2007] 00551: Weekend Thinking - "Well, the long weekend is winding down and I'm already gearing up for work tomorrow." -- An entry about general updates and ultimately when I first invite readers for my more private Sex is Chocolate entries. I still write these from time to time.
  
• [2008] 00596: Waiting for Word - "In the US, November 4 is Election Day and a lot of things will be decided." -- This is the entry that marks the day we decided to move to Vella.

I found these results a lot more interesting than the start of year first sentences. These kinds of memes are hit-or-miss for me since I always structure my entries in a similar way. Birthdays are first, followed by talking about work and then general updates and ending with a comic. Thus the first sentence is usually a birthday greeting or a work rant. The again when we look at these entries, some pretty interesting events happen for me around the first week of November, for some reason.

This exercise got me thinking about how much information we have in thees blogs and online journals and I found myself digging back into my own history. This lead to me trying the same exercise with a few other friends and soon I was going back through years of feelings, quizzes, experiences, memories and images. It was a nice experience and a very enlightening one in terms of the friends who histories I explored. At the same time, it felt very intimate and almost as if I was digging in a place I shouldn't have. Then again as long as I had access, this was something being presented to me as something they wanted to share right? Ah the conundrums of blogging. But the insights I've gained from my reading are priceless and they reinforce why I keep some of the LJ friends that I still maintain here.

I miss the times when LJ was more active. I'd find myself getting added by some new reader and then I'd explore his or her LJ in term and from there decide whether or not I wanted to follow his entries further. These days LJ is mainly a ghost town in terms of my side of the universe - sure I have friends marked but many don't post here anymore or don't blog at all. I'm starting to get that Dark Tower-ish feeling of the world moving on and I wonder if I should remain here. there's so much history here and I'll always have a great respect for the core community here and the level of writing I normally find here. Then again, many of those writer are now silent, their blogs more like memorials to their works. No new people really add me as much and that thrill of a new friend, a new life to read about and perhaps a new real world friend to be made. It's hard to say really.

This is definitely woolgathering. Pardon me thinking aloud - it's why I started this blog in the first place after all.

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What a timely comic, Tatsuya.

I'm normally not very geeky here on this blog - I tend to save all that up for my entries on the Geeky Guide, admittedly. So let's change that up for a bit and let you all get a taste of some of the stuff I'd write about over there...

I finally finished reading Star Wars: Survivor's Quest, which is the last of the recent Timothy Zahn contributions to the Star Wars Expanded Universe...at least in terms of my collection, that is. This means I can finally start re-reading my older books from the Star Wars: New Jedi Order series for the sole purpose of reviewing everything that's happened before reading the last books in the series, which I acquired in recent years but have yet to read. It's somewhat weird and hard to understand, I suppose, but for those more driven geeky readers out there, I think you can relate. I mean seriously, wouldn't you want to review all the books at the beginning of a series before reading the ones at the end if more than a year of time has passed between reading the first book and the last one?

My "conversion" to using Google Chrome is going pretty well - the browser is amazingly fast even compared to Firefox and as long as you don't start with pre-loaded tabs, its start-up time is next to nil. I'm trying trying to work around the limitations of the new browser, overall I'm pretty impressed and am liking how things go. Given that, the need for smarter alternative solutions is essential.

I'm thankful for multi-platform IM client Digsby, since it's a lot prettier than Pidgin ever was and it allows me to connect to Twitter and Facebook chat. This way I can keep up-to-date on all the status updates of everyone without needing my Firefox extensions like Twitterfox. Plus the simple added feature of being able to auto-hide the main window and to be able to post replies in the pop-up notification you get when a message is received is just brilliant. They're too features that really maximize my desktop real estate and make sure that my IM activities don't get in the way of what I'm working on in the main window.

Lastly, I'm considering experimenting with Windows Live Writer as an standalone blogging tool. I currently use Semagic to update my LiveJournal entries while I update the Geeky Guide (hosted via Blogger) directly at the website. With my attempt to migrate everything to Chrome, needing to have Firefox open just to update my blog is an added drain on my resources and probably not the best solution to things. Given that, I'm looking for a way to update the Geeky Guide another way while still having access to Zemanta, a great blogging tool that adds relevant links, images and other possible related blog entries to your dashboard so it becomes lot easier to add more value to your entries. Since I already use an offline client for LiveJournal, I might as well try one that works for both blogging platforms, supports Zemanta and helps me avoid needing Firefox just for blogging.

Decisions, decisions...

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Oh poor Alice! LOL