Given that I'll be with my family starting the 24th and in Laguna starting the 26th, what's any good geek to do in order to prepare? But of course! Secure an internet connectivity option while away from the Sietch!

Tobie and I had been talking about getting one of those USB broadband modems ever since Ondoy since that left us without DSL for a few days. With his work highly dependent on internet connectivity and my general geeky sanity also dependent on internet connectivity, it was essential that we eventually get one as a back-up option in case internet goes out. This was also going to be a primary option if ever we should venture out of town so Tobie can continue to get his work done and I can continue to function in general.

Yeah, I know my reasoning is pretty lame to most, but to us hard core geeks, you understand me right? I'm not addicted to the internet!

...I just need it.

I wasn't sure whether to get Globe Tattoo, SmartBro or Sun Cellular, so I did the best thing to help me decided - I tapped the social networks and started a Twitter / Plurk / Facebook discussion poll to sort through the pros and cons of each service. Given my priorities of (1) practicality as a prepaid internet alternative and (2) it's ability to function outside the Metro Manila area, the comments remained very diverse.

One thing that most people agreed on was that Globe Tattoo generally sucked and only worked well in specific areas.

Sun got rave reviews for affordability with its P50 unlimited surfing for a day option and its service performance thus far. What people can't seem to agree on is whether or not Sun works well outside of the city in the further provinces. Some swear it always works for them while others played it safe by only confirming that performance was good as long as you had Sun Cellular signal. I haven't really heard a lot of good things about Sun coverage though.

Then came SmartBro - a lot of folks had a lot of positive things to say about it and were all for it, but what really caught my attention was the fact that a lot of people also testified that it worked well outside of the city. Given this is a chief priority, SmartBro started to sound like a better option more and more.

So finally Tobie and I stepped out to deposit money at the bank and then go look for my dongle. after wasting some time window shopping at Datablitz, we finally walked into Villman to ask about the dongles. Originally the plan was for me to get a SmartBro dongle while Tobie was going to get a Sun dongle but without prompting the sales clerk blurted out that Sun didn't do well in the provinces. I'm serious - he actually specifically mentioned the provinces. Taking this as a powerful sign, I took the SmartBro modem and Tobie opted not to get one in favor of just sharing the SmartBro dongle if ever we did leave town. And that was that.

Does one even call this thing a dongle?

Now I just need to figure out how to reload this thing. It seems the most realistic solution for me is to reload at Fandom Cafe and other such load facilities. I'm hoping there's a way to use the prepaid cards too, but then it seems this option requires a Smart cellular number. Does anyone know if inserting the SIM card into an open line phone unit will allow me to load credits directly into it or will it not count as a valid mobile number? I am so calling customer service later.

But for now, I need to sleep. I'm only up this late since (1) Tobie and I had a nicely yummy lunch at Sbarro's and (2) naturally I wanted to setup the SmartBro software and test out the modem first. So far so good!

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This strip appeared on Jayson's birthday. I'd like to think he would have loved it.

Sunday was a recovery day, as is often the case after a massive party night at Bed. Tobie and I woke up closer to 04:00pm and he already had to prep for his company Christmas party in the South. I couldn't go along, which is understandable since it's still technically a work function, so I opted to make the most of my time at home by catching up on missed internet posts from the past week. Given how busy things were with Jayson's funeral proceedings, we're talking about a LOT of missed internet activity.

So Tobie went off to his party and I started sorting through about three days' worth Facebook posts, and maybe around 2 days of Twitter and Plurk updates as well. I was also organizing a lot of missed downloads from the week in order to bring myself back up to speed, although this only refers to having copies of everything that I was looking for, not necessarily having read and/or watched them. Oh joy. It actually took a better part of the night for me to get through everything and yet I still managed time to (1) cook a pot of munggo so I'd have something to eat and (2) write an LJ entry trying to summarize the wild events of Saturday night. Believe me, it was a LOT harder than it looked to get everything into a post that shared enough detail without becoming scandalous, hahaha!

By the time Tobie had come home, I had fallen asleep in what was originally meant to be a power nap of sorts. Original plans included going out to O Bar to bring Keith there but (1) Keith never answered our calls and (2) Tobie was unable to wake me in turn. So somewhere closer to 02:00am, I finally woke up, far too late to really make our way anyway. Damn you alcohol, you REALLY mess up the day after the drinking, don't you? But don't worry, I still love you!

It had to be the Jager shots. Jager does funny things to your head while assaulting your taste buds. Oh yes, Jager is deliciously evil.

Once awake, Tobie took the time to share all the crazy prizes he got from the party, the best of which (in my opinion) was this cute little piggy planter. It comes with seeds already and it's supposed to grow fairly decently, but quite frankly its appearance alone (plus the insanely funny Chinese-English instructions on the box) made it more than worth it. He had brought home some palabok for me and so I ate that while we finally got around to watching SyFy's Alice.

It was pretty bad though. Tobie thinks it was like Push levels of bad (which is really, really bad) but I'd like to think it was a little better than that. It was just very confused about what it wanted to do and how it wanted its actors to act and how it wanted to related to the original Alice in Wonderland story and possibly confused about whether or not it had a definitely story. Um. Okay, maybe it really was that bad.

By then it was nearly morning and so I set about cooking a major batch of Mexican Relish that will hopefully last the whole day. I normally work with about half a kilo of meat and this time around it was a full kilo, but things started to go bad once I started. First, we finally ran out of gas as I was trying to cook the meat and so I had to stop and wait for the gas delivery to come. When I was finally able to resume cooking, it was only then that I realized that I had accidentally purchased a kilo of Filipino-style tomato sauce, which turns out to not only be sweeter but is also a lot more watery. Ugh. So I was constantly adjusting my ingredients to make up for these shortfalls plus the fact it was the first time I was cooking a batch this big. Thankfully, I managed to pull through despite insufficient green bell peppers to boot and things turned out fairly decently. It wasn't quite my normal relish in terms of consistency, but I think I more or less managed to capture the taste I wanted.

This time around, we watched a better TV movie - Terry Pratchett's Hogfather, which Tobie had yet to watch. I'm glad he enjoyed it despite not necessarily being a fan of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books (yet? *grins*) and it made for a very lovely morning. We were supposed to go to sleep immediately after since it was already past 01:00pm however I realized that I had forgotten that I had brewed a pot of coffee before watching Hogfather. So now I'm here drinking my coffee and got Tobie to join me so he could drink his cup as well and we'll hit up the bank before bed since we're awake anyway.

But I still have work tonight, so boo. This was the reason I was trying to stay up all night as much as possible - the pressures of working the night shift. Oy vei.

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I don't think this will help me figure out what to get my family for Christmas, LOL!

Today is Ninoy Aquino Day and I don't think I own a sufficiently yellow shirt. I'm taking advantage of the holiday tonight, which is a nice change of pace. Of course perhaps it's not so much a leave and maybe more of just me working from home.

It's a little weird to consider that it's my birthday one week from now and I'm considering cleaning up my social networks and removing friends that may not necessarily friends anymore. Sure, I could keep them in the name of networking or something but I doubt I'll seriously feel comfortable enough to tap into those kinds of resources. Naturally family members have to stay and to some extent I'm maintaining a wide diversity of ADMU folks since technically I'm alternate year representative for my high school batch. I know, who ever wants alumni duties, but it seems to have been thrust upon me and it's never been in my nature to simply let things go and fail on its own. Yes, it's better to actively contribute to the failure, hahaha!

I think I'll get around to it by the end of the month - a slow and thorough review of all my social network friends, whether or not they're active, whether or not we actually interact or perhaps whether or not I care for your updates (of if you care for mine). I don't think I'm going to limit my profile's viewable content too much anytime soon, but that's an idea, too. It sort of goes against my generally open policy about things, but I think it's about time. This is all part of moving on into a new chapter of my life and since not everyone seems to want to come along, I guess I shouldn't expect them to change their minds. And I'm definitely not going to even consider dragging them with me into the future - that's not my call to make. Either you folk choose to walk with me still, or just enjoy your life on your own and I suppose let's not interact all too much from this point.

Looking at my contacts, I seriously I'll be deleting THAT many people, but let's see.

I really miss having a nice digital camera handy and I'm finally going to get around to remedying that situation. I'm mapping out a Binondo adventure with Tobie this weekend so we can go visit the only official Pentax digital camera servicing center in the Metro. Seriously, I miss taking photos, even though I'm hardly a "professional" or proper photographer. I just know what I like and I do the best that I can with the technology behind whatever camera it is then hopefully recover the rest of it in post-production. With all the fun cooking experiments and various events that have come and gone, it's a real shame that I haven't had much of a chance to document things.

Well, we'll fix that soon enough. Hello long-ish weekend!

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And this is why some managers actually consider "gossip-management" strategies.

Earlier in the week I had predicted that this was going to be a bad work week, and this is definitely one of those moments that I hate being right. Gah, at least there's only one more work shift to deal with tonight.

The on-going issues with Twitter are annoying but not exactly game changing. Let's face it - for people who have been using Twitter well beyond the recent celebrity-induced Twitter boom, outages are not new at all. What's interesting is that this particular outage is related to an on-going Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on Twitter and other social networking sites like LiveJournal, Facebook and YouTube. If the reports are to be believed, these attacks are all centered out a particular LJ blogger who wrote against Georgia. Weird.

I managed to make a nice spicy tuna pasta today. I still need to work on my portions and the amount of spices I play around with - this one had a fierce mix of black pepper, cayenne pepper, chili powder and Italian seasoning. Oh, and there was the usual garlic, onions and tomatoes, tomato sauce and some tomato paste and the bonus of mushrooms and capers. I just guiltily wish that I had cooked more noodles even with the addition of those nice herb-y bread sticks, hahaha! Yum! I'm glad Tobie liked it, too! Let's have one more sentence end with an exclamation point!

I feel particularly proud about this pasta since it's something that I've been experimenting without the aid of a recipe. It's based more on memories of different pasta dishes I've tasted over the years and me trying to figure out what parts of it I liked, what would be needed to capture that flavor and other fun creative bits. While I doubt I'm going to leave recipes entirely anytime soon (there are still many dishes I want to learn how to make), I know that part of my growth as a cook will inevitably involve not having guidelines to follow and just going with my gut in terms of what to eat.

Given the stress of work life, I find myself returning to the comforts of Broadway. Let's face it - whether you're feeling happy, sad, angry or whatever, Broadway has something for you. Given the volume of albums that I've collected over the years, having all these musicals on shuffle can get pretty weird. Then again, it does have some pretty interesting results and I'm a big believer in the power of music shuffling. I can't quite figure out why precisely, but it always seems to manage to find the songs that best suit my mood or they'll be songs that will just work to counter act my current feeling in order to turn my mood around. Oh yes, Broadway is the best thing for moments of strong emotion.

Speaking of, I think I ought to finally try downloading the Billy Elliot album. Elton John, here we come! =P

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Beware fans of Greek Mythology! LMAO!

I forgot yesterday was Towel Day. Bugger. Belated greetings fellow hitchhikers!

We got a fair amount done today in terms of the apartment. Tobie picked me up from work since he had gone back to his parent's place to get more of his things. This time around he divided everything into smaller, individual bags filled with DVDs, RPG source books, comic books and other novels. Oh, and game boards! How could I forget those? So yeah, there's a huge pile of geekery growing along the wall that is in desperate need of organization yet we are still sorely lacking in terms of actual storage space and shelving. We'll fix that problem soon enough.

Today my mini-project was setting up the new TV along with my pre-existing home theater system. It took some time and some dedication from my microfiber cleaning mitt, but eventually I got it working in a decently aesthetic arrangement. For now the surround speakers are stuck in front until we can figure out an efficient way to mount them or secure them behind where a couch should be, but it's not so bad. Tobie had an extra mattress he got to bring over and it now functions as our pseudo couch.

What is it about moving that turns any new apartment into a pseudo Japanese arrangement with almost everything being very, very close to the ground? Seriously?

So now we have the computer set up (sans an internet connection), the TV and the DVD home theater system (with sad surround speakers in front), the small fridge running, the water dispenser now giving nice cool water all the time and the bathroom all nice and tidy. The bedroom has...a bed, and a little CD cabinet re-purposed into a pseudo bureau where I stash watches, personal effects and my one million contact lens cases. Pao also came by today to help us with the installation of our new door knob and we just need to wait for someone more professional to install our dead bolt as well.

Today Tobie's folks come home, so he'll have to spend the day in the South, more or less. That leaves me to settle the arrangements for other utilities, get my clothes organized and out of their bags and boxes and perhaps get some internet time at Fandom. Sadly, I really do miss Facebook and my other social network activities, haha. And coffee. Sigh.

One thing at a time - Sietch Creare (as we're now calling it) will become a fully-functioning geek condo soon enough.

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I would SOOO love to do this in a meeting sometime, haha.

Bugger - I forgot to greet my high school classmate, Dino. Yesterday was his birthday and I'm miffed that my system of overlapping social network notifications, Google Calendar and SMS alerts made me miss a greeting. Sorry about that man, but a belated Happy Birthday all the same, Dino!

My Sunday has been pretty blah so far. It's one of those days that feels like you're hardly moving and time is just crawling. All of last night was spent blogging, cruising online, playing Facebook games and reading comic scans. I fell asleep before Brian |kitchengod| got back from the party that I had also skipped out on. Boo me? Who knows, really. My body was in no condition to really stay up considering that I was up for most of the day together with my Mom and my brother, Mico.

I woke up rather late and got back into more internet time-wasting and comic scan reading. Today's project was re-reading both The Infinity Gauntlet and The Infinity Crusade. I also tagged all the books purchased yesterday in my Shelfari account, although they're still sitting in their plastic bags right now. As expected, I've created another shelving problem for myself, hehe.

Something seems to have changed recently in terms of my Guys4Men page or something. For some reason I've been getting messages out of the blue, which tells me that for some reason my profile is getting noticed. I haven't changed any of the content, so I figure it's more about how the site tags my page and how often it decides to include it in the lower extremes of the search results. Whatever it is, I'm amused by some of the folks who have started to message and I've made at least one fairly interesting friend. There was some 18 year old kid trying to hook up, but of course I ignored him, haha.

I've been feeling really lazy today, but I've finally showered and am now dressed ready to go out. We might watch Hellboy II or look for a new mobile phone for Brian or both - who knows, really? He's badly in need of a new phone given his current one is doing the whole possessed routine with the flashing lights and the selective dying at inopportune moments. With luck we'll find something I can purchase via 0% interest. If not, then we'll just have to deal with whatever we can find - at least the credit card is a lot more robust and can take a lot more than before, hehe. As for Hellboy, despite the mixed reviews it remains to be the only movie really worth seeing in the theaters this weekend.

In odd news, they're showing Imagine Me and You at the Galleria. How random - it's an older GLBT movie, but it's definitely one I love dearly.

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Talk about aiming low to feel better...

This has been a rather blah day, but I'm not complaining.

I've been up practically since last night when Brian |kitchengod| went out to Malate while I stayed home. I made good progress with some of the stuff I set out to do like a few more blog entries about comic book reviews and one post about how to pass a demo teach after all the demos I've watched over the past few weeks.

I'm most proud of my finally working on the books this weekend and the current arrangement seems to work for the most part. While I share Brian's sentiments about how doubling-up books (meaning having two rows) sucks since you can't see the back row anymore, it was the only way to get everything shelved well. For my geekier friends or perhaps those just curious about the books, you can view the photos of the new shelving arrangement via Multiply or you can just scan my books on Shelfari.

Yes, I really, truly am proud about having gotten this done.

Today there was the potential to meet up with Mom for a book run, but that didn't pan out. So instead I made sure to get a haircut - and that's certainly a load off my shoulders (har har). With the afternoon now free, Brian and I headed out to Waltermart for some much needed grocery shopping. He's trying to plan out the menu for the week so that we can bring food to work and try to save more that way. It seems a prudent effort and I really hope we get to stick to that sort of a plan - it'll go a long way towards better financial management and more importantly much better tasting lunches at work! =D

Yeah, this weekend was pretty domestic for me.

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Talk about conveniently limited empowerment, hehe.

I'm not going to work tonight given that for the most part, I'm not feeling well. It also happens to be my birthday, and ironically enough no one at work really remembered. Even the initial HR announcement about this month's birthday celebrants as was sent only this morning didn't include my name. I'm not sure how to feel about all this, I mean I'm probably partly to blame since I don't really get overly close to my trainers or something. At the same time, I guess when you spend 5 years at a company, you're bound to reach a point in time when the people closest to you and who would probably remember your birthday have all moved on to other jobs and you're one of the few "old-timers" left at the company. Ah well, let's see how things go - my birthday is really just starting in terms of US date and time.

My cold isn't so bad but I can really feel a cough struggling to come forward. I've been somewhat preemptively taking Tuseran forte to fight those symptoms and so far things are more or less manageable. Of course, the constant amount of medicine in my system keeps me in a state of partial wooziness, which is probably not the best thing for work. Thus the pseudo working from home arrangement makes sense for now, hehe. I'll keep in touch with the office via webmail / IM / SMS as needed, unless I pass out due to the meds or something.

It would have been cooler if a friend or two could have popped over to Matilda tonight to help me pass the time, but then it's still a work night so that's not really happening either. So yeah, all alone tonight. It seems somehow fitting for now. And no, I'm not even considering going out or anything silly like that. Why spend when you can just enjoy the wonderful world of the internet at large, yes?

Greetings have been coming in since Sunday, really. Well, that is if you count automated greetings from the likes of JobsDB and Jobstreet, haha. I've been getting a fair share of messages via Facebook, Multiply and of course Plurk, too. Surprisingly LJ hasn't been that active in this regard, which is kinda sad - not because I want more greetings but more because it shows how people have moved on to other platforms or just don't bother reading as much. Well, that's the world we live in now, after all.

My thanks to all those who have taken the time to greet me on yet another successful orbit around the sun. Whether via online messages on social networks, emails, text messages or even a call or two, I really appreciate all the greetings. Now if only I'd get some actual gifts, too! LOL

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Hey, we could all use this kind of pheromone impact, LOL