First, Happy Birthday to a fabulous longtime online friend, Jujiin. Happy Birthday, Juj! Looks like you're having a pretty great birthday, hehe.

It's a gaming Sunday again and I'm composing this entry in-between my turns. As Nabs is trying to deal with being a prisoner in the Myth Maker's camp, Adrian, Mahar and I are just going along for the ride in order to learn what we can based on Nab's part of the story. All the plot threads are getting more and more interconnected and so it pays to listen if you really want to unless you want to avoid in-game "spoilers" of sorts. Oh crap. Maleficent has joined the game - that can't be a good thing.

Nono is here for the day as well given it's still pretty flooded in his area. It's been far too long since I last saw him so it's nice to hang out again too. Although, he'll also have to bear witness to our gaming antics, hehe.

Last night was fun and pretty relaxed. As Tobie finished up with his work for the day, I finally started watching my download of the season premiere of Star Wars The Clone wars, which was pretty good compared to the first season. That got me into the mood to watch the original micro-series and given Tobie had yet to see it in its completion, it made even more sense. So the night became a fun Star Wars night for us - I wonder what Genndy Tartakovsky is up to these days? The last news published indicated he was potentially involved with Power of the Dark Crystal (the potential sequel to The Dark Crystal) as director. Now that would be pretty interesting.

We also got around to watching Inkheart, which was a pretty fun Brendan Fraser movie. It certainly felt like the kind of movie that would fit in a World of Darkness sense - a theme that I'm beginning to see more and more in movies and TV shows. I doubt it's because the movies have started to work within this kind of a mold but more likely because of my increased awareness of World of Darkness rules and thus I'm actively associating what I see with the game system. Go figure.

We potentially have a Fandom Live shoot later as well. Not sure if I'll be participating but then it'll be about The Surrogates so that's bound to be fun, hehe. Oh geeky life.

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I wonder if my team has learned to follow my Twitter feed yet, hahaha!

Going to work in the day is always such a pain for me. It means that I need to deal with the regular amount of traffic that the rest of you daywalkers deal with along with the heat of the sun and all that fun stuff. Bugger. Plus given I had to go all the way to our QC office, which meant traveling all the way across the city in order to get there. In my head it automatically translates into the need to take the MRT since it's always the fastest way of getting across the city and beating the traffic, but it doesn't mean it's a pleasant experience.

Instances like that always reinforce why I've chosen to work at night. There are so many benefits to working the night shift and all you need to give up is, well, a social life during your working days. It's not that bad, believe me. At least I always get weekends off so I have some semblance of normalcy and this year I've promised to make better use of my vacation time in order to attain a better work-life balance or whatever you want to call it, hehe. This is the year that I still get my work done AND I live the life of a better geek, hehe. So say we all!

Man, BSG is over. Star Wars the Clone Wars has wrapped up its first season. We're generally just running out of things to download follow in terms of US programming. At least I still have loads of movies / DVDs to watch and other geeky things to get into.

I forgot to mention the fact that before we went home from our fun beach house weekend, Emman and Apple were ridiculously kind enough to give me huge amount of comics. Apparently the comics had been wasting away in a box in storage for some time and suddenly they thought of it while we were at their house once we returned to the city from Laiya, Batangas. Emman led me up to their storage attic and we brought down the boxes and I found myself drooling over all these Spider-Man books from around 1994 - just before the Clone Saga kicked in and pretty much the height of my comic book collecting era. Unfortunately those books got consumed by termites while I was away from home and were lost to me. What were the odds that someone else would have most of these same comic books in mint condition and was willing to just give them away? Not only that, but he had most of the Doom 2099 comics, which was my favorite 2099 line of comics ever!

My eternal gratitude goes out to Emman and Apple for letting me just take the comics of their hands. I'm such a happy camper and I can't wait to make the time to sort through them and compare them to the paltry remnants of former comic book collection.

I was supposed to write something, but words fail me at this precise moment. I promise to continue the story by tomorrow. Honest!

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Mothers have very strong kung-fu indeed!

This weekend has been very...different, at least thus far. Strangely enough, it's been rather different more because we haven't done anything like this in, well, a rather long time. So it's not new, more of a return to older habits. After so many weekends spent considering clubbing or not, attending some work-related function here or there or just staying home alone, Brian |kitchengod| decided try and turn things around one way or another.

First, we spent the morning just lazing in front of the TV together. We first watched my recently downloaded copy of the direct-to-DVD animated movie, Wonder Woman, which was pretty kick ass. I've always enjoyed the Wonder Woman stories given the uniqueness of her character and the rich mythological world she gets to operate from. The animation was pretty good and the story was rather tight, so you can count on a more robust review in the future. Brian still seemed to be up for more comic book geekery so I had him watch JLA: The New Frontier as well.

Brian then helped me with preparing the laundry for pick-up, which was a bit of a new thing given recent times and that helped speed things along. We eventually fell asleep and woke up a bit too late to get to Greenbelt in time to claim our reserved tickets for Watchmen. Thankfully, I managed to get tickets for the last show in the general part of the theater that we like the most and that gave us time to still go around the mall as we had originally hoped to do.

Given my stress level after missing our original Sureseats reservation, I pushed for us to go look at books, which is always a relaxing activity. I also had to pick up my replacement Power Card at Power Books along with figuring out how to use my P500 gift card from Christmas. We found nothing at the Greenbelt but we did try our luck at Glorietta and found a decent last copy of Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book. SQUEE! Brian also found this book called Idlewild, which he thinks I'm going to enjoy. It certainly shows potential.

Originally on our agenda was getting new pants but with all the shops migrating to the new Glorietta 5, the arrangement of the older stores was confusing. We eventually ventured to G5 and managed to find the new location of Artwork, our favorite pseudo vintage T-shirt shop. We hadn't bought anything from them in practically a year and so we ended up going a little nuts and went home with 4 new shirts each. With all our bags in hand, we ended the things with dinner at Capricciosa, which wasn't at all that great and coffee at Seattle's Best.

Once we had killed enough time, we went up to the theaters for the midnight screening of Watchmen and found out we were watching at the same time as fellow geek Mika - in fact our seats turned out to be in the exact same row. Weird how life does things like this. The movie was such a mind fuck and it was certainly impressive. Seriously, words fail me right now and I'm still trying to figure out everything that I liked about it and it may take a bit of a while before I get around to a full review.

Today has started with a similar degree of geekiness. Brian and I have watched yet another DC Comics direct-to-DVD movie, Batman: Gotham Knight before bed and watched this week's Star Wars: The Clone Wars episode, too. Then just for the fun of it, we watched the first episode of Visionaries and that got me wanting to download copies of Centurions and that ageless classic, ThunderCats.

Now we're just waiting for Tobie to arrive for a light dinner before we head off to what has not become our weekly session at Fandom Cafe.

Yes, this weekend as been rather good indeed.

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Yes, it would be so nutty to outsource calls to a random foreigner...but still fun!

Today's the birthday of a fellow geek who looks pretty darned good in a while gown. Happy Birthday, Nina!

It's only natural that even essential services like water and electricity are bound to have downtime. Whether it's to perform maintenance on existing equipment, make improvements to the infrastructure or even introduce new equipment, downtime seems almost certain and the engineer in me acknowledges this need. However there are some basic prerequisites to such work apart from emergency situations were lines break or storms knock power lines down.

For all of this weekend and pretty much until around 09:00am this morning we didn't have water. Initially it was an annoyance that was manageable given our building's limited water stores and eventually it became a major problem as midnight on Sunday night came and went. Naturally it was a difficult situation for all of us and it meant limited bathing opportunities and putting a lot more effort into controlling one's bladder. It meant not washing dishes as often as I normally would and definitely not getting into any major cleaning operations as well.

What really bothered me was not the actual water service interruption but more the lack of proper communication and advanced notification prior to the outage. If it was really supposedly because of scheduled service improvements that needed to be done (and were supposed to be complete by either midnight or noon on Sunday or midnight Monday), they should have at least sent notification to its customer well in advanced and not just the day before or so. When you check the website of our two main water providers in the city, Maynilad only has an outdated log of outage announcements while Manila Water doesn't even have a section for such information. The news agencies were also largely silent on the issue apart from who short articles I found on the Inquirer with little else beyond that. Where was the effort to keep the public informed? Where was the basic concern for how people should prepare for a water service outage of this nature?

My disappointment in our local utilities companies is significant, to say the least. More and more one can't help but speculate that they just took over the government's utility burdens because of how lucrative these industries are and how much potential revenue they'll be able to milk off the population for services that people can't live without. Given that, they still behave like monopolies in their own right and just pursue their bottom line with no real concern for the needs of their customers. Industries run in this manner really don't deserve to continue to operate.

But at least now water has been restored and we can get one with the rest of our lives. I just hope that the next time around they try to handle things better.

But apart from that, I'm pretty much okay. I've downloaded and watched up until the 9th episode of Legend of the Seeker and I'm already up to date with both Battlestar Galactica and Star Wars: The Clone Wars. I also managed to watch Run Fatboy Run and the surprisingly decent School of Life, which I caught on cable. I also took some time to get some geeky writing done and managed to publish reviews for Save Me, Shaun of the Dead and The Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft. The movies were generally fun but that comic book was certainly something else - I can't wait for the regular run of the series in April!

Lastly, there was a big geek party over the weekend and given I didn't know the host, I wasn't invited. Even if I had been invited, would I have gone, perhaps? Or would I have lingered over comic to a decision and in the end just run out of time to do so? As part of my quasi-goals for the year, I really want to put effort into being more sociable and meeting up with more friends. Naturally this means going out more and I'm hoping for situations outside the expensive bar / club scene and more along the lines of parties, meet-ups and marathons. Given this, I'm hoping to organize a 'thon over at Vella (if people are amenable to traveling to the Makati area). Penny's suggestion is to watch The Big Bang Theory, unless there are other ideas.

Whaddya think?

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Drive-by Blasphemy so works for me! LOL

It's American Idol season again. I don't know how I'm supposed to feel precisely - my interest peaked during the season with Taylor Hicks since I liked Elliot Yamin and pretty much waned quickly beyond that. The audition episodes were just horribly painful and a lousy excuse for television programming and I only really wanted to see the final few and ultimately who won. Let's face it - you can only endure the judges juggling around key signature phrases in their commentary at the end of every performance. Adding a new judge might help but it'll grow old pretty quickly towards the end. Still, I'll probably still follow along to a limited extent since everyone else will be following the show and I'm bound to pick up something through social osmosis or something.

The TV shows I am even mildly excited about are all being shown over in the US, and thus I'm "forced" by the media to resort to alternative online sources to keep up-to-date with my favorite shows without being, oh I dunno, at least a season and a half behind the times. I'm talking about shows like The Big Bang Theory, Battlestar Galactica and even Star Wars: The Clone Wars for the heck of it. Yes, I'm still watching that darn cartoon despite how annoying Asoka is. I need my Star Wars fix after all, right? Don't we all?

At least our home theater system has certain improved our quality of life, in a way. More importantly, it's allowed me to upgrade my geek quotient to a limited degree since I can view all my downloaded TV episodes on our larger TV set. Sure, having a 19" wide screen LCD monitor isn't that painful a TV experience, but it still makes a difference to take things away from the computer and back into the living room, hehe. I just really want to get an HDTV within the year - that'll certainly make the difference in things, hehehe. Ah well, for now that's just a pipe dream unless I see a significant change in our finances, hehe.

Today was just generally blah (hence my somewhat aimless random writing prior to this statement...and probably after) and I'm not quite in the mood to stretch my brain around difficult concepts. All I've really accomplished is to look for a few more songs to download and eventually play at all the parties coming up over the next few weekends. I need to eventually sit down and start planning things out and determining what'll actually go into the other external drive as our "playlist" - oh the challenging decisions of these modern times, yes? LOL

I crack myself up. Seriously I do.

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I love it how technology can often make people resort to stupid "techie" solutions.

Things have been pretty blah so far. Nothing amazingly interesting nor anything terribly traumatic for that matter. I suppose I shouldn't complain, right? After all, it could be worse in one way or another, right?

On the PS2 front, I spent some time testing some of the games I bought over the holidays. I'm stuck in this quest to find a working copy of Final Fantasy X since I want to play it again and my latest acquisition works...but is in Japanese. Bugger. I also took the time to get our own copy of Rayman Raving Rabbids just because I find them disturbingly cute along with our own copy of Puzzle Quest. The gem of this set definitely has to be Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, which is definitely kick ass. You can tell that Lucas Arts decided to borrow a page from the likes of God of War and Marvel Ultimate Alliance in coming up with the gaming dynamics. It's not necessarily my kind of game (I bet Brian |kitchengod| would do a lot better if he gave it a shot), but still it's worth the effort for sure, if only for the geek factor, haha.

On the download viewing front, I finally finished my acquisition of this year's Christmas special of Doctor Who entitled, "The Next Doctor" Of course I watched it today and was mildly amused by the steampunk-ish flavor to things. At the same time, I realized that I had not watched my copy of The Infinite Quest, an animated Doctor Who special during the Martha Jones period. It was a bit more enjoyable than the Christmas special except for the bad animation quality.

Beyond that, I've taken to trying to finish re-watching the second season of the original Transformers series and finally getting around to starting to watch the entire run of The Black Adder. Yeah, I guess I'm in the mood for lighter entertainment or something, nothing majorly heavy. Then again, I'll never endue slapstick and so British humor seems to hit the spot precisely. Considering I've purchased working copies of the the first three seasons of Battlestar Galactica and the all episodes of Season 4 up until this year, I'm not sure if I'm ready to get back into their struggles, trials and tribulations just yet, hehe. There'll be plenty of time for that next year or something.

I know, I know, it's that time of the year when it's stupidly fun to refer to "next year" as if it were so far way when it is in fact only a few days away. Oh simple joys.

I need a life, haha.

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Oh Duck is just too cute for words, hehe.

This weekend is starting off well enough (and quite lazy to boot) and there's not much more to be expected, I suppose. I've been managing to stick to my commitment to spend the weekend at home, even with Brian |kitchengod| and Ryan went to Malate with Monchu and some of his school friends, or something to that effect.

Most of my Saturday was dedicated to getting back up-to-speed in terms of my online life. It involved logging into all my social networking accounts that are normally blocked at the office like Multiply and Facebook and ultimately a lot of downloading via uTorrent. Yeah, let's not beat around the bush and just accept the fact that I keep up with US programming via illegal downloads. So sue me. =P

I'm back up to speed with Pushing Daisies, Star Wars: The Clone Wars and the Robot Chicken Star Wars Episode II special. I've downloaded all the episodes of Heroes that I missed, but then again I haven't really been watching since I saw the first two episodes of the series. Given the cliffhanger end pretty much expected for every episode, I'm sorta wasting for the end of the season to start marathoning things, or I can devote my Monday holiday off to that. Ideas, ideas.

On a very strong side note, I'm really saddened by the fact that it's been announced that Pushing Daisies is not going to be continued after the 13th episode of their second season. I really, really like the show given the quirkiness, the Tim Burton feel, the random musical bits (especially with the help of Kristin Chenoweth) and even Lee Pace is becoming more and more attractive to me. Now the show is going to end and any remaining plot threads are only possible going to be covered in the form of a comic book. Good luck on me getting copies of that until a kind soul, um, liberates a copy and posts it on the internet. *crossing fingers and toes*

I spent a fair amount of time talking to John yesterday, which is one of the perks of living next door to him and Ryan, really. What started as him not having keys for their apartment turned into a chance to catch up and talk about mobile and internet banking, cleaning products and general tech stuff. Yeah, we really get along when it comes to things like gadgets and cleaning.

Today we all trekked over to Cartimar since John needed new plants of his aquariums and Brian was keen on getting plants for Vella's street-facing balcony / veranda of sorts. It's not one that we can actually stand on so it makes sense to spruce up that unused space with plants. I'm a total idiot when it comes to actively choosing a viable plant and yet I kept on coming up with reasons to veto many varieties. Eventually we reached a compromise of getting these bamboo-like grasses, whose name I forget.

Now Brian is preparing dinner along with Ryan contributing ideas. I've done the big job of, um, cooking rice. Yes, my meaningful contribution to the cooking effort is putting rice into the rice cooker, filling it with water up to the line and flicking the switch.

Ah domestication.

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No, there's no escaping the evil world of Capitalism.

So what did I accomplish this weekend?

Given my long Friday shift and Lydia's Breakfast Party, Saturday was pretty much non-productive.

When I did wake up past midnight, I did get around to finally synchronizing myself with the US by watching both episodes 3 and 4 of Pushing Daisies and the latest episode of Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Naturally I continue to love Pushing Daisies and every episode is worth waiting an entire week for. I think I'm beginning to form a slightly geeky crush on Lee Pace, who plays the protagonist Ned. And of course there's Kristin Chenoweth, who is always worth watching, hehe. Clone Wars was pretty good this week, although I think I'm still generally holding my breath about the series and waiting for it to get somewhere. The introduction of commando droids was a little weird, but still interesting.

Chris and Chase did come over for dinner last night and it was awesome. Brian |kitchengod| really cooked up a feast and I think the night went rather well, as simple as it was.

I've finished Feeding Frenzy 2 twice now - once the usual way and once using The Intruder as my fish. I've given up on Diner Dash Seasonal Snack Pack and Diner Dash Flo Through Time - they're just too hard! I ended up downloading the first Diner Dash and now I'm stuck there, too. I tried playing the endless shift mode and got to level 20...but of course now my hand hurts. Bugger. Where are StarCraft II and Diablo III when I need them? I need to progress past these kinds of arcade games!

Brian and I were supposed to go to our banks today but ended up postponing it for tomorrow. I only have to do my usual "bank run", which ironically enough means depositing money into the savings account from my perspective. Sue me if it's a confusing term, I just like saying it. Brian has to make the monthly deposit for his mom's condo, which he's paying for on her behalf since she's out of the country. Of course being up all night in order to preserve our sleeping pattern and general feelings of lethargy has translated into us pushing out departure time back and then ultimately postponing the whole thing for tomorrow. Why is it so hard to leave the house once you're all settled in?

This week should be a lot lighter for me in terms of work. I don't have a class to run and I'm not obsessing about nesting either. I will hold office on the floor for the next week or so to help clarify any questions or concerns that the pilot group might still have while I work on additional training materials for them. My boss, Carlo, is on leave this week, which means I have to pick up his slack to keep things running. It's not that bad given I used to manage all this before. Still, I'll not be overly optimistic and will remain on my toes to monitor things as they progress.

Brian is cooking breakfast now - part of the compromise for not going out to the bank today. I always get excited when he starts to prepare food - he makes omelets into amazingly special treats. He's doing something with chicken breasts this morning, so this is well beyond an omelet, hehe. All I can manage is to cook rice and that's about it.

Welcome to the last week of October. I still don't have a Halloween costume for work. =(

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You know, I wouldn't be surprised if there was a Cartoon Mafia, hehe