Lippo Centre

this is my favorite building in HK (one of the pair). wiki tells me it was designed to look like koala bears hugging a tree trunk. hehe.. real cute.

props to kerwin for taking the picture. but i did the tasteful cropping (notice how the bank of china tower tastefully peeks at the left side.. hahaha..).

the chinese believe the Lippo Centre has very bad feng shui. sucks how something so pretty is regarded quite negatively.

hapit na...

just go ahead let your hair down

there comes a point in every young man's life when he wants to grow his hair longer than usual. this point came last year for me. my hair grew long enough to have strands tickle my neck at the slightest suggestion of wind. thereuntil i have been rather clean-cut and it was admittedly a thrill having to work quite a lather each time i shampooed.

long-haired and missing adventure, i went with DOTers (DOTA -- Defense of the Arts -- players) to Baguio for 2 days and a night. we didn't know anybody there but we managed to rent a 3-bed room near Teachers' Village. it wasn't much, but we had cable TV.



i felt normal walking around SM Baguio with long hair. somehow, everyone looked artiste up there. everyone also looked a lot more laid-back and trouble-free. (everyone i know who's been to Baguio say the same thing about the local's temperament. we all assume it's because of the weather.) everyone went about in the manner of cool resignation; it seemed preposterous to fuzz about one's hair.

the next time i feel the urge to wear my hair long, i'll climb Baguio.

Tribu 25

two years ago today exactly, I wore barong too big for me, and awkwardly marched on stage with mama and papa.

graduation day.

batch 2005! wherever you guys are, congratulations to all your successes.

nutinians

he's born in scotland but has italian descent. he's father owned a fish and chip shop, but his music-loving grandpa encouraged him to sing. he's 20 years old but he growls his accent like an old man.

with all these contradictions, it's good to know Paolo Nutini knows exactly who he is. his music is soft and poignant (read cafe friendly) and his poetry is surprisingly honest.

easy favorites are These Streets, Last Request (there's a hidden acoustic track which is nothing short of suicidal), Million Faces, and Rewind. but for sheer honesty and LSS-inducing musicality, Jenny Don't Be Hasty takes the cake.

this is a refreshing album because it tells exactly what it wants to say, and we walk away from it somehow feeling a connection with the artist. sure Fergie, Justin and Gwen are cool and all, but can you honestly say you can listen to all the tracks in their albums without thinking they are having identity crises?

(Fergie (The Dutchess) tries so hard to convince us that she can sing by imitating your next-door birit queens (Finally). Justin (FutureSex / LoveSounds) suddenly turns into a peace-advocate halfway in his album (Until The End Of Time). And then Gwen (The Sweet Escape). Gwen! Gwen! Do you really have to go Beyonce on us (Orange County Girl)?)

listen to Paolo Nutini, guys. it's been a while since i had a nice long conversation with an song-writer.

Google Ads, yeah!

so there. i finally decided to join after reading some stupid article from jayjay about quitting your job and just starting a blog to earn money. haha. well, i figured i could keep my job, and earn from my blog.

yeah, right.

unless you cheapskates start clicking on the not-so obscure stuff on top of this page, i'm not getting any Google dineros. well, could you just please come back to visit? i get paid too for traffic -- they call it impressions.

i read somewhere someone was sent a $90,000 check from Google just from ads. oh well. but just in case, mamangka ko.

cm'on. click on ads already!

spiderman

i used to live in a village once in the Cainta area. we were drawn to it because of the cheap apartments. it was all about "living alone" back then, and we felt too cool to live with relatives we knew nothing about.

first, we had to house-hunt. it involves buying a lot of Buy and Sell classifieds, browsing obscure internet forums with threads like "quiet 1-B Aprtment w/ T&B", and walking. well, it mostly involves a lot of walking.

Buy and Sell rolled in one hand and a bottle of C2 Green tea in the other, i braved the noisy streets of makati's suburbia district, the maze of the Ortigas residential areas, and the darkness of a Taguig baranggay (there were no lampposts in the streets and i was there at night). of course, i could always find well-meaning friends to come along. once i was with suri -- who perfectly understood the point of living hip and young. another time i was with ogdoc -- who i completely convinced i had to leave my old apartment, lest i go mad.

most of the time, i was alone, dramatically pretending i had to look for a place to lay my head to rest for the night. but no, there was no baby Jesus in that drama.

ultimately, word of mouth about a nice new place in cainta caught me and a bunch of other officemates. one by one, we grabbed our mattresses and headed to St. Joseph Subdivision. home was going to be a 4-storey building with 1-bedroom units. of course each unit had it's own T&B. i stayed in the 2nd unit of the ground floor. oski, alain, lil jessica, and mama rene all had the four units on the fourth floor. we were like those spiders elementary brats keep in match boxes. just stick us in our little boxes and we were good for the night.

(more soon)

Book 2

it's been a while kids. mustamos?

i'd assume everyone's all grown up already. so i can't write about crappy stuff anymore. maybe i'll go in the line of campus politics and finally give my long overdue answer to kitrotsky. or maybe raise the bar higher and write about -- hmm -- global warming.

right, and bore you to death.

truth is, it hasn't been so busy at work lately. finally got our project's schedule relaxed. so now, devoid of any UTPs to review, prototypes to make, and Use Cases to draft, i am left to wonder what my previous life was like. the life before BIR gave me a tax identification number.

i vaguely remember the smell of Cuz in JY Square, where we used to munch on humba, breaded porkchop and the occasional frankfurters during lunchtime. and the smell of the AS classrooms before the airconditioning is turned on. and the smell of newly photocopied materials on data struct concepts. (the smell, always the smell.)

then i remembered i used to blog. when banne and i reread some entries i wrote before, i had to cringe at how horrible i wrote. very few things are more embarrassing than reading yourself trying so hard to make an impression.

i think i'll tell you about the method of Global City and the madness of Cubao. the bizarre manangs of Quiapo and the bizarre manangs who work in my office. the landlords straight from hell and an angel i met in North Av. or an eagle i saw in Shek-O Beach.

hopefully i can keep this up. until the next project milestone comes anyway.