The Geek Brewery

Illustration by Diane Cheney

I am one of UP’s centennial freshmen, a n00b to College life. Entering in such a very liberal University wasn’t easy. As expected, there was “culture shock”. But believe me, it was fun.

It was only in college when I discovered my so-called Life Lines. These life lines saved me from boredom, weird assignments and insanity. Here’s a few of them:

• Got something to search? Google is your friend. It’s your portal to virtually unlimited resources. May it be an assignment, jokes, games, parodies and list goes on and on.
• But if you need extensive information on something, Wikipedia is always up to help you. In case that you’d need more, see the external links and notes below — links to their sources which in most of the time contains more extensive info are systematically listed. Another advantage of those links are they’re written in APA/MLA style. This means there’s no need to rewrite them for your bibliography.
• What if you were given by your Panitikan ng Pilipinas class a job to research on Biag ni Lam-ang? WikiPilipinas.org offers sufficient Philippine-centric articles which are normally not easy to find in the Web.
• It’s late midnight and you’re uber-bored writing your term paper. A good place to reenergize yourself is to watch CollegeHumor videos. They got very good originals that college students can relate to. They also have an array of high-quality third-party content. They also got a blog where they post funny graphs. [Someone in Plurk told me that CollegeHumor.com paid Paris Hilton to make an Obama/McCain campaign spoof. Cool.]
• For group works that requires collaboration on a paper or a spreadsheet, Google Docs is helpful. Given a permission by the document owner, anyone from the group can make changes instantaneously visible to anyone. This makes collaboration an easy task — easier than giving each one a copy of the file for editing and compiling all changes in a single document. Another big advantage of this one is when a hardware (an external disk or removable drive) fails, you can always download it from anywhere in the world given that you have an active Internet connection.
• Your teacher asked you to read a very thick novel. Shall we say the novel “Love in Time of Cholera”. SparkNotes offers comprehensive summaries of some famous pieces of Literature, may it be a poem, novel, etc. They also offer condensed online textbooks on science subjects and U.S. history.
• Studying Law? As in the Laws in the Philippines? ChanRobles law firm has an online repository of Philippine Laws, the Philippine Constitution, Republic Acts among others.
• As you may have noticed above, they’re life lines on the Internet. Now, let’s UnPLUG ourselves from our PCs/Macs. Join a special-interest organization. I’ve tried this and it’s actually a good outlet for people who love to talk about their interests but unfortunately have friends who aren’t interested with it. You learn new things (in my case, Linux stuff) while plowing new friends. You get a chance to talk and talk about geeky stuff without boring people.
• Give yourself a break. Bond with nature. I bet most schools have an open-field or park. Give yourself a chance to roll on the grass, play frisbee with friends or have a walk with your pet. It may be costly but if you’re adventurous enough, have a discovery dive and discover what the open seas offer.

For the mean time, I’d stop here. I have more in mind, but let me reserve it for another post. Nyahahaha.

My regular/loyal readers (if any ) would surely notice that it has been a very long since I posted my last post (actually, I posted a sensitive artice that I had to remove). I’ve been focusing on my academics lately, especially now that I’m enrolled to interesting General Education (GE) subjects.

I am on a 19-unit load, 2 units more than the prescribed BS Compputer Science (BSCS) 1st Year 2nd Sem load since I enrolled to Chem16 – a 5-unit course not taken by BSCS students at the same time not taking my third 3-unit GE Subject.

My two (2) GE subjects are actually two courses on Gender, Sex and Sexuality. The one is Social Science 3, gwhich will focus on the psychological and sociological side of the said topics; while the other in is Panitikan ng Pilipinas 19, this one focusing on the Philippine literature aspect.

Soon, I will be posting my review on UPCAT the Movie and the book Isang Napakalaking Kaastigan. Actually, the book Isang Napakalaking Kaastigan was written by my Panitikan ng Pilipinas 19 instructor Sir Vlad Gonzales.

Keep posted.

Three men (one teller + two guards) were shot dead on an armored-car robbery outside the Bahay ng Alumni of UP Diliman Campus in Quezon City, Philippines at around 1pm.

The robbers initially used a Blue Mitsubishi Adventure bearing a plate number WKJ 409 which
they abandoned on a nearby location, just behind the Department of Citizens’ Military Training.

Inside the initial getaway vehicle were the two SFV 903 red plate numbers which was used to
hide the vehicle’s identity. (more…)