A lot of things happened during the past months. I’ve been to a four-day basic masses integration and art workshop in Hacienda Luisita in Tarlac, finished yet another weight training PE, transformed my laptop, explored haircuts, had fun with my classes and my classmates and a lot more.

After finishing my third weight training class in UP, I can say that this summer’s weight training under Sir Marvin Sabado was the most challenging. I’m very proud that I still got a 1.50 from him even though I missed two days of classes during our trip in Hacienda Luisita. All those strenuous days of workout was definitely worth it. Until now, I still continue the abdominals regimen I’ve learned from the class from time to time.

PE 2 WT-M W7 class

My English 10 class under Miss Loujaye Sonido is so far the best GE I’ve taken in UP. I enjoyed the class plus the outside-the-classroom experiences. I really enjoyed the company of my classmates and our beautiful teacher. My thesis paper partner and I also got a 1.00 on our thesis paper.

Our class went on a four-day basic masses integration and art workshop (Lakbay Sining) with Sinagbayan (Sining na Naglilingkod sa Bayan) at Hacienda Luisita in Tarlac. There I learned to asarol (hoe) the soil at Ka-Gerry’s place. I also enjoyed pumping the poso (handpump) for different people (mostly strangers) for three straight days; which was an instant workout for me in preparation for the upcoming weight training practicals then. Did that for three days and fortunately my triceps didn’t sore up. During the art workshop, we were asked to choose our class. I chose the art workshop as I don’t have a talent in playing musical instruments, dancing and making songs.

Ang pag-aasarol

During the “last day of summer classes” inside the classroom and even after it, my classmates and I still went out from time to time during deadline of submission of papers and the benefit gigs we had to attend such as the Barikada: Tulong para sa Corazon de Jesus at Hacienda Luisita. Among all of them, I enjoyed Barikada the most. Barikada was a night filled with progressive music and booze – for a cause. I never imagined an activist gig to be that fun.

At Clerisy with English 10 classmates after last day of classes (inside the classroom)

English 10 class picture at Barikada

More Barikada photos

The English 10 kids who stayed ’til the end plus Miss Loujaye

Being a BLKD fan, I did not miss the opportunity at Barikada to have a fan photo with him. To my surprise, he recognized me even though we only met at Hacienda Luisita. More info about BLKD on at fuckyeahblkd in tumblr.

Fan photo with BLKD

Even more BLKD fanboys

As compared to my previous summers, I spent lesser chunk of my time in front of my laptop. But that didn’t stop my laptop from giving up. Too bad for my laptop, his owner loves tinkering stuff. And this is how it looked like while I was tinkering (stripping) it:

I decided to give it some decent outfit so I bought filing cases from CDRKing. Eventually, it now looks like this now:

As the summer classes were about to end, I also made a remake of a video I uploaded before. Here’s the remake:

I would like to share moooooooore photos and videos but my body is already giving up. Disclaimer: the next links are potentially offensive and may be NSFW. I’d be wrapping this up with a pull-ups shot taken by a classmate, and a couple of vanity shots I took supposedly for my own consumption.

For the past few days, I’ve been keeping myself busy with my fitness. LOL. I tried to exercise more, started to jog and significantly decrease my alcohol consumption. I guess my effort paid off. Last November 2010, my body fat percentage was still around 17%. Yesterday, the interns at the College of Human Kinetics measured it for us again for our fitness test and now it’s down to 6.2%. My resting heart rate is now 48bpm, enough for me to self-diagnose myself with sinus bradycardia. Both my resting heart rate and body fat percentage say I qualify as an athlete, now I need to find a sport to play. My next goal is to increase my BMI from 21.22 to 23 while still maintaining my body fat percentage to below 10%.

By now, I should be keeping myself busy WordPress-izing a website but I’m still not in the mood of doing it.

Wall climbing is one of the things I really missed doing for the past few months. I first fell in love with wall climbing days before Valentine’s Day during the UP Fair 2010. Grip UP and Power Up Tandang Sora put up a climbing wall at the Sunken Garden for the fair.

Since then, I started visiting Power Up Tandang Sora (climbing gym) from time to time, bringing with me random friends. There were even times when I went there almost every other day that I decided to subscribe to two-week gym memberships.

Although strenuous, wall climbing is a very fun activity. It provides a glimpse of outdoor rock climbing in a controlled environment. Not only it will help you develop endurance, strength and power, it may also reinforce your willpower (to reach the top ).

How to go to Power Up Tandang Sora

For those who want to give indoor climbing a shot, you may visit Power Up Tandang Sora at 690 Tandang Sora Avenue, Old Balara, Quezon City. From Quezon Memorial Circle, enter Commonwealth, turn right on the street (Tandang Sora Avenue) right after Mercury Drug and KFC then finally turn right on the first street. You should see Power Up there.

Cost of climbing at Power Up Tandang Sora

For first-timers, it should cost you around PHP 220.00 (not sure). Included here is the climbing fee, equipment rental and belay card. For your succeeding climbing sessions, it should cost around PHP 200.00 (still unsure; PHP 150 for climbing fee and PHP 50 for equipment rental). In case you decide to make it a hobby, you may also avail of their 14-day (or two-week) gym membership at PHP 600 or a month membership at PHP 1,300. The membership will only cover for your climbing fee.

Here are some tips for those who want to try it out:

• Don’t hesitate to try it just because you don’t have any climbing experience. Everyone who’ve tried it had a first time, too! The gym staff will teach you how to use their equipment safely. They will even issue you a belay card that you can brag to your friends!
• Try to bring a friend with you. You will have to pay an extra for a belayer. Alternatively if you are friendly enough, you may make friends there and ask them to belay you.
• Bring extra clothes. You should be comfortable with your climbing clothes. It should not be too tight nor too loose.

Looking forward to climbing again next year!

As I was skimming the Top 500 Non-individual Taxpayers of 2009 earlier tonight, I happened to notice Golden Arches Development Corporation at Rank 95. Golden Arches is the corporation behind McDonald’s Philippines. Because of that, my stomach began growling but as far as I knew then I only had 20 pesos in my pocket.

As time passed, my hunger intensified. Hungry, I searched for the room for coins. I found coins on the floor, my bag, the cabinet, among others. I was able to collect 11 5-peso coins, 146 1-peso coins and 8 25-centavo coins (which one of them I later discovered to be a 1964 5-centavo coin).

Crazy as it may sound, even though I can already afford to eat at McDonald’s already I decided to sort the coins according to year before eating. First thing I did was to create a MySQL database for it. Then I wrote the PHP app where I’ll encode the coins. After which I started encoding data for my 1-peso coins. I made sure that the data in the database are correct by checking it on my physical count every ten coins. I failed to encode the year of one 1-peso coin since it was already mutilated to the point the year is not recognizable already.

Here’s the result in coin-graph:

And here’s the dump from MySQL sorted by year and by frequency:

As you may notice, among the 145 1-peso coins I had no 2005 1-peso coin. Oldest coins minted back in 1995 whilst my latest coins in 2010. As expected, 2010 coins took the lead. I can’t seem to understand why I got a lot of 2004 coins. I speculate that the Central Bank over-minted coins in 2004 to the point that they halted production for 2005. Another observation was that all of my coins minted from 2004 onwards were magnetic. I also got 3 magnetic 2003 1-peso coins out of the 10 I have in possession.

Enough of those coin stuff. Way back in high school, some of my classmates and even teachers suspect that I have ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). I tried running through the symptoms of ADHD in Wikipedia and now I’m diagnosing myself with ADHD. Hahaha.

Here’s the list of symptoms (those highlighted in blue are the things that apply to me [I think]):

• Be easily distracted, miss details, forget things, and frequently switch from one activity to another
• Have difficulty maintaining focus on one task
• Become bored with a task after only a few minutes, unless doing something enjoyable [sorting coins is enjoyable!!]
• Have difficulty focusing attention on organizing and completing a task or learning something new or trouble completing or turning in homework assignments, often losing things (e.g., pencils, toys, assignments) needed to complete tasks or activities
• Not seem to listen when spoken to [rarely]
• Daydream, become easily confused, and move slowly
• Have difficulty processing information as quickly and accurately as others
• Struggle to follow instructions
• Fidget and squirm in their seats
• Talk nonstop [do I need to elaborate on this???]
• Dash around, touching or playing with anything and everything in sight [and everyone, LOL]
• Have trouble sitting still during dinner, school, and story time
• Be constantly in motion
• Have difficulty doing quiet tasks or activities
• Be very impatient
• Blurt out inappropriate comments, show their emotions without restraint, and act without regard for consequences
• Have difficulty waiting for thingI think my friends would agree on me s they want or waiting their turns in games

There you go. If you know me well I think you’ll have to agree with me. On the Wikipedia article, it also says “Untreated adults with ADHD often have chaotic lifestyles, may appear to be disorganized and may rely on non-prescribed drugs and alcohol to get by.” LOL.

Yesterday, I attended my first WordCamp ever. I registered for WordCamp for the past two years but due to unseen circumstances I wasn’t able to make it. I arrived there very late, 4pm (it started at 8am). It was fun to see bloggers I last saw a year or two ago. After the event, I went out with some bloggers to socialize.

In a week, Canonical will be releasing yet another version of Ubuntu. It will be Ubuntu 10.10. Just a trivia, Ubuntu does have a unique convention for their version numbers. Ubuntu 10.10 means it will be released on October 2010. They use the YY.MM format instead of the usual version numbers.

I think that would be all for now. Bye.

Two days before August ended, I rewarded myself by buying an airplane ticket to Hong Kong. Since early August, I’ve been obsessed by the idea of going to Hong Kong or Singapore. There were countless nights when I slept late just to read Hong Kong and Singapore online travelogues.

In these two instances lie something common – I chased my dreams. I think it’s safe to assume that everyone of us has a set of dreams and aspirations in life but I believe I dream more compared to an average person, and you can, too. I must admit that my dreams are my motivation. The more I dream (postscript: I think obsess is a better word for me) about something, the more I work hard to attain it.

You don’t have start small. Don’t be afraid to try every opportunity that comes into your way that might help you reach your dream, no matter how big they are. Last July, there was this opportunity to work for the Google Word of Mouth project. At first I was hesitant to try it. I was starting to doubt my capabilities. Eventually, I gave it a try and fortunately I succeeded. Not only did I gain experience but I also got a chance to meet and work with interesting and inspiring people (including Googlers).

Chase your dreams! For those who are still confused on how to do it, here’s an article from eHow: How to Chase your Dream.

• Coordinating and following things up for an upcoming project with a company.
• Coding ACReS and hopefully committing the code to its Google Code repo once I build enough courage to do so.
• My application to GRIP UP (a sports climbing association in UP). Climbing, climbing and climbing.
• Working as a Student Assistant in DilNet.
• School.

I’m very excited for the first bullet. Woot.

I’ve been locked out in my room. I left at around 1am to eat my dinner at Shakey’s Katipunan (which went 24/7 since last week, I guess) while waiting for my OS installation to complete. I only brought my wallet and pen with me. When I went back I discovered that the secondary lock was locked. It can only be opened from the inside. I tried to knock and shout at my sister for her to wake up but to no avail. I even tried to throw coins at her through the window but still I failed miserably.

For me to survive, my instinct told me to find a place where I can access the Internet. Next thing in mind was to find a place where I could spend the rest of my night.

And so I went to this Internet cafe. I haven’t been here before but I’ve been seeing it’s entrance everytime I withdraw money right before eating at KFC Katipunan. It’s a lot cleaner here compared to 168 129 Internet Cafe on the adjacent building. The seats are comfortable, the computers are responsive and they do have a good keyboard, mouse and speakers. The restroom was also okay, they had the necessary toiletries inside.

I kinda enjoyed wasting my time here watching Air Crash Investigation on Youtube, playing RockBand 2 songs and playing my favorite ATC simulator. I’ve also emailed and SMSed my sister to notify me thru email when she’s awake.

My only concern in staying here is that I’m using a public computer. There might be a keylogger here, that’s why I don’t type my password here directly. I copy-paste letters and numbers from webpages when typing my password. I also use Mozilla Firefox’ private browsing mode to reduce my footprint in this computer.

Good luck to me!

It was my dream to enter a flight school after high school, but it was too expensive. I entered the University and gave up on my dream. My interest to airplanes slowly deteriorated up until recently when I was able to play Microsoft Flight Simulator X again.

Yes, you read it right – Microsoft. I installed Windows back on my laptop, originally to play WarCraft 3 Frozen Throne again. Then I gave Microsoft FSX a try again and I got hooked on it in no time. The other day, I’ve started playing an air traffic control (ATC) simulator, which I found very hard at first but later realized it wasn’t that hard when I got the feel of it. My interest on planes grew back, as well as my dream to become a commercial jet pilot.

The dream is back. After finishing my bachelor’s degree, I’m planning to save some cash for flight school and pursue my dream. I hope that I’ll be taller by then. (Should you have any tips on how to grow taller, just share them on the comments area.)

One of Cebu Pacific’s Airbus A319-100; actually rode the same plane with same registration number

Fifteen (15) minutes ago, I was flying an Airbus A321 on a flight simulator. Five to ten years from now, I envision myself flying a better Airbus (I’m an Airbus fan) jet in real life.

I know I’m asking myself much. In case I fail to pursue my dream, I hope I can be an air traffic controller at least. It’s a great job, too!

————–

PS: It’s 2:49am already. Tomorrow’s my first day of being a Junior College student. Hopefully, just another two more years and I’m done on my bachelor’s degree. (goodluck)

If I were to tell everything that happened to me from my long break here then it would make this post the longest post I’ll ever make. But I’ll better not tell everything because odds are you won’t care anyway.

Star Wars. I followed Randalism‘s suggestion to watch Star Wars starting from The Phantom Menace (Star Wars 1) to Return of the Jedi (Star Wars 6) instead of the “usual” Star Wars 4 to 6 then Star Wars 1 to 3. I still haven’t started Star Wars 5: The Empire Strikes Back up to now due to lack of focus. Yes, I prepare myself before I watch movies. I guess it’s due to my short attention span.

After watching Star Wars 1 to 4, I now want to be Master Windu, Luke Skywalker or Han Solo although my favorite character is Jar Jar Binks. Liz made a “Konrad Skywalker” cartoon as seen above. Out of my addiction to Star Wars there were days when I plurked in Gungan Basic. LOL.

After 19 months, I now have Windows on my laptop again. I installed Windows 7 just to play the games I used to play. I missed the fun during the North Alliance’s last overnight party. I didn’t have Windows installed on my laptop so I wasn’t able to join them in X Hero Siege (a WarCraft 3 game, it’s actually a downloadable map).

Before installing Windows 7, I reconfigured the partitioning of my 160GB hard disk on my laptop. I had to move everything to another partition and delete the rest. Right now I don’t have Linux on my laptop yet for the first time in 21 months. I’ll be installing Ubuntu 10.04 LTS when I wake up later, first thing in the morning.

Configuring Windows 7 was a fuss. It took me hours just to make things work. Until now, I can’t get to make HP Quick Launch buttons to work. The NVIDIA black screen bug still bothers my laptop up to now. I’ve been having that problem way back when I was still using Windows Vista. The problem occurs when using the more recent NVIDIA drivers for my video card.

What’s keeping me busy this summer? Summer classes and DilNet application process. I am enrolled to two classes this summer. I have a 7:15am Physics 72 class under Sir Carlos Baldo III and a 2:30pm Weight Training class under Sir Christian Wisdom Valleser. During my free time, I go to DilNet Helpdeskto work/train as part of the application process to be a Student Assistant. After not wall climbing for more than I month, I’ve visited Power Up Gym Tandang Sora last Saturday to climb. I really missed climbing but I don’t have funds for gym membership right now.

That’s all and may the Force be with you.