dahon.typepad.com

Gnocchis for Steve!

Gnocchis are so filling. Here's a good recipe, to try.

I'm stuck with thousands of pictures on my drive and could not find the time to collate and post.  I went to visit my good friend Jaja at San Francisco couple of weeks ago and I almost literally died. That's fine, all cool, it's my life, but what's not fine is that I have to drag people with me in my death.  Stories soon and oh, I hope it to be sooner than soon. 

In the meantime,  these gnocchis, my favorite at the moment is dedicated to Steve Jobs.  I have always loved Apple's designs way before the hype about iPod and iPhone. Back in 2002, I  spent all my savings to buy an iBook (worth 70,000 pesos back then) because the design haunted me and I could not get  over it until I have it.  Was it impractical? Not exactly :). I bought it not for the device but for the art I guess. 

But he gave significance to each one, saying how it sent him into the wilderness, strengthened him, made him the lateral thinker and innovator we know him to be. Look deeper into Jobs’s influences and you see not microchips and circuit boards but India, the Beatles, LSD, and Buddhism. In the nervous, incurious world of today, these markers are salutary for their apparent waywardness.  - How Apple Revolutioned the World.

But right now, I'm on Android, from time to time jumping back to Steve's world, for that kind of world has been a trailblazer for the rest. 

 

Hunches.

Cure for the indecisive. Librans, unite! The elixir of our lives.

The Non-Plans.

I think it's a matter of pride that propelled me not to give up on The Great Hard Disk Crash. As my dad continually hinted - or jokingly demanded, having gone to college with a course related to computers,  I should know how to fix all technical issues related to it.  Yes, correct, because that should also justify an almost a decade of experience in Information Technology. Gawd, please don't make me open this thing, I cringe at anything hardware that has its intestines looking up at me.

After several play of keywords at Google and several installations of free software tools, I found some applications that detected my long lost pictures. I almost screamed with delight when the screen suddenly displayed, DSCXXXXX.JPG and began to lists all my pictures and other files. I don't care about other files (well, except for my bookmarks, that was one valuable storage of wonderful discoveries), I just want the pictures, my bragging rights to myself (not to anyone mind you), the only legacy I could pass along to my grandchildren that has lasting value.  Staunch technical geniuses/certified geeks at the office have given me useful pieces of advice but none have predicted that the information can still be recovered, in such a, um, simple and cheap way.

Aside from the power of the web and a stolen wallet at Ayala Avenue last Friday, what else is new with me? Well, obviously a site redesign. I figured the butterfly design, if anyone of you happen to see it a few days ago, was a pre-defined template of Typepad and I could not imagine associating myself with butterflies. They're just too delicate to watch and I'm tough in a fragile kind of way -- whatever the hell that means. [Cinds, I know you liked the previous, but I hope this one's more me].

This picture was taken on a train and we were on our way to Barcelona city proper.  I was jotting on my journal, squeezing my mind of all memories the past days. My sprained left ankle was swollen and my cloth belt which I wrapped around it, was not helping. That ankle, even though sprained for the past 5 days, have endured the endless walking and the running and chasing of buses from Granada to the last pit stop in Spain - Barcelona. Miraculously it did not cause any pain, just a little bit of swelling, a little bit of twitch, but nothing searing.

I chose this picture as my banner image because it captures the purpose of this blog -- a moment of rest in the middle of an adventure. The moving scenery captures my passions and my state of mind, and as I move with it, this blog attempts to capture the significant experiences. The text "living" was a way to emphasize me not as an observer but a part of the adventure and syempre, mga funny kapalpakan and bloopers effect are encompassed by the sprained ankle.   I dirtied the picture in sepia tones with grainy textures, because with me, it's never perfect, most times, nothing goes as planned, which makes the picture  worth telling.

Napiga ko na ba ang pedeng maging symbolism sa picture na to? :).  The site is still three-columned and although I'm a bit unsatisfied with the size of the main body content and having requested for a change in Typepad's 500 pixel limit, I love this design better than what I have done before. Despite its sepia monochromatic feel, I obviously still love colors so you can still see splashes of it here.  Mustard is my color of the year.

So now, I'm re-welcoming all of you to my blog with an over-analyzed banner image ;).

This is how the Geeks Say It.

OC.

It's almost 5:00AM and I am about to sleep.  I have been slaving many hours finishing the online album of my Cebu-Camotes-Ormoc vacation with prenships last Holy Week. It's not so much the editing of the pictures that's taking so long, but it's more of me choosing which ones out of a hundred great pictures should be The Chosen Few. All of us brought our cameras and imagine the total breakdown of pictures:

• Aimee - 290+ pictures
• Pen - 260+ pictures
• Cinds & Papa Bin - 200+ pictures (based on their posted album)
• Joy & Papa Lem - 730+ pictures
• Rose - 540+ pictures

That's a thousand pictures for me to go through and it's hard, ang hirap hirap pumili for a Libra like me! I'm a bit of an OC pa naman, I kept on changing pictures once I've come across more appropriate ones - with vibrant colors, more candid photos, best landscape. I am proud to say that all of my albums in this site and in my flickr sets I patiently made with thoughts that it will convince you to go to these places, drink up the sun, relish the food, experience that ever dramatic term LIFE, o ha.  All of the girls will receive a dvd of 2.1Gigabyte worth of all the pictures we've taken -- just in case Pen cries out that she's not in ALL of the pictures chosen, hahaha! Peace Pen! :)

I have no sleep but I love it -- all of it. I'll post more about kwentos soon, I just need to grab my beauty sleep.

The Good Sylars.

I had some marathon interview I had to do in the office last Saturday early morning till noon, and surprisingly I learned a lot.  I like the calibration post-interviews, I guess I love listening to point of views of people on how they see others, compared to mine.  Parang you get to see a different view from the same landscape.  How cool is that. 

And here's one cool snapshot of one of my favorite interviews ever, from the young geeks of this generation:
Me:  You  mentioned in your resume that you love Unix (reading aloud from the resume), "you have it in your home, you have it your office and if you can install it in your phone, you probably would".
Wonderful geek extraordinaire:  Yes. [Nervously smiles]
Me: Well, why didn't you? [Dying to grin ear to ear]
Wonderful Geek extraordinaire: What?
Me: Why didn't you install it in your phone? [Intrigued]
Wonderful Geek Extraordinaire: Ah, [Seriously pulls out his phone from his pocket and showed it to us....hahaha! Nakakatuwa talaga sya!] I'm not sure if it would work in my Nokia 6220..
Me: Have you tried it?  [Stopping myself from hugging this boy]
Wonderful Geek Extraordinaire:  Ah no, no...
Me: You mean, not yet?  [Grinning ear to ear]
Wonderful Geek Extraordinaire: Ah yes, not yet...[nervously smiling]

[I love him, the young and restless minds of the youth! He was previously telling us, albeit nervously, hands fidgeting,  of his other innovations and we were floored, totally impressed!  I was discussing this with Aaron my co-interviewer and we laughed, wondering if when he gets home, that would tick him to tinker his phone endlessly]

Y'all listen to JLo: Let's Get Loud!!

Yeah. Time of the year.  I remember on my first year with this site, I changed my design every season -- and I can still remember that big sunflower:

that minty flakes:

that favorite season of mine for the colors:

and a lot others, some forgettable :).

Right now, it's not the seasons that's driving the inspiration for this site's layout , nowadays it's just mood swings.  So if this design is a big loud change, that's because right now I feel like ripping the metals out of my teeth since no matter how much wax I put in, it just keeps hitting my mouth sores, goddammit! I digress, I always do. When there's pain it's hard not to get distracted. I decided to go for weird mixtures now, and regret will come later :D.  I know the colors are too much, I know they don't click but in that area at the back of our head that causes us sometimes to do something outrageous, I feel the colors may not click but they are meant, meant for each other even if only for this site! Goodbye usability! :)

The reason also why I'm no longer changing the design of this site as frequently as before is because it could take more than a day for me just picking colors. Background color, font colors, text colors when linked, colors of linked text when hovered.....whew, I'm OC that way, it's scary. And I feel I don't have enough time...well except for today.  The cute little chicks banner image above are from my old rickety but still reliable Olympus C740 (soon to be shelved!), taken during my farm trip in Batangas together with my father.  The quoted text is my motto for this year, 3 words that constantly move me whenever I silently utter it.  Dear friends, stagger onward, rejoicing! :)

My thanks to the company of KFC's fun and hot shots and a pint of Coke Light, the Color Wheel (which I messed up), and Pogs' endless rants over ym.