chronos

we come of age and we expect to be nothing short of wiser. we age and behold, life unfolds its mysteries one after the other as we gracefully surrender the things of youth and trade them with things better suited for the journey. at last enlightenment. at last clarity of adage. at last tranquility within, contentment and altruism. at last a love eternal.

we face the dawn mindful of the shadows that we cast. the light that we set our gaze upon is the light guides us to where we might be and is also the light that marks shadows of were we have been. how ever high or below the horizon the light we behold, however short or long the shadows cast, we are stuck between moving forward and going back. stuck in the intersection of time. as tomorrow becomes today and eventually yesterday. despite our longing to weild it with our will. to hold off change or to encourage it is not ours to bear.

time is time whether it be fast or slow. it can haste or delay but never with complete alacrity or procrastination. ever still and ever in motion. we are stuck in an hour glass until our sand runs out.

"sleeping the day away" was a myth. it was something that i sometimes wished for during times that i had nothing to do and staying awake became a bore. i never thought i would live to see someone give a more comical sense to it so you would imagine my horror at proving myself wrong.

22 hrs and 15 mins. that's how long i shamefully slept yesterday. it might have been a miracle that i stayed awake while eating lunch..

when friday came i was a bit restless for the 18th hour. we were playing tennis. cy, miguel and i. none of us were really experts at it. i might have gotten lessons but that was way back during 2nd year high school and the last time i held a tennis racket was when we were goofing around at the resort's tennis court a number of friends and i were staying in on a christmas vacation at boracay. miguel i think (feel free to say otherwise on this one) had lessons as well but i don't know extensive it was and cy never swung a racket in his life. we weren't expecting long rallies but we played just the same.

when we arrived and stretched, there were some ball runners that watched us a nearby distance but suffice to say that after cy hit the first two balls and they both landed on the other court (that would be over the net, over the place that i was expecting to receive it, over still the tall fence and finally to the empty, unoccupied and unrented court beyond ours), the pack of ball runners found better entertainment watching tv. one samaritan from the pack decided to help us all out without being told to (and we gave him a big tip for his initiative) and we played a rather chaotic mixed doubles (we were actually picking up the balls more than we were hitting them) for 150 mins. in sum, we all agreed that it was good sweat and we were all looking forward to next friday. we went to cafe breton afterwards to cool down, have some tea and crepe and talk company matters.

no wonder i had to sleep for 22 hours and 15 mins. i must have worn myself out running around the court, picking up balls, swinging air and flexing my tummy muscles from laughing my head off at our individual stunts.

we're playing tennis again this coming weekend and ebi (cy's older sis who also had lessons before) said she'd come. i just hope i won't sleep as much the day after.

3 hrs and 57 mins of doing nothing. who would've thought that i'd be complaining by now? really i confuse even myself sometimes. after pulling the shades up and hooking my earphones for classical music access, i stare at the clouds like i always did during high school. i mull my life over and i wonder about things i usually do when i get the time to. light and shade and the tricks lighting can play on our eyes. perspective. nothing more than an illusion...

i want to be a gosu designer. but currently, i'm a developer. and as such, i concern myself with syntax, api, best practices and optimization. is it perhaps of my personal experience that i expect at least the same courtesy from other technical persons in the field? i guess it goes without saying that people who call themselves developers and do nothing of the items stated above are trouble. in all honesty they should switch to another profession and steer clear from me (preferably, they should be absent within a meter's radius from me.. physically and virtually).

i guess my ranting about them proves that i have been exposed (unwillingly of course) to these so called techies. and it is for my better health i suppose that i vent about them here.

1. abu and his henchwoman with their cryptic english ( i wonder if they created an art of unintelligible, loosely constructed english? not of course that i'm saying that my english is perfect, but at least it's functional...) and worse, their incapacity to implement a simple mechanism to wrap information in xml (and they were given the wsdl too!!!!) in a programming language they testify to have been using for years. idiots. it took me less time to write a script in asp, a language i didn't know and they supposedly mastered. honestly, i did in 4 lousy hours (and i didn't even file it as overtime) what they had been trying to implement for the past 3 days. they must have missed something in their english... oh what was that abu? can you hold? i have to decipher that one. i'll get back to you later.

2. jon, who procrastinated a whole month before testing what i had rushed to deliver to him: a working shopping cart system complete with integration and layout. and who changed his eAccess password without informing me. you wouldn't believe this guy. i asked him several times over if he happened to change the password because if he did, i have to tweak the config file of the app and upload it again. he said no. but then why was the system which i had tested and worked flawlessly having errors now? the error message was a telltale sign that the error persists during sign in. that's a no brainer. it's either the sign in name or the password. since the sign in name is within my control, by the process of elimination it must be the password. but he didn't change it... or didn't he? i tried logging in to his eAccess account and bingo, username and password do not match. i reset the password and tried testing the app again. and it worked, flawlessly as expected. so much for not changing the password. why i oughta...

3. telesforo, my latest pain. who incredibly made it to tertiary education without knowing how to read. honestly, the point of documentation and in-line coding/comments are fairly obvious. they are to be read. yes, that's R E A D tele. very good! templates, although they are to be the bare minimum of anything, in this case the integration script, should still be used accordingly. don't expect to copy and paste it in your code and expect a fully functional app afterwards.

my point is, being a developer requires certain codes of conduct as well. read the comments. understand the code. do whatever it is that you can do on your own before finally asking for assistance. if you are on a deadline, don't pull me in to the mess. don't let me code for you. you are a technical person, you can do that on your own. technical assistance is fine. but being asked insipid questions whose answers are just beyond the // is not just annoying. it's insulting to both your hard work and profession.

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional