so far, so good

i haven't studied and crammed like this since college. a week done and a week more to go. here's a screen capture of my gradebook for ccna1 (click on the image to view a larger one). like i said; so far, so good. hope i do as good or better at ccna2.

a rather hasty update

So obviously, I've been veeeery busy. How busy? Not to be able to post re my bday kind of busy which means i'm basically booked till 2008 cause my bday was soooooo blogworthy (thanks of course to my dear dear cy). My CCNA training starts next week which means more unmanageable stuff for me to try to get through alive. Anyway, enough of my whining. Here is the 411 on my latest developments:

projects (all in UPStrat):
1. Mira - nth iteration
2. Ledgit - closed beta
3. manilaeats - first iteration
4. Hedgehog - zero feature iteration, yet to make concept

school:
1. CCNA1 and CCNA2 Instructor Fast track training at UST - this is basically Cisco Networking stuff. Oct 16-31 ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
2. Basicon - midterms on tom
3. Netopsy - project spects to be given out tom in preparation for my 2 week absence due to item 1 under school (OB of course)
4. MS - after this term, my 75% discount on my MS tuition kicks in. To start my MS next term or not to start?
5. BIR project - prototype up. process side is still screwed thanks to the indecisiveness of the BIR peeps. Every time we set up a meeting, it becomes nothing but a whining session/character assisination/political bickering. Which translates to a 3 hour meeting worth only 30 mins of information that will help us move on with the project.

personal:
1. still have to make cy's surprise in time for his bday which falls on a CCNA training day T_T
2. yet to make cy's surprise for our anniv which is 19 days away and falls on the last day of the CCNA training (dammit)
3. yet to have a massage, hot oil, pedicure and manicure and my eyebrows threaded
4. yet to finish reading making and breaking the grid
5. spanish class: have to catch up
6. violin lessons start as soon as CCNA training is done (free thanks to sir raffy! ^^)
7. still have to dress up researes.com which cy bought for my bday as a surprise
8. still have to port blogs to researes.com and develop back end functionality

dota:
1. last hero used: furion
2. last game played, last night (tsk tsk tsk)
3. until CCNA is done, my dota playing days will be on leave

So if my blog remains unupdated for the next couple of weeks, don't be surprised. Try to contact me though if it still is in 2 months. Maybe you'll find my corpse in UST. In case you do, please don't forget to put in my tombstone 'Died in CCNA training. Damn you Cisco.'

Thanks.

vientitres

23 is such a big number, especially if you've had unrealistic expectations from yourself- when you've estimated to have already climbed a comfortable spot away from the novices in a corporate setting, when you've imagined yourself to be living on your earnings complete with a fat bank account, a pad of my own and a car to boot, when you've told yourself to have already started wedding plans and other whatnots.

Yes, 23 is a big number. Enormous. And just looming to uncomfortably near.

A couple of days from now, my eldest brother is going to celebrate his 27th birthday and I'm sorry that I couldn't possibly be physically present to celebrate such a feat with him. Five days after he celebrates his 27th birthday, I'll be turning 23.

I have no qualms with getting old. I do however have some rather unsavory thoughts of getting old without getting anywhere. At 23, I'll be nowhere near a comfy spot from the noobies in a corporate environment. Instead, I'll be assistant lecturer in the academic scene and a co-founder of a software company that specializes in cutting edge web based solutions. Both an incredible feat to some but when compared to the goals i set upon myself to achieve during my college years, way, way out of point. At 23, I'm living off my own salary in the sense that I get to pay rent, the association dues, the utility bills and a dsl subscription without asking for a cent from my parents but I am nowhere near having a fat bank account and a pad of my own. I have a car but technically speaking, it's a conjugal property with Cy so I wouldn't dare classify it as mine alone. And lastly, the plans of walking down the aisle are there but Cy and I have talked about saving up first despite questions of his family members about when the big date is finally going to pop up. I blush everytime. Cy grins everytime. But plans are not wedding plans until you get gowns fitted and menus ordered.

So here I am, days away from facing the day when I wake up and it'll be another whole year for me. And judging things based on my previous expectations, I am one utter failure. But unexpectedly, it doesn't bother me as much as the thought of getting and heading nowhere did in my college years. I have a dog that adores the path I walk on (not to mention my laundry basket and basically anything I leave lying on the floor), a loving and understanding family that misses me whenever I forget to phone home, an endearing bunch of soon to be in-laws who worry about me as much as my family does when I get sick, college and high school friends that keep in touch and of course, a love of a lifetime. For me there is one man and one earth and thus, I live only once. And if that doesn't count as something grand, then perhaps nothing ever will.

la lluvia

tengo gusto de él cuando llueve. i like it when it rains. tengo gusto de despertar a él. i like waking up to it. i like the cool that invades my room, making the airconditioning unnecessary and next to useless. inutil. i like the fog sticking to the windows, the coldness of which seep through your skin, stealing your warmth in the natural laws of heat transfer, as soon as you dare to touch the once clear glass, now beaded with drops of rain. some, succumbing to gravity and falling, bumping those on its way down to form a bigger clear sphere. more certain of going down. abajo. siempre abajo.

mis sentidos quiero siempre la lluvia. my senses always romanced the rain. and i am forever eager for its return the moment it withdraws. always greedy for it to stay. eternally lustful of it when it is away.constantly and decidedly selfish to those who do not share my sentiments. it is, after all, the closest piece of heaven i can attain as a prisoner of gravity. heaven in so small a package. tan pequeño un paquete.

it is to my ignominy that i admit that there had been a time that i wished for the rain not to come. i wished for it not to find me, caught so unaware as to be drenched and helpless and eventually shivering from cold. my feet, that of which i am so conscious and careful about are reduced to nails whose underneath pale a violent violet. the arch no longer white and creamy, but a lump of veins threatening to bulge themselves out of my skin. una qué vergüenza. shame, that i have to admit all those, even to myself. i had come to doubt that perhaps the reason that i love the rain is probably because i never saw both its sides. when i was in highschool, i was driven to and from school. and i never had the inconvenience or the adventure of commuting. in college, my dormitory was but a pedestrian cross away from school and i had discovered to my convenience, routes that shielded me from the rain. i had loved. but i doubted that love because for a moment, i thought i only did love the rain because i saw only, as i rarely do, the good side of it. i thought that perhaps, i had nursed that thought until it grew into a full affair.

out of the two years since i left college, i had to commute via the mrt then the lrt just to get to school. where i would spend two hours on my lecture classes and stay for just a while to catch up on the latest developments of the BIR project i was assigned to. and ever since the tropical depression, my rides became an adventure. a game of hide and seek between me and the rain. that which i loved. i became wary at the signs of rain at the sky. i became irritable when i got caught in its wake. and i finally admitted that perhaps, i had loved blindly.

and i finally admitted to cy that perhaps he was right. that perhaps, i only loved the rain because of my one-sided perspective of it. most people would gloat over a victory. spread it thin until it becomes inappropriate to the point of irritating and rub it in. pero no el. no el. not him. not my cy. he, well we, bought a car. his family's car more specifically since bob was planning on buying a new one when he gets home come august. a 2000 Civic model of Honda make, manual transmission just as we both like it to be. it's second hand but it's well maintained and i have no complaints about its engine. a few scratches and scrapes here and there but it's of no real consequence. no es importante. what matters is that cy and i can go where we need to be, safe and comfortable. driving each other around. it's our biggest conjugal property as of date.

pero esto no está sobre ése. it's not about the car at all. it's about romance. and the infinite chances that exist despite the smallest of possibilities. to cy i am thankful. because he gave me back the rain. and i nothing if humbled.

kudos to you my cy. te quiero para siempre.

Son of ..

Mac. That's exactly what it means. In the realm of names, Mac is used in family names to indicate that you are the son of . You know those posts where people try to enrich your education by giving you a vast history of something? Like the history of names for example? Well this is not one of those posts.

Far from the depths of general knowledge, this is actually nothing but a shallow status report. Brief at its best and if not, descriptive at the least.

So I'm still trying to get myself used to Mac OS. Being a Windows user ever since I got my hands on a PC, I'm telling you this is no trivial task. Learning is hard. But I guarantee you that unlearning things that you are so used to that they have already become second nature is harder. This is so reminiscent of my fumbling Dvorak days where I traded in my Qwerty keys back last year's summer. Now, the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog is equivalent to yd. 'gcjt xpr,b urq hgmlo rk.p yd. na;f eri Completely keyboard gibberish wouldn't you say?

Anyway, taking a stand requires sacrifices - a lot if you are swimming against the current. And the current is Qwerty and Windows. Here's a typical scenario whenever Cy and I go to a lan shop to kill people. Not actually kill them per se' but pawn their heads for gold in a game called Defense of the Ancients, more popularly known to the masses as DOTA. So anyway, the moment we get to time in, the first thing we do (almost like automatons) is to go to regional settings and add Dvorak as a keyboard input scheme. Why not use Dvorak for our hotkeys, changing every hotkey would require some hacks on several files and besides, the convenient remnant of our Qwerty is surprisingly enough to press the right hotkeys. Translation: we're too lazy to edit the right files and change them back before we leave as courtesy to the next user.

So away from my digression and back to my point (it seems that lately I've been having a lot of 'points' and I'm beginning to wonder if it's a good thing or a bad thing). Trying to ditch my Windows habits and trying to crawl my way in to getting what I want done is sluggish. But there are improvements. I'm trying to get a lot of materials, podcasts, videos etc that would help me jumpstart my Mac prowess (note to self: riiiiiiighhhhhhhht). Oh well, pain is pain if anything at all, I still have my desktop pc booted with Windows. Anyhoo, I did say that I adapt, easily.