Complaining never gets old

2006-08-23T13:09:00.000-07:00

make no mistake, i am back and alive and reborn. skidiving was the most exhilerating experience i've ever had, and the anticipation was worse than anything i've gone through - ever.just not knowing whether you'll make it out alive is such an amazing feeling. i can only imagine the amout of faith these guys who do it regularly have, or whatever the hell it is that makes them do it on a regular basis. driving there, i saw a few things that a paranoid person could have deemed as signs... a couple of birds were hovering in circles outside the house, and a crow was in front of the car when we were on our way out, not to mention joni's splitting headache when we woke up to go to the place. but then again it was nice and sunny and mostly clear outside so there really was no excuse. i could feel my heard pounding louder as we drove through the most redneck-y houses and mobile homes i had ever seen. on the premises of the place, i really got nervous as there really was no turning back. i met my instructor, bill who was well in his 60's and although it seemed like he was well experienced and fatherly, it kinda crossed my mind that it was quite possible that bill didn't eat right and didn't take care of his heart well. like what if he gets a heart attack or something right in the middle of the jump? it did sort of ease my mind that he told me i'd have an emergency cord to pull in case he doesn't. once we got on the plane, it was a terror i had never felt before. right before jones jumped off i saw such fear in his eyes, and while i myself was nervous as hell, it cracked me up and did relax me a bit... but when it was my turn to step onto the plank, it was like everything stopped for a second... then it was the most awesome feeling dropping down so fast that for a moment i really did feel like i was suspended in air and everything had just gone to a halt. once we went parallel to the ground and i saw the videographer, time started running again, and i was juggling between getting my face on the video and enjoying the experience. it was likewise a rush two days ago from this jump when we went surfing at cocoa beach and i caught my first wave. now i understand why people -- real people, not just the posers i know, get so hooked on it. it was electric when i first stood for a few seconds on my board. that moment was golden as well. then of course i had ridden it too far up shore and when i lost my balance. i smacked my back on the sand but what really hurt was my back from the sunburn that evening.. now back from my florida vacation, i've been thanking god for having such a belssed life. i've gone to so many places, and experienced so many things, absorbed so much culture, that i really feel like i'm one of the luckier souls on this world. the past 12 months have been so full of priceless experiences which is amazing considering how lazy i can be. i'm even more excited that there's a whole lot more to come for me in this life. i'm still alive and so that's what it only means.

2006-08-21T05:26:00.000-07:00

im gonna be skydiving in a few hours! im so freaking excited... i cant wait to experience how that will feel. in a way it's like i'm going into this not sure if i'm coming back...and i guess that's part of the whole experience other than the jump itself... ive been asking myself if ive been the kind of person god wanted me to be and if this will be the day that i join him... im sure he hasn;t set everything up in my life so perfectly just to end like this...it would be like watching the lord of the rings trilogy marathon for the first time and having the movie end right in the middle of the first movie... there just is going to be so much more... all i can say is that I LOVE THIS LIFE I'VE BEEN GIVEN, and i would not have lived it any other way. i love it so much that i want to experience something like skydiving, eventhough it may be the last thing i ever get to experience. i love my mom, my dad, my sister, and my bunchie. just wanted to make sure you guys knew that. well blocking out negative thoughts is another thing in this whole experience, i'll tell you that... more about it when i get back!--and i will! (after i change my soiled diapers)

2006-08-10T21:49:00.000-07:00

i'm so pumped. in a few days, i'll be leaving for florida to chill an relax and enjoy myself before i subject myself to yet another burn-out experience. i keep wondering why people choose to subject themselves to the kind of life where you make your job your life and barely have time for anything? and for what? so you can retire well and THEN enjoy life and your money? :\

2006-08-10T21:25:00.000-07:00

ahh i'm back...this was just too good to pass up.. i was, just a few ticks ago, laughing my ass off watching America's Funniest Videos. I all of a sudden realized that I have not been enjoying life by perennially intinentioanlly missing that show based on a childhood thing that i should not make fun of people's misfortunes. i stuck to it because it made sense for me to not want people to find it funny when i trip. and i'll admit i probably would not be a good sport if that happened. by my god, these videos are freaking hilarious! where have they been all my life? so then i ask myself, have i become too cocky to be all of a sudden the boss of destiny? do i dare claim victory over a long standing bylaw in my own quirky mind? have i grown enough to understand how things happen for a reason and shit does happen? am i now man enough to taunt the karmic forces to remember me once in a while? or am i daring god to crack another joke? the scary thing is that i think it's all of the above. it may happen to me soon, but until then, i'll laugh everytime i recall that fat lady falling from the rope and landing face first in mud...and that man getting hit in the nuts.. or that kid getting poked in the eye..

2006-07-31T23:01:00.000-07:00

im too sleepy to write.. -back to new york -hot as shit -rip off photos -good for nothing new york sales people -heavy as balls AC -all good and cool. -more tomorrow :)

2006-07-26T09:32:00.000-07:00

two days ago, these coned schmucks finally did their job and fixed the blackout. one freaking week to fix everything. people were paying them to sit on their asses and fix what needs to be fixed WHEN a blackout happens. i shouldn't thank you for anything you scumbags. that crap shouldn't've even happened if you guyr were doing your jobs. apparently it IS, like my aussie friend said, "third world." back in manila, sewege problems are fixed only when it floods about 3 feet up, and the freaking local gov't sits on their fat gin busting asses the entire year until next rainy season comes and they start hearing complaints of clogged drains. so much for first world america, new york and coned-- you fucking turds.

2006-07-20T22:04:00.000-07:00

(written July 18,2006 ~ 2345) yesterday really was easily the worst day yet. and i take back what i took back in my last post--i really should use more "fuck yous" when speaking about new york. it started out... well started out from the previous day, monday, since due to the extreme heat, and low voltage, i had not been able to catch a wink... this was probably compunded with the fact that i had downed too many cans of arizona green tea energy drink, but believe me, it was hot as hell, and the fans weren't working right. really new york, i'm impressed with all your dazzling lights, and glamour, and expensive cars, and celebrities, and your incompetence and inability to prevent these kinds of situations. around 7 am or so, i was at my oc still, trying to find something to do when i got an email from a developer i was working with in australia. we had a skype conference for about an hour or so, then i went on to get myself a meal. the voltage had been oscillating again--giving alternating current a whole new meaning-- but compared to last night it was relatively better so the fans were giving out some air. i had taken about three more showers by 9 am, and was feeling a sleepy after a full night's non-sleep. i was able to catch an hour or so of rest before i woke up again due to the heat. i tried working a bit, but i was just too fatigued to focus, so i was just browsing around the net and found that the high today would peak at around 3 pm.. great. i got through 3pm okay, and had decided, after 2 more showers, that i would go and try the gym 6 blocks from my place, on a free 2-week trial. i knew i should not have brought a backpack, for it turned out that i really would not have any place to store my stuff. if only the stupid window repair guys had not misplaced the padlock i had placed on the sil, i would have brought it. long story short, i lost 40 bucks from my wallet when i left my backpack on top of the lockers. that shady ass janitor holding my bag when i went in to check probably took my money, though i really could not blame the guy since it was my fault i left my stuff outside. i forgot to mention that at around 4 pm, the cable went out...no tv, no internet... okay maybe those assholes at rcn were fixing something and it would be back soon.. 45 minutes and 15 more on the phone on hold with rcn, there was still nothing, and i was starting to find the whole thing amusing. jokingly, i muttered that the only thing lacking for this to be a real joke was for the power to go out. i decided that when i get home from the gym and find that the cable is still out, i'll be off to dc to stay over at my girlfriend's that same evening. true enough, those bastards at rcn couldnt give a time it would be back up, nor could they give an explanation.this was about 8 pm, and the power was even lower than the night before. the bulbs could barely give off light, and even the low power fans weren't working anymore. this was fucking bullshit. fuck you new york. fuck you astoria. fuck you rcn. fuck you con ed, you motherfuckers. so much for first world usa and city of all cities new york. fuck you you worthless dump. i dont know why people heart your dirty, arrogant, and unprepared ass. after an hour i was grabbing everything i could under practically moonlight because the lamp was barely giving off any photons. after about 20 minutes i was at the train station waiting for the train to take me to penn station. of course if these idiots running the trains were doing their jobs right i would have made the 10:05 train to dc. around three stops down, the train was stallled for 20 fucking minutes because the guys at the nest one were miscommunicating with the guy running my train. these imbeciles. fuck you too MTA. im glad your asses were fined 3 million dollars for that strike.you should have been fined more you incompetent boobs. i was thinking of just going back to NYU to try to catch some sleep til the next train at 3 am, but i decided to go to penn station anyway to gamble on the idea that maybe new york was so fucked up that evening that the train wiuld be delayed. true enough it was! ahh finally one good thing came out of this fucking mess, thank you god. i was out of hell. today, i found out that astoria had totally lost all power. fuck you new york. fuck you con ed. the tax payers and customers have been paying you to sit on your fat asses to not plan for these kinds of sitiations. there goes my 2 week supply of meat. i really wish i could move out of new york and just live in a better city.

2006-07-17T23:44:00.000-07:00

sorry for my last post... i shouldn't have used "fuck" that much.. the power just dipped again and killed my pc a few minutes prior to this posting, so i am once again fuming.. but anyway, ok this is interesting...apparently, someone scriptkiddy-ishly rewrote a friendster page to contain script that allowed passing name=value pairs to friendster urls to send a message, request to be added as a user, and repost the bulletin board message to spread the thing. the posting looked like this: Subject: boob flashing of famous mestiza model in embassy last sat Message: Fresh pix from the said incident last saturday at embassy bar is finally out. This famous mestiza commercial model and product endorser was doing it all for the camera, last sat night at embassy bar. Based on the sources this mestiza chic was apparently drunk and wasted at that incident, making her careless.. and bra-less if I may say... For sure you know this famous mestiza model. Almost 20 pix of the said incident are posted on this friendster link, check it out before they pull those naughty & mestizalicious pix out. check it out at www.friendster.com/embassyvip the unlikeliest people were posting it--multiple times even, so i decided to investigate. I downloaded the code, and did a diff. i found javascript functions to POST the urls with the uid of the poor fellow this guy was trying to spam, and posted the following on my friedster bulletin board: RE: boob flashing mestiza post....READ THIS Message: people, don't open this or try to load it. i did a diff on the file and found that it does the ff each time you load it: 1) sends a smile to friendster user id: 9613366 (from you of course) 2) sends a request to the user named: jhay-jhay gutilban (consistent with the user id mentioned above) to be added as his/her friend 3) reposts the thing on your bulletin board with the link. (i.e. someone who posts once -- hmm okay, okay curiosity maybe ..but someone on your list posting more than once, REALLY wanted to see those pics!... tsk tsk... nahahalata yung mga manyak :P ) I don't know if it's just to annoy jhay-jhay, or jhay-jhay actually wrote it. but aside from these, i don't think it does anything else (i haven't looked any deeper into it.. waste of time imho). so, please avoid opening this to save our bulletin boards from spam, and more importantly your reputation :) interestingly, the guy usedsome tool perhaps from the friendster page hacking site mentioned in the code (not worth dignifying here) to try to obscure the functions, but all it did was change the non-alpha characters to some form still readable by the browser. what gave it away was that the words were still there... :D amusing though... what's more interesting is how much people were reposting this on the bulletin board! (i.e. how desperate some were to see it :D )

2006-07-17T20:22:00.000-07:00

what the fuck.i cannot even begin to describe how pissed and baffled i am at this city. the fans have been running slow, im on my laptop right now, typing this on frigging word because my freaking desktop turned off twice in the last hour, and the damn cable modem dozed off like 6 times in the last half hour. and as i type the lights are starting to dim down again. what the fuck is wrong with this picture. okay so it's the hottest day of the year and everybody’s at home, cranking up the ac or fans or whatever...im sorry, what city did you say this was? that’s right, new fucking york. the fucking biggest motherfucking stage. the big fucking apple... in what country? oh that superpower freaking usa right? well guess what, rest of the world, new fucking york in the us of fucking a, cannot handle the fucking power demand. how is that i asked myself... well i can google the figures on the economics and the numbers but it still wouldn’t make much sense. how can a city like this, in a country like this not be able to provide the power it needs on a night like this? is everyone else in this place used to this? what the fuck is wrong with this picture? so there was this blackout last year. why the fuck wont the “brilliant” brains of this damn nation take care of the problem? as the fucking power dips yet again, i assure myself that there will be a perfectly reasonable explanation tomorrow morning on amny, or on cnn tonight if my tv manages to keep running. im trying to convince myself that i’ll read back on this post and wonder what ive been writing since i should have done my research first before getting this pisssed. perhaps having taken a lot of ee subjects back in college, im sure i’ll understand the explaiantion down to the delta-to-wye equation. but fuck that. i don’t need a fucking diagram right now. what i need is an answer why this fucking city is having this problem, and why the fuck im paying con fucking ed for my power to dip every 20 fucking seconds. i hope bloomberg of pataki or whoever the fuck it is running this dump, feels this fucking bullshit experience they call living in new york. i thought maybe my last post was a bit harsh on this city. well fuck that and fuck this place.

2006-07-15T22:06:00.000-07:00

talking with someone earlier describing her utter disappointment after watching a childhood favorite, i just appreciated how perceptions early on really affect your benchmarks and standards on things. i remember the exact same feeling i had after watching a dvd re-release of 'the warriors.' before gathering a few spectators i hoped would share in the same dark gore and depravity i remember as a child watching the flick, i warned the involved party of tremendous violence and bloodshed...so much so that it may become utterly indigestible and gruesome and not worthy of a $15 dvd pricetag. i braced everyone in the room, and turned the lights off for the full brutality effect. i was excited for it was not only reliving the most violent movie i had ever seen in my life, but it was the one i found most appealing due to the variety of gangs, and the way each part of new york was given character just by the gangs they represented. Cyrus gets shot and everybody gets hysterical... okay as i recall that looked more chaotic than it seemed... okay the warriors are running... a few close encounters and im still waiting for that darn bloody violence... hmm maybe teh next one will be gory! yummy... okay carry on.... hmm still nothing after a few gang encounters.. man for a movie about gangs in new york in the 70's they sure are lucky to be avoiding all the beatings i think the deserve right about now... bam! finally, an encounter withe the baseball furies! gotta be the coolest gang ever.. okay a few punches and they're out of the park... hmm.. i assure the others watching that there's more bloodshed in store and that the director just had an uncanny sense for building up the excitement. around 7 days later, they get into a fight in one of the subway restrooms.. great, a few punches here and there and they escape... hmm you're makeing me look bad here guys... ahh wait the final scene at coney island.. "warriors..come out to play-yay.. warriors..." with the clicking of the bottles on that bad guy's fingers, i get excited for the climax is about to unfold... the riffs come in.. the witness speaks... the warriors run, and the camera pans away as the riffs pound the bad guy into the sand. great. 2 fights in the whole movie, and a total of 1 drop of blood. it really wasn't all i billed it out to be. makes me think now how some of the other things i remember from my childhood are really what they seemed... my dad for instance is never as huge as i remember him to be, and it always surprises me how short he now seems... burgers in this country aren't as big as i always thought they were.. and interestingly enough, 'Fame' actually sucks.

2006-07-13T23:23:00.000-07:00

exactly 24 hours ago, i was in a cab with zafar on my way to the dc union station to catch a 3:15 to new york. i actually felt kinda sad to be leaving dc. i love the way it's just so clean and uncluttered. i can't help but wonder then why people flock to new york -- with all its dirty streets, filthy as ass subway, expensive cramped apartments, and stores full of salespeople who feel they're the most entitled people in the world. getting out of the train, i had a sudden feeling of familiarity when the smell of new york hit my olfactory glands.i started thinking why new york has the feel that it has for fashion, success, and money. all i could think of was that it was just that it beat every other city to the punch. wall street was established here and so perhaps everything else went on from that, and the fact that americans first immigrants came through new york's ports. that's all freaking new york has over other cities, and now it has such a freaking right to draw such talent and brains and force them into confined spaces. thing is, i would willingly pay more rent and taxes in a clean and orderly city like dc... and that would be well worth my money. i just dont get it... but i'm here and it's because maybe i'll get it someday.. why it's such a terrific place to be in and why generations and generations of people flock to this place. i'm just praying that i get it soon..

2006-07-11T00:08:00.000-07:00

i guess my birthday went well. i wasn't expecting much anyway... the day started a bit late,being exhausted from the previous day's labors. I had one goal yesterday, and it was to see the gospel of judas at the national geographic museum, for it was on its final day on exhibit, and there was no way i would miss a chance to view the actual thing in front of me. i was in awe, to say the least to be in the midst of such an ancient and influential relic -- compounded with the fact that the pope at the time actually had every intention of getting rid of every other gospel, and yet it survived. its ink faint, and it's fibers barely hanging onto each other, it truly was a sight to behold. lucky for the catholic church that this gospel's contents were not as threatening to its foundations unlike the other gnostic writings. a sign was that it barely received as much negatative reaction from church officials as did the da vinci code in which their reflexes by the way were anything short of screaming "oh f*ck, we're slowly being discovered, and now they're gonna start asking questions... our marketshare may be at risk!" -- yeah the corporation is facing tough times.. so anyway, after a few minutes of trying to sneak in a snapshot or two, i stumbled upon a football exhibit, and conveniently enough, a huge projector screen showing the live world cup final, with a couple of rows of bleacher benches on a 10x 10 artificial grass mat. there, i cheered and jeered, until france's hopes dropped like materazzi on that zidane headbutt. if the italian went below the belt and hammered that zidane nerve by insulting his family, team, or whatever it was, then i don't think i would've done differently...that said, i admire him for not taking sh*t from anyone on his farewell game. that's not saying however that i do condone smacking anyone who says a nasty comment about your momma. maybe that seemed like the 'man' thing to do back in high school... but for crying out loud, you are zidane, football legend.. you are way above that. if that italian was low enough to insult your family, then you should not have dignified the bastard with a headbutt... he wasn't worth costing your team or your country's world cup trophy. i would still love to hear what zidane has to say about the whole thing... so anyway, all is well... italy got the well deserved world cup, but zidane got the MVP which he deserved despite his actions... i stayed at home all day today as i got into another freelance gig doing ASP stuff. more tedium than excitement, but more moolah too. done half of the requirements for today, so we'll see how it goes. my aussie counterpart just got back to me today on that design i spent all freaking night sunday doing, and he had some pretty good stuff to say... i'm still interested at this point. all day on tv it was either the world cup incident, or the collapsed apartment building in new york. i promise to have a more interesting day tomorrow when i wake up.

2006-07-08T21:44:00.000-07:00

i spent the last ticks of my 26th year of existence in the driver's seat of a 10 foot u-haul truck, in a harris teeter parking lot in arlington. ain't that special? i used to think my birthdays would get better as i aged..that i'd eventually find myself in some obscene bash with strippers, and tigers, and fire eaters and everybody around me naked.. rather, here's how my day went.... well first off, living and working in a country 12 hours behind where i was born kinda feels like having a day and a half to celebrate your birthday, so mine started at noon today. right about then, i was lifting boxes and wooden ikea segments of house fixtures, and the succeeding hours on the previously mentioned u-haul monster. suffice it to say that the first third of my extended "hello world" anniversary was spent either 65 mph on the i-95, or lifting a junkfood box full of political science text, or a drawstring garbage bag full of polyester. it used to be balloons and toys and cakes and everything nice. and now it's this. scaling everything from 7 to 27, the commensurate adrenaline stimulants and euphoric sparkplugs would indeed be the debauchery and sleaze i described as a "celebration" earlier. why can't a kidlike me just get some hookers an alcohol in a room and have some fun? we'll see how the second third goes... i'm seeing the actual gospel of judas tomorrow, so let's hope i get some enlightenment from that.