Shaky over Quake-y

I really hate earthquakes. These natural occurances fall under my most-unwanted list (which also includes tornadoes and hurricanes).

Anyway, a great part of Luzon was rocked by one around mid-day and although the tremor was not that strong (magnitude 4.2 on the Richter scale), the terror it caused is still justified to an extent. Yup, it was rather minor but if one will consider what a certain email that I received this afternoon implies, things may get more than a bit freaky.

I received an email at around 4PM saying that the quake that rocked the country today may be a part of a series of earthquakes that began last week. I don't know how accurate the facts in the said email are, but if they really are, the quakes seem to have originated in the Latin Americas last week and traversed eastward until it reached our country.

I won't deny that the possibility scares me.

TRIP: Tales of Graveyard Duty

So I now find myself (again) with nothing to do as there are no problems in the gateway. Yup, times like this are preferable over other scenarios. Good thing I don't feel sleepy now, lest I fall asleep here on in front of the PC.

When I started this blog, I decided that I would post as frequently as I could for two reasons: 1. Readers come back frequently if they know there are regular updates; 2. Writing regularly keeps the skill as sharp as possible.

A few months ago, I made an entry (or perhaps, two) under the Totally Random, Incidental Post (TRIP) category so as to keep myself writing. For the past few weeks I've gotten quite lazy updating this blog, so I only posted what I considered major updates regarding myself and totally decided against posting anything random.

But inactivity is not always good, right? I mean, if you've been sleeping (almost) the whole day, you'll be yearning to do something right?

LATA: Schedule Shifting Powers

It's been quite a while since I posted something about life in teh ACeS and I suddenly find a bit of time to update my blog. Couple that with something I had been working on since yesterday, and you have this post. :p

Owkay, I'll try to minimize my tendency to beat around the bush and go right away into business. For those who still do not know, a gateway facility like ACeS should be manned 24/7 and to ensure that, we need to devise (and of course, follow) a shifting schedule amongst ourselves. Well, I've been making those schedules for the most part of 2007 (we used to take turns in devising the monthly schedules, actually) and the hardest month for which to make a schedule is of course the last month, December. Talk about grand finale, huh?

Who will be on duty? - the perpetual question here in ACeSThe reason for that is the fact that the team would want to celebrate the holidays with their family. As we have both Christmas and New Year coming within a week of each other, coupled with a few company activity, the question that lingers is of course, who will be on duty?

I've managed to create a shifting schedule that could quite comfortably suit us, but I expect it to go through the hardest deliberation that the ACeS team will ever witness. LOLz.

Of course, there's still the omnipotent, "Schedule Shifting Power" (SSP from hereon), which allows members of the team to adjust even the most un-adjust-able schedules. As everyone has shown year round just how powerful their SSP is, I won't be surprised if mayhem starts soon. Hehe.

o_o;

More stopovers

My renewed addiction to RO had taken much of the time I could have likewise spent in updating this blog. :p

Yeah, yeah, more stopovers. I just don't feel like writing these days.

Teh adventures of Mantis-Man

I said in my previous post that I'd stop to smell the flowers coz I seem to be taking things at a rather speedy pace. Well, sad to say, there hadn't been many flowers to sniff back at home. Good thing that Dad gave me something else that I think may suffice. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Mantis-Man:


From Dad's back (wherein he first landed) he found his way into cyberspace. Yeah! Here's another pic:


To tell the truth, I hate these insects when I'm leveling my mage in the Louyang fields of pRO's Valkyrie server. They're aggressive and too much of a pest. But though they look so creepy in real life, I still find this rather old mantis kinda cute. So here are a few more pics:


Feeling a bit camera-shy...


And this, I presume, is their way of bidding their farewell.


Til next post! :p

To take things slowly

Random fact about me: I'm a slave driver :p

I always expect the best from anyone or anything. When it comes to gadgets and techie stuff, I become even more demanding. I always go for the fastest device my budget can afford, and my new PC is just that.

Frankly put, I'm yet to find a PC that can cope up with my multitasking skills, or my slave driving tendency. :p I subject every gadget I get my hands on to the worst stress I can think of the moment, and PCs are quite unlucky enough to be tasked to run graphics-intensive games while downloading stuff, surfing through the web, and blogging. And yes, my new PC gave up on me when I tried to have it run RF Online and Pangya simultaneously. >:3

And then there's my other heavily-burdened, overly-driven cellphone. It's loaded with the usual stuff I'd need in my daily grind, and it's no longer just a cellphone coz I use it mostly as an MP3 and movie player.

Owkay, enough with beating around the bush. These days, my cellphone is hellishly slow that even creating text messages is taking a bit of time. Nope, make it a great deal of time (which I don't have the luxury of). I've recently deleted several programs I'm no longer using, and I've lessened the number of videos and MP3s to free up memory (which is not even running low, as a matter of fact). And it's still slow.

As always, my optimistic side comes up with something despite the difficulties and inconvenience. I now take it as call (perhaps from up above) to take things slowly. Lately I've been in too much in a hurry to actually take time to smell the flowers.

And now I'm planning to do just that.

Update: I just remembered that I wasn't trying to run RF Online and Pangya simultaneously when the PC crashed. I was trying to run RF Online while still logged on one user, and I then switched to another user where I was planning to run either Pangya, Freestyle, RO or Perfect World (or perhaps all of them).

Long overdues

My last updates have been posted more than a week ago. The inactivity is largely my fault, as I couldn't redirect my thoughts properly after what happened to LU! Live 2007. I have actually decided, when I put up this blog, that I will never focus on anything negative since I believe that life is too short to continuously dwell on one's problems. Yeah, I'm channelling all my optimism and positive life outlooks on these posts because I've decided that Blue Phoenix will be just that.

It took me quite a while to fully recover from a bit of disappointment over the aforementioned activity (I guess, we were all disappointed) and office responsibilities had not been cooperative with my blogging. But enough of that, I have some long overdue posts that I should have blogged about several days ago.

First things first. When I decided to actively participate in LU! Live 2007 way back a few months ago, it was because I wanted to end my ragnaddiction (or addiction to Ragnarok Online) with a bang. Yes, my love-hate relationship with this game had been going on for more than 4 years already and there had been a point, a few months back, when I decided to finally put things to an end.

Two things, however, had changed my mind over quitting: Valkyrie, the free-to-play server, and the on-going Ragnabattle in the Ragnaboards. Add the fact that I can't find any other game that appeals to my gamer's heart, and I now realize that I'm really not ready to give it all up.

In my honest opinion, LU! should have made Valkyrie a few years ago. If they did, perhaps they could have managed to retain many of their loyal players. But enough of the game talk at this point, coz I'm supposed to focus on what happened during the event.

To get the ball rolling, so they say, we started on the wrong foot. There'd been so much hassle before the event that there'd been a point in the midst of all troubles that I had been numb. I was so impervious to the grief as though I've been injected with strong doses of anesthesia (and the effects are still to wear off, even at this point of time). When I think about it, I did have a great time back then, but I was too numb to actually feel the enjoyment.

So, we didn't sell all our merchandize (which were only a hundred mugs and fifty slim potion replicas), we didn't win the best over-all, nor best RO booth which we were eyeing (but we did manage to get the best Pangya booth), and our cosplay was not so good (*cough* extreme understatement *cough*). Everything didn't work out as planned, and there'd been problems right from the start and up to the very end.

But now that I look back at what I thought had been a harrowing experience, and behold things with an objective point of view, I can see that it had been one of the best experience of my life. There'd been bickerings, but there was camaraderie. Problems sprouted in every corner, but we managed to gather all our strengths together to overcome them. We never had enough sleep, but who cares anyway?

Yes, only by looking at things objectively can one see the great picture. Only now that I finally calmed down and mulled things over with (a bit of) peace in my heart have I realized that I still want to go through the same experience next year. :p

Hayyz, next year, next time. Though I may not be so sure whether I could participate or not, there's still the possibility that I could. So, see you again next year guys! Let's try our best to win then.

UPDATE: Here's a picture of the tarpaulin wherein the guests of the booth signed.

ACeS Survival Guide Part 1

This is one of those posts I've been meaning to put up ever since I started blogging. But it's only now that I find the urge to jot these down, hehe :p

Life in teh jungle is tough. Yeah, yeah, you're probably tired of hearing that from anything and everything about survival so I'll get direct to some major points. I'll introduce a few words that those who wander in this realm should know to be able to communicate properly with the creatures within (LOLz) as well as a some customs and traditions. Well, communication is of utmost significance so I'll tackle it first.

First word: Mutant. No, not X-men, of course. When team ACeS speaks of mutants, we are talking about any food that went through the, you know it, microwave oven. Likely, to mutate something means to cook it using the aforementioned device.

We use the microwave oven to cook anything from eggs, to instant noodles, to tocino. So yeah, we eat mutants for breakfast, and we're probably the X-Men's greatest fear. LOLz :p

Next word: The Chair. Actually, not really a word in a sense. When using the term, The Chair, the topic of the conversation is the sole conference chair in the control room that is pretty handy when you're too sleepy. Alam na. hehe :p

More words to enhance your vocabulary next time, as I'll move on to some important customs that visitors need to be familiar with. Foremost would be, visitors SHOULD have their birthday celebrations everyday. Harhar! (Actually, we're not imposing this one that much. C'mon, we could always celebrate your mom's birthday, or even your dog's. As long as there's ice cream) :p

And then there's the golden rule:

Anything that's on the table is free for all.

Harhar! Don't put it on the dining table if it ain't for everybody! ^_^ More survival tips when I've got 'em in mind.

Not just another planning session

The LU! Live 2007 event will take place a few days from now (quoting GM Tristan, konting tulog na lang!) and my co-organizers are very much looking forward to it. By the way, SniperAngel, Winter Angel, Jhoi Hize, Anna and yours truly will be having a booth for the LU City side event on November 3 to 4. We'll be selling souvenir items like mugs, pins and slimpotions.

Aside from taking advantage of the chance to make some bucks, we are joining the search for the best booths during the event. This is one of the reasons why we've been having regular planning sessions for the past month either on the Ragnaboards, through YM, or in Manila.

Last Saturday (October 27), we had a meeting in order to discuss the designs of our booths, The Twilight Alchemist Pharmacy and LevelUp Gamers' Pad. We are hoping the booths win the awards that are up for grabs (and get the prize money, hehe) :p

We met at SM North EDSA and we discussed everything we could over lunch and merienda (thanks for the sundae, Rainne!) before we went to the LU office in the Pacific Star Building in Makati for an organizers' meeting called by GM Anael. The meeting went fine, although right now nothing of the things brought up during the said meeting seems to be alright. But that'd be for another post which I'll upload later.

What I'd count as the highlight of my trip was a few hours after the meeting in the LevelUp office. I was eating in Greenwich in the 4th flr of SM Megamall when a small girl (about 7yrs old) quietly approached me (I was sitting alone on a rather inaccessible corner) and held out a note. As I don't have a photographic memory, I can only remember snippets of the supposed letter (it was written in Pilipino) and it goes something like this:

Please give me some money so I can buy some medicine for my mother who has asthma...

I was a mildly surprised at first, but I didn't give her any money. C'mon, it was obviously a ploy by one of those syndicates, who capitalize on charitable people for their nefarious means. The family sitting next to me seemed to have noticed her first, as they handed over a pizza slice to the girl, who left abruptly.

Now, you may ask how I'm so sure it was just a ploy? Well, when the little girl walked away (after being shoo'ed by one of Greenwich staff), I saw her join an older tomboy and another young kid. The tomboy (probably around 14 to 16yrs old) immediately took the pizza slice from the girl and placed it inside a plastic bag. The tomboy sent the young girl away again at once, and the poor kid was once again going from person to person, showing the note. I dunno if the family that gave the pizza slice noticed it too.

It's well-known that syndicates use these methods, and I've seen too much of it on TV so I was able to tell at once. But let me say this, seeing it in person will really affect you especially if you least expect it. I've grown to shrug off beggars in bus/jeepney terminals, but seeing a young girl being bullied to submission inside one of the ten biggest malls in the world is something you just don't see everyday.

I'll upload a picture when I update this post. I'm yet to attach the data cable on the PC for my cellphone.

Update: Here's a blurred picture of the three kids.



The one wearing a lilac dress was the one who approached me. Meanwhile, the one with a red shorts is the tomboy who acted as their guard.

Something I can't understand

I believe I'm not the only guy out in this planet who simply can't understand how girls' minds works. I've got girl friends who never tire of asking me about my lovelife, as though their existence depended on it.

I personally don't like to think that their existence does. SRSLY.

Now that I think about it, I'm not too much bothered with the absence (or practical non-existence) of my lovelife. If they'll just consider a few things, such as my being just the average guy, they'd have thought that I'm just not that eligible bachelor who ought to have tied the knot ages ago. Yes, ever since I can remember, I'm just the plain kid who only get the limelight when recognition day arrives. (So what if everyone says that only my brothers are good-looking? They never get to have medals during recognition days, hehe) :pwhy can't guys be sweet to all the girls they know without rousing rumors?

I also can't see why guys can't be sweet to all the girls they know. It seems that when a guy does sweet things to one girl, the other girls would think that there's something going on.

And girls seem to take it as their responsibility to continuously look around, sniffing for whatever they could. In almost every relationship I've heard of, the girls would never tire of suspecting a third party to the point that guys start to have a mindset that they ought to have a fling. Many times I've deduced that it is the girl's fault that the guy got fed up.

To wrap things up, I'll quote a friend of mine who once said, "Girls - can't live with them, can't live without them." Whether of not what he said is valid or not, I may only find out if I find that significant other I still haven't found. And yeah, I still haven't found a likely candidate, in case you still haven't figured it out. (And that is another thing you've got to keep in mind when talking to girls, be direct to the point)