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The fossilization of memory. Sounds too scientific, too pedagogic. Very much like the notes I used to write in Zoology, only in a sentimental context. Note that this blog is a hole in my failing consciousness. Should you leave this blog wondering about things, e-mail me at utakgago [at] gmail [dot] com for questions, job offers, and for-the-lack-of-a-breather e-mails. Subscribe via RSS.

Geek, geek talks.

Maybe this sounds impatient

Hey, no one’s sending an e-mail about that free hosting or domain thing I won last Saturday at Wordcamp. Is that even true? Of course, being the technodumb that I am, I don’t know the difference between hosting and domain but whatever that is - I won one.

Geek talk

I’ve been trying to recall where I was in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath but I failed. Maybe I was stuck in Chapter 9 two months ago and decided to just put it under the mattress. But yesterday, while hauling out t-shirts and shorts and socks from the dorm and bring it back to Bulacan for laundry and all, the book fell from the shelf. Not that it walked all its way up to the bookshelf; maybe I wasn’t really good with recalling where I put my books after I ditched them out of my sight.

So I tried to read it at the bus traveling downhill to South Luzon Expressway but I can’t. I can manage reading even inside moving vehicles and trains and all (but not too long - it also makes me dizzy) but Steinbeck’s masterpiece which, according to critics, is one of the best books ever written, isn’t really that good for me. Maybe there’s an underlying message between its pages and I’m dumb enough not to even feel it - the Dust Bowl Migration sort of makes me sad with all the farmers leaving their farms after fighting for their ancestral lands and all, and the Joads had to leave, made their way to California and then what? I should finish that book before the year ends. I promise.

Now I’m reading Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, my third Murakami read within two months (after the lengthy Wind-Up Bird Chronicles and the magnificently eerie After Dark). His book collections are really addictive for those who would find him a bit of Salinger-like, but I’m gradually seeing the patterns of his stories (though there’s no apparent connection between one of his books to another, though). I wouldn’t like to abandon my other Murakami reads (like Norwegian Wood) but once I got sort of enlightened with his writing styles and got bored of it, I’d murder him. That’s what I did to Dan Brown when I’ve read all four of his books (actually, I left Deception Point unfinished since I knew who the culprit is even before the climax begins). He’s a page-turner, yes, but when you get to know all of his books and starts to wander and ridicule his entire collections of Translatr and Illuminati and other virtual whatnots, you’d really have this desire to debone his fingers just so his writing career would vanish.

And I’m having an itch to buy Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, but maybe it’s a wiser idea to borrow books from HP addicts. Not really a fan of Harry Potter books and movies - I just liked Rowling’s eye for suspense and discovering mysteries and genealogies and links and all. And I know a handful of spells as well - though it would never come handy or useful in the Muggle world, anyway.

Project Lafftrip Laffapalooza 2008

I may not be a humor blogger but I definitely read humor blogs. And I’m glad to participate in this Project Lafftrip Laffapalooza 2008 Humor Blogs contest by Kwentong Barbero. :P

1) Xienahgirl - I need not to say the reason behind this vote. It’s simply self-explanatory. What I really like in this blog are her stories, personally-related stories and ruminations about turnstiles and train stations (and everything that I can’t really put into words and that I haven’t recalled) and job-hunting and everything.

2) The Loser’s Realm - ZOMG, one of his ELONGATE pictures convinced me to vote this guy. It made me laugh big time. (C’mon, you won’t really dare to post a picture like that in your blog.) But don’t tell his boss about his blog–he might be kicked out of his job.

3) Dear Diarya - I don’t know why but his blog posts are humor and philosophical at the same time. It’s a kind of blog who might sound stupid at first glance but really, when you read his thought-provoking posts (and I’m serious–this isn’t paid advertisement, mind you), you’ll start thinking that this guy has the knack to make his readers laugh and think at the same time. Cool.

4) Kokey Monster - lots of intended puns going on in this site (especially one of his latests, entitled Lunukin Mo! for chrissake).

That’s it. I’m too tired to vote for the last one.

This entry was written by Kevin, posted on September 13, 2008 at 11:31 am, filed under 2in1, Books, books, books, Opinion, Pensive shits, Slang and random and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

In case you haven’t heard.

Willful submission

Something’s terribly wrong with me while taking the Macroeconomics exam. Willful submission, I would like to call it. I was at peace. Surrender from the bullets of all those mathematical equations, I told myself. Days ago I have been planning on making homemade bombs made of chicken’s proventriculi soaked in gasoline (a much-celebrated delicacy on the university’s outskirts) that would successfully detonate itself with a button’s click at my professor’s office, hopefully destroying the exam copies or anything to postpone the exam but after thinking about lighting a pack of these entrails I suddenly thought of abandoning the bullshit. In Fight Club, Palahniuk listed on certain recipes for homemade bombs: two quarts of nitroglycerin, orange juice, wood shavings, but my attempt was loosely planned. So maybe I had to take the exam - the awful one-and-a-half hour exam - the exam that made students yelp and grasp for tissue papers in hopes of blotting their bleeding noses.

Where had I gotten myself into? Nowhere. I was really good with theoretical questions, if you want to know the truth, but it only had forty points to push my way out of the pits of hell. The graphical analysis was definitely easy but the computation bored me. I was just skinning my lips throughout the examination the way troubled catatonics would do things like that in this absent-minded way, staring at an imaginary conduit, thinking about morphing this whole dungeon into something else. But - oh well - I failed the exam and I’m sure of it.

After the exam, I briskly walked straight to my dorm and slept for four full hours. This is my vacation.

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Haslett stories

There’s something about short stories that really excites the hell out of me: the length of it. I was about to drill a hole on my laptop reading Murakami’s ‘The Wind-up Bird Chronicle‘ not really because it was exceptionally boring (well, it wasn’t on some parts) but it was awfully long (compared with his short stories, obviously). Also, I can’t see any progress. The scenes down the well goes on and on until it lulls you to sleep. It’s enchantingly weird, yes. It’s definitely this deranged, out-of-this-world kind of novel. But it lacks the suspense. Kumiko’s whereabouts was not yet even mentioned ever since she left Toru’s house on the first few chapters of the novel.

However, Murakami’s ‘After Dark‘ barks the other way around: it’s a short story with seemingly brutal pincers to drag you close to the story no matter how distant you are.

J.D Salinger’s ‘Catcher in the Rye’ for me is a short story (I have yet to know the standards for consideration to render a story short or novel in length). David Sedaris’s ‘Me Talk Pretty One Day‘ is an anthology of wildly entertaining short stories enough to make you laugh pretty longer than a usual Bob Ong book would do (err, I can’t remember myself laughing while reading ‘Ang Paboritong Libro ni Hudas‘). And Jessica Zafra’s ‘Twisted‘ series, of course.

However, Adam Haslett’s ‘You Are Not a Stranger Here‘ is a startling literary debut, somewhat close to Jhumpa Lahiri and her startling Pulitzer prize-winning debut, ‘The Interpreter of Maladies‘ in terms of its approach and its impeccable choice of concepts and storylines. But Lahiri’s work is more of cultural - focusing on Indian immigrants and some third-world stories; Haslett’s work is more of experimental and psychological. I’ve read three stories from his abovementioned anthology of short stories and all turned out to be clasically good and heart-warming (especially the story about this mother who got four digits of her right hand chopped away with a meat cleaver by his meth-drugged son, really dramatic).

Short stories are somewhat made for the hectic and for the work-bloated. When in the mood, I would read these short stories while waiting for a jeepney ride - you rarely miss the story since you can still manage to keep up with the pacing, and the fact that it’s short urges you to hasten your progress (since a back-to-back leaf can be read within a minute) and finish the story.

And oh, it costs forty pesos. One of the million things to love thrift shops like Booksale.

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In case you haven’t heard

Well, I’m sick. I’m having bouts of frustration these days ever since I lost my flash drive (which explains the minimal blogging), my umbrella, my newly-bought lighter and recently, my laptop charger. All of them lost in an entire week. Oftentimes, when these things happen in daily succession as if it contains an underlying pattern around it (chaos theory?), I can’t help but blame things. Probably there are dwarves around. Or thieves fancily dressed and invisible. Or ghosts. Or distractions - yes, probably I’ve had enough exams these days to make me lose the nuts and bolts which were keeping my head intact.

  • The loss of the flash drive was indeterminable: I can’t even remember where I left it, when I last used it (but I can’t help but suspect that it’s in my bedroom). The loss of the umbrella was pure stupidity: I left it on the jeepney ride, but it was really thoughtful of that lady besides me to call me in this hushed, respectful tone as if I was born precisely a decade ago before her: “Kuya, yung payong mo.”
  • So I reprimanded myself and told myself to keep it on my bag, but I hadn’t. I lost it while I was constantly reminding myself to keep it - ironic, I know. I was in Laguna when it suddenly occurred to me that I forgot to pack my umbrella on my bag, so it’s probably sitting on the red-leathered passenger seats of that bus that brought me to Cubao.
  • The lighter got lost after I slept on a friend’s house. I wrapped it on my handkerchief while sleeping and the next thing I know it was gone. Both the umbrella and the lighter were newly-bought: the umbrella was a week old, the lighter lasted for a good hour on my property.
  • I discovered that I lost the charger Tuesday night since my laptop went low-bat and it took me forever to find the charger. Then, it occurred to me that I lost the charger. So the next day I went to the barracks-shaped computer shop and asked the management if ever they were fortunate enough to retrieve a lost charger for a Dell Inspiron 6000 model, black in color. “No sir.” I told them that I was one of the customers that night who was surfing the net using their Wi-Fi. “No sir,” they insisted.

I started calling myself stupid, absent-minded, dimwit, anything else that could demoralize my morale. I’m such a lousy guy who keeps on forgetting things: was it a short-term amnesia that specializes in gadgets? Or may an amnesia for black things? See, my umbrella, my lighter, my laptop charger and my flash drive were all black. Or maybe those were black dwarves..

Then I asked myself: Where will I buy such a charger? Gilmore. Yes, Gilmore, the Mecca for technogeeks. But where will I get money? My Dad would scold me to death for losing four things (three, since the lighter shall not be mentioned ever) all at the same week.

I found the charger Wednesday afternoon at the same house where I lost my lighter. I left the charger there.

This entry was written by Kevin, posted on August 13, 2008 at 7:18 pm, filed under 2in1, Books, books, books, Life at UPLB, Opinion, Stress ball narratives and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

The ever virus-free laptop which had three virus cases in three months.

My laptop’s working full steam now. My ever virus-free laptop which had three cases of virus “infections” for the past three months. One month a virus, probably. The last case was regrettably my fault, since I downloaded some codec or whatever and I accidentally downloaded an “anti-virus” program suspiciously offered after my laptop got the virus - which of course is the culprit. I never thought that among a thousand, or probably a million viruses hanging around the Internet with all those hideous names, one is tricky enough to disguise itself into an anti-virus.

Deviantart Desktop

Probably the coolest Windows Theme I got (courtesy of Alienware). Click to magnify.

I would like to thank Gian, that virus-buster friend of mine - a servicemate, our beloved Sports Writer (ah, the days of being a humble Layout Artist), recently-branded Valedictorian of his batch at my alma mater, now an Atenista in the making - for the impossible help and assistance. And for luring me to play Call of Duty again, of course.

Again, that’s a paid advertisement. After a thirty-minute restless argument we had about this advertising thing (since I practically want a kilo of rice than twenty pesos) - I finally agreed a twenty-peso deal to blog about him. LOL. What’s with rice prices these days?

I am very much excited to blog about the two books I finished yesterday (Haruki Murakami’s “After Dark” and John Le Carre’s “The Constant Gardener“) but due to my clumsiness, the three-page book review got lost after I accidentally deleted it inside my flash disk. And, just so you know, my flash disk - though it has a free McAfee Anti-Virus software (not bad), a Sudoku and a Mahjong game to flaunt - it still didn’t have its own recycle bin. And I didn’t have a copy of it in my laptop.

How cool is that? I thought about that book review for two days - made it as thought-provoking as it could be, even quoted remarkable quotes delivered by the Takahashi or by Justin Quayle, and edited the entire review to perfection!

Maybe at the back of my mind, I intentionally erased the file. But as far as I can recall, I haven’t thought of that.

Anyway, after a while I slightly promised to my laptop not to cause harm towards it ever again. I would not allow project-making, flash-disk overloading third parties who would infect my laptop! Not now. Even if I installed it with a Spybot Search and Destroy, a Crap Cleaner, a Avira AntiVirus, and a Norton AntiVirus 2003, I would not - despite the tight security - allow anyone to infiltrate unscanned softwares and hardwares in my laptop.

That’s why I’m not subscribing to any Internet service for now. I’m writing this in a Notepad, save this in my flash disk/drive, go to the nearest computer shop and post this, and then I make way for DoTA mode. Heh. Better grab the opportunity while I’m still on vacation!

This entry was written by Kevin, posted on May 31, 2008 at 8:05 pm, filed under IRLs, Photos, Stress ball narratives and tagged , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

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