Realizations

If I were to go back to all those stuff I worried about in my youth, I'd be laughing instead of worrying.
Because I know that there are far more important things that actually matter in the long run.

If I were to go back to all those opportunities I found as unnecessary, I'd take them.
Because I realize that some things only happen but once and can't be relived over again.

If I were to go back to all those moments that I thought were unspecial, with people I always see, I'd treasure them more
Because I realize that those moments happen but once, afterwhich they can only be remembered

If I were to go back to all those fights that I thought I had nothing to lose, I'd patch them up as fast as Ican
Because I realize that the wounds get harder to heal as time goes on. 

If I were to go back to all those times I loved, I'd love even more
Because there's no such thing as enough when it comes to being passionate and sincere.

But I can no longer go back. Not you. Not anybody.

That's why it's important to look forward with the intention of looking back.

From this moment on I will live like I'm already from the future, gone back, and given the second chance to do things over.

That someday I will look behind and think about all those things that I've done, and  I can smile.

Because I've realized.
 

Where's mah money?

So last week I tried for the first time to issue a cheque to myself. Long story why. Anyway it turned out that my account had been marked as dormant. Apparently banks like to keep your money but not so much. If they find out the account is no longer being transacted on they start pinching money from it bit by bit like fish on a lake nibbling on a dumped corpse.

Yes I'm working on my analogies.

Anyway if you got a dormant account you can't deposit, you can't withdraw, and you can't issue cheques from it. You can't undormant a dormant account. It's still your money but you can only look at it. At least until you go to the main branch and tell the manager there that no, the mob did not rub you off for bad payments and yes,  you are alive enough to withdraw.

So that's what I did.

Lo and behold  the place where my branch stood was now a vacant lot. Many WTFs were had this morning.

So I went to another branch just to check what happened. It did not help that the branch name is BPI Sherwood.

Yes. The king of thieves forest.

Anyway turns out that I wasn't the only one who realized that analogy because the branch relocated to another place near the old place but far enough from corny robin hood jokes.

So I wasnt able to reactivate my account today. It will have to stay dormant fir a while longer. At least until I can figure out how to convince the sheriff of Nottingham that I'm alive and out of corny references.

Gregorian My Ass

Gregorian Chant albums have the most misleading covers. Whereas you'd be expecting a hard-rocking epic doom choir to herald the Ghost of Christmas Post-Apocalyptic Future from the illustration, you'll actually get 50 minutes of men singing in falsetto to the tune of songs like "Kiss from A Rose" and "My Heart Will Go On". That'd be like watching a DVD with an Expendables cover and an Eat Pray Love content.  
 
On a related note, I once entered a strip club that made women dance to Gregorian Chant songs.  It blew my mind. I wonder if Pope Gregory had this in mind when he first thought a bunch of guys singing together in unison would be pretty badass.

Rufo's Famous Tapa Vito Cruz Delivery Number

5220936 You're welcome.

E-Abandonment Issues

Why are people so upset when their phones have new models released in the market "too soon"? Um, hello, sir. Your phone won't stop working suddenly when it realizes it's not the newest bitching product around. If that were the case, we'd probably be treating phone releases like the second coming. Phones will be flying left and right overnight, not because that last phrase makes sense, but because fuck  you that's why.

And if the manufacturer suddenly decides to stop upgrading your OS, your OS won't suddenly die from lack of attention. It's a phone, not a three year old child. By comparison, the S40 has been around since the advent of the 5110. If Magellan had a phone it'd probably have used the same OS. It's still perfectly find today and you can still find shady Armenian yahoo groups supporting cracked Bantumi games for S40 handsets .

Do you go "Hold on! Don't release the November issue of FHM yet! I still have the October issue and it's still perfectly readable!" every time a new magazine serial hits the stand? Because that's what it sounds like when your GS3 is suddenly made obsolete by the GS4.  Listen, the companies don't need your opinion on how long their flagship model phone should stay flagship. If they decide to switch flagship models faster than the CEO's switch trophy hooker-ish GFs, tough shit.

If any it's better for the lot of us. The faster the models get changed, the faster the older ones depreciate, and before long, even Joe Fishball has a quadcore five inch phone that can compute the tax for half of Metro Manila in two minutes.


Oh, there you go. Another update from your favorite phone maker:



Fuck you. The world's not going to wait for you to get sick of your phone. 

Back to normal programming.

Working and Commuting in McKinley Hill (Part 2)

It's been a year and a half since I last wrote about McKinley Hill. If you don't really have enough time to read back or even read this column, the bottomline is still it still sucks wide-open, gaping ass. Here are some of the new updates:

1. There are traffic lights now at the Lawton Entrance. The traffic lights, however serve little than to ensure that there is a traffic jam in the place 24/7. You could exit from McKinley Hill at 3pm or 12am and you'd still encounter the same level of traffic as you would at 7pm in the evening on a particularly crowded payday. The lights do have a countdown mechanism but the countdown clock is covered by trees when approaching from BGC.

2. Pay parking has increased from 50 pesos per 12 hours as of writing to 60 last year, and finally, to 10 pesos PER HOUR starting November 17. That's a hundred and forty percent increase in rates in the span of two years. In another two years, you will be required to surrender your kidney just to pay for the ridiculous parking rates (where are we, Makati CBD?!).

3. Speaking of parking, it is well worth noting as well that two more outdoor parking lots have been demolished, ensuring that everybody crams into the increasingly crowded sole parking lot building in the entire province . The place fills up to the sixth floor as early as 10:30am. Most of the lower levels are still reserved for the elite few (who, for some reason, never really use the slots)

4. The aforementioned demolished parking lots are now immense cavities in the ground that fill up with rainwater during storms, and turn into putrid cauldrons of untreated swamp water in the following weeks, ensuring a uniform smell of depressing decay from Enderun to One World Square.

5. In lighter news, there's now cheaper food alternatives squeezed in between Two and Three World Square. The squeezing part is quite literal, with the place congested and unventilated, as though the inclusion of a slipshod food court there was more of an afterthought than a real consideration of officeworker needs. As proof, just visit the place when it rains. The place is not even 5 months old and it's already leaking harder than Joey Marquez after a drinking bout in AirForceOne. Even by Megaworld standards, that very shitty work right there.

6. For the commuters, the ticketing system issued by the sole operating bus company was at one point extended to illegal uninsured colorum vans and FXs. It's actually an interesting development because reality is, there's just not enough buses to cover the influx and outflux of people during peak hours. Sure, it's illegal and sure, the conditions inside the vans is below par but at least its faster. But if there's anything you can count on McKinley Hill, it's to bust anything good for the commuter. Starting this month, the ticketing system is now exclusively for the elusive buses. If you're using the colorum transports, you're paying 25 pesos, which is 5 pesos more expensive than the buses. So if you hoarded up on the tickets, tough luck.

7. Still no church, drugstore, clinic, or grocery. But that's already a given at this point. Who needs those anyway?

8. The building are starting to show signs of wear and tear and terrible maintenance work. Our office building is no more than 5 years old, yet the pantry walls are practically crumbling from the leaks that are seeping into it from a combined effort from rainwater and drain water of the upper floors.

9. And the worst part of it all is that because companies are continually pouring into our little slice of paradise, the resources, be it food, transpo or pretty much anything else, are starting to get strained and there's very little effort (or even apparent effort) from the administration to address it. With the place looking like it's far from fully occupied, given the current trend, things can only get worse.

10. Speaking of worse, starting this year, the construction of McKinley Hill West has started, across Lawton Ave. Whatever congestion we're complaining about is set to double after another two years. If you're looking into staying here for a long time, you best watch out.

My point in preparing this list is that there are a lot of better places to work in, places where the workers aren't thought of as a problem to be solved or milked for chump change. McKinley Hill could've been so much more awesome than any of those places. But it's not. And the longer that it seems, the more apparent it is that there's no real effort for McKinley Hill to improve for workers and residents alike.

For shame, Megaworld.

When a developer refuses to acknowledge that things have to have development, that's just sad. 

You're No Better

Okay, let's get this out of the way. Senator Tito Sotto sucks bigtime. There's not much debate there. He lies to the public, meanders during tax-paid hours, and  steals in the form of plagiarism and God knows what else. His mustache doesn't help in the good-lord-he-looks-like-a-villain department. People want him out and never heard from again. But then again, wasn't that the same line we were wailing some 10 years ago on the eve of EDSA 2? What was that you said? You didn't vote for him? Well I didn't either. But he's still there. WE obviously didn't do enough to convince everybody else to NOT vote for him again. Democracy isn't just about having a say in something. It's also about freely exchanging your say in something. If you didn't do your part, you're partly to blame. So shut up already.

But that's that and this is this.

Bottomline is, Sotto is in the Senate and we want him out.

"He should act better than that! He's a senator!"

People are once again calling for him to resign for plagiarizing speeches and articles. On Facebook. Using posts/speeches that they probably just jacked from other people, who thanks to the wonders of technology, are automatically attributed to unless deliberately removed from the repost/share loop. We need to get the word out, even if they're not our words or words given to us first hand. Sotto's the criminal. We're the vanguards of integrity.

"He should act better than that! He's a senator!"

Just as a bit of introspection, can we say that to ourselves as well? We who tirelessly repost, retweet, reshare without ever a word of notice or gratitude to the original creator of content? Remember what Sotto said about the Kennedy speech? "I thought it was apt for the moment, so I used it." That's pretty much every reason ever for reposting cats in hats, quotes, and Jinri Park pictures all over the internet. And that's probably your reason as well.

When was the last time you wrote your own speech? Thought up your own quote? Shot your own picture for sharing to everybody that doesn't involve beer, group pics, and jump fucking shots? By comparison when was the last itme you shared something of similar content from somebody else? Do you even remember who actually originally authored the content? Instagram doesn't fucking count.

Face it. You're no better than Sotto. You suck just as much. It just so happens he's a senator and you're not. Which means, shitty as he is, he is still better at you at being shitty and actually thriving from the amount of crap tacked into his personality.

"But he's a senator! He should be better than us!"

Can you even begin to digest how pathetic that sounds? To actually admit that it's okay for somebody to be better than you for god knows what reason, not even in something like a skill, but in something as purely simple as virtuousness, as though having a smaller role in society entitles you to a lower moral baseline.

No.

The only line I'll accept is that "I'm better than that tool of a senator. Which is why he should not be there. Because I can do a better job than that fucker." Something to that line. Because as far as morals and intentions are concerned, there's no reason you should not claim and actually be inferior to Senator Sotto.

Stealing to bring down a thief is just as ridiculous as the original offense.

You have your capabilities. Write your own content or ask for permission.

Be better than Sotto. Be above him.

Then maybe looking down on him might not sound so ridiculous.

Resident Evil 6 : No Main Menu?

Just an informative post. Normal posts will resume next week.

So I finally got around to play Resident Evil 6 last night. I was planning on playing it with my girlfriend but since she was still cooking dinner, I decided to just dick around with the main menu and whatever options are there.

Turns out that when you plug that disc in and the game starts rolling, there will be no main menu. You get thrown into the tutorial/prologue part, no questions asked. Okay maybe some questions regarding brightness etc, but no main menu.

Turns out it's not until you save that the menu appears, a good 15 minutes after the start of the game. What the hell Capcom.

As another tip, do NOT stop playing while going through the prologue. You will just start over again. Just keep playing until the start menu appears.

Next time you boot, you will be taken to the start menu automatically.

That said, happy gaming!