Rhetorical eloquence.
First of all, I’d like to start this blog entry by a simple conversation I’ve had with Gwen minutes ago, while I was thinking of what I’m supposed to be writing here. She told me what my intro should be; the four-liner chat log says everything about it:
8:41:36 PM Foster, Gwendelyn: i really don’t know what to say
8:41:39 PM Foster, Gwendelyn: but i want to blog
8:42:52 PM JMacalinao: tapos… (Translated: then…)
8:45:25 PM Foster, Gwendelyn: then say random things
Then random things I shall write! Although my Twitter basically says everything about what’s happening in my day-to-day living, including my replies to other people’s actions, there are also things I haven’t included there.
Like this site, for example. First off, I’d like to thank Mallory for changing my link on her site, without even telling her what my new site is! It’s either she has meticulously psychic powers, or she basically looked at her comments, where coincidentally, I posted one. Second, I got Janine to post my link on her blog, because I basically told her to. That’s three links in total now. Come on, guys, I need a lot of your websites — and traffic — on my site! Heh. (I’m thinking of putting up my host’s link here too. I really have to thank Jonathan for hosting my sites.)
I haven’t thought of how I would implement my portfolio page, but I do know WordPress is going to do the rough job for me, setting up all those page. Structure, and as always, content are the big problems in this portfolio.
Things haven’t been going so well with our software project, EASE@Haven, mainly because of the bombardment of documentations and the lack of development man-power. The interface is almost done with their main functionality intact, but the other part of functionality that we all love, the error checking part, is so difficult to implement in the system, that I had to force myself to use plugins along with the already easy jQuery library. I hope we get everything ready by this Thursday.
Other projects have been bugging me lately, too, like the microprocessors/microcontrollers project. We had to do a bicycle speedometer using a sort of old-ass microprocessor (M68HC11). Since I’m doing all the programming (in freaking assembly code), I shouldn’t have the problem with how I’m supposed to work the program with the circuit. But it seems we haven’t done anything about the circuit itself, which is a bummer.
Oh, and don’t forget all the papers we have to submit in the coming days! They’re falling on us like hailstorms!
As for my iPhone updates, I’ve upgraded it to the recent 2.0.1 firmware. Nothing new. What’s new is the extraordinary theming you can have when you’ve jailbroken it and installed WinterBoard. It’s basically like SummerBoard on steroids, because its theming capability is so amazing. Who knew that you can make a theme that changes — no, animates — your wallpapers in your homescreen! Definitely blown away on this one.
Hmm… Looks like only tech and academics are the only stuff I can brag and/or rant about for today. Other stuff have been full of dullness and false alarms in the past month, although I can’t complain about them now. I’ve already done that in the past five years, and I can’t afford being a broken record. (Yes, being one is a waste of time and money.)
The 8th of August of 2008 is a lucky day, can’t say anything wrong about that. It’s just the case of where the luck is going (or went, since it already occurred to you).
Edit: It’s officially 11:11PM while I’m writing this. I wanna greet my cousin Jacque for her twenty-third birthday today (August 11th). I almost forgot it until my Friendster birthday e-mail alerted me. Hurray for unsolicited e-mails!
One La Salle? Hell yeah.
[I'm posting this during the class.] What happens if you guess your answers (by picking one of of the three choices) in a TREDTRI quiz and get twelve out of the fifteen questions correctly?
You get this pin!
How “School Days” and “Higurashi” can change my life.
Okay, so these are anime. One of the best, actually, but the main reason why I think these will change my life is not because they are the best, or that they depict my actual situation. (Actual situation is soooo far from it, I cannot emphasize it enough.) But before I state my reason, let me tell you what these anime are.
Both of these anime have some things in common. In the pro side, both appear to have concepts of friendship and love. In the con (or not-so-con-for-me-now) side, they all have bad endings. Not just bad, subtle endings, but the endings where you actually see sharp, stainless steel kitchenware, and liquids actually flying out of people’s bodies — and in different colors too (black and red, take your pick). Both anime have the same number of main female characters. (Although, School Days have more total female characters.)
The difference of the two series are the male protagonists. School Days’ Ito Makoto is a good-natured, but indecisive womanizer, and Higurashi’s Maebara Keiichi is a once-paranoid person that led him to murder his friends. (Thank the eternally repeating June 1983 because that’s the reason why he realized his mistakes.)
And now, the reason. Well, there’s none. There’s no particular reason why, but after watching these, there’s a weird feeling inside me that forces me to look at better things in life. It might be because of those murder/suicide things, but for comparison, these “weird feelings” don’t occur when I watched Death Note. It might be the female characters, but Negima! has enough girls (31, plus several other minor characters, to be exact) for my sensitive eyes to devour on. Probably the concepts of love, but I can just watch Bokura ga Ita so I can cry. Maybe it’s the combination, I don’t know.
These two anime have this weird effect. When I watched the whole first season of Higurashi (composed of 26 episodes), this effect went on for two and a half weeks. School Days, with 12 episodes, six days. This effect that I’m talking about is the change of my state of mind. It just — changes. I feel more composed, and less depressing thoughts are made. Heck, it even made me productive in academics (INTROSE recitations, for example)! Kinda ironic, don’t you think?
The disadvantage is the length of effect, or lack thereof. If there is something (or someone) that can act like a lifetime life-changing object without killing me, then by all means, I’d accept.
What’s EASE?
Since my professor in INTROSE has (sort of) approved our project, let me actually tell you what this EASE thing is all about.
Basically, EASE is short for “Enrollment and Accounting System for Educational Institutions.” In the logo above, there’s the EASE thing, plus the @Haven, telling the visitor that it’s made for Haven Montessori (a school founded by my mom). That’s basically it: A software that will help my mom have more vacations, than to have more stressful nights. And to prove to my mom that this is what I’ll do when I go to an actual programming job.
Right now, I’m thinking about doing it in HTML/PHP and MySQL, all in a cool SSL layer, just to be “secure.” And probably one part of it in Java, then the database located on and off-line. Sounds cool, right? Well, let’s see if we can actually do that.
Oh, yeah. I’m starting to do some prototypes. Like, interfaces. Web interfaces. What fun. (You can obviously see why people don’t take me seriously. Even in…)
Half-way there!
Two more hours to go.
It was like only yesterday when I first stepped into the not-so-sacred grounds of the university, that I still cannot believe that I actually passed here. All those days where I struggled to pass course subjects, thinking negatively, but in the end, literally shouting out in the corridors because of good news, seems to be repeating themselves over again. I don’t know why that fact is interesting in itself, but heck, it’s fun.
It’s also fun that you forget what you’ve learned. All I know is that Reimann sums are pure bullshit. Exact math, yes. They’re helpful, yes. But the fact that I’ve forgotten them that easily is enough to make me think that it’s bullshit. Correct?
I even forgot how to program effectively in Java! Jeezus! That’s the exact reason why I want MPs.
About the Picture:
Current iPhone homescreen. Used an iPhone application called ScreenShot. Current number of icons in homescreen: 44.