Facebook Relationship Status Updates

Most of you guys here have a Facebook account... so I'm sure more or less you'll know what I'm talking about.

I don't know about you guys, but I really, really enjoy reading my friends' status updates. Especially those that say "_____ is now in a relationship"

Never fails to bring up a smile in me.

Just When I've Decided to be Girly for Once...

Luck just wouldn't let me.

Last week my husband decided to buy me a very cute, very handy, very small, and very awesome laptop (yes, I just loved it!). No, it's not my birthday. And no, that's not his present for our wedding anniversary last month (of course he already gave me one, and I'm not gonna tell, like you're interested). He bought the laptop because of one teeny weeny discussion we had over our desktop's wallpaper.

Our pc desktop has always had a picture of The Beatles as its wallpaper. Upon our return to Paris, I don't know what's gotten into Alan's head, but he changed it into a picture of his silly dream car. Of course I hated it. And so a teetytat ensued. Well of course you could say why didn't we have separate user accounts in the first place. Well... first of all, we both hated having to choose our user accounts upon startup. Second, we (usually) both run the same programs, apps, etc.... And besides, I usually do all pc-related stuff for him. Upload photos/songs/videos for his archos player, upload games and update firmwares for his PSP, download torrent movies for him, upload stuff and synchronize his PDA. If he wants something done that has anything to do with his gadget toys and the pc, he calls me. So I saw no point in separating user accounts.

But then he also hated the stuff I put in our pc, MY programs, apps, stuff he doesn't use. And he hated the fact that the desktop's full of shortcut icons. And mostly, he hated that he ALWAYS had to choose between windows xp and windows vista everytime our pc boots up, as I installed dual OS in our pc... because I still sometimes miss the practicality of running things on xp. And I told him it didn't matter if he didn't like a lot of things in our pc because he rarely used it anyway. And then he retorted that he rarely used it because he gets lost with all the things that's in it.

And so these things he hated and hated all piled up until finally, great news! He took me to Surcouf and voila! A brand-new laptop of my choice. At first I wanted to get a notebook. They've got a lot of those here. You know, the tiny things that do delightful stuff? I'd have wanted to get a 10-inch screen MSI notebook, with built-in webcam and an 80GB hard disk drive, and it weighs a little over a kilo. It was perfect. Well, almost. Only it had no dvd player. It's a notebook, so what did I expect?

But Alan is not the type of guy who likes things that's missing something and you still have to buy separately. He likes them all packed up in one item. And in a way he was right. So he told me to get a laptop instead. Of all the lappies in that store, acer aspire caught and held my eye. Mainly because of its small size, a 12.1-inch screen (really, I would've chosen size over specs. hehe). And also, Alan was right again when he said that 80 GB of HDD just wouldn't do for me, and running just on windows xp, and I've also somehow come to love vista. Of course it's way more costly compared to MSI Wind. But then, for a laptop that's ultra portable and heavy on the specs, the price is more than worth it.



I've never parted with it since the day we bought it. I take it practically everywhere! It's light and small enough to carry on my backpack.. I'm even using it to write this blog just now.

There's just one thing I hate about this laptop, though. Oh, the laptop's really fine. And gorgeous. I just hate the fact that I couldn't find a decent bag for it. Not a case, mind. A bag. And a girly one. Yes, for once, I'd like to carry a girly bag around. Not only because girly bags look cute. But because of the fact that since I love carrying my lappy everywhere I go, with a girly laptop tote bag you don't look like you're walking around the streets screaming, "I'm carrying a laptop with me!" for every mugger to see (oh yes, there are street muggers in Paris!).

But goodness, gracious, great balls of Julian McMahon, I just couldn't find A. CUTE. GIRLY. LAPTOP. TOTE. BAG. anywhere! why? have they simply forgotten that women buy laptops, as well?

i found some on ebay and amazon. And the prices are cute, too. But the shipping costs double or triple the price of the bags, which totals to a whopping amount. Like, something I could buy a few pair of jeans with. So I got stuck with one of those ugly black square things that when you wear, you look like you're walking around the streets screaming "i'm carrying a laptop with me!" for all the muggers to see (i told you, there are street muggers in Paris!).

But I still love the lappy. Thanks, baby, for getting me one. The pc at home is officially yours now.

Meet-up with My #Istambayan Friends

a few days after our Bora escapade, Ruel and I met up with our #istambayan friends. this is my first time to see my girls again since i left the Philippines five years ago (Ruel has seen them in his wedding last year).

we held our get-together at Gilligan's, Trinoma. syempre yung mga hindi na single, hindi rin mag-isang nagpunta. Ru was with her wife (and my sister) Mal, i was with alan and chichi, and Jo was with her boyfriend Feli. Mai came with her daughter Anja, and Joyce, who came alone but was later joined by her boyfriend. and Zel came with some cigarettes (she's single and happy, at the moment ^_^).

too bad nikki couldn't join us because i don't know why (i forgot what she said her reason why she couldn't come).

so here we are... after five years....

Clockwise: Ruel, Joyce, Me, Jo, Zel, Mai

Mine and Mai's little angels

View the album HERE

Our Trip to Boracay

we really didn't think our Boracay escapade would still push through after chichi was hospitalized just a couple of days before our scheduled departure. but thank God it did. we were already worrying about how to cancel our trip because Mal can't seem to connect with PAL, but when chichi's doctor found out that we were scheduled to go to Bora, she promised to monitor chichi closely during the day and said that if she continued to be better by evening, she'll disharge chichi. she said, "hindi ko babasagin ang trip nyo". and so that's what she did! chichi was discharged at half past midnight, we went home to scram-pack, caught a few winks, and off to Boracay we went!!! 

CLICK HERE to view our pictures from our first day in Bora.

CLICK HERE to view our day 2 in Bora;

and finally,

CLICK HERE to view our last and finaly day in Bora.

well, too bad jj wasn't able to come with us (again). he said he didn't have money. mal and i already offered to shoulder his expenses. so then he said he's working and couldn't take a leave. he's been there already... so i guess he just wasn't that much crazy to go back.

if you ask me.. i find Boracay to be beautiful (it would be totally moronic of me to say that it's not). but i'm really not the beach or outdoor type of gal... i don't see the point of going through all that trouble (taking the plane, riding the ferry, the tricycles, etcera) just to get to a beach. but of course that's just me. i've heard a lot of people say it's worth all that trouble to go there. mal and ru and my mom have already been to Boracay before, so this wasn't their first time. personally, if i could go somewhere else, i wouldn't really choose to go back there for all that trouble. but chichi did enjoy the beach, though. i believe that was the first time that she actually stepped outside barefoot to feel the sand underneath her feet.

all in all, it was a great holiday. not because we were at one of the most considered to be beautiful beaches in Asia, but because i was there, with my family.

Unsafe Drinking Water in Manila

.... atleast for Chichi.

chichi confined in the hospital for a night after days of drinking from local bottled water. arte ng sikmura mo chi!

I Just Can't Help But Post This:

me, my sister, and my cousins' then and now photos (",)

this picture was taken at Mal's 17th birthday in 1999 i think.

L-R: Lanie, me, Mal, and Lynlyn

and this one was taken last week, nine years after. lanie has just given birth to her second child (third, technically, because her first was a set of twin girls)

L-R: me, Lanie, Lynlyn, Mal

parang lahat kami nagbago, si lynlyn lang ang hindi? ganon pa ren itsura nya. maganda pa ren.

Tagaytay Trip with the Family

This is my first time, I think, that I went to Tagaytay. I don't remember ever going there before. Hmmm... oh, no, scratch that. I mean, yeah, I've been there. But not really up close. And not with the family. So here's to the first time with the family!

(minus jj though, he wasn't able to come because: 1st, he's not feeling well. he's been sick for the past couple of days now. and 2nd, i don't think he's too excite to go. But we were all surprised that Dad went, too, though! But it was really so good to have him with us today.

Add caption

More Photos are found HERE:

And then after our trip to Tagaytay (and stopping on the highway for some buko pies and a quick snack at the mushroom burger... we decided to pay Lanie a visit at the hospital (she's just given birth to a healthy baby boy!)... see... hitting two birds with one stone! (",)

And then one last picture-taking with the cousins outside the hospital.

  

And what good is picture-taking without goofing around?

Going Back Home After Five Years!!!

Finally!!! We're coming home to visit!!! This is chichi's very first ride airplane ride. I was a little nervous but chichi doesn't seem fazed about it.

Now, Alan here, is an entirely different story. He's smiling in the picture. But the truth is, he's scared sh*t:

I expected the flight to be difficult with Chichi . It was a very long flight. But to my surprise (and huge relief, too!)... My little princess behaved so well during the entire journey. She watched in-flight movies, ate, and slept without any problem! That's Chichi amusing herself with the aircraft's TV.

Review of No Country for Old Men

**** MY TAKE FIRST!!!*****

i loved this film. the review below said it all. and i just can't add any more praise at the brilliance of how the movie was directed and played, much less rave about the performances of the actors. and i'll never find words big enough to be worthy of being called a review of my own. all i can say is oh, i just loved the chigurgh character! he sure was scary as hell! he totally gave me the creeps! and he's absolutely cute, too! hehehe.... although i think it's true that in the last 20 minutes running the movie will more or less make you say "WTF is going on???" and the ending kinda leaves you saying "no joke????", i still think it's a brilliant film, though. and oh yes, the last 20 minutes will leave some audience angry and disappointed, and killing off the good guy at the height of the climax surely takes the audience in the "drop-and-then-it-all-slows-down" part of a roller coaster.... but well, that's basically what watching the movie's like... a roller-coaster ride. you know, just when you think it's never gonna stop, it suddenly slows down after the highest drop and then you know the ride's coming to its end but you still feel your nerves jumping even hours after it has stopped.

and yes, i felt sad about the ending. but i didn't feel bad about the movie. and i certainly wasn't disappointed. what other kind of ending could one hope for? this is the kind of story that from the very beginning gives you the feeling that no good is ever gonna come out in the end. you just can't see a situation in which the good guys are gonna be treated right. i don't want the last 20 minutes of the film to spoil the best first 100 minutes of a film i've seen in a long time! besides, unconventional endings don't really bother me at all. i feel sorry for the viewers who, after seeing the film, still had questions and needed a verbal account of what happened to everbody in the end. because every single scene in the movie told it all. you just had to pay attention. you just had to watch more, than listen to every single sound and every single dialogue being said. moss was killed by the mexicans. sheriff bell retired because he no longer feels adequate to keep up with the changing times that's becoming increasingly violent and evil. chigurgh's got the money. he killed the wife. and yes, he got to walk in the end. i'm sure some people prefer the bad guy to be killed or apprehended atleast, but this isn't one of your ordinary action films where the good guy MUST survive because he's the good guy. and that is what the movie's been saying all along. That evil does win sometimes. and in this story, it did. and THAT is the end. i'm amazed at how some people needed to be told a narrative of this key point to be convinced that indeed, the movie has an ending. only not the usual stuff where the cast hug one another in the end or yell in triumph or what other kind of endings that we've been used to seeing to know it's the end.

and it's really unfair of accusing the coen brothers of not having the guts to pull off a proper ending that's why the movie ended the way it did. the brothers presented the movie exactly as the book told it according to the author. the audience has to understand that the movie ended the way it ended because that's how it ended in the book.

but then if you're the kind of audience who needs every detail to be spoon-fed or atleast narrated or post-scripted before the end-credits, and who's looking for a "good-triumphs-over-evil" kind of ending... well, this movie isn't really for you. better wait for The Dark Knight batman sequel (or whatever it's called... which, incidentally, i'll be watching as well not because i'm a batman fan... in all my life i've only ever seen one batman film - Batman and Robin, and that's because i wanted to see what all the hype was about Poison Ivy.... but this time, i'm gonna watch it because it's the last film that the late Heath Ledger did. and i don't doubt that in this movie, like all other typical movies, the antagonist will pay for being the bad guy, and the good will surely prevail.

oh, i don't really like rating by stars. so i'd give No Country for Old Men a 9.9 over 10.... well, of course, i can't give it a perfect 10! after all... i did say i felt sad about the ending! (",)


Review from New York Times

“No Country for Old Men,” adapted by Joel and Ethan Coen from Cormac McCarthy’s novel, is bleak, scary and relentlessly violent. At its center is a figure of evil so calm, so extreme, so implacable that to hear his voice is to feel the temperature in the theater drop.

But while that chilly sensation is a sign of terror, it may equally be a symptom of delight. The specter of Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a deadpan sociopath with a funny haircut, will feed many a nightmare, but the most lasting impression left by this film is likely to be the deep satisfaction that comes from witnessing the nearly perfect execution of a difficult task. “No Country for Old Men” is purgatory for the squeamish and the easily spooked. For formalists — those moviegoers sent into raptures by tight editing, nimble camera work and faultless sound design — it’s pure heaven.

So before I go any further, allow me my moment of bliss at the sheer brilliance of the Coens’ technique. And it is mostly theirs. The editor, Roderick Jaynes, is their longstanding pseudonym. The cinematographer, Roger Deakins, and the composer, Carter Burwell, are collaborators of such long standing that they surely count as part of the nonbiological Coen fraternity. At their best, and for that matter at their less than best, Joel and Ethan Coen, who share writing and directing credit here, combine virtuosic dexterity with mischievous high spirits, as if they were playing Franz Liszt’s most treacherous compositions on dueling banjos. Sometimes their appetite for pastiche overwhelms their more sober storytelling instincts, so it is something of a relief to find nothing especially showy or gimmicky in “No Country.” In the Coen canon it belongs with “Blood Simple,” “Miller’s Crossing” and “Fargo” as a densely woven crime story made more effective by a certain controlled stylistic perversity.

The script follows Mr. McCarthy’s novel almost scene for scene, and what the camera discloses is pretty much what the book describes: a parched, empty landscape; pickup trucks and taciturn men; and lots of killing. But the pacing, the mood and the attention to detail are breathtaking, sometimes literally.

In one scene a man sits in a dark hotel room as his pursuer walks down the corridor outside. You hear the creak of floorboards and the beeping of a transponder, and see the shadows of the hunter’s feet in the sliver of light under the door. The footsteps move away, and the next sound is the faint squeak of the light bulb in the hall being unscrewed. The silence and the slowness awaken your senses and quiet your breathing, as by the simplest cinematic means — Look! Listen! Hush! — your attention is completely and ecstatically absorbed. You won’t believe what happens next, even though you know it’s coming.

By the time this moment arrives, though, you have already been pulled into a seamlessly imagined and self-sufficient reality. The Coens have always used familiar elements of American pop culture and features of particular American landscapes to create elaborate and hermetic worlds. Mr. McCarthy, especially in the western phase of his career, has frequently done the same. The surprise of “No Country for Old Men,” the first literary adaptation these filmmakers have attempted, is how well matched their methods turn out to be with the novelist’s.

Mr. McCarthy’s book, for all its usual high-literary trappings (many philosophical digressions, no quotation marks), is one of his pulpier efforts, as well as one of his funniest. The Coens, seizing on the novel’s genre elements, lower the metaphysical temperature and amplify the material’s dark, rueful humor. It helps that the three lead actors — Tommy Lee Jones and Josh Brolin along with Mr. Bardem — are adept at displaying their natural wit even when their characters find themselves in serious trouble.

The three are locked in a swerving, round-robin chase that takes them through the empty ranges and lonely motels of the West Texas border country in 1980. The three men occupy the screen one at a time, almost never appearing in the frame together, even as their fates become ever more intimately entwined.

Mr. Jones plays Ed Tom Bell, a world weary third-generation sheriff whose stoicism can barely mask his dismay at the tide of evil seeping into the world. Whether Chigurh is a magnetic force moving that tide or just a particularly nasty specimen carried in on it is one of the questions the film occasionally poses. The man who knows him best, a dandyish bounty-hunter played by Woody Harrelson, describes Chigurh as lacking a sense of humor. But the smile that rides up one side of Chigurh’s mouth as he speaks suggests a diabolical kind of mirth — just as the haircut suggests a lost Beatle from hell — and his conversation has a teasing, riddling quality. The punch line comes when he blows a hole in your head with the pneumatic device he prefers to a conventional firearm.

And the butt of his longest joke is Llewelyn Moss (Mr. Brolin), a welder who lives in a trailer with his wife, Carla Jean (Kelly MacDonald) and is dumb enough to think he’s smart enough to get away with taking the $2 million he finds at the scene of a drug deal gone bad. Chigurh is charged with recovering the cash (by whom is neither clear nor especially relevant), and poor Sheriff Bell trails behind, surveying scenes of mayhem and trying to figure out where the next one will be.

Taken together, these three hombres are not quite the Good, the Bad and the Ugly, but each man does carry some allegorical baggage. Mr. Jones’s craggy, vinegary warmth is well suited to the kind of righteous, decent lawman he has lately taken to portraying. Ed Tom Bell is almost continuous with the retired M.P. Mr. Jones played in Paul Haggis’s “In the Valley of Elah.” It is hard to do wisdom without pomposity, or probity without preening, but Mr. Jones manages with an aplomb that is downright thrilling.

Still, if “No Country for Old Men” were a simple face-off between the sheriff’s goodness and Chigurh’s undiluted evil, it would be a far stiffer, less entertaining picture. Llewelyn is the wild card — a good old boy who lives on the borderline between good luck and bad, between outlaw and solid citizen — and Mr. Brolin is the human center of the movie, the guy you root for and identify with even as the odds against him grow steeper by the minute.

And the minutes fly by, leaving behind some unsettling notions about the bloody, absurd intransigence of fate and the noble futility of human efforts to master it. Mostly, though, “No Country for Old Men” leaves behind the jangled, stunned sensation of having witnessed a ruthless application of craft.

To XP-fy or to Vista-fy?

windows vista looks nice.... but it sucks. i mean, really sucks!!! there are lots of programs and applications and... ehem... hacks... that just don't run on vista.

i was comfortably happy with windows xp... until finally, my CPU's not happy with me anymore and decided to say good bye and leave me with no choice but to get myself a new unit... and anyway, a brand-new flat screen monitor would be sweet, too... but i've always told my friends i will never upgrade to vista until maybe in the next two years. but when you go out to buy a new PC you won't get one that still has windows xp running on it. they're all vista! so what choice did i have?

i've always thought vista's uncool. but two hours of fiddling with it, i've changed my mind and decided it's not uncool. it's unacceptable! nevetheless, i told myself maybe it takes just a little getting used to. it wasn't until weeks when i've been encountering problems with programs and applications not running on vista that all my pent-up frustrations began to take toll. and these are programs and applications that i use a lot. i was getting sick and tired of using someone else's PC just to be able to run them. so finally, i decided to downgrade back to xp.

but then i found myself already used to vista's interface and besides, the xp that i downgraded to was xp pro, and i used to run xp home, i'm not sure if there's that much difference, but i kinda missed vista eventhough it sucks, so i upgraded to it again. but i still need those progs and apps that don't run on it, and so round the circle i go...

this is the nth time that i've changed and reverted my OS from vista to xp and back again... i know there's something about having a dual OS or hard drive or whatever that allows you to have two operating systems at the same time but i just can't seem to get the hang of it. everytime i try to make a partition of my hard drive so that i've got vista running on one and xp on the other, i always end up just having either the vista or the xp. and i have to re-install and re-download programs and apps every time i change my OS.

and now i'm not just having problems with these progs and apps, but on my PDA phone as well, as it syncs with my pc each time i connect it. but something went wrong somewhere and now i don't have any data left on my PDA and none on my pc either....

sigh... and to think tomorrow's monday.

like, hell.....