Salamin

Goodbye Serendipity, hello Wordpress!

If you would care to follow me, please update your links to http://salamin.bagarinao.com/
This blog site has already been exported successfully, including all comments. Unfortunately, it is not possible to export to the new site any new comments added to this old site. Anyway, I'm disabling the comment feature in this latest post. All the other comments made from hereon, will just stay here (and fade into oblivion).

I'm planning a lot of exciting things in my new blog. New look, new categories, new ideas. I hope to start fresh.

Sayonara, bmblog. 'Twas fun while it lasted.

This is the third time I changed my layout style. And guess what, I'm still unsatisfied. I'm running out of choices of templates designed for Serendipity. Sadly, there aren't that many templates available for the few users of Serendipity.

We've also moved our site to a new webhosting plan. It took us a while to figure out that we're still stuck in an antiquated plan where our harddisk space is limited to less than 1 GB, when there are already dozens of webhosting plans out there that offer THOUSANDS of gigabytes. My current blog alone is more than 100 MB. So that made the decision quite easy. Welcome to the terabyte age, baby!

Transferring our site is another matter, though, but it's something that I could delegate to my technical support (read: Baggy). Just wake me up when my blog is up and running again, sweatheart. Thank God for techie hubbies!

Well, back to the blog. I'd like to migrate to Wordpress (if you can't beat 'em, join 'em!). But I don't know if it's that easy to move from Serendipity to Wordpress platform. Anybody had any experience doing that?

Baggy says that I may have to move my entries manually (read: one by one!) if I want to preserve my archives. Another option is to just make a new subdomain, then start from scratch using Wordpress. Maybe create something like salamin.bagarinao.com. But what about all the incoming links to my present blog? I would lose them all, of course. But then again, if my Technorati ranking is correct, I'm losing links by the week, anyway. I used to be very keen on getting links before, but I found that somehow it took the fun out of blogging. The heck with blog stats.

Just a word of warning, though. In case this blog becomes temporarily unavailable for a while, it probably means that I'm revamping the site for the better.

For those who wondered why there was a "Part One" included in my previous post, read on here to find out why.

It's February 18 today, and I'm happy. And it's a big deal.

With Daddy (beaming with pride, I believe!) on my wedding day (January 6, 2001).

You see, it's my Dad's birthday, and today I remember him with happiness in my heart, instead of sorrow and grief. This day is unlike the previous birthdays which had been punctuated by sadness and longing for the man who left us some four years ago. This day, I feel more alive than ever, and grateful that he had been a part of my life.

Had he been alive today, he would have been 69.

Well, Valentine's Day is just around the corner, and as they say, "love is in the air." Of course, come February 14, in Japan it would be women giving out chocolates to men, not the other way around. Years after living in this country, I still find this to be a rather strange custom. And I've never handed out chocolates to anyone, not even my own husband. But I'm sure he understands. He has gotten chocolates from the secretaries in his lab group, by the way.

Speaking of love, there's this interesting site where it purportedly evaluates the compatibility of two blogs. Called ????????? (translated: my peace(?) beta version. Don't know if it's right, but I sure hope it's not "my piss") ). All you have to do is input the url of, say, your blog, and that of the person you'd like to check out. The program will then go through the RSS feed content and search for keywords that recur through the blog entries. Based on the recurrence of these particular keywords on both blogs, the compatibility of the persons who own the blogs will be evaluated. The result will change depending on the updates made to the blog. According to the news released by ITMedia, for example if the words "soup," "rice" or "menu" appear frequently, then the evaluation report will give something like, "the two of you often talk about o-bento (but I guess dining out would be preferable to o-bento).

So what would they think of next? How many compatibility tests are out there already?Just for fun, perhaps, it would be worth checking out. Unfortunately, I think this works exclusively for Japanese blogs only. But I do wonder if a similar system has already been developed for English-written blogs. Might be useful to those singletons out there who are still in the market, errr, searching for their soulmates.

Speaking of cartoon characters, I think I'd like to be Bubbles of Powerpuff Girls. Soft and cute but could knock 'em monsters down.

Found this interesting meme about personalities and cartoon characters at Bernard Chan's blog.

Intro to the tag :

Everyone has a personality of a cartoon character. Have you ever asked yourself what cartoon character you most resemble? Apparently, a group of investigators got together and analyzed the personalities of well-known, modern cartoon characters. The information that was gathered was made into this test.

Rules of the game :

Answer all the questions (only 10) with what describes you best, add up all your points (which are next to the answer that you choose) at the end and look for your results.

Okay, here goes :

Sometime ago, I asked Aya if she knew exactly what kind of work we do. Turned out that she didn't. So I told her: "We're scientists. You know, I do experiments everyday, just like the experiments we do at home. Tatay does stuffs on the computer. We're both hakase." Hakase (??) refers to someone who holds a doctorate. Aya knows this word because she watches Powerpuff Girls on TV, so I thought I'd use the word to give her an idea. In the cartoon series, the girls refer to Prof. Utonium as "hakase."

Aya laughed out loud and said: "Eh? Hakase si Tatay? Ikaw rin? Pano ka naging hakase eh babae ka?" (What? Dad is a PhD? And you too? How could you be one when you're a woman?)

Thanks a lot to the people who created Powerpuff Girls. You've inadvertently given my daughter the erroneous idea that for someone to be called Dr. or hakase, that someone has to be a man. But for now, I'll reserve my rants about gender issues in another blog entry.

I couldn't forget that incident, because it illustrated perfectly how many of our misconceptions could start early on in our lives, no thanks to the crap that we are inevitably fed by the media, friends and families, the very environment we grow up in. The images we see on TV or movies are very powerful in influencing our perception of so many things. (Image taken from www.tv.com)

I was walking back towards our office when I saw a BMW car pass by. I thought, wow, what a really nice car, I wonder who's driving it? Must be one of the guys on the 9th floor (the powers that be, the ones who run this institute). Then I saw the driver. To my surprise, I recognized the person driving the car. It was one of the janitress whom I occasionally see walking around holding a bucketful of stuffs for cleaning.

Another car drove by, not as stunning as the BMW, but it looked fancy just the same. And just as I thought, I recognized the driver to be another janitress who cleans our toilet. Both of them probably just got off from work and were on their way home. I couldn't help but smile to myself. In this country, the people who clean the toilets get to go home earlier than the rest of us schmucks, and they get to drive those fancy cars. Only in Japan.

No, I've not abandoned this blog. Fortunately - or unfortunately - for you, o faithful readers. What have I been up to lately, you ask?

Well, I've also been busy doing a lot of experimenting in my kitchen lately. Here's my futile attempt at recreating the party atmosphere back home. Food, glorious food!

Why, I've been taking my sweet, sweet time savoring the first few weeks of the new year. Got back to Nippon right smack on New Year's Day. Spent the first day of the year cooped up inside a Boeing 747, amidst flight attendants whose glazed eyes betrayed their longing to be elsewhere except on that flight. But perhaps that bodes well for the rest of the year...I mean, traveling on the first day of the year...perhaps this year will be another year of travel for us?

About our trip home? Oh, I couldn't possibly wrap it all up in this blog entry. I won't even attempt to. Too many stories, too much to tell. Too many photos to share...and I'm pretty lazy right now to work on them yet. But if you really want to look at some of our vacation's photos, just check out my Flickr photo album. Dozo! Vacation in the Philippines can be summarized by these words: food, food, and more food! Oh wait, there's also family, heh. Just kidding. Family is topmost on my list, of course.

Here in Japan, the nights are getting longer, the days unbearably colder. We have unearthed our thick coats and jackets for the winter season. It's almost hard for me to believe that the year 2007 is almost over. It seemed only yesterday when we went to Kamogawa to celebrate New Year's Day.

But boy, oh boy, I'm SO excited. We're going home next week. Times like these, I feel grateful that I live in neighboring Japan, because it is relatively easy to go home. It's just a mere 4-hour plane ride to get to Manila from Narita airport. I haven't been home for about two years now. So naturally I'm excited, and not even the news of the recent coup attempt, imposed curfews, and bombings in the Philippines could make me feel any less enthusiastic. Weird huh? But homecoming always gives me a sort of adrenaline rush, you know. As soon as I get off the plane and the familiar sights and sounds assault my senses, I feel that rush.


The rush becomes even more acutely heightened as I bite into my piping hot Jollibee Chickenjoy, dive into my big pile of haluhalo topped with ube, kaong, leche flan and other sinful goodies, shop-till-you-drop in Duty Free Philippines and SM (of course), or simply get myself lost in the mass of humanity rushing into the malls for Christmas shopping.