Salamin

A Quantum Leap of Sorts

nospam@example.com (kathy) — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 08:30:22 -0700

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.

Unsatisfied

nospam@example.com (kathy) — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 05:22:45 -0700

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.

Happy Birthday (Part Two)

nospam@example.com (kathy) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 06:23:02 -0700

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

Continue reading "Happy Birthday (Part Two)"

Happy Birthday (Part One)

nospam@example.com (kathy) — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 05:31:07 -0700

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.

Continue reading "Happy Birthday (Part One)"

Compatibility Test for Bloggers?

nospam@example.com (kathy) — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 10:57:51 -0700

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.

What Cartoon Character Am I?

nospam@example.com (kathy) — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 05:13:44 -0700

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 :

Continue reading "What Cartoon Character Am I?"

Misconceptions

nospam@example.com (kathy) — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 08:08:53 -0700

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)

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Why I Love my (Old) Honda

nospam@example.com (kathy) — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 02:16:19 -0700

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.

Continue reading "Why I Love my (Old) Honda"

Revvin' Up

nospam@example.com (kathy) — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 04:50:57 -0700

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.

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Bakasyon!

nospam@example.com (kathy) — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 05:53:02 -0700

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.

Posing with the carabao (who was named "Rosalinda") during our visit to Villa Escudero in 2001. Loved that place.

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.
Continue reading "Bakasyon!"

Moving out, Moving in

nospam@example.com (kathy) — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 08:08:51 -0700

Moving out is always a painful process, no matter how convenient and easy the moving companies make it out to be. In retrospect, they probably did the easiest part. They only had to lug the big stuffs from Point A to Point B. The new settlers, meaning us, have to do everything else from a) packing, b) unpacking, c) arranging, and d) decorating the place. Well, of course they also have a "plan" where they do everything from a) to d), but it will definitely cost us an arm and a leg.

But oh, what a price to pay. I'm so tired. So dead tired everyday. We haven't even begun with b) yet. So far we've only opened boxes that would allow us to function normally in our day to day lives. I shudder to think of the weeks or even months ahead that we have to spend to make this place decent enough to live in.

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My Most Favorite Tree in Autumn

nospam@example.com (kathy) — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 08:22:18 -0700

When I was in the university, there was a big tree near our cafeteria that turned bright, golden yellow each autumn. It stood alone, apart from the other trees, as if in embarrassment because of the stinking smell of its seeds which fell on the ground. But its striking color easily made it my most favorite tree of all, and it became something to look forward to every autumn season.

I learned that the name of the tree is "ginkgo" or ichou (Ginkgo biloba). Right at our institute, we can enjoy a beautiful avenue lined with ginkgo trees. Every autumn many people would stop and take photos of this avenue. Some of them would even pick up the seeds (which are supposedly edible). As to why people would want to eat the seeds with such stinky smell (well actually it's just the rotting flesh), your guess is as good as mine. Well, we do eat durian, which is probably the smelliest fruit ever, right? Anyway, when the tree leaves are in their brightest yellow, you can expect them to last for only a week or so, and then the leaves start falling down.

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What is Your Dream?

nospam@example.com (kathy) — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 05:11:55 -0700

I'm doing a lot of ruminating lately. As you could probably tell, from the kind of posts that you are reading in my blog lately. Maybe I'm psyching myself. Maybe I'm having a midlife crisis of sorts.

Or maybe, after such a long time of procrastinating, I am finally beginning to ask serious questions.

I remember, around the same time last year, a reporter from a local newspaper came to interview me at work. He was supposed to write an article which would feature some of the foreigners here in Tsukuba, something on international relations in our community.

He asked me the usual questions - why did I come to Japan, when did I start work, my research, family background, etc., etc.

And then out of the blue, he asked: "Yume wa nan desu ka?" Translated, it means, "What is your dream?"

It caught me by surprise. I had mentally prepared for all the questions I could think of, except for that one question that he popped without warning.

Continue reading "What is Your Dream?"

Winning and Losing

nospam@example.com (kathy) — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 09:47:44 -0600

We face many battles in life. Sometimes we win; sometimes we lose. It's a fact of life. Winning always brings a feeling of euphoria. Losing, which in reality is more than just an antithesis of winning, can be like an open wound that takes a long time to heal - if it heals at all.

But, as someone said, life goes on. Reluctantly we trudge on, and grin and bear it like everyone else.

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What Drives People to This Site?

nospam@example.com (kathy) — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 07:15:54 -0600

I have always been curious as to what content attracts the most visitors to this site. For site statistics, I use the free service offered by Google Analytics.

So I decided to find out what has been driving traffic to my blog for the past ten months. Within the period of January 2007 up to October 2007, here are the top ten most visited posts in this blog:

1. Yahoo Messenger Virus

1,099 pageviews

2. Tagalog Trivia in Constantine

626 pageviews

3. Ten Japanese Habits Worth Emulating by Filipinos - Part One

577 pageviews

Continue reading "What Drives People to This Site?"