New Rule: If You Are Unlucky In Love…

Gambling man
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… You are lucky in billiards. hehehe.
Just got back from playing billiards with my office mates , and for the first time since forever I had the most wins! woot woot!
Now , maybe I should start playing poker and try my luck, maybe the old filipino saying (unlucky in love, lucky in gambling) would do its trick and help me win!

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Amazon Ships Vinyl Here! WOOT WOOT

Image representing Amazon as depicted in Crunc...
Image via CrunchBase

Damn this just made my day, It seems that amazon has a nice vinyl store and  they ship here in the Philippines!
I’m still hating on them for not allowing electronic items to be shipped here.(I am personally blaming them for not shipping keyboards here; for what for me feels like repetitive stress disorder, or the pain I feel in my fingers, hand and arms because of too much typing .)
I am like a kid left alone in a candy store(considering that I could get the beatles album for around 15-30 dollars each, I consider this a bargain!)
Thanks Amazon! Hope you finally ship electronic stuff , and allow music downloads here in the Philippines!

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GMANews.TV – Sleepy student barred from taking final exams – Odds and Ends – Official Website of GMA News and Public Affairs – Latest Philippine News – BETA

City of Manila
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There was not a single class that I didn’t sleep on in college. The problem was I had this bad habit of sitting in the first or second row. If I had professors as easily offended as the one in this article , I would not have passed any of my subject! Hehe, good thing I had such wonderful professors!

Sleepy student barred from taking final exams
AIE BALAGTAS SEE, GMANews.TV 03/19/2009 | 11:24 PM
MANILA, Philippines – A second-year college student in Manila was barred from taking the final examinations by her professor after she was caught sleeping during a lecture, a television report said Thursday.
In his report on GMA News’ “24 Oras,” JP Soriano said Elizabeth Balitaan, a student of La Consolacion College, has admitted falling asleep while her Finance professor Ronald Pastrana was lecturing, but said it was due to a headache.
Balitaan said she tried talking to Pastrana but he refused to listen to her.
“Kinausap ko na po siya. Sinundan ko siya sa Dean’s Office tapos hindi niya ako pinansin. Tapos failed na daw po ako [kasi] parang nakakabastos daw ang ginawa ko,” Balitaan said.
[I tried talking to him but he won’t listen to me. He told me to consider myself failed for sleeping in the class.]
Balitaan was later allowed to take the exam by the school administration, the report said.
The incident however upset Balitaan’s mother, who went to see Pastrana to discuss the problem.
Pastrana, for his part, said he did not allow Balitaan to take the examination because she missed a lot in the lecture.
via GMANews.TV – Sleepy student barred from taking final exams – Odds and Ends – Official Website of GMA News and Public Affairs – Latest Philippine News – BETA.

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rePost:Business and Snake's Oil Men:Linus' blog: SSD followup

I wrote this yesterday about my take on business and snake’s oil sales men and realize that sometimes they are not trying to fool you into a decision.  It is sad but sometimes people don’t try to think things through and investigate the stuff they are trying to say. Here Linus Torvalds shows us why a lot of reviews cannot be trusted, and judging from the way he says this I believe he is even referring to some people who are said to be professional reviewers. Things like this used to make me sad, then I realized that when something becomes useless they tend to become irrelevant to people and they tend to be cast off, like a year old fad. The thing is we need to try to live more aware of things and try to always go beyond what is obvious and easy to get. Do not subscribe to labels and pre conceptions, exercise that which we have that makes us more than animals!

Sadly, almost none of the reviews seemed to ever catch on to that, as they were all looking at the (totally irrelevant) throughput numbers that basically don’t matter in any real-life situation. Everybody just quoted the nice big marketing numbers, because finding the numbers that matter more to actual human perception (notably: average and maximum latency) was so much harder, and most disk benchmarks are crap and don’t even give those numbers.
Which is why I was so happy to see this review at AnandTech. Half the numbers quoted are still the worthless ones (I guess you can’t avoid quoting the industry standard benchmarks, even when they are horribly bad), but much of the actual discussion is about how unusable a drive is when it has maximum latencies in the hundreds of milliseconds.
via Linus’ blog: SSD followup.

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Confessions:Never Loved:The Everyday Masters – Part 5 at Paulo Coelho’s Blog

Read The Whole Thing!

My friend insisted: “Have you ever loved anyone?” I have always been afraid of that question, but Paulo asked me to write this diary and so I have to give an answer. No, I have never loved anyone. I have had many men but I have always waited for the right person. I have been all round the world and have not managed to find the home that I am looking for. I have been in control and have been controlled, and relationships have never gone beyond that.
Now that I have answered “No, I have never loved anyone,” I feel freer. I see what is missing in my life.
via The Everyday Masters – Part 5 at Paulo Coelho’s Blog.

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Things To Ponder: Reclaiming The Space :Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Realtime kills real space

My friend
Image by Scarleth White via Flickr

Call me a Luddite but I think its time to fight back!
Not by isolating ourselves and not using the web and all its gifts but by trying to one up the web and making our real world interactions better. Trying to find the kinds of interactions that would flow naturally from using the web and living a connected life.
This is a new category , “Reclaiming Space”. trying to find the ways that would help make the web a complement , and not a substitute to real connections!

A government survey conducted last year concluded that eighty-two per cent of those between the ages of ten and twenty-nine use cell phones, and it is hard to overstate the utter absorption of the populace in the intimate portable worlds that these phones represent. A generation is growing up using their phones to shop, surf, play video games, and watch live TV, on Web sites specially designed for the mobile phone. “It used to be you would get on the train with junior-high-school girls and it would be noisy as hell with all their chatting,” Yumiko Sugiura, a journalist who writes about Japanese youth culture, told me. “Now it’s very quiet—just the little tapping of thumbs.”
Realtime, you see, doesn’t just change the nature of time, obliterating past and future. It annihilates real space. It removes us from three-dimensional space and places us in the two-dimensional space of the screen – the “intimate portable world” that increasingly encloses us. Depth is the lost dimension.
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Realtime kills real space.

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Best Read:Better Man:The everyday Masters – Part 4 at Paulo Coelho’s Blog

200509 master/slave
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The harder thing is to try to be the bigger/better man/woman and in a sense this is about knowing yourself, being true to who you are, and trying to best your thoughts on who you are.

Cliche is cliche for a reason, it is the low resistance path, and as stated below, It is a choice.  We must be mindful that we choose to get irritated, we choose to be disrespectful, we choose to be humiliated, we choose to be mean, we choose to be impolite.  I’ve been thinking about this while going to work. I saw three people at Philcoa near UP trying to find a jeep that would take them to Nepa Q Mart. I have nothing against rural folks but I suspect that someone cheated them recently because the driver of the jeepney I was riding, was telling them that if they wanted to go to Nepa Q Mart the only way was to take a bus and they were at the farthest lane, the lane which no buses enter. Here was this jeepney driver trying to tell them something true and in a way did not even benefit him, because he was telling them to ride the bus, and here was these people telling him off.  What he did was simple to say “Okay I don’t care anymore (“Bahala Ka Na” <in tagalog>)” and he drove away.  I’ve been in similar situations where I tried helping someone and was rudely treated and I have to say there are a few times I wasn’t able to contain my irritation and probably insulted/cursed a few people. “If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too;”(line from If by Rudyard Kipling). I forgot that I know who I am , and the opinion of others are to be considered but far from something to be mad about. In most things and situations I believe we should try to be a better man than we think we are.

If I react the way that people expect me to, I become a slave to them – and that is a lesson that applies both to love and work. It is very difficult to prevent this from happening, because we are always ready to please somebody, or to start a war when we are provoked, but people and situations are the consequences of the life that I have chosen, not the other way around.
via The everyday Masters – Part 4 at Paulo Coelho’s Blog.

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Had To Share:Nice Story On Injustice:Guilt and forgiveness – Part II at Paulo Coelho’s Blog

A teacher writing on a blackboard.
Image via Wikipedia

Nice story read the whole thing!
Guilt and forgiveness – Part II
Published by Paulo Coelho on March 6, 2009 in Stories

Here is a beautiful story that illustrates precisely what I mean:
When he was small, Cosroes had a teacher who helped him to become an outstanding student in all his subjects. One afternoon, the teacher punished him severely, apparently for no reason.
Years later, Cosroes acceded to the throne. One of his first actions was to summon his former schoolmaster and demand an explanation for the injustice he had committed.
‘Why did you punish me when I had done nothing wrong?’ he asked.
‘When I saw how intelligent you were, I knew at once that you would inherit the throne from your father,’ replied his teacher. ‘And so I decided to show you how injustice can mark a man for life. Now that you know that,’ the teacher went on, ‘I hope you will never punish another person without good reason.’
Guilt and forgiveness – Part II at Paulo Coelho’s Blog.

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Learned Today: Feel Not Own:Experiences Beat Possessions: Why Materialism Causes Unhappiness « PsyBlog

Waranuch Wongsawad (Thai actress) visiting Asi...
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I’d like to reframe this question, see I think one of the reasons that Experiences beat possessions is that most possessions are acquired as means to experience “buying/shopping” and because shopping is a low quality experience I believe that people who go for experiences are happier. I think a nice avenue to study this is to compare model builders versus shopper of less active/creative/input driven stuff and I think that the results would validate my reframing.
I am taking a vacation a few months from now and the truth is the only way I am affording this vacation is through belt tightening and delaying some of the things I would have already bought weeks ago, if not for this short vacation. When coming up with the decision to live frugally for approximately  4-5 months (I’ve got alot of credit card bills mostly grocery and books/comic books/cds and a few restaurant bills, If I knew earlier I probably wouldn’t have to be as frugal now.) The thing I was thinking about the most is that I have strong emotional memory (I don’t know If there is such a thing but that is the closest short set of words I can come up with).
My EM goes both ways I remember the ups and downs and the uniques. The way I see it is that If a choice has to be made then the choice would be experience over material things.

Why do experiences fare better than possessions?
It seems, then, that at some level we understand that our experiential purchases give us more pleasure than our material purchases. But why is that? Van Boven (2005) suggests three reasons:
1. Experiences improve with time (possessions don’t).
2. Experiences are resistant to unfavourable comparisons
3. Experiences have more social value
Experiences Beat Possessions: Why Materialism Causes Unhappiness « PsyBlog.

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