To those who actually want to make use of their time, you might want to check this out:
rainy monday and grad school thoughts
yeah, i’m sure your day was pretty interesting too, but so was mine.
monday usually means showing up at the office a little before 8 am. today’s suspension of work was annouced a little after 9 am.
ISH was at WORK.
WORK was SUSPENDED.
SUSPENDED = SINE.
Therefore:
ISH —> SINE!
(of course, this was totally high school mentality, but that realization came when we were already halfway towards Liz’s car, so what the heck.)
we watched Lady in the Water. you HAVE to watch this. and m. night — dude, is it me or is that cameo looking more and more like a career?
during the ride home, that inevitable wave of guilt came over (conveniently right after the movie, of course). as soon as i got home, i changed into bum clothes, set up my laptop and opened the Service Desk to say hi to the issues awaiting. they weren’t that many; apparently they also appreciate a good stay-in-and-bum day too.
i took the time to surf everything that i still haven’t the guts to surf during work. no, not porn, you pervert. games, google jobs (whoops), and grad school. i got this sudden urge to plot for the future (which was rare). i narrowed down the good grad schools for computer science studies — Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon and Berkeley (dammit, these names scare me to death). i came across some good scholarships too. what i didn’t expect to come across was some good tips:
– Graduate school is all about research. Training about research. Papers, papers, papers. If you can’t stomach any more research, SCOOT. Maybe it’s just not for you.
– An MS or PhD is for obsessive people, people who get more excited about digging deeper than actually having a job.
– Also ask yourself, what’s after grad school? Probably teaching, or even more research work. If you can’t stomach that, then SCOOT. Cmon now, I gave you a second chance.
– Graduate school’s all about depth, not breadth.
I nailed the first four – I’m obsessive about details and unanswered questions, teaching college brats could be cool, and I hell do want to meet other obsessive weirdos like me. But one essential question left me stumped:
WHY DO I WANT A PHD?
The lady who wrote the tips said that it was imperative that this question be answered. Since I very well took her other tips to heart, I can’t just ignore this one. Honestly, I don’t have an answer. Yet.
Here’s to hoping that ‘yet’ has a purpose.
flashback
back in high school, we had this Trig professor, Sir Melo. He wasn’t really your dreamy wow-pare-dapat-nag-artista-ka-na-lang guy. He didn’t even try extra hard to make your heart skip a beat. He was just this laid-back, witty, yeah-my-day-sucks-too-pero-kebs-lang kind of guy. i remember how our class made him lose his cool one day (which wasn’t often) when we hid his chalk. now, i think he married one of our English teachers. he was perfectly normal. perfectly flawed. perfectly cool. perfect.
i don’t even know why i thought of him today, but i want my own sir melo. no, not sir melo himself. nah, i want my own one.
critical
i solved my first critical ticket today. yey me. although it wasn’t really that much of a feat — just needed to bounce an application (e.g. stop and restart the container — as i always say, the comp sci solution to everything).
it’s funny how relative it is, what ‘Critical’ means to different people. an employee about to be late for a report. the signs of a bulge in a socialite’s tummy. a pimple on the teenager’s nose. lost tsinelas.
disturbingly blank
nothing really sends my head spinning more than that morning walk at the underpass from the Enterprise to Insular. a thousand blank faces — yuppies, vendors, bosses, transients — greet me everyday as they scurry off to their cubicles. hiya, rat race. is it silly that it bothers me that it’s a thousand faces i don’t know?
i want
everything that we do should be done for selfish reasons. wanting to be famous. wanting to be appreciated. wanting to save the world. different reasons, same drive. I WANT.
it’s the only way to be sure that what we do is real. to do with passion and utter stubbornness. it’s the only way everything ought to be done.
escapism
thank God for StumbleUpon, or else I would have lost my mind. it’s the perfect i-don’t-care-if-hell-breaks-loose-if-i-don’t-solve-this-issue breakaway.
http://www.dumb.com/dumbcriminals.htm – i feel so much assured now. hehe.
http://www.geekologie.com – my favorite geek nook as of the moment. i love the swiss knife couch.
http://www.nostalgiacentral.com/features/20moviethings.htm – apparently, i wasn’t the only one who noticed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_problems_solved_by_MacGyver – finally! haven’t done reading them all though. ๐
c’mon, spank me
i’m a sinner. yes i am.
i have a new crush. he’s sort of this new celebrity in town. charming and funny, he’s at least 5″11 (+1000 pogi points!). he’s also cute, in a professor-in-powerpuff-girls sort of way.
we had him over for lunch, and it nulled my other doubts. this guy is smart — no, witty.
he’s also a man of the cloth.
sheesh. it’s fun to have a new crush, but i’m up against God, i know better than to push my luck.
God, bati tayo ha? haha. :p
at the office on a friday night
i spend roughly around 3% of my time riding elevators now. it’s getting to be a familiar scene — the elevator doors, the security guard, and the waiting chairs beside him. i glance at the office door and realized that i belonged to the other side of it now. i remember the time when my place was at the lobby — getting a visitor’s pass, rehearsing interview answers in my mind, staring at my rarely-worn formal shoes.
for a moment, it felt surreal.
sometimes, i just feel old.
often, i just feel too contemplative.
twilight zone
By moonlight many years ago,
my true love did I know.
And by that moon I begged her wait,
but that night did she go.
So young lovers heed my words,
don’t squander love away.
The moon is changing ever still,
soon comes the light of day.
did you like that poem? was it a little familiar? if yes… then buko ka na! dawson’s fan ka no? :p it was the poem used for the episode near the finale, i believe. this was unearthed when a friend asked me for the url of a website i made way back.
i’m talking about way back 2nd yr HS, when i first learned how to code html. and you know how thrilling that can be for a geek like me. ๐ my (over)enthusiasm was obvious — with the moving marquees, frames, overloaded backgrounds, midis (midis! eek.). it unanimously screams ‘NEWBIE!!!’. picture me cringing right now. yeech.
for the spcp friends who want to take a nostalgic trip, visit ishg.tripod.com/a. while you’re at it, you can visit ishg.tripod.com/parokya and ishg.tripod.com itself for some dawsonisms, quotes, etc. (eeek! so high school!) but don’t say i didn’t warn you. ๐
yoohoo, tickets, where are you?
it’s a pretty slooow day for the service queue today. all afternoon, i had 8 tickets. the same 8 tickets i had morning, save for two E2E auto-tickets. TWO AUTO-TICKETS?!? come on people, something must be wrong here. our web apps are too quiet…
(haha, i’m not really complaining. i’m just in disbelief. :p )
bored to death? then click away:
need a no-brainer break?
http://people.freenet.de/schnubelken/bunnys/
lie-detector manual
http://www.blifaloo.com/info/lies.php
is music your life?
http://www.pandora.com/
kaleidoscope world
http://www.zefrank.com/byokal/kal2.html
ascii image maker
http://www.typorganism.com/asciiomatic/asciiomatic_afterupload.php?fileID=4790&fileTitle=
windows auto-philes
http://www.cothrun.com/gallery/albums/Misc/windows_mix.swf
mag-aartista ka, kid
i met the most adorable kid during the ride home. i know everyone says theirs is the most adorable kid, but out of all the adorable kids, this guy was the most talkative.
he wasn’t even on the jeep, yet he had us all secretly smiling. when told by his mom to go ahead and climb up the jeep while she paid their fare, he shouted “ma! may driver! ayoko pa, baka biglang umandar!”. once inside, he was told to sit across the free seat from his mom. “ma! gusto ko kumandong sayo!”, he retorted. (i know it sounds whiny, but imagine that it was said in a cute way :p )
talk about being kidnap-prone. he chatted with anyone and called them ‘ate’ and ‘kuya’, he sang ‘makita kang muli’ for everyone in the jeep, and i believe he told everyone about yesterday’s episode of Panday too.
i guess little tykes aren’t so bad after all. ๐