I don't know if it's due to the alternating moments of end of the world jokes and Lenten reflections, but I started out adding the 2005 tag on the albums from that year upon noticing that I have reached 12 pages on my albums already, and in the process of doing so prompted feelings of the aforementioned title. It's rather funny thinking back on my then attitude of immortality as a teenager, and in hindsight, I feel younger now than I remember having felt seven years ago. Still, everyone my age in those 2005 photos (self included) look fresh and green, like in our "Springtime of Youth" and all that jazz. :D  First post was the first album containing pics of my 20th birthday. It's been more than 5 years since then, and I've been posting all digital photos here for posterity since our family had acquired our first dinky Canon digicam. It goes without saying that I haven't uploaded everything yet. (Yes, aside from the currently incomplete Europe trip 2008 album sequence.) This is just a third of all the pictures our family has taken. While my smaller digicam gets borrowed from time to time, Dad's is usually considered communal/corporate property, so the 2 other thirds of pics are either for work or for the LOJ Family/REACT-NCR/MCCI/Toastmasters/etc. It's amazing I hadn't gone blind from the radiation after staring at all those pictures Dad had me download into our many harddrives. I wish I could say that after so much practice, I've gotten better at posting these online photo albums. Alas, they remain far from the pretty portfolios I envision them to be. I guess you could say that our family consists of amateur photographers. And by amateur, I mean the definition of the word according to the awesome G.K. Chesterton: "The word amateur has come by the thousand oddities of language to convey an idea of tepidity; whereas the word itself has the meaning of passion. Nor is this peculiarity confined to the mere form of the word; the actual characteristic of these nameless dilettanti is a genuine fire and reality. A man must love a thing very much if he not only practises it without any hope of fame or money, but even practises it without any hope of doing it well. Such a man must love the toils of the work more than any other man can love the rewards of it."(from his work of literary criticism, " Robert Browning") --- Scans of photos taken by my little sister, on her Corregidor field trip with a film camera, 2005.   For August, that is. They're actually lesser than I thought. Miscalculation likely due to the sheer number of cameras I've juggled for that month.
I could not believe how few the pics for September were. Which would be up next in my upload list. If you're about to raise protest, it's 5:30am right now for me, I have to be awake in less than 3 hours, and I'll sleep off the uploading process, so come back later. Go watch a gay movie or something.
EtA: Been moving pics from one folder to another. Am dizzy. It's 5:30am the next day already. Send help.
EtA: Done! With 30 mins. to spare until 5:30am the next day! Woot!
I wouldn't take this link as an accurate assessment of the psychological factors surrounding social interaction through short messaging. (Because the idea would comprise an entire book, and a hypothetically work-in-progress one at that.) It's not even close to a normative essay on the subject. But it illustrates how easy miscommunication can arise in this electronic age, and that we may be losing the battle of essence+meaning vs. form+functionality. I mean, as much as Twitter seems attractive even for the sole purpose of gratifying the part of me that believes I live an interesting life, or the convenience that shoutouts and status updates in social networking sites present in appearing to let people feel like they're a part of my life by taking time to broadcast my existence to them, I think they're just the same thing as the habit of forwarding random quotes to all of one's contacts in one's cellphone. While significance of these activities to daily living operates on the message quality and frequency, it's the timing that would matter in the end, for both the sender and receiver. Mulling over this topic only served to remind me how important praying is, and how the act of talking with God could be dangerous in itself. And frankly, I'm pretty sure I could live without investing so much on my internet presence. I'd rather learn how to pray better and more often. (Yes, this repeats my strong sentiments on email etiquette, seemingly against the culture of making meaningful social interaction through SMS communication, sounds anti-Twitter/Facebook/etc., and is rather vague that it's almost passive-aggressive whining. I guess this is just how my frustration coupled with my sincerity express themselves. And I'm not sorry, bec. saying sorry in the internet only means you are sorry in the internet.) Woke up with hives. Not taking it as an inauspicious sign, but unless it goes away shall have no peace enough to concentrate on baking. Been incredibly restless if not sleepless these past ten days, amazed at managing to drive in such condition without meeting a fiery death. Maybe hives is sign of utmost stress and exhaustion reached.
Have not done one jot of baking this month aside from burned attempt at snickerdoodles for Dad's birthday. (N.B. Do not bake with active 1-y.o. boys around with grabby hands.) Have 5 dozens of cupcake gifts to do before the 27th, and a Pangwi family reunion's worth of giant cookies, decorated butter cookies, and soft cutout Christmas cookies. Oh, and apple pie.
In other non-baking news, Dad's laptop got reformatted and is now experiencing charger difficulties, Kuya Deo's nth new laptop is all black, Marikit's new tablet is not Wacom, my laptop Deep Thought's music files is nearing 10Gb again, and Dad has seen to replace my just-needs-a-repair Canon Powershot with an Olympus digicam. And haven't even started writing on Christmas cards yet, oh joy.
(N.B. Do not scratch plantar aspect no matter how great it feels.)
EtA: Anti-allergy meds (I DO NOT have allergies, WTH, body?) cause drowsiness, water from faucet is brown, and I need to go to Christmas Mass in about 2 hours. Buggre Alle this for a Larke.
I'm about to spam your inboxes. Unfortunately, though the pics are sorted from Lucerne to Pisa, the following albums in the process of being posted are photo backlogs that ARE NOT from the tour. Oh, and I still haven't finished captioning the Paris album yet. D'oh.
Still haven't even started sorting the backlog of cellphone cam photos since FEBRUARY yet. *headdesks*
Uploading is speedy enough, but downloading isn't (my brother's playing online games again, eating up our measly DSL connection), so I'm afraid I'll postpone looking at your recent updates until next time. ...until I watch the last few episodes of Smallville Season 7. Seriously, my laptop has less than 5Gb space left, and I haven't transferred the photo folders from my Dad's laptop (the one we brought along the trip) yet. I'm a little reluctant to delete my downloads of Torchwood Series 2 because I haven't gotten around to buying a blank DVD+R to fit everything (plus the Declassifieds and the Dark Talk file), and since I can't be parted with my ginormous folder of SV fan videos, I have to delete the bigger episode files.
I procrastinate because it's Michael Rosenbaum's last few episodes playing Lex Luthor as a regular character in the cast, and I'm a little nervous of what's going to happen to him (to Lex, I mean, though I wish MR the best in the world!) as I haven't been spoiled of the finale yet. (I wish I could say the same for Supernatural Season 3 though. *sighs*
In the meantime, I ask for a little patience (you know who you are, mate *blows raspberries*) bec. captioning all those pics is daunting, and I have to email the links to our tour mates, so I have to be more careful with what I write, yeah?
So stay tuned!
Like I mentioned in my previous blog post, thanks for waiting for me to upload these. I will be accepting requests to burn the entirety of this into a DVD, to be given on the appointed day of our next reunion. Part 1 - Introduction & Opening Prayer Part 2 - Presentation 1: Michelle Part 3 - Presentation 2: Ivan Part 4 - Presentation 3: Jonas Part 5 - Presentation 4: Fame Part 6 - Presentation 5: Zosing Part 7 - Presentation 6: San Miguel, et al. (I) Part 8 - Presentation 6: San Miguel, et al. (II) Part 9 - Presentation 7: Cheryl Part 10 - Presentation 8: Sharon Part 11 - Presentation 9: Erica Paula Part 12 - Presentation 10: Richard Part 13 - Presentation 11: Nelson Part 14 - Presentation 12: Yusen Part 15 - Presentation 13: Tiffany Part 16 - Certificates Part 17 - Awarding & Closing Remarks Part 18 - Lunch I am heartily sorry for spamming you with my video posts. I have ten more to go, and if I don't finish them all by today (12 November) I will be done by tomorrow. I have to ask you to be patient and put up with it in the meantime. Or you know, just ignore them, which I will also be thankful to you for, for reasons you shouldn't be interested in. To those who are concerned (i.e., who were sent to my site to access the videos), thanks for waiting for me to upload these. I will be accepting DVD requests, to be given on the appointed day of our next reunion, so please help our class president in organizing it! Yours sincerely, Michelle P. My Dad's laptop has twice more RAM than I do, and he's been learning how to use a computer since December 2006, and he still doesn't know--
1. That if you want to view your Desktop, you just have to minimize the windows and not click that nice red X to remove the undesirable programs from your field of vision, and
2. That if you have many visible files in one folder, it doesn't mean that putting them in yet another folder within the initial folder gives your space for more files, because it's not like shuffling items in containers makes extra room for more to stuff to put in.
I got my organizational skills from my Dad, and being his own boss and the boss of the family and the business for more than 30 years while juggling his increasing duties as a member of other organizations made him the most fun compartmentalization role model ever. Except when he exasperates me with his computer antics.
From Raini: 
My Lakbayan grade is C-! How much of the Philippines have you visited? Find out at Lakbayan! That btw is my motto that reminds me to do regular backups, and not just a religious statement. While sorting my Dad's CD library (which is a mixture of CDs from his company, from other companies, his personal files, his music CDs, my older brother's music CDs and personal files, my younger sister's music CDs and personal files, and unused blank CDs), I stumbled upon an unlabeled data CD, which I thought was another blank CD until I opened it. The Simbang Gabi documentary that I thought I lost during the laptop replacement last year? It seems I backed it up after all, and it was what that unlabeled CD-RW contained. Unfortunately, it did not contain the pictures we took while filming and the ones from the internet that I amassed and used in the documentary, and the original files of the nine-day filming was not included either, but at least the unpolished but completed version of the documentary that was submitted, the WMM project files, the narration mp3s, the script, and all my research (4 months of it!) was in there. It wasn't the best work I've helped in making (we had less time doing post-production work on it than with Living On The Edge), but it was our most researched, and I had a painstaking time composing and editing the script for a 30-minute documentary that contained all the necessary information on Simbang Gabi as part of Philipppine folklore in a modern and urban context. The actual documentary was a rush job, but the story behind it was comprehensive for my anal retentive self, and I was proud of it, despite my critical commentary of it during the filmshowing in class (much to my groupmates/friends' horror and irritation). Since I consider it educational regardless of the hurried job in making it, I'll be posting the parts of it here while I'm catching up on fanfic. :D  | asdkjfhg | Mar 12, '07 7:36 AM
for everyone |
Not sleeping for more than two hours makes me jittery. Bleargh.
Um, pics 27 December 2006 and onwards are still pending upload until someone fully fixes the submarine-pipe-damage that's disrupting smooth internet connections in parts of Asia. I know I've suffered worse way back when we were still in the dialup era, but there are 78Mb of photos to be uploaded, and despite the vacation and the New Year's Resolutions, I don't have the patience to suffer through having to upload them one day/folder at a time and having to rearrange and caption and all that as I try to make Gmail not timeout on me. Gah. Since I've started using our new external DVD writer and finally labelled and sorted my CDs, I'm going to be backing up my picture/video files (mostly old ones from acads) here in the following days.
So if you're going to be pissed at my flooding of your My Multiply pages, blame the source of my anger. I put things in order when I'm too angry to think; it's my version of meditation: projecting the negation of the entropy in my head by fixing the clutter around me.
Since Deep Thought went Humpty Dumpty on me, I am now a computer squatter.
In other news, upon putting a nice bottle of men's perfume under my nose, I accidentally got some on my skin. Since man-perfume draws me to the nearest nice-smelling body like a butterfly, and I particularly like that Bvlgari Aqua scent, I think I may be developing a complex, because wanting to lick my own skin can't be healthy.
If I haven't sent you off screaming from the TMI yet, I wish you a Happy Samhain! I so totally cast calumnies on your questionable efficiency. If this disparaging remark is going to get both my accounts here and there cancelled faster than you could say "slanderous like whoa," I wouldn't care (much). *waits for main page to load* If I didn't need to send a message through there to someone, I wouldn't have to suffer through this unnecessary technostress. Let us all please open our eyes, go through the process of disillusionment, and return like prodigal children to our sweet roots in email. Email is your friend, esp. if it's not the taking-my-sweet-time excuses-full Yahoo!. Anyone who wants Gmail invites, kindly give me your email address. In other news, I hope I don't regret linking this account in my profile there. People might make connections with regards to my... okay, I should stop being a blithering idiot. So much for my paranoia. *rolls eyes at self* | |
