Sunday, November 27, 2005

Yeah, I'm Not Gonna Make It

(Cross-post from here.)



I think I would've had a good chance to make it if I had started on time though. :(

I'm not gonna stop though, I think I'll finish this novel.

An excerpt:


“I really should organize my stuff more. You’d think someone living alone deep in the woods would have a lot of time to organize, but no, there’s always one thing or another. Squirrels, usually. Silly things keep insisting their friends are nuts! Or the nuts are their friends, something like that; I never was very good at understanding their chitter-chatter, most of it is about nuts anyway. I think they have like two hundred different sounds to represent nuts, did you know that? It’s funny too how they attach the same meaning to the term “nuts” as humans do. How do you suppose they picked that up? I hope it’s not me, I don’t think I have a tendency to say people are nuts. Aha there it is!”

Sunday, November 20, 2005

Are Filipinos the Next American Minority After Blacks?

One of the panels from Marvel's House of M (second issue) made me think so... (Click for bigger view)



I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.

Context: Mutant scientist Hank McCoy and human scientist Henry Pym were discussing the moral issuess surrounding Henry's isolation of the mutant gene.

Stand Tall, Shake The Heavens

Sometimes I can't help but look back on the story so far and wonder where the hell I'm going. I'm in a pretty good place right now I guess, compared to a majority of people in this country. I've got a good job with a more than decent salary that lets me consume the mythical three-square-meals-a-day and pile on a bit of luxury on top of that.

But sometimes you stop and think to yourself, is this all there is to life? Slaving away as some company's employee, getting promotions and raises, then retiring to watch your kids grow up? Don't get me wrong, I love my job and the company I work for is great, very responsive to its employees. And I'm sure retiring and raising kids is a worthy goal for some people. But I highly doubt I'm that sort of person.

I get antsy sometimes, I often tell some people at work that I think of resigning at least once a week. The thing is, I don't really know where to go or what to do if I resigned. All I know is at some point I would like to be doing something else with my life, something other than a regular nine-to-five (well in my case more of eight-to-seven) job, something that leaves a mark on the world. Stand tall and shake the heavens, I always like to say to myself.

My biggest problem right now is fear - fear of burning bridges. There was this awesome article somewhere by this shareware guy about how to start your own indie business (I'll credit him sometime when I remember), and I remember one of the things he said that struck me the most: Don't be afraid to burn bridges.

But I am afraid, and with good reason. Like I said, I've got a good job, it's decent pay and I even enjoy the work a good percentage of the time. And of course, I'm also providing financial support for the rest of the family.

It becomes more frightening when I take into consideration what my passions are. The main ones right now are: gaming and web development. Taken together, it points in one direction: I should work on a web-based game. But the size of this task at this point is too huge for me to imagine, and the risks far too obvious. It would be very hard and it may take years to turn a profit, I would need some considerable financial base before doing this. And I would also need an idea of what game to do...

The second problem is focus. I lack focus. This I've known for a long time. Even if I decide on one course of action, I'm never sure that I would have the will to carry it on until the end. I can have focus and determination in the short term, i.e. a task that takes a week or so I can easily focus on. But the sort of life-changing ambitions I'm considering right now can't be done in a week, and I fear that I will run out of steam half-way through and all will be for naught.

I need to overcome these problems. I need to overcome fear. Well, now that I think about it, it would be far easier to overcome fear if I knew that I had focus and determination. I need to be become stronger than I currently am.

Yay For Default Blogger Templates!

Temporarily shifted to one after someone reported some javascript redirecting to a porn site. Doesn't happen on my machine though. Sheesh, now I have to debug a non-replicable bug on my blog. And I didn't even get any porn :p

Update: Moved now to roywantsmeat.blogspot.com

Sunday, November 13, 2005

Why Do I Blog?

girl from work (10:19:57 AM): may blog ka ba roy?
zroytang (10:20:18 AM): haha bakit mo natanong?
girl from work (10:21:04 AM): nagbabasa kasi ako ngayon blogs ng high school friends ko e
girl from work (10:21:11 AM): e ikli lang :D
zroytang (10:21:28 AM): I have one with entries dating back to 2002 :p
girl from work (10:21:49 AM): tlga... updated?
zroytang (10:22:01 AM): minsan
girl from work (10:22:24 AM): may icky luv stuff dun? >:)
zroytang (10:23:15 AM): haha maybe, maybe not
girl from work (10:24:46 AM): haha :))
zroytang (10:26:30 AM): sometimes you write something and later, you think, "maybe I shouldn't have written that"; you look back at it later and think "what the hell was I thinking", but you should keep it up anyway, so you remember what it was like at that time :D
girl from work (10:27:23 AM): hehe oks lang yan... alam ko yan... nagligpit lang kami last week dito sa house... and i saw an old journal from 1996 pa :))
zroytang (10:27:50 AM): except yours is not in public for people to find by accident :p
girl from work (10:28:06 AM): hehe yep :p
girl from work (10:28:21 AM): anu isearch ko to find ur blog by accident >:)
zroytang (10:29:00 AM): ask and I will tell you; I have nothing to hide :D tsaka mostly boring stuff lang naman un, kailangan mo isaisahin yung posts to find anything remotely interesting
girl from work (10:29:31 AM): sige... something to read while i wait for breakfast :)
zroytang (10:29:49 AM): 10:30 is not a time for breakfast
girl from work (10:30:20 AM): brunch :D
zroytang (10:30:51 AM): I am thinking if it is a good idea...nobody else at work knows the url, and I am not sure if I have written anything stupid about work haha
girl from work (10:31:14 AM): haha... baka may mga ***** sucks ba :))
zroytang (10:31:23 AM): no, of course not
zroytang (10:31:41 AM): if I give you the url, you must give me something interesting to read in return :D
girl from work (10:31:54 AM): hindi akin na blog pwede? :))
zroytang (10:32:08 AM): mas maganda kung iyo hehe
girl from work (10:32:37 AM): haha... sabi ko nga wag mo na ko bigyan ng url e :))
zroytang (10:33:03 AM): haha bat ayaw mo
girl from work (10:34:02 AM): I am thinking if it is a good idea...nobody else at work knows the url, and I am not sure if I have written anything stupid about work haha
girl from work (10:34:10 AM): familiar ba? :))
zroytang (10:34:47 AM): :p

(Edited to remove the name of my company, and keep the name of the person I'm chatting with anonymous. Not that I have anything to hide, but more because it feels like the right thing to do.)


Sometimes I wonder why I do. When I started keeping a website for myself back in '02, it was more because I wanted to experience having to maintain one, and to sharpen my HTML skills (I'm pretty good at it now I think, although my web design still sucks); When Blogger started becoming prominent, I figured, might as well convert to a blog to take advantage of automatic archiving and stuff, as it was becoming tedious to update a website by hand.

Even now, I'm not sure why I go on, when I'm not even sure if any people read this (I am aware that there are some that probably do, though they usually remain quiet :D) I'm not sure why, but I guess I feel a need to maintain an online "presence" as it were. Part-time therapy, part-time boredom, part-time egotism perhaps?

Why then am I hesitant to let a coworker (who is also a friend) know the url? Like I said, I don't have anything to hide (and I'm pretty sure I haven't said anything stupid about my work, mostly because, hey I like my work!). If I had anything to hide, why blog in public at all? You could always hide behind Livejournal's protected system (they have one of those right?) or use an anonymous name.

I don't have an answer. But if she (or anyone else) asks again, I will give the url. :D

The Bible Promotes Capitalism

At least, that's what I was thinking when I was listening to today's Gospel regarding the parable of the talents.

Bsically, I think the gist of it is: God gives us talents, we should do the best we can; if we don't, how can we complain when others do better?

Yeah, I pay attention in Church. Go me!

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

What I'm Worth

Apparently, I am worth $1,758,066 on HumanForSale.com

Also, I don't why but


My blog is worth $1,693.62.
How much is your blog worth?



I wish someone would send me that cash, I could use it.

Nanowrimo...Why The Hell Not?

I was introduced to nano a few years back when some fanfiction writers I knew online told me about it. I've attempted it every year, and failed each time. I just don't have the drive.

I figured I wouldn't start this year. After all, here I am, it's the ninth of November, and I don't have anything, prepared or otherwise, why fight a losing battle right?

If you think I don't fight losing battles, you don't know me very well. Who knows, I may catch up and might actually make it this time.

And I'll write in public too. I have no title, so bear with it -- roynano.

Sunday, November 06, 2005

Games - GameFAQs Top 100 Games (User Picks)

For it's 10-year anniversary, GameFAQs has released the top 100 games as chosen by its' users during their anniversary contest.

To give you an idea of the general composition of the GameFAQs populace, 15 of the top 100 are Squaresoft games (including every single US-released main-series Final Fantasy), 17 are Nintendo games (5 Zelda, 7 Mario, 3 Metroid plus a couple more). Only 11 are PC games, 4 of which are from Blizzard.

And poor Megaman didn't make it into the list. Good old Street Fighter II actually did better, coming in at 47.

Thursday, November 03, 2005

The Long Weekend (or lack thereof) and Open Source Code

Filipinos traditionally take the weekend of All Saints/All Souls Day off, to rest and to visit their dearly departed. Westerners, particularly Americans, treat this time, specifically All Hallow's Eve, as a children's holiday. Given GMA's penchant for holiday economics, it was evident we would get at least Monday and Tuesday off, and they were indeed declared as holidays, so Filipinos got a respite shortly before the much-dreaded EVAT implementation.

Not me, though. I had to work. Funny how the demo projects always manage to get me during times of extended holidays. I haven't yet had the benefit of a weekend - I spent most of Saturday through Wednesday in the office. Yesterday, I was able to negotiate that I be allowed to take today (Thursday) off; Seeing as how Nov. 4 was also an RP holiday (celebrating the end of Ramadan) and they were asking me to come in anyway, they gladly agreed to swap my holiday.

Anyway, the project I was working on at least proved to be slightly interesting. It was a popular open-source ERP software that we were customizing for the client. Now, I've never delved far into open source code before (although I've wanted do), so I daresay I hope the quality of other open-source code out there is at least better than this one. It may be a popular open-source business package, but the codebase seemed incredibly messy to me, and hard to pickup without having to go through traces and stuff. I don't know, maybe I'm just demanding.