first encounter

...with william gibson's neuromancer.

it was the late eighties, i can't be any more certain than that. at that time, i was hanging out at a little "computer store" in b.f. homes paranaque that sold (nudge nudge, wink wink) computer games. this was also the near the opening of the p.c. age, but at this time it was already the p.c.-xt that was becoming the must-have. 8 or 16 megahertz, as i recall (and where are we now? gigahertz). the 5 1/4" floppy was still the medium of choice (360Kb capacity), the 3.5" microfloppy at 1.2Mb still rather rare.

at that time, the games were still very much MS-DOS based, and one of them in particular caught my fancy. oh, there were the lord british ultima things, and the leisure suit / space quest stuff, but this game was different.

the game was neuromancer, and it was published by interplay.

i'd always been interested in computers ever since i saw the texas instruments ti-99/4a way back in '83 (third year high school), and i'd used a commodore 64 while working as an encoder for a pastor at a local church; but their games were more reflex-based (and my reflexes in that regard suck. hehehe).

this game was different. it was more cerebral, in a way (although it did have its arcade-like moments - especially when dealing with a.i.'s). kinda like a mystery (though no dead bodies), with a computer hacker as a protagonist. this concept clicked with me and while the graphics were clunky (EGA resolution at best), the challenge of upgrading "your" hacking skills while uncovering the mystery both inside and outside the "matrix" certainly gelled with my nerdish and science fiction inclinations.

all i can say in hindsight is that it certainly took a good chunk of my time getting to the end of the game...

funny side note: computers in those times had a "turbo" button. this was one of those games where activating that function actually sped up gameplay. not fun when dealing with a.i.'s out to "flatline" you.

they never did a sequel, though.

for me, the sequel to the story was to happen many years later - i found the novel on which the game was based on.

and that's another story.

.75 over

sunday afternoon was devoted almost exclusively to rearranging the ground floor furniture (and the dirt underneath said items) to finally set up (partially) a home entertainment system that was obtained from a barkada gone stateside.

to that end, a huge, semi-heirloom buffet table was set up next to the ground floor windows to take the full weight of the 29-inch tv - and all the other furniture in the room had to be relocated elsewhere to accommodate.

that effort ended at a late hour, and after that i had some data wrangling to do: moving gigabytes of data from and to my usb hard disk (semi-reference material for a project of ours).

read: slept late.

monday's dawn, and early-ish to work. spent most of the day figuring out why my dvd burns of an esteemed gentleman's data kept dying on verification. turns out that the media he'd purchased would fail if the data exceeded 4GB in size... ...funny for something marked 4.7GB capacity, but you get what you pay for.

now, there was this late movement afoot to watch the (likely temporary) re-release of "meet the robinsons," but i was feeling the siren calls of the land of nod and hence decided to go home at dismissal time to get a sleep on.

...the best laid plans of mice...

no sooner had i closed the apartment gate behind me and passed the door of unit "a," than the screen door opens. it's charlie, one of the landlord brothers. in the course of the pleasantry exchange, i decide that now would be a good time to discuss a cable connection for the 21-inch tv displaced by the events described earlier. he invites me in and we continue the conversation - and he sets an opened beer before me.

i've been invited to their little drinking sessions before (often when they see me pass by their door on my way in), but i've almost always found a way to beg off, bar once before: they were commemorating their late father's birthday, and i could find no way to excuse myself. that time, they served vodka with lime, and between the three of us (two brothers and me), we polished off a whole bottle of absolut.

okaay...

i do warn him that one beer and i'm a goner...

anyway, his brother julius arrives, and their drinking begins in earnest. me, i manage to nurse a beer, and 3/4ths of the next after that.

wide ranging conversation. salient points: their ancestry is of pre-world war european aristocracy - genealogy was purportedly traced back to even napoleon bonaparte. charlie is 62, julius is 50 (and youngest of the brood). i'm still not sure what charlie does for a living, but he certainly does travel a lot. julius is a purser at an airline where the ownership adheres to a particular accounting precept of not releasing money on mondays...

ten o'clock rolls around (my, how time flies), and i make my semi-staggering exit. at this point, i've gone over my previous one-bottle-instant-sleep limit.

i drink two glasses of water before turning in, and sleep comes easily.

but the headache on waking up, oh man. gonna be a loong day. hmm. i forget if we came to an agreement about the cable connection. oh well...

stairwell by sunset

2.5 sec exposure, f3.3, iso 50
exposure noted by jose, crop suggested by paul

little things: update

...on the topic of recharging:

i generally charged my nokia phones without much consideration (in the days before lithium-ion batteries, it was supposedly fearfully important to fully discharge the battery before recharging lest the dreaded "memory effect" rendered the battery functionally useless - which it did, in time, regardless: it was just how much time you could keep the battery alive before replacing it).

the k310i is different. recently, i noticed that even if i kept the phone plugged to the charger overnight, it would never give the "battery charged" indication text. the battery icon in the top right corner would just have this "lightning" zigzag graphic overlaid on it - and it wouldn't go away so long as the charger was connected.

now, not having read the manual thoroughly (my eyes tend to glaze over while doing this), i decided to test a notion that popped in my head. what if charging the phone was similar to charging a cybershot battery in-camera?

so: turn phone off, plug charger, connect to phone.

in about two hours, the screen lit up with the the battery charged text.

...hmmm. i wonder if this is going to be a boon or a bane...

clouds under clouds

road trip: through a casio's eye

road trip 20070611 part III

after the unlikely castle, we went on. still the same twisty road, but after a while, it began to straighten out. it was at this point in time that i noticed that together with a seeming lack of habitation on both sides of the road, there was also a singular lack of gasoline stations on this particular road. so: good road for daytime driving - not good for running out of gas or night driving (or running out of gas while driving there at night).

the night driving bit? there's something about the aiming mechanism of the right-hand headlamp - the beam is aimed down; i'd had it adjusted, but the thing is busted because before long, the beam was back to its droop. so i'm not too confident about driving in non-illuminated countryside roads with half of the car's illumination capability devoted to a distance about a couple of car lengths in front of me.

at any rate, once the road straightened out, we got to a t-junction which offered the choice: left - lemery/taal, right - calaca.

left it was. and then the signs: shell, petron, caltex some distance ahead. and jollibee, too.

there was a time i was using petron to fuel the car (i'd tried shell, but my unscientific impression was that i either got bad mileage, or somehow the stuff evaporated too quickly in the tropical climes of this country). petron lasted longer by the same impression, but the car would run roughly, especially cold. then, vaguely intrigued by the promises of a tv commercial, i tried caltex at last. hmm. car runs better. then there was the tune up. car ran even better.

hmm. can anything be said about all this fuel tomfoolery? perhaps i'd have to run some sort of benchmarks, but that'll take some doing (and i'd have to stick to a repeatable schedule in terms of driving). some other time, perhaps...

so, caltex it was, and it was also the last station before the arch proclaiming entry into lemery. put in 500 pesos of gas, and decided to take a leak as well. hint to future travelers: if you happen to use this gas station's cr, either put on insect repelling lotion beforehand, or bring a can of bug spray and blast the place before entry. mosquitoes, huge, and lots of them. peeing while surrounded by whole bunches of those things is... ...interesting... ...to say the least.

lemery then. from the standpoint of the main road, its not much to look at. similar in effect to what i think of as "strip towns" that seem to build along a main (provincial) highway where most everything flanks said artery. not much by way of striking anything.

side note - asking for directions. we stopped at a hardware place and glenn asked how to get to taal (just to be sure). we were told that all we had to do was turn left after the bridge. seemed simple enough... no, we didn't get lost, but we did pass a bridge. and there was an unmarked road leading left. could that have been it? the uncertainty kept me driving forward. perhaps we'd see a sign... ...which we did, at the very end of the road, just past another bridge. the thing about instructions is that there always seem to be assumptions about familiarity with local landmarks - an assumption that are likely wrong, else why ask for directions in the first place?

at any rate, we took the left turn, and hit paydirt. it felt like a time warp, as the houses flanking the road displayed their ancestral origins: primarily bahay-na-bato architecture, stonework lower stories surmounted by a wooden upper floor, some windows of which were still what looked like capiz shells in gridwork wooden frames. they were also quite notably brightly painted ones...

...not sure if that was the practice way back when, but it certainly livened up the place.

streets, though, were thoroughly modern, if narrow. well paved concrete, two lanes; and no sidewalk to speak of.

i was itching to take pictures, but there was no visible place to park the car to do so.

one right, one left, and suddenly that was it. the old town had fallen away, and modern bungalows (with signs advertising balisongs for sale) on either side.

okay, u-turn, back. i stopped just before the final turn back out, next to a park. glenn got out to ask the tambays where we could get to the church... turns out i was parked just before the ramp to the basilica (i wasn't sure if it was an entry or exit - it wasn't clearly marked which). good thing the car has a fairly tight turning radius, and i lumbered up the ramp in 1st gear.

and there it was, the taal basilica.

signs and portents

i don't remember precisely where we saw it, but somewhere near the beginning of the calaca/taal diversion trip, there was a sign by the side of the road:

jollibee 32km. (or something like that, a rather huge number)

wow. imagine what kind of effort that would be just to go to a jollibee in these parts...

road trip 20070611 part II

after what seemed like a short while, we were soon passing a structure that most people refer to as the "radar." i've always found it curious - why would there be a need for a static-antenna radar installation on the tagaytay ridge? there was a sign, but again i was paying more attention to the road - glenn read it out as we passed. to wit: it was definitely a military installation, but instead of a radar, it was the home base(?) of a radio communications regiment or something.

and as we passed, the "special device" picked up a burst of communication. hmm...

before long, we were faced with a choice: calaca or nasugbu? we'd actually gone a bit past the calaca fork, but something about the nasugbu road gave me pause. it was under an arch, and beyond that was a lowered-pole arrangement (similar to railroad crossing barriers) that blocked onward progress. okay, calaca it is. also, at that point the notion of a goal destination finally crystallized: the calaca fork was off to the left (southwards). we might be able to get to the storied taal town itself if we went that way. now we'd find out if the signs to direct us that way existed...

now, just as we got on the road to calaca, on the other side was a sight that could, for all intents and purposes, be a harbinger of things to come: there was a 10-wheeler dump truck that was half off the road in a small ditch of some sort. it seemed to be "fresh," as there was no crowd of curious bystanders around it - or it may have been the fact that the truck had also broken an electric utility pole by the roadside, and the upper fragment thereof now lay on the top edges of the truck bed.

however, i quickly put "portents of doom" out of mind, and proceeded onward.

a long and winding road... :-)

two lanes of asphalt, twisting and turning through a sparsely populated, thickly greened area. it may have been anywhere from 15 to 20 kilometers long, with no turnoffs that i noticed, i was just having too much fun driving. not that quickly, though. with the ups and downs and twists, i rarely got past 3rd gear, and i don't remember the engine even making it to 3000rpm, so the average speed must have been in the high 40's (kph).

the low-ish speed was good, of course, given the number of turns and fairly blind ones at that.

all in all, i don't remember a better drive. most of my driving is actually long straight highway stuff, so this twisty stuff was a refreshing change.

and somewhere in the middle of it, the areas on either side of the road opened up, and there on the left was a castle perched on a hill some distance away. that was so remarkable that i slowed down and parked just off the road on a little level area of grass.

glenn got out and crossed the road to take pictures; i stayed in the car just then, thinking that i could take pictures with the borrowed-cam(tm) on the way back.

after a while, glenn came back and showed me the pictures he'd taken. interesting, and also for what was not visible (from this side of the road anyway).

there be a dragon here.

and off we went again.

road trip 20070611

i've never given the practice much thought, but just the same, i was expecting something of the kind to happen; and it did: the holiday aspect of independence day was moved to the 11th (a monday), from the 12th (a tuesday, the actual commemoration of the event). so that made a three-day weekend (well, for the rest of the working populace that don't have a half-day saturday at work).

given the prevailing heat in the metro - notwithstanding the official start of the rainy season had been announced a couple of weeks past - i'd felt that it'd be nice to have lunch in tagaytay on sunday and thereafter while away the afternoon taking pictures at various photo-ops. however, something about a late saturday night leading into a late sunday wake-up put paid to that.

instead glenn (makati housemate) and i decided that a look-see of the new ayala mall right next to sm city (north edsa?) was achievable. in the spirit of killing two birds with one stone, we decided to go to sm city first, park there, pay a bill or two, and then walk over to the "trinoma."

suffice to say, it's kinda bewildering (but then again, any new place would be); kinda large, kinda curvy within. right now, my impressions of the place can still be mutable. let's see what the next visit or two will bring...

monday dawns, bright and early. i'd intended to leave at 9, but glenn has some work-related emails to churn out; so i do some pre-flight checks on the car: tire pressures, windshield fluid reservoir, radiator and catchment bottle (?); attempted another unblocking of the left-hand side windshield washer nozzle...

10am, and we are off. ...to the local caltex station. add about 700 pesos worth of gas (takes the gauge about a needle-width above halfway). should be good enough. so, a few turns later, are on the cloverleaf and heading south on the slex. the car is fairly quiet at speed (average 80kph, or about 2500rpm in 5th). there is little by way of traffic, the only slowdowns are where the lanes divert to one side or the other around areas where the slex is being resurfaced. in fact, i took one such diversion and managed to miss the shell megaplexreststop thing on the right. but no matter, we were making good time. the only bit of uneasiness was with the exit. i've never driven enough to tagaytay to constantly remember which exit to take (santa rosa, as it turns out), or even how many exits past alabang it is (didn't manage to count this time, either), or what the exit immediately before is (just to get ready to make the lane change).

santa rosa exit, past two stoplights, and the two-lane road to tagaytay beckons. with some mobile chicanes (trucks, tricycles). nevertheless, an hour and ten minutes from setting out, we were at the bag of beans. made good time, indeed. the expected congestion was nowhere to be seen - which is good: i haven't quite gotten the hang of clutchwork in heavy traffic.

bag of beans is an interesting place; how best to describe it? hmm. i really ought to make notes and take more pictures with the borrowed-cam(tm).

to find the place, coming from the santa rosa road, you can find the place past the main rotonda and then a main junction and then a "reverse fork" in that two roads merge into one. past that fork (and keep the fork in mind when going the other way), on the right, there'll be a stretch of gravel between the road and a highway fence (metal rail on concrete posts, to keep cars from falling down the slope). that stretch of gravel affords the parking for bag of beans. typically, you'll see the cars parked before you see the sign itself. the sign itself is beside the shop that is practically the place's only presence on the road. flanking the shop, though, are two gates by which you descend into the establishment proper.

one could call it a restaurant in a garden. there are two main dining areas that are enclosed by screens, and a couple of other roofed though open air "huts." first thing you see coming down the left-hand stair is a large bird cage... ...and my memory fails me for the other details. i will endeavor to provide a more detailed account next time i happen to swing by there.

on to the food. the sign says "bag of beans" and "english pies and bread." that would be their specialties, then. i'd tried their apple pie before, quite nice. this time, though, being very hungry - skipped breakfast - i ordered the first thing on the menu that caught my eye. grilled salmon. glenn had porkchops and something called "mushroom clear soup."

being ravenous, once the food arrived, i dug in immediately (although i did have time to fiddle with the camera's macro mode while waiting, subject being a lone flower in a bud vase on the table). no pictures of the food, though. food was good.

off on a tangent: as a result of the tune up and oil change episode, the car was running quite well. wikipedia has it that the car's engine has 97bhp. now, i have no idea how that compares to other cars in terms of response, but once or twice when called for on the way up, the car did appreciably move with alacrity when i got on the gas pedal more than usual. (i rarely venture past 2000-2500rpm on the tachometer - this time, overtaking, i managed 3000-4000rpm, and it didn't take a long time for the needle to get there.)

anyway, lunch done, and we got back in the car. pulling out of the parking, i wondered aloud what was there on the right. see, last time we went to tagaytay, there was the mother of all traffic jams i've ever remembered on the ridge. i did recall that there was an unbroken line of cars heading to and away from the road to the right.

interesting prospect. so, instead of heading back to the junction and rotonda, i decided to follow the road wherever it led...

...more next time.

reunion

that's a new dessert from starbucks (new to me, anyway. i generally used to go for either the chocolate eclair or waffle with cream and strawberry or a clone of italianni's tartufo).

they call it a strawberry cheescake, but its more a fusion of cheescake (the lowest two levels) and a strawberry mousse on sponge cake (the upper two layers) glued together by strawberry jam.

suffice to say that i like it.

but that's not what this post is actually about.

anyway, she is one of those souls who were on the good ship 557 nueve de pebrero which at one point was sailing towards a date with some kind of destiny that was not to be -- courtesy of some ex-disney icebergs.

interestingly enough, she was the p.a. to the first director of the outfit; and then departing to come back as a liason to the animation council something-or-other.

either way, but more often in her latter role, we would have coffee breaks near the pantry - i'd have coffee, she'd have coffee and her smokes...

shooting the breeze with her was a particularly pleasant way to while away the time...

she departed for good; quite a whiles later the good ship foundered on the rocks of, oh, good intentions perhaps, but most likely sterling incompetence on the part of the captains thereof.

we've been in text contact on and off these past few years, and have met at least once in the intervening period. in the interim, she's had the recent expression of a genetic disorder that was (and probably remains) life-threatening; but is now under some sort of control by medication.

turns out that (and isn't this sometimes the case) it could have been worse; but as it stands, life can be good.

chance had it that she was going to the town center one fine day; and so we had a lunch meet - and i had that dessert during the time we spent.

...and it was a three-hour lunch, so to speak.

a pleasant reunion to be sure.

third molar

...is out.

about two and a half years ago, had a molar pulled from my upper left jaw. since i elected (budget considerations) not to fill the void resulting from the extraction, it meant that the second and third molar were now free to move forward into the gap.

didn't think too much on this fact (bad idea, ultimately) until at some time in the past (don't remember precisely when), i was eating some lapid's chicharon (cracklings?) and bit down hard on a chunk thereof...

...and felt a cracking as a piece of the stuff got wedged in the gap between the 2nd and 3rd molar. ouch.

since then, it's been giving me grief on and off, which i duly numb into submission by judicious doses of mefenamic acid...

but earlier this week, me and a couple of friends were dining (hah!) al fresco at the local donut joint and i espied across the street the unusually-named 1770 dental clinic. granted, i pass by it everyday going to work, but it doesn't really register. hmm. so, while waiting for my order to arrive, i risked a quick visit and inquiry, and before i knew it, i was scheduled for an extraction today.

again, the local anesthetic prior to the three-prick syringe-delivered anesthetic. inasmuch as the tooth was already loose, there wasn't too much of the sense that the dentist was wrenching too hard - she was just twisting the, what, pliers(?) one way and the other, and then the tooth was out.

not bad at all.

interestingly enough, the molar had only one root. she noted that 3rd molars are typically problematic, and the one root effect may simply be that the two roots had fused.

another interesting fact: her birthday is right after mine.

hmm...

fully synthetic (snake?) oil

earlier today, 7:30am saw me around the alabang town center area. hmm. the day before, i got the name of a local auto shop that an officemate recommended for their tune-up services.

threading my way through the parking around the church beside the town center, i drove slowly from one end of the auto shops that lined the edge of the parking lot until i saw the name of the shop under the awnings. "mac-r," though the banner above the awning read "mc clain" something or other.

strangely, they were open at this early hour. well, am here, might as well go for the long-delayed tune up and change oil (the last time i did that was january 13 of this year).

add to that the fact that the car had been idling poorly ever since a late night visit to someone called gorgeous lady to pick up some "contraband" for distribution to interested parties... this lady happens to live in a place called, aptly enough, moonwalk. after that trip, something happened to the carburetor's state of being such that the idle with the aircon on was about 500rpm, a far cry from the previous 1K rpm or such. rough, to say the least.

as a matter of fact, the saturday of the photo trek ii, after the fuel visit to the gas station (that had no mechanics present that day), i took screwdriver in hand and fiddled with a, well, screw on the assembly - and got the car to idle at about 700rpm with the aircon on (but 1200rpm without - oh well).

so, time to hand the car over to the professionals. i opted for replacing the air filter, fuel filter, oil filter, sparkplugs... ...and went for the fully synthetic mobil 1 oil.

needless to say, this spiked the estimate considerably, but the pitch was too good to let pass: 10,000km or one year before the next change, whichever comes first.

hmm.

indeed we shall see. the car runs so much better now, with a considerable increase in response to the gas pedal's prodding.

let's see if this is all just psychosomatic... tune in for further details.

interesting side effect

sunday afternoon: threaded my way through the oddly shaped parking lot of the "centennial terminal (2)" of the ninoy aquino international airport. i was going to call it oddly "arranged," but a quick google earth look-see reveals the, well, bigger picture.

the airport itself is laid out in as a parallelogram, with one of the sides in line with the main runway. in the rough center of the layout is the v-shaped terminal building: two wings/arms; south wing for domestic and north wing for international services of philippine airlines.

between the arms of the vee, the various parking zones surrounding a circular area containing the air traffic control tower and a lower building that seems dedicated to massive cooler/evaporator airconditioning units. public parking is essentially to the west of the atc circle.

entrance to the parking is at the west sharp tip of the parallelogram, with various arrows painted on the access road hugging the perimeter indicating traffic flow. the "oddness" of it is that the parking rows cut straight "vertically" north/south across the parallelogram's long east/west axis.

which means that turning into a parking row necessitates a more than 90 degree turn, close on 120 or so, i guess. minor quibble, i suppose - but the car is small. i wonder what it's like for the bigger denizens of the streets (american suv's, for example).

i was there rather early - hopefully to watch a few planes taking off or landing - and also to escape the oppressive heat in the makati apartment. i was planning on spending a few hours in the car, engine and aircon running, listening to some music courtesy of a teeny mp3 player attached to the car radio via a cassette interface with wire and earphone jack. (the car's radio is a hit and miss; sometimes it works, most times it doesn't - hence the investment in the cassette interface.)

okay. park car, insert cassette, power on. i attached the mp3 player and was working my way through stellastarr*'s harmonies for the haunted album and fiddling with the volume control when there was a slight burst of static, and then a voice.

what the hell?

a woman spoke, saying something to the effect: "cebu pacific (number) please expedite your approach, incoming traffic 24-a."

i'd heard jargon like that before, seeing as i visit a certain website full of aviation videos, some videos of which include air traffic control chatter.

amazing! somehow or other, the car radio was picking up the atc communications. in my excitement, i texted a friend about it. i then disconnected the mp3 player. still the voices came. sometimes, i could even hear a few planes' communications with the tower, mostly asking for "pushback."

as a test, i ejected the cassette. a radio station came on, but poorly (not surprising, seeing as i almost never tune to any stations at all). the atc voices were stilled. popped the cassette back in, and they resumed.

interesting. wonder what it is that's making it work.

anyway, at that time i decided that i might as well see what action there was out there for a while. securing the car, i made my way to the end of the domestic wing and saw a cathay 777-300 and a singapore 777-200 take off in succession. there were also a bevy of philippine airlines a320's taking off.

and then a philippine airlines a330 landed.

that was most likely the flight from bangkok. so i made my way to the arrival area of the international wing...

anyway, an interesting afternoon, to say the least. and a bit of trivia, too. or maybe it was just that shift, but all the atc controllers i heard that afternoon were female...

photo trek ii: the evidence

that's a bird, not dirt on the lens...
































it's me (my shadow, anyway)








look! airyplanes!


same plane, a second or two later. it's likely an airbus a330-300

photo trek ii: american war cemetery

i was unable to join the first photo trek, held on the previous sunday, due to some sort of intestinal distress -- i'll leave it at that: no more details necessary. hehehe.

saturday afternoon was full of sunshine with puffy white clouds in a nice blue sky, jose commented upon the quality of light favorably. i think it had been raining sporadically the whole week, so there was the promise of that happening on the photo trek.

after lunch, i sunk a k's worth of gas (premium, as it says on the filler flap), and we left the office around 3-ish, 3 of us and 2 to follow.

not knowing precisely where the venue was (jose knew the way, but with entry from edsa to mckinley of forbes park - i was, however, keen to avoid edsa at most costs on a saturday afternoon), so prior to our departure i opted to use (again) google earth to map out a likely route.

the american war cemetery, from the vantage point of the satellites that take the google earth pictures, is a circular arrangement of roads just south of the larger arrangement of circular roads that make up the "fort" development on the former reserved lands of the fort bonifacio military reservation. that selfsame circle-within-circle road arrangement also makes the place look like an archery target from space. um. best not follow that line of thinking too far out...

therefore: slex, c5, go under first bridge, turn left, follow road to t-intersection, turn right, and turn right again at the first instance of a tall condominium complex. easy, no?

easy enough, but a potential hell on the clutch leg. slex's northbound saturday sucat/bicutan/c5 tollgate slowdown was in evidence at the time, but not so bad really. at least there were gaps in the crawling to reach the maximum 80kph limit. and the up ramp to the c5 tollgate was more manageable than the last time (a wedding in a place far far away). i virtually crawled the car up in first and had to only disengage the clutch a few times.

out of the gate, find bridge, turn left (when the rest of the driving public deigned to let me through, that is: giving way is a foreign notion to filipino motorists). snaky road with another cemetery to the left - forgot to pay attention as to what the name of the place was.

at any rate, a few turns later (and one blocked road), we came unto the venue.

...and discovered that we had just about an hour to take pictures. one semi-wrong turn later, got to the parking lot, and jose and a were out like shots, getting their picturing on.

on my end, secured car, and got myself to working the borrowed camera. all in, i was taking shots on automatic; if something caught my eye, activate camera (asa/iso pre-set to 50) and adjusted shutter speed between 1/125 to 1/500 to get a decent enough exposure per the lcd display.

not too much thinking involved... hehehe.

unfortunately, by the time the other 2 were finally near, the place's wardens(?) were shooing all the guests out for closing... so one of them took some pictures at the mini-mall we ended up eating at a dining establishment thereof (hossein's of persian kebabs).

all told, took 25 pictures. may post them later, after resizing to blog-friendly size. and it didn't rain at all. :-)

roaches

decided to go home to pasay/makati last night. housemate over there was in bangkok for a conference, and the sublets of the other room were likely as not to be in parts unknown. not to mention that i forgot my handy-dandy large umbrella the last time i was there (and might need it today for the photo trek organized by our estimable photographer-in-residence jose).

so, after a few hours of grappling with the strangely flaky broadband internet connection (the rampant thunder and lightning storms of late may have something to do with that), decided to finally hit the sack around eleven-ish.

one-thirty am or so, i feel that prickling sensation between my left shoulder and my neck; that sensation that can only mean a roach is crawling on me. bolt upright, brushing my shoulder with my right hand and look for the offending creature. nowhere to be seen. move the pillows, still nothing. i gingerly sniff my hand - and there's the acrid whiff of roach on it. rubbing alcohol takes care of that, but now there's more work to be done.

now, there's a light on, a fairly weak one (10 watt incandescent), the theory of operation being that roaches are negatively phototropic -- so they should steer clear of the room. so much for theory. i opened the main room light (a twisty 20-watt compact pl flourescent) - lo and behold! perched on the jalousie frames were three roaches; the adult kind, winged and able to fly. good thing that i keep a can of insect spray next to the bed. DIE, you buggers! each one of them got a good, solid blast from the can.

they erupted into flight. oh boy.

one flew straight at me - reflex brought the spray can up, and whoosh, the roach flew into the emergent cloud of bug spray and dropped to the floor with an audible thud. then they scampered out of sight.

urgh. i lay me back down to sleep (with the main light on), and as i was drifting off, i heard through the pillow (!) faint scratching sounds. one of them was back on the bed, and scurried off to the side. i proceeded to blast the area between the bed and the wall.

then a few minutes of peace. once more, lie down. no sooner done than a roach emerges from between the pillow and my knapsack (which i had placed on the bed), calmly cleaning its antennae between its, what to call it, mouth parts. okay, this is getting ridiculous. slowly, i reach for the can of spray, and blast the roach in one unbroken stream as it scurries away the lenght of the bed.

geez, will i ever get any sleep?

just then, the roaches begin to run up and then fall down off the walls. one of them falls just beyond the foot of the bed. lying on my stomach on the bed, i decide to watch it die.

it lies on its back, legs spasming to get it upright; but the end result is akin to a rowboat with only one oar, it just spins in place. i get the bug spray and drench it in chemicals, but its still very much alive. wow, these things are tough. no wonder its posited that they'll survive a nuclear war that may wipe humanity out. just then, another roach joins the spinning-rowboat-party. blast that too.

minutes pass.

still ticking.

i'm getting impatient. right, get the rubbing alcohol, and liberally wet them with it. in moments, they've stuck their necks out (wonder why) and have stopped moving. personally, i think they drowned in the alcohol that i poured on their abdomens (as their breathing is accomplished through holes in their sides, i believe -- may have to wikipedia that).

after that insecticidal incident, no more roaches were noticed by me. or maybe i was too tired to notice after i fell asleep again.

really have to find a way to address that house's roach/ant/rodent/spider problem...

a failure of imagination?

a few days ago, a friend mailed me a link to some cool moon facts

diverting and educational all in one, especially at that time of day (round about the 3pm mark -- when the not-enough-work-ennui effect is strongest for me).

i've always liked astronomy, though i doubt i could ever sink my mind into the mathematics that underlie much of the science in it. i rather go for the imagery that the bevy of astronomical instruments (and the astronomers that use them) serve up for the edification of the general masses.

as a matter of fact, here's a site that i visit every day for my astronomical image fix (updates after lunch, though)

so where does the title of the post come into this?

it has to do with the "man in the moon" -- a particular pattern that the brain imprints on the arrangement of dark "seas" on the moon.

i don't see it.