i’m not really friends with her. heck, she is even part of the mix-up that tore up my friendship with my two blockmates.

but the thing is i know her and we have shared some moments together when things were still ok. i remember how she confided to me how she was fighting for this guy who had another girl friend at that time. eventually, she married him.

now she’s gone. just got a text message from my sister that she died this morning. she was diagnosed with leukemia after marrying her long-time boyfriend a few months ago. it was the type that could not be treated anymore since it was already chronic (?) or advanced stage (?). she contracted an infection and she was not able to leave the hospital since.

i feel bad because we are of the same age. it’s just a shame that she was not able to enjoy her brief marriage with my sister’s kabarkada.

it was tragic in a way. life’s like that, it can be snuffed away in a snap.

i had just been texting my bestfriend, who has been suffering from post-break up depression, that life is too short for us to be just moping around. we have to live the life to the fullest.

some commenters on huffingtonpost.com said FOX news flooded youtube with their own edited version of the tina fey-palin sketch on saturday night live which downplayed sarah palin’s brainlessness (bush doctrine: “pffffft i don’t know what that is; foreign policy: “i can see russia from my house!) and buried the ones that showed the complete clips.

well, that’s an exaggeration, i know. but that’s how i feel today.

i think i lost 10 lbs last night after i spent more than an hour at the hard core gym within our subdivision. my stuntman-trainer (totoo, stuntman sya sa mga pelikula pero kasing liit siya ni ernie reyes, jr.) subjected me to a grueling session and now i am aching all over. at first it looked so easy since the weights of the machines i were using were at the minimum but i was really out of shape therefore everything was painful at the end of the session.

i immediately went to the neighborhood spa for a massage. i don’t know if what i did was wrong but i didn’t care last night, i just wanted to have a good rub down to soothe my aching muscles.

i can endure the pains and exhaustion basta i’ll be healthier and be in shape for a grand total of P200 plus P35 per visit! compare that to gold’s gym that charges a minimum of P30,000 in membership fee pa lang yan ha. sobra naman kasing mga charges yan eh. and i read a lot of glowing feedbacks *insert sarcasm here* about fitness first and the automatic charging that this gym does to your credit card.

i just have to tell my trainer that hinay-hinay lang. baka maging mala-madonna o vina morales ang katawan ko after 3 months. ngiiii, scary thought.

i don’t know what to make out of my defense today.

i passed but with a caveat (“provisional pass” they say). the chairman chairperson of the panel asked me to step outside to give me an opportunity to wring my hands or twiddle my thumbs (and hold my stomach until i could go home and release it in the comforts of my bathroom) while they deliberated whether they would give me a future or not.

then the chairperson then shook my hands and congratulated me since i passed. here’s the clincher: i pass if i submit the revisions within one month to my adviser and reader. and oooooooh boy, do i have a big problem on my hands. revisions.

they saw through me; they knew i was lost with my thesis in terms of direction and how i will fully execute this thing.

i’m quite tired. i don’t really know what i’m doing with myself, with my life. why i’m subjecting myself through this unnecessary trouble. i’m also questioning the wisdom in staying in this profession since my insides are already squirming at the thought of going back to my f*cking beat after two weeks.

–
BLOOD ON THE STREET(S)

blood on Wall Street, that is. thus the end of Lehman Brothers.

in the end nobody wanted them — while other financial institutions (et tu, Merrill Lynch?) scramble to merge with others or take cover by restructuring (dang! we have our money with AIG-Philamlife. gotta ask Philam whether they will follow).

poor Lehman. a lot of investment bankers, analysts etc. will be brushing up on their resumes. i now have two financial institutions crossed out in my list of research notes to read. the first one is bear stearns (goodbye bear) and now this.

i talked to the merrill lynch guy who was here in july (or august?) about fannie mae and freddie mac and off-hand i asked whether this was the end. he said it won’t be and he suspect that bigger things are yet to come. i knew merrill lynch was in dire straits (oooh those write downs!) but i did not imagine that they were in deep shit, enough for them to be contemplating they contemplated (and now almost done deal) a merger with Bank of America. correction, BoA will be buying them for US$50 billion. i mean hey, that is merrill lynch! mind you, when i was thinking about this, this was before the sept 5 downgrade by goldman sachs to “conviction sell”.

so now i wonder what will happen to the merrill lynch guy. will he be updating his resume as well?

how about you, citi?

while i was checking out my youtube account, there was this guy who was trying to befriend me called akosichris. i checked him out and was surprised to see a white guy playing OPM pop on his guitar and singing tagalog (albeit with a heavy american accent). i guess he loves philippines and even went here and tried singing on top of a house in caloocan to a throng of neighborhood children and drinking cobra at some bar in QC.

i laughed (in a good way) and thought of those fil-ams who couldn’t care a fig about trying to learn tagalog. i clicked the “ok” button and allowed him to by my youtube friend.

then i saw another white guy playing buloy by parokya ni edgar. his tagalog is better than that of akosichris

i wasn’t able to find any info on whether these guys have pinoy parents/friends/girlfriends who introduced them to OPM. it’ll make a nice feature story targeted at slang fil-am PBA players…

just this week, we drew our collective breaths when scientists at CERN started their dumb-ass experiment with the Large Hadron Collider. some of us let out a sigh of relief when our world was not sucked into a black hole and everything was still normal save for the two strong earthquakes in indonesia and japan. unfortunately, an indian girl took it more seriously and commited suicide apprently due to end-of-the-world fears that this behemoth machine may trigger.

hey, i’m all for science and the scientists’ quest for knowledge (i grew up in a scientific community after all and my mom is a scientist) but what do these scientists at CERN were thinking anyway?! i mean, do they have the right to subject us to this kind of apocalyptic danger just for the sake of curiosity? what right do they have to play god compared with us lesser mortal men and women? they close down defective nuclear power plants and force countries to give up their nuclear superpower amibitions because they are danger unto mankind and yet these scientists play god just to see what happens post-Big Bang and look at the so-called primordial soup?

what’s funny though is that stephen hawking bet that CERN wouldn’t be able to find the “God-particle” using that machine.

ok, granted that the black hole thing was just amplified by doomsayers… still, what if something went terribly wrong?

my husband likes sarah palin because she’s good looking, kinda like a prettier sister of tina fey. it seems like american males do like her as revealed by a media survey recently where men outnumbered women who supports/like palin.

that’s a scary thought.

what’s more scary is that she might become a vice president of the US. she:

• supports teaching creationism in public schools, though she does not believe it should be mandatory
• supports gun safety education for youth, and the right to bear arms, including handguns
• reduce state government spending, including cutting $1.6 billion from the Alaskan construction budget
• opposed federal listing of the polar bear as an endangered species, warning that it would adversely affect energy development in Alaska
• opposed the designation of the Cook Inlet beluga whale as an endangered species
• but is against “explicit sex-ed programs” in schools, backing abstinence-only education
• upported a non-binding referendum for an Alaskan constitutional amendment to deny state health benefits to same-sex couples 

kinda like george dubya bush, isn’t it?

“Time Magazine says that when Sarah Palin took office as mayor, she approached the town librarian and asked how to go about banning books from the town library:

[Former Wasilla mayor] Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. “She asked the library how she could go about banning books,” he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. “The librarian was aghast.” The librarian, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn’t be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire her for not giving “full support” to the mayor…” - from boingboing.com

just because she is a woman, it doesn’t mean that women should automatically vote for her. come on, look at her political stand and her track record first, for pete’s sake!

(not the radiohead album =))

my cousin, potatochips, and i were having drinks at metrowalk one August evening and she was relating to me how flabbergasted she was with today’s youth (as if! we’re not that old). she was watching TV one night and one news program showed man-on-the-street interviews of students who were asked “do you know who ninoy is?”.

the replies:

• tatay ni kris aquino
• nasa P500
• di ba naging presidente sya?

potatchips was screaming, “what’s wrong with these people?! it’s only 25 years ago, not 100 years ago since he died! how can they not know who ninoy is?”

i told her i really don’t know where we went wrong. is it because history teaching is left in the doldrums or we have no proper history teaching to speak of that our supposedly future leaders do not know their past? or is it because the youth today have so many distractions (mp3 players, internet, PSPs, cellphones) that lessons easily fly out the window the moment they step out of the classroom?

should we wonder why imelda is still being idolized today? estrada sashaying around, planning a comeback on 2010?

do they know pag-ibig sa tinubuang lupa?

i guess not. you don’t have to be a history buff to know that…but i guess we are living in the land of amnesiacs. a land that would surely lose its soul, sooner than we think.

Vulnerability researcher Robert ‘RSnake’ Hansen is very harsh in his response to Google’s decision to build its own browser:

If you build a browser in isolation, you don’t get the benefits and knowledge of the smart people who have come before you. Yes, Google’s browser is open source, like Firefox. But even Firefox came from Netscape, which had tons of background in the browser world, and Mozilla, too, has learned from a mistake or two. It is easy to call into question Google’s ability to build a safe browser given its rather poor track record in other areas of security. And no, you shouldn’t download it — not if you care about your security. So, like cryptography, you shouldn’t build a browser unless you really, really know what you’re doing.

Read the rest of the ZDNet article here.