Final Poster + Next Step

Finally, the term paper for our LITERA1 is over. As my movie ad, I have used this poster made using Adobe Photoshop and with the help of my sister Michelle. ^^ Though I can’t say that its one of the best as compared to my classmates’ work, but at least its something I never expected to be able to accomplish.

Now, setting this aside, the bigger problem is the thesis. Our deadline for submission of documents is on July 19, and honestly, we haven’t started doing anything regarding it. Well, this should explain my absence for the next few weeks, where I may not be able to blog for awhile. Till then. Ja-ne! (see you soon) ^^

Thesis Woes + Badminton Experience

Today, there has been 2 major events that happened in my life. First one is the realization of our thesis. We are quite behind schedule. How I wish _____ (one of my thesis mates) would start realizing that and start helping out his “thesis mates”. I guess right now, he’s quite distracted. Hehe sino kaya siya?

Too many ideas/recommendations were thrown to us a while back in our meeting with an English professor. And most of those would cause a major revision on what we have already made in our software. Nevertheless, they were quite helpful and hopefully, we will be able to satisfy 90% of them.

Enough about thesis, let me move on to the more exciting part of this entry. The Badminton Experience. Earlier, this afternoon, Bash, Dotagod Law, and me went near Manila City Hall and played Badminton there. There were supposed to be four of us but Allen wasn’t able to make it due to an “appointment”. Nevertheless, we had 3 round-robins in a span of 2 hours.

Bash had the most wins in the 3 round-robins, collecting 5 wins. I had 4 wins, and Dotagod unfortunately had none. Law said that badminton is so different from DotA. He can’t farm opponents, nor deny shuttlecock. I totally agreed with him.

Nonetheless, there were some highlights in our games. Like how I was taunting Dotagod and he returned a major smash to me saying: “You think!?”. It was totally horrifying… I hallucinated with the image of me being OWNED by him in DotA. Another highlight was my 2 consecutive trick on Law. On my two consecutive serves, I shouted “short!” and he quickly reacted by moving away from the shuttlecock and it entered the box, thus giving me two consecutive points. Hehe it was really funny how he realized he was tricked twice. Finally, my last highlight was during the game I won against Bash. It was a similar incident to my trick on Law as I shouted “short!” on my serve and Bash, without hesitation, moved away from the shuttle cock. Hehe too bad, on the next possession, he returned my serve with a smash, thus ending my “tricking spree”.
(Note: Bash won twice against me. Thus making him the best player among the three of us.)

Well, this ends my entry for today. Hope you enjoyed it. ^^

The Warning + My Poster

It is confirmed. I have indeed failed our first quiz in LITERA1. I got 10/20… perhaps the lowest in class. Thus giving me a 0.0 for the 10% of the total grade of the course. Just a while ago, right after our class in LITERA1, my professor wanted to talk to me. So I stayed and got “lectured”. Hehe just kidding.. actually what happened was he told me that he was shocked seeing my performance. He didn’t expect that since I was a magna cumlaude contender. Thus he told me I could retake the quiz, but I have to read another novel and the quiz will be twice as hard. Then again, he told me it was still too early for me to decide on this… so I should be careful from now on.

Anywayz, past is past. ^^ This failure will be my inspiration to do better and be more serious in this subject. Oh, by the way, today is the deadline for our project proposal for our movie poster. To give you a background on this, well, we were tasked to make our own movie poster featuring real actors/actresses based on the novel that we read. The rules are: [1] we cannot use the same title as the novel. [2] We have to provide justification for the poster (eg. title). Thus here is my movie poster proposal.

For my “movie”, I shall have Dingdong Dantes as Adrian Banyaga, the heir to seven major corporations. Young, handsome, but foolish, all he wishes for is a life to live. Anne Curtis will play as Anna Villaverde. After her role as the Kampanerang Kuba heroine, she is perfect as among the powerless of the powerless. Quiet and vivid, all she wants is to have a burial, an end to a story.

Before I end this entry, let me give credit for my friends who helped me in this. Mr. Rommel Mendoza and Mr. Bryan Hong for the beautification of my poster. Thank you very much. ^^

First Blood! LITERA1 and PLDT pwned me

June 15, 2006…. the day we had our LITERA1 novel quiz. The quiz was able to make me “drop dead”. Hehe so far, I managed to collect 3 points out of 10. The remaining 10 points are still unknown because it is an essay, however, 99% chance is that I will fail this quiz. The consequence? Well, I lost 10% of my final grade in LITERA1.

Later that day, I found out that indeed our DSL connection was broken. I lost my internet connection till just this morning. What tragedy! I missed downloading the 20th episode of the “Return of the Condor Heroes 2006″ by one or two days because of this. Hahaha well, at least now its working. ^^

Hmm… it looks like Miami Heat has the advantage now in the NBA Finals 2006. Since Dallas Mavericks lost Jerry Stackhouse for their 5th game. Hmm… the standing now is 2-2. And well, somehow my pride as an analyst is on the line here. I kept telling my friends that the Dallas Mavericks will be the champions even before the playoffs started. ^^ Well, time will tell.

A Sense of Urgency

When the going gets tough, I get tougher.

I never imagined that I will be able to read this far. No, I still haven’t finished reading the whole novel yet. But I was able to read up to page 278. Yeah! That means I read more or less 158 pages of novel text in half a day. So why half day only? Well, since today is a holiday, my family and I went to SM Mall of Asia (my first time!) to explore and buy groceries. It took 4 hours of my reading time thus I started reading the novel around 2pm continuously till 7pm. Of course there were short breaks where I ate mirienda and watched TV.

7pm onwards, I ate dinner with my family. Then, I continued reading till 8:30pm where my father played table tennis with my youngest brother. I joined in with them and played till 9:30pm. After that, well, I went to the gym for a short workout so that to continue what I had promised myself. I promised myself since May 8, 2006 to go to gym at least 3 times a week and build discipline along with it. Well, so far so good.

I was planning to sleep early when I started thinking of what to expect this week. Other than our exam in LITERA1 and JAPALA1 on Thursday. I realized that I haven’t worked on our thesis for more than a week now, and well, tomorrow we will be meeting with our adviser. Gotta have something to show her… para hindi naman nakakahiya. Then I realized that there is still something I haven’t programmed in our thesis software which is required… the “give correct answer” feature. I had a hard time figuring out how on Earth am I gonna program it until just a while ago when an Angel whispered it to my ear… alas! I have an idea!!

This sense of urgency has got me going. Hopefully, this new-found energy of mine will last a bit longer. Must resist temptation! So far, I almost gave in to playing PS2 again, but thanks to my will-power… hehe I was able to stop myself. Hope that power is enough to stop me tomorrow.

End of blogging for today. ^^

Playing vs Reading: A Dilemma

What a day this has been. My expected goal for this weekend was to finish reading the novel “State of War”. And the result? Well, more or less, I have read just 30% of the novel. I guess I should make up tomorrow (good thing it is independence day). Then again, bad news is that tomorrow, my family plans to go to SM Mall of Asia (or is this good news?). Hehe

So what happened during the entire weekend? How come only 120 pages were read? Its a sad fact that I lost to temptation and spent 50% of my free time playing Suikoden V in our PS2. Another 20% of those were spent in Robinsons (Saturday) where Bryan, Lawrence, Edel, Allen, and me watched XMen3 and played bowling afterwards. The remaining 20% was divided to watching TV, playing table tennis, and reading the novel. Bad Deryk! As punishment, I shall not play PS2 for a week! It’s a promise! Let me write this down as a reminder for myself. Hehehe

Oh wells… I’m wasting time here updating my blog when I should either be sleeping or reading my novel. Thus, I gotta go and take my leave. Farewell and I shall return!

School Aims to Draw First Blood

Uh oh… it looks like I got myself in a tight situation in school. Let me explain what is going to happen. First, my JAPALA1 class. This thursday (June 15), we are going to have a quiz on Japanese adjectives, wherein it requires us to memorize more or less 120 adjectives. My progress with this task is 0%. Next problem, is my LITERA1 class, wherein we are required to finish reading a novel (either “My Brother, My Executioner” or “State of War”), and we will be having a quiz about it also on thursday. I chose to read the novel “State of War” by Ninochka Rosca and it is more or less around 400 pages. Too long for my liking… because I really dislike reading books. Hmm… so far, I have read 120 pages and hopefully I can finish the novel tomorrow. *sigh*

Third problem is thesis. So far, we haven’t started writing our documentation of the software and a bigger problem is that we haven’t started testing it with the students in the ELL (English Language Laboratory) which we should have done since last week. Well, it can’t be helped since we had a bit of a problem with the ELL department. Hopefully, sometime this week, we can resolve this issue.

The question now is… will school draw first blood against me this term? Or will I be able to survive all the problems (especially thesis). Anywayz, no point thinking about how big my problem is right now… what matters is that… I do something to make that problem disappear. ^^ Go POPSICLE!!

Note: “POPSICLE” is the name of our thesis group. It stands for “Past or Progressive. A Software for Identification and Correction of Language Errors”.

The Birth of Bonta’s Realm

Alrighty! Now I have my new and improved blog site. Hehe from now on, I will be blogging here since its a lot more organized to write here. Anywayz, I’ll do my best to keep this blog alive. Somehow I kinda feel bad about my other blogs. But, past is past. Time to move on to this new and clean blog. ^^