Wednesday, May 31, 2006
Fotogra weddings by Mimi and Karl
Manila Tagaytay Baguio Boracay Wedding Photographers
Eto yung favorite ko dun sa pre-nups sa site:
Friday, May 26, 2006
Pisay links
Newsbreak has a bunch of stories about Pisay, the best of which deals with the establishment of new campuses under the system despite inadequate funding. Hardest-hit is the budget for faculty salaries:Then there are teachers’ salaries to consider. Another P35 million is needed for one-year operations and teachers’ salaries. This is so because the system adheres to strict qualifications for teacher applicants and maintains a teacher-student ratio of
1:10.
The current faculty includes some notable names. The Western Visayas Campus prides itself in having the first Asian teacher to receive the Intel Foundation Excellence in Teaching Award—Dr. Josette Biyo, science research teacher—who won the award in 2002 and was consequently honored by astronomers by naming a minor planet after her.
Despite all this, observers say, the inability of PSHS to match the pay rates in other local schools and abroad is taking its toll on the quality of instruction.
“It is difficult to retain the best teachers because the pay is low,” Abad said.
Students at the Philippine Science High School are scholars all through their four years of study. Apart from free tuition, they get free lodging and, depending on their family income, are also given allowances as well.
Many graduates often return the favor by teaching in their alma mater. But they leave eventually. “You cannot feed a family with the kind of salary they pay there,” Lorenzana told NEWSBREAK.
The magazine also goes Dan Brown on us with a piece about the Opus Dei 'invading' the school. I guess the topic is sexy enough, but it's also very sloppily researched. Puro tsismis yung laman.
Finally, there's a feature profiling Pisay graduates after leaving the school, usually for UP. The article points out that Pisay graduates tend to become slackers during college (which is true for the most part), with various experts citing their theories why this is so.
A more interesting point that comes almost as an afterthought in the article is the fact that Pisay people really stick together, maintaining their friendships well after college has ended. So true. Bakit nga ba?
Thursday, May 25, 2006
Song meme
Step 1: Put your MP3 player or whatever music player you have on random.Step 2: Post a line from the first 30 songs that play, no matter how embarrassing the song.
Step 3: Post and let everyone you know guess what song and artist the lines come from.
Step 4: Strike out the songs when someone guesses correctly.
Step 5: No cheating
3. Oh, Hannah how I miss you
7. Hold on to your head, when your heart is broken
8. I know you had to go away, I die just a little, and I feel that now you're the one I need
15. Is it in your mind at all? Could be me, could be me...
16. Why can't I breathe whenever I think about you?
19. He made you believe in no man, no cry, maybe that's why...
21. It's just a shimmy and a shack, uh huh, I can't fake, we're on top
22. I said please don't slow me down if I'm moving too fast
30. And it's such a miracle that you and me are still good friends, after all that we've been through
Labels: music
Friday, May 12, 2006
Superhero
Your results:You are Spider-Man
| You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.  |
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Happy
At lunchtime yesterday, we had a meeting with some people from Business World, which led to this conversation between a couple of our editors:Editor 1: "Saan yung office nila, sa Makati? Ortigas?"
Editor 2: "Hindi, malapit lang. Sa may E. Rodriguez. Hindi mo ba alam yun?"
Editor 1: "Saan dun?"
Editor 2: "Sa may Happy."
Editor 1: "Ahh."
And then earlier, while an officemate and I were talking about making plans to go to a Sitti gig, we had this exchange:
Me: "Every Friday nights, may gig siya sa Stone House, sa may E. Rodriguez"
Officemate: "Saan yun?"
Me: "Malapit sa Happy."
Officemate: "Ahh. Alam ko yun."
Tuesday, May 09, 2006
Hating Kobe
Slate's Sam Anderson is right on the money in his article, On the Pleasure of Hating Kobe Bryant (And the sadness of watching him exit the playoffs)I don't hate Kobe for petty reasons: for his talent, for instance, which is beyond dispute and often gorgeous to watch, or because he sold out Shaq, or because he's an adulterer, or because his face looks like a weasel. I can forgive all of that. I don't even hate him because the referees surround him with a sacred halo of gentle touching (he was once so coddled in a playoff game that Ralph Nader had to start agitpropping about it), or because he's skewed the self-perceptions of pickup ball-hogs across the nation, or even because he makes close to my yearly salary every time he scores a basket. This is all irritating but peripheral. The true source of my rage is much, much deeper: I hate Kobe Bryant's rotten and derivative soul.
Since Michael Jordan's final title in 1998, NBA superstars have suffered mightily from what Harold Bloom termed "anxiety of influence." The Jordan myth—a morality play about how dedication, respect for the game, and loving your parents makes you the undisputed greatest person in the world—has stifled an entire generation of great players. But, as Jordan's most talented immediate successor, Kobe has been uniquely warped. He's plagiarized MJ's game so expertly that, in many ways, he's ahead of the master's curve—Kobe is stronger than the 27-year-old Jordan and has a deadlier outside shot. But for all his miraculous skills, Kobe is painfully bad at mythmaking. Since he's a Jordan-like talent, Kobe clearly thinks that he's entitled to the Jordan mythology, but he doesn't have any of Jordan's charisma or imagination. As melodramatic and managed as Jordan's career was, there was some authentic core—it was original and seemed to mean something. Kobe exists entirely within quotation marks.
Go Suns!
Neal Pollack said it best:The Suns are a team of destiny, even if that destiny is to lose to the Spurs in six. So go, tall, laid-back French guy! Go, tall, laid-back stoner guy! Go, smart liberal Canadian guy! Go, pixie-like Brazilian speed demon! Go, dude playing for a multi-million dollar contract! Um, who else? Go, guy who throws assholes like Kobe Bryant to the ground! And go, go, go Coach Pornstache!
Friday, May 05, 2006
Thursday, May 04, 2006
The Name of the Rose
I posted a write-up about The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco over at the Prose Portal. This was me being lazy, since that book was my Holy Week weekend reading, and it took me this long to post about it. I'd actually read another book since, Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. I'm hoping to write about that soon, perhaps tomorrow.I haven't been very good about reading lately, mostly because of the ongoing NBA Playoffs. Up next for me is Roddy Doyle's A Star Called Henry, about which I've heard marvelous things.
Wednesday, May 03, 2006
I got in
Do you guys remember me applying for grad school a few weeks ago?I had assumed that I didn't get in, since it had been a month and I still hadn't heard back from them. I was already making plans for the summer, a nice little vacation with the money I won't be spending for tuition.
Then I got a message in my inbox last weekend:
We are very pleased to inform you that you have been accepted as a student under the Master of Technology Management (MTM) program of the University of the Philippines – Diliman Technology Management Center (UPTMC).
But then my happiness was short-lived when I read on:
To prepare for your coursework, you are required to attend a series of Preparatory Courses/Workshops on General Management, Marketing, Production and Operations Management, Accounting, and Effective Communications, which will be held on May 7, 14, 21, 27 & 28 and June 4 & 11, 2006. Each workshop session is scheduled from 8:30 to 11:30 a.m. and 1:30 to 4:30 p.m., and will be held at the TMC in UP Diliman. Registration and payment of fee (P6,000.00) for the five (5) workshops should be done from May 2 to 5, at the TMC Graduate Program Office.
There goes my summer. Not only will I be in school every weekend, but between tuition (for the workshop and next semester) and for all the other stuff going on, I won't have any money anymore.
On the other hand, I'm legitimately psyched to go back to school, so much so that the courses listed above look alluring.
Last night, I was thinking about how I really, really want to do well in school this time. See, the thing that I probably most appreciate about going to Pisay for high school is that it made it okay for me to be, well, regular, or to think of myself as "regular". I mean, whenever I felt too golden about myself back in high school, there usually was a Physics exam or a Bio assignment that handed my ass back to me. And while I realized that I couldn't be the smartest or the best, I also realized that I didn't have to, and that I could live with myself knowing so.
I can't speak for everyone else, but I would guess that this would be true as well for a lot of my friends, to a certain extent. There is this unfortunate side effect seeing how some (most?) of us haven't fulfilled our full potential, but then again, a lot of us have done well, and are (for the most part) not unhappy.
It's just that since I entered high school, I have felt neither the desire nor the need to prove to anyone, least of all myself, that I'm smart or I'm good. Until now. I guess I figured it's time to stop getting my rocks off over an exam I took over twelve years ago.
This is turning out to be quite a year for me. Several weeks ago I was given a little promotion here at work, and later this summer I'll be moving out to live on my own (which makes me more broke). Now I'll be going back to school.
If everything goes according to plan, I'll be 27 (turning 28) by the time I finish grad school. Tapos nito mag-aasawa na ako.
