Happy 2001, everyone! Just got back from the beach. I will unpack now. And download my email.
Packing for Tali
Well, it’s late, and I better start packing. Bye-bye, if anyone’s reading this! I’m off to Tali Beach in Batangas for some sun, sand, sleep, and scuba-diving! Be back in 2001.
Arminian Girls
Whoops, looks like Russ got hit by that sexy Armi/enian girls search again. What he doesn’t know is, that was probably me this afternoon: going through his archive, happening across that entry, and trying the search term for myself to see if his blog really would turn up — which it did. So I clicked on it, and it turned up in his referral log, which he happened to check the same day, I suppose.
How embarassing. Perhaps I should email him. Or perhaps I should wait for him to see this blog entry pop up in his referral log so he can read it for himself and leave a note using the fields to the left. *wink, wink* You reading this, Russ? Sorry `bout that Arminian thing. Won’t happen again!
Senatorial Consternation
I just saw the lineup of candidates for senator here in the Philippines, and it doesn’t look good. Among the big names are Dong Puno, Noli de Castro, Alfredo Lim, Orly Mercado, Ronnie Zamora, and reelectionists Juan Ponce Enrile and Gringo Honasan. Many of them with more background in showbiz than in politics or law, and all of them very much pro-Estrada. That bodes ill for the country.
Going to the beach tomorrow
Going to the beach tomorrow with the folks. It’ll be wonderful to get out of Manila. Hopefully we can get some scuba diving done. Fun, fun. (Even if it’s with the folks. ^_^ )
Nyerk, I can’t believe I just used that smiley. Too much blog-surfing. ^_^
Annoying Production Problems
There are two things I hate when working in advertising and TV production related services.
1. Producers who submit incomplete requirements, then submit a completely revised list of semi-completed requirements much, much later on, so that the whole project needs to be revised one day before deadline. During Christmas break.
2. VTR technicians who don’t stripe their tapes, forget to lay-in a straight, uninterrupted timecode, and fail to add two seconds of head and tail time to each video clip. The tedious task of on-the-fly video encoding then falls to the editor, since the timecodes, jump cuts, and pauses-between-videos are simply too screwy to leave to automated batch processing — which needs straight timecodes and proper spacing between clips.
As I commence this work, I will soothe myself with Allegri’s Miserere, Barber’s Adagio for Strings, Myers’ Cavatina, and Albinoni’s Adagio. I wish I had Rach’s Vespers on MP3, too. I sure could use some vespers. Seeing as how it’s 6pm, and I’m still at work.
Work finally begins
Whoops, I will now have to get offline to digitize a TV commercial. Work begins.
Smelly sheepherders
Just went on a semi-spree; blogging-spree, that is, looking at blogs. I found a few nice Christians with blogs; I’ll add them to the menu now.
I know what this person means, about atheists and agnostics who speak out against God and the Christian faith. Too often have I read threads in PEX or other writings by skeptical bloggers who readily speak out against Christianity in all its forms (whether conservative Protestantism, liberal born-again Christianity, or traditional Catholicism), making bold, arrogant claims without any facts or quantification to back them up. Statements along the lines of… “The Bible? How can you trust some book written by smelly sheepherders thousands of years ago? Everyone knows it’s been edited and re-edited hundreds of times.”
Rocko’s Modern Life
I love Rocko’s Modern Life; it’s one of the funniest cartoons I’ve ever seen. I like it better than Cow and Chicken, I Am Weasel, The Powerpuff Girls, and… um… well, it’s a tie with Dexter’s Lab, I suppose. The adventures of Rocko, the Australian immigrant wallaby, take their cues from the trials and tribulations of raw, real-world living, but with a comic twist from the cartoon’s sometimes outlandish surrealism.
Joe Murray, Rocko creator. I emailed him once, and attached a copy of the wallpaper I made in Rocko’s honor. He liked it, and emailed me back to say thanks. Really nice guy.
Here’s a site with a Rocko episode guide, and a revealing FAQ site featuring an interview with Joe Murray.
The Gas Stove Miracle
Last Christmas (1999), I won a single range gas stove at the company Christmas party. I had no need for it, so I left it in my room, unwrapped and forgotten for the whole year.
Two weeks before this Christmas, I spied the package sitting on my bottom shelf, so I took it out, dusted it off, and brought it to church to donate the stove to the Flying Medical Samaritans. They’re a group of Christian missionaries in Mindoro who take care of poor homeless children and run medical missions around the islands. Gerry, of the FMS, who attends at our church, accepted the stove and said he would see if anyone needed it.
The following week, Gerry approached me and said that a pastor ministering to villagers on one of the more remote islands of the Visayas had been needing just what I gave: a single-range gas stove, and he had been overjoyed to receive it when Gerry arrived by plane.
I’m glad that God is constantly working in our lives. What if I had just decided to let the gas stove rot on my shelf till it wasn’t fit for anything but the garbage? (It’s happened to a few of my things before.) But just when someone needed it, he sent it through me. Praise God!