Thanks wordpress.com! You’ve been a real good free blog host and I’ll surely let people know that if they ask

I was having a haircut at said neighborhood barbershop when he started giving me a vigorous neck rub, a sign anyone who regularly goes to such places knows marks the end of the session. It felt great so I asked if he does massages, he said yes mentioned p200 and off we went. Now I’ve tried all sorts of ultra posh massages at so many places and even expensive home service types already, but this one made me feel like I wanted to knock my head for all that wasted money. Manong twisted, gripped and kneaded my back, arms and legs like so much pliant dough. He used his rough fingers (made smoother by some cheap lotion. Mental note: bring my own next time) to find knotted up veins jammed with toxins and proceeded to attack it with the force of a vise grip over and over until it softened and passed through. To the uninitiated it would have felt like complete torture, but I knew what he was doing. The last time I went through anything like that must have been more than a decade ago, when I was still playing for a team that had a guy like manong masahista slathering myself and my teammates with buckets of what seemed like ben gay, but was 10 times worse – and stung to high heavens, and then used the same tortuous procedure that makes you swear and spit in pain as if you were being knifed.

I tried to bear it as well as i could, trying to focus on the black and white TV blaring Eat Bulaga in the corner. Whenever it started to hurt again, especially when he was doing my knees and lower leg area I even goaded him to try harder even if I was already seeing stars from the intense pain. Of course I consoled myself by knowing that whatever evil stuff that was stuck in my veins was finally letting loose, and as proof, hours and even a day after I was manifesting the result of toxins coming out my body (I wont get into details as this is a family blog. ahem.)

And now, the result. I played what seemed like a full hour of basketball, 3 games end to end and I did not hurt like I normally do. Sure I was slow and definitely not as effective as I’d wanted to be, but at least I lasted while the young un’s were starting to sit down. Obviously this serves as a starting point for better performance later on.

The next step is to have another massage (thank God for it being cheap!) so he can finish off whatever else is left in my veins to finish off. It’s not gonna hurt as much as the first time, and in fact, the ultimate goal is to keep having the same treatment until it doesn’t hurt at all, even if he grips with all his strength. As of last time he wasn’t even trying hard, and I was twisting in pain. But as he keeps kneading it’ll feel better and better until finally no pain at all.

Such is my faith of having a body that produces toxins. I’m gonna have to deal with this for the rest of my life. But it’s ok I guess as long as I got guys like Manong Masahista around.

The movie is a stunning display of violence and real life in the drug dependent slums of Rio, where large sections called Favelas are controlled by drug lords with small armies armed to the teeth with high powered rifles they carry around with them like jewelry. The streets are dark and dirty, the poor wear tatters and live in sub human conditions, the local police are so crooked and desperately corrupt that they often end up in turf fights of their own, and the rich College kids are lazy, doped out brats whose insulated view of the world makes them just as guilty to the depravity around them. On one hand, they work in NGOs trying to help the poor and mouth slogans and sing songs against the police, but on the other they consume and even distribute drugs that helps fund the cartels. A pretty familiar world for the typical city dwelling low income Pinoy, if you ask me.

Anyway I hope to write a more thorough review (although I think I may have already) once I find a new home for Movie Exchange, which I have removed from the server to save bandwidth. I also hope to do a review of the 1994 Hoop Dreams, another gritty documentary which I’ve finally gotten around to watch and was given the highest possible rating by none other than the great Roger Ebert himself, calling it ‘.. is one of the great moviegoing experiences of my lifetime‘.

I have to tell you, Mr. Ebert is one of the few idols I have in life. He is a fantastic writer and speaks of the world around him with complete honesty and a lack of bias that occasionally shakes the foundations of all I had thought were my beliefs. If he says a movie affects him, then by God I will do everything I can to see it – and Hoop Dreams definitely did not disappoint.

Finally, I want to do a review of my sister’s 1.3 li Toyota Vios, which I managed to drive around for a week or so.

Now those are only the stuff I’m planning to do that involves reviews. I got other stuff in line like making HowTo videos, finishing and documenting projects, and finally, joining a group I’ve been wanting to do for quite a while now.

I’ve been thinking long and hard about that last one and I’m not yet finished deliberating about it. It involves even more work for me, but at the end of it I’m pretty sure I won’t regret it because it is something I’ve always wanted to do, which is give back. I am not afraid to fail doing so, because I believe that trying and continuing to try is enough to surpass the possibility of failure. However, I’m not going in there to fail. In order to do so, I need to have everything laid out and planned ie, get my shit in order. Either that or not at all.

I think hobbies are important because it takes you away from what you’re doing long enough to at least give you a fresh perspective on what it is you normally do. In other words, I worked on my car because I didn’t wanna work on my projects or the sites – my solution to the fact that I am so up to my ears in work (and consequently, thinking about it), that if I spend any more time working on it I’m liable to go nuts.

The left and right turn switch doesn’t work for some odd reason, so my solution was to open and clean it up thoroughly using a rag and contact cleaner spray. I did so, and by golly who’d have known such a thing was so complex inside? It had bearings and tiny little springs that would fall over the place if you weren’t careful opening it up. At any rate, I got it to work in the end, but only after a hell of a time. I realized I was literally bent over in concentration for an hour or two, and when I finally got it together and working I felt like celebrating. Problem is, the switch for the windshield wipers suddenly doesn’t work now (it was working fine before I opened it up, and I never touched it when I did), so that’s egg in my face right there. I’ll get it to work though. I’m sure it’s just something loose somewhere.

I think our brains don’t (and likely can’t) differentiate how important one job is from another. I gave that job a hell of a lot of time and effort – as much time and effort as I would say, getting a website to run or code to work. The difference is, I’m sick of sitting in front of a computer monitor and straining my eyes doing that, while working on the car gives me a chance to get my hands dirty (I like that) and active plus the fact it solves a problem that had been bugging me for a while.

If it didn’t rain today, I’d probably have found myself at the court shooting hoops too. Again, I’d be exerting a lot of time and effort (a great deal more effort of course), but the result would be the same. It’d have given me time away from work, time that I’d appreciate because afterwards it’d give my head a fresher perspective on things I deal with at work.

I realize now that people probably don’t, or at least shouldn’t, mean it when they say they just want to sit around and completely space out when they have a chance to do so. It may seem to be the last thing anyone wants, but when a vacation comes around I think it’s better to engage in some activity that will completely involve you as opposed to just watching the tv or aimlessly surfing around. I bet that if I had done that my head would surely have started thinking of work again, naturally because that was the last thing that concerned me before the break began. My brain doesn’t know about the vacation break. It just keeps going on and on thinking about stuff, solving problems when it finds any. So the solution is to give my brain something else to work on so that it can still keep functioning at the same level as when I was at work, but at a different scenario or at least happier, healthier one (like sports or family stuff).

Sounds like a good idea I think. I thought about above when I was dealing with the turn signal. I just need to remind myself next time to deal with something simpler so that I’d not end up with another problem after

It’s taken me a long time to decide which free blogging place to use and although wordpress.com has its limitations, it’s certainly less limited than blogspot and LJ. Or at least, as far as I know since the last time I checked, which has been awhile. Suffice it to say I’m not completely sold on staying here, and I do wanna check out the others, although it’s time consuming and besides, it’s just for a personal blog right?

Nah. You know what? Why don’t I just go flat out and just say I’m lazy. Yeah that hit the nail on the head right there.

At any rate since I’m rambling here, I’ll just make a quick mention of the fact that I’m happy I’ve finally gotten a hang of Drupal and it’s companions CCK and Views. And you know what? The mere fact that I actually take time to mention such a thing is proof enough that dealing with Drupal is not a task for the weak, no sirree.

I’ve known ‘the power of Drupal’ for some time now, and have been quite aware of its success, but I swear to God learning how to develop a fairly ordinary site using it sometimes makes you wanna tear your hair out. But lo and behold, as of the latter part of last week I actually had something decent going for a client, and it looks like I’m pretty much on my way. Of course having said that some ginormous complex problem is gonna crop up that will stun me yet again, but I’m pretty confident now, at least more than in a long time since I’ve been trying to get it going.

In the meantime however, I’m almost sure I can answer near 90% of anything WordPress can throw at me. I know it sounds like hot air but it’s true, and given the fact I run a whole bunch of WordPress sites means that I should be pretty good at it by now. And also, I’m just saying that to compare how difficult Drupal is, as compared to WordPress. I’m sure a lot of Drupal diehards are gonna wanna scalp me for saying that, but hey, it’s true. It’s very powerful true, but it’s also very very difficult to customize and theme.

Many times I felt like just making the site from scratch but for some odd reason, I hung on. It might be because I like pain, but more likely it’s because I think I kept finding something nice about it which is why I kept at it. Now that things are moving along I’m actually starting to think of new projects that I can do with it.

No, actually two. One has to do with a techie type site where I can post howto videos that deal with mostly webmaster subjects (and yes, I hope to include WordPress and Drupal howtos in there), hopefully to help keep people from having to spend a hell of a whole lot of time grappling with it like I did, and also because since Paypal has (somewhat) finally allowed incoming cash in, I wanna give the ‘Donate’ Paypal method a try. I think it might work.

And the other project has to do with a directory slash registry type of listing with a membership system that’ll help people find a certain thing faster. Nope, no details yet, I don’t wanna get that idea stolen. Besides, I really haven’t gotten deep into the details of theming a Drupal site as well as I’d want it to look which means a look as far away from the ridiculously ugly geeky default themes it comes with. Yep I know I am once again stoking the ire of the Drupal faithful, but I challenge everyone other than the medically blind to say that the default themes are pretty. I mean seriously.

Details later.