2007 in 7 Lists of 7

It’s been my tradition here in my blog to post a yearend entry (2005, 2006). I usually post the most memorable things that happened to me from the very first day of January until December in my year ender specials, and in 2006, I’ve also included a list of my favorite entries for the whole year. But this year, I decided to make seven lists of seven. The lists talk about the best of 2007 except for the news category. I’ve also added notes here and there, and some are potential spoilers so be warned!

Most of the things that I have listed below are in either chronological or alphabetical order.

Books

This year, I was able to read 15 books, almost twice than last year. I really had fun reading this year.

  • Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — JK Rowling: The ending of Harry Potter’s epic tale was really fantastic. JK ended it with a fitting finale. How I wish there is a sequel to this book, but then, the time has come to end this very fascinating story.
  • The Kite Runner — Khaled Hosseini: I like this book very much. Furthermore, this is the best book I have read in my entire life. Unlike other fiction reads, this book is realistic. I recommend this to all, but most especially to those people who are not hooked into books and to Afghan refugees.
  • A Thousand Splendid Suns — Khaled Hosseini
  • The Chinese Cinderella — Adeline Yen Mah: [My Review]
  • Youngblood3 edited by Artura, et al: If you’re into Filipino literature, this is the book that you should buy. Very entertaining. And this is not fiction, by the way. [My Review]
  • The Dogs of Babel — Carolyn Parkhurst: The weirdest book I have ever read. It’s about Paul, a linguist, who tries to teach his dog how to speak. No, not because he’s out of his mind but because he wanted to know the real cause of his wife’s death. The words Parkhurst used in the ending of the story were really strong. [My Review]
  • For One More Day — Mitch Albom: Another tale about death. Yes, it’s a good book, but how I wish Albom would explore other topics. [My Review]

If you have read these books, you would notice that most of them are sad stories, but yeah, the characters lived happily ever after.

Songs

Entries

  • Faulty Schedule: My craziest misadventure this year. In this entry, I wrote how I spent almost 12 hours… in the mall.
  • The Perfect Duo: Chemistry and Zoology: You would fail these two subject if you don’t know how to memorize. And would you believe me that I enjoyed them? Haha.
  • The Divine Subjects: A review of my subjects back in first year, second semester. I used Dante’s concept in his Divine Comedy to give the final verdict for each of my subjects.
  • Stinks and Sells: I particularly enjoyed writing this. It’s my own version of what’s in and what’s out.
  • Big Surprises: The story how I acquired my notebook.
  • Let’s Talk About Grades (Part 2): What I realized in these posts was that grades aren’t everything.
  • Signs and Symptoms of Stress: The title says it all. I had a good time writing this and rereading it makes me laugh. XD

I know that the title of this entry says that for every list, there are seven items. But I have to break that because I reckon I have more interesting entries this year. And so we continue…

Web Apps

  • Last.fm: A cool way to discover music.
  • Google Reader: This one is a bit old, it’s been out since like two years ago. But it deserves a spot here.
  • Twitter: Who doesn’t love Twittering, eh? It’s enjoyable even though there is a maximum of 140 characters per tweet.
  • Sxipper: This one is actually a Firefox plugin. It can automatically input your information in every single form. It can also remember and generate passwords for you. A similar service is Clipperz.com.
  • del.icio.us
  • Flickr
  • Google Apps: Sign up and get your @yourdomain.com mail. All of the essential features of GMail are included. There are also other available applications that you can use.

News

Unlike the other categories, this one does not talk about the bests of 2007. These are the breaking news here in the Philippines. Majority of these are bad news.

  • Bus Hostage
  • The Glorietta 2 Blast: What’s the latest developement? Have they solved this?
  • Mariannete Ampere’s Suicide: A very very sad story
  • Erap’s Pardon: No way!
  • House of Representatives Bombing
  • The Peninsula Hotel Siege: Trillanes, please spare the hotels. Lol.
  • Peso’s Increasing Value: How come we cannot feel it?

Bloggers

I had fun reading your blogs! Keep on writing interesting blog entries!

WordPress Plugins

Yes, I know, most of things/persons that I have listed above (Especially in books, songs, web apps, and bloggers) were not published/released or didn’t start blogging this year. But then, this is my blog. Haha.

Well, I suppose, this is my last entry for this year. May everyone have a prosperous 2008! Rock on!

10 Comments

My Latest Baguio Adventure

Last week, I was in Baguio with my family. We went there because of my uncle and aunt who came back here in the Philippines after six or seven long years stay at USA1. We stayed there for exactly 24 hours. Hmm… did I enjoy the trip? No, why? It was raining there last week. That was why we can’t go to Burnham Park or even Camp John Hay.

The place where we stayed for the night was big, it was a nice place. Since we can’t go to a park we decided to eat in the place we stayed in.

BBQ

In the afternoon of Saturday, we went to — um, I’ve already forget how you call that place — somewhere in Baguio to buy pasalubong2. There, I saw the unusual taho vendors3. They also have the strawberry flavored taho but I still haven’t tried it yet.

Then, we went to Baguio Cathedral to hear mass.

Baguio Cathedral

And we also went to the air-con-less SM City Baguio.

SM City Baguio

I tried to look for a good book at National Book Store there, but I haven’t seen any interesting fiction. Actually, I was disappointed, they have fewer titles available there. But I have seen a copy of “Water For Elephants”. So if you live in Baguio and you are looking for a good book, I suggest you buy it. And speaking of books, I have finished “A Long Way Down” by Nick Hornby last Tuesday. I didn’t enjoy the book. Now, I’m reading Khaled Hosseini’s latest book, “A Thousand Splendid Suns.”

The next day, Sunday, I didn’t join my parents to go to the market. I only told them to buy me strawberries. And look at this:

Strawberry

That’s the biggest strawberry that I have ever seen… and ate! And then, we ate lunch in the villa because it was still raining. And that’s all.

It’s not an interesting trip. Oh, I have heard that we’ll be going there again this coming October. I just hope when we will go there again, it will not rain.

*****

I’ve recently updated my WordPress installation to 2.3. There might be some bugs lurking around. If you have seen one, please report them. By next week, I’ll sit my final exams. Wish me luck. Ah, I can’t wait for the sem-break!

  1. But they’re now back in Texas []
  2. gift []
  3. Here in Pampanga, you will only see taho vendors during the morning, and not in the afternoon. []

13 Comments

Oh Nose! Not Now!

Yesterday evening, I didn’t eat too much. I felt nauseous. After an hour, the nauseous feelings was gone. But a few minutes after nine in the evening, my stomach started to feel upset. It continued like that for three hours. I was not able to sleep well, in the end, I only had four hours of sleep.

When I woke up this morning, I was coughing and I had some sore throat. Because of these, I don’t speak too much. I only do vigorous and exaggerated gestures just so I can communicate with others. And I look like the stupidest living person on earth because of this!

And now, I have hyperthermia, in other words, I have fever. And my tonsils are inflamed.

What’s next? I don’t want to think about that.

The big problem is that tomorrow, I have to sit two midterm exams! Eek! :censored:

Gudlak sa akin!1

I have to sign off now and try to review WordPress 2.3 Beta 1.

[UPDATE] I feel better now, I can go to school today and take my two exams! Now, I need to review! [/UPDATE]

  1. Good luck to me! []

18 Comments

Stinks and Sells

Sorry, I neglected this blog for the past four days. I wasn’t visiting it much within that period. Why? I got some problems with my PC and I troubleshooted it alone. Thank God it’s normally working again. And oh, I got addicted to O2Jam. Haha.

So lets go to the topic. Back in high school, in our official publication, the Chimes, we have this write-up in our features section called “Ins and Outs.” I was one of those few people who contributed in that item. You might think that doing it is easy, but I tell you, thinking of what is “in” and what is “out” can be really time consuming.

And since my life is not that interesting lately because I’m just stuck at home (okay, I’m not saying that I’m bored) and I miss doing “Ins and Outs,” I’m gonna do one… my own version. And I’m calling it “Stinks and Sells.”

Dora the Explorer (negrang lakwatsera) stinks
Dora the Exploited1 (negrang GRO) sells?! Eek! Yeah, she sells her body.
Political ads stink
Makisig’s Lucky Me ad sells
Yahoo! stinks?
Google sells!
Summer sells
But because of the hot weather, I take my word back, it stinks!
School will stink forever
Rejoice for vacation sells!
O2Jam sells
But Audition sells better
“Pichay, itanim sa senado” stinks
“Pichay, itanim sa semento” sells
Amazing Race All-Stars really sells
But I still don’t know which team I’ll root for
Harry Potter sells
But does nude Daniel Radcliffe sells either?
Spams and spoiled hams2 stink
Hams sell
Ball pen stinks
Mechanical Pencil sells
Dial-up connection3 sells
But DSL4 sells even more
Maria Flordeluna stinks
Will Rounin sell or stink?
Robinson stinks
SM5 sells
WP 2.1.3 will stink soon
WP 2.2 will for sure sell

I want this to go on, but I’ve ran out of things to include in here. Oh, well, I’m off to read your blogs.

  1. It was one of my high school classmates who created this. []
  2. Spam comments from legitimate users []
  3. As long as the pages that I want to view load in a reasonable amount of time, it’s tolerable to me []
  4. I’m just waiting for the activation of my DSL. Thank you, God! []
  5. They’re constructing another annex in SM City Pampanga. It’s the third annex. []

23 Comments

Abused Web Applications

No, this is not a meme. I’ve decided to make this entry so I can share to you, my dear readers, some of the web applications (or simply webapp) available for free usage that I’ve been using. Dunno if you’ve heard of them, but still, let me write about them.

Google Analytics

This is one of the services available in the internet that stores your web statistic by just inserting a script on your code. But I don’t think it’s reliable because the script that you’ll add is JavaScript powered, so if your visitor has deactivated JavaScript, he or she won’t be recognized as a visitor. Oh, well, this service is for free, why not abuse it?

GMail

After I’ve got an invitation to join it, I left Yahoo Mail forever. Why? Gmail has so many features available free of cost. What’s more, it offers a whooping 2.8 GB (and counting) of storage. You would surely not need to delete anything for a long period of time.

Google Reader

This is my favorite service that Google offers. So what is this Reader? It’s a web-based feed aggregator. That means, when I subscribed to your feeds and when you publish a new entry, I’ll see and can read it in Reader without visiting your site.Great, hu? It helps me to tract those blogs with new posts that I still haven’t read. I really recommend this to all bloggers. You can subscribe to my feeds by clicking the “Subscribe to RSS” link that you can find at my footer.

Google Maps

No, I’m not a real user of this service. It does not give me any help as of the moment because the Philippines is not completely mapped. You won’t be able to see even just the main roads here in the Philippines. I hope in the near future, the Philippines is fully mapped so I can use it to get directions. That would be very great!

Flickr

This one is owned by Yahoo!. I’m new to this service. This web application is best if you can get a pro account (the paid one). Nevertheless, there are so many cool photos there (you can even do derivative works with some). This is must-subscribe-to if you’re a photographer or even photographer-kuno. From now on, I’ll get there the photos that I may need to use to create my layouts.

del.icio.us

Another web application owned by Yahoo!. This enables you to bookmark any page in the internet. Because of this web application, you can now see your bookmarked web pages anywhere, just be sure you have a computer with an internet connection :P .

FeedBurner

Oh, I really like the services that they offer. Because of this, I can save a little of my bandwidth. It gets my feeds, and then, it’ll do the rest of the work for me. It sort of republishes my feeds. That’s why if you have subscribed to my feeds you would see extra links below each post. It also gives me a statistic how many people have viewed my feed and my site.

DeviantArt

You’ll find great works here. From photography to painting. If you need some inspiration, this one is a great site to start with.

Friendster

Have you heard of the news that Filipinos have dominated Friendster? Lol. When it was still new, that was in 2004, I really got addicted to it. But now, it has lost it’s magic. The whole concept is now boring. But it amuses me that some senatoriables uses it, like Chiz Escudero, Trillianes, and Sharon Cuneta’s husband, Kiko Pangilinan for campaigning.

Technorati

I’ve been visiting this site more than the usual lately. Basically, for the sake of bloghopping. It’s also one way to tract what is the hottest topics in the blogosphere. It also tracts your blog’s rank but Shari says it’s not reliable.

That are just only ten of the numerous web applications that I’m using. If I would put all of them here, this might get really long and I don’t want you to get bored with all of these1. Do you know any web application that you may recommend to me?

  1. And if you haven’t noticed, I haven’t included WordPress. But do I still need to include it? []

22 Comments