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Are you wondering what the Year of the Ox will bring for you? I was born in the year of the Dog, 1982. How about you? What year were you born? Check out your horoscope here: Chinese Horoscope by Yahoo! To all my Chinese colleagues and Friends... KUNG HEI FAT CHOI!!! Welcome the Year of the Ox! Photo from Wiki

On January 14, Pro-Palestinian activists in Lebanon attacked Starbucks, causing the branch of the U.S. coffee shop chain to close its doors. The protesters accused the coffee chain of supporting the Israeli army and the attack in Gaza, basing their protests on a letter that indicates that the company’s chairman and president, Howard Schultz, has been donating money to Israel. Starbucks has vehemently denied this on their website and apparently the letter was published on an Internet site by an Australian anti-Zionist, who made it clear that he wrote the letter as a parody... Unfortunately, the same violent protests have still been happening, not in only Lebanon but in other parts of the world as well. Hmm. Can Starbucks sue that Aussie dude for libel? In other news, I am personally boycotting Starbucks until they give me my free Starbucks Planner for 2009. I have checked a dozen Starbucks shops in the past 2 weeks, and they're all out. :p The one in SM Batangas even said I have t...

The Conficker worm is spreading worldwide, now affecting around 10 million personal and business computers. A report from F-secure says it leaped from 2.4 million to up to 3 times that number in just 3 days. Are you scared yet? The worm can be acquired through a vulnerability in the Microsoft system which could allow remote code execution if an affected system received a specially crafted RPC request. This is not a problem if you already have the patch they sent out in October. The worm can also “mutate” and launch “brute force attacks” that relentlessly try thousands of letter and number combinations in codes to steal personal passwords and login information. Lastly, the worm can infect removable devices and network shares with an autorun file that executes as soon as a USB drive or other infected device is connected to a victim PC. This last one may be most common for personal computers, so protect yourself RIGHT NOW and turn off your AutoRun. I think you can do this by right...

(See the complete list of nominees at the end of this post.) Of all the Best Picture nominees for the 81st Academy Awards, I've so far only seen The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. It's easy to see why it received 13 nominations, but when I saw that one of them was for Best Actor... wha wha what?? Taraji P. Henson's nomination for her turn as Benjamin's momma was well deserved. She was as convincing as an old woman as she was a young lady. And everytime she was in a scene with Brad Pitt, you just had to keep watching her. And Benjamin, despite being so curious looking, seemed to blend into the background. The Best makeup nom is a shoo-in as well. The way they made everyone go from young to old (or vice versa) seemed amazingly well researched. I would even say that Cate Blanchett deserved an Oscar nod if only for her ballet dancing. (Wow, she looked really young.) Does she really know how to do ballet? But Brad Pitt, whose "best" scene in the whol...

Inquirer.net/Intel-announces-RP-operations-shutdown http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123249785750100437.html?mod=googlenews_wsj Holy crap...I cannot believe it. I have been reading so much about the recession and the economic downturn and how so many people have lost jobs and how businesses have closed up shop in countries like China and USA, but still it surprised me when I read that Intel is shutting down it operations in the Philippines... I searched my mind trying to think of friends or acquaintances who worked for Intel but couldn't pin one down. Still, it's too close to home to not be worried. Intel is the world's largest semicon company and has had operations in the Philippines for 20 years. Their Cavite facility handles flash memory manufacturing. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, the big chip maker has not reported a net loss since 1986. But CEO Paul Otellini, in an internal Webcast to the company's employees said the first quarter was too clos...

!!! ~~~~~ LINK TO UPCAT RESULTS ~~~~~ *updated 20-Jan-09 5:30PM CONGRATULATIONS FOR PASSING THE UPCAT!!! CASTUERAS, CELINE ALMIRA PACHECO, LOS BANOS BS EE MICLAT, ARMANDO III TUALLA, DILIMAN BS BA WOW! WOW! The UPCAT results are out! I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the UPCAT results are now online. :p During my time you had to really go to UP to check the results. I distinctly remember that day when our batch's UPCAT results came out... It was a weekday, the day before the JS prom and we were all in Pisay, but some of the parents were already at UP searching for our names in that really short list they put up on boards near the Registrar's Office. There were no cellphones then so I had to call by payphone to my house. There was a line at the phone booth already! When it was my turn, my mom told me that my sister had called her earlier (also by payphone) that my name was there! Oh! The exhiliration of learning that you didn't mess up the exam...Haha! After worrying...

Yesterday I went to the Lasik Surgery Center (LSC) at the Megaclinic in Megamall to claim my free Lasik surgery screening. Yes, it's free! Why, you ask? I joined a promo by Business World and Lasik Surgery Clinic where all you need to do... is tell them how lasik surgery can change your life, and for a mere 50 words and 5 minutes of your time, you get a free Lasik screening and 20% off on the actual Lasik procedure package! The prize of course is a free Lasik procedure, and only those who are good candidates for Lasik can qualify for the contest. I was really planning to get my eyes corrected this year or next year, but since the opportunity presented itself, I thought, why not? It was Batangas Fiesta yesterday so we were on Holiday, so I got myself an appointment at LSC and went. It was quite interesting really, aside from the usual test like reading the letters and looking at that red house in the distance, they made me take other tests like looking through a tunnel and anothe...

Disclaimer: I am not a medical professional nor have I have taken any tests that prove that I am suffering from any psychological disorders. This post is in response to a really cool website featured a few days ago on "Blogs of Note" called Coffee Messiah . It was all about, well...coffee. :D I started drinking coffee about 9 years ago. My first cup of espresso was on the dinner table of the Pizzocherro house in Cascine San Pietro, Italy. I didn't like the strong bitter flavor at first so the next time they offered I took some cappucino instead. Italians love their coffee almost as much as their wine, so every meal we had ended with a "Cafe?" from Mama Ornella... By the time we were to leave Italy I was hooked. To Manila I brought home a Moka (espresso maker) and bags of Italian coffee. After I've gone through those I went for Starbucks. :p When Starbucks began giving those planners for Christmas, I would usually get at least 2 - and that translates ...

Tweet As mentioned in my last post, me and my family, my girlfriend, my sister's boyfriend, and my grandmom all went to Pagudpud for the long holiday. Pagudpud can be found at the northernmost tip of the Philippines ' biggest island, Luzon. Click here for some more info about Pagudpud.

Obama will be US President on January 20, 2009. The question now becomes: can he live up to all the hype? I sure hope so. But in any case, we Filipinos shouldn't worry. Sec. Dureza says, we are, along with China, the 2 most resilient economies in the East. I suppose it's just a fluke that the equity funds I own are now almost half the value. Hehehe... AI is coming too! That's American Idol. On the 15th! (Or is the 16th?) And again, I'll be hawking away at youtube, trying to find the clips before it gets taken down. My 11-day vacation is over. It was actually too long I almost forgot I even work. Haha. My family & I, with my lola, my gf and my sister's bf, drove 2 cars up north to the white sandy beaches of Pagudpud. We were not disappointed, the beach was great! We had so much fun "fighting" the waves and losing, and rolling around on the sand. Haha. We also took photos of the windmills. Awesome clean energy! We had lunch at Vigan. Passed t...

It has become a sort of Christmas tradition of mine to send out a Christmas greeting to everyone I've met from around the world. Usually, a lot of emails bounce because either email accounts have been closed or their inboxes full (hopefully of Christmas & New Year messages like this one), but most get through, and it gives me great satisfaction to think that somewhere on the other parts of the world, a friend or family is reading my holiday greetings! Sometimes a few reply with the fondest greetings and some even with photos. That's the coolest thing about it really: that even though we have not seen each other in years, and even if it is just once a year, we remember and smile for the memories. :D A WARM MERRY CHRISTMAS and a HAPPY NEW YEAR from me & my family!!!

____________________________________________ A couple of weeks ago, I had my eyes checked. Turns out, the contacts and the glasses I am using now are already obsolete for my requirements. So I bought new contact lenses (which cost a fortune) and tried them out last Saturday. That evening I went out to the balcony to look at the stars. For the last few years, when I looked at the stars I saw them as blobs of overlapping double images. They didn't even twinkle. But that night, I saw them again. For the first time in a long time. As stars, and not as blobs of white. And then at that moment, it was worth every centavo.

I never thought I'd ever be this disappointed to hear about a new holiday... Monday, December 8 is a holiday in the whole of Batangas Province. Arfgh!