He took me on a joyride in Dapitan once, and we entered through the unpaved roads leading to rural communities along the coast.

This day led us to a rice paddy, a common, nevertheless breathtaking, sight in Philippine provinces.

On a bank across the pond walked an old farmer, in ragged clothes and a straw hat. Behind him followed his faithful dog, tail wagging, happily panting. The man signaled his dog to stay, then boarded the motorcycle waiting for him at the end of the dirt road.

The dog stopped, then obediently sat down. Then it set its shoulders back, sitting straight and proud, dutifully assuming its post on the narrow bank.

Contact lenses are my savior. Ever since senior HS, I’ve been wearing them everywhere. I’m grateful they exist, but am even more grateful that better options like LASIK technology exist.

Individual contact lenses are cheap but over the years, the numbers add up. I have to buy a new pair every three months, plus I have to replace my contact lens solution and lens case every month. It’s also inconvenient. When I have my lenses on, all water-related activities are put on hold. I can’t take a shower, can’t play in the ocean, can’t swim in the pool… well, you see the picture.

LASIK is the ideal alternative, because it’s been proven to work (it’s been performed for over ten years), it requires less recovery time and is less painful than other procedures. LASIK combines 3D mapping and customized treatment for the 1st all-laser technology. LASIK prides itself on being the procedure approved by the US Military and NASA for pilots and astronauts.

If you’re in the same boat as I am, you can find more LASIK information at iLASIK.com. Not everyone is eligible (like people with thin, irregularly shaped corneas), and complications may occur (like dry eye, halos & double vision). Consult your doctor before deciding on this procedure.

I am experimenting with new ways of presenting my photos. I think my photos look a lot more professional when they’re elegantly bordered and identified.

Initially I was just going for a watermark, to prevent any possible stealing of photos. (Not that it’s ever happened to me personally, to my knowledge anyways, but it’s a common story in my part of the world.)

But I quite dislike watermarks because they tend to ruin photos. And they give off a negative attitude, like a whiff of “I know you’re gonna steal my photo so I’m going to uglify it so you can’t use it.” I’m not dissing the ones who use it, of course. I know a lot of photobloggers only do the watermarking as a last resort, and even prominent bloggers have had to resort to it just to prevent thieves (and yet oftentimes it still doesn’t work).

So, anyways, I’ve seen this kind of bordering done on a few photo blogs so I decided to do the same. I think my photos look majorly prettified. :D

It’s a photo of a fallen tree along the coast in Dapitan, Zamboanga del Norte, Philippines. Mysteriously, the tree is still alive even though it’s been beaten down by wind and sea.

This photo is uncropped and unedited, except for the resizing and the added borders (I used FastStone Photo Resizer because it’s a very small application and it doesn’t eat up a lot of resources).

My boyfriend loves to play computer games. He’s a pro at CounterStrike, but that game bores me to death. He loves DOTA (what does it stand for anyways?) and Wesnoth. He introduced me to Utopia (and for a season or two I let it dominate my life until I decided to quit and return to normalcy).

This time he’s into fantasy football. I suppose since he played a bit of soccer in his high school days, he’s feeling the bond. Since I’m so eager to remove him from the RPG world (it’s taking up all his time and not making him any money so what’s the use?), I decided to steer him to WaiverWire Beta.

It’s the best place for him to start learning and engaging in fantasy football. It’s built as a social network, so he can find gurus to teach him the ropes. It’s got statistical analysis software and player comparison charts to help him in creating his fantasy team. Plus, it can even send game updates straight to his mobile phone so he won’t have to be locked to his laptop all day.

In the spirit of social networking, I hope one day WaiverWire can create embeddable widgets for posting on other blogs and websites. It’s still in beta, so who knows?

I was doing the dishes in the dirty kitchen* this evening when I heard something fall from the ceiling. I didn’t see anything on the floor so I paid it no mind. I went about my way and placed all the newly washed dishes on the dish rack inside the house. Afterwards, I went back outside to dry the large mixing bowl I used to carry the dishes.

I was about to place it on top of a stack of bowls and frying pans, when I froze in my tracks. On top of the frying pan lay a freakishly large, very ugly and scary-looking insect!! It looked like it was about to take flight any second, and I absolutely abhor flying insects so I slowly backed off and from a safe distance, ran back inside the house.

The thing looked like this. (You can click on the image for a close-up.)

I called my boyfriend and asked him to take pictures of the insect, because I wanted to blog about it. (I was too scared to go back out into the dirty kitchen so all these pictures are taken by him.)

He told me it was a katydid. I had no idea what a katydid was so I looked it up on the Internet. It turns out that katydids live in trees, and they’re camouflaged as leaves. Our katydid certainly resembled a leaf, but from what tree or shrub, I’m not sure. We have a lot of trees and herbs in the backyard right outside the dirty kitchen, like nangka (jackfruit) and star apple (also known as caimito). We also have oregano, maybe that’s where it lived. Do you think it looks like an oregano leaf?

It’s certainly good at camouflaging, that’s for sure. Look at its legs. They even look like thorns! So maybe it really came from one of the thorny shrubs, though how it got up the ceiling is a mystery. (Well, ok, our backyard garden is running so wild some vines are already creeping into the kitchen.)

Here’s a closer look at it’s head. An hour later, Gim went out to check if it had flown away, but it’s still there, still as ever. He says it thinks it’s in a tree. I say it’s maybe disoriented and doesn’t know where to go. But neither of us is brave enough to pick it up and place it outside, hehe.

Here is more detailed information on the katydid.

*Dirty Kitchen is a term used in the Philippines to mean a separate building or room outside of the main house where all the food is cooked and prepared. This kitchen is often literally dirty. The main house may or may not have another kitchen, but regardless whether it’s dirty or squeaky clean, it’s not called a dirty kitchen, just a kitchen. :)

You’ve probably watched this before…

…because it’s a viral video. To date, it’s got more than 7 million views recorded in Youtube, and that’s not even counting the number of times it was viewed as an embed on a blog or website.

It’s easy to understand why this vid became such a hit among Youtubers, it’s interesting and immensely entertaining. But there are loads of other videos that are just as interesting but haven’t gone viral. Or the other way around (search up “Evolution of Dance” on Youtube and you’ll understand).

Yovia.com, a startup that is investigating the concept of “viral”, believes it has found a formula (they call it the Social Velocity Engine) that allows them to tell if something is about to go viral. Of course, since they are monetizing this theory, it’s only available to their selected sponsors.

However, they have revealed that part of this formula is making use of social media like pay-per-click advertising, and have shown that it works better than a Google AdWords campaign.

Yovia is conducting another YouTube research in 2009. Click on the link if you’re in need of some viral help for your brand.

Oh yeah, and since it believes in social media advertising so much, Yovia offers paid part-time positions for contributors. Sign up if you’re interested!

I’m lucky I have a not-so-common nickname. Flisha, as my father invented it. I get to have a simple username unlike my sister Tricia and Melisse, who often have to use numbers to claim a unique username.

Still, there are a few other people with my name so I’m OC when it comes to signing up for new services. I’ve gotta claim my name first. I’m sure I’m not the only one with this new age disorder, so teh Internet geeks have found a way to help us cope.

UserNameCheck.com checks whether your preferred username is still available or already taken among the many Internet websites they have listed.

I found a lot of new sites I’d never known about and started registering like mad for an hour or so. Haha. Now I have like 20 new accounts that I don’t what I’m going to do with.

The list of services is a bit lacking, though. I would love for this tool to incorporate more searches for social networks. Where’s FaceBook and OpenID? In the Philippines, Friendster trumps all other social networks, although Multiply (listed) is fast gaining ground. Ning is also an emerging player that’s not on the list.

A lot of the included searches are for start-ups like Kwippy and Jaiku, invite-only sites. Flickr and Picasa shouldn’t be part of the search, I think, since these services use e-mail addresses as usernames, so they’d probably be eternally available for the username one prefers.

Still the major sites you’d expect to find are there. The very useful ones are Blogger, Digg, eBay, Gmail, Yahoo, Multiply, MySpace, Stumbleupon, Technorati, Twitter and Plurk.

So if you’re username-obsessed like me, go visit the site. :-)

Having a home you can call your own (not one you’re just renting, and definitely not one with your parents’ name on the deed) is one of the common conversations between me and Gim. Being in our mid twenties and being in a relationship that’s pushing seven years, we’re getting serious about getting married and settling down.

He’s about to get his medical degree this April, while I will (hopefully!) get my Masters degree by March or October. We’ll then have two years in between to save up for our dream wedding (small and simple, but a tiny problem’s that his family fills up a whole convention room) and honeymoon (I wonder if he can afford a seven-day cruise for me??).

Not to mention land and a house. We’ll never have it as glamorous as Hotel Casco Antiguo (Register for an eBrochure Here)**, but an environmentally friendly little house on top of a hill with an infinity pool facing the ocean’s all it takes to please me. ;P

I’m just kidding. We’ll work our way up to that, but for the near future, any place is a home when he’s in it. :)

**Panama’s oldest (existing) condominium-hotel with five star amenities and service, an amazing rooftop terrace, a bar, a swimming pool located in historic Casa Antiguo and part of a world heritage site. How romantic can this site get???

Dumaguete is the a tiny university town. It has a land area of merely 34.26 km² but hosts a total of seven universities and colleges. The biggest institution in Dumaguete is Silliman University which is already 0.61 km² all by itself.

We visited Silliman on our short stop at Dumaguete, and took a look at its many marine life museums.

Here come the pics!

Here I am standing beside the bones of a whale. That’s one enormous animal! (The whale, not me.)

Blowfishes! I think. Heh. I wonder how the students were able to preserve these fishes in their blown-up state?

Gimmi and the Blowfishes.

Silliman’s collection of starfishes.

Er… I think this is a shark. Am not so sure.

Starfishes in all their forms and sizes! Do you know, not all starfishes are pretty? Some are evil, like the ones we have over at the Sta. Cruz Islands in Zamboanga. Those evil ones eat corals.

But I’m sure these here are pretty and harmless. :-)

Gimmi under the bones of a whale.

That’s a scary looking skeleton!

Preserved turtles in swimming action.

Just me, wistfully wishing I were really swimming underwater. :-)

Pretending I’m in the forest. :-)

And in the sea again!

Under a whale skeleton.

Why would we find an intact whale skeleton underwater anyway, Gim?

Gim patting the dead turtles.

No. They didn’t fall while Gim was there.

Looking at baby clams!

And shells and mollusks.

These are giant clams!

Whale bones. And Gim. Creepy.

Gimmi in the middle of a massacre.

And then me.

Silliman University apparently likes to collect whale bones.

This is a WHOLE whale.

A crocodile!

Gim looking at crocodile particulars.

A croc lurking in the mud.

A croc on land.

This is an aquarium. Boy I want that in my future home!

Pretty corals.

Sea anemones!

Corals?

A sea anemone close-up!

Nemo, is that you?

Yes it is!

End of tour. :-)

Yes, that too. But I really meant I I love to sleep with the lights on. I cannot sleep in the dark.

This is a sore issue between my boyfriend and I. He insists on turning off the switch because he wants to sleep in absolute darkness. I, on the other hand, will fidget and toss and turn when this is the case. So I insist we sleep with the lights on at all times.

Thankfully, we found a compromise. Night lights! These things are dim enough not to disturb my Gim, and bright enough to comfort me in the dark. They come in cute packages, too. :-)

They’re cheap but malfunction easily, so I have a lot of these in the trash.

It’s a quick fix for now but in the future I’ll be needing classier fixtures like sconces. This one looks very nice, wouldn’t you say so?

Do you sleep in the light or in the dark?