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This is the One, Utada's third english album. Released last may 2009

Hikaru Utada’s been doing another concert tour which launched last Janaury 15 . Her last concert tour was Utada United in 2006 which was held in various locations across Japan, this time though the tour is around the USA!

She’s doing the tour to promote her 2nd english album (3rd if you include her Cubic U days) This is the One. Some youtubers were able to sneak in their cameras and get videos! She sang soem of her japanese songs during the show! She also Sang Sanctuary and Passion together… AT THE SAME TIME! and she sang the backward-lyrics live as well!

I wish I had a VISA right now… I’d kill for tickets to see Utada.

For music interest though, if any of you guys reading this have never listened to Utada before, you should definitely try listening to the This is the One album. Its seriously not a Jpop/anime/asian music album at all and I think anyone and everyone can seriously enjoy it. I have the special edition US retail version (with additional bonus tracks) and its been part of my “study playlist” for quite a while! Some interesting songs to note:

Apple and Cinnamon

A very simple piano R&B ballad. I find it has a good mix of melody, well-written lyrics and deep pulsating beats. A great love song which focuses on a failing relationship with an interesting allusion to apple pie being Apples and Cinnamon work so well together.

Automatic Part II

A direct allusion to her first japanese single AUTOMATIC in 1999.  Interesting here is if you compare the two songs and play them one after the other you can really see the difference between Hikki back then and Hikki now as well as how different R&B music was 10 years ago from now. Automatic is less melodic than its predecessor but uses a heavier R&B beat. The lyrics are also… quite provocative with which in part shows how Utada 10 years ago was just a young 16/17 year old girl and now she’s a 27 year old woman.

Come back to me

The first single released for the album. After seeing the epic failure I thought Easy Breezy was as a lead single for an album during her Exodus days, its nice to see a single that reminds you why Hikki is such a powerful artist. Come back to me is a soft sad ballad which is reminiscent Flavor of Life and Prisoner of Love but uses a more western approach and style to the arrangement and treatment. Its a good break considering that I was getting sick of utada’s dance electronica english songs already.

There’s one particular line here I really like. It goes “I wish that I could photoshop all our bad memories” I think we don’t need to ask why

From 1030am – 1pm and again at 530pm to around 800 pm we were walking all over UP and Pansol with Manong Rommie to the presidents home.

Annoying thing though, me and my friends didn’t get to go anywhere last night and when I got home from the interview there wasn’t even anything on the table for me to eat! Nothing at all!

Its sad a little cause when it comes to friends I’m really happy with just a birthday greeting but from your parents to not even prepare dinner on a tiring birthday, is a little darn irritating.

Thank you to all those who greeted me

1. Joseph Teoxon
2. Paulo Torralba
3. Phillip Verde
4. Miggy Francisco
5. Miguel Ignacio
6. Quinito Fernando
7. Jandric Lim
8. Carl Flor
9. Karen Nicolas
10. Gabio
11. Ferdie Lajom
12. Isa romualdez
13. Chino Habaluyas
14. Nina Espiritu
15. Pao Monteiro
16. Jamaica Obeso
17. Mari Gutierrez
18. Pia Del Carmen
19. SIR JOPE GUEVARA
20. Sidney Lee
21. Nicole Tiutan
22. Osan mendoza
23. Jas Weigel Sarmiento
24. Joseph Angan
25. Pin Parlade
26. Aila Genella Alcanta
27. Andrea Carlos
28. Rem Del Rosario
29. David Sison
30. PC Magnaye
31. Maycee Sugarol
32. Ingrid Salud
33. Lei Canlas
34. Gabriel Jose
35. Drez Oarde
36. Ralph Gonzales
37. Karen Santos
38. Ari Salud
39. Shanice Garcia
40. Alfred Dicioco
41. Jio Igual
42. Augus
43. Dar Haw
44. Janine Motoss
45. Bea Cupin

ooh cool that makes it more than my entire high school class

Philmug revamped its appearance 2 days ago

I’ve been a member of Philmug even before I got my mac (and I don’t own an ipod to justify joining philmug before getting anita).

The community has shown resilience and strength over the years even though the forum design and backend has become dated over time.

A few days ago, Philmug got a facelift! It now looks and emulates the feel of the modified aqua/platinum GUI theme of Mac OS X: 10.5 Leopard and 10.6 Snow Leopard. The vBulletin was also supposedly upgraded which is always good.

One thing I find annoying though is how the forums keep asking me to retype a captcha image each time I search. This is somehow ok I guess since I don’t get the usual parse errors I normally get when searching.

I’ve gone through Netscape Mail, Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird (my favorite PC mail client so far) and now I use Mail (the pre-installed mail application in mac os x). One thing I can conclude so far is that I cannot live without an email client application.

Though the trend in technology is switching to doing everything on the web (including email accessed from browsers we know as webmail ex. Gmail). I still find the usefulness of email clients to be undeniable specially when you live in the Philippines where wifi access isn’t always possible. This is even more useful if your in school doing a lot of org work/ group work or you work in a field that needs fast information decimation.

For those of you who have ignored email clients for the longest time. Email clients such as Outlook Express, Outlook, Thunderbird and Mail use either a POP or IMAP protocol to get and copy email from your email accounts to your local hard drive. In the old days of the internet this was the only way to check email but now we have email client’s biggest competitor webmail which allows us to access our inboxes from any computer with just the use of a browser.

Most people would think, why should I use an email client when it would use local space on my hard drive not to mention I’d need a whole other application just to check mail as compared to using webmail which is readily accessible through browsers that are pre-installed in our operating systems?

Though this is a huge drawback to using an email client it still doesn’t lessen the utility value of having a local copy of your email. This is specifically even more highlighted when you are an extremely mobile person and may sometimes find yourself without internet access.

Here are a couple of my experiences that can show the notable use of my email client

1. During an EBAM (Editorial Board Aspirants Meeting) the executive aspirants we’re trying to take note of the suggestions of some of the absent aspirants that we’re sent via mail the night before. Most people with a laptop would go to their browsers and log on to gmail to access the previous nights set of emails but the problem was the campus network group was having trouble with the WiFi in our building at the time. Luckily I use Apple Mail and had a copy of their mail already downloaded.
2. Normally checking mail would be a chore that you had to go through periodically (students normally doing it in the evening) opening a separate tab and then logging on to their email accounts. During the different hellweeks in my semesters specially during Marketing and Leadership and Strategy class, I found it really easy as I received and downloaded attachments with probably only a 1-second delay to the time the person sent it. I got updates as they we’re updated and news as it was being written. Did I mention it doesn’t feel like a chore? Thats because I can leave Mail running constantly (with it checking for new mail every 5-10 minutes) while I just browse along facebook or finish my design comissions, I don’t have to open a new tab just for email.

Case number 2 is specifically important to me as a student and as a member of the school newspaper where the rule is to ALWAYS ALWAYS reply ASAP to every email and text message.

But with those big reasons alone why aren’t most students making full use (specially as macs are becoming more and more popular in school and macs have pre-installed email clients) of their laptops and using email clients?

Well one big hurdle so far (within the ateneo) is that the our incampus Wireless Internet security prevents downloading email to clients. This however does not hinder reason 1 as there are multiple wireless hotspots in Katipunan that allow POP and IMAP access.

People usually think of it as hard simply because they have to actually do something before recieving email. For many of you who think this is the case (specially you mac users who never get to use your mail application) below is an image at how idiotically simple for the internet generation it is to set up their Mail applications (the process is actually quite similar in other email clients)

Most email providers with pop or IMAP access will have more detailed instructions. A good email provider that does this that I know about is gMail so check out their website for more info.

If your asking what email clients you should use? For PC users, I highly recommend Thunderbird over Outlook but either is still quite good. For Macs, the preinstalled Mail client is already there so why not use it?

First of all Gurdy says happy gregorian calendar new year!

Gurdy says happy new year

My way of starting the new year is by getting a 39 degree celsius fever and a soar throat that cripples my speech I’m actually feeling better now after spending most of the day not talking at all (I actually replied to my philosophy teacher’s question by writing a note on a scratch paper:lol:).

I also started my Communication 14 “Dream Project” today by not drinking any carbonated or sugar-compressed drinks (coke and my school C2 addiction). I actually do feel healthier after a day of drinking 80% water (10% was my morning fresh milk and 10% was my evening tea).

Unfortunately I won’t be able to do one of the things that I was looking forward to do this year. Because of a) my dad’s unpro-activeness and procastination (he kept saying oh there’s going to be a voter’s registration at the club house) b) my inability to keep track of things that made me ID-less the whole Christmas break (thanks to Joseph Teoxon by the way for keeping my ID safe), I am still NOT a registered voter. So kill me if you deem me extremely sinful. Again this is a justification of why I should get a driver’s license already (where else in the world would you see a 21-year-old city kid without a drivers license).

I’m retiring early (if you count 20 minutes before 12pm early… this post seems to have a lot of asides) tonight lol maybe I should continue the I can’t speak charade tomorrow

I haven’t clicked the update link on my wordpress admin panel yet (I’m waiting for a compatibility check with my plugins) but a lot of the new features are really worth being excited about.

1. Global Trash/ Undo – I actually have mixed feelings about this. I’ve always wanted an undo feature in wordpress but I never thought it could be implemented in the same way as a trash bin. It does go hand-in-hand with the trend of doing everything on the web.
2. Image editor – This is something really big specially if you work with wordpress as much as I do (and if you use it with newspaper/magazine sites the way I use it with the GUIDON and G).
3. Easy Video embedding – This would be a great help to those who like sharing youtube posts a lot but I wonder if the code will be xhtml valid afterwards?

I’ll probably try this out on my offline installation of wordpress tonight before I upgrade any of the wordpress blog installations I have . If you wanna know more about wordpress 2.9 check Wordpress.org.

The GUIDON EB race started a few weeks back which prompted me to put training into a hiatus while focusing more on webdesign and press rather than dancing. I still love dancing but I really have to put it on hold, graphics and web design are still of course my first love.

Speaking of graphics on the web, Tata made a post about this a while back. In the good old days when PHP was just starting to creep its ways to the regular filipino web designer as a helpful tool and Wordpress was still called b2. Back then we seem to all worship and adore sites like Aethereality.net, Blinding-light.com and Daydreamgraphics.com. I wanted to reminisce and take a look at them and well I sort of saw that many of them have become stuck in the past.

All three of the sites mention above have not been updated in more than a month. Two are still using the sort of fan-girlish anime type layouts we all used to use when we started out. Daydream graphics has embraced wordpress as a CMS and let go of its home grown database of tutorials and layouts but well I no longer worship the layouts that are posted there. On the sidenote, the only premade layout I did and submitted to aethereality is still the last updated pop-up layout available.

Unfortunately, sem-ended far too soon…

None-the-less I enjoyed it, I finally got to bond with my childhood best friend the Playstation 2 and read up on the Marvel Universe. I finally got to finish New X-men, New Mutants, New X-men: Academy X. All that’s missing now is Astonishing X-men and Uncanny X-men.

I’ve also been replaying Valkyrie profile: Silmeria. Odd how it just seems so much easier now that I grinded my main part characters (and certain einherjar) to level 20-25 as early as chapter 3 while keeping certain einherjar (mosly the useless ones like milidia and alm) at the levels that I got them (below level 15) so I can learn skills faster .

The Cast of Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Yes, Mark is a huge Buffy geek. I actually have copies of the Season 8 comics! As much as I like Buffy, nothing can defeat the original female butt-kicker of the 90’s and early 2000’s generation.

Xena in Samurai armor

YEAH!!! I’ve been watching Xena: Warrior Princess reruns on the SciFi channel for a while and has secretly been part of my geekyness since it was showing on Star World when I was a freshman high school.

Fun Facts:

1. Xena is actually a spin-off from the Hercules series (the one with Kevin Sorbo). Most internet people actually know this already but I was shocked when my mother asked “is that Xena? the female version of He-man?”… I know the inner guy geek in me had a face-palm moment.

2. Buffy was originally a full feature comedy film created in 1992 with another actress. It was sort of a flop but the idea was good enough that people wanted to turn it into a TV show.

3. Xena’s Chakram is actually a real weapon used by sikhs (makes you wanna go aahlalalalallalala-shiiiaaah!)

4. There was originally a planned Buffy The Vampire Slayer animated series. Search around Youtube you’ll likey.

5. Xena has a daughter hahahaha yes warrior woman is a mommy. Actually she had a son before that she gave up because she was a bad warlord (Solan) who eventually died and then Eve, the divinely concieved (yes we’re talking about the angel gabriel thingy here) daughter. Yes Xena has all this weirdness in it.

… Yes Mark is a geek