Andre Salvatierra. Coffee-Swilling Biped. Information Addict. Autodidact. Former Musician. Skilled Irritant. Experienced Metaphysical Bridge Burner. Mantastically Manly Man. Professional Insomniac. Sometime comic artist for the Manila Bulletin. Former paper-pushing desk monkey. Now a dungeoneer in a specialty coffee shop somewhere in London. A not-just-occasional poster of potentially friendship-ending acerbic-humor-snark. I like to blog about interesting things.
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Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Apparently, debit card charges take a while - up to a week - before they are properly reflected in an account’s transaction records. These gaps have led to some gross miscalculations as to how much money I thought I had (and therefore reflecting my assumed ability to spend) and how much I would actually have left. Long story short, I didn’t have the money I thought I did, and now I only have 15 pence left. Awesome.
If for some reason I ever even remotely get the urge to try and offer anyone banking advice, you have my permission to savagely beat me with any blunt objects available to you.
My cat, A-dolf, just died yesterday. My dad took him to the vet, where he was diagnosed with severe kidney problems, among other things. They had him on an IV drip and a catheter, and seemed to get better, but died as the night went by. Just wish I could have been back there in the PH to have been able to take him to the vet myself, but well, here I am.
That fat, adorable bugger would hop on to my lap whenever I would be watching TV, drawing comics, or just whenever he would see me around. He had this cool, collected, unflappable personality (for a cat), and he’d be really picky with who he cozied up to. Loved that cat more than the other two we have, and it’ll probably be a while until I can warm up to another fur ball again.
I swear, one of these days I am going to COMPLETELY SNAP and start forcing people to put on deodorant at knifepoint.
I’ll pretty much be starting with you, random-person-sitting-next-to-me-on-this-bus. Soap and water. HAVE YOU HEARD OF IT?
Miscellaneous Odors
On the bus today, a lady who quite clearly had bathed herself in perfume sat next to me. To avoid suffocating from the near-field ecosystem completely alien to humans in their right minds, I quickly took to another seat.
To my delight, another woman sat down next to me, and she was the polar opposite of perfume lady: this fine specimen of the fairer sex exhibited an overpoweringly horrible body odor that threatened to completely implode several blood vessels in my skull. She had the aisle seat. I was trapped.
While I was busy choking to death, a mildly unsexy, scantily-clad punk-rock chick with an 80’s-Boy-George-hairdo in the front row of the bus stood up, exhibiting her tastefully revealed ass-crack, deciding to pull up her pointlessly-belted pants in full view of the entire bus as opposed to just doing it in her seat, for the viewing pleasure of all currently riding in that rolling, red tin can of olfactory death and destruction.
asdhjsfgkjhdfgpokjrpgokdf;lvbka[d.
On Reading and Researching about Health and Nutrition
I still read books through and through even if I discover that they’re mostly full of B.S. (mostly books on health and nutrition), because every now and then, you get some pretty good, accurate, and useful information that you otherwise wouldn’t have come across if you gave up reading at the first sign of wrong information (examples: Loren Cordain’s Paleo Diet book, Dr. Andrew Weil’s stuff, Jordan S. Rubin, articles from the Natural News website, etc.).
The trick is being able to think critically, separate fact from fiction. Check everything, then check again. Check the cited sources, check the research papers, check the the criticism from peers and whatnot.
This is where a LOT of people fail, simply because they are too lazy or give up too soon.
It’s tedious, but totally worth it - the results of accurate health and nutrition information applied correctly are astounding and leave no room for doubt or ambiguity.
(For the record, I’ve been pretty sickly my entire life. But since 2006, I’ve gone on a high-fat - the healthful kind - high-protein and low-carb diet consisting mostly of fresh, “real” food, and I’ve been healthier than I ever was - slim, gaining muscle at a nice, gradual pace, and I don’t even need to count calories or deprive myself. The only thing left for me to solve is my insomnia; once that’s done, I’ll be just peachy).
/rant
Trolling - It’s Super Effective
You know that time I was going about trolling the cashier at Krispy Kreme? Well I just went back for more of the same, and… this time they didn’t bother upselling me anymore. Problem?
iA Writer - A minimalist, full-screen word processor that lets you do just one thing: write.
I want this so badly on my computer. In fact, I want this so bad it may seriously drive me to get a Mac.
For someone who constantly writes - as I do - and someone who is a text-editor-and-minimalist-word-processor geek - as I am - this for me is the very definition of a killer app.
Feature-wise, it’s very slim - anorexic would be an apt term - but that’s by design: It’s completely uncluttered, and it doesn’t let you fuss about with unnecessary settings only tangentially relevant to the actual work of writing that you need to accomplish. It lets you focus on that one thing, and that one thing only, absolutely prohibiting you from messing about the program unless it’s to type words and form sentences.
Plus… auto-Markdown. Oh man.
It also appeals to my ultra-minimalist leanings without sacrificing excellent design and functionality. It’s beautiful, and it is something I covet.
If you’re a Mac user, you can purchase iA Writer here. Also, I hate you.
(Source: mnmal)
This is extremely disappointing. I used to be an eMusic subscriber some years back, and they had nothing of this sort of nonsense. Sure, some of the tracks normally available to Western users were restricted, but other than those, we had full access to their catalog of old and obscure music, which was in itself, fantastic. You could get Sinatra, some great old blues records, good indie bands that barely got any exposure, and even a good range of classical music.
Lately, I’ve been thinking of going back to get a subscription, so I visited the site and was promptly greeted with the message in the photo above.
This turnabout is a slap in the face of any true music lover who is willing to go through legitimate means to acquire his or her music, and this stinks of nothing but corporate protectionism. This is highly unnecessary, especially in this day and age.
The Internet helps level the playing field for everybody. But not everybody wants that to happen, quite apparently so.
Addendum: these sorts of business policies do not help minimize piracy. They encourage it.
What do you live for?
What do you go to bed at night and wake up every morning for?
What drives you to keep on doing what you’re doing?
What does all that mean to you?
What does your entire life and the way you’ve been living it all amount to?
What does it all mean?
Is that all there really is?
Guys, guys, stop blaming PAG-ASA. If you believe anything by a government agency that still uses WORDART in their presentations, something’s wrong with YOU.
Seriously. Check weather.com or some other service.
Hate to use the word, but… I’m prototyping wallpaper. A microtextured, minimal, motivational wallpaper, to be precise.
I’ve been experimenting with various minimal desktop setups, which include icons, window decorations, desktop environment mods, and wallpaper. Digital minimalism certainly has a lot to do with aesthetic experience. As it is, I’ve been scouring the interwebs for the above things to find that “just right” look, but there’s always something about the stuff I download that I always find fault with no matter how small it seems. That certain je ne sais quoi that’s missing. So I decided to put up or shut up, and started working on my idea of a great minimal desktop.
The first step would be the biggest piece of my desktop (and probably the easiest of the lot to work on) - the wallpaper. Once I get that down, I’ll move on down to icons, and maybe eventually window decorations - the whole shebang.
I’ll be releasing a wallpaper pack in a few days, as soon as I stop obsessing over the tiniest details that I think matter. It’s only in this case that I’ll allow myself to go completely OCD (See the version numbers in the photo? I’ll save you the pain of reading the changelog and wanting to gouge your own eyes out… it has just about every stinking variation, degree, and layer/effect configuration written down).
/rant
My current lifestyle is just not doing it for me. I feel like I’m standing knee-deep in quicksand, slowly sinking yet not really caring much about what’s happening. I need some drastic changes.
- I just dumped 11 years worth of documents and downloaded things (that is, everything in my “My Documents” folder and home folder that isn’t an out-of-the-box directory) in a “For Processing” folder, where they will be sorted: either properly filed for further reference or permanently deleted. Sentimental value is no longer a factor; if it’s not useful to me, it will be deleted, without prejudice.
- I deleted my Foursquare account. Virtual badges and ad hoc honorifics should mean nothing to me. Besides, letting everyone know where you are all the time can be a security risk.
- I deleted my GetGlue account. It had basically poured gasoline on the already raging fire that is my addiction to information and threatened to completely overrun me by further facilitating a pro-consumption philosophy that I have only my poor impulse control as a defense against.
I’m currently trying to find a way to reduce my email accounts to two, and eventually, if possible, just one, all the while mainting sanity with all the necessary accounts required to function in the modern connected world.
That said, I also need to limit my time in front of a computer - about 70% of it is completely unnecessary, spent on mindless browsing and on social networks. I could use that time to further myself, learn a new skill or improve existing ones or something.
There will be more deletions, with the primary goal of significantly cutting psychic entropy.
The less I have, the less divided my attention becomes, the more I can focus on the truly important tasks, and the more apparrent the truly important tasks become.
