Brain Dumps

Favorite Anime: Revolutionary Girl Utena

Spent most of the day traveling from mall to mall to find something. Didn’t find it.

I’m bored, and I don’t feel like writing something informative. Here’s a “filler” entry for this blog instead.

Spent most of the day traveling from mall to mall to find something. Didn’t find it.

I’m bored, and I don’t feel like writing something informative. Here’s a “filler” entry for this blog instead.

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My favorite anime series would probably be 少女革命ウテナ(Revolutionary Girl Utena).

Revolutionary Girl Utena

Just after Utena’s parents died she was consoled by a prince who gave her a ring with a rose crest on it. Utena was so impressed by the Prince that she vowed to become one herself one day. A few years later Utena is attending Ohtori Academy where she gives all the teachers headaches because she dresses in a boys uniform so she can be like the prince she met long ago. After Utena’s friend is insulted by a member of the Student Council, Utena fights in a duel for her friends honor. Utena’s rose crest allows her to enter the dueling arena where Utena wins the duel and becomes engaged to the Rose Bride. Unknowingly, Utena is pulled into a series of duels with other members of the Student Council for the possession of the Rose Bride. As she becomes fond of Anthy, the Rose Bride, she must fight to keep her friend safe and to discover the horrifying secret behind Ohtori Academy.
– synopsis from Anime News Network

Due to the nature of the series (psychological, allegorical, yuri), I can get away with saying “This series rocks!” without really explaining why. :D

My enthusiasm for the series may have been caused by the following quote:

「卵の殻を破らねば、
雛鳥は生まれずに死んでいく。
雛は我らだ、卵は世界だ。
世界の殻を破らねば、
我らは生まれずに死んでいく。
世界の殻を破壊せよ！
世界を革命するために！！」

If the egg’s shell does not break,
the chick will die without being born.
We are the chick; the egg is the world.
If the world’s shell does not break,
we will die without being born.
Break the world’s shell!
For the sake of revolutionizing the world!

Fitness and Faulty Advertising

In line with centralizing all serious stuff between my blogs, I’ll be continuing my series of posts on fitness on this blog. The other posts are still archived in LiveJournal because copy-pasting them here would be cheating.

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The most annoying TV commercial for me nowadays is the one for Lucky Me Sotanghon Lite. See if you can figure out why I don’t like this commercial:

Continue reading “Fitness and Faulty Advertising”

On Religion

This blog will be up for a long time so I might as well get this “issue” out of the way this early.

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Between my habit of dropping F-bombs and PI-bombs and my ever-present “skull” pin, it’s not apparent that I consider myself a religious person. I’m a practicing Roman Catholic, and I just came home from a 6pm anticipated mass.

Don’t worry, I am not going to preach about my religion in this post. We’ll just look at one of the more pragmatic ways of looking at religion, namely, how it can apply to your personal growth.

Note that while this post can be applicable to atheists and agnostics, it may not be applicable to people from extremely strict religions. If your god dictates what you must do every second of your life without fail, I would suggest that you don’t go beyond the cut below.

Continue reading “On Religion”

Friday, first week

Couldn’t think of anything to write today. Besides, even if something popped up in my head in the next few minutes, it would be too late to write a full post.

There goes my first week of my “self training”. I’m not really happy with my productivity this week, but at least it’s on par with my productivity while I was working.

Week highlights:

Got this website.
Was able to setup this blog.
Finished setting up SVN and Git in my Linux server. Considering to study/use Git instead of SVN as my version control.
Made some changes to my LinkedIn account.

Stuff done outside work:

Ran my first 5k in 35 minutes. Must wake up earlier to lessen inhaled smoke from passing vehicles.
Still struggling with weak triceps in push-ups. Pull-up count is still 5.
Getting tired of Restaurant City.
Read the entire archives of both Dr. McNinja and Questionable Content. I am now filled with both awesome and twenty-something gutter humor.
Trying to 100% The World Ends With You.

I’m thinking of getting an iPod Touch soon (tomorrow?) to get the hang of the platform. In the meantime, I still have to study a bunch of management books and a crapload of languages.

On Procrastination

Procrastination is perhaps my most serious character flaw. When I see that something isn’t really important, I tend not to do it right away.

People who know me might say otherwise, though. What they are seeing is actually me doing workarounds for my flaw:

They see me finish something way ahead of time.

Usual scenario: I get office mail to do something as trivial as update an Excel file or send the total page count of your work in progress. Deadline is end of the week.

I finish the task 10 minutes later.

Reason why I didn’t procrastinate: It was a trivial task. As long as I am not “in the zone” coding, I probably have a couple of minutes to spare doing trivial tasks. Besides, the mere fact that I have my mail client open means that I’m not too occupied at the moment.

They see me finish something not trivial way ahead of time.

Usual scenario: same as above, but the task will take more than 2 hours to finish.

I’ll finish the task 3 hours after receiving the mail.

Reason why I didn’t procrastinate: It was probably a mechanical task and I want to procrastinate on my “thinking” tasks. Usually these tasks are similar to the stuff I mentioned in the previous example, but in a larger scale. I get to turn off my brain and I get paid to do it. Everybody wins! (err.. sort of)

They see me finish something that requires thinking way ahead of time.

Ok, so the task doesn’t fall under the two scenarios above. What’s my excuse now?

Actually there are a couple of possibilities:

I try to fool myself.

Remember the mantra in my first post? Putting things in different perspectives is an effective way of applying that mantra.

Don’t want to fail Calculus? Put your mind into aiming for an A+. If you win, you get an A+. If you don’t, you might get depression but I doubt you’ll get an F or even a C.

Same thing with tasks. Deadline is next week? I could either personally shorten the deadline to this week (this is a bad thing, I’ll explain in a later post) or I could fool myself that it’s a lot more important than my other tasks so I’ll prioritize it.

I’m a competitive guy.

Similar to fooling myself, but I decided that this deserves a bullet point of its own.

For some odd reason, I don’t like to lose to other people. So if there’s a task that requires thinking, nothing riles me up more than the thought of competing with my colleagues — even though there’s no really no competition involved in the task itself.

Actually there is something that riles me up more: the thought of competing with cute female colleagues who are a lot more skillful and smarter than me. Go ahead, call me chauvinist if you want, but this M.O. singlehandedly allowed a guy who graduated with no honors in HS to graduate with Latin honors in college (my HS was an all-boys school… you get the picture).

and lastly…

I’m bored.

Yup, you read that right. Sometimes I procrastinate on all my tasks and I end up doing nothing.

Doing nothing = boredom.

Bry + Boredom = unexpected results.

Finishing tasks way ahead of time ∈ unexpected stuff that happens when Bry is bored.