first day high

so. in another attempt to pursue unfinished business after, well, finishing graduate school, i am embarking on a four-month journey to a healthier body.

i want to write but i'm mental-blocked

hold on, is "mental-blocked" even a proper phrase (or compound word or whatever)?

i got home early today because the office declared a semi-half-day, which pegged quitting time at 3pm. so i've been spending enough time on the internet clicking on the usual suspects, and i was running out of stuff to read. i did come across baddie's post this afternoon, which prompted me to think of my own rainy day pet peeves, which in turn reminded me that i almost had another klutz incident this morning.

...

(stopped current train of thought because it's getting really lame.)

...

then i came across jewel's blog, and i am reminded again of another dilemma of sorts.

ever since i decided to create my latest blog at wordpress.com, i've been (un)seriously contemplating migrating my main blog from blogspot. sentimentality aside, i am reluctant to move from blogspot because it is the only one that provides an email backup of my posts as they are published. and in my experience, the sidebar html widget is much more user-friendly than wordpress html widget. i was seriously pissed that this was the only site i could show off my last.fm artists and recent playlist using the flash widgets - multiply, lj and wordpress failed massively. and my plurk widget only worked here. in fact, blogger wins at widgets, period.

however, wordpress (and i'm using the free hosted one) has a lot going for it as well. it has more themes (blogger is seriously lacking in themes); there are "pages" which are similar to posts except that they aren't constricted by the date; there's a cool spam filter; there are "categories" and "tags"; and it's compatible with gravatar. the clincher, however, is the "read more" (or "summary") option (though i have to admit livejournal is one-up with the lj-cut). installing this option in blogger takes a bit of patience, some css knowhow, and a lot of hits and misses.

there are a few things that aren't found on either platform which i really really like, such as lj's multiple userpic (i haven't used up all 15, and my lj friends have lots and lots more on their paid accounts). lj also has a nifty lj user graphic, such as this one:under_crisis. it also has several fields besides the post title and tags, such as music, location and mood (and moodthemes are customizable!) and all of these can be specified if you emailed your blog post. best of all is the lj-cut, which allows the author to hide several non-continuous portions of the post.

expert bloggers have probably worked around my complaints and devised how their platforms could work for them. but i'm no expert, and i don't have the patience to get into the nitty gritty programming. so i'll just keep on wishing that someday blogger will create their version of the lj-cut, and i'll be the happy camper forever. or until the next hot platform comes along.

where there's smoke, there's fire

still on a high from last night's school of rock gig. (coincidentally, i loved that movie.)

then i read my pinoy blogosphere mail and got the biggest surprise.

now, i don't have anything new to contribute to what has already been written, so better just read it yourself.

all i can say is, it seems raimund's segue last night may have more meaning than i initially thought it did.

it would be a really brilliant 30th birthday gift. kahit next year na yung u2.

wish lists

christmas is my favorite time of the year for a number of reasons. sure, it's also the worst time ever to be hit by depression, but lots of other stuff made sure that i won't be stuck in that rut. one of them is the time-honored tradition of exchanging gifts.

there are many ways that this tradition can go wrong. one is if you don't have anyone to exchange gifts with, which almost happened to me this year if i hadn't been part of the hr christmas party. another is getting the worst gift ever. thank heaven somebody invented the wish list.

ah, wish lists. i actually started last month, when i posted my desired christmas gifts (however improbable to get) on the klite message boards. last week, out of sheer boredom, i actually constructed a list with three classifications: short-term achievable (like if i had an extra few thousand), intangible (more of services), and long-term achievable (aka next-to-impossible). as always, they were all about me -- selfish and materialistic are not overstatements.

of course, for exchange gift purposes i had to trim it to something more manageable and easier to find (for my gift mommy/daddy) and up to 500 pesos. so i had to think fast and come up with the things i liked but did not want to buy myself. i even asked my guy friends what cds they recommended, out of desperation. i finally ended up with this:

1. a pair of piglet (of winnie the pooh) bedroom slippers
2. a dvd of the incredibles
3. the starbucks christmas bear (the girl, of course -- it has its own doll)
4. memories of love -- the live cd for the concert of kevyn lettau, lou pardini and joe pizzulo held this year
5. bubble bath (even if i don't have a tub)

so, what's on your christmas wish list? and please, not world peace.