When I finished grade school, I thought that “Time is gold” could never have been more cliche. But where I’m right at, it can never be more true.

Just to put everything in perspective, I’m going to have to state my predicament in a concise statement: I need a minimalist web layout. Or design. Or whatever web geeks call it. It’s Christmas so I guess it’s less shameless (eh?) if I just put it out there for everyone to know. I’ll be crossing my fingers hoping Santa might just get lost and somehow mistakenly land himself on my blog and grant this wish.

I don’t want too many colors. Perhaps just a header with a logo relevant to the blog title. At the risk of sounding lol-funny, I see a vampire with sagging eye bags and without a lower jaw, baring his fangs. I’m nowhere near creative so that’s the least I can come up with whatever faulty artisty gene’s still in me. Also, I like my text space-saver small in size and kind of like the body-text for this website because I tend to write long entries. Courier New, is it? I wouldn’t mind Arial too. Two columns wouldn’t look too awkward, I hope. Also, a small space for my Flickr thumbnails and of course, the obligatory Google ads.

I initially started college with a career in the field of electronics and communications in mind but I spent the entire first year reading trash novels so much that I managed to convince myself a year later that I was meant to be a literature/English/creative writing major. And I did. In retrospect, what I think really happened was a sort of rebellion against my parents whose plans, though well-meaning, were nevertheless theirs and not mine.

Five years into the literature program, I realized most of these people are pretentious wankers who like having their egos stroked. It’s quite sad how they take so much pride in getting their works published yet fail to see how meaningless it actually is no matter how witty or educated.

I’ve never been so disillusioned as when I have to deal with their academic elitism. They give so much praise to literary works critical of human condition when they can never be more out of touch with reality themselves. These hypocrites confine themselves within their walls with their pen and paper, avoiding any contact with the dirty, the perverse, and the uneducated. And by virtue of association, I feel like an accomplice to this unfortunate ignorance. It is a denial that nobody inside ever talks about in the same manner they keep their antagonisms against each other buried under their friendly faces. Fuck them!

Last Friday, I told my parents how I want myself in again on their initial plan. I’m going right back into engineering when I get my degree. Too bad I have until then to say good riddance!

The guy is living the life I want. Damn him. I’m green with envy.

Anyways, I figured I’d give the gallery feature a shot. Looking at his photos made me want to own a Nikon D3, but seriously, who would spend $4,999 on a camera?

The following photos are taken from when Carlos, Kim, Maui, and I went to see Cloverfield when it opened in theaters last January.

When I impulsively decided to make a career out of blogging two weeks ago despite a tugging awareness that it’s not going to turn out the way I planned it in my mind, I quit my other addiction: World of Warcraft. I remember quitting twice before but in both instances, either the withdrawal was too strong or I was simply too weak not to yield to pitying the crying peon on the Cancel Subscription page.

The first quit lasted for about two hours. Upon canceling my subscription, the next hundred and twenty minutes were spent thinking about the friends I have in the guild and how they’d fare in Karazhan without their top hunter to help with crowd control, and making elaborate entrepreneurial plans of monopolizing the adamantite market in the Auction House so I could get the 5000g I needed for my epic flying mount training. Fortunately, my second quit during the last week of October 2007 didn’t become quite a withdrawal disaster as the first. Only this time, I managed to protract all the same ideas for one week before I went back to renew my subscription.

When I quit two weeks ago, it was partly because I wouldn’t be able to literally afford another miscellaneous expense after the web domain and the web host. Ergo, my credit card eating another $15 a month for WoW is gluttony.

What really pushed me to leave the game, however, were the insensitive people in the guild. Hut & Spicy isn’t really accommodating to newcomers. I’m fairly new to the Kil’jaeden server to which I transferred, along with a couple of friends, upon invitation of HnS’s guildmaster for the reason that there is a much solid Filipino population there, Alliance-side, than the server I’m from.

What he failed to emphasize was how most of the veterans in the guild are just plain immature and hard to deal with, and the guild officers are terribly apathetic. I could hardly believe this puerility comes from twenty-something professionals, some of whom are already married.

I remember I was once told to shut up in /gchat for the reason (if you can call it that!) that I didn’t have a raiding spot and therefore, I earn no right to communicate. It was meant to be halfway somewhere between a joke and the gentle sarcasm you associate yourself with newbies to establish your authority but how the guy said it was nowhere near polite. He ended up getting a spot on my /ignore list, though not without us throwing shit at each other.

I’m sober for a straight two weeks now after finally cutting it cold turkey. It’s hard getting clean and the prospect of going back to the game is always on the horizon each time I wake up but from the quitting WoW stories I’ve read online thus far, looks like I have a bumpy road ahead of me–for the next few months, at least.

My primary concern for leaving the confines of developer-hosted blogs is the enormous monetization potential of affiliate marketing, contextual advertising (Google AdSense comes to mind), and pay-per-click marketing–all of which I’m not the least familiar with until a week ago. In fact, I barely even thought it possible for me to single-handedly build a website from the ground up.

Various informative articles scattered online managed to get me through all the preliminary obstacles of setting up a website but newbies seem to have a way of attracting new and difficult problems along the way. As I have mentioned before, I don’t have previous knowledge about any advanced programming languages except for the elementary HTML I gleaned from my Livejournal days (even that, is a bit shaky). It is quite understandable therefore why I find myself struggling with layout designs and feeding on free WordPress themes from generous designers online.

The real problem, however, is not in the technical aspects of developing a blog so much as generating internet traffic your way. I’ve set up some trial ads from AdSense but of course, there isn’t anyone around to visit the site and do the clickity-clicks.

Just recently however, I upgraded my operating system from the stable XP to the not-so-stable Vista despite the generous caution against Vista people have been handing out to likely candidates who are willing to take the bait. Needless to say, the new AVG8 didn’t quite make an impression on me as I failed to try it out due to compatibility issues. I was getting an application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect error. The installation files said that it is compatible with Vista but it didn’t explicitly say Vista SP1. Makes me wonder if I’d ever encounter the same problem at all if I chose to hang on to XP.

It could probably be a faulty version or installation of a Visual Studio update, though. I’ll try removing the Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable, revert back to the 2005 Redistributable, and see how it goes. Meanwhile, I’m using avast! and it’s doing really great I might consider sticking to it if I don’t get AVG to work.

For some strange reason, I woke up last Tuesday morning feeling a very strong urge to write although I didn’t find the time to because there was too much sun outside. Nevertheless, I spent the entire day reading news items and blogs, hopping from one link to another until I found myself overcome with the great possibilities the blogosphere has to offer those that actively pursue it.

Later on, I realized most of these sites are published with WordPress so I went on to download it expecting I would soon be installing a desktop client from which I can write and publish voila-style. Apparently, I was next to illiterate at pro blogging. The download gave me a couple of files that needed uploading to a web host–and I wouldn’t have known about that either unless I Google-ed “WordPress installation.”

Soon enough, I was reading everything about buying web domains, web hosting, name servers, a little bit of CSS, X/HTML, PHP, and mySQL, leaving the computer afterwards feeling I only understood about 10% of it. Experience, as they say, is the best teacher, so I braved the intimidating world (wide web) and went to sleep that night with a free domain and web host, and a functional but empty WordPress account.