2021 September
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Random high school memory: I think it was in second year physics class maybe, we had an exercise / contest where we were required to create a rubber-band powered car from a plastic bottle. We didn't have the internet back then, but if we did, we could have easily Googled "rubber band powered car" and got a good sense of what the car was supposed to look like: you attach four wheels to the bottle then make a twisty thing with the rubber band to propel it forward. Indeed, all the other teams did their rubber band bottle cars this
2019 August
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I thought about making a tag "things that would only interest me" for this one lol. I've uploaded some old web archives of the oldest versions of my site - back when I still had free sites hosted on the likes of Geocities, Tripod and the lesser-known TopCities. Click here for the index! I've had these archives for a while and only now decided to put them up on the site. It's fun browsing through the older versions, basically relics of a bygone era. It was a time of hand-made HTML, CSS and JS, something that appealed to the tinkerer
2019 April
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I recently found out about the blog at geocities.institute where they dig through the Geocities archive torrent extracted by the internet archive and write about interesting things they find. That of course eventually led me to traipse through the internet archive's wayback machine again, especially looking back at some of my older websites. I like having the ability to dig through time and find old content I've written or created. (Which is only one of the reasons why I advocate backing up your social media content regularly). That's why I like this blog, it means I can easily look through
2018 December
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This might surprise you, but I tried my hand at writing fanfiction back in the day. Most of it was Final Fantasy-related (as that was what I was really into back then) and the odd Ranma 1/2 one (mainly because I was a member of an anime-focused fanfic collective, called the "Nikholas F Toledo Zu" for inside joke reasons, writing under the name "Vector"). Anyway, I'm not exceptionally proud of the writings, but I like having all my work available on this blog/website/whatever, so I've added them at this link: Fanfiction. Give them a read, if you'd like. The Final
2018 November
2018 October
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I've noticed that when I dream I live in a different house. In the dreams, "home" is not the home that I live in now. Instead it's the "home" I grew up in. It's my grandparents' house, where we lived until the right after the turn of the millenium. That house is no longer there; I've mentioned it before. But when I manage to remember my dreams it seems like it's still "home" for me. I distinctly remember some dreams where I come home to that rusty metal gate. I can't remember any instance where I recognize my current home -
This is a story from the early days of the internet. Circa 2001-2004ish. A time of Geocities and AIM and and ICQ and from before Gmail even launched. At that time, I was a big Final Fantasy fan (okay, I still am, more or less). My first real experience with online fan communities was a Yahoo Groups mailing list called the "Final Fantasy Forum". It was a fun, tight-knit group that loved to discuss the FF series and other JRPGs of that era. The group was small, maybe 20-30 active members at peak, but it was also very active; it
2016 September
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Almost six years ago, I had to undergo minor surgery and had to endure the pain of being administered spinal anesthesia. I was reminded of this recently because a loved one with an even lower pain tolerance than I did recently had to undergo a similar procedure I have a pretty low tolerance for pain myself. I tried to spin it a bit positively in the blog post linked above, but there's no question many times during the procedure I felt miserable and in lots of pain. Even just the process of being put on a dextrose was pretty uncomfortable
2016 August
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No, not that kind of history, don't worry. Twenty-five years ago this month, the first website went up on the world wide web. That was 1991. It took a few years for the Philippines to catch on, the first internet connection in the country was only set up in 1994. My personal experience with the internet came a bit later, during our freshman year in University, sometime in the schoolyear 1995-1996. Around that time a couple of friends and I would walk out to this computer shop along Katipunan avenue that had internet access. Computer shops weren't prolific back then,
2016 June
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I read an article recently about how we should encourage entrepreneurial spirit in kids from a very young age. It made think of a time when we were kids and we tried running a business It was a summer from years ago. Perhaps 1988 or 1989, or maybe a year or two earlier, I can't be sure. I was young, my brother was younger by a few years, my female cousin older by a few years. Back then our families live under the same roof, my grandfather's house We needed something to keep us occupied during the summer. We probably
2013 February
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"Sir, baka pwedeng lipat na lang kayo ng taxi," the driver said to me apologetically. "Hindi na po kasi ako aabot sa garage sa Sta. Mesa." He offered to drop the flag-down fee from the fare so I just agreed. I got off and looked around. One of the reasons I agreed to let him off despite the late hour was that I knew the place where we were passing by -- a well lit area where I could easily get another taxi or take an alternative form of transportation if needed -- it was the neighborhood I grew up
2012 July
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When I was growing up, our mom would make this sandwich spread concoction that was a mix of cheese, butter, sugar and milk. I loved it, and when my mom told young me what the ingredients are I quickly gave it the name "Cheetergarmi" (I'm sure you can figure it out). She still occasionally makes some for us to this day, just had some for a midnight snack! Also, I pretty much wrote this post so that I could have a Google search term that returns a single hit to a blog post of mine.
2008 January
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Random memory for the day: I remember watching the Superfriends TV series when I was a little kid, and every time Superman would fly off into space, there'd be a shot of the earth as a globe, with Superman flying out from the northern hemisphere. As a stupid kid, I thought to myself, "I wonder why the earth is shown as an oblate spheroid? When I go out with my parents it was obviously flat." (Paraphrasing a bit since when I was a kid I did not know the term "oblate spheroid") I have always had a curious scientific mind