Of Being Twenty-Six And Sickness

I've just realized I'm 26. I turned 26 a long while ago but it has now hit me. I'm really immature and insensitive. I think I have to start acting my age.

I've also realized that I'm always sick with one ailment after another. Usually with a few weeks respite in between. Last year I had irritable bowel syndrome and cough and colds. This year it was chickenpox, a six month bout with cough and colds and now after a month of committed excercise it's back to colds. I don't know why my immune system is so weak but from here on I'm fighting back! RAAAAAAARGH!

Burning Wii Backup Discs

I am making this post for future Wii burners everywhere. Use DVD-Rs. That's 'minus' R.

I don't want to tell you how many DVD+Rs I've wasted and the number of hours downloading an English version of Wii Sports. The original Wii Sports that came with my Wii was in Taiwanese or some such. I had to go to extra lengths just to play it and when I did I had to figure out what those Chinese/Taiwanese/Japanese characters meant. Wii Sports isn't the most seeded game out there because it's usually packaged with the console so it took a long while to download. But it's all worth it! I can now understand those onscreen instructions and even gauge my Wii fitness age. The world is mine! Bwahahah-hurgh ack.

In Which A Wii Is Bought, The Internet Delved, And Generally A Happy Ending

I bought a Wii last Saturday. It came with an original Wii Sports game but the console itself was softmodded. The problem was the console was modified from a Japanese (or Chinese?) version into a US version but the original Wii Sports game was Japanese and region locked so I couldn't play Wii Sports on it. The only reason I wanted a Wii was to play boxing on it. Last Christmas vacation my cousins invited me to play Wii Sports Boxing with them and from then on I wanted a Wii for myself so badly. Good thing I had some money from my Christmas bonus and money I was saving for medical emergencies. XD Okay okay. It's a bad idea but I wanted the Wii so bad!

Back to the story. I delved the internet backwaters looking for a solution. I tried googling for "Wii Hack" or some such and after a few blog posts referencing other blog posts and then an obscure "to come solution" I found a comment saying that "Geck OS" made region free playing possible. It's a good thing my Wii came with the Homebrew Channel or else I'd have gone crazy on how to hack my Wii to display that channel. This Homebrew Channel makes running homebrew on the Wii so much easier because I don't have to have an original Twilight Zelda something saved game to make my Wii crash and some other hardware to make my Wii boot into a configurable mode every time I need to run homebrew. By the way, homebrew means anything not made by the makers of the console or licensed game makers.

I wrote a bunch more stuff here but I think I'm just rambling. Long story short: Geck OS didn't work but after much more delving I found Menu Loader and I was able to play my original Wii sports game albeit in Japanese (Chinese ?).

The Boxing game is crazy fun. My arms are tired.

Ping Pong Playa

Watch it. I highly recommend it. At first it's annoying but strangely it becomes endearing.

"I LIKE... I LIKE... I LIKE CEREAL!"

Car Accident

Juzie figured in a three car collision last Monday night. On a red light stop in front of Power Station in Macapagal Avenue an owner type jeep smashed into her car from behind and caused her to crash into the van in front of her. She suffers from partial hearing loss in her left ear and pain in the right part of her neck. It's a good thing she's religious about wearing a seat belt or else she'd have broken her face on the steering wheel.

Her rear bumper was damaged and we didn't notice the front license plate being loose so when we reached the LTO (Land Transportation Office) we found out it must have dropped away on the way there.

While waiting for the traffic enforcers and investigators to arrive Juzie and the other drivers didn't talk to each other but when the investigators did arrive the driver of the owner type jeep was quick to accuse the others and even raised his voice.

It took an hour for a traffic enforcer to arrive at the scene and another hour for investigators to get there. It took maybe 30 minutes for them to make an assessment of the situation and maybe 45 minutes to guide us to the LTO branch in Banilaw. The owner type jeep was leaking fluids when last we saw it so the driver was understandably late to the LTO by maybe an hour but he didn't bring the jeep. The LTO Officer took note of this and asserted maybe his jeep wasn't registered. On the way to the LTO Juzie's car made loud thrumming noises when the engine was doing low revolutions but not undergeared.

The LTO Officer determined that the driver of the owner type jeep as the person at fault and the driver of the van didn't press any charges. The van's driver when asked to fill out the form given by the LTO Officer went out for maybe 30 minutes. It turns out he didn't know how to write. The driver of the owner type jeep when asked to fill out his form asked in turn if he could borrow some eye glasses. I wanted to kill him.

Another LTO Officer took pictures of the damage to Juzie's car and the van. He asked for 190 Pesos as a fee. I thought these public servants were being paid through our taxes. We were told to come back Wednesday for the police report with the medical certificate in hand.

After the red tape at the LTO we went to UERMMC (University of the East Ramon Magsaysay Memorial Medical Center) for a check up. We were directed to the Emergeny Room as it was past 10 in the evening. Juzie was checked and xrayed (which waiting for took the better part of two hours) and diagnosed as having neck muscle strain. The xrays didn't show any fractures.

What's left now is to wade through bureaucratic muck to get a replacement license plate, the LTO police report, the insurance claim.

This is a reminder to people out there. It doesn't matter if you've trained yourself to be a good driver. You can be the most careful driver out there and a careless person can still hurt you.

Take care and give allowances for other's stupidity and carelessness.

Low Carb Diet and Exercise Update

My sister mentioned a few days ago that low carb diets are actually better for weight loss than low fat diets. While browsing reddit I came across this article.

At first I didn't like his writing style but the few reddit comments there were on it convinced me to finish reading it.

I think I'll give it a try but protein diets are expensive. How am I supposed to eat lots of protein and little carbs and feel full without going broke? Anyway. It's worth a shot.

I'm up to 30 pushups now. Used to be 25 was the point of muscular failure for me. 30 now feels easy but I'm still wary of triggering my vascular migraine by exerting too much.

Silliman Beach

That's Silliman Beach. Yep. It's dirty. It didn't use to be like that. I remember I learned to swim here. I don't know what island that is in the background. Probably Siquijor. Please correct me if I'm wrong. The strip of land in the center is part of the Dumaguete Airport.

Religulous

I'm watching it right now. It's bloody brilliant. There's a problem with blogger uploading pics right now so ... ack.

Holidays and Diet

Lola: "Tambuka nimo Mikey uy!" (Grandmother: You're so fat, Mikey!)

later...

Lola: "Ngano wala ka ga kaon? Kaon! Kaon! Daghang pagkaon!" (Grandmother: Why aren't you eating? Eat! Eat! There's plenty of food to eat!)


Sigh.

Pushups

I did 40! Then another 30! Then got a MASSIVE headache. Argh.

Soya Milk and Exercise

I just found out that during my early childhood I drank soy milk because I was allergic to cow milk. A lot of things have now made more sense. Sigh. This means I do have a lot more work to do to slim down. It's been almost a month since I recovered from a 5 month respiratory something and vomiting phlegm and acid reflux.

I have started exercising again. Before I got sick I was fat but during my sickness I got a lot fatter because I couldn't exercise and I ate 3 square meals a day while my work only entailed sitting in front of a computer. I've started exercising again right when I realized I have stopped coughing those small coughs from the mucusy drip at the back of my throat. I now jogg every weekday I can. Now I can finish 5 rounds around the block without the last 3 in excruciating pain and side stiches. I do pushups. A year ago I could do 20 at a time. When I started again I could only do 10 and it took me 3 days to recover. Now I can do 130-140 a day split into 4 20-rep sets in the morning and 3 20 reps at night. I can do the same number of bicep curls (too bad I couldn't take my dumbbells with me on vacation.) I can do 3 30-rep crunch sets although I can only do them when no one is in the staff house living room where I stay (but I'm hoping to catch up during my vacation.) I'm still fat but I don't have that really bad bloated feeling. Here's hoping I can sustain this streak indefinitely.

In order to have the energy to exercise in the morning I have cut back on my pc gaming time. I sleep at 10 in the evening so I can wake up early for my jog. I also try to eat only at breakfast and a cupcake sometime in the afternoon. I succeed maybe 80% of the time. I've felt great. I'm thinking I can do this but some days there's a wall. A wall where I can only do two sets of pushups and maybe just part of the second set. I step back and relax then try again tomorrow. Usually I can get back on the number of sets I usually do.

Not to be cheesy or anything but: Yes I can.

Side note. Cebu pacific charges Php 100 for every kilogram over the 15Kg alloted. WTF.

TiddlyWiki

I got it from here. http://eriwen.com/tools/wikify-yourself/

At first I'm wary of using this page because I didn't understand how it worked. I thought it would upload to a database somewhere but when I tried it out I found that it just overwrote itself. It's Javascript based. Or something. Anyway. It has revolutionized how I keep notes. I've been using it for 4 days since I read about it in reddit. It's beautiful. I can create daily journals and edit the menu to display quick items for ToDo lists or pending research items or even just copy paste stuff from emails. I tried using the Windows Calendar for keeping track of stuff but I didn't like the interface. I tried using ToDoList by AbstractSpoon but now I just use that for keeping track of work. With the GTD flavor of TiddlyWiki I add stuff, links, images or whatever for what I'm supposed to be doing. For a person who can't remember to finish a can of Coke I am really enjoying this Wiki.

By the way, I tried adding the checkbox addon but couldn't figure out how to work it. No matter. It's still awesome.

I you want to try it out for yourself open http://checkettsweb.com/tw/gtd_tiddlywiki.htm and save the page on your machine. Open the saved htm file in a compatible web browser and voila! Awesomeness at your fingertips. You may have to customize a lot but it's worth it.

There's an option for uploading the data you create using the page somewhere but I haven't tried it.

EDIT: After a month of writing journal entries and exercise tracking stuff I'm still enjoying TiddlyWiki. Eric pointed out how to work with the checkbox plugin but I guess the real problem I had with installing it was that I never got the confirmation message that the plugin was indeed installed. I was just digging through the various tiddlers when I noticed the Plugin Checkbox tiddler. WTF. I didn't even noticed I ever installed it properly. I might have also parsed Eric's comment wrongly (or misread) when he said to create a checkbox all you have to do is type [(space)]. Or maybe I just spaced out. The internet does that to me sometimes. XD.

Again. I can't remember installing this plugin properly. I don't touch drugs. Or alcohol.

Thanks, Eric!

EDIT: Aww. Checkbox thingy doesn't work on Chrome. Works on Firefox, though.
EDIT: Stupid. I edited the Checkbox Plugin Tiddler by adding [ ] and [X] at the beginning to test for it. It stopped working after a browser restart. Anyway, it works on Chrome. Woot!

Fuck you, Globe Telecom

I get these spam Globe Svcs+ messages every 5 minutes. I think they started a only a few days ago. They don't show up on my inbox but they pop up on my phone's screen uninvited and very intrusive. They disappear after about 2 minutes on their own but that's 2 minutes too long. If I get my hands on the person responsible for this I wish him the hell of eternal waking. (Sandman Vol 1 I think.)

There's another one! Fuck you GLOBE!

EDIT: I am switching to Smart.
EDIT: Thank you, Ralph. I'll try what you said.