Popeye

1-foot Popeye plushie from the UFO Catcher at Tom's World SM Southmall yesterday.

a good day for plushies retrieval... (lmao)

Tom's World, SM SouthMall. 

Ribbid...

Kero came home with me.
Tom's World, SM Southmall.

Kitty came home with me

Kitty came home with me.
Tom's World, SM Southmall.

Another Day, Another Monkey

Pest control guys were spraying anti-termite stuff at the house so I went to SM Southmall for some R&R.

Got myself some candles for my potpourri oil burners at the boarding house as well as incense for my room here down south. Also had to replenish my DVD-Rs and CD-Rs supply. Hmmm. Seems the CDR King here at SM Southmall is doing a Mercury Drug with "get-your-number" queued service.

Seems okay, except for the fact that there's only one cashier for all the faster service attendants. Can you say bottleneck?

And... This may seem redundant... Guess who came home with me from Tom's World? Another day, another monkey. Different color though. Still have to get the pink colored one to complete my collection.

Oooh... Monkeys like me.

Jelly Belly has a thumb-sucking twin. Hehehe.

Same circumstances, UFO Catcher kiosk in Tom's World, SM Southmall.

Came home...

Sony Ericsson K770i... To replace my Asus V80 which I lost during the lantern parade. But wait... There's more... Jelly Belly, the thumb-sucking monkey, from a UFO Catcher kiosk in Tom's World. Hehehe.

He came home with me...

He came home with me from the UFO Catcher again.

Guess who came home with me from Tom's World SM SouthMall?

UFO catcher haul. Been a while since I visited a UFO catcher. :D

Some stuff

Took this pic last week, the week the San Beda Red Lions won the NCAA seniors basketball championships. The banner on the entry arch of San Beda read: Home of the San Beda Red Lions.
 

 
Oh, and I have another Hello Kitty ufo catcher catch to add to my sister's collection. Got it in SM South Mall, Tom's World.
 

Gorilla Puppet

A gorilla puppet my friends gave me for christmas.

Shrieking Gorilla Doll

A shrieking gorilla doll my friend gave me for christmas. Fone vid's a bit dark, though.

Poi, Poi, Hello Kitty and Maya

Finally got myself well-balanced poi from JR. They come with free lessons, too.

With that I found my way to the UP CHK last Saturday for a poi session with JR. Philip of FlipSpin and Clair joined me there for the poi spinning. Two girls who had previous poi lessons joined us. I think their names were Jane and Arlene, I'm not sure though, O_o;; forgetful me (sorry ladies...). Oh, and it was like a reunion of sorts since JR, Clair and I all come from the UP School of Library and Information Studies (SLIS, formerly ILIS, formerly ILS).

The poi I bought and the practice poi we all used were different from the poi we were used to. We use balls on ends of rope at home for practice and though soft they still hurt when they hit us. The pratice poi was of the beanbag-type so the force is dissipated. Of course hitting yourself in the nuts (beanbags hitting beanbags :p) still hurts a lot but we can manage.

JR said that the more the merrier. So if anyone is interested, why not join us every Saturday? Just message me and I'll text you the details.

Anyway, Philip and I think this is a nice way of cross-training for those like us involved in skill toys / arts. The move set and basic actions are similar to 2A (double yoyos) style of yoyo play so we were a bit familiar with the movements. Can't wait to learn more and try it out on the fire poi. :D (Jeez, this despite JR showing us his burns for moves gone awry.) But heck, we all only live once so I'm definitely going for the fire play!

It was tiring, ngalay we call it. Arms hurt like hell. But I found my way to Greenhills after that. My old Questor officemate Tak (Takako Takimoto) is in town. Her husband Joel Gammad (now Atty. Gammad) shuttles back and forth between Japan and the Philippines, but for the first birthday of their daughter Maya the whole family took the trip to the Philippines. Maya looks so much like a mini-Tak. The birthday party was held near our old office along Ortigas, near Roosvelt St. Some of our old kendo clubmates were also there. It was nice to see Ralph, Patrick, JM and Joan. Patrick's bigger than all of us now since he's 2nd year high school. He used to be the smallest at 3-ft tall when he was just in grade school. Now he could beat the crap out of all of us.

Tak and Baby Maya

Ralph and Patrick

Ralph getting a Tekken tattoo from the face painters

Jolibee... without the scandal...

Tak, Joel and Maya

Tak and Baby Maya

Ralph with Baby Maya

Ohhh... And I got this cute Hello Kitty plushie from the UFO Catcher at Time Zone in Glorietta on my way to the regular Saturday yoyo training camp meet of FlipSpin.

Crossposted: gokitomo.com, gorilla.multiply.com, gorilla.vox.com.

Of Hardware, Linux and Sleepy Pigs

Before I start, here's a pink sleepy pig with an outie belly button I got at Tom's World SM South Mall Las Pinas.

Anyway,
I wanted to set up my second hard disk with different Linux
distributions. SO I did the usual formating, partitioning and adding an
OS loader. In this case it was GRUB. Things were going great, I had WinXP, Nimblex, Ubuntu, Damn Small Linux and Geexbox
up and running then WHAM! Blue Screen of Death... WinXP or Linux. Seems
my PC was overheating, the processor temperature was reaching the
auto-shutdown point set at 60 degrees celsius. I suspected that the
culprit was the lack of cooling air reaching the processor or lack of
contact between the processor and the heatsink. I was right. I replaced
the power supply a couple of months ago and had to remove the processor
fan to get at it. Back then the grease was already drying up. The PC is
a year old so I was half-expecting it to dry up already.

I
took the fan and heatsink apart and I was right. Damn things were dirty
and air wasn't reaching the processor. Plus the thermal grease was
already dry. I didn't have any thermal grease around. The stores in SM
Southmall didn't have any in stock as well. So I had to make my own.
The grease is important since it allows contact between the heatsink
and processor so heat is conducted from the processor and makes for
easier cooling by the fan and heatsink. So I googled for alternatives.
I found Homemade Thermal Grease! at overclockers.com and Thermal Transfer Compound Comparison at dansdata.com
very helpful. Hmmm... Seems toothpaste plus grease could do the trick,
so could Brylcreem, but I couldn't find that particular page again
since the PC hung before I could bookmark

I cleaned the dirt off the fan and heatsink with alcohol so they
would dry fast (couldn't use water, WATER BAD!) Ditto for getting the
dried thermal gunk off the processor. There were different recipes for
homemade thermal grease, one suggestion was 75% toothpaste and 25%
grease. I experimented and came up with a 50%-50% mixture using
toothpaste and joint grease. The green gunk I lathered on the processor
and slapped on the fan and heatsink. Well... So far so good. It's been
a week now and no trouble yet. The processor temperature is down to 48
to 51 degrees. it's been a week and it's still going strong.With the PC
in fighting form, I was able to finish the updates on FlipSpin.org (the Summer Swimming Party) and TeatroSanJose.org (Salubong)





Crossposted: gokitomo.com, gorilla.multiply.com, gorilla.vox.com.

Gorillas in My Midst

Over the years I've amassed a small collection of monkeys, all stuffed toys mostly given to me by friends. Why gorillas? A bit of history, when I first became a net regular, the name igor was already taken in most email and web addresses, so I had to choose another screen name.

My solution: move the "i" in "igor" to the end and add "-lla". The result: "Gorilla". At about that time the anime "Slam Dunk" was being shown locally on Channel 5 and "Gori", short for "gorilla", was the nickname of Akagi, the team captain. Some people assumed that that was the reason for my name, but it wasn't. Until today, some of my friends call me Gori. So, I introduce to you my gorilla family... Yes, gorillas are in my midst.

One of my very first gorillas was this multi-colored huggable from my then girlfriend Jocelyn a little more than 10 years ago. It got lost one time, our maid took it home, thinking I wouldn't miss it. But I raised so much hell that it reappeared the next day. It meant that much to me.

A couple of years later, when I was working for Questor, the Uy brothers (DJ and Bryan) gave me this Mojo Jojo for my birthday.

Two years ago, for my birthday, I met the Questor / CV5 / P3 guys (Bambi, Olan, Cherry, Cecil, Bebert, Nick and Kenneth) for a night out. That day, the biggest member of my gorilla family "ILLA" came home with me.

In March last year, I bought a whole bunch of these clingy monkeys. Some of them found their way to my nephew Enzo's pram. I kept one of them for some monkey love.

This one I love a lot. This is "ILYA", a gorilla puppet given to me last Christmas 2006 by Bambi and Olan. He has since seen action in a puppet show during Enzo's birthday.

See him in action. Isn't he adorable?

Another gift gorilla, this one was given to me by Nick. I named him "NOGNOG". It's a shrieking gorilla doll.

Yup, he does sound like that when you push down on his tummy.

Just last Saurday, I passed by Vente, a Php20 store in Glorietta. I found these multi-colored orangutangs. I didn't let them go. They're the newest additions to my growing gorilla family.

So that's my Gorilla Family, and rest asssured it will keep on growing and growing. Thanks for looking.

Crossposted: http://gokitomo.com, http://gorilla.multiply.com and http://gorilla.vox.com

UFO Catcher

stuffed toys and plushies

Wacom and Weddings

My cousin Neil got married to his beautiful bride Cielo last Friday, December 8 at the San Sebastian Church. They met in UST where they got their college degrees. They also became co-teachers there because they taught right out of college. Neil didn't have any problems in the NCAA and UAAP since both UST and San Beda College (where he finished grade school and high school like me) won the basketball titles. Cielo was in a quandary in the UAAP when Ateneo and UST were duking it out since she studied in both schools. Speaking of basketball, Cielo worked for Vintage and also became a courtside reporter at one point. The reception was sort of like coming home for Neil since it was held in San Beda at the Jubilee Garden. The couple wanted to have the ceremonies (officiated by Fr. Tarsi, our principal in high school) held at San Beda. But that wasn't possible after the ruling that only parishes can hold weddings. My sister and brother-in-law, both bedans, were one of the lucky last couples to be married in San Beda. (Multiply Photo Album Link)

I dropped by Meowok and Olan's office last week for some manga updates. I dread going there. :D Hehehe. Like I said in previous posts, it seems I end up buying new stuff for my PC to be able to keep up with the increasing computing demands of graphics work associated with manga retouch and lettering. I wanted to buy Bambi's extra motherboard for upgrade purposes, but it turned out to be basically the same as my current motherboard (ECS Elite Group ). On Olan's suggestion, I bought a Wacom Graphire 4 4x5 pen tablet from Octagon Computer store in SM southmall to replace my now obsolete low-end Creatis graphics tablet. Took me some time to find out how to limit it to work in just one instead of my two monitors (dual monitor set up). It works like a charm! Plus I could change the tablet backing with photos and magazine cutouts. :D And of course, a trip to SM wouldn't be complete without a visit to the Tom's World UFO Catcher. There I got this ugly Tweety bird. :D

crossposted: gokitomo.com, gorilla.multiply.com, gorilla.vox.com