TheFranciscos.Net

Finally, one of the most important bands of our time gets it’s due. The Clash has always been one of my favorite bands, ever since I discovered “Combat Rock” in 1983 (when I was still 10). Since then, I’ve come to acquire most of their recordings (at least the ones available on CD anyway). In fact, if I remember correctly, my first-ever CD was their double-disc compilation “The Story Of The Clash”. It’s still one of my favorites and I give it a spin every few months or so. The public’s attention to the band has been raised especially after that rousing rendition of “London Calling” by Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Dave Grohl and Steven Van Zandt as a tribute to the late Joe Strummer. I strongly believe though that the heart and soul of the band was Mick Jones, as evidenced by his modest success even after leaving The Clash with Big Audio Dynamite. At any rate though, I’ll be drinking a beer for the band tonight.

It’s been a while since I’ve listed some of recent favorite things, so here goes:

Favorite TV show: Six Feet Under – Who knew that a show about a family running a “funeraria” could be so interesting? Great acting all around coupled with excellent storytelling make this my current “must-watch” (at least if and when The Sopranos come back). One of my favorite parts about the show is the relationship between David and Keith. Not to sound gay (I’ve always been on the homophobic side), but their relationship is the very human and believable. I could do without their very graphic kissing scenes though.

Favorite concert DVD: New Order – 511, Live At Finsbury Park. I never knew that New Order can play such an entertaining set. Standout songs are Crystal, Regret, Bizarre Love Triangle, Temptation, and Blue Monday. It even includes their old classic Joy Division songs like Digital, Transmission and of course Love Will Tear Us Apart. Add to all that a sound mix done in DTS, and you’ve got the best concert DVD I’ve seen in a while.

Favorite graphic novels: I’ve been through so many recently, so I’ll just list down a few. X-Force: The Final Chapter, New X-Men: New Worlds, J. Michael Straczynski’s Midnight Nation, Amazing Spider-Man: Revelations, Amazing Spider-Man: Until The Stars Turn Cold and The Incredible Hulk: Return Of The Monster. Oh also, Aileen got me a complete set of Bone books for my birthday! So many good books, and judging from the rush of comic-book movies that have hit the screen in the past few years, the general public is finally realizing how good a medium comic books are. Interestingly enough, a lot of these books are Marvel books. I’ve always been a DC fan raised on a steady supply of Batman and Superman, but Marvel is really kicking butt with their new books. The most prolific and imaginative writers in the biz are with them, and it’s translating to great and refreshing stories.

It just occured to me that my birthday this year is 03-03-03. Pretty cool huh?

Besides being tired all the time due to all the stress from work, I’ve just also been uninspired to write anything for the past few days. It’s my birthday today though, and I thought, what better way to spend your birthday than to just spend a nice relaxing day at home (especially after the past two months at work of working late and working weekends). So here I am, taking today and tomorrow off doing absolutely NOTHING. I don’t know about you, but that sounds really great to me.

Birthdays traditionally mean a new lease on life, and recalling that when you came into this world, you started with a clean slate. That couldn’t be more emphasized to me today after an accident that I had last Monday with my car. I was driving along the PA turnpike, when a sudden onrush of snow appeared seemingly out of nowhere. It was just my luck that this happened just while I was negotiating a curve, and before I knew it my car was slipping and sliding out of control. After trying to regain control for a few seconds, I knew that it was inevitable that I was going to crash. I was just hoping that nobody else would crash into me. Before I knew it, my car decided to do a counter-clockwise turn into the median wall and ended up perpendicular to the traffic on the highway. Thank God that the other cars behind me slowed down and avoided bumping into me. My car is a total wreck (or so the insurance company claims), but I luckily walked away unscathed.

I don’t remember much from what happened since it all seemed to happen so quickly, but I do know that in those split-seconds when I realized I was going to have a bad accident, I recall thinking about Aileen and Zoe, and basically hoping that I’d live through this so I can talk to them about it. Of course, this was right before the moment that I hit the wall and whispered my last words before actually ramming into it. If I remember correctly, my last words were “Oh, f**k!”.

Needless to say, I consider myself very lucky to walk away from that. Considering it was the PA turnpike, it could have ended a lot worse. I’m very grateful that I got to spend another birthday with my family. I think that this new lease on life is the best birthday gift that I can receive (although Aileen’s gift of a set of Bone books are pretty cool too).

Thank God for the simple things in life – they really are what makes life worth living.

After almost three weeks of being away from this blog, it’s kinda redundant to be talking about the same thing I was talking about in my previous post, but yep, the snow is STILL coming down. And it came down with a vengeance over the weekend in the form of one of the worst snowstorms ever. While we didn’t get the 2 feet or so of snow that some areas got (I heard that the mountain regions of West Virginia got about 40″, but who cares about them anyway ), we got a full 12-14 inches of it, which is the most snow that I personally have ever seen in my life.

A nice outcome of this whole thing was that work was called off (kinda makes sense because nobody could even get on the roads), so we spent most of the day just lounging around. Aileen was studying for her board exams on Friday and Zoe and I were doing the couch potato thing. We did go out for about half an hour or so so Zoe could play around. We were hitting each other with snowballs and digging our feet into the snow. I would have loved to make a snowman, but we couldn’t figure out how to make one without freezing our butts off first.

I was also able to watch a good number of movies over the weekend (including The Ice Storm, which I thought was a really well-acted movie) that I’ve left permanent butt impressions on our sofa. It was good to catch up on my DVD watching though – I’ve got about a 200+ DVD collection of which I’ve probably been able to watch only half. Just a couple of more weekends like that and I’ll be able to watch ’em all.

When the snow finally ended, Aileen and I took turns shovelling our driveway, and both our backs our killing us right now. Aileen got tired of using the shovel and started using her hands to move the snow. They really should make some lighter shovels because more than half the weight you throw around when shovelling is the weight of the tool itself. One thing I can say about it though – thank the Lord for ibuprofen.

Brrrr….. that’s all I can say. This month has been a real winter, the first one we’ve had since we moved to the States. I woke up yesterday to -7° weather – the most frigid weather I’ve ever experienced. It doesn’t feel much different from the 10° to 20° temperatures we’ve been having on average. Like Aileen says, when it gets to &20deg; and below, it all starts to feel the same.

It’s not just the cold that bothers me though. The snow has also been falling down constantly – almost at a daily rate. I didn’t use to mind that at all before, but now that we’ve got a house, snow showers equate to another session of shovelling the driveway – and we’ve got a pretty long driveway too. I guess that this is all part of the fun of homeownership.

Anyway, at least Zoe seems to like the snow a lot. She always says “I want to walk in the snow, Daddy” after coming home. Of course, I let her walk up and down the freshly snow-covered lawn while I watch her from inside the garage. It’s funny how walking around in slush can be so much fun to little kids.

I’ve practically been invisible in this blog for the past months…insomnia does create more time for people like me :). I have been sleep-deprived for the whole month of January (not of my own volition, mind you) and now that I have a weekend off work, guess what i do?! Life is really full of irony…or do I mean cruelty?

Before I indulge in one of my fave pasttimes (whining/self-pity/griping), I just wanted to share Zoe’s Toddler Creed:

“f I want it, it’s mine.

If I give it to you and change my mind later, it’s mine.

If I can take it away from you, it’s mine.

If I had it a little while ago, it’s mine.

If it’s mine, it will never belong to anybody else, no matter what.

If we are building something together, all the pieces are mine.

If it looks just like mine, it is mine.”

This is dedicated to all the 2 and 3 year olds (chronologically and/or mentally) out there!

So how has everybody’s year been so far? Hope everybody got what they wanted last Christmas. Sorry for not blogging for the past few weeks. Hope everybody’s been having a great new year. Things are pretty hectic in our household. Aileen is doing a grueling pediatric rotation at Children’s Hospital, and our team at work is frantically trying to finish coding for a Jan. 21 code stop date. It’s so frantic, that some personal things need to be shelved (including our anniversary celebration), at least for now.

I’ve decided to start the new year on a healthy note, which is why I decided to buy a treadmill. It’s been great so far. I’ve been running on it almost every night for about 2 1/2 miles (takes about 35 minutes) every day. Been feeling better than I’ve had in a long time… and I’ve been losing some weight too, which is something I’ve meant to do for some time now (about 10 years). Aileen likes it too, but she’s just too tired some days to do it.

Thanks to Carlo and Tony for helping us bring up this 200 lb treadmill from our basement (where it was sitting for about 2 weeks) to our 2nd floor.

Anyway, back to work for me… still have tons of stuff to do to catch up to our deadline.

Merry Christmas!

The most memorable Christmas tune for me, being a child of the eighties, was Captain Sensible’s “One Christmas Catalogue”. I remember going around the house and mumbling to myself “To Christmas, to Christmas” (part of the song lyrics). I was never able to get that song on vinyl because it used to be available in Manila only as a pricey import vinyl. Needless to say, that price point was out of reach for a 10 year old like myself at that time. So for the longest time (a t least since I started to be able to afford CDs) I was looking and looking for that song to be available on disc. A couple of years ago, I finally got my Christmas wish when the compilation “Just Can’t Get Enough: New Wave Christmas” was released with that wonderful song in it, completely remastered and sounding pristine. Just goes to show you that good things come to those who wait.

So tonight will be the first Christmas eve we’ll be spending at home… Zoe’s pretty excited about it. She’s got a ton of presents to open and she can’t wait. We told her that we need to go to Christmas mass first, and then eat noche buena and then she can go and open them. I hope Aileen likes the gifts that I picked out for her, she pretty much knows where I picked her gifts up from since she “accidentally” saw the new department store card I opened up. We’ll find out later whether or not I’ve finally understood her taste in clothes after all these years.

What I’m pretty excited about is our noche buena – Aileen’s preparing a pretty good amount of food, some ham, lechon manok, embutido, and either rice or bread. Yup, for me, it’s all about the food.

Anyway, I wish everybody a very merry Christmas… as for me, I’ll be starting my merriment once I get out of work in a couple of hours.

Lyrics to “One Christmas Catalogue”:

Many years have gone

More than I can say

Cuz I wasn’t there

It was yesterday

(women chorus): Is it Christmas?

(guy, hissing): Christmas!

(women chorus): Is it Christmas?

(guy, hissing): Christmas!

(women chorus): Is it Christmas?

(guy, hissing): Christmas!

Ever have one of those days that you feel has been just a complete waste of time?

Let me put it this way – I just don’t think that developing a specific functionality is feasible when the specs for it haven’t even been completely thought of. Halfway into the software dev cycle is NOT when you want to implement “minor” db table changes. A minor tweak here, a slight adjustment there – before you know it, the stuff that was working so flawlessly yesterday completely breaks when these changes happen. My past two days (and quite possibly the rest of this week) have been wasted just trying to get the components working with the new data structure. Argh!

My point is – can’t we get the functional specs done first, then design the database, and then start coding? That way, we don’t waste each other’s time and avoid strangling each other. Thank God I’m going to John Harvard’s tonight… after a day like today, I really need a drink (or six).

Some pictures of our house –

More over here