Make Yourself Foundation, the nonprofit organization conceived by the members of Incubus, have donated to the Philippines, Indonesia and Samoa — countries that have just recently been hit by natural disasters.

I have admired this band for their musicality, and I admired them more for their altruistic spirit. But I must admit that what made me post a short note about this foundation is the mention of my country.

Thank you, MYF.

Read article >>

Loving the cat.

I don’t know when this happened, and I don’t know in what context this was said. I haven’t seen the episode where Alec Baldwin supposedly said this “quip”. But from this blurb I don’t see the wit. And whatever he said ain’t pretty. No, he’s no Baldwin here.  Or maybe he is… but he’s the clueless kind.

Opinions, opinions. That’s why sometimes it’s better to keep your mouth shut.

Being the queen of knee-jerk reactions with a blog is love.

Read story >>

Megan Fox and Gwen Stefani

It’s a week for dyeing and highlighting… which made a few celebs look like anything but themselves: Megan Fox looks like Salma Hayek with Keira Knightley’s smile, Kim Kardashian looks like Jennifer Lopez, Joel Madden looks like Joshua Jackson… and Gwen Stefani returns to her roots.

Others included are Eve, Justin Gaston, Susan Boyle, Julianne Hough, Chuck Wick, Heidi Montag, Spencer Pratt, Heidi Klum and Shia LaBeouf.

View gallery >>

Apparently I’ve been living under a rock because I’ve only recently learned that my favorite X-Men character Gambit is included in the new X-Men movie, X-Men Origins: Wolverine. He’s played by Taylor Kitsch who is one of those cute guys from The Covenant.  I hope the movie will turn out all right… But if it isn’t, at least with Hugh Jackman and Taylor I’ll have my eye candy.

Megan Fox

At least that’s what they say Megan Fox is poised to be. And who can blame them? This girl is sultry, and can definitely hold her own against her robot co-stars.  But what’s interesting about her is that sans makeup, she looks like your pretty girl-next-door.  Kudos to her makeup artist who can turn her into a film vixen.

I’m excited about Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, because I’d get to see her and Shia LaBeouf together again. I’m sorry, Brian Austin Green, but I really like Shia for Megan.  There’s something fascinating about the boy-next-door getting the prom queen.

Read the story >>

It’s always a treat looking at Matt Mullenweg’s photos, especially since he posts pictures of food.  I was looking at his picture of ramen, and I couldn’t help but be amused… I can’t be sure, but I think there was a miscommunication in the comments section.

Anyway, all these food pix are making me hungry.  Gotta find myself a bowl of noodles.

Here I am spending an afternoon supposedly studying for my Credit Transactions finals (I am — I’m just multitasking since I’m typing my digests and the temptation of being online was just too strong to ignore), when this article disturbed me.  Because my first reaction was that it dripped of racism and bigotry, and that the website just wasted web space and bandwidth by placing that article online.

It hit close to home, because I am Filipino.  And even if I know that the current depressing economic and political situation that our country is in has persuaded even my college-educated countrymen to go abroad for work that do not equal the letters they have been graduated with, I still think that the article was written in poor taste. After a couple of re-reads I was able to see the satirical undertone of the article; however,  I think the subject is just too sensitive that he should not have written it that way. But then, I think he is getting the publicity that such an article would generate — there are now many comments on the article, with a few unjustified ones hurling insults on him, his country and his race. I understand such reaction — it’s human nature. But counter-mudslinging doesn’t help matters.

I don’t see any apology forthcoming — in fact it’s a futile and unnecessary effort, anyway. The writer is entitled to his opinion.  That’s it.  Maybe an explanation that it was meant to be satirical would soothe our ruffled Filipino feathers a bit, but then the production of such an explanation depends on the writer.  I won’t hold my breath, again since it’s a futile and unnecessary effort on his part.

Discrimination still exists, and the only way we can combat it is that we don’t fall prey to it ourselves.

I’ve given my two centavos’ worth (and in this day it’s not worth much, sad to say). I’m happy with that.

I learned of Francis Magalona’s passing yesterday while I was in school.  It came as a surprise, and all who learned of the news were disbelieving: “Di nga?  Walang stir?”

Death is always a sad incident, especially if it’s sudden. The Master Rapper may have succumbed during his self-proclaimed “happy battle” with leukemia, but his thought-provoking works and insights on the Philippine social and political landscape — FrancisM, if we are to encapsulate everything into a word — will live on: cherished and remembered by those who have been lucky enough to have heard or seen him perform, and discovered by the next generation of music enthusiasts who will Google or Wikipedia his name.

The Man from Manila will surely be missed.

Trying out this new defragmenter, Smart Defrag on my mom’s laptop. Aside from the “normal” defrag, it features two other options: the fast optimize and the deep optimize. I’m using the defrag option at the moment, and I’m fascinated by all the blinking colors, haha. But really, I’m looking forward to the promise of a faster computer, since mom’s laptop is a bit slow (Windows XP Pro running on 256 RAM… with 10 mb used as VRAM, hmm) and preinstalled with Norton antivirus.  (How resources-hungry can you get?).

If it works great, I just might uninstall the Diskeeper Lite on my own PC (incidentally, I’m typing this bit on my PC… and the monitor isn’t pukish yellow!  It is a bit blurry, though. Haha, I’m too lazy to go out and buy a new monitor) and install Smart Defrag here, especially since I’m getting annoyed about the constant check DKLite does.  And maybe on my sister’s laptop, which has Auslogics Disk Defrag.

And what’s great about all the defragmenters I’ve mentioned is that they’re free.

Now if only there were a Life Defragmenter, I’d be set.

You can download the installer from the author’s site or from MajorGeeks.Com (from which I downloaded mine).