bluestella
scribbles of a simple man
Divorce papers are not the answer
Jan 30th
MARRIAGE
When I got home that night as my wife served dinner, I held her hand and said, I’ve got something to tell you. She sat down and ate quietly. Again I observed the hurt in her eyes.
Suddenly I didn’t know how to open my mouth. But I had to let her know what I was thinking. I want a divorce.. I raised the topic calmly.
She didn’t seem to be annoyed by my words, instead she asked me softly, why?
I avoided her question. This made her angry. She threw away the chopsticks and shouted at me, you are not a man! That night, we didn’t talk to each other. She was weeping. I knew she wanted to find out what had happened to our marriage. But I could hardly give her a satisfactory answer; she had lost my heart to Dew. I didn’t love her anymore. I just pitied her!
With a deep sense of guilt, I drafted a divorce agreement which stated that she could own our house, our car, and 30% stake of my company.
She glanced at it and then tore it into pieces. The woman who had spent ten years of her life with me had become a stranger. I felt sorry for her wasted time, resources and energy but I could not take back what I had said for I loved Dew so dearly. Finally she cried loudly in front of me, which was what I had expected to see. To me her cry was actually a kind of release. The idea of divorce which had obsessed me for several weeks seemed to be firmer and clearer now.
The next day, I came back home very late and found her writing something at the table. I didn’t have supper but went straight to sleep and fell asleep very fast because I was tired after an eventful day with Dew.
When I woke up, she was still there at the table writing. I just did not care so I turned over and was asleep again.
In the morning she presented her divorce conditions: she didn’t want anything from me, but needed a month’s notice before the divorce.
She requested that in that one month we both struggle to live as normal a life as possible. Her reasons were simple: our son had his exams in a month’s time and she didn’t want to disrupt him with our broken marriage.
This was agreeable to me. But she had something more, she asked me to recall how I had carried her into out bridal room on our wedding day.
She requested that everyday for the month’s duration I carry her out of our bedroom to the front door ever morning.. I thought she was going crazy. Just to make our last days together bearable I accepted her odd request.
I told Dew about my wife’s divorce conditions.. . She laughed loudly and thought it was absurd. No matter what tricks she applies, she has to face the divorce, she said scornfully..
My wife and I hadn’t had any body contact since my divorce intention was explicitly expressed. So when I carried her out on the first day, we both appeared clumsy. Our son clapped behind us, daddy is holding mummy in his arms. His words brought me a sense of pain. From the bedroom to the sitting room, then to the door, I walked over ten meters with her in my arms. She closed her eyes and said softly; don’t tell our son about the divorce. I nodded, feeling somewhat upset. I put her down outside the door. She went to wait for the bus to work. I drove alone to the office.
On the second day, both of us acted much more easily. She leaned on my chest. I could smell the fragrance of her blouse. I realized that I hadn’t looked at this woman carefully for a long time.. I realized she was not young any more. There were fine wrinkles on her face, her hair was graying! Our marriage had taken its toll on her. For a minute I wondered what I had done to her.
On the fourth day, when I lifted her up, I felt a sense of intimacy returning. This was the woman who had given ten years of her life to me.
On the fifth and sixth day, I realized that our sense of intimacy was growing again. I didn’t tell Dew about this. It became easier to carry her as the month slipped by. Perhaps the everyday workout made me stronger.
She was choosing what to wear one morning. She tried on quite a few dresses but could not find a suitable one. Then she sighed, all my dresses have grown bigger. I suddenly realized that she had grown so thin, that was the reason why I could carry her more easily.
Suddenly it hit me… she had buried so much pain and bitterness in her heart. Subconsciously I reached out and touched her head.
Our son came in at the moment and said, Dad, it’s time to carry mum out. To him, seeing his father carrying his mother out had become an essential part of his life. My wife gestured to our son to come closer and hugged him tightly. I turned my face away because I was afraid I might change my mind at this last minute. I then held her in my arms, walking from the bedroom, through the sitting room, to the hallway. Her hand surrounded my neck softly and naturally. I held her body tightly; it was just like our wedding day.
But her much lighter weight made me sad. On the last day, when I held her in my arms I could hardly move a step. Our son had gone to school. I held her tightly and said, I hadn’t noticed that our life lacked intimacy.
I drove to office…. jumped out of the car swiftly without locking the door. I was afraid any delay would make me change my mind…I walked upstairs. Dew opened the door and I said to her, Sorry, Dew, I do not want the divorce anymore.
She looked at me, astonished, and then touched my forehead.. Do you have a fever? She said. I moved her hand off my head. Sorry, Dew, I said, I won’t divorce. My marriage life was boring probably because she and I didn’t value the details of our lives, not because we didn’t love each other any more. Now I realize that since I carried her into my home on our wedding day I am supposed to hold her until death do us apart.
Dew seemed to suddenly wake up. She gave me a loud slap and then slammed the door and burst into tears. I walked downstairs and drove away.
At the floral shop on the way, I ordered a bouquet of flowers for my wife. The salesgirl asked me what to write on the card. I smiled and wrote, I’ll carry you out every morning until death do us apart.
That evening I arrived home, flowers in my hands, a smile on my face, I run up stairs, only to find my wife in the bed – dead.
The small details of your lives are what really matter in a relationship. It is not the mansion, the car, property, the money in the bank. These create an environment conducive for happiness but cannot give happiness in themselves. So find time to be your spouse’s friend and do those little things for each other that build intimacy. Do have a real happy marriage!
If you don’t share this, nothing will happen to you.
If you do, you just might save a marriage.
Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.
Cebu inmates for “This is it!” DVD release
Jan 26th
Somehow, Michael Jackson has been part of every Filipinos. Every generation he left few songs for us and when he died alot of Filipino people mourn for him.
This video was Cebu Inmates first groove in tune of Michael Jackson song and I heard Michael Jackson was laughing when he saw this video.
After Michael left the world, he left a concert in UK. This is it was a documentary video and the producers wants this Cebu inmates to be part of their DVD release.
The Cebu dancing inmates, who first became an online sensation with theirrendition of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” are still moonwalking with the late King of Pop. Jackson’s longtime choreographer Travis Payne and dancers Daniel Celebre and Dres Reid paid a visit to the Philippines to teach the inmates routines from “This Is It.”
Manny Villar Jingle on Japanese
Jan 24th
Manny Villar will do everything just to get the spot. Let the Filipino people do the voting, not the money or fame.
Sun Cellular Broadband, change IPV4
Jan 22nd
Last Thursday I planned to update my personal website but as I have gone through it, I cannot access it. I tried to reach my hosting and asked them if they did have a problem with their server. I accessed the other domain which I hosted at the same hosting site, but gone smoothly. I first think that the server where in my site was hosted was down. My hosting customer service agent did answered me the next day. Asking me what is my ISP, told him I got Sun Broadband Wireless. He mentioned to try changing my IP address on my Sun Broadband setting. Here’s how:
1. Go to Start then Connect to
2. Click Sun Broadband Dial-up
3. Go to Properties
If ever you had a problem accessing some websites on your Sun Broadband internet, try doing this.
Twitter banned common Password
Jan 13th
It has been a month since I should post this topic, but then for the sake of informing everyone about it I’ll still post something about this.
On my personal experience in using Twitter I did change my password couple of times, I don’t know who’s hacking my account well? what will they get from hacking an account right? Before I had a problem in login I remember I subscribed to an automatic followers website, so I think hackers did crack my password there. But anyway, Twitter did banned common password and it is on this link.
The top ten banned passwords for Twitter are:
1. 111111 2. 11111111 3. 112233 4. 121212 5. 123123 6. 123456 7. 1234567 8. 12345678 9. 131313 10. 232323
Good thing Twitter is doing their best to solve problems in passwords.
Lenovo Skylight: Netbook with ARM CPU
Jan 7th
What’s ARM by the way?
ARM is a 32-bit reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by ARM Holdings. It was known as the Advanced RISC Machine, and before that as the Acorn RISC Machine. The ARM architecture is the most widely used 32-bit ISA in terms of numbers produced.[1][2] They were originally conceived as a processor for desktop personal computers by Acorn Computers, a market now dominated by the x86 family used by IBM PC compatible computers. The relative simplicity of ARM processors made them suitable for low power applications. This has made them dominant in the mobile and embedded electronics market as relatively low cost and smallmicroprocessors and microcontrollers.
This is the first real device coming to market with ARM technology. By the way, it runs on Linux.
Lenovo will launch and invites us to put in the groove as we await this netbook, with their Lenovo Skylight
model, as Engadget reports. Flat rounded device will be available in the US this April. I don’t know when they will be launched here in the Philippines, lets just wait and see as Lenovo Philippines unveils this here. It cost American people about $500, possibly even lower if a 3G arrangement with AT&T works out.
Lenovo, per its press release, should make the device available in China and Europe later in the year.
The Linux system developed by Lenovo, but not further specified, displays some rather nice gadgets on its screen, 18 of which should be preloaded on the device when it comes out April 18. The integrated ARM processor is rated at 1 GHz, although it’s not clear from the specifications whether it applies to the single- or double-core processsor version
“The First Filipino-created, Filipino-developed, and Filipino-owned Video Game on Facebook”
Dec 27th
First Filipino Facebook Game
“Pssst! Pinoys got Facebook game!”
Wordtrotter, fondly dubbed “The World’s Coolest Word Game” by fans and gamers from around the world is now the first Filipino-created, Filipino-developed, and Filipino-owned video game on Facebook.
The game challenges players of all ages to guide an uncanny word bug known as Wordtrotter in a quest to catch mystical alphabet bugs, the Letterbugs, to form a secret magical word that will save the world from being destroyed by the curse of a wicked witch.
Or monsters will have them for lunch—alive!
Launched on Facebook (http://www.wordtrotter.com/facebook) last November 9, 2009, Wordtrotter aims to stand toe-to-toe with foreign video games on the social platform.
Wordtrotter (official site www.wordtrotter.com) currently ranks number one in the world in Google’s search results for the keyword phrase “world’s coolest word game.”
It also appears on top of over 204 million Yahoo! search results pages when you look for “free internet word game.”
“I am thrilled to unleash, by the grace of God, an offspring of innovation on Facebook,” Gil De Palma, Wordtrotter creator and President & CEO of comics/animation/video game company Palmagick Entertainment, said. “And it’s 100% proudly Filipino-made.”
Unique Homegrown Game
What could anyone possibly do with a word game—aside from guessing the game word? Everything has been pretty much cut-and-dried for this genre.
Test drive Wordtrotter and you’ll discover that it’s unlike any word game you have ever played before.
It’s like a fusion of three of popular video games—Pacman, Text Twist, and Snake—framed by De Palma’s distinctive creative twist.
“First, I put the game within a story,” De Palma said. “Then I told the story as a game.”
The synergy of game mechanics gave birth to a unique word game with an engaging mystery, engaging gameplay and distinctive design and skill requirements that feature a far greater entertainment value than what each of the abovementioned individual game offers.
Play Wordtrotter as a word game or a puzzle game or a casual-action game, but you’ll have to watch your words (literally!) for it is engaging and so much fun you’ll hardly notice that you’re building your vocabulary as you play.
But that’s just the beginning of your Wordtrotter adventure…
Can You Find the Word that will Save the World?
The curse of the wicked witch Grimmar has plunged the bug world Wordth into darkness. You must guide an uncanny word bug known as Wordtrotter in a quest to catch mystical alphabet bugs that form the Anti-Spell, a secret magical word that will save Wordth from destruction.
Seek out dictionary bugs, the Vocabugs, to obtain word clues like synonyms, antonyms, and definitions to help you catch the right word.
To power up your Wordtrotter and earn bonus points, feed it with bugstuff found on top of Wordth’s sleepy letter-shaped hills.
Watch out for bug traps!
Grimmar has discovered your mission, dispatching her bug-eating monsters, the Buggers, to smother you. If you fail, they will devour your Wordtrotter—alive.
You may implore Def the Forgetful Wizard for a talisman that will give you magical powers—but use it at your own risk. The absentminded wizard randomly grants both helpful and harmful powers.
Otherwise, just pile up game points to earn Wordtrotter Coins and use them to purchase power up items. It will also unlock magical powers that you can send as a gift to your friends.
Find the word. Save the world. Achieve score milestones to win Wordtrotter Crowns. Hot tip: The last crown rewards you with 100 coins.
Win a free game! Achieve 100,000 game points to download a free Wordtrotter special edition game.
All this you can easily share with your friends on Facebook.
Oh, and…just try not to become a Bugger’s lunch.
It’s Got Full Facebook Social Gaming Functionality!
Wordtrotter comes with full Facebook application functionality so you can enjoy it with all your friends here: http://apps.facebook.com/wordtrotter/
You want to share the game? Easy. Just one click and your friends will get it.
You want the world to know your top score? Just click!
You want to send a free game, power-up gifts, and other game freebies? The Wordtrotter FB app will handle it all for you.
Wordtrotter even features an in-game coin system that allows you to buy magic powers and other game items on the fly.
One of the coolest things is that you can also invite friends and compare scores (and brag!) on the game’s leaderboard.
And you and your friends and friends’ friends can all be a Wordtrotter fan right here: http://www.tinyurl.com/wordtrotterfacebook
Of course, if you fail to get the right word, everyone in your list will know, too!
How to Make the First Filipino Facebook Game
Wordtrotter is an all-Filipino child with one birthfather and two sets of adoptive parents, in a manner of speaking.
“I did not do it alone,” said De Palma, also the founder of video game publishing company Gameris, Inc. “It took months of prayers, hard work, and fun with the best team I have ever worked with.”
De Palma considers his partners, businessman Johnny Tamayo and lawyer Ma. Arlene Mendoza, as Wordtrotter’s first adoptive parents.
“Leny and Johnny were there at the onset, sharing their business acumen and legal expertise to help me conceive a game that would break the mold,” De Palma says. “I could have never done it without them.”
Then there’s the Palmagick team of Filipino artists and programmers that helped him turn his concept and story into a world-class video game.
“My team works like a street gang,” De Palma said. “We go at every project tooth and nail as one man.”
It worked well when he gave the game a whimsical letter-shaped world with a distinctive gravitational orientation—characters trot and jump horizontally, vertically, and even upside down—never been seen in any other Flash games before.
De Palma said: “There were no available source codes we could use as a model. The forums didn’t have any answer to our development queries either. The notion that innovation spells the difference between a leader and a follower gave us the impetus to do it on our own—from scratch.”
Creative Director Jd Dimanarig and Graphic Artist/Animator Cristian Sigua collaborated with Lead Programmers Roy Sanchez and Rafael Hingco, researching, experimenting, and complementing each other with creative and technical input to build Wordtrotter’s unique game engine.
“Let’s build the “awesomest” word game!” It was the team’s development war cry, according to De Palma. “Of course, we would change it to ‘coolest’ later,” he said.
The Facebook project duo of Technical Director/Web Designer Fred Timajo and Senior Game Programmer Jan Manalaysay teamed up with De Palma, Dimanarig, and Sanchez again to integrate Wordtrotter into the social platform as an application. When the FB project hit a snag right about the same time when Sanchez also discovered a game-breaking bug, the gang would strike again…
The rest of the team, including SEO Chief Mary Rivera and Social Media Manager Ina Mangalindan who supposedly had entirely different tasks, backed them up with research, programming, and game testing works to surmount the hurdles.
Singapore-based Creative Directors Joni Raso and Jeff Mendoza also provided artistic guidance to the team.
Gameris’ Tamayo and Mendoza likewise suggested ways to help make the first Filipino Facebook game application globally competitive.
“God gets the glory,” De Palma said. “Right from the start, the Lord has blessed with a team that’s on top of its game. I knew then that we could make this Facebook game.”
Let’s Make History!
Test-drive Wordtrotter on Facebook and see that Filipinos can hold their own against the best in the world.
And yes, you’ll be playing the first Filipino-created, Filipino-developed, and Filipino-owned video game on Facebook—with your head held high…
It’s your game!
“Wordtrotter puts a piece of video game history in the hands of Filipinos,” De Palma said. “And we can all proudly say, ‘We got Facebook game!’ ”
First Filipino Facebook Game
Beautiful Girl
Dec 12th
My mum and I got a chance to see Jose Mari Chan sing live as Mr. Alex Prieto have two free tickets to the concert. We are actually disappointed on what transpired that night. The electricity went out, we are expecting live orchestra/band to play for Jose Mari Chan, nada zilch zero.
He sang about 10 songs and the concert ran from 7pm until 8pm. One song he sang is this, Beautiful girl. enjoy the video.
Christmas Wish-least
Dec 10th
As I am waiting for Sir Jao to come, I am listening to a conversation on my right. They were talking about Christmas wishlist as what they have on their list and so on. I came to think of having my own Christmas wishlist. Thinking of a nice present this Christmas is difficult though. I won’t expect that I can get two or three kinds on my list this Christmas rest assured I appreciate any. Here’s my list.
Christmas wishlist:
- New laptop! Preferably Mac Pro
- Caaamera! D90 oh soo love it!
- PSP Goo woah woah!
- IPodTouch!
Lets just stop wishing for lustful gadgets, be more practical.
- New starbucks planner
- Starbucks tumbler
- New pair of headset
- New converse shoes
- Russ dog stufftoy
- Techdeck set
- Martin Fowler book
- Any malcolm gladwell book
- New fullpack Java book
- Any blue star item
- Any Team Manila shirt, Small or Medium is my size
- Lomo Camera
Despite of having a Christmas wishlist, I still believe that what matters most is a gift coming from one’s heart.
Code Refactoring Seminar
Nov 27th
URL: http://code.google.com/p/codeleanrefactoringseminar/downloads/list
How should you refactor your code?
* Incremental refactoring & the Boy Scout rule
* “Leave the campground cleaner than when you found it”
* Code quality
Code Rot & Technical Debt
Code rot – the decay in software that occurs as a result of not updating your software in respect to the changing environment in which resides
Technical debt – The situation that occurs when you opt to postpone some development activities in favor of a shorter release date.
“Agile – the power of moving quickly and easily; nimbleness: exercises demanding agility“
Does being agile means that you get your product out the door as fast as possible?
* Yes..even if its substandard it is still being agile..
Would you deliver a “squirrel burger” if it meants that you could make the deadline?
Is having a technical debt a bad thing?
* Its tactical decision.
True meaning of Agility
* Agility is measured by the speed of change, not the speed of delivery
How do you know if your code is suffering from code rot?
* immobile
* obscure
* rigidity
* fragility
* Dispensible
How do you know if your code is suffering from a code rot?
Code quality – your code base that many bad code smells.
Development effort – it is becoming more and more difficult to understand.
- take more time to work on the same parts of the code in your system.
Productivity – more difficult to change, developers missing deadlines.
Strategies for Code rot
* automated unit tests
* code reviews
* continuous code write
What if theres too much technical debt in your project?
* Rewrite vs. Refactor
* Depends on the time
What happends to shops that don’t refactor?
* The dead sea effect
* code quality drops
* senior developers quits. they can no longer maintain program
* morale in the shop drops. seniors quit.
* New hires come in, new developers don’t stay because of code quality.
* The big ball of mud
* in many case, systems with large technical debts devolve into systems with no discernible architecture or design (aka the “Big Ball of Mud”)
* common in development shops that suffers from the dead sea effect.
* prevent your application from becoming a BBOM by continously refactoring your code.
Refactor or Rewrite?
* rewriting solves the symptom, not the root of the problem
* the real problem is that there is no refactoring.
* The BBOM is the symptom of bad development practices.
* You should only rewrite a system if:
* The system does not work at all
* It is cheaper to create a new system than to maintain the exsiting system
Beware of the Second System effect
* The second system effect is the tendency for developers to redesign a successor system into giant..
The tale of the Squirrel Burger
What would you do?
* For me, I would do give them the squirrel burger for I am thinking of the sales not the quality of burger we have.
Would you serve it?
Answers:
Reckless/Deliberate
* We don’t have time to design?
Prudent
* we must ship now and deal with consequences
* Now we now how we should have done it
Inadvertent
* What’s layering?
Anatomy of a Software Development “Squirrel Burger”
* No Documentation
* Nobody understands how the system works.
* The shop is “agile” so they decided to document
* Low Code Quality
* Inefficient Development Proccess
If it isn’t broken, then why should we even fix it?
* Refactoring as defect prevention
* refactoring makes code easirer to understand and that makes it easier to find bugs on your code
Why refactor our code if the client doesn’t pay us to refactor?
* Refactoring and the story of Louis Pasteur
* During Pasteur’s time, the concept of washing your hands before an operation was thought to be rediculous
* Refactoring is something that clients rarely ask for.
Refactoring Part II
*fizzbuzzzzbaz coding*
The two values of software
* Function
* Form
Some Bad Code smell Examples
* Contived complexity
* Bad design they want to try out.
Single Responsibility Principle
Many bad code smells inviolate this principle.
Its should do only one and one thing.
Does the following code violate the SRP?
Examples:
* Statement-level examples
* Method-level examples
* Class-level examples
Bad code Smells
The Couplers
* siamse twins, kill one affects the otherother
The Bloaters
* Class, that no one undestands it
Object Orrientation Abusers
* Program code they still writing C. Ugly code structure.
Comments list