Yep, I will be leaving the company I'm currently working for. Don't ask me why, I'll just answer with a barrage of canned words like "greener pastures" or "better compensation", but the real reason would be so different and so damn better.

I saw Pacquiao beat Larios last sunday. No, not on 3-hour-delayed ABS-CBN but Live. YES, live. I was dressed and ready to go to church when the taxi I was riding turned his AM radio on full blast, and the last thing I caught on radio was "Jaca jaca" before I asked the driver to turn to SM coz I heard they have a live show of the Pacquiao fight there.

Unluckily, when I reached the movie house, every ticket was already bought. Damn. And I sprinted from the SM Cebu entrance to the movie house just to have the guard tell me that they are fully booked. F***. So downhearted, I went to Ayala. At least, I could gain some comfort watching yummy ladies pass by. And then I heard that Tequila Joes was offering the Pacquiao Fight live for P200.00. To make the long story short, I had a hoarse voice and an uplifted spirit to exorcist the demons of monday boredom.

But back to my leaving my company.

I will surely miss this place.

The very first thing I noticed the first time I entered the halls of this company last 2.5 years ago was the smell of the air. Until now, before I enter my office, I would make sure to take a very deep breath, so I could fill my lungs with this l*xm*** scent. Its different from the air outside, it is like an invisible boundary. The very air will welcome you and will proudly proclaim that you are inside l*xm***'s premises.

I will surely miss my workmates.

Ever been in a company full of cums and magna cums? board topnotchers and technical gurus? This is it. It is as if graduating with honors is a dime a dozen in this company. Be in a group like that, and sooner or later, you will find out that you have  evolved from a simple thinking human to something that resembles a human, but thinks like an evolved specie. Conversations would usually border from the most mundane, like, why are manholes round, to highly philosopical questions like, why is Dilbert's boss bald.

We actually tried to design a flying house, something that can hover above ayala, so that everytime we shit, we shit at ayala.

A friend of mine actually questioned the existence of mermaids based on a few simple facts, 1) that a fish with an upperbody of a human won't be able to breathe underwater. 2) that a fish with a lowerbody of a human won't be able to swim in the sea but walk instead.

And mind you, these are people who can code device drivers.

I will surely miss this place.

My two mac machines, my clone PC that runs XP and my Dell P3 that runs FreeBSD6.2. I'll be missing you all. My cubicle,... ,my cubicle....

All good things must come to an end. So that even better things can start.  

Its been a while since I had a date. Damn.

I should get a date.

Sooner or later.

My social skills are degenerating.

I need practice.

A lot. 

If only I can code a beautiful, sexy, brilliant, witty girlfriend in C++ or Java.

Care to date me? 

I hereby declare ...

That I hate mondays ...

I can't think on mondays.

I can't code on mondays. Except if the deadline is looming.

I've got a project deadline this coming thursday.

But I still can't code on mondays.

I hate mondays. 

Before I drown myself with alcohol,

I want you to ask yourself one thing.

Have you ever talked to the moon?

Tell her words of flattery?

Words that could win a thousand hearts,

Break it into pieces,

Make her plunge her shine

On the other side of the world?

im fine ... doing a hail mary pass on all the projects that I need to
finish before my final resignation day.

im excited ... i'd be transferring to a younger company, more exciting projects,
an office with nice ambiance, better salary.

im nervous ... thinking about all the adjustments I have to make, like waking up early
to beat the 8:00 AM office sched.

im a bit uneasy ... im leaving my comfort zone,... my friends,... everything im familiar with.

that's how I am today.

four office days more to go. 

funny that i seem to blog only when i'm nervous.

a question for you:

if you are omniscient (know everything) and omnipotent (can do everything) , what don't you know?

The poetry of being caught in a barbed wire

They twist, they bend.

Like melodic voices from churches

Enter the ears,

They enter your skin. 

Sharp,...

Like being hanged on that cross.

The pain reverberates

Throughout the body,

Like mass,

Or recited prayers

Echoing on walls.

It bleeds,...

Blood gushes out,

Like money that trickles down

On offertories.

Then you walk home,

Just as if its just

Another day. 

I'm packing my things ...

I'm cleaning my files ...

I'm backing up my data's ...

Tomorrow is my last day ...

I just realized that I'm extra-ordinarily attached to my cubicle ...

I shed tears for it ...

Come wednesday, somebody's gonna reformat this machine that I have loved for more than 2 years and a half.

Come next week, somebody's gonna sit and feel at home on this cubicle.

Come next month, somebody's gonna start writing maintenance code for all the codes I wrote for this company.

Come next year, I'll just be another statistics in this company, no trace of me will be here.

Except perhaps for my code, or my design. 

A Programmer and His Slave

Her name is Radha.

I gleaned her name from a music mag article written three years ago about this sensational group called Kulay whose lovely vocalist was named Radha. The real Radha (the singer), had a very powerful voice and a sexy body, much like my Radha whose CPU runs at a full 500 Mhz, a kick-ass, shiny gray finish and a sleek, antique, out-of-this-world keyboard whose symbols, only a “martian” could understand.

I was that “martian” though. Every time my finger touches that old, yellow-stained keyboard, she sings, like the real Radha, her voice, too complex for a mere human to understand, lovely for a martian to appreciate and too powerful to be touched by the lesser mortals surrounding me in my dusty, dirty old room.

Forgive me for referring to my Radha as a “she”. A feminist would think that a complex, electronic, binary, cold-blooded monstrosity could never be a “she”. But she was a “she” to me as much as our president is a real “she”. She was my girlfriend, my mother, my ever-loving secretary and my tireless, full blast entertainer.

I wedded her the day I bought her but I told her that I won’t give a “for better or for worst” promise. Instead, I told her that I would dump her anytime I could afford a new machine, with bigger boobs and a much more powerful processing power. Typical man, eh? She did not utter a word as I brought her into my room, as I plugged her. She just sat there, like an ancient sage, meditating, chanting and thinking.

She wasn’t cold-blooded. Everytime I turned her on, she would add a five degree centigrade heat to my already hot room. This is a much-welcomed treat since coding a software at three in the morning, with scary white-ladies walking to and fro at your back, is generally not recommended if you don’t have an adequate heating system. She was my heating system; the heat emanating from a 15-inch AOC monitor is enough to keep you up until four and burn permanent letters in your eyelids.

Like a whore, she never says “no” (well, even a whore could say “no”, I just remembered Les Miserables), but unlike a whore, she doesn’t get paid and she doesn’t get to enjoy it. What she gets in return is more data to crunch, more computation to do and more errors to recover from. She was my willing satisfier, my ever-ready “digital orgasm” giver and my lullaby singer.

In case you don’t know what a “digital orgasm” is, it’s the “high” programmers get when a piece of complicated code runs perfectly.

She was a mother to me. I can weep unashamedly infront of her. Her presence means comfort, her absence, … well, it means you have to eat whatever the house help had learned to cook. I equipped Radha with the best software in the market and her absence would mean that you have to make do with the rag-tag programs available in other computers (have you created a beautiful webpage with MS Notepad ?, I did, and I’m damn proud of it).

Until now, I could still remember her hum … I could still remember all the good memories I have when I graduated from college but her hum was a distinct memory, it helped me sleep every night during my college days.

Her hum was a silent comfort. It reminded me that I was in my room, with her, just beside me.

A few, nostalgic memory ain’t that bad huh?

Well, I remained true to my words and dumped her a year ago. My new Pentium 4 comes with bigger boobs and much longer legs. She’s now resting in my parent’s house, still usable, still capable but too tired to walk. She’s now being used by my sister who can’t tell the speed difference between a Pentium 1 and a Pentium 4. She’s now an old hag, compared to the sexy, blonde bombshell I’m using now to write this.

Sometimes, after keying a few codes on my new “she”, I would remember her. Is she still humming that sound I used as my tranquilizer a few years back? Then I would see her again, an ancient sage, alone in a mountain, meditating, chanting, and trying to understand the dynamics of the world AMD and Intel had created for her.

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I wrote this when I was 20, on the eve of my first job as a paid programmer. Until now, I still can't forget my first machine, an AMD K6-2 500 MHz my father bought for me. She had this distinct hum everytime u turned her on.

And yeah, 2.5 years ago, I also dumped that Pentium 4 for a sleekier, more elegant, more beautiful PowerPC-based PowerMac Dual Pro, with 512 MB Memory and 80 GB of HD.

In contrast to what u might think of me, i'm a very normal guy. 

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