Goddess, I Am.

Confession time! I never really knew what was going on in the world unless I read about it on Facebook or Twitter, or if The Husband told me. I’m even worse with celebrity news. I know, I know. It’s the Internet age and news is everywhere, blah blah blah. However, I open so many browsers for work that opening a few more just to read the news really isn’t something I would go out of my way for.

That has changed since I got Agrippa. You see, there’s a very nifty (and free!) app called Flipboard that makes the news so much more accessible to me. I get my news (plus my Twitter and Facebook feeds) in a fancy magazine-like interface, and it makes browsing for news so much more pleasurable.

Honestly, I can’t believe how gossipy this app is making me. Flipping through content just to see who bombed what and who the wireless cctv cameras caught canoodling this time is now becoming an integral part of my day.

I am such a dork, I know.

Practically all my life, I’ve never been political. I could never be bothered to care who was running what and when. Politics – especially Philippine politics – is so messy, dirty, and downright exhausting that it’s hard to keep up, so I never really bothered.

Until now.

I look around at the mess that is my country, and it’s impossible and undeniably selfish not to care. Now, more than ever, we need good, sound, well-grounded leadership, and I believe with every fiber of my being that there’s only one man for the job. That is Gilberto Teodoro, Jr.

I could list a thousand reasons why G1BO deserves to be the next President of The Philippines, but I think I’ve done and said enough on Facebook and Twitter for the past couple of months or so. And at this point, a mere hours before polling officially starts, I don’t think it will make much of a difference.

All I want to say right now – and pardon me for the rather worn-out cliché – is VOTE WISELY! Whatever does that mean these days?

I say it’s looking beyond your personal circumstances and thinking about what this nation needs as a whole. (And really, I’m not talking about how half the population now needs the best fat burners. This country’s needs are a lot more serious than that.)

I say it’s casting aside ridiculous emotions, and recognizing the ones who are deliberately preying on those emotions for no other reason than these are the only aces up their sleeves, the only thing that they can exploit to further their ambitions because they’ve got no skill and no accomplishments to speak of.

Finally, I say it’s voting for someone you truly and steadfastly believe in for the right reasons.

Tonight, I will say a little prayer for My President, My Country, and My People.

We’re being given another chance to do things right. Let us all take it.

I usually find the stuff that people do on Facebook ridiculous. I absolutely loathe getting hit by pillows, and I hated that whole underwear color thing that was going around like a cold a few weeks back.

But today I’m suffering from food poisoning after I ate a bad burger from Brothers Burger yesterday and perhaps my brain has been addled so much from all the throwing up that I’ve been doing that I’m actually finding a new Facebook trend a lot more interesting than the article I’m supposed to be writing on home insurance quotes. So much so, in fact, that I’ve decided to post it on my blog instead.

So this is how it goes:

1. Go to urbandictionary.com and type in your first name.

2. Copy and paste this as your Facebook status and the FIRST entry for your name under comment.

These are my favorites for ‘Iris’ (unedited, so pardon the bad grammar and spelling in some):

1. beautiful, honest, popular, poise, sensitive girl; she is more than meets the eye.

2. A very beautiful girl who was sent from the heavens to come and pleasure all the men in this world. she is one who colors the world, and brings happiness to all, with a wild side.

3. One of the Most Amazing Girls you’ll ever meet. She is one of the nicest people you know, nobody hates her. Easy to fall in love with. A girl you’ll never forget. Every Iris is her own person and you’ll never meet another like her. Very trustworthy. Has beautiful eyes and a perfect face surrounding. She’s more than just a pretty face.

4. A very beautiful, angelic girl with a great smile. When with her, you will feel like the most blissful person on Earth. She has the greatest personality and will be there for you whenever you need her.

6. a beautiful girl inside and out. she is extremely complex and mysterious. nobody truly knows her but that is also what makes her so beautiful. she is the most well-liked girl you know and has an abundance of friends and is the most amazing and caring girl you will ever meet. simply talking to her will change your perception of beauty. she reflects the image of the perfect girl and you will feel incomplete without her.

9. A name for an Asian stripper.

13. A mean girl who thinks she can do whatever she feels like and get away with it. She is dirty minded and makes too many sex jokes.

That was fun, wasn’t it? Head on to UrbanDictionary.com to give it a try.

It can’t be any fun being my laptop. I don’t spend my days surfing, or watching videos on YouTube, or even playing games on Facebook. All I do is work, work, and work some more. And don’t get me started on the amount of work I do. Let’s just say that in any given day, I have about 3 days’ worth of work to do IF I do everything manually. Fortunately for me, my boss loves buying me software, so most of my tasks are automated, which is definitely the only reason why I actually manage to do everything that I’m supposed to do every day.

Now, most of these software run on – surprise, surprise! – Windows. My darling Octavian, however, runs on Mac OS X 10.6.2 (Snow Leopard). This means that to be able to run these software, I have to run Windows on a Macbook Pro somehow. One way to do is to install it in something called Boot Camp and choose Windows when I boot up Octavian . . . Yeah, right. Like that’s going to happen! Running Windows on its own on a Macbook Pro is like playing a shitty VCD on a perfectly good Blu-ray player – it’s sacrilegious, to say the least.

So as an alternative, I’ve chosen to purchase a software called VMWare Fusion, and this is, by far, one of my best investments yet. VMWare Fusion allows me to run Windows as a virtual machine (I named it Lucius Cornelius Sulla, tee hee) so I won’t have to leave OS X to run Windows applications. This means that I’m actually running two computers simultaneously on one. Add the fact that I’m also running another half a dozen apps on the native OS X system, and I’ve got an extremely overworked laptop. Very few laptops will be able survive such a beating without crashing, and Octavian’s one of those – he’s never crashed once. Rather, he valiantly takes whatever demands I put to him without complaint. Yes, he’s a good boy, that’s why I love him to bits (no pun intended).

Octavian came with a 2GB DDR3 RAM, which was a big deal for me, considering the crap that I had to put up with before I bought my first Mac. Though it’s sufficient to run both my systems simultaneously, I do suffer lags every now and again, which is really a bit annoying when you’re trying to get things done yesterday. I knew a RAM upgrade to 4GB would take care of this, but since the DDR3 technology is fairly new, the chips weren’t readily available locally – and I felt that I had to purchase it from an authorized Apple store/service center to get their techs to install it for me. Unfortunately, there was a 2-month waiting list to order ‘em chips, plus it would be about twice the price of getting it from somewhere like TipidPC or eBay.

Now, for as long as I can remember, the guys at the PhilMUG forums have been insisting that a DIY RAM and hard-disk upgrade was as easy as pie. It’s so easy, in fact, that these sort of upgrades do not even void the warranty! I’ve been toying with the idea of doing it for the longest time. I’ve even watched videos of how it was done, and they all made it look so easy! I’ve always chickened out at the last minute, though. I don’t know what came over me this week, but I suddenly fancied that my poor Octavian was coming down with asthma from all the hard work (the real Octavian was asthmatic, after all) and that I needed to do a RAM upgrade stat! So I ordered a couple of 2GB Team Elite chips from a TipidPC seller, who came highly recommended from ‘em forum guys, on Tuesday. I paid P4,700 (about $100) for both chips plus shipping on the same day, and got confirmation that it was en route to Cebu.

The chips turned up the next day, Wednesday. The idea of opening up poor Octavian sickened me so much, though, that The Husband ended up doing it for me that afternoon. First, he tried to get the screws off with a really old #00 screwdriver that he found buried amidst his old junk. That didn’t really work – 3 of the screws won’t come off!

So we hurriedly took a trip to True Value in Ayala to get a new screwdriver and ended up with a set. This time, Octavian was successfully opened up. The Husband removed the old 1GB sticks and replaced ‘em with the new 2GB ones (there’s two of each). The process took no more than a couple of minutes. He then closed up Octavian, and I re-booted. To my horror, it showed that I only had 1GB of RAM from the 4GB I was expecting! I nearly cried. I did a test using memtest, and yep, there’s definitely only 1GB.

So The Husband opened up poor Octavian again, and sure enough, one of the chips was loose. He fiddled with them somewhat, and they were finally in nice and tight. I booted up Octavian again, and scarily enough, he only had 3GB! By this time, I was definitely in a panic. The Husband opened up Octavian again and removed the chips. We both checked if they were identical, and they were, right down to their 2GB DDR3 warranty stickers.

The Husband had the brilliant idea of trying to isolate problem. He installed just one chip, rebooted, and checked the system – definitely a 2GB. Off came Octavian’s back case yet again, and this time, he installed just the other chip. Lo and behold – it was a 1GB!

So it seemed that the problem was with that second chip. I thought it might have been mislabeled or something, but the guys on the forums believe it’s a faulty chip. I contacted the seller – who was really nice, by the way – and he asked me to send in the faulty chip yesterday so he can replace it. I thought he was going to wait until the chip got there before he sent me a new one so I was resigned to the fact that I’ll have to wait a couple more days, but no, he sent it straight away, the moment I confirmed that I’ve sent the faulty chip. I’m expecting it sometime today.

Right now, Octavian is running on 3GB RAM – the new, working 2GB chip and one of the original 1GB sticks. I have not experienced a single lag since, even when I’ve got Windows running, too. It takes a bit longer to start up (about 30 seconds), though, but that’s perfectly understandable. It’s the actual working time that matters to me, anyway, and a longer start-up time just means that I have more time to get breakfast ready.

With the favorable experience that I’ve had with the 3GB RAM so far, I can’t wait to see what the 4GB would be like! I’m getting stuff done even quicker than usual, too. A happy Octavian means a happy Mommy Iris.

Now, if only LBC would turn up with that chip already . . .

LBC turned up just as we were about to head to the mall to watch New Moon. Once again, Octavian was reopened, and in less than 2 minutes, he was sporting a spanking new 4GB RAM. (Check out the wallpaper. Cute, huh?)

I’ve blogged several times before that my sister designs and creates swimwear. She has since expanded to dresses. Pretty, pretty dresses. Dresses so pretty that you can’t help but look pretty, too.

I am normally a reluctant shopper when it comes to clothes. Getting me to buy a dress, or even a top from any shop would require a significant amount of arm-twisting and praises aplenty. For the past couple of weeks that the little shop’s been producing dresses, however, I’ve been shopping without even batting an eyelash. I’ve bought about 5 dresses and half a dozen swimsuits so far. They all look like I’ve been poured into them – they’re that gorgeous. Why, I didn’t even need my regular weight loss pill to make the frocks look flattering on me at all!

And it doesn’t look like the end of this newfound penchant for shopping is in sight. Is it because she’s my sister? Maybe . . . IF she gives me a discount. But she doesn’t, so I could happily shop from eBay, or Multiply, or any one of the cookie-cutter shops in Ayala or SM. Unfortunately, these shops – online or otherwise – are producing clothes that are less and less to my liking in style, quality, and price. My sister, a consummate shopper herself, has recognized the need for high quality, affordable clothes that actually fit and look good.

You don’t believe me? What can you say about these darlings?

I have this gorgeous number in orange!

She REFUSES to sell me these, says I’ve bought enough! (Right. Like that would stop me!)

I have this in mustard, and I’m DYING to go to the beach and wear it!

If you want to see more, visit Innuendo @ Facebook.

The more dresses you buy, the less I buy. That means you help me hold on to my money. Besides, you can’t let me be the only well-dressed gal in town. Where’s the justice in that?