The following blog was originally posted from my old blog, The Geejay Journal:

Friday night, Raquel and I just decided to head home early to watch the second half of the second season of The West Wing DVDs she borrowed from the Melbourne City Library. We also watched the recording we made of The Apprentice. It is shown at the same time as Stargate SG-1 on Thursdays so we had to record one to watch later.

The furniture company called me Friday telling me that our new leather sofa would be delivered between 8 to 10 am Saturday. So while watching the DVDs and the Apprentice, I can’t get over the fact that by tomorrow (well, the tomorrow of that day Friday), we would no longer be sitting in foldable picnic chairs.

I was pleasantly surprised that the furniture deliverers were at our door at 8:30! At last, we thought, we have a decent sofa!

Here is a pic of the new sofa. Pardon the quality as I used my phone’s low-res digital camera here:

Needless to say, Raquel and I are both stoked. We spent the rest of Saturday just watching DVDs while enjoying the new furniture. What a bunch of couch potatoes, no?

But Sunday, I decided to get off my butt and worked on moving my Lovarian Adventures webcomic site to its new home at our new host at Palabok.com. I had to convert the PHP code into Classic ASP/VBScript. Originally, though, I planned to convert the PHP code to ASP.NET but that would take longer to do as I’m not that proficient with VB.Net nor C# (ASP.NET languages).

Since we need to budget our continually growing expenses, we wanted to stop paying for two websites. With this in mind, I had to fast track the move of the webcomic site to the new host so that I can discontinue the former site.

Anyway, I do not want to get into a lot of detail so I’ll just make a long story short. I was able to finish a working version of the Lovarian Adventures webcomic site (minus the bells and whistles of the old site) and ready to upload on the new host. It should be up and working by the time you read this.

We ended the weekend watching Australian Idol and the remaining top four contestants. I’m no longer excited by the remaining contestants though. I dunno why. Well, we were enjoying the new sofa more than the TV at the time anyway.

The following blog was originally posted from my old blog, The Geejay Journal:

As they say here in Australia, it’s hotting up!

I went out to North Melbourne today to pick up from the courier company the wireless phone with answering machine that we bought on eBay. I took the train and walked the rest of the way to the courier’s depot.

I just realised that winter is indeed over as it was quite warm outside. And this was just spring. I wonder how hot it would be in summer. Ugh.

Fortunately, we have a casual dress code policy at my new job so I normally just come to work wearing a T-shirt and jeans. Today was no exception. I usually bring a sweater/jacket with me in case it gets cold but I had to take it off as I was starting to perspire from the heat.

I’m just glad to be back in the cool air-conditioned office and doing programming work. Really!

Before I end this post, I’d just like to point out that the phrase “it’s hotting up” is one of those phrases used here that I’m really annoyed with. It should “it’s heating up!” The word Hot is not a verb and shouldn’t have a present participle form. Heat, however, is a verb and “Heating” is more appropriate than the grammatically incorrect “hotting”. There. I finally got that off my chest.

The following blog was originally posted from my old blog, The Geejay Journal:

It’s 11:30 pm and we’ve just come home from our meeting with other Melbourne-based Filipino posters on the Philippines.com.au forum at the Crown Casino. It was suggested in the forum a few days ago that maybe we should all meet in person. Get to know one another for real.

I was very keen to be a part of it as Raquel and I do not really know anybody here in Melbourne. All of our friends are either in Sydney or Canberra. I thought it would be nice to make new friends here in Melbourne and the planned meeting of forum-posters is an opportunity to do just that.

The plan was that we will all meet at around 6:30 pm to 7 pm at the food court area of the Crown Casino near the cinemas. If anybody got lost, we can contact the mobile (cellphone) of the site’s administrator, Homer, who is also going to the meeting. Raquel and I got there at about 6:25. The biggest problem we realised then was that how would we tell these Filipinos apart from all the other Asians at the said food court. We haven’t met these people in person before so we really don’t know what they would look like. And they wouldn’t know what we’d look like as well.

We decided to sit in one table for a few minutes while we look about for a gathering of people who could be Filipinos meeting for the first time. We did hear a few people who passed us speaking Tagalog but they didn’t seem to be looking for anybody so they weren’t likely to be the people we were supposed to meet.

Then we spotted two guys looking around like us. I got my mobile and started to dial Homer to see if he was already in the food court area. At that moment, one of the two guys got his mobile. He must be Homer, I thought. I hung up and walked towards the two.

As it turned out, neither of them is Homer the Admin. It was Bryan aka Bongbong and Benny aka Gee. Benny told me he was texting (sending SMS to) the Admin when I took out my mobile so he thought I was the Admin.

So then, there were four of us. It was a start. We talked about job searching, where we were from, where we lived now and how long each of us have been in Australia. Shortly, Michael aka Milkshake joined the group.

We started combining the tables then when Alvin (the lurker, he just reads the forum he said) joined us followed by Homer the Admin and his business partner Giovan (I’m not sure what his forum nickname was). Then while we were settling in our seats, Richmond (D’oh! I didn’t get his actual name) joined us. He was the last to join the meeting.

We talked about a lot of stuff like politics, propaganda, the situation in the Philippines, where to go to buy Filipino items, travel, and heaps of other topics. It was very enjoyable to be able to commune with fellow Filipinos again because I was able to speak in Tagalog and I was able to talk to people who share the same interests and culture as I do.

It’s like being home again. I could’ve pretended that I was just in Festival Supermall (in Filinvest, Alabang) chatting away with friends while the mall employees are eyeing us for hogging the seats when we are not actually eating.

Speaking of eating, I just remembered that we were so caught up with trading stories and chatting that we almost forgot about dinner. Well, I say almost because I did remember and was the first to bring it up with the group. I suppose everybody was still full because they ignored my dinner comment. I had to bring it up again and we finally agreed to have dinner.

Richmond suggested we eat pizza at this restaurant within the casino grounds itself but decided against it later when we realised the hassle of leaving our bags at the cloak room and that the actual restaurant inside was already full. So we went back to the food court and had to put together some tables again.

We bought our food, sat down and chatted some more. We talked about forming a new Melbourne Filipino group that is at least internet-savvy. We may have to think of a name for the group. We can worry about that later.

Anyway, we enjoyed the meeting so much that we hardly noticed the passage of time. Soon, it was already 10:30 and we agreed to call it a night. Specially since some of us (Benny and Bryan) need to catch a train before it’s last service for the day leaves.

We said our goodbyes but before going on our separate ways, we agreed to meet again at a later date for a backyard barbeque or something. All in all, I was very glad to have joined that eyeball meeting. I hope that Raquel and I will make true friends from this group. And with everybody so easy to get along, it’s easy to see that we will.

PS. If I incorrectly put down the names of one of the guys who went to that meeting, I apologise to that person if he’s reading this. My excuse? I’m not really good with names. I’m surprised I remembered all of them (I hope).

The following blog was originally posted from my old blog, The Geejay Journal:

It’s my second week of working at my new job and so far, I’m still enjoying it very much. It is a very relaxed environment but the work is still challenging and exciting. The problem with being relatively new-comer in a new company is that I still do not know everybody that well and everybody else knows everybody else quite well.

From experience, I find it difficult to join in on on-going conversations because people would tend to talk about shared experiences past and present. So when the company decided to have a bowling night tonight, I signed up hoping to bond with my new co-workers.

Apart from the thick smoke-filled air of the bowling centre (smoking is allowed there), I’d say it was a very regret-free night. I enjoyed myself and got to know my co-workers a little better.

Now here is the thing… It’s been a while since I last played ten-pin bowling. Although I enjoyed the game, I’m now in pain. My right thumb and right wrist is aching at the moment and so is my left thigh (I know it shouldn’t be affected but it is).

And tonight, I was feeling enthusiastic in continuing the Lovarian Adventures webcomic at long last. I printed my blank comic page templates and started sketching. To my surprise, I found it painful in the wrist to hold a pencil! So, this is the case of “the mind is willing but the flesh is weak.” Ugh.

Hopefully the aches will pass before the weekend ends so that I will still have time to draw a new comic page update (in over four months). In the meantime, I will try to work on the new site at Palabok.com.

The following blog was originally posted from my old blog, The Geejay Journal:

Back in the days when I had to drive by car back and forth between Melbourne and Canberra, I usually stopped by at the Sundowner Paddlesteamer Lodge in Albury for the night. They had cable TV so I was able to watch Discovery Channel again.

Anyway, this one time I was watching Discovery Channel, they had this feature about this Filipina health worker working in East Asia (I forgot which country). Anyway, she spoke in English for the show, though with a thick Filipino accent, and she got subtitles whenever she spoke. I actually found it funny that the producers thought that there might be westerners who may not understand her brand of English.

Another time, I watched an ABC program called Global Village and it featured a segment regarding Filipinos taking up house in Manila cemeteries because they have nowhere else to live. In interviews, the locals would reply in English but again, they had subtitles whenever they spoke. I thought the Filipino accent wasn’t that thick.

I am now feeling that maybe I need subtitles of my own when I talk to Australians. They seem to understand me clearly enough though. They do tell me that I have an American accent and they guessed that maybe I lived in the US for a while or something. I just tell them that it was because of my Americanesque education we get in the Philippines, with our country being a wanna-be US state and all. That and we were colonised by the Americans back in the early 20th century.

Anyway, one day was watching this American series showing a non-city dwelling family (I forgot which US state they reside in but I thought their accent was a bit southern) and they too got subtitles when they spoke. Now that was funny. I thought I understood them quite clearly (without any effort in trying to understand them, in fact) yet they have subtitles. Weird.

I’m not sure if it was the Americans themselves that put the subtitles there or the Australian broadcasting company that showed the series. In any case, I don’t feel as insulted as before when they subtitled my fellow Filipinos after that.

On the topic of insulting subtitles, I found this very funny video news feed that was supposedly taken in Iraq. Watch it now. It’s a 1mb file though so if you don’t have broadband, it may take a while to load.

Finally, I just like to say that I have nothing against subtitles personally. Whenever Raquel and I watch DVDs, we usually turn on the subtitles just to make sure we don’t miss any words. Since we are both fast readers, the subtitles don’t really bother us. We think it actually helps us understand the show better.

The following blog was originally posted from my old blog, The Geejay Journal:

Yesterday, Raquel asked me where we would go for the day. We would regularly go out somewhere on weekends whether it be the park, a shopping centre, the library or the beach.

This weekend, I thought we go see what the Eastland Shopping Centre. Not too exciting I know but you have to understand that a lot of Filipinos, such as myself, consider going to malls a very leisurely activity much like going to the park for a picnic.

So finding a good-sized mall where one can hang-out for a day is highly desired. Ever since moving to Melbourne in July, I’ve scouted for such malls nearby and so far I’ve been to Chadstone, The Glen, Southland and Crowne. Although all of them are big shopping centres, I usually go to Chadstone and Southland as they are fairly easy to go to via car.

So yesterday, I told Raquel that maybe we can see this place called Eastland Shopping Centre in Ringwood. To digress for a bit, Raquel and I noticed the apparent lack of imagination in naming these big shopping centres sometimes as there is the Southland in the south, Eastland in the east and Northland in, you guessed it, the north.

So off we went. Took the car and drove north via the St Kilda Road then through Punt Road. Then we went eastward through the Eastern Freeway where I can drive at 100kph. Still, the whole trip took around 25-30 minutes and this was without heavy traffic. We were thinking that maybe the reason there wasn’t much traffic was because everybody was at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) watching the Australian Rules Football League (AFL) grand final match between Port Adelaide and Brisbane. Probably.

When we got there, we weren’t really impressed. It sure is big but not as classy as Chadstone and doesn’t seem to be as big as the one in Southland. Although it is a big enough mall, it does not seem to be worth the time and effort spent to get there.

If you are still reading this, then you must either be family or one of my friends, who are my primary target audience anyway. I just want my family and friends to know what I do on an ordinary day.

So this is just another day about just another shopping centre.

Well, I moved to Melbourne back in July and it is only now that I’m beginning to settle in. AHHH. And I love the feeling.

The thing was, during the first few weeks in Melbourne, I was preoccupied with trying to get the new apartment in order and trying to fit in my new work then as a programmer consultant.

After a few weeks working at the client site at Transurban Citylink, I realised that I am no longer cut-out for the consulting/contracting life. I must be getting old because I’m now more interested in getting a job that will provide me with stability and predictability.

With consulting/contracting, you never know where your next job will be (after the current one). When you go to another client site, you’ll have to get to know the people working there again, learn the system their working on again, and just live with the fact that the next client might be located an hour’s train ride from your current home. Then there is also the fact that I have to dress-up in very formal business attire (which I totally understand because my company then had to live up to this professional image).

I just want to find a job where I know that it’ll be 20 minutes away by train everyday; where I just need to get to know the people once and it’ll be worth it because I’ll be socialising with these people for a long while; where I don’t have to wear formal business attire everyday; where I can come in at 10 am and it’ll be alright (because it’ll be flexible hours). Well, my prayer has been answered.

I saw this job opening for a company on Seek.com.au one day and the skill set they were looking for matched my skill set exactly. So I gave it a go and submitted my resume. I received an email from them the next day saying that they wanted me to come over to their office for an interview. I’ll cut it short by saying that I got the job!

It’s in the CBD city centre and is only 15 minutes away by train. I can get there in 20 minutes. The work atmosphere is pretty relaxed. It’s flexible hours. The dress code is casual so I come to work in a t-shirt, jeans and rubber shoes. The technology is what I’m familiar with plus I get to work with newer technology like C# and ASP.NET (it’s a Microsoft shop company).

So all in all, I find myself blessed. It’s my fourth day at work and I’m loving it. The work, although challenging, I still find enjoyable to do and I guess it’s also because of the relaxed environment. Now I don’t feel as stressed when I get home from work.

I guess what I’m saying is that maybe I have more energy to get back to drawing now. Whereas before, although I want to make updates on the gallery and on my comic site, I just don’t have the motivation to sit down and pick up the tablet to draw anything decent. Now, it’s different. Of course, I could just spend my free time just watching TV or playing Counter-strike. Still, I think I’m actually getting back the enthusiasm in drawing I once had.

We’ll see.