From the depths of the abyss, darkness wraps me in its inescapable clutches, but here I am, borne again and resurrected. I have born the unbearable breathlessness of blog-less life. I have stretched my pseudo-elastic patience to lengths I have never thought possible to exist. I have been a prisoner of what almost seemed like eternal slumber but slave to its cruel and ironic fate of restlessness and unease. I have been dead.

But today I changed it all. I heard the soft cries of willowing whispers coursing through silent breeze in those foggy nights. Little by little, it fed me through the pain-staking hunger I had epically endured. Soon it gave me enough strength to break through the herculean force that kept me in heavy shackles through all these days. I have finally seen the light, something that was totally in-existent from where I came from, AGAIN.

I have been away from my blog for a long time, a week, more or less. And it made me feel very detached. I was active in interacting with other bloggers in the blogosphere though, and it was a very enriching experience meeting other bloggers, talking to them with ‘forum’-esque proportions in their own territorial domains, bugging and teasing each other.

You’re in my arms and all the world is calm, the music playing on for only two. So close together and when I’m with you, so close to feeling alive. A life goes by, romantic dreams will stop so I bid mine goodbye and never knew, so close, was waiting, waiting here with you. And now forever, I know, all that I wanted to hold you so close. So close to reaching that famous happy end, almost believing this was not pretend, and now you’re beside me and look how far we’ve come so far we are so close. Oh how could I face the faceless days if I should lose you now? We’re so close to reaching that famous happy end, and almost believing this was not pretend. Let’s go on dreaming for we know we are, so close, so close and still so far.

Image by angelofmayhem via Flickr

Image by Dr Case via Flickr

I found this from Rob's site. Well, I just couldn't help it. I needed to re-blog this. Please visit his site to check our more from him.

I've contacted Inca about her works a few days ago, and she had gladly sent me her masterpieces. I have always been a fan, so without further ado, Inca's Gallery.

I especially like the last one!

All of these were done in 2008.

She says:

I had a drawing class and a photog class. Yung graphic thing, experimenting lang yun hehe.

The photo with me in it is part of a self-portrait triptych that follows the "See, hear, speak no evil" phrase. Instead of "evil", I decided to put the things I didn't like seeing, hearing, or speaking of.

The other 2 photos were taken at a historical site for a class project.

She will continue to make more! And we will be expecting more! Thank you Inca!

Quote of the Day:
"To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream, not only plan, but also believe." -- Anatole France

Simple point & click enrichment of your blog posts (and emails). In real-time, while you type. We suggest tags, links, photos, and related articles. You save time and aspirin.

5M+ pictures, 5M+ articles. 10M+ possibilities.

Zemanta Live Writer plugin screencast from zemanta on Vimeo.

Basically, the video tells you more info than I could. I just couldn't show you how I use it, but you say the video so I guess that would be enough. It's really fun to use. It just gives you easier access to stuff you'd want to incorporate in your blog. You should try it.

One key thing to note is that this plugin is not browser exclusive. It allows integration to almost all browsers, Firefox, IE, even Chrome and Safari. So regardless of what platform you use, Zemanta can be installed.

This plugin also works for various e-mail clients, including Yahoo Mail and Google Mail.

Feel free to throw your comments and suggestions about these new widgets.

Future Update: I will be incorporating a page for you to be able to contact me. It will be ready very soon.

Enjoy my site!

Quote of the Day:
"The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible -- and achieve it, generation after generation." -- Pearl S. Buck

EDIT: Media already available. Click here to listen.

I have been listening to a lot songs lately and they've got me singing. My latest creation to date: Open Up.

I have been so inspired that after writing this song today, I immediately recorded it. And for added bonus, I added an accompaniment; and with further extra, I attempted to add backup.

Unfortunately, our internet is going wonky again, and would not allow me to upload my new song. I will try to upload it again tonight and hopefully it should be available by then.

I first heard his pieces from his Multiply site. So I immediately emailed him to allow me to publish his works on my Blogger.com. He gladly agreed and sent me his music files.

What I will be offering you tonight will be two musical scores he created for a play in school. Not much detail has been given to me about the nature of the play but in one of our correspondence he mentions:

" these songs are for a play.
ok first was for the creepy theme... then my friend, Kyle's group mates said that it was too scary... the play is of a love-story that has a ghost in there somewhere.. like the ghost was in love with the girl or something...
so i made the second file i sent u... i tried to make a median between love-story-ish and scary music..."

Play List:
1. Christopher Graham - Web Theme
2. Christopher Graham - Ghost Love

I hope you enjoy!

Quote of the Day:
"Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life." -- Berthold Auerbach

JS-Kit ECHO is basically the latest commenting system launched (Public Beta) last August 6th, 2009. Adding rich, interactive features for any blogger's site, this has been their goal.

Echo is.. the way to share your content, and watch the live reaction. Embed it on your site – replacing your old commenting system – and you get:

• Real-time – Watch people react to your content live – without refreshing the page!
• Social Gestures – Echo captures the Social Gestures relating to your content including comments, likes, star ratings and more!
• Stream – Echo simplifies the presentation of conversation to just two levels. This simpler, cleaner style helps people keep track of contributions and engage in parallel conversations.
• Hyper-Distributed – Visitors share your content with their friends across all their favorite social networks at once – broadening the conversation and driving new traffic.
• Aggregated – Echo captures conversations related to your content from across the web and places them on your page.
• People – Echo allows people to connect to your site using their profile from the worlds most popular social networks. Users can even bind multiple social media accounts together.
• Multimedia – Echo items can include safe HTML, photos, and video for a richer conversation.
• Multiplied Engagement – Echo increases engagement by providing more ways for users to get involved and express their opinion.

I haven't fully maximized it's feature yet. I just read about it over Dede Andro's blogsite, and thought it would worth the while trying it out. It would take some time to be familiar with it though. It's pretty much easy to use and navigate around with. One thing that makes this commenting system interesting is the function that allow reply threading, unlike the old commenting system that comes along with blogger.com that basically keeps the replies in a single chronological order with very little interactivity.

Another thing you need to take heed, is the fact that every comment comes with an avatar, and unless you edit your profile, an ugly blank faceless image would be displayed. Anyhow, adding in a small photo isn't such a troubling chore. You can actually log in with any of the following IDs:

-- OpenID
-- Blogspot URL
-- Facebook Account
-- Yahoo Account
-- Google Friend Connect
-- Twitter Account

Or you can also use, if you have any, JS-Kit Account or Haloscan Account. If you don't have any of the aforementioned ID's, which I highly doubt, you can create a New JS-Kit Account. Simply select this from the drop down list (it should on top of all the mentioned login IDs).

How to login? Oh, just click the Admin drop down menu and choose login and you're all set.

Well, I guess those would be the basics. I'll be monitoring how this system would turn out. Hah! I'm one to say, someone who gets a lot of hits and countless comments in a day. Yeah right! But in any case, just to prepare and pave my way to the future success of this blogger page, I'll keep it up.

If you happen to check this commenting system out, feel free to voice out your opinions. After all, this commenting system has been installed for that purpose.

I find it really curious to wake up in the middle of the night and suddenly get hit by a blogging inspiration. How weird is waking up at early dawn, around 4AM (yes, since by MY definition, night means the whole duration of your sleep, considering you aren’t a vampire, e.i. you sleep like everyone else starting in the late evening and waking up at early morning the next day), hearing the DJs on the radio talking about the previously famous (and now made even more famous because of his sudden death – on my birthday nonetheless) MICHAEL JACKSON where somehow they also managed to mention GRAVITY somewhere along the course of their discussion about something I couldn’t really remember (yes, I listen to the radio – Monster Radio, RX 93.1 – even when I sleep, so don’t you dare tell our landlady that I’m sorta, kinda, but not quite wasting precious electricity, which by the way is an energy resource that needs to be conserved due to scarcity issues and whatnot – I know, I’m not perfect).

So, as I looked at the wall clock staring blankly at me with hands pointing at an angle which would supposedly mean a few minutes past 4 in the morning, my mind rushed through thoughts much like a scheduled virus scan which suddenly pops up when you least expect it, searching through banks and banks of memory for something that you don’t normally find on occasion. Only this time my mind was going on auto-pilot searching the best ideas I kept about Gravity and all. Then… after a second or 30, Gravity sunk its imprints on to my very core. I could only imagine how drastically different our lives would be without it, how worlds would unimaginably crash into each other’s orbits (or would there still be any) without it or fly infinitely away from each other without it (whatever!), and how cosmically chaotic everything would be without Gravity.

Well, that’s just me thinking about a life without gravity (but then again, the omniscient and boundless God we believe in would probably think of something to tie it all again). Let’s just limit our fictitious thoughts to the time when we suddenly lose the force of gravity to the time before God would give us something to replace it with and make things better again.

OK, moving on. Remember how gravity attracts two objects with mass? There’s supposedly physics involved in it; I’m sure you can google it yourself. The point is this force exists to make things stable, to give some order into our own existence; why no matter how high you throw the ball, it’ll always fall back to the ground; why no matter who you are, how high your status is, we all still hit the ground hard when we fall. That’s all there is to it, really. No matter how much you build your life on something, it will always come (sometimes even crashing) down. Alright, for those optimistic ones, think of it as something like, no matter how busy or hyped up or high your life becomes (in terms of career, love, money, or whatever), it will always fade down into ease someday. Life becomes a roller-coaster because of Gravity. Basically, Gravity makes our life more interesting!

And like Death, Gravity is another one great equalizer. Like Death, no one escapes Gravity. Like Death, Gravity has its force on us, and we are powerless to defy it. We can dare resist it, but ultimately, we will all fall, and die.

So I immediately got up, paced my way through the quiescent silhouettes of my room and curiously searched the internet. Interestingly, I found out that Michael Jackson is still special, despite his being him. He may not have escaped Death, but he surely found an ingenious way of defying Gravity.

Wanna know how he did it? Check this out.

Scan through it. The images will tell you everything. Notice the Jackson et al under the United States Patent label on the upper left!

Rest in Peace, MJ. You've had a hell of a roller-coaster life. You've reached the highest height of your career, and you may have faced the most troublesome ones in your life. You definitely went up, and you're also definitely going down in history.

Last night, the 9-day (actually night) novena for my mom had finished. It’s been 10 days since we cremated her body and placed her ashes inside a box. You could only imagine how a human body could easily be reduced to a handful of dust. It’s already been 14 days since her last breath, and tomorrow, on my birthday, my mother who was with me for 22 years would be 15 days dead. It’s ironic really, for me to be celebrating life on the one hand, when on the other, I’d be mourning my mother’s death. But it’s really that simple, life goes on. Come to think of it, death does so too. But then again, we’d have our philosophical differences here and we’d end up discussing something else when in fact I’d like to talk about another.

Anyway, I’ve been on blog/text/chat/email sabbatical for a week. I guess it is part of the ritual that people do when they experience a life-turning event. And for me to talk about it in such a casual tone now would lead you to think that I’ve been able to cope well with everything I’ve had to face. I’ve been strong, thanks to all of your support. I really appreciate your warm texts and messages of encouragement and concern. Although I wasn’t able to reply to all of you, know that I really am very grateful and I feel so lucky to have you as friends. I’m taking this time now to say thank you to you all.

This is actually a day delayed blog entry. The thing is, yesterday, we lost our internet connection due to whatever reason globe can think of (or maybe they did have some technical problem or perhaps it was just the regular system maintenance). In any case, I wasn’t able to share this with you the day before.

I believe you can say that this would be another start of my blogging escapades (yeah right!), since I think I’m now ready to get back on track and pick up from where I left everything off. I’d like to think that new things have opened up to me despite the others that have closed.

Last week, I started work with Azeus. If you don’t know what that is, google it. Google is your best friend (next to what’s-her-name). Anyway, it’s been a mix of fun and tough lessons. Yeah, we’ve been training for more than a week now. And tomorrow, we’ll have our final exams for this specific lesson that I am not telling, ‘coz you might say that we’re such pussies having a hard time on something that you find easy to do. Spare me the criticisms, I’d rather not hear what you have to say (so it won’t hurt me) – based on a personal experience that I haven’t been too keen on forgetting. (Talk about bitter!)

I am supposed to be preparing for that exam now, but knowing me, I’ll always have the time of my life for anything and everything (that I want, that is).

Yeah, I guess that’s what’s been keeping me busy all this time, keeping my mind off things, and giving me something else to look forward to. But you know what, no matter how strong your façade seems, there will always be that weak spot that when hit would make the whole fortress crumble. Yeah, I cried. And I guess I needed that.

…

But hey, I took some pictures while we were on break earlier, and look at how the view is like on the 29^th floor.

That’s it for now.

What would you do? It’s tiring as it can be. What with all the stress that’s lurking everywhere ready to pounce anytime. You can never really be too careful these days. Anyone, not to mention everyone, could be it. We can never really know. How much would it take for me to see what lies ahead so that I won’t have to worry about tomorrow? I know it’s futile to worry about what will be rather than expending more time and effort resolving what is. But that’s the problem, instead of enjoying what is, I spend more time worrying and looking for ways to alleviate pain of yesterday that’s causing more problems today.

The Beleaguered Champion seeks to find a place to rest. Under the tree of answers, he wishes to lie underneath its shade. But in the scorching heat vast desert that he has traveled, in the viciousness of the jungle he’s been through, in the depths of the dark abyss, nothing but a void and empty space lies before him. It’s even more disturbing for despite its barrenness, there is always and there will always be something that will push him to the edge.

The Beleaguered Champion started by spending a tremendous amount of time training for what may lie ahead in his life’s adventure. Giving everything he has to offer, this hero wanted to be at his best when he faces the demons and monsters on his way. Nothing could possibly stop him and nothing will.

The Beleaguered Champion went into the immense ocean of oceans. There he met other champions just as he; eager and determined to topple every barrier that may come there way. However, in spite of the immensity of this area, there were only a few possible paths to take. And only a few would be able to go through it. Before this Champion knew it, he was fighting for his slim chance and his inalienable right to passage, against the others that came before and even after him. This isn’t a very pleasant sight. The steady flow of knights treading water was now drenched in thick blood drowning in their own despair.

Despite the horror, the Beleaguered Champion went on his way; weary from that great feat. He knew too well, that it wasn’t going to be the last. He knew that in every other field, battles have to be fought, won, and forgotten. Loss; he knew no such thing. In every step he makes, victory was his vision, faith was his shield, and hope was his sword. Coated in an armor of well-forged skill, no one can bring him down.

The Beleaguered Champion went on this excruciating journey, seeking the most appropriate spot to take the most amount of rest from time to time. But somewhere along his way, dust of confusion was lurking and growing, causing this hero to lose sight of his vision. Trying to regain control over everything before him, he insistently shook them off his feet, along with them everything he used to cherish. This foul mistake cost him a lot, and now his debts are due. Our Champion is now at a loss.

But this would not stop the Beleaguered Champion from moving on. Dragging his every step, he tried to get as far as possible and settle at a new site, either regaining old visions or forming new ones. Our Beleaguered Champion had to start again.

To be continued…