Quaere Verum

There was this couple who used to go to shop in the beautiful stores. This was their 25th Wedding Anniversary. They both liked antiques and pottery, especially teacups. One day in a fine shop, they saw this beautiful teacup. One said, "May I see that? I never have seen one quite so beautiful," and the lady handed it to him. As she handed it to him, suddenly the teacup spoke. "You don`t understand," it said, "I haven`t always been a teacup. There was a time when I was red and I was clay. My master took me and rolled me and patted me over and over and I yelled out, `Let me alone.` But he only smiled, `Not yet.` "Then I was placed on a spinning wheel," the teacup said, "and suddenly I was spun around and around and around and around. `Stop it! I`m getting dizzy` I screamed. But the master only nodded and said, `Not yet.` "Then he put me in the oven. I`d never felt such heat! I wondered why he wanted to burn me. I yelled! I knocked at the door. ...

If you live here in the Philippines, and assuming you don't live under a rock somewhere, no doubt you've heard about the resurgence of violence down south, as the the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) wreaks havoc on various towns and villages, killing civilians, burning houses, destroying public property. The MILF is an armed group which has as its goal the secession of Muslim Mindanao, what they call Bangsamoro , from the Republic of the Philippines, and they have been using violence to further that goal for more than twenty years. Recently, the Philippine government attempted to forge a peace plan with the MILF through a Memorandum of Agreement, which, among other things, establishes a Bangsamoro Juridical Entity (BJE). This, for all intents and purposes, is tantamount to creating a state within a state. All would be well in good, except for the fact that the government, either in a fit of arrogance, or an apparent display of bad faith, failed to consult local leaders, ...

I keep getting asked how to make guild badges in RAN Online , so I decided to just make a post to so I don't have to keep repeating myself over and over again. First of all what's a guild badge anyway? What's it for? A guild badge is just a small icon displayed over your character's name which identifies which guild that character belongs to. To the right of the guild badge is your guild nickname. In reality, that icon is nothing more than an ordinary bitmap (BMP) file 16 pixels wide by 11 pixels high (16x11). So how do you go about making your own badge? The simplest way is to open Microsoft Paint (in Windows XP, simply click the Start button, then scroll over to Accessories , then Paint ), then click on Image on the Paint toolbar, slide the cursor to Attributes (you can also press Ctrl-E instead), select pixels as your unit, enter 16 in the Width box and 11 in the Height box, then click OK . You'll get a 16x11 drawing area. Of course, the drawing area is a bi...

Hey. It's been a while since I last posted any entry. More than three months actually. All of a sudden I just lost interest. I've been blogging for almost four years now, and somehow lately it has been a bit difficult to sustain the enthusiasm for blogging that I've once had. Call it idea overload. Since my last update I have had dozens of ideas for new blog posts, fueled by the sheer number of events happening all around. Despite the plethora of things to blog about, none of my ideas ever got off the ground and materialized to being a blog post. I guess I just didn't feel motivated enough to commit any of my ideas to keyboard. Maybe the cynic in me is starting to rear its ugly head. I can only seem to blog about bad stuff, but all that negativity is starting to take its toll on my already pessimistic personality. Lately it seems as if I've been seeing the bad side of people more than the good. I'm starting to have doubts on whether people are by nature inheren...