Unang Sabak: The Launch

August 23.  NAIA, Pasay City. Kadarating lang ng sasakyan namin, puno na ng hamog ng madaling araw ang tiyan ko. Medyo senti dahil nasa lugar na ako kung saan lilisanin ang mother land at ipagpapalit siya sa lugar na mas mayaman at kayang ibigay ang hindi kayang ibigay ng sariling bansa. Gusto kong maiyak pero gusto kong iparamdam sa kaniya na kailangang lakasan ang loob. Kahiyaan na to. Wala nang atrasan. Ganun din sa Kuya ko na di ko alam kung excited na umalis ako o nagmamadali na makausap ko si Nanay para maayos na agad mga utang namin sa Pilipinas. Bilisan mo na! Yun ang basa ko sa mukha niya.

Papunta ako sa dayuhang bansa ng Kuwait. Itinulak ng kagustuhang maiangat ang buhay ng pamilya sa Bulacan. Aabutan ko doon si Titang, 21 taon nang household staff sa isang mayamang pamilya doon. Hindi na siya nakapag-asawa sa tindi ng pressure na hatid marahil ng buong angkan sa Pilipinas. Nasa ibang bahay naman si Nanay, tatlong taon na simula nang irefer ni Titang para magsilbi sa maysakit na nanay ng among babae. Pikit matang tinanggap yun ni Nanay dati. Alam ko.

Dare You To Move

Welcome to the planet. welcome to existence
Everyone’s here, everyone’s here
Everybody’s watching you now, everybody waits for you now
What happens next, what happens next

[Chorus]
I dare you to move, I dare you to move
I dare you to lift yourself up off the floor
I dare you to move, I dare you to move
Like today never happened
Today never happened before

Welcome to the fallout, welcome to resistance
The tension is here, tension is here
Between who you are and who you could be
Between how it is and how it should be

[Bridge]
Maybe redemption has stories to tell
Maybe forgiveness is right where you fell
Where can you run to escape from yourself?
Where you gonna go?
Where you gonna go?
Salvation is here

Outcried Shadow

Waking up ignoring a dump
seems each night is a bump
moving the stillness of this cloud
may this answer the immense slump

Carrying the unbearable
with sight seemingly unable
emptiness discreetly skin deep
damn make life a bit stable

Yearning to assert your name
above the waters kept me sane
shouting this heart aloud
dawn quite catered the same

Grasp this soul insistent and great
while disbelief in avid fate
draw your bond and depart
cease the sore and endless ache

Of this moon my dearest
passion seem had it blessed
calm this essence make it ease
steal the mist unto your vest

-kiko

Street Fighter IV

FLASHBACK
One of the most interesting part of my childhood are game consoles.  I started with an Atari 2600 at home and since then, oddly enough, we never got hold of a new one.  It took me guts to cut classes just to answer that passion since learning a lot of new stuff going out.  From SNES, SEGA and digging arcades from all the corners of our town.  Apparently, time spoke for itself that NOT everybody has to own consoles just to be in mainstream.  Answer: your home PC.

TO HADOUKEN OR NOT TO HADOUKEN
Being one of the cornerstones, not to mention the foundation of my geek territory, CAPCOM’s Street Fighter was a god.  It has practically invaded a large part of my childhood.  All those time, legit or not, that I spent on gaming and arcade shops are way too planted in my system like a haunting dark past.  This passion, still,  is currently and depressingly sustained by game emulators that you can find all over the web.

With those tiny pieces combined, nostalgia came knocking in when I knew about this:

Imagine those gamepad maneuvers that we geeked on the past couple of years, all of them rushing back at full throttle.  If i remember precisely, the last time I played Super Street Fighter Zero II was 2003 when my younger brother used to force me in teaching him how to acquire Akuma (remember how they used to hide that animal from the list?).

As of now, it is taking me a lot of time to have the PC version.  Hopefully, I can get my hands blistering on those killer combos again.  Vader, help us.

Working In The Background

One of them stuff I’ve been busy with lately is reuniting with my first ever love, programming.  I have to choose not to discuss my platform maybe because I don’t want to lecture you with boredom.  But if the stars and moons in the galaxy pushed you here and you happen to be indulged with debugging curiousness, I’d rather share a few ones that I also got tangled into recently.  Read along and learn with me:

Introduction
To be a good programmer is difficult and noble. The hardest part of making real a collective vision of a software project is dealing with one’s coworkers and customers. Writing computer programs is important and takes great intelligence and skill. But it is really child’s play compared to everything else that a good programmer must do to make a software system that succeeds for both the customer and myriad colleagues for whom she is partially responsible. In this essay I attempt to summarize as concisely as possible those things that I wish someone had explained to me when I was twenty-one.

This is very subjective and, therefore, this essay is doomed to be personal and somewhat opinionated. I confine myself to problems that a programmer is very likely to have to face in her work. Many of these problems and their solutions are so general to the human condition that I will probably seem preachy. I hope in spite of this that this essay will be useful.

In this essay the term boss to refer to whomever gives you projects to do. I use the words business, company, and tribe, synonymously except that business connotes moneymaking, company connotes the modern workplace and tribe is generally the people you share loyalty with.  Click here to read further.

-RLR