Last month, Paolo Granada Lim, my best friend, wrote a blog post about the gadgets he uses. So if my best friend does it, I should do it too, because we are best friends. However, since I don’t want people to accuse me as being a plagiarizing copycat, I will not entirely copy Paolo’s format but instead I will follow The Verge‘s way.

Well, I only get of the house to smoke, drink and, surely, get laid. Meaning, I don’t carry any of this stuff when I’m feeling alone and life is making me lonely, I can always go…downtown. So in a sense, this blog post is technically flaunting my gadgets and gizmos galore and to be like my best friend, Paolo Granada Lim.

The Bag

This cheapo Highland backpack is a no-nonsense gear that  isn’t really worth writing about given that this costs around 500 pesos only. This item is so insignificant I can’t even remember when and where I bought this. I think my mother bought this for me three years ago. I am not entirely sure. But this one is serviceable and I can’t live without this one, even if it makes me look like a schoolboy, a miner, a construction worker or the fan favorite  Autobot, Bumblebee.

The Main Tool

I’ve already reviewed my netbook here. My thoughts are already poured in my review so I’d skip this one.

Device name: BESTFRIEND (Windows name your device in all caps)

Gaming Console

The PlayStation Vita is one hell of a sexy gaming beast. It is certainly overpowered for its use. Sure, I play Vita games on it, but I didn’t purchase this for self-fulfillment alone. This is my machine that I use to play Minis so that I can review them for PSPMinis.com. Also, our site is expanding very soon, but I can’t share the details yet. I certainly can, actually, and then I have to kill you. Also, you might want to visit my gaming blog, VitaMayo.com.

Device name: Vita Mayo

Portable Media Player

I recently bought an iPod Touch 4th Generation that holds a whooping 32 GB of storage. I bought my sister an iPhone 4, albeit second hand, so that I could repay her since she assisted in financing my vices allowance and tuition back in college. And then I found yet another writing project, an iOS game review site. I used my sister’s iPhone initially, but I decided to purchase my own iDevice. The project alone could recuperate the cost of the device  itself in a couple of months. I always wanted a portable media player, so here it is and I am very satisfied. Anyway, you can check my app reviews in LoadingScreens.com, my name there is Jasper Cruz. Our site is still on beta phase. Stay tuned. 

Device name: iKkin

Mobile Phone

I am not a big texter. I retired from it since 2009, I’d rather sit down and talk to people in person or outright physically date them. This year, I might want to open my life again to new possibilities, gain new friends for a change. I tried to close down my fort after a series of disappointing people ruined my perfect life. But the fact is, people won’t stop demolishing your existence so might as well BRING IT ON! Don’t act surprised to know that I am actually semi-introvert. I am never friendly, I just have manners learned from Hiraya Manawari.  I can socially adapt and can get in and out in any conversation but I don’t actually retain 99.9% of new found acquaintances because my love and care are already distributed to you, my family and friends, and that love and care can no longer be divided further, if I do, I have to love and look after you, less.

Enough drama, the point is, I text, what, five people? I just chat/flirt on Skype or FB. But of course, I still need a phone. I have a Blackberry Curve 8520, I took it from my sister after I gave her an iPhone. Fair trade. God, the Blackberry keyboard is orgasmic, I can actually feel pleasure typing on it. I tried using touchscreen phones, it is a struggle. Also, Blackberry is very useful for emails, calendars and organizing things, God I so love it, it is perfect for productivity. I do have plans to upgrade, I’d look for a Blackberry Curve with 3G capabilities. The 8520 is EDGE-only, what the fuck is this? 2004? What? I’m gonna use WAP? Rico Yan endorsed WAP. Like Rico Yan, WAP is dead, get over it.

And for backup I have this 800 pesos worth of Samsung Phone that’s so cheap it doesn’t have a name. It has an autonomy up to a week after a single charge if you only text, and around 5 days if you call every now and then. Very nice, this is actually a bundle handset for my Smart postpaid plan. But Smart Telecom is shitty. I cut myself out of the contract.

Device name: Berry Good (Blackberry Curve 8520),  —–’s Dildo (Samsung katabs phone, it has this name because, honestly, a girl from Christina Nights, rubbed her breasts with this phone for no apparent reasons)

Miscellaneous

Notepad. I find it difficult not having an analog diary journal. It is not actually a journal, it is a ledger/appointment/ reminder / contact book, the ultimate slasher. I should get a proper ledger because finances just can’t mix up with other things. Even if I divide the notepad evenly, the financial data would soon take over the entire notepad. Truly, nothing makes the world go round but money.

Life would be perfect if…

I have a point-and-shoot camera. I don’t take pictures because I don’t know how to make one. My hand-and-eye coordination isn’t functional, I can’t hold the camera still, and it’s super tiring shooting photographs. I am not into photography at all, even if you give me a DSLR I’d give it back to you (or better yet, sell it), I have no use for it. I just need a point-and-shoot camera because Vita’s, iPod Touch’s and Blackberry’s cameras are like mills, full of grains. And I don’t have photographs of myself recently and the places I visited, and moments I made. So sad. I need a camera so that I could ask someone to take photographs of me.

I don’t believe in the notion that when you love yourself too much, you are selfish. Nope. Selfish people actually don’t love themselves enough, or at all. Being selfish is like being happy for someone else’s misery because you have to take something away from anyone or hold out something from other people in order to feel better. Either case, it’s essentially stealing. Unless he/she clearly deserves it, that’s just being low. And  that’s demeaning for one’s worth, you know, to stoop that low.

Loving one’s self is the only activity in the world that is healthy when done excessively. Why? Because believe it or not, you are alone in every single thing you feel. When you’re hurt, you are the only one that actually feels that throbbing pain. Don’t believe those people saying that they feel you, no, they aren’t hurt seeing you hurt, they are angry, sad or emotionally blackmailed. And if you are happy, people are not happy for you, they are proud of themselves seeing you happy because “Hey, happy person, yey!” And to be truthful, they are just sighing with relief not to hear another whine, rant, sob, and/or dramatic monologue from you. Sometimes, two or three of your friends are asking inside their heads, “Where did he/she get his/her source? Probably high-grade, fresh picked, kinda wet”. Yes, this specific. There is only one test to make sure that you love yourself enough. Here it is, answer this question honestly,

Do you love me?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

I’ve received several emails from one of my clients stating, basically, to burn the house down. Apparently, Google is changing its search algorithm. All of the established SEO practices are obsolete, not really obsolete, but do not carry much weight in the search rankings. This is all speculation, but we’ve seen this coming. Google changes the rules of the game once everyone learns how to play the game.

I just bullet point the changes because I’m lazy:

• Comment linking (the Name/URL method) plays little in the ranking game. I don’t think this method will ever become obsolete. This is the easy way to introduce your sites to other people. Write a good comment and then people would click the link that goes with your name.
• In-content, Body links is the new king. Footer links, sidebar links ain’t that royal anymore. The former is always the greatest way to rank in the search engines and acquire visitors. I think people are starting to get blind in the footer and sidebar links, anyway.
• Thin, static websites take a backseat. – Agree with this, this ain’t 1999 anymore.
• Web Design ranks too! - expect graphics artists, web designers, WP/Joomla Theme creators to receive fatter (more fatter than they are already receiving) paychecks now.

It seems like the changes are nothing really drastic. I just didn’t list everything and expound further because, good god, the changes are big enough that every little work I did since September last year, goes to the trash can. I’m starting over again. This is just ludicrous.

The Killing is like a relationship. At the beginning, it is mysterious. Then later on, it is already tedious. At first, the show is focused on one thing, solving the murder of Rosie Larsen, everything else is less important. In season 2, the agony is prolonged, things got complicated, too many people are getting involved. Don’t ask me, I am also confused if I am describing The Killing or a relationship.

Last night,

Friend 1: You can’t acquire AIDS from kissing.

Friend 2: You’re dead! You always f*ck everyone! (to Friend 3 who has chronic erectile dysfunction, just to be very clear.)

Me: NOT everyone! *Patented Jasper Nikki LOLing in the Deep*

Friend 3: That’s the positive side of having erectile dysfunction, lower risk of having AIDS.

All: Scandalous laughter.

…and we were barely drunk.

The original Cebuano conversation,

‘Gaw 1: Di man ka magka-AIDS sa haluk lang.

‘Gaw 2: Patay ka! Di baya haluk lang imuha, gi-iy*t baya nimu tanan!

Ang Kinagwapohang Ako: Dili tanan!

‘Gaw 3: Mao na ang positive side ana, di ko magka-AIDS!

Make me happy, like this happy.

It’s official, I’m in my prime. I am now legal at 21 years old. Greeting me on my birthday is not enough, you should be grateful too, thank your personal gods that they’ve allowed you to meet me. Now, imagine if I didn’t crash into your life. Sad. Things only get worse from there. Look at everyone who doesn’t know me personally. Aren’t you all lucky? I know, life goes on for them, but it isn’t as fun, as meaningful as your time being with me.

Now, where are my gifts?!!?!?!?!?!

I may blog often, and work too hard, play lots of video games, watch lots of movies and scripted TV shows, read books, but it doesn’t mean I don’t have a life. I often go out with my friends, playing basketball, drinking, smoking, doing drugs (joke!) and beings, and much more. Because of my constant mingling and tingling, I often cross paths with people I don’t like crossing paths ever again.

Friendship’s meaning is getting over-saturated, just like love, because everyone tags everyone as a “friend” . Friendship, like love, should be special, exclusive. Give it to everyone and you are a whore, no, a slut, because you don’t get paid. It’s a myth, how many times do I have to repeat this, I am not friendly. I just function with basic human decency, it has nothing to do with me trying to befriend you.

Oftentimes, somebody joins our table during our drinking sprees somewhere, everywhere, be it a friend, an acquaintance of  my friend or my friend’s friend’s acquaintance. I know, it’s a basic social contract among males to share their sex lives for the lulz. But, if I just met you ten minutes ago and you share your sexperience, God damn you. I have vivid imagination and you just poisoned my entire right brain hemisphere. Also, respect those girls please, they’ve already done the disrespecting to themselves by doing you.

I like sharing sex stories (if you are my friend) because it’s fun to hear all of those erectile dysfunctions, hiding under the bed for 16 hours because the older sister came home unexpectedly storylines, etc. etc. Meanwhile, if you are not my friend, stop. Don’t make it sound like porn, because let’s face it, we’ve tried, it’s difficult to pull off pornographic moves, with all the spasms and slippages.

The point is, I don’t add people in Facebook the moment I arrive home after meeting them. I don’t ask for their numbers the first day, or like, forever. I only ask for their numbers if it’s strictly business or you gained your place in my phonebook. In fact, I don’t have numbers of my friends, and if I do, I rarely text them. What qualifies as a friend for me really is, we’ve done great things together, but never each other.

On that note, Simon, my best friend like Paolo Granada Lim, who is able to recover from his heartaches by bodybuilding, observed that it’s difficult for him to find me a girlet because he does not have any idea of  my type. He said, it’s too inconsistent basing on the girls I’ve dated. But one thing for sure, I didn’t date, ever, girls within my intellectual wavelength. I easily denied this, but after 2 nanoseconds, I did agree. Girls within my wavelength end up being my friends. I hate to extinguish a relationship of eternal amazing conversations just to follow an urge that gets quenched in a matter of minutes. I do my f*cking to someone else, in my own time.

Before Sunrise

Two people talking and walking, and I am not interested in whatever they are talking about. If I am looking for European scenery, I’d rather Google stock photos of the continent. The movie is essentially about two boring people boring each other to death they deserve each other.

Brokeback Mountain

I didn’t endure this movie because it’s gay, per se. I just hate the—clouds running in the skies—sudden cuts t—river flowing—o nature and it’s a jar—Heath Ledger leaning back as shadows slowly creep all aroun—F*CK YOU!

Cars

I love Pixar to death. I cried watching Toy Story 3. I died watching Cars.

Troy

Essentially, Troy is a glorified bikini open aimed to insult literate people.  I have yet to finish Illiad in its entirety but I am very familiar with the myth (Thanks to you, Edith Hamilton). It’s alright to condense, modify literature so that the source would have better transition into another medium, but Troy‘s treatment with the myth is like Noli Me Tangere directed by Michael Bay. I didn’t understand, this should have been an epic war movie and the next thing I know, I was on my way to Pindasan.

Black Swan

I was excited. I was waiting for the lesbian sex scene, and then I switched to porn.

Paasa Near the Windmill

The Walking Dead Season Two ended around three weeks ago, and now I have to break my silence. Lori is a psychotic p*ssy for rent and should die already. In one episode, she channeled Lady Macbeth to subtly suggest to Rick that they’ve got to get rid of Shane immediately. And then later, when Shane and Rick got their issues sorted out by the highly effective fistfight like it’s highschool life, Lori approached Shane near the windmill and recited mixed signals ramblings that can be reduced to being paasa.

These push-and-pull maneuverings are not for 30-something, Lori. Grow up, or return to Prison Break.

Shane is my favorite character in this series because we definitely share the same qualities and issues both from within and other people’s affliction to us. We even share the same principles. Always, I strongly agree to every single Shane decision / proposal.

As soon as there’ll be a zombie apocalypse, I’ll be more Shane than that pacifist Rick. And I’ll never fall for another Lori again.

I am a hardworking freelance writer. I’ve taken in so many projects, my relatives are already asking me if I have been secretly supporting my hidden children. First, I don’t have children to feed and, consequently, its mother to bribe in order for her to shut up and preserve my status quo.

Second, this is not about my personal life. This blog post is about a very handy tool, very useful for people who have serious web-based projects.

One of my projects is maintaining (and of course, writing for) over 400 domains with WordPress as their CMS. Granted, most of these domains are just variants of the same site, it’s just ludicrous to f*cking memorize hundreds of combinations of login credentials! And that’s just one of my several projects all running at the very same time; not including my social networks, my blogs, my emailssssssss, my online collaboration tools and so much more. It’s very dangerous to assign just one password for all of these things, because if one of them gets breached, it’s over.

Meanwhile, I’ve been using LastPass to manage my login credentials because I don’t want saving them in the browser themselves for two reasons. One, browsers are not that secure if you surf around porn and arguably copyright infringing websites. And second, sure you can import your credentials from browser to browser but you are just making it worse.

LastPass is a password management solution that allows you to build a cloud-based database of all of your credentials. You then have to download their extension, plugin, whatever the browser calls it, and then login your LastPass credentials there and you can now autofill / autologin forms in a few clicks. It’s the Inception of passwords.

LastPass promises to encrypt your master password (and all of your passwords and credentials) with 256-bit AES encryption jargon, I don’t understand. Of course, I could spoil the fun with skepticism but since convenience is better than security, why not?

I am joking. There is really no safe method in handling your passwords most especially if it’s done digitally. My practice in handling this situation is proven effective; I didn’t include my main email and banking logins in my LastPass database. Those two are the most important digital things to me because they hold the last fort, and my money. If, God forbid, my LastPass account gets compromised, I could excuse myself from my clients that LastPass got hacked and it is not my fault. It also helps that they encourage me to use password management tools as opposed to writing them on notepads, digital or analog. I can easily blame this on them. HAHA.

When using LastPass, you have to logout from it everytime you are not around, or you are being an idiot to let your passwords laying all over the place uncovered. Better yet, have your own computer, with your own profile that no one can access except you. Like every good things in life, I just love LastPass for the convenience, nothing more.