3rd time in vancouver

I'm finally back in Vancouver, third time around. I'm now staying at one of the homestays here... and I have a nice big closet and room. It's definitely a change from where I used to live. This time around, I'm paying more, but I get the comforts of having privacy. So far so good, though of course, some times I still think that I might have made a mistake. Living back in Fraser Street with my grandparents was nice too. But I guess at times we really do have to make a choice, and I made this choice to live separately from them in the mean time. And it's always a risk.

Anyway... let's see how I adjust further to this new place. It's been just 3 days. Let's see how it goes.

On a happier note, Olympic fever is hitting the city and I am excited as I'm planning to go walk around downtown this coming weekend with my aunt (and I'm staying overnight in Fraser). The opening is on friday night and there are tons of activities in downtown Vancouver! Can't wait! I'm already thinking of buying souvenir items! When's the next time I'll be in an Olympic city anyway?

Paano Na Kaya

Got to watch "Paano Na Kaya" last Sunday with my friend, friend's sister, and friend's yaya (complete!). For those who do not know, this movie is the second major film release of Kim Chiu and Gerald Anderson, the first one being "I've Fallen For You", years ago, which was a major flop. I just have to remind myself that I dragged Chase to watch that movie at Shangrila during prime time and lo and behold, we were the only ones in the movie house. I guess that pretty much says that movie was a flop! But this time around, it was different. We went to watch in Glorietta 4 and there was a line! We ended up watching from the second row.

The movie's not too bad. Although we felt like we were watching Mano Po at times (I guess whenever Ricky Davao talks Chinese), the movie's overall entertaining. Kim and Gerald's really grown up and I think they really did good on this one. I guess from the soap's they've been in, their acting skills have been honed. Still not comparable to John Lloyd and Bea's "One More Chance" (My favorite btw), but still not a bad movie. There were funny moments, and there were kilig moments - especially with the bunch of teenage girls sitting behind us, kilig na kilig - with matching sipa sa upuan ko!

Would I recommend it? I will have to, especially to those who are avid watchers of Filipino drama and love story movies like myself. However, I still don't like their movie poster - mukhang fake.

paying more for space

For the past two years I've gone to Canada, and for a couple of months for each year, I stayed at my grandparent and aunt's place. It has really helped me save a lot more of my per diem because I only gave minimal amount of monthly "fees". For example, compared if I were to rent out or do a homestay, I would probably spend roughly around 750$ per month, while I only spend 300$ when I stay with them. Not to mention the fact that they provide me with pretty much everything (including doing my laundry! hehe).

However, for this third time I'm going, I've been thinking a lot about renting out. You see, one of the main reasons why I'd like to opt to rent outside is because I don't have much privacy at their place. You see, it's a small place, fit for the 3 of them, but not enough room for a +1 (me!). I only stay in the living room, and the thing is, since the place is a condo/apartment, my grandparents, wake up early, and so I have to wake up early too. I guess my main concern was the lack of privacy and space. If I'm vacationing, the setup would be ok, but if I come back all the time, and stay for 3 months at a time, that might be a bit hard, not just for me, but for them too. If I am adjusting, I am pretty sure they are making adjustments from their end too!

And so now that I think about it, I'd like to pay extra to get that space, and remove that burden to them (although they would say I'm not a "burden").

I'm not sure if I'm doing the right thing, but I am justifying my decision also based on the fact that I believe when I do rent out, I will grow more independent as I have to do more of the stuff by myself. Will be harder, but a better training ground for me to grow up.

A couple more days left and I haven't decided still.

Now if I rent out, I have two options - with food (homestay), and with no food (just rent out). I'd say I'd be spending roughly 600$ for the no food, while my monthly expense for the homestay will be around 750$ (including breakfast, lunch and dinner).

I know I want to be independent, but homestay is tempting. I just have to clean my room and do laundry.

Decisions. I'm getting quite excited with me "moving out". I feel like I'm growing up.

jam packed weekend

It's ironic how I was just writing about my "relax" work days, when in just a few days after that, I ended up having an all-night-all-day work weekend.

We had a huge release last weekend and even during pre deployments, we already ran into a whole lot of different issues. That must've been a premonition because during the actual release night, we encountered this huge issue (something to do with caching). Luckily, we have great teammates who helped us out in figuring out what was wrong - we woke them up around 4 am in the morning :). And business gave us time to get it fixed before doing a rollback. Good thing we got that extra time as we finally got it to work!

I was awake friday to saturday morning (in Pacific time), and then had to support another release happening saturday night to sunday morning (in Pacific time too).

Crazy weekend, but in the end, we pulled thru. We have some production issues, but no showstoppers, which is a good thing. So in order for me to go back to relax mode, I had all my fixes fixed and deployed yesterday so that QA and UAT may test it and eventually we could get it redeploy and promoted to Production by next week.

What a weekend. I think it was only yesterday I caught up with sleep - I slept for 10 hours. :) I'm taking the day off this coming friday. I need to make some time for Chase this weekend. I haven't seen him for almost a week and half!

some free time

I've had little development task over the past two weeks, which is a good thing because I haven't really had this much free time compared to last quarter of 2009. The free time has allowed me to watch tv, eat, sleep, etc. Just kidding! The free time has actually gotten me to work on my other random tasks at work, like improving our alarming system, fixing up some shell scripts I've had hanging around, etc. It's always nice to get something done that's been pending for quite a while because you've been prioritizing the projects before these "subtasks" but which may also be equally as important.

Aside from that, I've gotten better long and uninterrupted sleep this week compared to the past two weeks.

I feel quite good. Maybe since last weekend's release is done, and there's only one more release left for this month (this coming weekend), I'm very much looking forward to relaxing more.

I've also started listing down the things I'll be needing for my travel this coming Feb. Better be ready now than last minute (I experienced that the first time)!

pig out at dampa

Our team has been recognized in our department for one of the projects that was successfully implemented to Production (it was a 2 year project). As a reward, the big boss went to treat the whole team out for lunch. However, since some of us are back here in Manila and we can't join them over there in Canada, our manager gave us a budget of around 50$ per head so we can go out and enjoy ourselves here. :) 50$ per head... pretty big... that's around 2000 per person and there were four of us, bringing the total of 8000 pesos budget.

So we were deciding where to eat and stuff ourselves... we had a ton of choices but we ended up going to Dampa. This way, not only do we enjoy seafood fest, but we got to order probably one of the most expensive dishes there is - 1.5kg Lobster. Holy crap it was so big! That cost us 2700 (just for the lobster). We had it separated, lobster soup and the lobster itself. We also had huge lapu-lapu fish (costs us around 1000+ just for the fish), crab, shrimp, mussels, beef and broccoli and liempo. This was probably one of the best meals I've ever had!!! And you know what, we almost finished all of it. The liempo wasn't that good, but the rest were awesome.

Here's before it was cooked:


Here's after it was cooked:


Here's the team: The huge lapu-lapu hasn't come out yet at this point!

thoughts on haiti earthquake

When I initially heard about the Haiti earthquake, I thought that it may have damaged a couple of structures only, but as news came pouring in, I didn't expect it to be so much more tragic. Just watching the events uncover there, the pictures, breaks my heart. We just feel so helpless.

What's heart breaking is that a lot survived the quake, but a lot has also died because there was no immediate medical aide available at once. As Doctors Without Borders says... "Patients who were not critical only three days ago are now in critical phases. This means that people will die from preventable infections. It's horrible."

This is just sad.

Such a poor country, recently hit by a hurricane, and now a devastating earthquake. Of course, government is partly to blame as they probably didn't have building codes to ensure that structures are well built. But I guess there's no point in pointing fingers now. At least from what we see from this tragedy, we see people stepping up to help. As for us who are left watching the news for updates, let's just continue praying for the best to the people of Haiti.