Yesterday was May 14 and here in the Philippines that’s election day for the senatorial and local government candidates. Based on my experience so far on election day, I wasn’t excited at all. You see back in 2004, it was the first elections I was eligible to vote in. It was the presidential elections too so that made me even more excited to vote. I made it a point to register so I could vote. But come election day back in 2004, I couldn’t find my name registered anywhere. Feeling cheated of my constitutional right, I went home feeling dejected. I know deep in my heart that the only obvious reason was my vote got stolen (bastards!). Election fraud in this country by the administration is amazingly blatant it’s fantastic. Yet they still manage to get away with it.

So I woke up yesterday morning feeling skeptical and sure enough I didn’t find my name anywhere. I was told I just need to register again. I’ll do that but that’s no assurance I’ll get to vote again when the time comes. I feel like I’ll forever be screwed over and repetitively denied of my constitutional right! My message to our dear administration: F*ck you!

Here in the Philippines, paying 750-800 pesos a month just to play a game could be a steep price to pay. But if you’re talking about the MMORPG World of Warcraft, it’s actually very cheap entertainment. Yes that’s how much I have to pay to play that game and I have absolutely no regrets. Sometimes I think that $15 my fellow online gamers in the US pay is a LOT cheaper than what I have to pay since I always think that the average joe who works for $8 an hour can pay for his WoW bill in just two hours of work (ok I know he has to pay for other stuff but still). Here in the Philippines, 800 pesos is not even a day’s pay for minimum wage workers here. Due to this thinking, I used to think that I had a pretty expensive “hobby” in my hands… then my friends started taking up airsoft war games.

You see two of my closest friends are currently first time teachers at our high school alma mater and they needed some kind of outlet to vent all the negative energy from the kids and complaining parents and faculty room drama at work. They chose airsoft. Basically it’s war games with pellet guns. I was kind of shocked to find out how much they spend on that hobby. Compared to the few thousands of pesos they spend, I now think my $15 a month playing WoW is a hobby well spent on. I can interact with a lot of people from all over the world just like what I currently do as part of b5media! I’d rather do that than risk getting shot in the ass by a pellet. =p

Hi guys! Do you live in the Philippines and are a book fan? If the answer is yes then you might be interested in visiting Readnow, a blog written by my friend Vincent Ong about the latest books hitting Philippine shores. The blog is supported by National Bookstore and will also include advanced book reviews and even the nook’s suggested retail price and arrival date. This is a great opportunity for all Philippine book lovers to know more about the books they would love to have and read! Visit Readnow now!

The reason why I haven’t been active here is because I got my copy of World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade already and have been leveling my level 60 character towards 70. I’m still just 63 while a huge number of m guild mates are already 70 or real close to it. I just want to say that the experience of playing the expansion is really great! I think as that as far as designing the new zones that I’ve seen so far, Blizzard has outdone themselves. Now back to playing… scram! =p

It’s been about a week since the World of Warcraft expansion The Burning Crusade has been released and I still don’t have it. It’s frustrating to see pretty much my whole guild playing the expansion content (some of them are already around level 64, 65) while I’m stuck playing the old content. Because of this I stopped playing my main who’s a mage and I decided to continue leveling an alt warlock I made long ago. This way I won’t really feel that I’m missing much since I’m leveling using the old content.

But the fact is I still don’t have it and I’m really sad I don’t. My cousin from the US is supposed to get me a copy and mail it here and I’m getting really restless waiting for the day it comes in the mail. This is one time I really wish that real world mail works like the in game mail of WoW. You send something and in one hour the recipient get is it. This way once she mails it me I won’t have to wait long. But alas it doesn’t work that way and that really sucks.

Our dog Hondo is a Boston Terrier and I always thought he looked like a bunny especially when he was younger. Here’s proof:

Shimon Carrots, Leora’s Bunny

Hondo, the Boston Terrier

See! Bunny!

It’s been quite a while already since that earthquake hit Taiwan, causing connections from the Philippines to be heck slow. Things are much much better now since I expect things are being done to fix the situation but it’s still not 100%. I can’t wait for things to get back to normal so I don’t need to worry about whether I’ll be able to check my mail, make blog posts and even play World of Warcraft hehe.

Speaking of slow internet, I think it’s causing some problems with Gmail. I tried mailing a few pictures a while ago and it was taking forever I just gave up. I ended up sending the pics through yahoo mail instead just now.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m part of a blog network called b5media where I blog about the NBA. I just want to promote another b5 blog called Literally Blogging since it has been taken over by a good friend and classmate since elementary Jan Vincent Ong. Check it out. I think Jan is a great fit for that blog. He has the literary geeky-ness and passion appropriate for a Lit blog.

I noticed I’ve been neglecting to update this for a a few days and that’s because of two things.

1. World of Warcraft

A few months back I temporarily quit the game because of my poor vision but I quickly realized that it’s worth a try to “game test” my vision to see if it can handle the game once more. To my joy I found out that my vision is not just good enough to solo but to party up and do some player versus player and some instance raiding too. My vision is far from what it used to but then it’s good enough for wow.

2. Cousins from the US

A few days ago my cousins from the US came over after about 3 or 4 years of not seeing them. Naturally I had to spend time with them. This kept e away from my blogging and my gaming for about a day or two but that’s a cheap price to pay to spend time with the cousins I missed so much.

With this blog being just a day old (just imported to wordpress yesterday) I had make a change to the template that I was pretty happy with… until I decided I wanted my sloganizer back. It never really occurred to me that since my old template had the sidebars on the left side my sloganizer would interfere with my posts. I went looking for a nice elegant looking template that had the sidebars on the right side and this is what you see now.