Written Contusions

Hey! I've been busy applying to be an online tutor this past week so I know I will be very busy, busy, busy! I've finished my initial interview and my simulations. I've also done my revisions on the work I've been set and hopefully, I get the position. I can't wait to be employed there.

What they do is they comment on essays to help students rewrite them better. Isn't it neat? Hopefully, that will also spur me in the proper path to writing once again.

By the way, I am revising my older blog, Tales of the Wayward Traveler: The Devil's Mirror and the other Devil's Implements, so be sure to check them out when I am done. It seems that those blogs were never really me except for the times they were not yet the Devil's Implements.

Literally, I've thrown the idea off of a bridge here in Cavite and what a splash! Hahaha. Stay tuned!

It seems like the Devil's Mirror is soon to shatter.

Earlier, when I was riding my homeward jeep, I thought crept up my tumultuous mind. Freedom! Beauty! Truth and Love!!! That was a line from the movie Moulin Rouge and it kept on flourishing in my minds ear. Since I was not able to shrug it off, what I did was to listen intently to what it was saying.

Hello there! I'm taking a break from my usual blogskin-making mode today. I think I had too much to drink after 3 days of not sleeping so I have to take it easy today. Looking back at it though, I haven't drunk alcohol for a long time now. Two bottles easily made me tipsy.

Well, enough about me. I am actually putting a post here so I could feature my new found addiction, Maitri's blog called Magic and Moments from Dragonfly Cottage. Maitri Libellule is a writer, a pet keeper of all sorts and a wonderful gardener. I hope at this point, you have already made an effort to click the link already and has already seen what I mean.

This new blog addiction I developed started just a month ago. I was in such a turmoil, emotionally, then and I wanted to clear my head. I remembered that I went to this certain blog of a woman who had such a passion for her writing and also about life so I immediately used all my powers (meaning Google) to search for her blog once again.

The initial hook that caught me was her profile:

Maitri is a writer, an independent publisher, and a fiber artist. She lives with 6 parrots, 4 dogs, a beta fish named Vincent, and is an avid gardener. Maitri's work and life are centered in works of compassion and loving kindness. You can see the entire scope of her work on her 9 year old site, dragonflycottage.com. She is also currently working on a book called "The Road To Dragonfly Cottage," The parrots, pugs, big dog and beta fish will all help of course.

Her pets will help her in her work!!! What a wonderful thing to read on an extra sad day! So after reading that, I started inching my way through her posts. The very first post I read on her blog was Every Night I Go To Bed Laughing! which was about how her pugs cheered her up. Being a pet lover as well, I went on reading and the rest was history.

In my heart, I found that her writing kept my spirit still. Simple words and heartfelt gratitude to the many blessings of Life are the two best things I found on her blog. Hearing (or rather, reading) about what makes your day wonderful actually has such a powerful impact on the psyche that it can actually make other people happy. I've tried doing that in the past but sorrow has overtaken me yet again. This is a reminder to start doing a gratitude journal once again.

Additionally, her writing about her pets always has some happy factor in it that makes me laugh. Compared to Maitri, I am actually a cat lover but I still find her pug entries fun. Dogs still has some charm over me but I would rather prefer cats over dogs. Here at home, we also have some sort of a zoo going on. We have a cat named Doggie. My sister named her like that because my aunt called her Muning (Tagalog name for almost every cat a Filipino family could have). The cat recently gave birth so we also have 3 kittens. We also have a cage full of love birds (budgies actually). Then there are the 3 mynas (Sweetheart, Honey and Darling), the 2 cockatiels, 2 sparrows (I really don't know what they are really), the dogs (Taneki, named after one of my louder aunts who's nickname is NekNek; Aladar, yes from the movie Dinosaur; and Bogart; Seph, our german shepherd, recently passed away), the monkeys (Takeshi and Kail), my dragonfin fish (Jetsam), the goldfishes, and the hamsters. If you will notice, Maitri and I have almost the same number of pets.

Unfortunately for me, I cannot post the pictures of our pets here because I have a deadly curse that I couldn't break. When I take a picture of a pet, the pet dies. So sorry for not posting my pets' pictures.

And then, there is this little thing she calls her garden. Take a look at her banner. Maitri's house is so gloriously covered around with flowers! I love it. She also takes photographs of her plants. Her profile picture has one, if you've noticed.

The last time that I read through her blog was just 2 days ago. Sadly, her mother has become ill and considering her age, might not live through it. I ask that everybody pray for her and Maitri as well. Pray to give strength in this most trying of times.

I hope you are reading this Maitri. Hugs!

Good afternoon!

Wow! Look at me! I have made another skin in just two days. This is very productive for me, considering that I have been neglecting my personal blogs for a long while now. Although I post on them from time to time, I really enjoy writing here in my interest site.

I guess, the reason why I enjoy posting here is because I am a visual person. I enjoy looking at things presented in an organized manner. I prefer colors compared to rhymes. I even remember book pages that has a weird pattern when you look only at the blank spaces. Hahaha! Weird , huh? !

More over, I find it easier to do layouts instead of poetry or prose because it really doesn't take out too much of my energies. With skins, you just have to make your web browser follow your tags and that is it! Compared to, let's say, poetry, I would have to think about how to cut lines, think of appropriate words and maintain logic while whittling metaphors in.

*static in the air*

And I just thought of something.... Most people don't really read poetry. On a site, they just skim and skim until something catches their fancy. At that point, they begin to read. So I guess I just really gave up one passion for another.

Fret not my friends. The Language has not left me in silence yet. I still have the skills, it's just skins I want to do right now.

And with that, I leave you with my latest skin, Fantasy Love.

Skin peeling is always good. Not only does it shed your blemishes off, it also shows that everyday, we change, and mostly, it's for the better! Cheers!

-this is statement that is so out of line, I am amazed that I still kept it here.

Skin making. Sounds like something freaky and grotesque to me. Maybe because it reminds me of Hannibal Lecter and the things that he could do.

What I meant was how to make blog skins. On an earlier post, I have reminded myself that I would give credit to the people and sites that have contributed in my skin making activities so here's a quick rundown of my essential sites when I make my skins.

The following are more technical; these are my references and my tools when I am doing my html coding.

1. W3SCHOOLS - Whenever I have doubt about my html coding or when I forget what attribute to put in a particular css, I go to this site. W3SCHOOLS have helped me a lot to become the skin maker that I am. This is where I truly learned to write html and css. As I always say, "When in doubt, log on to W3SCHOOLS!"
2. Real-Time HTML Editor - This is where I usually do all my coding because I can see how my skin would look like instantly. True to its name, you will really see the codes rendering right before your eyes. But of course, there's the good old fashioned notepad-save-ie-refresh style but this site makes life a lot easier for me.

Onto the artistic side, meaning, where I get most of my background-images, buttons, gradients, etc.

1. Wallpaper Abyss - They say "Thousands of free Wallpaper[s]" and it really is true. How wonderful to see a dizzying amount of art all in one site. I give them credit for being able to compile such a wide assortment of wallpapers.
2. GRSites - If I'm looking for gradients, banners, fonts, buttons and background textures, this is where I go. I use this mainly because of how easy it is that I remember the site name and it's easy to navigate this site. In addition to that, storage of your logo or button can actually be done on site so no problem when you get the url for the src="" of your <img> tag.
3. flickr - For my images, I use flickr most of the time because I can easily get the url for the image I want to use and it has 10MB of storage/mo so I don't get into storage space problems.
4. Here's a quick rundown of my other image online sources: DeviantArt, Flaming Text, Cool Text, Google Image Search, Yahoo and all the other search engines out there.
5. For photo editing, I use the basics like Microsoft Paint and for major alterations, Adobe Photoshop.
6. For a quick and consistent color scheme, I always use the Palette Generator from Big Huge Labs associated with flickr. Although I didn't use the Blog Header from BHL, I would also like to recommend that for a quick and no sweat blog header image.

Now, onto hosting. Of course, I wouldn't have it any other way, I put my skins on BlogSkins and you can find me there. Be my friend there and let's help other people beautify their blogs! Blogging of course is done through Blogger, although you could use other free blogging clients like WordPress, Tabulas, and LiveJournal.

As I was going through my daily surfing I came across this previous work of mine. I think the image will say it all.

Here's another thought:

"You don't have the right to ruin my day! Only I have the right!"

Ok, so the impact is lost in translation. That quote originally was thought of in Tagalog so here's how it should really go:

"Wala kang karapatang sirain ang araw ko! Ako lang!"

As my close friends know, I am more of a sarcastic joker. Most of the time, I get to the punch line in the manner of delivery (so forgive me if it seems to be an arrogant statement).

Actually, this is part of my subliminal suggestions to myself to not be so damn angry all the time. Partly, also a reminder to everybody that we all have choices; a choice not to be let down by other people. In fact, nobody can make you feel bad about yourself or just about anything. It's only you who can ruin your day by letting other people get to you. So whenever people start bitch slapping you... you know the line to say and you know where you heard it from.

One of my fave singers have just released a new song! Yey!

It's called Can You Hear Me. It made me happy to hear this song so here I am sharing this to everybody. Waah! I'm into soccer frenzy when I hear this song!

Ok so as promised, I have a new skin called No Time Left. This is in BlogSkins once again (a lot simpler, I already put my personal touch on this blog, obviously). I know the thumbnail (it's a pretty big thumbnail, alright!) is blurry but the current skin today is that skin so please forgive me.

This is in tribute to my dearly departed friend, Pits. I just figured that there really is no time but now. If we are to do the things we should be doing, better now than later. I hope people will like this.

Honestly, I took too long to make this skin because I wanted to find the perfect banner for this skin. Good thing I don't tire easily when browsing for this (although it took me about two days of hunting). The original picture was black and white so I also did some tweaking on this image. Of course, my favorite color is green so I made it greenish and then, lo and behold! Purple managed to weasel it's way in to the palette. Hahaha! Don't get me wrong, I like the color puple (sounded like Oprah's movie). It's just that it reminds me of eggplants whenever I see those two colors together.

By the way, I almost forgot. Thanks to the Palette Generator on Big Huge Labs for helping me be as consistent as possible, in terms of the colors on my skins. I always have to remind myself on some things. This is a reminder to put a page for my skin making tools here in this blog.

Here's the link to my No Time Left skin.

On a lighter, less blog related note, I was watching MYX yesterday and I saw Enrique Iglesias with a new video. It's called Can You Hear Me. Read more on this at The Devil's Pen.

Here's another skin that I made for Blogger. Again, this is posted on BlogSkins and for this skin, nobody rated this yet. I know it's sad. But anyway, you can still download this here.

So this other one is actually harder to make because I had to process the image. The toucan was supposed to have black feathers and an orange and yellow beak. However, I found black too depressing at the time so I got trusty old MS Paint and just inverted the color and cropped the image.

After a few lines of html and css, there you have it. This is just pretty mediocre for me because this skin and the Garden skin I posted prior to this were actually the first two that I had the guts to publish on BlogSkins.

As always, comments are appreciated, especially those that can change me for the better.

I have nothing to really blog about today so I just decided to put the older skins that I have already made from blogskins here.

This is a pretty simple skin called Garden because I wanted to have orange flowers when I get to build my own garden. Too bad for me, I haven't gotten around to saving enough money for that. According to BlogSkins, I got 89 downloads of this skin so far and I got 4.5 stars (not too bad considering the highest score is 5 stars) for this particular skin. This is available to download on BlogSkins. Here's the link to my Garden skin.

Basically this has 2 columns, one for a sidebar on the left side and of course, the posts on the right. When I was making this, I also put a background music but I left it out since it's too tedious to host it on the web.

Skins for July! Got tow already!!!

• No Time Left - posted on July 2, 2008. In memory of Pits.
• Fantasy Love - posted on July 5, 2008. Addictive! This is the current skin!

As I was going home, I was contemplating the sad fact that I have stumbled into a blogskin writer's block. Most probably because I have been dumbfounded as to what images or theme I would need to use and how to execute the layout.

I have two kinds of layout in mind: a, is to make it professional and light but heavy on CSS or b, to make it image heavy but light on css and embellishment. Since I am bogged down by such a dilemma, I went foraging for blogskin ideas thru the links that I could click on by MyBlogLog.

As I was doing that, I visited one of my contacts there. Her name is Robyn Tippins. You can click on her link on the previous sentence to go to her profile in MyBlogLog. As I was saying, I read her post on Practical Blogging about blog monetization and I found it so interesting. I mean who wouldn't want to earn money just by blogging... right? My eyes displayed dollar signs and I even heard ka-chings! from my pc speakers while I was reading the posts.

I felt greedy and wanted to do the steps that she proposed on there. I was tempted to visit the links that she posted but I remembered one crucial thing... I was not getting enough traffic into this blog so I went on another direction. I tried reading how to increase blog traffic on my blog.

At that point I came to stumble upon this post from EyeEarn Blog featuring 10 easy steps to follow to increase a blog's traffic.I found that step #8 is the easiest for me to do right now since I was blog surfing and I enjoyed that. Hehe! I found it very interesting and I will definitely follow the other steps listed there but I just had to tell you about those sites to help you in this crusade of getting ideas across to more people.

Ok, I've posted this, see you soon, and hopefully, I see more people going here in my blog. Everything changes, hopefully, for the better.

While I was updating my blog sometime this past week, I got a text message coming from my friend Lovie. Nung una, I was very happy to hear from her because I lost my phone due to freakin' stupidity (kwento ko na lang some other time). Anyway, she said she has some news about one of our dearest friends back in college.

When I clicked on "read" on my cel... guess what!? She said our friend Pits died.

Hindi ko na alam ang iisiipin ko. This year, dalawa nang kaibigan ko ang namatay. First was Muller. He was one of my office mates. Ngayon naman, si Pits. Kung nalungkot ako sa pagkawala ni Muller, mas malungkot ako sa pagkawala ni Pits dahil mas matagal na kaming magkakilala.

When we met, nagkasundo na kami kaagad. That was in the basketball area of LaSalle during the recruitment week for school orgs. Dahil ako ang VP for Tambayan, siyempre andun ako, manning the booth. Napakakulit na mama yan si Pits. Palatawa pa. Jokester and sometimes, the subject of his own jokes is himself. Mabait pa yan. He would attend our weekly prayer meetings and iyakan ng bayan. Pag may mga problema ang mga tao, marunong siya makinig and to give his own advice.

And then of course, there was the good times. Sa kanya ko natutunan ang katagang sprite genie (sprite na may gin). Madalas kami mag-inuman and he would even let everybody stay in his place kapag inabot na kami ng hating-gabi just to keep everybody safe.

Sabi ni Lovie, next Friday na daw ang funeral. But the thing is, nasa Binangonan ang wake and I don't know how to get there. Hopefully makapunta ako sa burol man lang.

To every body that reads this post, please play this game called High Delivery from Orisinal.com. Each flower you collect gets offered to Pit's memory.

Ok so pinost ko na nga sa blogskins tong layout na to. Guess what, I got two full star ratings. At dahil jan, I want to thank my sponsors, Wallpaper Abyss for providing such stunning backgrounds that we could use. And of course, Windows Live Writer for letting me blog without signing onto Blogger anymore.

Oh and speaking of Windows Live, I would like to let everyone know that Microsoft has this free blog publisher that you can download. To get a copy of your own Windows Live Writer, just log on to Windows Live.

Mabilis lang ang download. Pag ni-run mo na, parang nagpopost ka lang sa sarili mong blog and you still have the option of viewing your post as it will appear on your blog without publishing it yet. Same thing with photo blogging and video blogging, this program also features an easy way of uploading your media to your preffered online photo/video gallery like Picasa or Flickr. Not only that, you can also toggle between blogs that you manage especially if you have different blogs like me. I got four that I maintain at napabayaan already because tamad ako. It's a good thing about that kind of feature.

You may even post tags, and add plugins to your post. Plus, you can also add effects to the pictures to make them either pop out of the text or just plain blend them in as B&W. So there, you may actually be able to post everyday on your blog. Take it from me, super tamad ko talaga magpost. And this is my second day of posting for this blog. Hahaha! For more of the features, you can log on to the info page of Windows Live Writer.

Ok, stay tuned for the next update. Laging may nagbabago.

Ok so finally me desisyon na akong ginawa. Magboblog na lang ako ng mga blog skins na likha ko. Alam mo na, trip trip lang. Dito ko ilalagay sa blog na ito ang mga bago kong blog skins dahil simula pa nung una akong natutong magblog, andami ko na nagawang skin, kaya lang nawala na ang mga yon.

Dito ko ibubuhos ang aking kaadikan sa pag gawa ng mga blog skins. Bwahaha!

Kung sisipagin, magiging source din 'to ng mga skins for all other blogging sites, or at least ng Multiply.... *evil look at Multiply* Bwahahaha...

Now, as the first installment of my blog skinning (weh... bagong term ba yon?), here's what I call Artistic Kabuki na inspired by the anime Amatsuki. Here's a screen shot:

Looks family diba? E kung di ka rin naman pala tung@k... e yan ang skin ng blog na to ngayon e. If you like this, pwede mo to idownload from blogskins and click mo lang ang title ng skin na to. Bayad ko ha... ehhehe, siyempre joke lang, this is all shareware, just don't say you made it because hell knows, ako ang gumawa nito, and if I go to hell now, I've already made a deal with the devil, kapalit ng pagbalik ko sa lupa, ay ang kaluluwa ng laksa-laksang taong kinaiinisan ko at gumawa ng mali laban sa akin. Just give me my due credit. Hindi ako madamot. There, enjoy na lang sa pagdownload nito. Hopefully, I will make an impact in your blog.

So folks, stay tuned, maraming magbabago. Lahat naman diba?

I am still in my literary slump. Still a blank page.

I am burning my lungs out... smoke... dying neurons because of lack of sleep. Broken hearted? Not really, not so much heart left in me.

After a very late breakfast of cornflakes and coffee, I decided to turn on the TV to watch anything at all that the boob tube could dish out and I saw this local movie called "Ang Cute ng Ina Mo."

The heroine said a line that touched my heart. One that makes me think to revise this blog to a lighter note; move away from The Devil's grip.

She said, "How do I compete with 20 years that we've been apart?" -- ok short background, she got separated from her daughter who was taken to Australia and she tried everything to get to her. Her daughter visited her after so long and she tried her best to compensate for her absence.

It's just amazing for me to think that after so long, she never forgot her daughter and after 20 long years, she still had the will power to say that she will try hard to make up for the years that she wasn't there.

Now a thought occurred to me. If you've been in a relationship and then another person comes along and says to you, "I know you've been with your (bf/gf) for (x number of years) and I know that is hard to compare to but although I know it would be hard for me to win you over, I will face that head-on." What will you say to that then...?

Gee, I've found out that windows has this windows live writer that lets me write blog entries without signing onto blogger anymore. This will make my life much easier and I will be able to write blog entries faster. I feel that this is convenient for me. hopefully, I can end my spell of literary blankness. haha

Here's a quick list of my skins for this month.Feel free to browse through them. If you want, you may download the skin, just don't forget to give me credit. Thanks!

• Garden - originally posted on April 23, 2008 on BlogSkins.
• Toucan - originally posted on April 23, 2008 on BlogSkins.
• Artistic Kabuki - posted on June 26, 2008.