Letting go was never easy. Yesterday, boss finally decided to let go of our Helsinki apartment. It's been a quarter that nobody has been living there. There are also no signs of any big Nokia project coming up in the next few months so boss thought that maybe it's for the good of the company to let the apartment go.

I think we have one of the best apartments in helsinki. Location wise, it's close to everything: the office, the bus stop, the supermarket, the bay, the city center, the subway, the resto's. It's a big apartment. It can accommodate 4 people at a time and it's still not crowded. It has 2 toilets, a sauna and a loft. It's also well equipped. Living there was easy.

I have so much memories in that apartment. I've lived in that apartment with different people and it was all pleasant. I'll miss our warcraft/dota nights, "farewell" parties, and Chad's poker nights.



Our old apartment was a witness on how these consultants have grown into wonderful people. I hope the next persons to live there take care of it as much as we did. Helsinki life will never be the same without it.

~ How many girlfriends or boyfriends have told you they love you?
err... all?

~ Have you ever thought that you were going to marry a person?
sort of

~ Are you crushin on someone?
YES!

~ Have you ever loved someone so much that it hurts?
yes

~ Have you ever made a boyfriend or girlfriend cry?
i think so

~ Are you happier single or in a relationship?
in a relationship!

~ Have you ever been cheated on?
yes... karma yata. Haha.

~ Have you ever had your heart broken?
too many times

~ Have you ever broken someone's heart?
i would like to think so.

~ Talk to any of your exes?
last time was last year

~ If you could go back in time and change things, would you?
no. i believe in letting go and moving on

~ Think any of your exes feel the same?
most probably

~ Do you believe that you are a good boyfriend or girlfriend?
definitely! Haha

~ Have you dated people who were not good to you?
nope

~ Have you been in an abusive relationship?
nope! baka ako ang mambugbog. Haha

~ Have you dated someone older than you?
they're all older than me

~ Younger?
nope

~ Do you believe everyone deserves a second chance?
yes. but the third time is stupidity.

~ Believe in love at first sight?
nope

~ Ever been given an engagement ring?
hmmm... di ko sure kung for engagement yun pero may ring at may bato. hehe

~ Do you want to get married?
still torn if it's really worth it

~ Ever stolen someone's boyfriend or girlfriend?
errr... do i really have to answer this? haha

~ Ever liked someone else's boyfriend or girlfriend?
like? as in as a friend

~ Does heartbreak really feel as bad as it sounds?
it's worse than it sounds!

I have always been a big fan of senti music. I know my former officemate (who thinks that paolo santos is a john mayer wannabe and nyoy volante is a paolo santos wannabe) will shout at me to turn off my music player once he hears it. It was during my first few years of working that the music genre I listen to started to grow outside of the senti music I got used to. For as long as it's not "noise" and doesn't cause me headaches, it's fine with me.

Top 15 most played songs in my iPod...
1. Acoustic Medley - Freestyle
2. Superman - Five for Fighting
3. You and Me - Lifehouse
4. Any Lucky Penny - Nikki Hassman
5. Insensitive - Jan Arden
6. It Ends Tonight - The All-American Rejects
7. Sway - Bic Runga
8. Wherever You Will Go - The Calling
9. Adrienne - The Calling
10. How to Save A Life - The Fray
11. Ache - James Carrington
12. Pink Life - Gyskard
13. Love Generation - Bob Sinclair
14. Summer Sunshine - The Corrs
15. Where This Love Goes - Sherri Youngward

I love ipod but iTunes sucks big time! Imagine my horror when iTunes prompted me that it can't recognize my ipod and asked me if I wanted to reformat. Geez! I had no choice then but to reformat and curse itunes the whole day for the lost music tracks which I had diligently compiled, completed song info and even downloaded album covers. The worse thing was as if reformatting it once was not enough. Yep... itunes did it again to me the second time after a few months when the first incident occurred. For the last few months, I have been keeping a backup of my itunes library in my harddrive which I think sucks because it defeats the purpose of having an mp3 player. The reason why I have this thing was to get rid of the music files scattered all over my hd.

Every now and then, I download Heroes and smallville and convert them to mp4 which my ipod video could play. Also, every now and then, my video files disappear whenever I do a sync with my itunes library. I had to manually recheck the sync properties to get it sync with my ipod correctly. Wtf! I hate shitty applications. If I was OC enough, I would have debugged it myself.

I have two laptops but only one has my mp3 files. Stupid itunes can't play songs directly from my ipod. I don't understand why they designed it to be this way but i think this functionality (or a bug!) wasn't well thought of.

Yesterday, I had the luxury of time to surf and finally let itunes lay to rest. I found the ipod software I was looking for! I now love Floola and Pod player. Thank you lifehacker.com.

Crunch time is almost over. I hope! Been spending more time in the office than at home for the last weeks or has it been a month now?! My bed is missing me again. Hehe. Can't wait to have a long vacation... hayyy....

I have an odd habit. Every night, HH and I have dinner here at home. Knowing my schedule, we usually have dinner around 10pm or even later. Inspite of being tired, I always do the dishes after eating. As in! Even if the helper tries to stop me and insist on doing the dishes instead, I would't budge. I wouldn't even stop until I see the kitchen sqeaky clean. I think it's my sort of therapy. Something far different from the routinary work I do in the office.

After the Nokia visit and all the cleaning-up done to the office, I was left alone in the Nokia room. The whole team (except me!) moved to the common floor where my old cube was. I wanted to move out too but I didn't like the location of the cube I will be assigned to if I move. Might as well enjoy having my own office for the meantime. Boring but peaceful!

I checked my payslip for this pay period. I just noticed that my tax is bigger than my OT pay! Considering I almost lived inside the office the past month, imagine how big my OT should have been.... my tax is still bigger than that! Grrrrr! I could pay several maids for several months with that tax amount. It's a month's starting salary to a programmer. I could have bought a new phone with that amount. Oh well... some things are just not meant to be fair.

I still have a boring life.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Warning: Offensive words were used in this post.

I just have to let this out. I was in a "workshop" yesterday with my boss (the CEO) and some Nokians from Finland. The agenda was about HR processes and how our client can adapt to these HR best practices. My boss was actually impressive because of his extensive knowledge with HR processes being a former SAP consultant. Of course, they are our clients, my boss also did an impressive job in kissing their asses. It annoyed me when I heard him say "of course we can do all these for your because you're our valued client". After all the curses that I heard from him when one of the projects was fucked up and was involved in some corporate politics threatening to remove us from their list of qualified vendors for future projects. It just sounded so plastic. Of course my boss is just a businessman and all businessmen I know talk bullshit most of the time to sell something. Maybe I will never be a good businesswoman.

So, what does an impatient me do when stuck in this boring discussion with a client? Stare at whoever is talking, nod once in a while when boss says something so he doesn't look stupid talking nonsense, Scribble something every now and then even if it's just my name. I know im ruthless! Haha. Just kidding! For the greater part of the discussion I was actually listening, butting in once in a while and eating/drinking. Haha.

Towards the end of the discussion, the lessons learned from the fucked up project was discussed. It was a hot discussion. I felt everyone's tension. Although my boss admitted it was our mistake, I knew in my heart, the team did their best. Unfortunately, it wasn't good enough. Well, I wasn't actually part of the delivery team but I was sent to Helsinki to do some cleaning-up few months back. After the workshop (that seemed like forever), the nokians were sent to the spa and sauna. See! My boss is good at this corporate bullshit! We had dinner at this posh resto at the roofdeck of ViVere Suites in Alabang.

The verdict... it is still unclear to me why they were here. I am not convinced that they wanted business with us. As far as I know, they don't usually visit vendor sites. At the same time, i think it's unreasonable to fly all the way here to Manila from Finland(with all the travel advisories) just to let out that their big disappointment for fucking a project. They could have sent an offensive email or say bad words while in a concall. Anyway, one of the nokians are still here in our office. I am not sure why but he's here. I don't know if we are losing them as a client but I am sure they will still need us for the other applications that we support in Production.

As my boss said after getting another project from the UN arm and another project from the US few days ago, "I am ready to let go of Nokia". After almost 4 years of working with them, I think I am also ready to let them go.

I read an article about IT consulting. Here are excerpts...

...consulting life is not for everyone.
...it's a difficult life to adjust to.
...it's something you really have to want.

I was supposed to go to the office yesterday but I was too lazy to get out of bed because I was watching Heroes. As usual, I marathoned Heroes season 1. It's a nice series. It's like I'm watching X-men. Haha.

Still attempting to download the last shown episode of Smallville season 6. This annoying LimeWire Pro kept giving me porn instead of the real Smallville.

I have no social life. =(

I've been meaning to blog but my work is taking most of my time lately. Been busy doing developer tasks for my projects. Yep... I'm back to being a developer doing geek stuff again.

I got my questionnaire from our immigration lawyer this morning. I can't believe the questions there are more difficult that my college calculus exam questions. I have been staring at it since 9AM this morning but never wrote down any answer til now.

This is the 3rd phonecall from a creditcard company asking me if I want a credit card. It's annoying to know that these companies share each other's client databases not even minding to update records if this so and so person has already been called and offered with a creditcard. To date I have N-number of creditcards (of which I use only 3 frequently) inside my wallet and I don't intend to add more to it.