The World Cup kicks off!

This year’s most anticipated sporting event, making an historical first appearance in Africa, has finally started! The host nation, South Africa, faced off against Mexico in the tournament’s opening game.

The Mexicans started strongly, monopolizing possession in the first half. Giovanni dos Santos was very dangerous and although he failed to score. At 55 minutes however, South African player Siphiwe Tshabalala sent the home fans into rapture with the first goal of the tournament.

Looking to equalize, dos Santos let loose with a powerful and accurate shot that Bafana Bafana keeper Itumeleng Khune did well to save. Trying to salvage the situation, Mexico coach Javier Aguirre sent on Cuauhtémoc Blanco in the 68th minute. Mexico got lucky when a corner kick resulted in a pass to an unmarked Rafael Márquez who just had to tap in the ball for the crucial equalizer.

Both sides tried to go for a winner but the match ended with the score knotted at 1-1.

The next match pitted the 2006 runners-up France against Uruguay. The first real scoring chance of the match happened early on. A Franck Ribery low cross gave Sydney Govou an opportunity but the latter wasted it with a poor effort which went wide of the mark. Aside from a 81st-minute red card for Uruguay player Nicolas Lodeiro, the rest of the match wasn’t very exciting in my opinion and ended with an unremarkable nil-nil draw.

There are more games coming tonight and I’ll be watching as the US aims to repeat the historic upset of so many years ago against powerhouse England.

As for my predictions on who will win the tournament, I believe it will be Spain taking home the trophy. With an embarassment of riches at almost every position and beautiful attacking football, they are a favorite to win the tournament.

P.S. I’ve been organizing my notes and the photos of my trip to Japan and will hopefully post them in a few days.

Giren’s Greed is ruining my life, going to Japan, and other stuff

Giren’s Greed is ruining my life. For the uninitiated, it’s a game series based on the Gundam franchise. It’s a turn-based strategy game which combines resource management, tech research, and of course combat. I find the compulsion to play similar to what I experienced with the Civilization series of games. Just one more turn! Can’t… stop… playing…

Next, I think my PC’s video card is busted. Games start out fine then the graphics suddenly become choppy as hell after a few minutes. On the bright side, everything else seems to be working fine so I can still browse the net and downloaded videos.

Oh yeah, my family and I are going to Japan this May! My brother graduated high school and it’s been a family tradition that when one graduates, we go abroad. The only difference is that this time I’ll be paying for all of my expenses. Hence my inability to immediately buy a video card to address the above problem. But I am very excited about going to the country where some of my hobbies originated or have strong ties to.

Damn, Barcelona’s out of the Champion’s League, losing on an aggregate score of 3-2. Inter lost the second leg 1-0 but that was enough to see the Nerazzuri and The Special One through to the finals. So it will be Bayern Munich and Inter Milan, two teams I don’t like, battling at Real Madrid’s Santiago Bernabeu Stadium for the title of Kings of Europe.

Good drinking place for beer guys

I love beer. I especially love imported beers. If I could, I’d drink Belgian beers every day. Problem is, them imported beers are kinda expensive. To my delight I found a place which isn’t so far from where I live which serves a variety of beers from all over the world.

The Reserve, located at City Golf Plaza, Julia Vargas St. Ortigas Pasig City was a pleasant surprise for me. My best friend and I went there for the second time last weekend and boy, I’m sure I’ll be going back a lot.

They have a great selection of beers, making this beer lover very happy. Among The Reserve’s selections are some of my favorite Belgian beers Kwak, Chimay Blue, and Duvel. German Warsteiner, Czech Pilsner Urquel, the ubiquitous Guinness Irish stout, and many other European beers are also available.

They also carry the brews of the American microbreweries such as Rogue (their Dead Guy Ale is just awesome), Ballast Point, and Flying Dog. Budweiser isn’t the only Beer which comes out of the States and it doesn’t hold a candle to these very good American beers.

Their pulutan is also pretty good. One of the items we ordered there was their salpicao which we dubbed “salpi-crack” since we just couldn’t stop eating the stuff.

However, what clinched The Reserve’s place as my new favorite drinking spot was the price. Their prices are VERY reasonable. My favorite beers are priced between P150 and P200, half the price of brews in Beers Paradise in Makati though I don’t know if they brought down prices (or if it’s still even in business) since I haven’t been there for so long.

Great beers, great prices. It can’t get any better than that for the beer loving me.

It’s so hard to throw things away…

Operation Room Reorganization continues.

The moving around furniture, putting in new ones and removing old ones I don’t like anymore is done so my room looks a lot different from before.

Now I’m concentrating on cleaning out my loft (I have a sort of mini-attic in my room) which contains, among other things, all sorts of stuff from high school and college life. I’ve started to sort out which ones are still useful and those I want to keep and those destined for the trash bag.

While going thorugh all of them the memories associated with each of the items flood back. There are the good ones like the my composition for creative writing class where I cooked up my lola‘s/grandma’s spaghetti recipe. We were supposed to cook something and then write about the process. I’m not too good at cooking but it turned out pretty delicious plus I got an A, and the teacher’s single worded comment of “Excellent” while I was at it.

Then there was my stuff from Japanese class like my certificate for passing the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) level 4. That reminded me that I should try for level 3 soon before everything I learned starts fading.

Lastly there were the epic fails from, you guessed it, MATH!!! A particularly horrible one was a 4/20 score I saw on one test. I plan to burn it and other failing mark papers and tests I’m bound to see.

I know the point of the cleaning is to throw away unneeded stuff but I find it so hard to throw them away. Notebooks, papers, quizzes, and the like all have memories associated with them. Maybe I’m reluctant to part with them because I fear that these memories will disappear after sometime. But as life goes on I guess I just have to move forward, making space in my room for new memories to fit.

Did I have this much stuff?

Oooookay…

Operation Room Reorganization has hit a roadblock. After sorting and categorizing all the my CDs and books, I saw that I am nowhere close to finishing yet.

There are still all sorts of stuff I have to sort like all the school related things I never got around to throwing out (I even found my thesis), some old toys, freebies I’ve gotten from work, and a lot more.

I hope to be done with sorting this week so I can finally move the furniture around.

Sigh of relief

A great big *whew* for me as the Kaka to Manchester City deal didn’t go through. Thanks Ricky, for proving that it’s not always about salary in professional sports. Plus, Beckham is doing pretty well in Milan, and they’re just a few points behind Inter and very much in the title race.

Elsewhere in my life, I started reading R.A. Salvatore’s the Legend of Drizzt series and it got me playing Neverwinter Nights 2 again. I was only able to play the original campaign before. The first expansion, Mask of the Betrayer, continues the story of the original campaign and adds a few character classes. The second one, Storm of Zehir, changes the gameplay quite a bit. Aside from hacking enemies to pieces or pounding them with Meteor Storms, you’re part of a merchant company doing trading and caravans and stuff. Now you move through the world map instead of just fast-travelling to towns or dungeons so there’s an exploring part too.

In my schedule this week is a full-blown room rearranging. I’m currently organizing my books and other stuff before I rearrange the furniture. I realized because of this, how many CDs I’ve bought and burned throughout the years. Seeing my old PC (StarCraft!), PlayStation (Tales of Destiny!) and Dreamcast (Shenmue!) games took me on a nostalgia trip, interrupting my cleaning. With luck, I hope to be done with it this weekend.

Well, that was a long while…

For those who don’t know me very well, I have a short attention span when it comes to stuff on the Internet. And as such, I’ve been putting off writing entries again. And on a whim, I’m here writing another entry.

There hasn’t been a lot of action yet but things are bound to pick up as we move to February.

Updates (AKA what Ive been up to recently):

Warhammer Online – Levelled my Witch Hunter named Excellen Browning to 40. Still can’t get any decent equipment. Oh why do the item gods hate me so?

Persona 4 – Very fun game. Combines school life, dating sim, dungeon crawling, and world saving into one fun package. Gameplay is great and the story is good although Persona 3’s was more epic. The humor is way better in this one and the English voice acting levelled up a notch too (If you played .hack G.U you’ll hear familiar voices).

Work – Slated to do a story on Chinese New Year. It’s gonna be kinda problematic due to the fact that I know absolutely nothing about Feng Shui.

Football – AC MILAN PLEASE DON’T SELL KAKA TO MANCHESTER CITY!!!

Finally got around to doing this

I’ve been planning to get my own blog for God knows how long. I always had a reason for putting it off, which is consistent with my personality. But yay! I finally got around to doing it. Moving along…

I’ll be writing about topics ranging from anime related stuff, to work-related events and happenings, and anything I find interesting.

So to you, dearest readers who stumble across this blog for whatever reason, I hope you’ll enjoy reading through what I put in here in the future.