Just as we speak, the COMELEC is getting ready for the nationwide vote canvassing to determine who will take the seat in the Senate, Congress and Local Government.

Wow. Is it just me or does the above sentence sounds like a Ryan Seacrest line in American Idol? Then again, the excitement that is the National Elections is different from American Idol or Pinoy Big Brother for that matter. Haha, that would be a show. Put them all in a house across ABS-CBN and I bet you all of them would not stop bickering. Of course there will be some who would be all too pa-cute for the audience while a handful might be even plotting to oust kuya.

I have been disappointed with the whole system ever since events that transpired over the years. Sure there were few shinning moments of hope but wouldn’t it be nice if we live in a country wherein everything is smooth sailing and revolution is unnecessary? And don’t get me started with the P3.9T debt. At these times, all I can do is sigh.

Still, I hauled my lazy ass in the car and went with my family to Bulacan and voted. It will take days to see if the toll and gas was worth the time, effort and 5 ballots. I just hope the disappointment would lessen if not disappear altogether.

As a celebration for my sister’s 20th birthday, she and my mom decided to spend it in Puerto del Sol in Bolinao Pangasinan. It has become a tradition in the family to go someplace new every year especially in summer, although there were times that we went to some places at least twice.

The place was nice considering it was Pangasinan. For those of you who didn’t know, the beaches surrounding Pangasinan has become somewhat tourist-unfriendly because of aquaculture — particularly the bangus industry. Snorkeling would definitely be unsatisfying if you have already been to beaches and islands known to be as poplar diving spots. The view above the shoreline is another story. The developer must have made it a point to infuse the away-from-the-city-paradise feel so that customers would keep coming back, which makes it a plus factor for me. As a matter of fact, a couple was getting married on the night of the 30th.

Too bad we didn’t have time to visit the Hundred Islands. Alaminos was about 45 minutes away from Bolinao and my parents would rather be home as soon as we can.

All in all, I guess I could summarize the trip to be bittersweet. I just couldn’t help to be distracted amidst the loveliness of the scenery. And if you know me personally, you would have guessed why.

Here are some of the pictures of our trip!

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First and foremost, I have a new layout (again)! And this time, I made it all by myself.

That means, I can tell everyone with a straight face that I am pretty much familiar with PHP and CSS.  Woohoo!

Special thanks to Stock.Xchng for the free use of the photo in the header and footer, Theme Viewer for the free themes I can choose to base my site on, and, of course, my Dearest for all the useful tools and tutorials. Talk about spoon-feeding. I really do feel spoiled.

Even if I pretty much like the layout and the site will stay this way for a very long time, I would still like to read more about PHP and MySQL. I got excited to see that PHP has a similar form as C — only that it is used for webpages. Since I’ve been programming in C ever since first year College, studying the conceptual part of PHP was like a breeze making me inspired to dig deeper in the topic. Kiko also gave me a brief explanation about the bugs in the ESC website he was working on and I was interested to know the details of it all. That means, I should learn more about MySQL databases and how to process them to understand the bugs better. Who knows? Maybe I get to help him on the website. Would that solidify my geekiness? Hehehe, maybe.

Now that site layout is done, I could concentrate on the actual content of the site. I have been meaning to write a post on the family trip I just had more than a week ago so I better start with that.

I really hope everyone likes this layout as much as I do. BTW, I already used a higher JPEG compression for the images so that it could load faster. It would be nice if I actually have feedback on the layout *hint* leave a comment *hint*