Current location:	WAVE Booth
Current mood:	inspired
Current music:	Light And Shade, by Fra Lippo Lippi

Reporting From I-Blog 2...
.:THE I-BLOG 2 REPORT:.



.:Today's LSS:.

I'm listening to it as I write this post...

Light And Shade
by Fra Lippo Lippi

He will pain the light and shades
The colours and the trees
He will climb the steepest hill
Believing what he sees
He will lay down on the ground
Beneath the old oak tree
He will sleep forever
If you try to set him free

Chorus:
Sail on the wings of a cloud
Where to, well nobody knows
And cry, cry if you want them to see
Die every day to be free
Be proud to wear the colours that you call your own
Be loud, speak out when the world to know
Be strong, hold the flame for everyone to see
Be weak, if you want to love.

He will paint the endless sea.
A mystery to me
He will reach out for the sun,
Not dreaming what he sees
He will fall down on his knees
Angel touching ground
Takes him to the other side
Sweet love is coming down.

(Chorus)

.:Oh, Yes. I. Am. BACK.:.

My blogging has taken a hit for a looooong time, but thanks to I-Blog 2, that's going to change. Maybe it won't happen overnight, but I'm making bloody sure that the quality (and quantity) of posts for me would pick up once again...

.:Got There... Late:.

Anyways, as I promised to talk about I-Blog 2 and what happened there, let me start by saying that I will just show pictures of the event when I can finagle a few here and there from my friends in Bloglandia.

In any case, I got to the gathering late. I had work until twelve noon, though I cut twenty minutes and left the office at around a quarter to twelve. When I got to the Law building, "the infamous one" was actually talking in one room, and I walked in, armed with a PSP in the event that I found his speech not to my liking. The damned thing came in handy...

You see, setting aside my bias against him, the "the infamous one" actually has something going for him. Prior to this moment, everytime he opened his mouth within ten feet of me, he was going to elicit a reaction from me.

Sure, the reaction was almost always not a favorable one, but a reaction, nonetheless. He had controversy in spades. He could've used it to enhance what he had to say.

Instead, the guy practically bored me to tears. Seriously. I don't know how else to say it. I was frankly disappointed, but hey, no big deal. I just left the room and started talking to Sean, Jonas, and Charo.

Now, the conversations were mainly aimless, and we saw a very dazed and confused Kathy D (Dagnabit, forgot her URL... so much for turning over an old leaf and inserting hyperlinks to every blogger I mention by name...) walk out of the room where "the infamous one" was not yet done talking, despite the presence of an explicit 15-minute time limit per speaker. Typical. Heh.

.:The Second Wave:.

So lunchtime was composed of a few Brokebacking jokes aimed at me and Sean, as well as comments over my new PSP videos that I defend to be in my PSP mainly for its music, more than anything else (Okay, fine. So it's not safe for work if I showed you the clip... :P). Afterwards, we stepped into the room again to catch Dean Alfar deliver his speech, which was not nearly as striking as his speech last year that gave birth to this.

Do note be afraid of tomorrow, though. I'm sure a new webring based on his speech will come along the way as well...

Jonas was pretty amusing during his turn, all the same. I'm a sucker for his webcomics, so seeing his stuff and the other comics here and there was pretty fun. It's a bit weird to see him by himself, though. Oh, well. No biggie.

So during the open forum, unfortunately for the other two speakers, only Dean got questions. Jonas was lucky he had a mental lapse and conducted his own open forum after his speech, though.

Instead of asking Dean a question, when it was my turn to address him, I just reiterated the thanks of the entire Suman Sa Latik Webring in giving us inspiration to carry out writing no matter how arduous, no matter how mundane. I know I was scraping the bottom of the barrel when I went for Knock-Knock jokes about suman, but hey, no biggie.

Sean was best blogger of 2005. I had that honor in 2003. Dean has inspired us in his own inimitable way to really break out and write in a way we have never expected ourselves to be able to do. Of course, I still don't have a single Palanca award to show for it, but whaddaheck.

So yeah... as you can tell, I didn't ask a question at all. Instead, I thanked him, and then took the opportunity to plug my radio show on WAVE. I didn't think plugging my blog was allowed anymore, so I skirted around that.

Hades, I even gave away premiere tickets from WAVE just to drive home the point... heh.

.:The Third Salvo:.

This time, I picked the other room not only because Charo was a speaker there, but also because Podcasting never appealed to me thus far. So the idea of "monetizing" my blog was definitely more attractive to me, albeit rather daunting.

I'll gloss over the details of the speeches, and just say that they were very... informative.

.:Wrapping Up:.

Lemme just mention that this guy who was doing the impersonations while mentioning the various raffle winners was hilarious! He did FPJ, Erap, FVR, Mark Logan, and even Mike Enriquez. And he did all voices flawlessly. That was a spectacle in and by itself that should be the best unofficial highlight of the event... heh.

Congratulations to the people who have made the second I-Blog a blazing success! See you jabronis for the third one. :)

.:After The Fact...:.

Dominique played catch-up and showed up around two or so in the afternoon at the summit, and he, along with Jelo, tagged along with Clair, Charo, and myself to eat dinner at Mang Jimmy's.

The food there is still as good as ever: Tapa Mix, Lechon Kawali, and Sisig are definitely great items, but the fact that their rice is no longer limitless is a crying shame.

Still, the food is great, and we individually shelled out less than a hundred bucks each for a very filling meal and very engaging conversations about Jelo's alleged membership in the Scottish clan McGroen.

After the sumptuous dinner and the very awkward questions of whom Clair/Dom would rather sleep over with between me and Charo (They both chose Charo... am I that scary? :P), we went our separate ways home.

.:DOMestic Violence:.

So sue me, I wanted to have a snazzy title about the MRT ride home... :P

In any case, Dom and I spent the trip back home talking about a lot of... *very* interesting things. What struck me the most was how he kept on joking about how most of us seemed to have overreacted over the recent events in his life, particularly with Chicken Little (aka Ranulf) running around and telling everyone about what has happened...

When the discussion was reversed, I realized that my coping skills leave a lot to be desired in contrast... yeesh.