Great Sound: A Beauty to Behold.

With my recent purchase of a pair of Bose AE2i headphones to justify my library of lossless flute recordings, I had started to be fascinated by high-end audio equipment. Being a musician myself, I find it important to consider appreciative musical listening in par with playing an instrument. One does not simply plug in a pair of bad headphones while listening to a lossless recording of Karajan conducting Strauss waltzes with the Vienna Phil. The real sound will not simply be present in low-quality audio gear.

Upon purchasing the Bose headphones, I suddenly became aware of little nuances in recordings: études for the flute recorded with Jean-Pierre Rampal showed little variations in tone colour and warmth that I would never have heard with simpleton headphones. It's very important for musicians of a certain calibre to realize these nuances, and to focus on these tiny variations that would never had been heard otherwise. Listening to music very well with well-built equipment can indeed help musicians.

Further in my search for good audio equipment, I found several headphones that sounded better than my Bose, but looked rather more hideous. Not to say that my AE2i's looked hideous themselves, but they were not remarkably stellar in the looks department. I would have easily gone for high quality Sennheisers for almost half the price of my Bose, but they boast an awful look that made me look like a 1940's fighter pilot sporting a little white iPod. I figured that I wanted headphones that I think would sound excellent and would be proud to wear outdoors. My headphones, although a little awkward looking, didn't make me look like a ridiculous rapper sporting a Princess Leia hairstyle.

I scoured an Apple store nearby, and found a pair of Bowers and Wilkins P5 headphones -- and oh boy, did they stun me. They were up perched on a row of iPhones -- and they looked perfect for each other. It's as if the P5's were made for the iPhone or iPod or iPad. I figured they also looked stellar with Macs. They looked stellar with anything. Brushed stainless steel with aluminium accents clad in leather, these headphones exuded class. They were absolutely gorgeous, a beauty to behold. But how do they sound? I plugged my iPod in, and played Rampal and Bolling's Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano Trio, and I was surprised at the accuracy of the sound it delivered. It was stunning. Being a noise isolating pair, the P5's also gave a remarkable undistorted rendition. I would have gotten them on the spot, hadn't it been for the price: a whopping Canadian $300. Bleech. I figured that one gets what they pay for with these headphones.

Off to eBay/Amazon/Craigslist I go.

iWork '09 or MS Office for Mac?

These past few days have been emotionally harassing: excitement, regret -- just two of the plethora of emotions coursing through my veins. But for now I shall change pace. Enough with sentimentality.

Time to discuss something completely different: office software and productivity suites. As dreary as the Mac vs. Windows wars, this dilemma has beguiled many a Mac user who debates inside which platform to choose. Windows came up with Microsoft Office for Mac 2011, while Apple has retained its iWork suite from 2009, only having updated to accomodate OS X Lion users with the celebrated iCloud service.

Before the proverbial boxing match begins, I feel that I should share my background in computing. I'm a university student, writer, and an avid Apple product consumer. I've had my 13" MacBook Pro since 2010, and it has since ushered me into Tim Cook's realm: I found myself relying too heavily on the Macintosh ecosystem because it simply just works. No frills, just thrills. I was so glad with how seamless the services between devices were, and now that I'm writing this blog entry on my laptop, I know that I can pick up where I left off on my iPhone. Or iPad. Or my dad's iPod Touch.

Anywhere.

I would have ushered in equally the productivity suite Apple offers, iWork '09, but it is much more complicated, having scratched the fancy aluminum surface. There seems to be a ton of compatibility issues between Windows and Mac devices using different programs. I recall writing a research article with  Pages, only to find out that the APA formatting had completely gone awry once exported and opened on a Windows computer running MS Word. MS Word isn't even hard to use in the first place: everybody uses it too, and I admire how concise the user interface is on Word. This is what I primarily seek in a word processor: conciseness and usability. Pages, on the other hand, has a more concise user interface albeit less elegant than that of Word. Formatting isn't hard to work with: someone familiar with the Apple ecosystem will feel at home with using Pages. Another sweet advantage with the iWork suite is that if you're on OS X Lion, iCloud automatically syncs and saves your work. However, with the compatibility issues that arose with my Pages document, I think it's still worth staying with MS Word until iWork fixes these flaws.

As a writer, I rarely use the spreadsheet programs in these suites, and I admit that I have a recalcitrant hatred for spreadsheet software because I find them freakishly boring. They remind me of accounting courses that I would never sign up for even if those were the last breadth courses I need take in order to graduate. Eek.

As a university student, I have to give dozens of presentations for classes, and I believe almost anyone who had used Keynote will tell that MS PowerPoint is no match for the concise elegance, and the insane greatness (pun intended) that Keynote offers. With Keynote, there are endless ways to make one's platitudinous presentation the most mind-blowing oratory ever given. The transitions, the background, and the countless options that are extremely difficult to come up with PowerPoint just show themselves explicitly, beautifully in Keynote. I noticed this myself, as I found myself more motivated to create presentations with Keynote. I was also able to compress dense material and suck the marrow out of lecture time because the presentations just worked. They just did. Typical Apple. I wouldn't even bother with compatibility issues since I use my MacBook Pro to give presentations, although this is another crucial issue to look at. To be honest, I haven't exported a Keynote presentation to a Windows computer to be opened with PowerPoint.

All in all, there is no general winner between the two: for a writer and a university student like me, there are desirable aspects found in both suites. Because of its universal compatibility, I use MS Word to write papers, edit research articles, and generally do my research. When I present in front of the class, however, Keynote never fails to astound them. Using Keynote to present ideas written down in a table napkin in a café has always been a crowd pleaser, thanks to its beautiful yet natural transitions and effects.

It is amazing to realize how much these productivity suites have adjusted themselves to cater not only to office personnel, but to creative minds as well. MS Office cannot be simply called "Office" anymore since majority of its users are outside the stereotypical office context. Same goes with iWork: maybe someday Apple would release iWork Creative Suite, simply because these programs have transcended outside the office setting.

The Truth Is..

I miss you. I sort of do. Or not. Or maybe I totally do. But maybe I don't.

It took my inquisitive friend from art school who needed help with his chiaroscuro study for me to realize that. He asked for your artwork: intense background shadows behind a stunningly well-lit foreground -- he was begging me to borrow your work so he could write his paper on it. Then it hit me like a brick wall: the symbolism. My passing glance as I handed it over to be framed. My dad's bewildered look when he saw your work. The dark, looming scrawny shadows etched angrily behind the flamboyance.

I had really missed you.

We talk so intermittently, and I totally understand how busy we are, and how far apart we are -- there lies 10,000 kilometers between you and me. It's the irrationality of this sentiment that drives me astray: I haven't met you yet, and for the longest time now I had been harbouring these not-so-secret sentimentality for you. I feel like I can only get even more attached to you every single day. Or not. I try to fight it, you see. I tried to fight it once before -- and I did succeed. I had to sacrifice this beautiful treasure we shared because I had lost grip of my reality. But what good is reality, really, when the dream I had had come true?

I needed to retain this illusionary reality I held for the longest time, and I thought it entailed driving you away, and drove you away I did. I did it in the most inhumane, arcane, aloof way possible. And although it did serve me right to get back into this illusion of reality, I know I had lost something precious, something that can only pass us by once in a lifetime. There are 7 billion people on earth. 7 billion people. I am a social scientist: I know how impossibly unachievable something that we had was. And now regretfully I know how impossibly hopeful it is to have had something like that albeit for a few months.

But reality called. I needed to escape from you, from my dreams, to wake up in this cold reality. All the while I thought I had done the right thing. Or not.

Quelle bêtise.

April Showers Bring May Flowers

Or they were supposed to. It's mid-Spring and it's gloomy as ever. It's rather funny how three W's are unpredictable in Vancouver: work, weather, and women. For now I think we should definitely enjoy these unpredictable W's -- these past few days taught me how spontaneity can be fun.

Just my brother and I greeting you a happy mid-Spring!

Vacation Day 2: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Linguist.

Having ended the semester in a very positive manner does not guarantee that I will have an awesome two weeks' break. For the most part, I will be seeing myself at home, doing nothing since the Canucks were ousted from the Stanley Cup playoffs. I resorted to reading much about the universe and its rather startling 'design' as quantum physics puts it (a continuation of my beloved Astronomy class), and the teachings of the Buddha. The latter was rather random: I was thrown into the deeper recesses of curiosity after having read Karen Armstrong's biography of Siddharta. For those who are not familiar, Karen Armstrong was a Catholic nun who realized that individual and personal faith is more important that indoctrination. This is why the notion of Buddhism seemed attractive to me: it catered to the personal desire to be liberated from human tendency to sin, not to the eternal condemnation that results from sinning.

Anyway, besides my pursuit of pure knowledge in my study, I spent most of my time eating and cooking in the kitchen. This is what happens when a sad, single male in university spends too much time alone: he gets profoundly over-thoughtful and overweight. Besides my fattening kitchen escapades, one of my mini-projects before the next semester starts is to provide a complete morphological analysis of spells, jinxes and charms from Harry Potter. There are dozens of them, which keeps my data rather small, but with complex morphology from Latin and English huddled together, it will be rather interesting to see morphosyntax come into play when I analyze the variability between spells. There has to be a connection between the affixes and the spell/jinx/charm's ability or directed-ness. For instance, would changing the suffix in the spell "wingardium levios-a" to 'levios-um" change the direction of the spell, and instead render the wizard weightless instead of the spell's object? I'll check on it based on the morphology of the affixes, and the syntax of how the spells work with those changes. And I'll be linguistically spellbound.

And this is why I don't have a girlfriend.

Apparently I'm going to need more books to satiate me over 2 weeks. Oh God, I need something real to do.

In Flight.

In flight she spreads her wings
She flutters over dribbling hillsides
She glides over veiling clouds
She triumphs over encasing skies
In flight she dreams without end.

In flight she whispers promises
She mutters words of pulchritude
She proclaims her adoration unending
She breathes her love unfaltering
In flight she loves without end.

In flight she looks beyond
The mystic veiled shadow of the night
She yearns for what lies ahead
She soars away from her cloud-trodden past
In flight she flies beyond all.

In flight she exists in utter beauty
She emerges from worldly naught
And upwards she soars; she loves boundlessly.
In flight she breathes of love; she speaks of love
She yearns of love foretold to those who took flight.

Mon Français Epuisé.

En voulant être vite servi, j'ai appelé ma compagnie de téléphone en français. Bref, j'étais là en moins que deux: une fille m'a demandé ce que je désirais. Alors je lui ai posé des questions sur mon abonnement, et on a parlé longuement de mon départ aux Philippines, et tout ce qui se passera sur mon abonnement.

Puis ça a été couramment passé lorsque je lui en parlais jusqu'à elle m'a demandé autres choses: ceux que je voudrais faire avec mon abonnement lorsque je serai aux Phils, etc. Ma tête a été serrée: ça a confirmé que mon français devait être plus abîmé pendant deux semaines où j'étais en vacances. On allait continuer à le discuter mais finalement j'ai dit que j'avais épuisé mon français et lui ai demandé si l'on pouvait parler en anglais. Elle a obligé (grâce au Dieu) et on a ressorti les trucs dont on parlait. Mais ce n'était plus en français. :(

Ayayay, je dois l'améliorer je voudrai parler avec efficace.

Today I Opened Happiness.

Similar to that Coca-Cola mantra, "Open Happiness", I received a package from Harmony today and opened it. And just as Pandora uncovered the ills of this world, I uncovered happiness more than words can describe. She had the sweetest messages inside, and the most awesome works of art, too.

Happiness just seemed to magically explode in my room: after a harrowing semester, receiving quite an undeserved gift like this is... beyond words.

 She's not only the most awesome pianist (with whom I'm looking forward to make a bunch of recordings), but she's also the sweetest artist!

She also wrote the sweetest letter. Sweetness and happiness was just overflowing.

Well of course, I miss my old school. :)

Thank you for making my evening extra awesome, Harmony. I will meet you real soon. :)

Of Vintage Fountain Pens.

left to right: Sheaffer Imperial c. 1939, Esterbrook SJ (9550 nib), Esterbrook J (9556 nib)

There is always something so fascinating about vintage fountain pens: the aged, yet pristine finish, the beautiful slightly stubby fine points, or the perfect feedback that seduces every single fibre on the paper's surface. My first "vintage" pen was a light unbranded German pen from the 70's that my aunt gave me months before I left for Canada. I still have it; it gets cycled with my rotation of J. Herbin inks, typically when I experiment with different ink colours. 

My fascination started upon the purchase of my first Esterbrook: a grey J with a 2550 extra-fine nib. I immediately fell in love: the nib wrote with such finesse, its fine point while not being a scratchy quill, wasn't as smooth as an infant's arse that hydroplanes through any form of liquid. There was a beautiful feel to that pen, with its perfect size and weight to glide on paper with the slightest pressure. The nib eventually gave way to its age, and unfortunately I had to replace it. The grey J now carries a 9556 nib, a sturdier variety of the 2-xxx series nibs apparently tipped with Iridium.

Left: Esterbrook J (9556 nib), Right: Esterbrook SJ (9550 nib)

My second vintage pen is another Esterbrook: a beautiful blue SJ, a short and slim variety of the original J. Although it felt somewhat smaller, posting the cap over the body increased its size, making it more suitable for a lesser angled writing. This one came with an extra-fine 9550 nib: the finest nib I have written on a pen. Although considered a 'nail' by fountain pen aficionados, the finest of fine points proved useful for me especially when I wrote annotations on scholarly articles for my research. What drew me to this pen was its vibrant hue of blue: for a pen that is at least 50 years old, a pristine finish as this one's is quite hard to come with. 

The perfect combination: Esterbrook SJ with J. Herbin Bleu Myosotis

My newest vintage pen is apparently just two years younger than my grandfather. A 1939 Sheaffer Imperial with a no. 5 Feather Touch 14K gold nib, this pen is just beautiful. I bought it in a pristine condition from an antique store for fraction of its real value, after a good haggle (something Filipinos are well-known for). 

The way the nib wrote immediately made this vintage Sheaffer one of my favourite vintage pens.

Time permitting, I would love to collect more vintage pens; there's always something profound in these pens, especially how one would imagine the stories behind these pens, and how they could have survived decades of existence.

Payée.

Laissons-nous tomber, toi et moi
Avant que le soleil ne couche plus
Comme une pute qui se lèvera,
En trouvant l'argent du lit rompu.

pour que tu te souviennes à quel point je t'aime

Spark.

I pace sighingly beneath the arrant array
Looking at others
Look at myself

And I stare back at men
Who stare at me:
Yet I never recall a single face
Nor a time when I could distinguish one
From another
Among the grey pallour of shadowy bodies

Yet there are men
Who stare at the sky
And never at me

Their faces painted with livid sighs
Of stars and stardust lingering
Beyond the deepest of profundity
Glimmering, shimmering above
Each and every one.

Lit up the sky in flamboyant frolic

Lightwaves steering forth from a source:
A refuge, a beacon, a candle, a spark.