da tomāto

Malunggay pandesal and pansit. Scary, loud thunder. It happened twice within the last few days. Too close. No warning. The first one was the loudest. One big boom. If it wasn't for the rain that immediately followed, we would've assumed something exploded.

I can't make my blog look the way I want it to. Maybe I change my mind too often. Dinner was ginisang ampalaya (with onion and egg). We paired it with fried fish. I ate it with our home-made pickled ampalaya . I liked it all. It gets hot here at noon and it wakes me up. But it is nice in the evenings so I work comfortably. I'm surprised that I am not bald yet. The amount of hair that fall off in the shower is ridiculous. They fall with the roots too.

Sudden blackouts -- Another reason to use a laptop instead of a desktop pc - and I am considering it. While working last night, I heard a loud boom(!) from the street and the power went out! Waah, the machine! Electricity returned 5 minutes later, maybe less. I was too scared to turn the computer on again right away (and frying something inside ) so I turned the AVR off and waited 15 minutes. It booted up OK, no errors or anything. I did not want to keep it on any longer in fear of another blackout so I just shut it down properly and went away. I did what work I could do on my phone (which was not a lot - last night was not a productive night). What was that noise? It sounded like something blew up.

I prep'd for it so I'm going to do it, dammit! I prepared on and off for a week: researched, went through the steps and what to expect in my head, learned possible snags and their fixes (from other people's first-hand accounts), prep'd what I needed to use, backed up drivers and my files, wrote down my key and printed out my step-by-step notes. It took a while but I was ready (and pumped). August 5, 2015: Clean install of Win 8.1 via bootable USB. Success! There were only 2 things that my notes didn't cover: There were multiple one-time boot options on my mobo (press F12 to get to this boot menu on GA-A75M-UD2H). There were 4 choices for USB. Obviously, USB-Zip and USB-CDROM were out. I thought, "Oh, USB-HDD but what is this USB-FDD?" [Six minutes later...] Ok, not FDD. Should've went with my gut and picked HDD the first time but no harm done and lesson learned. Uhm, yeah, pick USB-HDD. NOTE: The bootable USB was easily created with Window