The freshman politicians of Service Through Appropriate Governance (STAG) Party, one of the two major political parties in Agusan National High School (and the one to which I belong), once again won the recently-held First Year elections by a landslide, with all six of the party’s candidates grabbing the First Year Supreme Student Government seats. You go, guys. Remember, though, that you are now Supreme Student Government officers, and that means you’ve got a job to do. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for you. In other news, you may now call me editor-in-chief Dean. LOL. Not that I [...] Continue Reading…

Let’s face it—personal blogging is a profitable niche no more. It’s a sad fact, seeing as how the original purpose of blogging was to serve as a sort of online journal. People’s tastes have changed, and blogging isn’t the obscure medium it used to be. Now, no one can wade through the Interwebs without hearing the word “blog” being mentioned—and boy, what a meaning the word has. The term now conjures images of fat geeks making money from home, and of websites that deliver to us breaking-news information even before television and print media get a hold of the [...] Continue Reading…

[Editor's note: This post was first published on April 3, 2008 in QWERTY Confessions by me. Enjoy.]
I live in a small city in Southern Mindanao, Philippines. Small is the operative word there, rather than city. We have a small, sub-par mall. Small communities. Narrow roads. Only one or two social watering holes.
And, a small airport.
Maybe you’re wondering why I placed that last sentence in a paragraph by itself. Since my childhood, I’ve always been thrilled by airplanes and flying. (Never mind the fact that my first time aboard a plane was September of 2007.) My father always flew to [...] Continue Reading…

Off the coast of Sibuyan Island in the Philippines, the underside of the sunken M/V Princess of the Stars rises above the waters in an ominous fashion. Still inside the vessel, bodies lay lifelessly, waiting to be excavated from their watery grave. Above ground, other bodies washed ashore in neighboring islands are being retrieved and buried by authorities, as they prepare to refloat the vessel and extract even more cadavers from the floating coffin, as well as remove toxic chemicals in its cargo hold.

While it looks as if Sulpicio Lines, the shipowner of the capsized vessel, is handling the [...] Continue Reading…

Apparently, Section One isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

When Section One and I parted ways in Sophomore high school year, I missed it. I missed the fact that I was part of the top brass of the Special Science Curriculum, of the entire school in fact. Being in Section Three was an uneasy feeling. I felt like I didn’t belong, in an arrogant sense. I felt like the gods had smoten me for no reason at all, that I’d done something wrong and they punished me by sending me to the third section. For ten months, in Section [...] Continue Reading…

Twitter’s been down in the dumps for a long time now. Downed servers, features being disabled (as of this writing, IM still hasn’t been restored). Twitter blog posts are never about new features, but instead about what has gone wrong with their system (and about how they’re “working to fix it”). Nobody knows why our favorite microblogging application’s so buggy—it might be because they use MacBook Airs, it might be because they use Vista—it could be anything!

Enter Plurk. Apparently using the wtf-is-wrong-with-Twitter buzz to generate buzz for their service, Plurk opened up to users only very recently and was [...] Continue Reading…

Hi, all. Let me bitch for a while about how freaking crazy school has been.

So, today’s the 30th of June. It’s only been a month since Junior year started, yet we’re already swamped with incomprehensible equations and ridiculous scientific terms. Like, WTF’s sin and cos and tan and tan-1? My calculator is increasingly becoming my best friend, and to keep myself within the realm of sanity I need my iPod everyday.

Physics, though, has been the most stressing subject I have ever encountered. EVAR!!111!!. Not that our teacher’s bad or anything. Physics isn’t like the rest of the subjects in [...] Continue Reading…

Finally, with some help from Small Potato, I’ve completed my very minimalist theme and have applied it to this blog. Ever since I got hold of this hosting account, I’ve been very keen on design and have always been on the lookout for simple, clean layouts. So far, I haven’t found exactly what I was looking for, and I couldn’t afford to hire someone to create a theme for me—so I took the matter into my own hands. I call this theme “DeanLozarie.com Theme”. Simple as that.

Oh, and although the theme is named “DeanLozarie.com Theme”, I’ve renamed the blog [...] Continue Reading…

[Editor's note: this was first published in Thoughts from Dean on April 25, 2008.]

High school, they say, is the most enjoyable part of the education process. Well, if acne, armpit odor, newfound pubic hair, and insecurity appeal to you. Of course, we’ve all encountered this precarious stage. For me to be able to blog about it as I’m actually going through the process is exhilarating (as weird as that may sound).
High school is also where most people meet their first love. Many will argue that they met theirs in elementary. I maintain that love is improbable to find in [...] Continue Reading…

[Editor's note: this write-up was originally published in QWERTY Confessions on April 5, 2008. It is a work of fiction, written by me.]
Gunshots.
I heard them in the distance. The consistent rattling of machine guns and explosion of cannons filled my heart with trepidation, but I knew I had no other choice. I took the earthen jar in the kitchen and started on my way, knowing that this day could be my last.
I heard an explosion from afar. The suicide bombers must have struck again. I whispered a prayer to Allah. Guide me. Don’t let me die. I continued to [...] Continue Reading…

[Editor's note: this was first published in one of my Wordpress-hosted blogs, "QWERTY Confessions", on April 4, 2008. I am republishing it here because school is taking up too much of my time I will try to write a new post every once in a while (hopefully, multiple times a week).]
In the darkness, the girl stands sobbing. Her immaculate face is drenched in her own tears. She looks haggard, like she hasn’t gotten rest in days. On her nightstand, three or four handkerchiefs lay dripping wet. The depression has taken its toll. She is tired and has nearly [...] Continue Reading…

Hi, guys. As I said before, the silence of this blog is too loud to bear, so here’s a post to fill the empty void and break the awkward hush.

So I thought I’d take you guys through a timeline-style tour of how a day in the life of Dean usually goes, just so you see how crazy the world I live in is. Let’s begin after the jump.
4:40
My day starts when Mom’s cell phone rings. It sounds like someone’s calling, so my still-groggy mother picks up the phone and says, “Hello? Hello?” into the mouthpiece. I wait for her [...] Continue Reading…

I’ve been really swamped with school stuff lately. Physics is like the most difficult subject ever conceived, and jumping Jupiters, Mathematics ain’t a piece of cake either.

So this is third-year life. I guess I was too busy thinking about next-only-to-seniors-superiority and prom to remember the darker side of Junior Year.

The turmoil has resulted in an eerie silence of the blog—a silence I despise. If you don’t know, I’m a chatty person in real life, and not being able to talk about things on my blog creeps me out. Actually, throughout the day I’ve been trying to write about [...] Continue Reading…

Daniel Scocco, the genius behind the Daily network (Daily Blog Tips, Daily Writing Tips, and Daily Bits) has concocted a brilliant plan: an international bloggers network.

Daniel says that a bunch of bloggers had thought about a bloggers union a few years back, but in a totally different way: they were concerned about healthcare, insurance, etc.—you know, like writers or labor unions. Of course, it would be difficult to form, much more manage, such a union which is heavily Web-based.

Scocco is thinking of a totally different bloggers union—one that would protect its members from such problems as content-scraping, online scams, [...] Continue Reading…

An email from Firefox Download Day hit my inbox today. Firefox 3’s final release is going to be made available for download on June 17. As I’ve blogged before, Mozilla will try to set a world record for most software downloads in one day with their latest version of the famed web browser. If you haven’t pledged to participate in “Download Day” (as the record-setting attempt has been dubbed) yet, go to their page now and pledge to participate! It’s fun, fun, fun!