Basic Life Support

I am disappointed with where the certificates are going regarding the Basic Life Support Seminar. It has already been a month and still no sign of the certificate of attendance or certificate of completion ID card. What the hell is going on with it?

By the way, the seminar itself went fairly well and the hands-on were really hands-on. The only problem now is where are the certificates? I’m going to need it for the Advanced Cardiac Life Support Seminar this January in Iloilo City.

So please, CERTIFICATES, show yourself! :-?

Basic Life Support Seminar

There will be an upcoming Basic Life Suppport Seminar on November 27-28 in Saint Gabriel Hospital - Kalibo, Aklan. The cost is at Php1000 and I think there are snacks included, I'm not yet sure. This is an important seminar because you need this and an ECG seminar to take a much advanced course in Advanced Cardiac Life Support. I think that the Department of Health is the one who will conduct the seminar - again another unsure information.

I will blog here again to enumerate what happened during the seminar and how it went. :-?

Recipe 101: Sweet-and-Sour Gluten

Today I will post the recipe for the Sweet-and-Sour Gluten.

Gluten is a special type of protein. It is found in rye, wheat and barley.

*Not good for people with celiac disease.

Here are the ingredients for the Sweet-and-Sour Gluten

• 3/4 kilo gluten, sliced, fried

SAUCE:

• 1 1/2 cups water
• 1/2 medium-size carrot, cut into flowerettes
• 1/2 cup pineapple tidbits
• 2 tablespoons cornstarch
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 1 1/2 tablespoons soy sauce
• 4 pieces medium-size calamansi
• Salt to taste

Mix cornstarch, sugar, soy sauce, calamansi juice and water in a saucepan until smooth. Cook over medium fire. Add salt to taste. Stir until boiling. Add carrots and pineapple and cook until half done. Add gluten and cook for 5 minutes more. Serve hot.

Recipe 101: Fried Vegetarian Tocino

Tocino is made healthy with this simple recipe.

Ingredients:

• 3/4 kilo vegetarian tocino, sliced
• 2 pieces medium-sized cucumbers, sliced
• 2 pieces medium-sized tomatoes, sliced

Here's what you need to do. Slightly fry vegetarian tocino. Arrange on a platter. Garnish with cucumber and tomato slices. Serve hot!

Recipe 101: Sauteed Mongo Beans

Mongo Beans or Mung Beans are small ovoid shaped green beans. To sautee means to fry in a small amount of fat.

Sauteed Mongo Beans have the following ingredients:

• 2 cups cooked mongo beans
• 1 cup tokwa, cut in medium-size strips, fried
• 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
• 1 tablespoon garlic, crushed
• 1 piece medium-size onion, sliced
• 1/2 cup tomatoes, chopped finely
• 2 cups hugas bigas
• salt to taste

Saute garlic, onion, and tomatoes. Add noiled mongo beans, and hugas bigas. Season with salt. Simmer for 3 minutes and stirring while cooking. Add tokwa. Cook for another 3 minutes. Serve hot.

Recipe 101: Tokwa Adobo

Here's the recipe for Tokwa Adobo.

Ingredients:

• 3/4 kilo tokwa, sliced or diced
• 1 cup vegetable oil for deep frying
• 1/4 cup calamansi juice
• 1 head garlic, minced
• 1 bay leaf
• 2 tablespoons soy sauce
• 1 tablespoon cream of mushroom powder(optional)
• Salt to taste

Marinate tokwa in calamansi juice, garlic, bay leaf, soy sauce, salt, and cream of mushroom powder overnight. Drain. Fry tokwa to desired browning. Serve hot.

*Good for 6 persons. 1 slice or 1/2 cup diced per serving.

Recipe 101: Potato-Egg Omelet

Here's one of the recipes from the previous article.
Potato-egg omelet seems to be an easy food to cook and is better served with these tips:

Ingredients:

• 1/2 kilo medium-size potatoes, peeled, diced
• 1 cup oil for deep frying
• 1/2 piece medium-size red pepper, chopped
• 1/2 piece medium-size onion, chopped
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 3 eggs, well beaten
• Salt to taste

Boil potatoes until almost cooked. Drain. Mix all ingredients well, except oil. Fry in small individual servings unless you want to make the continent of Asia in your omelet and cut them later. Place on an absorbent material such as table napkin or cheese cloth or what we Filipinos commonly call as katsa to reduce fat. Serve hot with sauce or ketchup.

*Good for 6 persons unless you're as big as the biggest losers on TV.

Balanced Diet: 3-day Meal Plan

Day 1
Breakfast
6:00 am - 7:00 am

• Banana
• Potato-egg omelet
• Whole wheat bread with margarine
• Unpolished rice
• Soy coffee with milk

Lunch

11:45 am - 12:15 pm

• Tokwa adobo
• Sauteed squash and string beans
• Unpolished rice
• Baked, boiled or fried nuts

Supper

6:00 pm - 6:30 pm

• Ginataang vegemeat
• Unpolished rice
• Fresh Pineapple

Day 2

Breakfast

6:00 am - 7:00 am

• Papaya
• Fried vegetarian tocino
• Boiled camote with butter
• Unpolished rice
• Warm milk, no sugar

Lunch

11:45 am - 12:15 pm

• Sweet-and-sour gluten
• Boiled camote tops
• Unpolished rice
• Baked, boiled or fried nuts

Supper

6:00 pm - 6:30 pm

• Sauteed mongo beans 
• Unpolished rice
• Fruit gulaman delight

Day 3

Breakfast

6:00 am - 7:00 am

• Apple
• Tempura chunks
• Pandesal with cheese
• Champorado
• Salabat

Lunch

11:45 am - 12:15 pm

• Vegetarian apritada
• Boiled malunggay
• Unpolished rice
• Soymilk

Supper

6:00 pm - 6:30 pm

• Chili beans
• Unpolished rice
• Fresh buko

*This is the 3-day meal plan for the balanced diet. I will post the ingredients for each mentioned recipe above on my next blog. Happy eating!

Diet 101: Balanced Diet

Balanced Diet aka General Diet aka Regular diet aka Full Diet aka Complete diet. 

What is a balanced diet? A balanced diet is a food preparation which provides complete nutrients as well as supplies carbohydrates, proteins, fats, vitamins, minerals and fiber in their normal proportions. It is the basis for all diet modifications.

Tips:

• Eat 3 meals a day instead of frequent ones or eating between meals.
• Establish a regular eating habit. When you eat breakfast at 6 am, do so regularly.
• Eat a heavy breakfast, a moderate lunch, and a light supper. 
• Eat food of the right kind, at the right time and interval, in the right amount, and in the right condition of mind, so eating in a relaxed atmosphere is ideal.
• Have at least a 5-hour interval between meals for digestion to be efficient. Last meal of the day should be taken at least 3 hours before sleeping unless you want to commit suicide by eating a heavy meal before sleeping to increase your chance of pancreatitis.
• Eat more fresh fruits instead of rich desserts but can you really resist a mango float, it has fruits. :-?
• Eat at least one serving of dark green leafy vegetables a day.
• Eat more unrefined, unprocessed foods.
• Avoid tea, coffee, alcoholic and carbonated beverages. For those who can't be satisfied with plain water after eating, try drinking soft drinks instead of water and maybe you'll tell yourself you've had enough. P.S. not for diabetics.
• Drink at least 6 glasses of water a day between meals.
• Include a variety of foods each meal. 
• Take time to enjoy your food. Do not hurry.

I'll have a 3-day meal plan written on my next article. :-?

Yahoo Messenger vs Skype

From what I've seen so far in internet cafes and people I know, they use Yahoo Messenger as their primary internet messenger to chat with other people. Yahoo Messenger is also the first internet messenger i used since it was the one I saw in internet cafes. So before we get on with Skype let me show you the list of features of Yahoo Messenger and they are as follows:

• Send text messages in real time
• Join a chat room
• Share photos
• PC-to-PC calls
• PC-to-Phone calls
• SMS text messaging to cellphones for free
• Webcam
• IM conferencing
• File Transfer and many more plug-ins

As you can see from these features, they are useful and easy to use. Yahoo Messenger is also used by many people in their homes. Especially here in the Philippines where the use of Yahoo Messenger is very rampant. So it is very applicable if you have a lot of chat mates here in the Philippines. It's user-friendly but you could get lost if you're a newbie. You can download Yahoo Messenger for free here: http://messenger.yahoo.com/download/.

Just click on the button. You can even download a local version since it is available in certain countries and here in the Philippines. If you have friends in other countries, you might want to try Skype since it is more commonly used there especially in the US.

Skype

A lot of people, including me, have the notion that to use Skype you need to pay a certain amount to avail of it's services that's why most people don't bother to explore Skype even further. This notion made me regret and tell myself, "Why did I just know about this now?". Skype is for FREE! It gave me better experience than Yahoo Messenger the first time I used it. It may not be the fanciest of all designs but it is worth it because of the services it can offer you. Skype is for free download at their website at: http://www.skype.com/download/skype/windows/.

Again just click on thebutton and you're set to download.

So why do I think that Skype is better than Yahoo Messenger? Here are the features:

• Has all the features of Yahoo Messenger mentioned above
• The Plug-ins are endless and cool although some of them are useless and full of errors
• Has a more professional look than Yahoo Messenger
• Easier to understand and more user-friendly
• The best part I like about it is that you can share your screen to the person you are chatting to. By sharing your screen I mean you can let the one who is chatting with you see what you are currently seeing on your screen. So if the other person is watching a movie, you can watch that movie with him or her. This is most important if you want to troubleshoot for somebody. They can show you their screen and there you can give them instructions on what to do next. It saves time and effort on the part of both persons. You can even select a part of your screen that you want to share, that's how much freedom you can have with Skype.
• Skype is used best when you want to exclusively chat with another person like a business meeting or a personal conversation.

It will always be up to the user on what he or she really wants to do. So try both out now, who knows, you could enjoy one more than the other.

The Sims 3

Whoah! I really got hooked with The Sims 3. I just had twins with my family in The Sims 3. So now I have 5 children. There are a lot of new things in The Sims 3. It just gets better and better every title of The Sims. I have been playing the series since The Sims and I've been loving this simulation game ever since.

In The Sims 3 the new things include having new skills such as gardening and fishing. You also get to have traits which are very interesting stuff. You can also ride a bicycle now. The best upgrade yet is to be able to go about town or any house without the long wait. The Sims 3 five times the loading speed of The Sims 2 and lesser loading times. So to EA, thanks for the great games out there!

Please support the game so we can have more titles out there from EA. :-?

Saint Gabriel Hospital

I just found out that the hospital where I'm working in has a new website/social network at ning. I haven't explored it yet but it looks promising. Hope you could visit it and give your insights about the hospital. It's at sgh-aklan.ning.com.

*Saint Gabriel Hospital is located in the heart of Kalibo, Aklan, Philippines.

It's been a long time

It's been a long time since I've last written an article in this blog. I've been very busy lately playing the sims 3 and other games(I'm addicted to them, not really. No, I don't think so). So right now I'm also applying for online home based writing jobs. I'm hoping to land even just one job as a start. I don't care about the pay as long as I'm gaining experience and it's worth it. I'd be very happy if I get accepted. It will be a fulfillment on my part and very self-fulfilling.

The Sound of Silence

...

School days

Those where the days in college where everything was so serious but also fun. I missed those times but I just remembered a video I made with my group in our seminar entitled Erratic Impulse. So here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qos2bgItbbU.

I made this using Windows Movie Maker. Those were the primitive days of my video editing. :-?

Manga

After deciding on how to draw my characters for a major project coming up, I decided to draw my characters in that project in "manga" look. So I started learning how to draw them and got hooked to a site called Manga University. It's a cool site and if you like you can check it out. It teaches you how to draw manga characters from head to toe. Very useful and essential techniques can be tackled here.
Here's my first digital character in manga(I've drawn using pencils and paper and they looked better because I had more control then. In my laptop, I have no tablet so it's all with the use of the pen tool in photoshop).
Manga university: www.howtodrawmanga.com

Mafia wars

A friend just got me interested in Mafia Wars today. It's a web-based mmorpg and hosted in facebook. It's got me hooked already. Time to do some crimes and earn from them!

I.V. Therapy

As a nurse in the Philippines, it is now a requirement by law to be a licensed I.V. therapist. To be one, you need to attend a 3-day I.V. therapy training course. Right now it would cost about P1,500 - P2,500 depending on the location of the seminar and institution behind it.

I've been in attendance in the said seminar here in Saint Gabriel Hospital in Kalibo, Aklan, Philippines. It cost us P2,500 for the seminar with 2 free snacks and lunch. It starts at 8:00 A.M. until 5:00-5:30P.M. depending on the lecturers. We just had our demonstrations by the preceptors just this afternoon and tomorrow we'll be doing the return demonstrations complete with all the enumerations step-by-step.

The institutions responsible for this training program are the Iloilo Misssion Hospital Nursing Service and the Saint Gabriel Hospital Nursing Service. Also there are sponsors for the said seminar including the Saint Gabriel Hospital, Inc., Saint Gabriel College, and GenCare Medical Distribution Inc.

For me, completing the requirements in this seminar is not enough to be able to fully call yourself a licensed I.V. Therapist, EXPERIENCE is still the best teacher. :-?

Ellusionist

Talking about magic, here's a cool site about it. They've got great video demonstrations there and a lot of cool stuff too. So check their website at www.ellusionist.com. ;-?

Just remembered...POOF!

Just remembered another hobby of mine. It was a year ago when I really got into it. It was a childhood ambition of mine to become a MAGICIAN! So last year, while we were reviewing for our board exam in Nursing, I was reviewing my magic tricks. I got some of my classmates to be in awe especially if I acted stupid and they thought I was wrong but in the end I was right. I just remembered it cause I'm gonna start reviewing my tricks in a few days.

New site discovered

I just discovered a new site for tutorials about after effects. It looks great and I'm still going to explore it. Here's the web address: http://ae.tutsplus.com/. :-?

My first major project!

Yeah! I finally made my first major project in after effects. It's my 75th monthsary message for my girlfriend. It's a start for me and that I finally turned the tutorials I learned from a lot of cool sources into a project. I really learned a lot and from these cool sites:

1. Videocopilot.net
2. creativecow.net
3. allbetsareoff.com

They are the coolest sites I've been into and the people there are amazingly creative, artistic and very helpful. I enjoyed watching their tutorials and hope you watch too. Here's the link to my project which I posted in youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIRZQbOQEf0

Finally

I finally created a project!Yehey for me! I made a project for my lovely girlfriend for our 75th monthsary!I love that girl!She's my only and last one! I'll post it here when it's finished. :-?

Gregory House, M.D.

Another hobby I do is buy a lot of dvd series like House and watch them all day long from the 1st episode till the last episode I can watch. Right now I'm starting to watch Season 5 of House and I'm excited.

Also, on videocopilot, there's a tutorial about making the video in After Effects about House where the cells in our body are magnified just like in House. It's a great tutorial and I love it!Hoping to make one in the near future! :-?

Electrified

I was shocked, well not really cause I was expecting it. Our electric bill is so high for a residential bill- I guess. It's up to 1,800 pesos. That's about $40 now. It's very high. Last month it was about $22. So what went wrong?

Well it was the overnight duty of my laptop because I'm downloading a lot of torrents right now and they are about 3 gigabytes in average size and there are about 7 of them so I really had to turn the laptop on till morning. So it's probably all my fault why. So the solution is to be patient in downloading the files and turn off the laptop when not in use. :-?

Freeze!

I made a project just recently about freezing time in After Effects. It sucks and I know it. I just kind of made it in a hurry because I was running out of patience as I always do cause I'm doing it on a laptop and it's kind of slow. Also, the camera that I used is a digital camera with dimensions of 320x240. I wish I had a better camera. It's not cool but hey, it's a start. I learned this from videocopilot(the best site ever). So here it is...

Who Are You?

Conflict

I'm having a hard time right now between Illustrator and After Effects. I'm always tempted to view tutorials for after effects when I see one. It then diverts my attention back to after effects and lose my focus in Illustrator. So, I'll go with whatever pleases me. hahaha...

I've also started to download symbols from deviantart. It's a great website for digital designs. A lot of pictures, graphics, photoshop brushes, and a lot more about art. So check out the website and there are a lot of free stuff there. :-?

Illustrator

Right now I'm learning illustrator so I could get started with making my characters that I'm going to animate in after effects. It's really taking a lot of my time and I'm already excited to make my cartoon skit.

Illustrator is like photoshop but for me, it's more of like drawing things as vectors, they don't lose detail even if you scale them up. It still gives you sharp edges not like in photoshop where the picture would pixelate. So I'm gonna continue watching the tutorials! :-?

Learning After Effects

I'm still trying to learn more about after effects and it's taking longer for me to make my projects than I expected. There are a lot to learn and remember and I can't seem to remember most of what I've learned. Must be "short term memory loss". However, I'm trying to start from animating cartoons because I don't have a good video camera right now and videos are nice to edit if they are high quality which in my case is out of my league.

So what I'm trying to do is to start a 1-3 minute animation in cartoons and see what I'm capable of. I'm having a hard time thinking of what my characters would look like and the plot of my animation. So I'm researching on the net but can't seem to find a good topic. I'm still trying though. I'm also learning from some cool websites and would like you to check it out also.

• Creativecow.net - a lot of tutorials here from a lot of sources
  
• allbetsareoff.com - a good site with cool and useful tutorials
  
• videocopilot.net - the best site for me and my mentor

So I hope I could start animating my cartoon and hope to post it here soon. :-?

NBA Finals 2009 LA vs ORLANDO

The NBA finals just finished a while ago. I had always admired how the Lakers play because it's showtime when they play. It's pure entertainment when I see the way they play the game. They don't play like Detroit and San Antonio - teams that are defensive specialists. It's nice to see their defense but it's boring all the way. There is nothing in their game that could make you jump out of your seat and make you cheer for either team. Back to the game, I didn't watch the game from the start and only saw it from mid 2nd quarter. It's a closer game today than it was on game 1 but still, I'm cheering for the Lakers! They got smashed by Rashard Lewis of the Orlando Magic in this quarter with his 18 points and 12 from the 3 point line. I think they got 3 pointers because when they post Dwight Howard, he's got 3-pointers all over the floor and can pass it to anyone of them when they double team him. Howard's my favorite active center right now. Go Superman!

And the game goes to overtime. I hate it when the Lakers get complacent. I like the play in overtime at the 1:20 mark. Gasol makes a 3-point play and gave the Lakers a 6-point lead!

Finally, the Lakers won! :-?

After effects

As I've said earlier, after effects is really an amazing program. I'd convince you to try it and you too will be amazed on what you could do with it. I think a lot of people will be discouraged the first time they see after effects because of its overwhelming array of tools that can get you thinking, "What now?". I got the overwhelmed and discouraged the first time I looked at after effects' interface but because I was amazed of what it could as to what I've seen in the net, I was really determined to learn about it.

So I started gathering the resources I needed and got all of them in the net. I started out at youtube, the most popular video resource of the net these days. I searched for after effects and a lot of results came back as I expected. I didn't know where to start so I clicked on one of the videos not knowing what to get. I didn't start out reading articles or help files because I hate reading especially if I'm reading from my monitor. It makes me sleepy in under 5 minutes of reading and dizzy in under 3 minutes. I'm also bored because if I'm reading, nothing moves or it's so dull but when I'm watching video tutorials or pictures, it makes learning after effects easier and more convenient.

There are a lot videos on youtube but the quality and contents are not as convincing and not as educational for me. I needed more. So I turned to yahoo's search engine(I prefer yahoo than google's because it's much easier for me to type). So in yahoo, I typed After effects tutorials and as usual millions came up. I looked at all the web pages that came up in page 1 of the search but found nothing convincing or worth it. So I looked further and I guess it was the 3rd set of results that got me lucky. That's also when I learned that if nothing good comes up in the first page, there are better things on the next results. I had the mentality that after I search, I only look at the first set of results and I don't look any further. So this experience told me, you won't always be lucky the first time around. Okay, so now I clicked a result with the website named videocopilot.net. It didn't hit my mind that this would be the site I'm looking for when I saw the site name. I couldn't see a resemblance with after effects but I didn't judge the site by it's cover so I looked further.

I was all smiles when I saw the tutorial videos especially the most recent post. So I started opening the tutorials and saw what I needed. I got hooked to this site and it was all about videocopilot after that. There are a lot of useful things at this site. The first thing I noticed about the tutorials, the guy talking/ teaching is not boring to listen to. He's like a professor in a classroom with interested students in him because he knows how to throw those punch lines out of nothingness. He know's when to joke around in the tutorial and when to get serious. His name is Andrew Kramer. I haven't looked at his profile yet but he's a great at making tutorials. So if ever you're interested in learning after effects I'd recommend you start out at his website and you'll be learning in no time. I'll stop right here because after a few weeks when I started with after effects, I lost interest because my computer is toooo slow to render my compositions. I just got interested again about 2-3 months ago from writing this blog.

As my first article in this blog I will enumerate things that make my life from boring to exciting.First up is what I'm currently busy with right now and that is After Effects. So let's bring up our online encyclopedia to define it for us. According to wikipedia Adobe After Effects is a digital motion graphics and compositing software published by Adobe systems. Its main purpose is for film and video post-production. For more information regarding this program, check their website at http://www.adobe.com.

So how did I this become a hobby of mine? Well, it as it turns out I'm interested in making films or animations and it really amazes me as to how technology has put it into the hands of simple people like me. Imagine back in the past where people made films and animations but they had to have special training or skills to do it. It could have been their hobby and it's what got them a job but hey, they had to have necessary and professional skills to do it. Today, with the technology that we have, even a person without prior knowledge or skills could get the hang of it even in just 24 hours. But today with programs like after effects, what they did with the first film of Mickey Mouse (one of my favorite cartoon characters growing up) can be done by an amatuer in after effects. I just can't stop talking about after effects because it has really amazed me of its capabilities but enough of that, let's go on to my next hobby which is...

Another adobe product, Photoshop, the first program that really intertwined my interests in digital designs. If I could recall, oh crap, i can't recall how I first got my hands on photoshop cause it's been a long time since I've started using this program. But anyway, I guess I was just out in the mall looking for some cd's to buy until I came across a cd of photoshop cs2. The picture on the disc that really got me buying the cd was a picture of a building with an edited copy of it by its side. I don't know what got me interested in that picture but I sure bought that cd. So right from the moment I first opened CS2 on my slow laptop I was already amazed even with the lasso tool alone from the tutorial and it just went on and on with amazement.

So the next hobby on the list is downloading. My day wouldn't be quite right if I haven't downloaded anything. Everything in the net out there is just ripe to be downloaded. It's like impulsive shopping in the mall only that my mall is the internet. And the net is complete with all the resources you need even some for free.

The most important hobby for me which really makes my life complete is going on a date with my tender, loving and caring girlfriend, Kaye, and watching movies every month. We just love to watch new movies especially box office hits(so we get our money's worth, especially now that movies here in the provinces in the Philippines can cost as much as P100.50. We used to watch it 6 years back then at only about P35.50, I don't know I can't remember anymore but what I remember was it was very cheap!

That's what I'll blog right now. Add some later. :-?