Learning Another Language—beginning with Spanish

It’s on my Top 5 list on what I want to accomplish in the next five years. I have started doing my self-study lessons late last year but had overlooked it when I got so busy looking for another job early this year. Now i'm back to it again.

When you are learning a language, the best choice is to enroll in a language school. But what if your schedule cannot accommodate such plan? As for me these days, I work at nights and I sleep on mornings. I haven’t found a language school yet that suits my schedule. Or sometimes, you just cannot afford to pay for a language school which, unfortunately, is also applicable to me. So what do you do then? Do you just give up on your goals? I don’t think you should. There are always other numerous internet resources.

• Chatrooms – just have to be very patient and cut through every crap of meeting people who wants to view your cam and ask you to do BS. There are actually helpful chatters out there and friendship is a plus while learning a new language.
• YouTube – I love YouTube and it’s always one of my research destinations.
• Language forums and community –my friend Van told me about Rosseta Stone Shared Talk and it’s quite cool.
• MP3s – this is how I currently study Spanish I. I have downloaded mp3s from a website I found using Google Hacks. I have a link to Spanish lessons MP3s and aside from Spanish, there are also mp3s of other languages like Japanese, French, Korean, Greek, Portuguese, Arabic, Russian, Mandarin, German even Hindi, Irish, Romanian and Vietnamese! I cannot post the link here though. I am not sure if it is legal. But if you want the link, I’ll be happy to email it to you. Just leave your e-mail address on the comments area and will get back to you as soon as I can. ¡Que tengas suerte!

Photo above by Darren Robertson

Your Best Choice on Italian Dining at La Jolla San Diego, California

What will complete lounging on sandy beaches, viewing the rustic shoreline, posh shopping experience in an upscale community and the best diving and snorkeling adventure in Southern California? It is an unforgettable dining experience in Trattoria Acqua, an Italian restaurant in La Jolla, San Diego California. It is casual dining place overlooking the La Jolla Cove and Pacific Ocean that gives a Mediterranean Italian ambience and boasts of award-winning service and authentic Italian recipes.

Dining is truly one of the criteria that define a travel destination like La Jolla (“the Jewel” in Spanish) and Trattoria Acqua will not disappoint on this area. Whether it is an intimate dinner for two or for a family, a lunch with business associates or with friends, Trattoria Acqua can accommodate every kind of customers for every type occasions from its sumptuous Italian menu delicately prepared by some of the most well-known chefs in the area. They also keep a wide variety of wine collections to choose from to match and indulge on your Italian feast. So, if you are looking for the best choices of Italian restaurant in La Jolla, Trattoria Acqua should definitely go on your list.

Weekend Testosterone Overload

Men love bloody, painful things. And the TV remote control. My brother is the perfect example. I stayed in all weekend because I was not feeling well. It also meant sitting through every bloody testosterone-driven shows my brother is watching on TV.

There was the UFC 97: Redemption broadcasted from Montreal, Canada. Anderson Silva won over Thales Lietes by unanimous decision. The crowd gave him boos, they thought it was a boring fight. There was just not enough blood. Chuck Liddel’s lost to Mauricio Shogun Rua is career-turning and can be very well the end of his UFC days.

There was also the WrestleMania 25 which is at least, always entertaining. When I was fourteen, I thought myself in love with Shawn Michaels. A decade and some later, Shawn Michaels is still in WWE and almost took away Undertaker’s 16-0 winning streak in WrestleMania. John Cena won the World Heavyweight title, snatching it from Edge and the Big Show on a unique three-way fight.

There was also the Fast and the Furious Sunday morning boxing event at Araneta Center where two Filipino boxing stars, Ryan Villoria and Nonito Donaire won over their Latin and American opponents, respectively. After that is the PBA basketball game of Alaska vs. Purefoods. I was happy at this point, I am a fan of Alaska Aces and they won.

My brother is currently getting interested with American Football. And I was thinking, really, can’t the overflowing testosterone on TV be enough?

US Embassy Non-Immigrant Visa Application Step by Step, How-to’s and Tips

Non-immigrant Visa is a visa issued by the United States of America to citizens of other countries who wish to enter the country for a temporary purpose. There are several visa classifications according to the purpose of visit.
Before you appear in US Embassy in Manila for the non-immigrant visa interview, make sure you accomplished the following checklist:

• Accurate and complete information on your DS-156 form with 2X2 photo. Photo should be a frontal shot of your face with both ears showing. Photo should be against white background and of you in business attire.
• Accurate and complete information on your DS-157 form.
• Passport
• Confirmed Interview schedule with the US Consul done by internet. Print email confirmation. You can do this by calling the call center or accessing online appointment application via their Visa Point™
• Paid Visa Application fees. DS-157 should have a machine validation from the bank when payment is made. Payment is roughly amounts to Php 7,000 when converted to peso.
• Letter of Invitation from business entity or family relations from USA
• Additional supporting documents depending on the purpose of your intention to enter the US Territories (Business, Work Permit, Tourist)

The Manila US Embassy where the non-immigrant visa interview is conducted is located at Roxas Boulevard , it is in front of the Bayview Park Hotel. See Google Map of US Embassy in Manila, Philippines.

The illustration below is the current procedure in applying for Non-immigrant Visa. Procedures could be subject to change at any time in the future but this is a good idea of the general step by step.

STEP 1: Non-Immigrant Visa Entrance
Fall in line in the non-immigrant queue. Reception attendants will confirm your appointment. Present your confirmed interview print-out, DS-156 and DS-157. A barcode sticker will be attached to your passport and Air21 form will be issued to you. Fill-out the Air21 form if your visa is approved.
STEP 2: Security and X-Ray
You will pass through a security check and your belongings will pass thru an x-ray machine. NO electronic devices and gadgets of any kind are allowed inside the embassy (cellphones, mp3 players, flash drive, etc). It is better to leave these items at home.
STEP 3: Pre-Screening
Pre-Screening is done in The Pavilion area. You can fall in line any one of windows labeled C, D, E and F. Present your DS-156, DS-157, passport and supporting documents. You will be given your QUEUE NUMBER. Keep this until the end of the interview. Proceed to the Waiting Area and wait for your Queue Number to be called.
STEP 4: Finger-Print Scanning
Queue Numbers will be called in random. Pay attention to this. When your number is called, proceed to the Finger-print scanning window where your finger-prints will be processed. After your prints are processed, they will return to you your passport, forms and documents.
STEP 5: Interview with the Consul
Wait for your Queue Number to flash on the queuing screen. When it’s your turn, go to the assigned window and present your documents and passport to the consul. The consul will ask you questions regarding your application. The consul will then inform you if your visa is approved or denied.
STEP 6: Visa and Passport Delivery
The consul will keep your passport if your visa is approved. You can now go back to the Pavilion where Air21 delivery service is located. Fill-out the form and pay the visa and passport delivery charge. Standard delivery time is one-week.

Some Helpful Tips in Applying for your Non-Immigrant US Visa

• Make sure forms are duly accomplished and documents are complete and accurate to avoid delays. Information on your passport should be the same of that written on your DS-156 and DS-157. If a question in the form is not applicable to you, make sure to write N/A or Not Applicable.
• Arrive in the Embassy at least 2 hours before your appointment time because queue lines can be very long. Arriving there early will give you ample time to go through the pre-screening process so you can make it on your scheduled interview with the consul in time.
  Answer the consul’s questions and explain in clear, short and concise manner. This is helpful for the consul and you.
• Make sure that you know pertinent information regarding your application that could include but not limited to:
  a. the purpose of your visit
  b. your relationship to the person who sent you the invitation
  c. dates (example: if you are attending a family member’s wedding, the date of the wedding. If you are going there for a training, the training dates)
  d. planned destinations in USA
  e. length of stay
  f. who will pay for your trip
  g. guarantee of your return to the Philippines
• Be honest on the information provided. Any fraud found will be subjected to refusal of any form of visa from the embassy in the future.
• You can bring a book to pass the time while waiting for your turn.
• Bring bottled water.
  
  Visit the Manila US Embassy for more information on Non-Immigrant Visa

Related Articles

• Applying for Student's Permit from LTO

Googlers fun lunch times – the innovative Google culture

Google must be one of the most admired companies in the world and mostly it’s because of the people that work on it. The curiosity of its people is endless and there’s never an experiment that is too silly or too mundane to take on for them. Take for example their latest lunch time hobby posted in the official Google blog, Will it Lens? It’s childish and hilarious but it just goes to show that they are having fun at work and are not are walled by corporate niceties. They actually make time to experiment even without clear objective or expectancy of results. But even so, it is quite obvious that there is a collective culture of continued growth and search for progress and of new way of doing things. This teaches us to continue challenging ourselves and go beyond our comfort zone and also, have fun while doing it.

You don’t know me --makes me cry

I was tweaking with my cousin’s newly bought laptop on Black Saturday at their house when she asked me to play a CD. There were only track numbers, no track titles. She told me to play Track 15 and told me not to cry. I love my cousin in the whole world but she sometimes has a sick sense of humor. I shrugged, raised one eyebrow and said fine; no matter what it is I won’t cry. I knew from the first few notes that I would cry, I got teary eyed when a woman’s voice started with the words “You gave your hand to me, and then you said hello. And I can hardly speak, my heart is beating so. And anyone can tell that you know me well…but you don’t know me”. It’s amazing that there’s a song that can make us cry and i'm not really embarassed to confess this.

My cousin, true to her mischievous nature said “I think she’s lesbian, listen to the line “I watch you walk away, with the lucky guy”. I got teary-eyed and laughing so loud at the same time with her comment. Silly, of course Jann Arden is not lesbian (as far as I know). The song was first sung by Ray Charles. The lyrics were not altered when Arden covered it.

I always relate the song to the movie that always makes me cry too no matter how many times I have watched it. It is particularly the scene in My Best friend’s Wedding, when Julianne met Michael at the airport. Someone used to and still always tell me that I’m such a cry-baby, yes he would know about that since I have cried on his shoulders so many times before but I do wonder.. if he ever knew me at all…

Ray Charles singing "You don't Know Me"

MV Doulos in Manila

Oh I know, I should try to post events on this blog as soon as they happened and not like three weeks later. No excuses, just pure absent-mindedness. Anyways, MV Doulos is a ship that has already traveled around the world for almost half century bringing books and charity to the most impoverished countries in the world. It is said to be the oldest floating bookstore and oldest active passenger ship according to the Guinness Book of World Records.

When you go on board, there are numerous framed posters chronicling the history of the ship. Of course, you will also find their famous bookstore where they sell different kinds of books from kids story books to cookbooks. What’s interesting is it started as a passenger vessel bringing potatoes to and fro Texas. Later in 1977, it was salvaged from a shipyard by a German non-profit organization GBA (Good Books for All) and transformed into something that it is today. It is registered in Malta and Doulos should mean “servant” in Greek.

But more than it’s commendable history and it’s astonishing record of receiving 2 million visitors on board to date, the heart of Doulos is its continuous mission to bring education and hope to places that is it most lacking. While they were in Pier 13 of South Harbour they did charity work in the most depressed areas in Manila. The ship was also able to travel in other locations in Cebu and Mindanao.The MV Doulos organization is also a channel where people can volunteer to help other people. It is a melting pot of many nations and backgrounds, in the hope that the assimilation of many cultures on board will create a sense of tolerance, understanding and friendships. To read more about them and their work, you can visit their website.

Discovering Eleven Minutes – A novel by Paulo Coelho

Starting a novel with “Once upon a time there’s a prostitute called Maria” will surely intrigue a reader. Whoever starts a mature-themed novel with a line from kid’s fairy tales? And when you take the next step to read further, you get hooked to a prose style that is marked Paulo Coelho. But it truly is a fairy tale as every woman, in her own view of reality views her life with this kind of quality, the question left is if it will have a happy ending or not.
Paulo takes on the topic of sex and how we, as humans find it our greatest pleasure, greatest source of power and greatest source of fear. Sex in the context of love, sex in its sanctity and sex in its profanity.
Coelho takes us to the voice inside Maria’s head as she went about her life and journey. How she despaired for an unrequited love in her childhood and vowed never to let a moment pass by again when love comes around next time. She discovered sex during her teenage years but found it unsatisfying and ordinary. When she met a foreigner who offered her a job in Switzerland, she formed grand plans to become famous and dreamt for a prince charming to sweep her off her feet. But things didn’t turned out as she planned when she ends up as a high-class prostitute in Geneva. She fell in love with a painter and in the course of her profession as a prostitute, discovered the extremes of sex that which discovered by self-mutilation and sex in the context of sacredness
The novel is interestingly graphic that one would imagine Maria’s pain when Terence inflicted her with his sadist methods but also relate with her tenderness and surreal intoxication when Ralf and her would just sit by the fireplace, talking but not touching, soul communing.
It is a novel of self-discovery which seems to be a template of most of Coelho’s novels and makes us think about our prejudices about sex and how it influences our motives and values. As Maria said in the novel: “Eleven minutes. The world revolved around something that only took eleven minutes.”
There was also a theme like this on Coelho’s novel Brida where Brida’s witch teacher told her that the “most powerful force that joins the magic world to non-magic world is sex”. The nover is a good read especially to the women who will read it, that although we despair in many matters in our lives like love, sex and self-worth we still have to believe that we can expect of good things and desire them, that we find meaning in our existence not in the pains inflicted by others but in the goodness and pleasure that we are discovering everyday.

House M.D. pays tribute to Dr. Lawrence Kutner

Dr. Kutner is one of the three “survivors” from Dr. House’s insanely series of tests to replace his three doctors Chase, Cameron and Foreman during the fourth Season of House M.D. I am totally addicted to this series and I have the complete DVD from first to fourth season and could watch it over and over again and still laugh over the House-ism moments.

They apparently cut short Kal Penn’s character Dr. Lawrence Kutner and I was totally shocked. I was so shocked that I thought that Kal Penn was really dead when an obituary appeared on House’s website. Apparently it’s Kutner the character’s obituary and not Penn’s. Kutner was a sassy, funny doctor and yet unassuming, brilliant and but was not overpowering. Although the show could have done better in giving him enough limelight and character unfolding, he had his moments when he stands on philosophy and medical diagnosis through Starwars and other science-fiction theory that he so loved.

Kal Penn, the actor asked to be let go from the TV show to work with Obama’s administration in Washington as associate director for public liaison. Whoa, not bad. So this means that he won’t be acting for a while.

Gone But Remembered

Some Episode lines
“I’m sorry for your loss.” - Cuddy
“It’s not my loss.” - House
“I’m sorry you don’t think it is.” - Cuddy
“Suicide means you could have helped him; murder means you’re off the hook.” - Cameron to House.

Hugh Laurie’s character Dr. House was shaken for Kutner who appears to be always a breezy, carefree person to commit suicide. As the funeral service is going on, House was in Kutner’s house searching for answers on why Kutner decided to end his life. For a doctor like House who always obsessed with answer, this was a mystery he has to solve even in the indignant lectures of Cuddy, Wilson and Cameron on his lack of remorse.

Contemplating Visit

Last time I posted an entry regarding browsing the arts housed in Lopez Museum from any desktop through an interactive button from their website. I enjoyed doing just that and also decided I would visit the museum one of these days and write about it here. The one thing that holds me back is I am sure I won’t be allowed to take any picture inside the museum for security reasons. Understandable, but really too bad. Since I won't have any photo except the building of the museum maybe, I was contemplating a scheme to present my visit in another way. I was browsing through a blueprinting site which offers to convert an architects design to blueprint and layout when an idea popped into my mind. Why not an unofficial lay-out of the Lopez Museum? I’m an IE and lay-out is just my thing. I’m not sure if this contemplation is illegal but wouldn’t it be a nice guide even before you go to museum that you would have an idea on which area you would want to check out first? I’m sure it’s not only me that has this nagging habit of reading guides and manuals first before doing anything or going anywhere. It’s just better to have an idea first on the course of actions that one would take for less effort and time wasted.

Applying for Student’s Permit from LTO

I went to LTO East Avenue to apply for my student’s permit this week. Admittedly I am scared out of my wit to drive and it is just out of necessity as requirement at work that I am even considering learning how to drive. Anyways, from past experience, I know I have to brace myself to having to get into a long line when doing transactions with government agencies. So as a preventive action, the first order of the day is to get there early. I got there at 7:00 in the morning and true enough, there was already a long line. I finished my transactions at around 9:30 a.m. At that rate, I’d say the service could still get better and should get better. It was only bearable because I met someone while waiting whom I was able to exchange conversations with.
If you want to apply for student’s permit the requirements are the following or you can check the LTO website. Student permit is a prerequisite when enrolling in a driving school and in applying for Non-Professional or Professional Driving license.

(1) TIN (Tax Identification Number)
(2) Photocopy of any of the following
a. Legal or Philippine Government issued ID ((SSS ID, PhilHealth ID, GSIS ID, TIN ID, Pag-ibig ID, Office ID)
b. NSO authenticated Birth Certifate
(3) Parents consent if you are 16 to 18 years old
(4) Php318.00 for payment of processing and permit.

How to get to LTO East Avenue Office
(1) Coming from South (Makati/Mandaluyong/Cubao)
a. Ride the SM Fairview Bus Route from any bus stop along EDSA going north and get off at LTO bus stop
(2) Coming from North (Fairview,Caloocan,Valenzuela)
a. Ride the Baclaran or MIA Bus Route
Nearby Landmarks: NSO Main Office, GMA 7 Station Building, Heart Center, Quezon City Hall

Application Process
(1) Fill-up the application form
(2) Pass it to the evaluator (Window 2/Window 3)
(3) Have your photo and signature taken on Window 6
(4) Pay the processing and permit at cashier on Window 7
(5) Permit is released on Window 13

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