Driving Range and Makati Golf Club

They say that you can never hit a golf ball on the first swing. In my case, it was true. First time on the driving range at Makati Golf Club (Located at Malugay St. beside Ara the Korean Restaurant) for yours truly. Always wanted to go but now found the time.

Soar! The golf ball flies through the driving range.

Slightly adjusted my swing. I think one of my fingers bled that day because my grip was too tight. Need to work on my stance and maybe arm strength? To be fair, the farthest my swing reached was on the third farthest shadow.

Details on the driving range. It’s 350 bucks per hour. Renting an iron club is 150 and recommended for beginners like me. Wood costs around 200. What you’re seeing on the picture is a machine that has a pedal that you can step on so that it automatically dispenses golf balls. When it runs out of golf balls, you can ask for a new set of balls.

The green net is there to control the balls from hitting establishments or even the cars that are located below the net. It’s actually a parking lot since the driving range is found on the second floor. There are stores that sell golf equipment in the driving range but me opted to just try it out. It’s quite lovely that nobody cares about who’s doing what.

If you want to experience playing golf, you can try a few swings here at the driving range. Makati Golf Club. Call them up at 830-2222. Verne out.

IntraLASIK. From a Verne’s Eye View

Had to take a break from writing to rest the eyes. Here we go.

“The Intra LASIK method is a 100% blade-free technique used to perform the critical first step in the LASIK procedure: creating the corneal flap. The creation of the corneal flap prepares the eye for the second step of the LASIK procedure, in which an Excimer laser is used on the inner cornea to correct vision. ” Verne  just quoted  this off the website: http://shinagawa.ph/lasik/about-lasik/what-is-lasik/

To give a background on how Verne came to wear glasses, it was the result of “very good parenting skills.” Verne’s mother worked a lot and she had to leave her kid in front of the television, playing video games, and read books in the dark most of time, which surprisingly honed his language skills lol. Thank god for Cookie Monster and Sesame Street.

After at least two decades of having glasses, Verne decided to go for it on a whim. Shoot laser beams through his eyes courtesy of Shinagawa Lasik and Aesthetics Philippines – http://shinagawa.ph Should be a boatload of fun.

Completely forgot what my grade was. Verne thinks it was around 350 for the left eye. and 625 for the right eye.  Here’s a slight preview of the past. Mostly eye frames.

Protective Outdoor Gear

Gauze, Appointment Card, and Oral Meds.

Eyeshield

Vigamox / Econopred / Artificial Tears

After Surgery Kit

After Surgery Instructions from Shinagawa Lasik and Aesthetics

The Last Frame I’ll Ever Wear

Glasses from Grade School

Frames. One without a lens, The other without an arm.

A Kid with his Dog

Verne will spare the audience from boring you all with more pictures of the past and instead, tell you briefly, what kind of process and medication was given to me.

LASIK Screening

As far as Verne can remember, The screening takes around one and a half hour to two hours. There were a series of tests which included scanning of your cornea to reading a chart off the wall to lights flashing at your eyes. A doctor will then determine whether which types of surgery are applicable. Microkeratome (Blade), and IntraLASIK (Bladeless) were the options. Bladeless sounded kind of good so Verne went that route lol.

IntraLASIK Eye Surgery

So a number of drops of anesthesia were placed on my eyes.  Wore a shower cap on my head and some sort of garb or apron over the body. First up was this room where they will open the corneal flap. Second room was where the pew pew lasers are fired. The lasers were shot for 30 seconds for each eye. Whole process lasted around 20 – 25 minutes.

From what Verne remembered, some sort of suction was placed on his eyes and there was a part where Verne was instructed to follow the light. Verne loves how there was some sort of thing being done to tweak his vision with no pain at all and also loves the flushing of the water part on my eye  lol.  There was some pressure from the laser but it’s nothing the anesthesia can’t handle. Not going to go too graphic. lol.

Some people would probably have their hearts palpitate during the procedure. Verne’s tendency when he’s anxious is that his hands are together clenched tightly and my feet will twitch. Never happened on this day.  Verne thinks there were more scarier moments compared to this like almost getting slammed through the wall by a bus while driving. Verne does the same thing when Verne was young and he used to have a fear of getting his sideburns shaved off and tooth extractions back in the day. lol.

After Surgery

Was given the following instructions by the attending nurse. Aside from a post-operation evaluation the next day and the following week.

• It consists of one eyedrop shot for each eye of Vigamox, Econopred, and Artificial Tears every three hours with a five minute interval.
• The protective glasses should be worn during the day for a week.
• The eyeshield is worn at night, during sleeping hours.
• And I received some Oral Medication.  Ofloxacin 1 tab for 2x a day usually taken after meals. Then there’s Naproxen for pain as needed. (Didn’t really feel the pain so need for you.!)

Gonna give my eyes time to heal. Takes around a week. Not going to show you the result just yet. Don’t really feel like overworking it as much as I used to do like when I used to play games  or stare at a CRT TV Monitor for around 16 hours. lol.  Thanks again Shinagawa PH.

Verne

Wordle, Chef Tony’s Midnight Cocoa Popcorn and the Death Star.

  

Wordle: From a Verne’s Eye View

First article out of the year and we’re going to do a little typography.  I know this isn’t new and I was playing around with something called Wordle (http://www.wordle.net).  What it does is that it gets a certain amount of keywords from your RSS Feed and displays it in numerous ways. You can also choose to input your own keywords instead just like what I did.

I decided to play around with this and find my own 15 keywords that I would like to associate my site on Wordle.  Took me an hour to play around with it. lol. So try to find your own keywords that will fit the nature of your blog or whatever message you feel like giving out.

Note: You’re going to need to install Java for this by the way.

Ok something came up, as I’m writing this,  someone handed me some popcorn.

Chef Tony's Midnight Cocoa Popcorn

Hmm. Time for a short popcorn review? Short intro first. For those who don’t know me, I’m really a picky eater. Explains why I’m not fat. I normally look at the presentation of the food itself and then the taste. If it looks good, go to step 2. Taste it. Weird, right?

Not really a fan of eating chocolate popcorn. The fact that I was also taking a chocolate drink – makes me think at first that I would not be able to taste how sweet it is. So let me nibble on a few pieces. Om nom nom nom nom nom. Sweet but too sweet that it forces me to close the lid and say – “Tomorrow again.” It seems to have this aftertaste similar to when a coffee is too strong or beer is too bitter that you are inclined not to finish it.  Usually when I eat something that tends to my liking, I finish the snack  in one sitting –  just like Pik-nik’s Ketchup Fries, Chippy, or even streetfood like “Fishball.”

When I drank the chocolate, surprisingly I was able to taste its sweetness. End of report. lol. On to the Death Star.

Fanboys - Image via Wikipedia

I saw this through HBO once. The movie is called “Fanboys”  – which had Kristen Bell of Veronica Mars fame as one of the actresses in it. It’s about a reunion of a couple of high school buddies who are into Star Wars and they want to live out their dream back in the day of stealing the “rough cut” of the movie from Skywalker Ranch.

What made me remember the movie aside from Kristen, is this conversation:

Hutch: You gotta find your Death Star.
Eric: Okay, Ill bite.
Hutch: Greatest deed Luke Skywalker ever did was take down the Death
  Star, right? As far as Im concerned, thats what everybody needs.
  You need that one bad-ass thing that lets you live on forever, you
  know.

That one bad-ass thing that lets you live on forever. Got that right. 2011 was one heck of a year. Went through a lot of painstaking moments and not completely out of the woods just yet. It was a year of self exploration. I figured out two things…

1. My ideal bodyclock in a workweek for productivity. Learning how to pace myself in terms of work in order to avoid burnout. Mornings around 7 – 11 am. I feel like I’m in the zone to work. Then it dies down in the afternoon – where I have to find my “second wind.”
2. Realizing what’s next for Verne. Traveling and conversing with people gave me a whole bunch of ideas and information. Not settling, at the same time, not tiring myself too much by working smart. Some people wonder why I don’t sweat. heh.

Are these two things going to be instrumental in leading me towards that “bad-ass thing” I want to be remembered by? I’m sure the Death Star isn’t going to fall on my lap. For the next two years, I’m going to learn whatever I can and meet whoever I meet in order to decide if I’m staying in the “Flip” or not.

There are certain options I’m looking into and I’ve narrowed my choices down to –  Game Production, Network Administration, Japanese Proficiency or probably a Masters Degree in Development Communication.  So while I work my way towards finding my “Death Star,” I hope you viewers out there can find yours or maybe you’ve found it already.  Cheers to the new year!

Verne

 

FL Studio

The road to music production…

I didn’t think that listening to Kaskade would inspire me to do it. I couldn’t even come up with a 15 second track until Shroud taught me the basics.

It was until this person I spoke to on Facebook who was from my previous job said that “I should become a DJ.” (Though I think the more correct term is a “Producer.” ) I thought to myself – I just downloaded the software and some plugins. Why not?

My guess is that I think she assumed I could become one due to my nature of posting videos on FB that are electro-house and the same can be said when I request for songs in the office. She’s got good insight…maybe. lol.

I’m currently working on a mashup between D Sound’s “Tattooed on My Mind” and Kaskade’s “Raining.” Had a guest singer doing vocals for Tattooed.

This is how it sounds so far. Update: I’ve decided to scrap that project and show you an earlier track called “Discovery.”

Discovery

Here’s a little backstory. A few months ago, I found my mentor in the world of sound engineering. I knew he was into sounds as another friend told me that he does produce music. I met this guy “Shr0ud” in an online basketball game called “Freestyle” and sometimes we team up just for the heck of it. We had some common interest in the sense that we  love games, anime, and geeky stuff. When that game vanished, so did our friendship for the time being.

One day we saw each other and I asked him to teach me stuff about FL Studio. I heeded his advice and downloaded FL Studio 10 Producer Edition. Got a number of plugins to experiment around with as well.

Now what have I learned? Ah! Learned how to automate clips and mess around with the mixer. Still figuring out how to do a cool “sidechain.” Shroud gives me ideas on what to improve on the track and tips in terms of where to find my plugins.

I explained to Shroud that I wanted to do electro-house music. He explained that he can do those in an instant. True.  Eventually I said I’d like to get acapellas and make remixes of current songs or songs that may have a potential to be a dance track. Something similar to what Robotaki does.

To give you an idea, how he sounds like:

http://soundcloud.com/colin-tremingway

His style reminds me of  T.M. Revolution mixed with game soundtracks. I personally think he can make it as a BGM guy for a game developer/publisher.

I always believe that in order to succeed, you need some sort of push. Something that will allow you to keep going despite the odds. Shr0ud for me, is not only a mentor but he is that push to keep going forward. Now it’s time to finish my track before the year ends. Edit: Still haven’t finished it o.o

Verne