Christmas Season Still

The rain caught us off guard this morning. We forgot to bring umbrellas today. It seems the season of cold and chills is still hanging around. It is still Christmas!

Filipinos often mistake the start as the end. Just when Christmas begins on the birth of Christ, most of us end the yuletide season. Our culture has shifted the calendar a few clicks back. Advent for us is Christmas and Christmas week has become ordinary.

In today's feast of the Epiphany, we are reminded that God has just begun. Let us not put off our lights for God has just begun lighting His. He begins with the star of Bethlehem, and now sheds His light on the whole world through his manifestation to the wise men. The dawn of Christ is still breaking out. There is much more promise to unfold.

As I sit here watching our barrio chapel's Christmas decorations, my mind wanders to how we could easily shelve the spirit of Christmas together with our Christmas decors. If Christmas was truly life changing with its loving and sharing, then it would live on throughout the year.

Life Begins the Day

The distant echo of thunder
Fading far behind me race
Retreat against the downpour
Of golden sunlight on my face

I smell the fresh new birth
Of buds and dew and spring
Dance light to the chirps
Of bobbing birds on wing

Life begins the day
When night has made it sleep
Arising to embrace the morrow
Out of past purple deep

Alight on soft feathers
With leaves and wind and breeze
I take a step yonder
Upwards the sky's sweet kiss

Down and up above, within
Life is born anew
In every bough and branch
In every drop of dew

The moon to rest this morning
And sun to rise and play
Across the blue dome of heaven
As life begins the day

Geek Mode

I was relaxing my brains after a week long preparation for the de Universa in Philosophy when I stumbled upon this short video in Google Plus. Apparently, geeks are not that boring.

The video reminded me of the passion that I had for programming. It all started with Lego when I was a kid. Building things is heaven. In Philosophy we talk of ontological truth from which a thing takes its existence from ideas in the mind. Back then it was pure fun and creativity.

When I got my first desktop PC and entered high school it was then that I met my first true love: Visual Basic, and then C, C++, Java, and all the other languages that were not spoken by the human tongue. It's a wonderful enterprise to feel self-fulfilled after hours of typing code, hard-cracking your brains out to debug, and finally getting that little program to run.

Here's the video from Oracle during their presentation last 2011: