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There was this couple who used to go to shop in the beautiful stores. This was their 25th Wedding Anniversary. They both liked antiques and pottery, especially teacups.

One day in a fine shop, they saw this beautiful teacup. One said, "May I see that? I never have seen one quite so beautiful," and the lady handed it to him. As she handed it to him, suddenly the teacup spoke.

"You don`t understand," it said, "I haven`t always been a teacup. There was a time when I was red and I was clay. My master took me and rolled me and patted me over and over and I yelled out, `Let me alone.` But he only smiled, `Not yet.`

"Then I was placed on a spinning wheel," the teacup said, "and suddenly I was spun around and around and around and around. `Stop it! I`m getting dizzy` I screamed. But the master only nodded and said, `Not yet.`

"Then he put me in the oven. I`d never felt such heat! I wondered why he wanted to burn me. I yelled! I knocked at the door. I could see him through the opening and I could read his lips as he shook his head, `Not yet.`

"Finally the door opened, he put me on the shelf and I began to cool. `There that`s better,` I said. Then he brushed me and painted me all over. The fumes were horrible. I thought I would gag. `Stop it! Stop it!` I cried. He only nodded, `Not yet.`

"Then suddenly he put me back into the oven, not like the first one. This was twice as hot and I knew I would suffocate. I begged. I pleaded. I screamed. I cried. All the time I could see him through the opening nodding his head, saying, ` Not Yet.`"

"Then I knew there wasn`t any hope. I would never make it. I was ready to give up. But the door opened and he took me out and placed me on the shelf.

One hour later, he handed me a mirror and said, `Look at yourself,` and I did, and I said, `That`s not me, that couldn`t be me, it`s beautiful. I`m beautiful!`

"I want you to remember then,` he said, `I know it hurt to be rolled and patted, but if I just left you, you`d have dried up."

"I know it made you dizzy to spin around on the wheel, but if I had stopped, you would have crumbled." "I know it hurt and it was hot and disagreeable in the oven, but if I hadn`t put you there, you would have cracked."

"I know the fumes were bad and when I brushed and painted you all over, but if I hadn`t done that, you never would have hardened. You would not have had any color in your life, and if I hadn`t put you back in that second oven, you wouldn`t survive for very long because the hardness would not have held."

"Now you are a finished product. You are what I had in mind when I first began with you."

That`s life, friends. That`s my life and it is your life. Some of you are in the oven, screaming, hollering, "Let me out of here!" Some of you are getting painted and the fumes are bothering you and driving you crazy. Some of you are spinning around and you don`t know where you are. You`re saying, "What`s going on? It`s a mess here," and the Master keeps looking and saying, "Not yet, not yet." You see, you`ve got to trust Him.

From my inbox.

If you live here in the Philippines, and assuming you don't live under a rock somewhere, no doubt you've heard about the resurgence of violence down south, as the the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) wreaks havoc on various towns and villages, killing civilians, burning houses, destroying public property.

The MILF is an armed group which has as its goal the secession of Muslim Mindanao, what they call Bangsamoro, from the Republic of the Philippines, and they have been using violence to further that goal for more than twenty years.

Recently, the Philippine government attempted to forge a peace plan with the MILF through a Memorandum of Agreement, which, among other things, establishes a Bangsamoro Juridical Entity (BJE). This, for all intents and purposes, is tantamount to creating a state within a state. All would be well in good, except for the fact that the government, either in a fit of arrogance, or an apparent display of bad faith, failed to consult local leaders, whose town and cities were, for unknown reasons, included in the BJE...even those predominantly populated by Christians. As such, the agreement was temporarily restrained by the Supreme Court while it hears arguments from both sides of the issue.

In the meantime, the MILF has again resorted to violence in order to press its demands for an independent Muslim state.

I say nuts to that.

The MILF high command has gone on record claiming that MILF forces attacking civilians are renegades, that is, they are acting on their own and not following orders from the MILF hierarchy.

To that I say, why bother negotiating with a group of rebels who cannot control their own ranks?

Why bother negotiating with rebels who act nothing more than common criminals who rob establishments, slaughter innocent civilians and children and destroy private and public property?

Why we believe people who claim to be willing to die for their beliefs, yet cowardly hide behind hostages...civilians used as human shields?

Why do we deal civilly with people who act like savages, people who desecrate and mutilate corpses of those they have killed?

Why treat them as if they have the moral ascendancy to represent Muslim Mindanao, when they have no mandate from the people of Mindanao?

Why are we considering bargaining away land which is part of the Republic of the Philippines, when it is clearly in violation of our Constitution?

Why give them lands which they claim to belong to them by ancestral right, when such lands are presently inhabited not only by Muslims but by Christians as well?

What gives other countries the right to intercede on their behalf for the furtherance of their objective for an independent Islamic state, when all the MILF has done to argue its case is to deal death and destruction to innocents whose only crime is to not subscribe to their beliefs?

Most importantly...

Why recognize a group which apparently has absolutely no respect for human life?

Why indeed.

While I concede the fact that it is indeed an honorable goal for Muslims in Mindanao to seek the right to self-determination in what they believe to be their ancestral homeland, there is nothing honorable in the brutal and despicable methods that they have adopted in an effort to achieve that objective.

I think it's time to take the kid gloves off, and recognize these people for what they truly are...lawless criminals who only know the language of violence.

The government should talk to them in the only language that they understand...and end this conflict once and for all.

Clearly, enough is enough.

I keep getting asked how to make guild badges in RAN Online, so I decided to just make a post to so I don't have to keep repeating myself over and over again.

First of all what's a guild badge anyway? What's it for? A guild badge is just a small icon displayed over your character's name which identifies which guild that character belongs to. To the right of the guild badge is your guild nickname.

In reality, that icon is nothing more than an ordinary bitmap (BMP) file 16 pixels wide by 11 pixels high (16x11).

So how do you go about making your own badge? The simplest way is to open Microsoft Paint (in Windows XP, simply click the Start button, then scroll over to Accessories, then Paint), then click on Image on the Paint toolbar, slide the cursor to Attributes (you can also press Ctrl-E instead), select pixels as your unit, enter 16 in the Width box and 11 in the Height box, then click OK. You'll get a 16x11 drawing area. Of course, the drawing area is a bit small, so press Ctrl-Pg Dn to zoom in on your blank bitmap.

At this point, all you have to do is let your creative juices flowing, and draw whatever badge design you have in mind. Of course, this method assumes that you have at least some drawing ability. When you're done with your masterpiece, press Ctrl-Pg Up to bring the bitmap to normal size so you can see if your design scales well to 16x11. Oftentimes it doesn't, so you may have to go through some trial and error before you end up with a badge that you're satisfied with. Once you're done, just click File on the toolbar and save the image as a bitmap.

It goes without saying that you're not limited to using Microsoft Paint. You can use any drawing/paint program you're comfortable with, as long as the end product is a 16x11 bitmap. Don't save your badge using JPG or GIF formats. They won't work.

If you have little or no drawing skills like me, there is another method for making badges, though it requires you to use some math and/or guesswork. This method involves searching for an appropriate picture to transform into a guild badge, then scaling it down to 16x11 pixels.

For example, if you want, say, a badge with a sword on it, first look for a picture of a sword on the internet. The easiest way is to log on Google, click Images on the top row, enter "sword" in the search box and click Search. Find a picture you like (it can be in any format, like JPG or GIF), and download it to your PC.

Take note that not all pictures scale well. A 16x11 pixel format does not offer a whole lot of resolution, so you'll definitely lose most, if not all of the detail in the original picture. In order to ensure the best results, try to choose a picture with little detail to begin with. Not having much detail will mean that the picture won't lose much when shrunk to 16x11 pixels. You should also use a picture that is in landscape orientation (as opposed to portrait), as close as possible to a 16:11 ratio between width and height. It doesn't have to be exact, but the closer the better.

If you already have your picture, start Microsoft Paint and open your picture with it. This is where the math and guesswork part comes in, since you have to scale it down to 16x11. Click Image on the Paint toolbar, and scroll down to Stretch/Skew (alternatively you can press Ctrl-W). Under Stretch, enter a percentage figure into the Horizontal and Vertical boxes. You're scaling down, so you're looking at a figure below 100%. If you want to reduce a picture to half of its original size, put 50% in both boxes, if you want to shrink the original picture to a third of its original size, put 33% in both boxes, if you want to shrink the picture to quarter size, put 25% in both boxes, and so on and so forth. This involves some trial and error, so don't be afraid to experiment with different percentages. If you make a mistake, simple press Ctrl-Z to undo your last change.

The trick is scaling it down to being exactly 16x11 pixels. There are probably going to be some variances, so feel free to add or remove an extra row or column so that the result is 16x11. This is done in Paint by simply clicking on the corner of your picture and dragging it.
You may not get it right on the first try using this method, or even get a useable badge in your first attempt, so be patient. When you finally end up with a badge you like, as with the previous method, save it as a bitmap.

Copy the bitmap to your My Documents folder. Remember that it has to be in your My Documents folder, otherwise the game program won't be able to find it.

Fire up RAN Online, press G to access the guild window, click on Modific button (which presumably stands for modification), and enter the filename of your saved badge (just the filename, e.g. badge.bmp, don't put in drive letters or subdirectories) and press Enter. Remember that in order for you to be able to change guild badges, you have to be either a guild leader or someone authorized by the guild leader. If you're not either, the Modific button does not appear.

The badge should show up over you character immediately.

To recap, all you need to make a badge is a graphics program which can handle bitmaps. You can use any graphics program you like, though the directions above assume you're using Microsoft Paint, which is standard on all Windows operating systems. The bitmap should be 16 pixels wide by 11 pixels high, and it should be placed in your My Documents folder.

I hope this post answers your questions on how to make guild badges.

Hey. It's been a while since I last posted any entry. More than three months actually. All of a sudden I just lost interest. I've been blogging for almost four years now, and somehow lately it has been a bit difficult to sustain the enthusiasm for blogging that I've once had.

Call it idea overload.

Since my last update I have had dozens of ideas for new blog posts, fueled by the sheer number of events happening all around. Despite the plethora of things to blog about, none of my ideas ever got off the ground and materialized to being a blog post. I guess I just didn't feel motivated enough to commit any of my ideas to keyboard.

Maybe the cynic in me is starting to rear its ugly head. I can only seem to blog about bad stuff, but all that negativity is starting to take its toll on my already pessimistic personality.

Lately it seems as if I've been seeing the bad side of people more than the good. I'm starting to have doubts on whether people are by nature inherently good as I have been taught to believe at the outset, since more often than not it is the selfish side of people that I find myself gazing at.

I often tell myself that there are more good people than there are bad, but somewhere along the way the line between good and bad has gotten a lot blurred. Nothing is in black or white anymore. Everything is in shades of gray, and sometimes it is just plain difficult to know where you're at when you're straddling the border of two or more shades.

I like to think that I'm a man of principle, but nowadays principles seem to be more trouble than they're worth. Argue on the merits, and you get branded as a boat rocker. Even being right can often turn out to be a liability. Apparently no one likes a know-it-all, especially if you're surrounded by egotistic people who feel as if their personal take on things is the only thing that mattered.

There was a time that I felt compelled to act on certain problems which I felt needed to be solved, especially those situations when no one else was lifting a finger to tackle the problem head on. But I've soon realized that if you come across to many as a person who has all the answers (not that I claim to be one), you're soon considered a threat by those whose spheres of influence are threatened by your ideas.

I call it a "messiah complex" of sorts (note that I use the term without any religious connotations).

Truth be told, the establishment hates "messiahs" because it undermines their very authority and at the same time it makes them look incompetent. And what's the end result? Legitimate solutions to long standing problems are thrown out the window simply because they're your ideas and not not theirs.

It's funny if you think about it. Despite millions of years of evolution, despite our being civilized, despite our education, at the blink of an eye a person can revert to a manner of thinking not dissimilar to that of an wild animal whose territory is being threatened.

Yeah. It's funny. I'm laughing myself silly with sarcasm.

But that's the way the cookie crumbles folks. And somehow we try to deal with in however which way we can.

Maybe I've finally turned into a true pragmatist. It's personally disappointing to admit that to myself, but idealism can only help you so much, especially if everyone around you shuns progress for the comfort of maintaining the status quo.