Top Sites Browsed in the Philippines

Top Sites Philippines according to www.alexa.com

1.

FriendsterFriendster is a leading global social network emphasizing genuine friendships and the discovery of new people through friends. Search for old friends and classmates, stay in better touch with friends, share photos and videos, and so much more.friendster.comSite info for friendster.com 2. Yahoo!Personalized content and search options. Chatrooms, free e-mail, clubs, and pager.yahoo.comSite info for yahoo.com 3. YouTubeYouTube is a way to get your videos to the people who matter to you. Upload, tag and share your videos worldwide!youtube.comSite info for youtube.com 4. Google.com.phgoogle.com.phSite info for google.com.ph 5. MultiplyUsers can create, share and discuss blogs, photos, videos and music with others as well as post reviews of movies and books, or share a calendar of events.multiply.comSite info for multiply.com Interested in popular sites on the web?Buy a List of 10,000 or 100,000! 6. GoogleEnables users to search the Web, Usenet, and images. Features include PageRank, caching and translation of results, and an option to find similar pages. The company's focus is developing search technology.google.comSite info for google.com 7. WikipediaAn online collaborative encyclopedia.wikipedia.orgSite info for wikipedia.org 8. Blogger.comFree, automated weblog publishing tool that sends updates to a site via FTP.blogger.comSite info for blogger.com 9. ImeemUsers interact with each other by watching, posting, and sharing content of all media types, including blogs, photos, audio, and video.imeem.comSite info for imeem.com 10. Photobucket image hosting and photo sharingProvides image hosting for auctions, live journals, blogs, message boards, personal websites and online photo albums. Reliable, fast and very simple to use.photobucket.comSite info for photobucket.com

my Fashion Statement as a Freshman

When I passed the UPCAT, my parents decided that I should study at UP without giving me any opportunity to compromise. For them, all other schools were irrelevant, not because UP was the only school in our region nor are there any other good schools to give me quality education. They preferred to enroll me at UP because that was the only way to free them up from another college tuition fee expense. Being the fifth child in the brood of seven, my entering to college was another predicament for my parents whose meager income could no longer afford to send me to a private school as two of my other elder siblings were then enrolled in a private medical school. The tuition fees and other miscellaneous expenses of my medical student brothers ate up a large portion of my parents’ monthly salary. In a way, to enroll at UP was a blessing in disguise as that would liberate me from wearing a sky blue blouse with necktie and pleated sky blue skirt uniform for four long years! Most of the college students in our region wore that uniform, obviously they were in the same school, and the only evident distinction of a UP student from a non-UP one was the dress code. When school was about to start in June, I was poured with enormous excitement to dress according to my own style and taste, thus, in preparation for school, I had to do some mixing and matching of the few wardrobes I had. I also had fascinations of becoming a campus femme fatale who would get to turn guys’ heads, a fashion icon who will solicit rave fashion commentaries from the socialist and elitist personalities in school, or a luminary in the alluring field of fashion if I wear fashionable dresses. My fashion statement was first exposed to the UP campus on the very first day of school. I was confidently dressed in accord to my own definition of stylistic fashion sense without a minutest hint that it was totally a fashion disaster brought about by my undefined barrio-tic fashion statement confused with incongruous taste for fashion accessories. Imagine I was clad in a violet-collared white shirt tucked in an ankle-length plain sky blue ‘A-line’ skirt with a long slit at one side. The conservative side of me had me wear a “half slip” inside to keep my underwear from being publicly exposed as my skirt was see-through. To un-complement my attire, I wore a beige Timberland leather sneakers shoes with white socks and carried a predominantly red Baguio-knit long sling shoulder bag that reaches my knees. To add more calamity to my catastrophic fashion sense, I accessorized myself with a fake Guess watch in my left wrist that caused itchiness to my ever sensitive skin, a big plastic yellow bangle in my right hand, and a pair of fake gold earrings that made my earlobes swell and eventually got deformed. It was truly an extreme deviation from the fashion genre of that time but nobody cared, or should I say, nobody cared to tell me how awful I looked!

What’s in my name?

My name is Dureza Antoinette. It is pronounced as “Doo-re-za An-twa-ney”. The name Dureza was my father’s weird choice while the name Antoinette was my mother’s choice. Back in my elementary and high school days, I used to have had aversions over my parents for their bad taste in choosing a name for me. I basically never liked my given name and I had thousands of reasons never to like it at all. My name, Dureza, which has an “A” at the end, has a quality of being inelegantly archaic. The Antoinette, though, is somehow more sophisticated which in one way or another modernized the antiquity of my other name. It is ironical why I hated classic names when to most people it is the best sounding names. My name was in itself a victim of countless disastrous mispronunciations and several murderous misspellings when I was in my elementary grades and high school years. Some of my teachers incorrectly pronounced my name as “Due-re-sa”, “Do-ri-sa”, “Dow-rey-sa” or “Due-rey-za”. I just don’t remember if they bothered to ask me how to pronounce it correctly. Nevertheless, I was at fault for having tolerated them to call me as such. I never corrected the mispronunciation of my name for I was then very timid to open my mouth to tell them that was not how my name should be pronounced. I tolerated them to call me “Due-re-sa” or “Do-ri-sa” even if such sounded like bass drum drummed annoyingly and closely to the entrance of my would-be deaf ears. My classmates murdered the spelling of my name as “Dorisa”, “Duriza” “Duressa” and other odd spellings which sounded like Dureza. My name had its share of ridicule from my classmates as it was associated with the name “Doray” which was the name of a very old woman in our Filipino character book whose partner was “Lolo Ingo”. “Doray” eventually became my petname that it made me furious to whoever called me by such name. To whoever called me “Doray” got my raised eyebrow with abhorrence deep in my heart. I find the history of my Dureza name very despicable as the name Dureza was copied from a classic English comic book. When people started asking where my name came from, I was reluctant to tell the truth. I was ashamed to tell them that my father came across that name from a comic book he was reading when my mother was still pregnant with me. Of course, I never told anyone about it in order to save from shame my father who is known to be a bookworm who consumes a day reading thick novels written by brilliant authors. Little do people know that he also reads comic books. When I browsed through the internet, I found out that Dureza is Portuguese term which means hardness, as in hardness of a rock and other solid state. When I went to study college in a leading university, it was then that I learned to appreciate my name. My teachers and classmates praised my name for being unique to them. The pet name “Doray” was changed to “Doris” and the “Dorisa” was pronounced and spelled as “Dureza”. I should have been thankful to them for not being christened as “Candelaria” or “Guada” for being born on the Feast of the Candles (February 2) but my innocence and peer-pressure got more weight to take me to abhor my name.