About Me

I’m Albert. Programmer (for web/software), food enthusiast (always trying unfamiliar foods and drinks), book lover, opinionated, and always willing to learn new things. Like to travel too.

This blog is my little creative outlet. Whenever I want to either unload something off my head or I want to just discuss things out there, it’ll be here.

Q: Where are you now?

I’m in Singapore, occasionally going home in the Philippines when I can afford to. I work here.

Q: It seems that you’ve blogged before, yes?

Yes. This is technically my fourth blog. My first one was in Blog-City (mega cringe-filled to the gills), second one is in the old BlogDrive (defunct, the name is now under a new incarnation), third one is in Tumblr (blog will be deactivated soon), and this is my fourth one. If we include my old GeoCities attempt at blogging (manual blogging, HTML-based) or even my handful of long-as-heck Facebook posts, yeah, six it might be.

The only difference with this one is this is fully paid and subscribed as well. I’ll probably keep it permanently, as I can afford the fees.

I’m in the process of importing my old BlogDrive and Tumblr posts, date-accurate. I crafted helpful indicators in the blog lists as well as in blog posts as to which is which. Posts will be marked with:

This was imported from my old Tumblr blog posts.

I’ll admit upfront that I redressed the older blog posts up a bit. I’m planning to someday monetize the blog other than a Ko-Fi page, and some of my past blog post content reeks of college and high school cringe and impishness, and maybe a few off-putting words and phrases. At the least, when I read them again here, I won’t die of cringe. But I still have a soft spot for my old BlogDrive posts, because that’s where my blogging style really started to develop.

I don’t know what to do with the Blog-City posts, though. It’s around 2003-4, and the blog posts read to me as foreign now. High school impishness with a touch of weird. I mean, for my old BlogDrive posts, I can still somehow see those and think, yep, I remember that dude at that particular point in time. Here, here and here. Not with the Blog-City, not anymore. I might not touch it, maybe.

I won’t import the ones in full Filipino language yet, though. I’m still thinking of translating but 1) I feel some of the original intent might get lost, and 2) it’s too tedious. So, primarily English for now.

Related link/s: Past BlogDrive Posts, Past Tumblr Posts

Q: Do you have social media?

Yes. But currently I’m not that active in public “engagement”.

I don’t like to use Meta’s main products that much. I do have a Facebook account I maintain just for my family and friends to “keep up to date” with (AKA “I’m not dead”). Posting a couple every now and then as a pulse check. I also have WhatsApp for work-related contacts (Singapore-based work). That’s pretty much it – Facebook and WhatsApp. If you see my handle in Instagram, it’s a hoax. I’m not putting my Facebook account link here, as I want it to stay as private as I could.

Just a side gripe: I don’t like engaging in Facebook’s algorithm-driven feed. It’s too sensitive, overly sanitary and extremely unwieldy for my liking. And it’s geared way too much towards engagement. Do you like seeing your acquaintances trying to do “engagement” posts, do illegal streams, or whore for donations thru short-form videos or online tips via “shout outs”? Or seeing pages for weather stations in Detroit in your feed but you live in Asia? Good luck.

I do still have X/Twitter, but disengaged from active use, and I now pop in every quarter or so, mainly for pushing blog or Ko-Fi updates. Sometimes I pop in if someone I knew sent a DM. Not the platform’s fault in any way, I just decided for the New Year to limit my online social media use, and I had to make necessity-based adjustments with my remaining social media accounts for the meantime. Triage, if you will. My region’s trends are also set to usually either Japan or Singapore just to (currently) avoid the American side, which I believe is mostly lost in a tribal war of its own making. I didn’t like it in pre-X either, TBH. Full of pretentious cancel-happy leftists before, now full of pretentious assholes from both sides. Hey, equality at least. Equal measures of shit. I found Asian Twitter to be more preferable to navigate. A much nicer space.

I also have one at LinkedIn. But for professional uses only (e.g work connections), I don’t do much engagement on that place. Think of it as if you’re in a room full of CEOs and executives that won’t think too kindly if you look less professional than they like. I just pop in every few months to approve connections or update things but that’s it, really. The more annoying thing for me when it comes to LinkedIn is that it’s spamming my GMail inbox with notifications and I had to navigate a labyrinth of options to trim it down to bare essentials.

I had Reddit, but I cut it off last December 2024 as part of my scaling-back. I also felt its decay coming soon, and I am not interested in staying any further. I had four, now I have three remaining. I also do not have any desire to sign up for the other social media networks, I find it exhausting to maintain so many online accounts nowadays. If Facebook, X and LinkedIn goes away, so be it. I do feel “social media” as a whole has peaked in the past 2010-20 decade, and this decade’s online revolution has shifted its capitalistic gaze somewhere else, like AI. Usage is dwindling, and things just end up being too regulated for speech to be free anymore. Discord’s booming because most of the major ones end up getting regulated, so smaller and more private spaces are getting more popular. Probably the worst the big social media companies will end up might be like Yahoo’s.

And on much older social media that went away with the dodos, yes I had Friendster. Was user # 4110809.

Managed to recover my old Friendster profile pic.

Q: Do you have a God?

I do. I was raised in a Roman Catholic household. I served as a sacristan for a few years of my adolescent life. What’s my current position? Let me quote someone:

“I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”
Mahatma Gandhi

Q: Do you like spicy food?

Yes I do. I want tickling delicious spice, not “please send me to the hospital” kind of spice. Hottest I can tolerate is the Korean “2x” spicy noodles.

Q: What’s your travel history?

Singapore – Feb 2017, June 2018 to present (I am employed here)
Australia
- Sydney & Melbourne – June 2025
Indonesia
- Bali – June 2025
Japan
- Tokyo, Kyoto & Osaka – September 2017
- Nara, Kyoto & Osaka – October 2019
Malaysia
- Kuala Lumpur – February 2023
- Genting – March 2025
South Korea
- Seoul – June 2023
Taiwan
- Taipei, Yehliu, Shifen, Jiufen & Beitou – June 2024
Thailand
- Bangkok & Ayutthaya – February 2024

What other countries I want to visit? In order of desire:

USA (specifically, Hawaii)
Vietnam
Italy
Spain
China
Türkiye
France
Germany
United Kingdom
UAE/Saudi Arabia

Q: What programming languages do you know?

C#, Visual Basic, Java. Very basic, no? But I learned early on after I left college, I didn’t need to learn EVERYTHING, I only need to master the skill of quick adaptation to what my employer requires. So in 2008, I used Visual Basic first because that’s what my employer needed. Then when I was handed an Android app project, I had to readapt to using Java. Then in 2018 when I switched jobs, my employer was using C#, so I used that.

CSS, JavaScript and HTML, I was OK with them already as I was fiddling with websites since high school. Like, download the page, analyze the source, saw how things work.

For the past 6 years, I’ve been a web application developer primarily for companies that use Sitefinity. I use .NET and C#, with some use of Angular in there. It does get a little same-y after those years, though. I started with one using SF v8. As of Feb 2024, I’m on SF v15. And after a length of time, you do get to know much of the nooks and crannies and all the quirks and habits of the platform.

Q: Why is this blog called “briathrail”?

When I finally pulled the trigger to invest some money towards a usable subscription with WordPress, I then set out on an official unique name for the blog. Initially I was OK with “ac2mng.blog”, but I felt something in my gut that told me this isn’t it. Sounds 2000’s-ish.

So I looked for symbolic naming. As I can admit, my blog posts can go on too long. I have been of the type to pour everything I think of into writing. Blessing and a curse. I got in to my high school paper due to my writing, but I always gave our advisor headaches at how long my editorials went and how she had to trim it with a chainsaw. “Loquacious type”, she said of me. I don’t have an editor now. I always try to keep my blog posts shorter, whenever I can. I blogged in university too, but I usually use the library internets and it’s usually an hour long for limits, and I have to visit a lot more sites, so my blogs then were short by design. Spurt what I want into a blog, then I go to do other things online. But give me rope (e.g. more time), I tend to write volumes.

And I also love foreign or exotic languages. I tend to remember a lot of them words whenever I encounter something that sounded mellifluous.

So for the symbolic naming, it had to be a reflection of my writing self, and be a non-English word. I added a third challenge: it must have some of the letters from my name, so “a”, “b”, “e”, “l”, “r” and “t”, part or in full if possible. At least there be guidelines this time. My BlogDrive was called “1csb” after my university freshman class (its internal blog name was “Hyrokkin”, because I was into Norse mythology back then too). My Tumblr was called “Flickering Illusion” (based on a part of the translated lyrics of BUCK-TICK’s “Kuchizuke“).

After searching for a while, I came across the word “briathrail”. It’s a Gaelic word meaning “verbose”. Sounded good to me too. And it has 5 of the 6 letters of my name. I searched online for other users, and it was nice that no one has used it yet for any bigger purpose.

I’ve been searching for hours, and I thought maybe this is it. I kind of liked it. I sat on it for an hour while playing Fate Grand Order. After an hour, I submitted it as my final domain name.

I’m OK with the blog name, I’ve definitely had way worse and this one seemed a bit more personalized for me.

Q: It looks like you’re using AI-generated header images for a lot of posts. Why is that?

It’s easy, costs nothing (I used Bing’s) and I don’t have to run afoul of image squatters or image IP owners. You have no idea how much is that as a benefit to a small-time like me. I don’t have to worry about Shutterstock or Getty or all those petty stock image sites. If I do have a photo on my phone that could suffice for header/featured images, I always will use them first, otherwise I just go for AI. Less time to think for that “perfect” image.

For AI images, I tend to look for a theme to transform with an art style. Usually a song title, specific topic or some combination of words in the blog itself, followed by a random art style I fancied. For example, I can type in “computer science, De Stijl” and just use the result that looked nice.

But for replication and truthful evidence, I made pages for my BlogDrive and Tumblr posts that used AI images, the prompts I used and reasons (and some notes). Should be enough to explain how those images came to be.

“What is normal, anyway? If you aren’t troubling the rest of the world, then there’s no harm in being not normal.”
Ichihara Yuuko, xxxHOLiC