Ma Mon Luk!
Basta special, me itlog.
I really have to write about the origins of that statement above sometime, before I grow old and forget about it. It has nothing to do with where Sam and I went today though, on this rainy Thursday afternoon. I had long wanted to take a leisurely walk down Raon Street, haven for do-it-yourself’ers and handymen. I needed to purchase two simple tools: a set of hex keys (Allen wrenches) and a rubber dust blower. The Allen wrench I needed to be able to open up the old HP scanner/fax/printer we have at home so I can clean up the underside of the glass bed. The rubber dust blower I needed to clean in between the keys of the office-issue T43 (pre-owned by some smoker who shall not be named).
And since we were in Quiapo we just had to drop in on Ma Mon Luk. Last time we were here was in October of 2005. The special mami and special siopao meal is something worth dying for on a rainy Thursday afternoon.
While we did find both blower and wrenches after a long and winding trek through puddles and occasional rain, I also found out where to get stuff that I otherwise wouldn’t even dream of getting, like the airsoft helmets and masks above. No I didn’t get any of those.
Joomla! Day Philippines - June 14, 2008
Finally! After having heard of Joomla! days all over Europe and the American continents, Joomla! Day is finally here.
Details on preparations can be found on the Google Groups Filipino Joomla Community. Our dev team is going, we’ve been working on Joomla! sites for more than a year now and it would be good to interact with other developers who have been involved with this CMS system that has made building websites so much easier for non-web savvy persons.
Google Adwords email scam
I got this in my office email today, which made me raise an eyebrow. As head of web development for the company I work for I have subscribed to almost every feature that google has offered EXCEPT for adwords. But in my senility I thought maybe I did sign up for one sometime ago so what the heck I’d check it out anyway.
The good thing was I never click on a link in my email — I copy the entire URL and paste it on my browser instead. This was something I learned to do after the Metrobank phishing scam.
So instead of ending up at the REAL phishing url (see highlighted section above) that was masked by the URL in the email address, I ended up on the real Google Adwords login screen, which of course told me that I did not have an adwords account.
I googled for the first line of the email and sure enough, I found out that it IS a scam. Fortunately, though, the phishing destination URL is no longer active.
seopulse has more to say on the matter.
Learning how to read again
The computer, boon and bane of my middle age, has not only taken away my ability to write legibly, it has also made me forget about adequate lighting. These days, adequate lighting for me is the one that comes on when I hit the Fn and PgUp keys on my office-issue IBM T43.
Along with forgetting about desk lamps and the need to actually see where I’m going, the computer has also made me forget how to read a book. Not an eBook, but one made of ink and paper and glue. The last piece of reading material I bought was a Reader’s Digest December Issue in Christmas of 2007 and I still haven’t read it from cover to cover, the way I did when I was younger and had all the time in the world and NO computer.
It’s only a matter of discipline, you might tell me. I really shouldn’t bring the darn laptop home after working on it the entire day, only to work some more on it in the evening. I should find a book that I know I would really like, one from my list of favorite authors, and then curl up in bed with it, turn on the house of troy lighting and start reading.
Which reminds me. I need new glasses.
Paco Park Redux
Finally visited the Paco Park (when it was open), as part of Sam’s mother’s day treat for me. Didn’t have much time to sit and ruminate under the shade of the old acacia trees because we had Maia the whirling dervish with us, but we did get to walk both the outer and inner circles of the concentric cemetery. And take pictures.
Read the rest of this entry »
Add an RSS Feed on your Wordpress Sidebar
Convenience is one of the general features of the new WordPress 2.+ versions. Adding stuff to your sidebar has never been easier. Add-ons that had been handled by external plugins in the earlier versions of WordPress are now built-in. They can also be added into your sidebar through drag and drop.
One of these built-in drag and drop features is the RSS feed widget. I’ve just added it myself on the second sidebar, which now features an RSS feed of Randy David’s columns in the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
If your WordPress installation is at version 2 and up, you should be able to see the RSS widget when you click on Design > Widgets on your WordPress administration screen.
Once you’ve added it to the sidebar of your choice, you can then edit the widget to show the RSS feed that you would like to appear on your sidebar, in my case it looks like this:
When you’ve entered the necessary data, click on “Change” and then “Save Changes”. When you go to the front end (homepage) of your site, you should be able to see something similar to what I have under the Communities Badges on this site.
You can have more than one RSS feed on your sidebar, just keep dragging that RSS widget into the spot where you want them to appear and presto!
Is the mailbox obsolete?
The advent of the Internet and email has completely changed the way we communicate with other people. When before we would have pen pals and engage in stamp collecting (an offshoot of having pen-pals from abroad), today we send email and digital photos over the Internet. Which brings me to the question: Is the mailbox obsolete?
For some people it may be true. While occassional bills still find their way into my mail box they have web-based counterparts which I take care of directly from the online banking facility that my bank provides. For purposes of bills and bills payment, mailboxes may indeed be unncessesary in this day and age.
On the other hand, offices that still require hard copies both for their filing system and therefore from their clients or subscribers as well, the mail box is alive and well and still being stuffed. And I suppose, until the personal digital signature has been perfected to the point where identity theft is impossible, I think the mailbox will be around for the next few decades.
Old buildings die
I remember the old houses in which I had the privilege to live. They had high ceilings, expansive living areas, and front lawns. They even had carports even if the owners didn’t have a car. I suppose this was standard design back in the 50’s and the 60’s, when middle class Manila had the space and the materials to spare.
It may have been in the mid-70’s when houses became more compact. Lower celings, carports that doubled as garages, and gardens that looked more like closets. I suppose this was because builders were starting to feel the economic crunch and space had become scarce.
If one walked leisurely down Buendia Avenue (as if one could) and looked at the buildings that have sprouted side by side in anachronistic order one could tell what year an edifice came to life, just by the design. Low concrete buildings squeezed in between high-rise metal buildings. Glass windows framed in aluminum on the checkered faces of steel buildings.
Some of the old buildings, rendered obsolete by today’s commercial requirements, have disappeared. Either literally torn down and ripped to its foundations or given a radical facelift (such as the Insular Life Building at the corner of Ayala Ave. and Paseo), the necessity of change and renewal has given old avenues that I knew as a child a face that still awes me even as I traverse its sidewalks today.
*Photos from lakbaypilipinas.com
Stolen moment at the Paco Park
A couple of weeks ago I was at a client’s site on a meeting. The place was just across the Paco Park so I couldn’t resist skipping over to the historic park when the meeting was over. Sad thing was it was a Monday, and the park was closed Mondays and Tuesdays. Serves me right, I said to myself, after having lived in the Paco area (vicinity of Merced and Herran) for the first six months of my solo return to Manila in 1999, and not having made the rounds when I could.
Similar regrets are not having gone up to Marawi City in the year that we lived in Lanao. I’d been to what was formerly known as Dansalan in 1995, when the Iligan National Writers Workshop scheduled a session there, but I’d never been back in the entire year that our new family lived just a couple of hours drive away. Not having gone to Cagayan de Oro to walk on the hanging bridges. Not having gone up the grotto in Baguio when we were there three summers ago, just to test myself if I could still make it to the top, where I once had my picture taken as a little girl.
Now that I’m (a lot) older I tend to not let opportunities that present themselves go by. Hence this quickie stop at the Paco Park. Bad timing, but good pictures, nevertheless.
Server backup in the third world
One of the services that the company I work for provides is a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Program (BCDRP) that is tailor-made for offices based in various parts of the Philippines.
Practically speaking, in the Philippines there is no such thing as 100% uptime for any office, unless it has generators that automatically kick in when the power goes out. Even when the building that houses the office itself is backed up by a generator, there is the question of availability of backup power for the individual servers.
Not all offices, especially startup ones, can avail themselves of backup servers, much less of Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) units that can sustain a server’s activity until power is restored. There are various ways in which a building, or the entire area where the building is located, can lose power. A cut transmission line, a blown up power transformer—these contribute to the uncertainty of when power can be restored. And when there is uncertainty, no UPS or backup generator will be enough to keep a server running.
With the loss of power for some key areas also comes loss of internet connection. When this happens, no automated, remote controlled monitoring and management can occur. A company offering BCDRP services that are fully automated, can rely on automation only for as long as the power and Internet is up. Once they both come down, and there are no warm bodies to kick in, then there is a problem.
This is where our BCDRP program becomes practical. Every day we send out a team that goes around from one client to another, replacing backup external disks and taking the previous night’s backups away for safekeeping offsite. This is on top of remote server backup and management that we also perform.
This is practical BCDRP for the third world.
Cyn Jefferson
Panaderos
baby boy
watson
Bambit
Sam
