The ultimate rain gear
Most of the jackets I’ve been seeing at the thrift shops (a.k.a. Ukay) are either cold weather ones with inline fleece or just plain windbreakers. I’ve been looking for a lightweight rain coat that is not made of plastic like a kid’s raincoat, but one made of impermeable fabric. I know there are good ones being sold at Columbia and I’ve seen them being worn by the newscasters at ABS-CBN, but when I looked at the prices I realized they cost way too much for my budget.
I had been seeing motorcycle covers every now and then, in fact my co-worker Roque has one protecting his bike from the weather. He maintains it’s impermeable, and it seemed like it was made of PVC coated nylon. A windbreaker-type raincoat made out of that material would be great for the sudden rains. Lightweight and easy to fold it would be ideal for someone like me who lives out of a backpack.
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).
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WordPress 2.5 peeves petted
A week ago I updated this WordPress installation to the latest version 2.5. This I easily did through webhost’s Fantastico software update facility, where all I had to do was click on a couple of buttons and the server did everything for me. That’s how I updated my WordPress no sweat, even in this sweltering summer heat, even as I was wishing I were in a class A motorhome on the way to Vigan instead.
While there are no obvious changes on the front end (what you see is still what you see), the administration backend looks radically different. Took me a while to get used to the new layout, and a few tentative clicks to find out where everything went. In the earlier WP versions, the menu items were laid out in a neat row. Now they have been segregated to “stuff that you do that other people can see” and “stuff you can do to break your site” (if you’re not careful).
Two of the things I’ve had to do are:
1. download the no-flash upload plugin here to fix my inability to use the new add media uploader facility.
2. disable the Ajax plugin that was a fix to the earlier version WP’s that took care of the “You do not have permission to do that” error message that popped up while I was saving my posts. Apparently the bug has already been fixed in WP 2.5 which negated the need for the ajax plugin, and actually broke your installation if you used it in 2.5.
So while there may not be much going on at the front … I’m having an interesting time clicking away at the new and improved WP 2.5 administrator screens.
The Taxman Cometh
It’s the lovely month of April when all above-minimum income wage earners are required to fill out the long blue forms and the short white forms and make the necessary (no to mention confusing, at least to me) computations of the amount of money the government takes from us to spend for the betterment of the country and my countrymen and, indirectly, myself.
Aside from the fact that I and millions of other taxpayers have very little (if any) say on how our tax pesos are being spent, the thing I dislike about filling out forms is not the computation or the redundancy of forms, but my handwriting.
My handwriting, if you will forgive the teen-age locution, sux. And it sux even big time when I’m filling out forms.
I attribute the degradation of my handwriting to the same technology that has provided me with gainful employment for the past 15 years: the computer. I used to be one of the students with the best handwriting back in school. Now my handwriting can best be described as the ground after the chickens have had their lunch.
Enter the Bureau of Internal Revenue Website. Now this is one of the things I am glad my taxes are being spent on. The BIR Forms page has all the major forms required of a Filipino citizen to make sure that the things which are Caesar’s are deducted from all forms of income. At least now they’ve made it easier for me because now I just have to type everything in and then print them out. The only thing lacking is my John Hancock (not!) and I take care of that seven times (four for the short white forms, three for the long blue ones).
If you’re in the Philippines and in the same boat as I am, these are the exact forms that you need:
- Form 2316: Employer’s Certificate of Compensation Payment / Tax Withheld (ZIPped Excel | PDF)
- Form 1700: Annual Income Tax Return for Individuals Earning Purely Compensation Income (ZIPped Excel | PDF)
I recommend downloading the Excel format as they are easier to fill out, just make sure you print preview and make the necessary adjustments where the form is not entirely wysiwg. But if you do have Adobe Acrobat installed, you can work with the PDF versions of the files by enabling the Typrewriter tool in Acrobat.
The other good thing about filling out the digital forms is that I can zoom in (200% is comfortably readable for me) on the fields and negates the need (for now anyway) of reading magnifiers, which I am as yet too proud to get.
Three more days till deadline! Happy filing!
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