Ang Kape Ni LaTtEX

If you’ve been wondering where I’ve been, well, the short answer is I’ve been writing at Filipinovoices.com:
Reciprocity
My wife, a travel agent, got fuming mad at a “friend” last weekend. Her “friend” inquired regarding passport renewal application with a caveat: “friend’s” birth certificate has some problems, preventing her from obtaining one from the NSO. My wife [...]

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Around a month ago Sidney Snoeck (who maintains the excellent photo blog My Sari Sari Store) posed a challenge to my blog entry Mariannet Amper and the Gospel of Hopelessness.
In that blog entry, I posited that the “the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer” mantra was part of a “gospel of hopelessness” [...]

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The newspapers and airwaves the other day were filled with the saddening news of an 11-year-old killing herself over poverty in Davao City:
Using a thin nylon rope, 12-year-old Mariannet Amper hanged herself in the afternoon of November 2. She was a sixth grader at the Maa Central Elementary School.
…
Along with her diary, the Ampers also [...]

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Jeff Atwood, a distinguished software developer, writes about the early days of his career without a direction, finding the career that he loves, and having fun while doing his job. :
Like my Dad, I spent many years after college flitting from job to job. I had nothing to complain about. I was making a great [...]

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Earlier this year a lot of us received forwarded images of a Ferrari F430 on fire. It was later posted as a video by a guy who’s part of the Ferrari’s convoy:

While seeing a car burn to the ground is shocking enough for most people, a Ferrari F430 is worth a staggering 12 million pesos, [...]

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The Doing Business 2008 report, an annual study conducted by the World Bank and International Finance Corporation, states that the Philippines ranked 133rd out of 178 economies surveyed in terms of ease of putting up and doing business in the country:
Regulations affecting 10 stages of a business life are measured from the perspective of the [...]

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I’ve been a member of the Pwede Na! Complete Pinoy Guide to Personal Finance Yahoogroup since 2004, ever since I’ve bought the book, but I rarely join the discussions there. However, an email sent by a member of the group containing yet another analysis of the country’s problems caught my ire, which started a fiery [...]

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The death of May Leong spawned a very long comment thread on her last blog entry, which reveals the complications of living and working in Singapore.
The issue starts with a comment that asserts that “the problem is with herself (May Leong)”:
Pardon me, but i think the problem lies with herself. Her emphasis on work and [...]

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When someone says “life is unfair”, it often means something bad happened to that person. Most people don’t realize the duality that “fairness” implies. So I’ll invoke that duality in saying that “life is unfair” because something lucky is happening to me.
I guess you’re wondering why.
Early the other evening an HR officer called me asking [...]

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Carla’s entry about an article on entrepreneurship led me to the blog of Tony Lopez of BizNewsAsia.
In his articles, Lopez quotes Senator Manny Villar, who thinks that the most significant challenge that Filipino entrepreneurship faces is our own mindset regarding it:
The senator wondered why the Philippines haven’t progressed all these years. And he [...]

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