Maybe it’s just road rage from all the traffic that I’ve been going through lately, whether driving my (borrowed) car, riding a cab, or being a bus passenger myself, but I have always wondered: why the hell do we wonder why there’s so much traffic in EDSA, when an average of 40% of the road cannot be used by 80% of the vehicles?

You know what I’m talking about; it’s the dreaded yellow lanes in EDSA, wherein buses and jeepneys are free to ply in and out of, but once private vehicles and, more recently, taxi cabs, enter the MMDA boys come swooping down on you like pet vultures of The Great Pink BF.

Of course, nobody really questions the law because, hell, private vehicle owners? They’re rich! If they can afford a car, they should be able to afford a ticket from the MMDA! Unlike those poor bus drivers who can swerve in and out of them yellow lanes because — hey, it’s their job — and they have every right to cut into your lane because they’re "less fortunate" than you with your spanking brand new Chery QQ.

So, let’s review the kinds of laws Filipinos have written against the "more fortunate" because it’s just "rightful" for them and they give just advantage to the "less fortunate":

Yellow Lanes

Seriously, it’s impossible to find what the whole point of this godforsaken law, and the way the MMDA boys have twisted it the other way around — theoretically private vehicles should be allowed in the yellow lanes because, heaven forbid, the sidewalks and establishments are deep inside them! Why private vehicles are treated like UN forces crossing the 38th parallel towards Pyongyang, I still don’t understand.

Never mind if almost half of EDSA is unusable — creating enormous traffic jams on an already overloaded highway — for which the apparent remedy is U-turn slots and pink urinals. It ensures that those who cannot afford their own cars and the "less fortunate" bus and jeepney drivers ferrying them have a free hand in doing whatever they want as long as they’re in these beautiful golden stretches.

Taxes on books and electronics

Why is everyone making a hoot against this "great book blockade" thing? It’s meant to keep you rich kids from getting your unnecessarily expensive copies of Twilight! Save that for the beggar outside your campus gate instead!

And if you think this is the first time the government did it… na ah ah. Seriously, did you ever wonder why those laptops, digital cameras, cellphones, and other uber-gadgets are just oh so cheap in places like Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan? It’s because the Philippines places high taxes on these dreaded devices! Dreaded, because everyone knows that only the uber rich can buy uber gadgets and henceforth they must be taxed! Never mind if everyone needs a cellphone these days, never mind if laptop computers actually empower the downtrodden by allowing access to the internet and therefore free flowing information, and never mind if digital cameras allow people to get rid of film cameras which, with the hazardous chemical content of both the manufacture of film and processing and development, leads to various forms of pollution. Never mind, never mind.

The Lina Law

The mother of all "social justice" laws, the Urban Development and Housing Act of 1992 (RA 7279) [PDF] colloquially called the Lina Law "lays down the groundwork for a comprehensive and continuing urban development and housing program" and "addresses the right to housing of the homeless and underprivileged Filipino people." Quite a noble law, seeking to allow the "less fortunate" a level playing field at finding homes.

Of course, a lot of unscrupulous-though-less-fortunate people also use it to steal land; while the dramatized cinematic representation is of some cruel Doña riding a Mercedes ordering goons to beat the crap out of poor laborers arms linked with wives and kids tearfully crying while the bulldozer comes in, many times hardworking OFWs, scrimping on meals to save for their dream house, come home with the lots they bought in the last seafaring-tour-of-duty occupied by gin-drinking merry men. These "less fortunate" persons then brandish the Lina Law being on their side, drawing the "rich" OFW’s savings into attorney’s fees in a court battle to get the land he actually really owns.

Who should benefit from our laws?

While there are laws that benefit the downtrodden that are commendable and praiseworthy, the cliche must once again be evoked: the road to hell is paved, gold plated, and vacuum sealed fresh with good intentions. Any law that tips the balance from one sector of society to the other must have easy-to-invoke stop gaps that disallow the law to be abused by the benefiting sector, or render them moot when the needs addressed by the law have become irrelevant.

Only when the law benefits everyone, not just the downtrodden, can a society be really called just and equal.

The contest is open to all bloggers, although the prizes are yet to be specified; do read the official blog entry to read the mechanics. The main item in the mechanics that amuses me, however, is item number 4:

Contest entries are blog posts that:

1. are at least 200 words long;
2. talk about places that are destinations of Cebu Pacific flights (e.g., Davao City);
3. must not contain negative reviews of the airline or any harmful content pertaining to the airline in any manner;
4. contain at least one text link to http://www.cebupacificair.com (e.g., “Cebu Pacific” or “affordable flights in the Philippines”), and must not have the rel=”nofollow” attribute in the link tag;
5. must not contain any other links except to Cebu Pacific’s website.

Emphasis mine.

Cebu Pacific has undergone a LOT of negative criticism lately, including from this blogger, and all I see in this contest is a futile effort to “balance” the “distorted” views of Cebu Pacific online and convince everyone that their airline is great, if only because they’re baiting us bloggers to blog about them in a positive way.

The irony is that the solution to Cebu Pacific’s bad reputation woes will need a lot more than a blogging contest. I will have to reserve my opinions regarding how to reverse public perception for another post.

Consider this as my (un)official entry to the blogging contest.

In this community driven award, bloggers nominate 10 peers that they deem as the most influential emerging blogs for the year, and I am proud to be a part of a blog that most of them deems influential. I believe it is evidence that the Filipino blogosphere is, contrary to perception, a very politically-aware (if not active) body which is hopefully representative of a newer generation of empowered Filipinos.

That said, a big congratulations to FilipinoVoices!

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 asked if she had consulted her local civil registrar or a lawyer to fix whatever her problems are. The reply (this was going on in SMS, if I recall correctly) made my wife hurl:

Nagpagawa na ako ng birth certificate sa Recto. Nakaprint naman sa NSO paper.

The “friend’s” excuse for taking desperate measures is the fact that she wants to become an OFW — our latest breed of national hero. And doubtless, nothing will stop her — if she has resorted to Recto to rectify (pun intended) her birth certificate issues and the DFA refuses to issue her a legit passport, she would doubtless return to those run-down shanties alongside the LRT Line 2 terminal at that avenue to obtain a fake one.

Read more…

Filipinos and Entrepreneurship: What’s the real score?

The result of the GEM Philippines 2006-2007 National Report, as cited by CVJ, is baffling, to say the least. In the study, GEM Philippines states that the distribution of entrepreneurs by socio-economic status is as follows: Class ABC+ 7%, Class C- 19%, Class D 54%, Class E 20%.

Results show that four out of 10 Filipinos (39.2%) aged 18 to 64 have businesses (see Figure 3) and the Philippines ranks second among the 42 countries surveyed by GEMfor 2006. The country is only second to Peru among middleand low income countries and ranks first among benchmarked countries in Asia.

This appears to state that Filipinos are, in fact, business-oriented. This is in stark-contrast to the often maligned notion of the Filipino as culturally biased against entrepreneurship, and having a seek-employment mentality as opposed to a business-oriented culture.

Read more…

Hope you check out Filipinovoices.com

Ironically, I was lugging a tripod I had bought earlier that night.

I had fun hanging out with Tess, her friend Aiyleen, and Sarah.

I also got to meet other bloggers like Noemi Dado, Melo Villareal (wherein he gave away calling cards, with an accompanying wallet), Arbet, Jeff, the Jester in Exile (he still doesn’t want to say his real name), Jeric and Shari, aside from seeing Benj, Aileen and Juned again.

And the schwag was heavy. LITERALLY. Like, a case of Coke Zeroes. 24 cans and all. My arms hurt lugging it back home, to think I practically lived in the area. No, that wasn’t a complaint

Oh yeah, Coke announced a video blogging contest that night, so if you’re interested, check out the details here.

Alin, alin, alin ang naiba? Ang pagkakaiba ng Tagalog at Filipino

Ayon sa Google, matagumpay ang naturang akda sapagkat kabilang ito sa unang limang resulta ng search na “pagkakaiba ng tagalog sa filipino” o “pagkakaiba ng tagalog at filipino”. Samakatuwid, kinagigiliwan ng mga estudyanteng nabigyan ng naturang asaynment ang aking blog.

Higit pa sa 25 na comment ang tunay na bilang ng comment sa post na iyan… marami diyang comment na hindi ko na in-approve. Ang ilan sa mga comment na iyon ay nakakairita lamang sapagkat nagtatanong sila ng mga bagay ukol sa wikang Filipino na higit pa sa nasasaad, e.g., mga tanong tungkol sa balarila at panitikan.

Patawad, mga bords. Hindi ako guro sa Filipino. Kinagigiliwan ko lamang ang pagsusulat sa wika na ‘to.

Maligayang Araw ng mga Ama!

I have been viewing My Sari Sari Store regularly for the past three years and to say that his photos inspired me is but an understatement. His style is a major influence in my own attempts at photography over the past 8 months of going around the Philippines — a photo collection I haven’t had the guts (and time) to come out with. My efforts (both successful and otherwise) at photography have been the expression of both frustration and appreciation of individuals like Sidney, a foreigner who perceives the beauty and idiosyncrasy of the Philippines in an a much better fashion than most Filipinos ever can.

While I can’t fully promise it, I’ll be working on my stash of photos in the next few weeks. They won’t be at par with the quality of Sidney’s gallery — but they would be in the same spirit of unraveling the beauty of the Philippines and its culture.

Thanks, Sidney, for showing us more colors of the Philippines than the drab that its people always paints it as. I fervently hope that soon enough you’ll be back to posting your photos of Philippine sights. Maraming maraming salamat sa iyo. Mabuhay ka!

When Microsoft came up with its Heroes Happen {Here} campaign as part of Launch {2008}, I found the campaign name cheesy. “Hero” is something you reserve for people who do truly great things, and hardly fits into the portrait of a software developer — someone like me. A flawed person who makes mistakes, writes bugs, and tries his best to go home early to the family every night even as QA bug reports come pouring in for immediate repair.

Deep inside of me, however, I knew the kind of power, and consequently, the kind of responsibility, software developers had in our hands.

Four years ago I joined the IT department of Philippine National Bank, and was assigned under the ATM unit — that small team (3 of us actually) who maintains the software for the various ATM models (which span three decades of ATM development!) the bank uses. Many days were boring drudgery, but there were some days wherein we are up on our toes all because of some error on the system, some bug that was found, some COBOL report that crashed, or some cases of fraud that required investigation, or your new software was being QAed not by your usual QA staff but by the meticulous, devil-in-the-details ladies of the Audit Department.

Whenever those days ended I always find myself spewing out a huge sigh of relief.

But beyond relief, the experience whenever I step outside of the PNB offices and use its public ATMs is quite exhilarating. It sounds weird, sure, but it was dogfooding (for the laypeople — dogfooding is when a developer using his own software for real world purposes) at its finest. Whenever I line up for PNB ATMs and everything works as intended for everyone, I’d be happy. Whenever I line up for PNB ATMs and something doesn’t work right — the machine is down, very slow transactions, unresponsive networks, I’d personally pull out my cellphone and call my colleagues over at operations to inform them of the problem. Sometimes, just seeing PNB ATMs in far-off backwater towns with the card receptor light blinking happily green makes me smile.

Sure, it sounds shallow. But there is an immense satisfaction to be gained from the knowledge that you’ve got a software working that genuinely helps people — the power that a public facing software application (which an ATM essentially is, tightly coupled with hardware as it is) holds.

(Continue reading A portrait of a software developer as hero)

One of the main points of criticism against my rather controversial, death-threat worthy posts regarding Cebu Pacific’s dismal service and the involvement of software development company Navitaire was that they found my posts too negativist and tried to bully me into suggested that I criticize more constructively.

In that case, I do hope Navitaire employees, both former and current, do open their minds and keep themselves from wanting to kill me while I attempt to provide some unsolicited advice, which I hope moves towards a more “positive” and “constructive” analysis of the system at hand.

First I want to acknowledge that some of the errors, particularly, some stray footers, have been fixed and have ceased to be an unsightly annoyance, and let it be known that the fact that errors are being mitigated is something deeply appreciated.

(Continue reading Unsolicited advice for improving Cebu Pacific’s Sky Sales sytem)

Highlighted text roughly translates to “stop this if you want to stay alive where you’re going”

From above, his email address is stevenson.salvador@linksys.com. His IP address is 66.114.104.164

UPDATE 1: I find it rather sad that the IP address above resolves to a Navitaire DNS server (as per the first comment below).

From http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/ipall.ch?domain=66.114.104.164

IP address: 66.114.104.164
Reverse DNS: slcinternet.navitaire.com.
Reverse DNS authenticity: [Could be forged: hostname slcinternet.navitaire.com. does not exist]
ASN: 18945
ASN Name: OMTEK
IP range connectivity: 3
Registrar (per ASN): ARIN
Country (per IP registrar): US [United States]
Country Currency: USD [United States Dollars]
Country IP Range: 66.114.0.0 to 66.114.255.255
Country fraud profile: Normal
City (per outside source): Salt Lake City, Utah
Country (per outside source): US [United States]
Private (internal) IP? No
IP address registrar: whois.arin.net
Known Proxy? No
Link for WHOIS: 66.114.104.164

I’m now considering what actions, legal or otherwise, I will take from this point onward.

UPDATE 2: Napakasakit, Kuya Eddie? Kaya ba nagcomment ka ng ganito?

Next time, keep your mouth shut if you have nothing intelligent to say. Also, please think twice before you give advice like this. Remember, you’re not talking to a student project. It’s Accenture. I completely believe that every thing you said was done but a project is not just about the software. Read, read, read, and don’t think you know everything. People who knows a little, talk like crazy. People who knows a lot… they read, think, and re-think before something comes out of their mouth.

This way, there will be no “death-threats” if I should even call it a threat. But if it is, do you think it’s okay to risk it? Your life inexchange for your stupid comments? I don’t think so.

I just think you’re finding a way out of your stupidity by diverting the topic from what you are saying into something else. That Salvador made more sense to me — it’s called common sense. A sense that you don’t have but pretend to have by using jargons like RAID and whatever.

Peace. Just my 2 cents. Just keep out of fights, okay? Shut up.

I can’t believe how “peace” and “shut up” could go on one line. Why do I have a feeling that that sentence was intended to be a veiled threat?

Let’s look at his IP address: 74.63.84.61

IP address: 74.63.84.61
Reverse DNS:
Reverse DNS authenticity: [Could be forged: hostname does not exist]
ASN: 0
ASN Name: IANA-RSVD-0
IP range connectivity: 0
Registrar (per ASN): Unknown
Country (per IP registrar): US [United States]
Country Currency: USD [United States Dollars]
Country IP Range: 74.63.64.0 to 74.63.95.255
Country fraud profile: Normal
City (per outside source): Chicago, Illinois
Country (per outside source): US [United States]
Private (internal) IP? No
IP address registrar: whois.arin.net
Known Proxy? No
Link for WHOIS: 74.63.84.61

Hmmm, taga-Chicago nga kaya? I wonder.