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!

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.

Twitter has evolved into a quasi-IM/quasi-blog platform where people not only say what they are doing at the moment, but posit and discuss ideas, catch up, keep in touch, joke around, and literally just have fun, while really being disconnected (e.g., you don’t need to log in and out of it like you do with IM).

Hope to see you there!

I had the same quandary when my wife put up our contact information for I-NAV Travel and Tours. Naturally, because it was a home-based venture, business and personal contact information was almost one and the same. While there were risks in doing that, the fact that we depended solely on the internet as a marketing tool, as well as the fact that it will be immensely difficult to obtain trust in business transactions if, say, we withheld our real name. The necessity to publish contact information superseded the need to protect ourselves from the risks of online information mining, whether real or imagined.

So far, in the whole year that we’ve done that, the only annoyances that we’ve faced are some anonymous guys trying to add my wife on Friendster. Sorry guys, if you’re not gonna do any business with us, no luck for you. Besides, she’s already taken by me, and if you try to pull anything funny off to get my wife’s attention, I’ll cut yours off. Raaaawwr. Hope that’s clear

So, giving up anonimity is really a risk that we have to take, if only to establish both our sincerity and credibility. Of course, further measures can be taken in that direction; joining business contact repositories like the Asian Business Directory will not only publish contact information, it may benefit online businesses through more extensive networking capabilities.

In the end, it’s really up to you but, as a rule of thumb, don’t give up personal information if you don’t have to.