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.

Anyway, while I was at home I thought I would be able to blog but, instead of writing, a different “muse” bit me and this is what I spent my time on:

This is the replica cockpit of an F-14A Tomcat, in 1:48 scale.

If you’re not familiar with what a Tomcat is, it’s the fighter prominently featured on Tom Cruise’s 1986 hit, Top Gun.

Hopefully the plane takes a more recognizable shape over the next few weeks. It’s a painstaking process and even after all this years I’m still learning a new thing or two about it.

It’s been two years since I’ve built any scale model, and the last plane that I completed was done back in 2005, and I’m happy over what I was able to start.

Hope that I finish it in time for our November IPMS Philippines National Competition.

Days before my dad’s departure he was frantically arranging for a barong to be made for my uncle (6 foot plus white guy in the upper half of 200 lbs). While the tailor was able to pull off a quickie, since the only basis for the measurements of the barong was a shirt my uncle left from a recent trip — short sleeved at that, I still wonder if the barong fits. We will know in a few days I’m sure.

It amuses and delights me at how Filipino traditions are still somehow maintained and observed in foreign countries. This is especially true in the United States, where the melting pot nature of the country, with numerous migrants and communities, raises the need and want to connect with people from your own nation and culture. While there may be large Filipino communities in, say, California, however, Filipinos elsewhere might be hard-pressed to find their kababayans easily.

One way Filipinos cope with the situation is to look for community events that are either near them or can at least be accessible in terms of schedule. This is where Filipino community sites like FilipinoVillage helps. It’s a site where you can add your Filipino events, no matter where it is held.

Connect with Pinoys at FilipinoVillage.com now!

Yesterday whilst taking a bath to get ready for work, I felt a weird growth on my cheek near the ear, where the sideburns are. Instead of heading to the office, I went to the hospital. My doctor told me that it appears to be parotitis, a common symptom for mumps.

So I’m homebound for the rest of the week, not unless I want to risk the fertility of all those single guys in the office who have yet to have children.

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!

CEB was also ranked by the magazine as No. 23 in the world and No. 5 in Asia in total passengers carried in 2007.

CEB carried a total of almost 5.5 million passengers in 2007, up 57.4 per cent from 2006. [Yahoo! Finance]

This is one of the reasons why Cebu Pacific has been gung-ho in expanding their operations, including a change in their online reservation system which led to quite a fuss in this blog a few months ago.

Kudos to them, although I hope we get less complaints about their services instead of more. Growth at the expense of customer service is the worst marketing tactic anybody can ever use.

Hat tip to Technogra.ph for this story.

Reading the following passage made me reminisce about my high school alma mater, which with its reputation and demanding curriculum, such stories are not unusual at all:

One graduate was Kim Soo-yeon, 19, who was accepted by Princeton this month. Daewon parents tend to be wealthy doctors, lawyers or university professors. Ms. Kim’s father is a top official in the Korean Olympic Committee.

Ms. Kim developed fierce study habits early, watching her mother scold her older sister for receiving any score less than 100 on tests. Even a 98 or a 99 brought a tongue-lashing.

“Most Korean mothers want their children to get 100 on all the tests in all the subjects,” Ms. Kim’s mother said. [The New York Times, emphasis mine]

I also had a batchmate who would freak out and weep when he got 99/100 in quizzes. He supposedly got beatings from his parents from such scores. It’s toll on the guy was obvious: he was socially inept. And by inept, I do not just mean that he’s a dork: by inept, I mean that, at 14 or 15 years old, he exhibited the emotional maturity of a 9 year old.

I’m not kidding, nor do I mean it in a degrading nor insulting way — he genuinely exhibited the emotional maturity of a 9 year old. While a lot of people was dealing with their adolescence hormones (although many, who are similar to him, are not), dealing with their relationships with the opposite sex, this guy was drooling (literally) in front of his Game Boy trying to finish The Legend of Zelda. He acted in this weird, comical way, as though he was always acting out a skit from some sort of cartoon. He wrote in the school paper, but his material never went beyond echoing the preachings of parents who made sure that their little boy behaved properly.

And all of that to satisfy the whims of parents who determined from day one that they will measure their child’s worth through the name of the school he went to, and through the numeric scribbles of some stranger on a thickened piece of paper.

While I agree that honing the talents of a gifted child is necessary so that talent does not go to waste, I believe that elevating perfection to some sort of sadistic standard and measuring a child’s worth through their adherence to that standard is pure and unadulterated child abuse. Indeed, many of us from that school, myself included, reached a point during our college years where we just burnt up, bombed out, and got disillusioned by the meaning of all the numbers ruling our lives, despite the absence of pressure from our parents at the time. It was simply expected of us because we came from that school.

It was tough being unable to distinguish one’s self worth from that stigma, the label of being a graduate of an elite school. Many people, upon learning that you’ve come from that school, immediately expect you to be some kind of superhuman or ubergenius; a person who is expected to be “successful” by excelling in all aspects of life, especially in academics and, years later, in a career. It’s as if failure is not an option.

I deeply appreciate my parents for not burdening me with the kinds of expectations some of my batch mates had to go through.

I am not discouraging people from sending their children to Philippine Science High School, or to any other science high school, or for aspiring for entry into Ivy League schools for that matter. Neither do I regret going to Pisay, because the challenges there certainly made me a stronger, more resilient, and more reflective person.

However, fourteen years’ worth of hindsight makes the repercussions of a high-pressure academic environment much, much clearer. Now that I am also a parent, at least the effort becomes more conscious: never ever make your child feel that they are only worth the grades they get. Being in an elite school is hard enough — lowering their self esteem will only make it worse.

They will thank you for it when you get older.

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)