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I was with the missus at Ayala last Saturday afternoon. Our daughter May Hara was attending the CPA oathtaking and ball at the Cebu Sports Complex that evening. The missus would be her guest. I was never good in escorting somebody to a ball; in fact has never been to a ball.

The evening ball was to start at 6PM yet so us couple went around checking prices of this and that merchandise while the daughter went straight to the event venue for the registration and other things.

I decided I might as well buy Prof. Dawkins' latest epic. So I got this:






Oops! Not that one but this:









This is available at Fullybooked.

Highly recommended for those who need to validate or update their understanding of evolution. The creationists, they're beyond help. Let them be.

Meal coupon courtesy of Air Philippines

This is kind of late now. But I remembered our lousy experience with PAL when I saw this meal coupon in my stack of documents.

When my co-employee and I were about to check in for our flight back to Cebu from Iloilo we were met with the announcement that our flight was cancelled. No reason was given. I am more inclined to believe that the low-cost flight was cancelled because there was not enough passengers.

Our other fellow employee had gone earlier on the Cebu Pacific plane although we arrived at the airport together. To think that he was a little miffed while we were yet in Cebu because he was not able to book on the same flight with us.

It would be soon dark and by then we should have been home in Cebu were it not for the cancellation. Many passengers were asking for meals or accommodation until the next flight. The station manager of Air Philippines handed out meal coupons and offered a roundabout passage to Cebu via Manila aboard a big PAL jet.

It seemed Air Philippines/PAL thought we all deserved a 75-Peso worth of dinner at an airport bakery.

12 Years of Good Governance in the Offing

I am thrilled at the prospect of a Noynoy-Mar tandem. It will mean 12 years of good governance finally for this benighted country. Noynoy in 2010 and Mar in 2016. My father who was a card-carrying Liberal would have applauded.

Although I am a little apprehensive of Korina being First Lady, I can live with that!

Kaikog, Delicadeza

I have always wondered about the equivalent of the Cebuano word kaikog in other Philippine languages or in English. With the Le Cirque incident I am now almost sure that the nearest equivalent is the Spanish delicadeza.

Kaikog or delicadeza has many facets. Lawyer Angie Umbac defines delicadeza as "knowing you are right but tempering your actions to consider the sensibilities of others. It is a form of diplomacy, of good manners, of respect for other and knowing your place in the universe." (see Philippine Daily Inquirer)

My family lives in a mixed neighborhood. The better off families line the side of the street of what passes for a subdivision. Our home is at the back of one of these well-off families. And even beyond our house are our poor neighbors who live on rented lots although they are simply lumped most of the time by census takers into the category of squatters. Our poor neighbors and us have to pass through an undefined right of way. Undefined meaning the right of way can be fenced off anytime the rich owner decides to use the vacant lot cutting us off from the subdivision street that connects us to the main road.

Some households along the subdivision street simply wash their cars on the side of the narrow street making the path muddy for us who have to pass on foot. One can call them "walay kaikog". Or as my Spanish-speaking grandpa would say "falta delicadeza". Perhaps as subdivision residents they may have the right to use the street the way they wanted. But they have no kaikog for us poorer residents whose slippers, shoes or bare feet get stuck in the mud as a result of their washing their cars on the street.

Our community has no waste water drainage system. (Doesn't that sound familiar for all places in our poor country?) So the people on the subdivision and the poor neighborhood just make use of the law of physics which says that water seek its own level. Overtime, drainage canals just sprung up here and there: on the subdivision street, on the informal right of ways, along the concrete fences. But mostly people make sure the water do not run through or stay in their properties. I can understand the situation of the poor families. With barely a space for their homes to stand on, they don't have a place for their waste water. But I am frustrated when the families with big lots just bore holes through their concrete fences and allow their drainage to flow into other people's lot.

I made sure from the start of our stay in the neighborhood that our waste water stays within our lot by digging a drainage tank. Environmentally speaking, this is not an excellent choice. But that is a subject matter for another day.

The simple reason is that I always believe in kaikog towards my neighbors.

Ooops! I am violating another aspect of delicadeza as defined by Shirley Lua (see again the PDI). She says delicadeza or kaikog is "an attitude of modesty . . ."

Where are the bridges?

This is from the front page of the Cebu Daily News. It shows children crossing a river in a mountain barangay of Cebu City on their way to school. After school, of course, they would be doing the same thing on their way back home.

So where is the bridge?






It's here in downtown Cebu City. And in many other parts of the city. They call this structure skywalk.

At least this particular skywalk is actually used by schoolchildren. But most of the other skywalks are just billboards for advertisements of the congressman or senator who funded their construction.

A brief history of the internet: my version

It's nice to know that my webpage from 1995 has been preserved. See it here.

The webpage was part of the website of the GOIT-7 and was hosted by GSILink. GSILink was the pioneering commercial internet provider in Cebu. It was started by Alan Young, Gerald Sta. Ana and, oops sorry I cannot remember two of the other people behind it. But one became the wife of Alan.

But even before GSILink there was Nexus Online of Alex Yap. One of the programmers of Alex went over to GSILink because Nexus failed to take off commercially although it was lucky enough to have plenty of telephone lines most probably courtesy of his wife's being employed by PLDT at the time.

I should explain the words in bold above. In those days if you wanted to connect to the internet you need to dial to your ISP. The 28KBPS modems ruled. Lynx was the only way to connect to the web when you use Nexus. Later however, GSILink showed the visual world of Netscape.

There was no Globe Tel yet so PLDT had the monopoly and did not care if you waited very long for your own phone line. It was the time when Lee Kuan Yew announced that in the Philippines 50% (I cannot remember the figure) were waiting for their telephones to be installed while the rest was waiting for the dial tone. Ironically he was speaking in the Philippines as a guest of PLDT.

The two internet providers connected to the internet via the bandwidth of University of San Carlos whose internet brain was Manman Kintanar and his students. Manman and his group also did the LAN, it was token ring at the time, of our office under contract of Tony Zosa.

Those were the days!

Twilight is the culprit

All books coming to the Philippines are now taxed because of this book. A top official of the Philippine Customs says the book is not educational according to their newest interpretation of the 1950 Florence Agreement.

I think the customs official does not read books at all. Or she has no teenage children or else they would feed her to the vampires.

I am often frustrated that my daughters do not read the books on my shelf which I heartily recommend especially the books by Dawkins. Or the science fiction of Asimov, Clarke or Brin. My son has read the Foundation series of Asimov but he has not lifted the cover of the Eternal Golden Braid.

If it is any consolation, my younger daughter is now reading because of Twilight. Hopefully she'll graduate to serious stuff soon. The older one recently graduated from college. Alas, all she has read are the Potter series and now this Twilight and its sequels.

Sometimes in my desperation I think our Customs should ban all books of the Twilight genre. I am kidding, of course, because I do enjoy fiction like the Potter books.

Pro-fixer poster?

This poster is required by the Civil Service Commission to be displayed conspicuously in government offices.

There are two problems with it:
1. It carries Manila phone numbers.
2. Most importantly, it means something else in Cebu and in other Cebuano speaking regions.

Labanan in Tagalog means fight. In Cebuano, hoever, it means take the side of. Imagine this poster at the LTO or BOC or any government agency. :-)

A colleague at the office says just change the anti-fixer to pro-fixer and the poster will mean what it says.

Manila from the Unit's eye

In the 15th episode of The Unit, the crew was sent to Manila on a mission. And this was the first scene. Uggh.

Forms that ask for the sex of your son

Some forms can be irritating in the way data are asked. Take the case of the Maxicare account application form.  Maxicare is the HMO engaged by our office for the medical insurance of our dependents.

Every beginning of year we are required to fill up an application form.  A single employee can enroll as dependents her or his parents or single and unemployed siblings. For married employees like me, one can enroll one's spouse and single, unemployed children below 25 years old.

The form has this column for names of dependents, another column for relationship with the dependent. So I put in the names of my wife and my son and declare their relationship with me in another column. 

But sometimes I  cannot understand why there is still a column for age when there is already a column for birthday. Perhaps an encoder of the data wants it easy. Or the database program is very primitive it cannot compute the age from the birthdate. Even an Excel data file can easily do that.

Now why on earth should the form still has a column for the sex and civil status of my dependents?  Unless same sex marriage is already practised in the Philippines I could not be married to a male spouse because I already signified my sex as male in the appropriate box. And my son could not be female even if he were gay or transgender.