Best laid plans

Haven't posted here for quite some time because I was busy with my other blog (see here).

But I need to record this.

Beginning of October the family planned to go on vacation. The last one together was years ago.

We decided on a 2-day fling in Panglao, Bohol as the most affordable and convenient for our office and class schedules. Honi will be on sem break from her last year at Don Bosco. Mamay has filed a leave from her audit work. Dodon is out of school (hopefully temporarily) and Nanay is long overdue for a break.

Mamay made reservations with Lost Horizon. We made a down payment of 1K. Our vacation would be October 30 to November 1. I made arrangements with my manager so that she would not go on official trips on those days. Mamay filed a week-long leave.

We mapped out the tours to make the best use of our time. Feeding our dog, Dingky, would have to be arranged with Nanay's sister who is a neighbor.

Then while we were still preparing for breakfast during the Muslim holiday of October 15, the bowels of the earth sent a big tremor upwards on the island of Bohol disfiguring the tour sites we were supposed to see and leaving suffering in much part of the island.

What to do with the leave of absence we had already filed? We decided to go to Camotes instead and made the necessary plans. We picked Bano Beach resort and got in touch with management. Payment of reservation was done through kwarta padala of Lhuillier. Another non-refundable 1K.

All bags were packed in the evening of October 29. By 8AM of October 30 we alighted from a Ceres bus near the Port of Danao only to find a long line of passengers with nowhere to go. The first trip of the vessel turned back when the port on Camotes was already in sight. The waves were too big. All trips on that day were cancelled.

But little Mouse, you are not alone,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes of mice and men
Go often awry,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!

                - Robert Burns, 1785

-Robert Burns, 1785 

115th Independence Day?

It should be July 4, some say, because on June 12 some 115 years ago we were really not yet independent.

My take: it is from the day the last American military force pulled out from the Philippines some 20 years ago. Here's a good piece that I can recommend.

I remember Pres. Cory marching to the Senate on a rainy day just to ask the Philippine Senate not to end the  treaty which allowed US military forces on Philippine soil. It was one of the grand moments of the Senate, I must say.

I also remember Richard Gordon, many others, but mostly Gordon,  ranting and warning about the end of the Philippines with the departure of the Americans. No such thing happened. In fact Gordon and his volunteers kept Subic floating. Gordon was wrong on that account but he and his volunteers also proved that we do not have to rely on others to prop us up. I salute Gordon and his volunteers for that.

Altho the Americans gave us "independence", it came with many pre-conditions. See this article in Wikipedia for the many "strings attached".

So, we have only been independent for 20 years yet. We have done a lot in those years. We can do more in the next. Looking forward to it.

Until then let's sing the Philippine National Anthem:

Ipad stylus for sale

When my brod sent me an Ipad (the first generation) for my law study, I had him load it with Notetaker, NotesPlus, Noteshelf, etc. I thought I would be jotting down class notes. I scrambled for a stylus to use along with the notetaking apps.

I got the iStroke for around P1,500. But after a year or so of use it won't work anymore. And I found out that I rarely used them for notetaking in classes. Typing on a real keyboard was faster. The IPad became just a bookreader.

And styli from China now come in all sized  just cost P30 at CDRKing. Here they are side by side.

Living in the past: the North Borneo claim

There are a lot of discussions again about the Philippine claim over North Borneo. The latest resulted from the furor caused by a group of Tausogs, followers of Sultan Kiram, holing themselves up somewhere in North Borneo to press their claim of sovereignty, actually for rentals.

Prof. Solita Monsod in her column in the Philippine Inquirer said that the Sultanate of Sulu has historical rights over North Borneo because in 1685 the Sultan of Brunei awarded it to the Sultan of Sulu for helping him defeat Brunei rebels. Then she proceeded to criticize the way Spain ceded the Philippines to the USA without, in effect, asking the Filipinos.

If it was wrong for Spain to cede the Philippines to the U.S., without a by-your-leave,  was it not wrong for the Sultan of Brunei to cede North Borneo to the Sultan of Sulu. 

But these things was par for the course in the ancient past. Lands and territories were passed from one potentate to another to the detriment of the inhabitants. Land and people were treated like ranches and cattle. 

That was wrong and so were the subsequent acts arising from it such as the rental claimed by the Sultan of Sulu about which the recent furor is all about. 

This is the internet age; let's stop reliving the past.

Travails of a desktop PC buyer

Our 5-year old desktop PC finally bowed out of service after Christmas. It was powered by a Core 2 Duo processor and a 512MB Inno 3D video card. The rig was not the fastest when I bought it because it was what my budget could afford. But it's 150GB hard disk was considered big then. When the hard disk conked out in 2011, its replacement with 1 terabyte capacity was just considered a medium one.

I think the processor simply gave up when it was subjected by my son to his Starcraft game, so I begun looking for a new unit. The monitor, keyboard, and mouse are still working well, so we decided to get only a new CPU.

It was a choice of going to Nutech or PC Quickbuys. I bought a few items before from Nutech and I was pleased with their service and prices. I was also a customer of Thinking Tools, the owner of PC Quickbuys, for years and had no problem with them.

In all this, I forgot about PCExpress where I got my original rig. They were pleasant to deal with when I bought my old desktop and when its video card was replaced later. And I now think that is when my trouble started.

As much as possible, I prefer getting equipment that needs heavy lifting from a roadside outlet. It's much of a hassle lugging a desktop out of a mall after buying and back into the mall to get it repaired.  But it was already Sunday, January 6, when I finished  picking from the price list of PC Quickbuys the components that should go into our new desktop. The PC Quickbuys store across the street from UC is closed on Sundays, so SM was the place to go.

Our first configuration consisted of:

1. Processor - i5-3570
2. Motherboard - Asus P8B75-M LE
3. Video card - Asus EAH6570
4. Memory - Kingston 4G, 2 pcs 
5. casing and power supply with enough 

We would still be using the same hard disk as it still working.

Plan B, just in case we'd be tempted by a higher processor, was

1. Processor - i7-3770, other items unchanged or

But it was not to be that day. We found out that PC Quickbuys did not have the items we have configured on paper. We settled on the following:

1. i5-3470 , cheaper but lower in power
2. motherboard - Asus P8Z77 (more expensive)
3. video card - Sapphire Radeon HD6570
4. memory - Kingston 8GB. I preferred to use 2 pcs of 4Gb to utilize the dual channel feature of the motherboard.

It was around 1 PM when we paid for the items and were told to come back by 3:30PM to get the assembled rig. But when we went back we were simply told that the chipset of the motherboard would not recognize our hard disk. We were advised to reformat the disk before we can use the PC. I suggested that they test the rig with a working hard disk of their own but it seems they did not have one. Believing their statement that all that I need to do was to reformat the disk and reinstall the OS, we went home feeling a little disappointed. I would have left a tip as usual but decided not to.

We immediately reformatted the hard disk as suggested but the OS wouldn't install. We decided to do a clean format of the disk by attaching it to a notebook. When it was replaced in the CPU, still the OS would not install but instead the monitor went blue with lines of error text on it.

On Friday evening, January 11, Dodon (my son) was full of suggestions he got from googling. He was adamant on getting online. We tried the suggestions and finally got the OS installed and the desktop was up and running by midnight. It appeared that the technician hooked up the SATA cable to the SATA 3.0 Gb/s connector on the motherboard. When it was hooked up that way, the SATA configuration on the BIOS should be set to IDE Mode instead of the AHCI Mode in order for the motherboard to recognize the hard disk. The AHCI mode was the proper mode if the hard disk was connected to the 6 Gb/s connector which it was not.

Finally I can update my lawblog. I still prefer the big keyboard over those of the notebooks at home. Thanks but no thanks to PC Quickbuys.

First hand experience with doomsday

December 21, 2012 has come and gone. And we are still around. The Mayans, if they were that great at predictions, should be the dominant race by now.

In the early 70's I was teaching fisheries and general science in the Dinagat Fishery High School. I was 19 when I first taught and left after two years. See here for the reason I quit.

I was living with Mano Boning and Nang Tolang and their twin children; an older son was studying in college somewhere I cannot remember now but probably Cebu City. Manong Boning was a utility man of the school while the wife was an elementary school principal.

One evening the couple asked me to go with them and the twins to the big house of Mayor Ecleo. They said that a big earthquake would happen that night and the only safe place would be the home of   the Mayor which was then newly finished and located on a ridge of a hill which had a good view of the Dinagat harbor.

Out of courtesy to my hosts, who treated me like a son, I went. At any rate, I was also curious to see the interior of the mansion. I found assembled there the top aides of the Mayor and other government officials including the DepEd school supervisor. I asked him, in amusement,  what the heck the two of us were doing there as we were not members of the sect founded by the Mayor. And, by all means, we did not believe that doomsday was indeed coming.

After midnight we were told that it was already safe to go home. Somehow the calamity was abated.

Surmising now, I think the supervisor was just there to show his support for the Mayor as I was just for Mano Boning and family. But I was pretty sure then that there was no great calamity coming because  it was still to be in 1975 as taught by Herbert W. Armstrong, the leader of the Worldwide Church of God to which I belonged.

Armstrong had this booklet 1975 in Prophecy which shaped the thinking of church members about doomsday. It was the reason that in 1968 I chose to study fisheries in Zamboanga City instead of accepting the offer of my father to send me to FEATI (then one of the better technological schools) to take up electronics engineering. 1975 was coming and the world - society, not the earth - was coming to its end. I took the two and half year fishery curriculum which would give me ample time to prepare before 1975 came. All members of the Worldwide Church of God were supposed to become rulers in the world tomorrow after the crisis of 1975 and should be prepared to be leaders. Whew!

The Armstrong church has since split into many branches. I left the church, a few years after the death of Armstrong, having learned of its cultic nature first here and in many other places. This site is highly recommended for an in-depth knowledge of the cultic practices of the original Armstrong group.

I forsook religion altogether and its many doomsday predictions. And what a relief it has been ever since. Alas, the 1975 booklet is still reproduced here. This is one of the typical illustrations from the booklet:

Been there, done that!

This reminds me of great company

I was reading the column Viewpoint of Juan L. Mercado and was struck by the familiar ring in this paragraph:

“Then and now, it is still the poor who bear the brunt.” One recalls a Grade One teacher who checked why a child was crouching below her desk. She didn’t want us to see her eat her breakfast of green papaya soaked in salt and vinegar.

After two years of teaching high school in Dinagat Island I decided to go back to Cebu to find another job nearer my mother and siblings. We lost our father two years before in a political murder in Zamboanga del Sur where we were living at the time. We were settled with our grandfather in Cebu when I found the teaching job in Surigao.

When one year passed and me still jobless I enrolled in an electronics course at the former Cebu School of Arts and Trades. I had to scrimp on everything because for my expenses I relied on my mother, a public school teacher, and my grandfather who was a small-town councilor.

During lunchtime I would seek out a vacant room. I would go to a corner, arrange an armchair to face the wall, and proceed to arrange my food on the arm of the chair. The food which I prepared was almost always corn, fried sayote, and soup from the morning's inun-unan.

The first time I did that ritual I heard, halfway through my poor baon, noises from behind. When I turned to find out, I saw three other poor students arranging their food on the armchairs. Each was facing the other corners of the classroom. Great company!

I presume they are now better off than I am since I had a little hard time getting a good job after leaving CSAT while many of my classmates immediately made it to the big companies which were then sprouting up in the new Mactan Export Processing Zone.