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.

The end of cash and the last money counter

With apologies to Francis Fukuyama for a twist on his book's title but I think it is safer for everyone if central banks stop printing paper money or minting coins. 

In times past workers were paid their salaries in cash. They would line up during paydays at the payroll teller's window or table, sign after their name on the payroll sheet and be handed envelopes containing their period's salary. Some companies did not even have envelopes. The payroll master just counted out the bills and coins in front of the worker.

Preparing the payroll sheet was tedious. You needed to have a typewriter with a very wide carriage because the sheet was twice as wide as the length of a legal size paper. If the payroll typist was not lucky enough he would fold up the sheet before he could insert it into his standard typewriter. And the payroll master needed to have the correct number of bills and coins for all those envelopes. Therefore he must figure well in advance the number of each denomination to be withdrawn from the company's depository bank.

But the risky side was bringing the cash from the bank. Many payroll money were lost to robbers or lost on the way to the payroll office of a firm. Good for those with big payrolls who had their cash brought to them by the bank's armored vans.

The worker also faced the risk of being robbed of his earnings for the period because his envelope  contained all his salary for the preceding 15 days of work.

But that changed with the introduction of ATM payroll accounts.  One does not need anymore to carry all 15-days worth of money. An employee does not even have to withdraw cash in order to pay bills. You can pay through the ATM.

However,  even with an ATM account a person can still be  robbed of his savings. A robber can just force him to withdraw money from the ATM and flee away with the cash.

We should make the next step: doing away with cash completely to make the world safer.  The First to disappear will be kidnap-for-ransom operations. Kidnappers cannot just ask the family of the kidnap victim to deposit the ransom to their account because it can be easily traced. Secrecy of bank deposits can be waived by the courts in criminal activities. 

What ransom will kidnappers demand? Jewelry? Gold bars? They will find it hard hiding and transporting their loot. Perhaps they can demand that the ransom be paid by transferring credits to their mobile phone accounts as in GCASH or Smart Padala. But those can still be traced.

How will jueteng operators conduct their enterprise if their runners cannot collect in cash? Will they turn to cellphone loads, as some are doing now,  as a way of collecting bets? That will move jueteng a little above the underground economy because some of its income will be captured through more usage of cellphone loads which means more taxable income for mobile phone operators.

With the end of cash goes the last money counter. But the world will be a lot safer. And in the case of jueteng, a little increase in government revenue.

OK, I forgot about the problem of counterfeiting which will also go away with the last cash.

Where is my thumb drive, Canon?

A few months ago I bought a Canon printer at the COMDDAP exhibit at SM City, Cebu. It was supposed to come with a freebie: a 4 gig thumbdrive.

Following instructions in their exhibit flyers, I e-mailed a scanned copy of my purchase documents to the Canon distributor in Manila. But in return, I got an automated reply asking me to send the serial number of my printer. When I did, I got another automated reply.

The Canon Philippines website has an online inquiry but when I did I also got another automated reply.

My e-mail to the Canon Singapore regional office bounced saying the addressee was not in the Lotus Domino directory.

Now, a 4gig thumbdrive is but a measly P500 or so at any CDRKing stores. But it is the duplicity of the Canon distributor - Dentsuindio - that irked me.

Update: The thumbdrive did finally arrive last week. But I think the exhibitor should have had on stock enough thumbdrives or whatever freebie they advertised. They spent more than the cost of the piece in sending the thing first to the wrong address and then sending it finally to me. 

The COMDDAP contact person was quick to answer my complaint. More power COMDDAP guys!

All's well, that ends well!