Man On A Street

Nov 7, 2010 They've been saying it for a long time—they finally got him today. The rathole where i live, there's a shack on the side where 2 old people stay, my landlady and the senile (poopdropping) landlord. They had an old old dog tied near the outdoor tiled sink and they've been saying it's useless so they're gonna get rid of it one day. That was Bachoychoy—really old stinker—too old to stand up except to eat, ask for water, sleep, poop, etc—looked like a grizzled brown chowchow with mangy hairless red arms (inflamed) ending in long claws. I used to feed him leftovers—he was grateful and my hand would sometimes get too slow to avoid his grateful licks. Anyway, at 6am today—I was in bed still groggy from the Tanduay rum—I heard the old landlady say "There's a gate near the sink, you can come in there..." Those were instructions for the executioners—I covered my ears but did me no good. The first two blows were followed by long howls tinged with regr...

I'm at my old college today -- Visca, Baybay, Leyte. I figured i'd spend the night here before going to Tacloban Saturday. I'd like to ask around for anyone experienced in building biogas digesters to fuel electric generators. I'm on an errand for my sister heheh. Had dinner with 3 campus paper editors (it was like a mini college editors' congress hehe) and they showed me around the publication office. Ahh, same old computers I remember from 3 years ago... still running on pirated stuff ... except that time when most computers abruptly switched to Linux... I discovered PCLinuxOS in 2004, at the height of the Microsoft-Business Software Alliance raid rumours at Visca. Heheh, everybody was scared because the penalty for being caught with pirated software was confiscation of your computer plus P100,000 fine for every pirated title identified -- including windoze. Some even hid their pirated CDs up the kisame. Over a weekend, many PC units in Visca were converted to Bay...

Seems a spammer got hold of my Yahoo!Mail addresses—or worse, my password—using my email address, it forwarded this message to several (but not all) contacts in my Yahoo! contacts list: Dear friend ~~ 2--p I have a Japanese friend who tells me that he works in a Japanese company. I visited the company he works for and found their products quite favorable. And the products have many versions, such as European version, American version, and the Asian version etc. All the company's products have photos in the internet.I suggest you take a look in this website: www.zol-trade.com. You will certainly be interested in some products. Thank you k--g o--^ Yahoo! Answers ( 'dear friend' emails ) says my computer and email password could have been compromised by a malicious program (which records keystrokes) and now part of a botnet. A TechWorld article tells me to get rid of Windows since it's a Window's problem. I looked in the Yahoo!Mail 'sent' box—the spam were sen...

Today I needed to get a new postal ID and since I'm new to Cebu (2 years isn't long enough), i googled. Found this nice tutorial courtesy of Maris—turns out to be a friend of a friend back when I worked at Convergys Banawa. Very thorough tutorial, i managed to follow da directions to where da postmen were hanging out. It was a hot and sticky 2pm so many of the postmen had their shirts off. Felt like a warehouse. The postman for our sitio (Sitio Verde, Labangon) wasn't on his table yet so I chatted with the postman-next-table. The conversation gave me hints on how getting a Cebu postal ID goes: "How long have you been living at Labangon? "2 years." "So you're not eligible for voting in the barangay yet!?" "Uhh..." [dunno] "Sez here you live in an apartment—how long?" "2 years . . ." "I usually don't approve applications with apartment addresses—people there don't last long, some get their IDs and disapp...

The drive from Clarin, Bohol to Tagbilaran can take one and a half hours so i usually have fun noting the names of the businesses along the way: Polbos ('powder') Lumber, Sumampong Lumber, Tomo Lumber, Balane ('magnet') Welding, Udtohan ('noontime') Store . . . So many Pinoy family (last) names. Even though there's the Claveria edict of 1849—the Spanish authorities made us change our surnames into Spanish for tax purposes. I'm not surprised. Bohol, after all, is Dagohoy country—Governor General Claveria's edict came just 20 years after the 85-year Dagohoy Rebellion so many folks could just have ignored the decree altogether. I wonder, if most of us retained our Pinoy last names, maybe we would see businesses like these today: Camatayan ('death') Community Hospital, Hupas ('expired') Pharmacy, Ilad ('swindle') Microfinance, Pildi, Pildi & Pildi ('loser') Attorneys at Law, Pan-os ('spoiled') Restaurant, Maca...

Ayos! —was finally able to import my (originally Friendster ) blog from Blogger to Facebook—Facebook wasn't able to import posts earlier than Oct 17 2008 though, so just head over to da Blogger acct for those. [Since Facebook will also import this post, it's written with Facebook readers in mind.] Now if only Mandigo Wordpress theme were available for Blogger . . .

Saw this post today—about importing Friendster™ blogs (basically Wordpress™ blogs) to Blogger™. I managed to import 50 (of the 59) posts—will do the rest tomorrow as Blogger only allows 50 imports per day. This is just my third Blogger post. Anything after the first post and before the post on Feb 2, 2010 was imported from Friendster. I've not been writing posts at Friendster for a long time [Friendster is now mostly for the teenage crowd (and their camp followers)] and I'm looking for a good blog system to settle on. Blogger is there as part of iGoogle but I'm not satisfied. Not yet . . . . UPDATE Nope, it wasn't 50 posts imported. There were errors so it was more like 40 and now the tool is not allowing me to import some more. I just deleted the imports and Google time again—Eureka! Here's an easier way to import blogs from Friendster to Blogger: 1) Log on to your Friendster blog and download your blog export file: It will be saved as a wordpress.yyyy-mm-dd.x...

The heading for my first post said "I'd improve this later . . ." that turned out to be five years ago . . . 2005. Man, I was wordy back then. Less wordy now . . . If I weren't on a cram course on CMS, I wouldn't have found this blog again. Hope this continues. Ahem.