Weathering Typhoon "Milenyo"

The Storm Proper


















I woke up last Thursday from the sound of the wind banging on my galvanized roof. The storm is really on it's full rage. I was informed last night when I arrived home that we will be experiencing storm signal no. 2, but something feels not right. The winds tells me this is not an ordinary storm.

We stayed inside my house the early part of the day, with me undecided if I should leave for makati or just stay inside home. I can't even open my doors or windows because of the strong winds which I reckoned to be around 100 to 130kph , exactly the same feeling of the wind on my face which I get when I'm travelling on my bike at the same speed. This can't be signal no. 2, so I decided to stay home.


















I can't open the tv for the news, I can't listen to any radio station, can't even turn my computer on and go online. We lost power early morning. Another precautionary move from Meralco to prevent any electrical disaster from happening. They usually turn off the electricity when there are heavy rains.

I decided to go out when I learned that 3 of our trees was uprooted, with one of the tree getting entangled in the process with my electrical line, telephone and cable lines, snapping all three (3) of them in the process.


















I had to be a electrician, telephone lineman, and a woodcutter all at the same time to clear off this mess, or at least just some of it.




















The Aftermath

The strong winds stopped later in the afternoon with my house and my parent's house still standing proud. We are still blessed, a neighbor just a few blocks away from our place lost her entire house when it collapsed. Although it was really a sad sight to see our favorite place for siesta will not be the same again.



































I walked around our compound to check the condition around. Galvanized sheets lying around.


















Our rambutan and mango trees uprooted and was thrown like 2-3 meters from the place where it was originally rooted. A sad sight, these trees always bears fruits for us for the last 8-10 years


















I had the chance to survey the rest of the city later in the afternoon and saw the sad condition the city was in. The city's favorite Mango tree which stands proud in the middle of the city plaza was battered.




















































A lot of neon signs was either blown, damaged or hanging on the electric post or electic wires.
McDonalds "golden arches" sign on top of a steel post which stands like 20 - 30 feet up high fell down on one of the store below.


















Jollibee's sign fell down too, falling down on a car but was held suspended by electical wires, which saved the car and it's passenger from critical damage (the car was moved when I took the picture and can be seen on the leftmost part of the image, with a guy standing in white shirt).



































With the current state the city was in and the damaged that the storm made, I assume power won't be back up for another 2 to 3 days. Sigh....

Still, it still feels good to be alive. And just like what Noah saw after the "Great Flood", a rainbow appeared after the storm. A reminder of God's promise to never again destroy the world by flood and to remind us of how powerful God is.


















Count all your blessings!

Web 2.0

Web 2.0... What is it? What's up with all the hype. Why is it that almost everyone I talked to online (at least the geeks, hehe) are talking bout it?

Social-networking(Friendster, myspace, etc.) , blogging, phlogging, wikis. These are just some of the samples that fall under Web 2.0.

The use of the world wide web is drastically moving towards online interaction and social networking, in which contents are dynamically created and contributed by it's users. Traditional static websites is slowly getting less attention if not becoming extinct. User-dependent web portals are generating more traffic, thus making Google Adsense a common buzzword by bloggers.

People always wants to interact. Thats probably the main reason why interactive learning is more successful than reading static, and boring texts on a book. People wants to be able to speak and be heard, to contribute and be part of a social circle. To collaborate and work with other people. To be in control of particular online project and owning data. These are some (if not all) of the qualities of a Web 2.0 application.

It seems that this time, the web is has been given a new life. Web 2.0 is on the brink of becoming a gigantic tidal wave (or so I hope).

Time to bring out the old surfboard and start riding the wave. Hang loose brah!

San Pablo City Councilor Assaults Mediaman

Councilor Edgardo "Egay" Adajar again???
Adajar was also in the news about a year ago when he went into a brawl with another city councilor while in session. Well this time, he was caught in this video assaulting a local media person, so there's no denying for him.

Honestly, I did respect him (Adajar) once, when I was an active president/officer of the San Pablo City iCafe Owners Association (SPCICOA). He was one of the active politician who is helping the association to fight off a proposed local bill/resolution that will hinder the growth of the iCafe sector since the bill was implying that the iCafe business is synonymous to gambling, video games and other forms of bad vices. Absurd! I guess the person who thought about that bill is still back in the nintendo family computer or atari days. He should get himself exposed more to the modern day computer. The local bill was still passed but is now under a more better terms.

Well, anyway, back to Councilor Adajar. Thats one vote less from me for him this coming election (and to think I did voted for him last election).

I am more interested in IT development, new technologies, breakthroughs and useful links, but this is one of the rare ocassions that politics and their moro-moro stunts amuse me. See the video and decide for yourself.

Paypal for PH

I am letting everyone know that as of now, I am fully supporting Paypal for the Philippines. I have signed up and have given my digital signature in hopes that the initiative will bring paypal to our country.

There are a lot of untapped potentials and opportunities for our local manpower waiting to be unleased if this pushes through (and hopefully, it will).

I have been waiting for Paypal to be available here in our country for the last 3 years. I have a paypal account but am using a US address of one of my friends in Florida. Problem is, my account got frozen when I tried to access it a couple of times (the IP was tracked and blocked my account when it was traced to be coming from outside the US)... sigh!

Well, the sooner the better. There will be a lot of grounds to cover I know, such as the finance and banking sector plus the current state of our government. But this movement will hopefully this will be a good start.

More updates on the petition later. Ciao!