unseasonal storms: milenyo

a while back, there was this little tidbit in the news about the "official" end to the typhoon season. the metro had, to that point, not been subjected to the ravages of tropical weather at it's worst. what was notable, though, was the unrelenting summer-like heat between the storm-intensified periods of monsoon weather.

...then it happened. a storm named xangsane, dubbed 'milenyo' (millennium, i think) locally. it was a howler. cocooned as i am in a fairly windowless office, and insulated from any real-time news (tv or radio), the first inkling i had of an impending storm was from the tv at a place i breakfast at on our office's street. signal number 3, in about three hours. on the way to work, a brief torrent of rain went unremarked by me -- then i saw the news.

forecast winds of 130-160kph, due to hit the metro directly by about 10am. if it continued on it's current track, it would also be the first in 11 years to do so.

called my housemates to secure what they could, and got myself to the office. turns out that the production manager had just sent out a text broadcast that people should just stay home. since we were already in the office, it was probably best to stay put.

however, a recent employee was overlooked in the text broadcast -- he arrived about 9-ish, just as the winds were picking up. so there we were, about 10 in all, at the building door, just watching.

our building faces just a little south of due east, and the winds were predominantly from the north (our left). i haven't quite figured out where that would be relative to the eye of the storm given the counter-clockwise rotation of such things in the northern hemisphere.

standing just outside the door, shielded by the building's corner, the effect of the wind was still tremendous. in the middle of the street, sheets of rain were as horizontal as i've ever seen them.
and then it happened. across the street, there's a building being constructed (where we may be moving in months hence). beside it, by arrangement with a church beside us, is a parking lot for employees of our building. this day, though, everyone had parked on the street itself -- which turned out to be a good thing, as the wind began tearing off the construction's roof sheeting. they were corrugated metal sheets a good 40-plus feet in length (i'm estimating). whole pieces would flutter in the wind, and then get torn off and either speared into the yard of a house downwind, or drop straight into the parking lot, spinning, before crumpling down against the perimeter wall of the village beyond.

those of us with cars moved them beside the church, then moved them again as the church sign was being torn from it's moorings and threatening to fall on the newly moved cars.

all of a sudden, the winds died and that overlong summer heat began to swell back.

amazingly, it was the eye of the storm. never been in one prior to this. after some discussion, it was decided to take refuge in a nearby shopping mall (covered parking for the cars, and shops to loiter in for the meantime). or not. mall security didn't want us to go back in (though we had parked on the other side of the complex) after lunch at mcdonalds, but somehow we got through.

...and the eye passed. with winds screaming through the mall courtyards, we stayed in the darkened mall atrium -- their power provisions apparently were no match for a situation like this.

i'd made the observation that since it took three hours for the wind to reach it's maximum fury, it would therefore be likely that in three hours the storm would have passed. and it turned out to be so.

the aftermath, in our vicinity, was mostly of downed or massively damaged trees; billboards and signage folded to the ground; reports of other buildings in our conglomerate suffering exterior glass failures... our own building had power problems that day: the generator's fan belt had been adjudged defective, and no spares were stocked or even dealer-available. murphy at his best.

personally, me and my officemates who share an apartment nearby also discovered that we had not been spared. at the height of the storm's second onslaught, we received a text message that a roof panel had been torn off our unit -- we had elected to stay put in the mall, however, so we put it out of mind until i insisted that we check after the storm had passed.

oh boy. the largest bedroom had taken a fair amount of water, and there were wet books and dvds and electric fans...

good thing that the landlord allowed us to move to an unused unit in the aparment row while the roof and the electricals were going to be sorted out. i certainly would prefer not not move back with wet wiring.

...took almost a month before we moved back.

herewith are the only two shots that it occurred to me to take with my phonecam:






they're from the central courtyard of the alabang town center mall, after the storm had passed.

for more info on the storm, here's a link to wikipedia...
xangsane on wikipedia

digicamfoolery

the goal: capture a sunset image.
the equipment: a sony dsc-p100 digicam.
the location: bolinao, somewhere.

normal zoom, ccd sensor overload, sun with bright blue vertical streak in viewfinder lcd. hmm. now, i've noticed that at certain settings with the optical zoom at full extension, the image dims -- ok, full zoom. better.

now fiddle with the ccd sensitivity (or is it the exposure time? -- don't remember now)...

...but here it is, a montage of the results as i ratcheted through the numbers of that particular setting on the camera.





methinks the leftmost one on the second horizontal row is the one that looks most like how i remember the sunset.

may 1st long weekend

this post has been long in coming indeed, truth to tell, i've not been in a blogging mood much of late.

however, it does pay to jot down things of a holiday nature, before the ravages of time and a faulty memory consign the events into a haze of forgetfulness.

so, taking advantage of the long weekend afforded by the may 1st labor day holiday, a trip to pangasinan was cobbled together. with an attrition in numbers that seems natural to group outings as these, the final count (on the final day) was enough to squeeze all and sundry into just one vehicle, a previous-generation short-wheelbase toyota hiace. "squeeze" being the operative word. which led to a fraying of tempers on the trip back, but that's getting ahead of the story.

why pangasinan, you may ask. well, for the prime instigators of the trip, perhaps it was to make good on the goal of the previous year's holy week trip -- on which we failed to make it to a certain beach in/named bolinao, try as we might (and twice attempted, all told, in a span of a couple of days).

friday night, and, as to be expected, unexpected hangups prevented a scheduled departure -- but this ought to be no surprise, and it wasn't.

off we were, 33% over the comfortable capacity of the swb van (true, it has jump seats behind the second row, but just you try to sit still in them for six hours straight -- it's torture), and a time somewhat shy of midnight (don't recall the exact time now -- so much for memory). drifted in and out of sleep during the trip, especially in the tarlac stages of the trip, until finally, at about 5am we arrived at the dagupan garden/village hotel. seeing as our numbers could not be accommodated in one of their admitted large rooms, we ended up with two. i was in the group that got room 45, the others in room 40.

breakfast, then a bit of sleep.

shy of lunch, we all got up, and the first foray to bolinao was attempted. this time, though, we had a guide. naturally, lunch was first and foremost in the minds of all. it was, as it had been previously, at the "d'original hito-an cm restaurant", where during the meal, it appeared that there were eagles or a similar bird of prey flying about over the fishponds that surrounded the restaurant. they were too far away for the 3x zoom of the digital camera to make out clearly, but i did take a picture of three of them.

meal wolfed down, the trip continued with the guide car in front.

then, just shy of 3pm, the hiace's horn went on, stayed on; the nose dove as brakes were applied, to the point that the wheels were locked and scrubbing on asphalt. in the windshield, a flash, a vision of an old man on a bicycle, completely broadside to our oncoming van, eyes scrunching shut for the inevitable contact.

the tires' scrubbing stopped, the old man vanished from the view out front.

there was a moment of silence, then the driver got out, and the circus began, or attemped to.

turns out that the braking had been miraculously spot on, with the only side effect being nudging him off his bike.

there were a few witnesses who laid the blame on the old man, as he had dashed between the gap in our convoy; however, the old man's relatives began to arrive and browbeat the earlier witnesses into silence. the potential for ugliness was now rising. somehow or other, it turned out that there was a clinic a few meters down the road, and the old man was taken there in the guide car. some male relative took it upon himself to call the local police, who arrived in a short while. strangely enough, the police were very pleasant, and did not seem of the mind to lay blame on either party, and after a while had gone on their way.

once the old man had been given a preliminary examination, the convoy then proceeded to the bugallon general hospital (and dialysis center) for x-rays to be taken. the rest of the afternoon went by as the procedures were accomplished, x-ray taken and developed. then it was back to the clinic, where the resident doctor proclaimed him in once piece (save for some minor wounds where he hit the tarmac).

it was, in sum, a rather unreal experience. especially if one took into account that this day was also the wedding of the old man's daughter, who was part of the first clinic proceedings with her hair all done and coiffed, and makeup still in evidence. certainly a day to remember, for all of us.

with night approaching, the decision was made to continue on to the beach. turned out that last year, we were actually on the right track, and we decided to turn back just shy of the goal. well, not quite. at the point we had turned back, there was still an hour's worth of bad almost-gravel roads to negotiate and then a dirt road to the beach entrance.

and there we were. at about 8 in the evening, we finally made it to the beach. in the distance could be seen the grand lighting of the other, posher, beach resorts that we had all passed to make it to this, the farthest accessible end of the beach at bolinao.

the sky was dark, with clouds, so the stars appeared between the tattered rags of dark grey. the beach where we were was unlit beyond the sundry incandescents and flourescents of the rudimentary cottages built by the enterprising local folk.

one of our number had brought along a high-candlepower handheld searchlight, and our guide driver was flashing it about; the beam was impressive, showing the clarity of the water, and for a brief instant, playing on some nude activities in the surf (so i'm told, i was looking up at the time).

guide was offering an overnight stay at his family's nearby rest house, and this was discussed by the group amidst intense lobbying by some. however, a certain bullishness borne of travel fatigue came to the fore, and the group decided to retreat to the airconditioned comfort (such as it was) of the garden/village hotel. after a gas stopover for the guide car (and at a place run by a relative of his), the car began to run roughly. some ideas were discussed, then i suggested that perhaps it was the fuel, and that he ought to get some higher octane gasoline in his tank to make up for the swill that apparently his last stop had burdened him with. he went for the shell velocity stuff, and that seemed to negate the rough running. we were on our way again. trip back, not including a dinner stopover at a place called "adora's" (with a slogan: "your taste is our business"), was about three hours all told

as to the food at adora's, well, perhaps it was the hunger, and perhaps not, but i liked the fried fish. turns out, later, that the rest house had no running water, so that would have been a bummer had we actually elected for that option.

sleep, and thus ended day 1. i mentioned earlier something about "airconditioned comfort," and it transpired that room 45 had a less than adequate airconditioner to cool the room, so prior to departure the following day, arrangements were made to transfer to another room with a hopefully working aircon unit.

bright and early the next day (as early as it could be to coordinate the waking of so many... about 9am), we set out for the beach again. somewhere along the way, we stopped at a mall and got some snack and other stuff to take to the beach. it was an odd kind of place, especially as instead of a supermarket attached to the mall, there was a full-fledged wet market in the basement...

half past noon saw us to the white sands of bolinao, where an empty cottage was located, far from the caterwauling of karaokes and their tone-challenged users, and we dumped our stuff there.

i didn't go into the water immediately, i left that to the others. remarkably, when i did go, i didn't stay long in the water, as some miscreant had throughtlessly emptied his/her bowels into the clear waters somewhere up the beach (likely among the rocks between our stretch of beach and a posh-looking resort in the distance), and the results were floating to our general location.

suffice to say that it negated any desire to stay in the water much longer...

so i just hung around the cottage, and contented myself with the oncoming sunset. took a bunch of pictures, trying to figure out among the multi-fangled settings of the digicam a way to get a 'what you see is what you get' kind of shot. turns out that max optical zoom is one way to lower the ccd's overload response to the light, and i went as fast as i could through the asa numbers as the sun raced down to meet the sea. matter of fact, i should have kept notes on the numbers that worked. next time, maybe.

a note about the beach. it's actually quite nice, the sand, unlike that of puerto galera's white beach, say, is amazingly soft to the feel. even if it gets between your skin and your sandal webs, it doesn't rub raw.

and then there's the fact that a river flows right behind the beach, separating it from the mainland (i think it could be called that). the river doesn't have a visibly appreciable flow, though, so i'm not sure if it's really that. don't even remember seeing if it makes it to the sea, actually.

nightfall, and departure. and then, a catch. that very evening, in dagupan city, there was scheduled, i believe, a world-record attempt at a "longest grill." it was decided to try to make it there, to join the fesitivities. i was not certain that it would be worth the effort.

off we went, and took a wrong turn. ended with a non-functional lighthouse looming over us as we did a u-turn. surprising, that. back on the right track, we sped through the night, and as we parked near enough to the location of the evening's festivities, fireworks went off in the sky above.

we got to the place, and it was over. with hunger now an insistent companion, it was decided to try for a jollibee or something to that effect. as we turned a certain street, a restaurant hove into view. there! and so we reversed a bit, and so came to the bonsai cafe of good coffee, small sizzling boneless bangus, very nice leche flan indeed, and a limited supply of small c2 iced tea drinks (and even iced-tea mix) -- we ran them out of the latter two items for that evening.

if you chance by there, look at the trophies in the display case. the wording will seem a bit odd, but with some thinking, it will make sense. in time.

a transfer to room 18, and all is well and cooler (though not as cool as room 40).

last day of trip, and a side trip to a purveyor of sharp bladed implements of, well, potential individual destruction (or at the very least, maiming). from dagupan, we headed in the direction of la union, but instead of heading up to baguio (which we could have done, really), we turned aside and headed i know not where precisely.

at a certain point, i made note of a sign that had a thought provoking message on it. beyond that, we stopped at a gas station to ask for directions. and turned back, but not before being flagged down by local police (not sure why). somewhere around the interesting sign, there was a road beside a sari-sari store, and that was our intended destination. leaving the van next to a waiting shed, we walked up the short road and came to a house. the inhabitant thereof affirmed that he was indeed that whom we sought, but as far as swords were concerned, he had none in stock, having shipped them all out to his customers... but he did have some inventory pictures and a few small samples about.

now, in the course of handling the samples (taking a blade out of a recalcitrant sheath), one of us managed to slice a finger (though not deeply enough to require stitches). deep enough to bleed (how much, i wasn't certain -- i wasn't around for the event: i had decided to be uninterested when i found out he didn't have any large swords in stock, and had gone out).

however, all was not lost, and it was discovered that some ways up the road, there was another place that also did similar business. off we went, and we hit the mother lode.

in a showroom, the man had more than a dozen swords on display, mostly replicas from movies. some of those things were seriously large, and heavy. and they were all sharp. i was more interested in the japanese blades, but they were disappointing. though i'm sure they could be fearsome implements to use, provided you could use them as intended, i was not taken by the level of artisanship involved in their making. perhaps i expected too much.

of note, one of the trophies in the display case in the showroom had the enterprise winning an award for excellence "...in cutlery".

cutlery indeed.

and so, all that was left was to head on home, and so we did.

english as she is spoke (and written)

seen on a piece of cardboard attached to a truck:

lust fleat
xfn 860

...just a matter of pronunciation and matching the next-best set of letters to the phonemes, i suppose.

operating system blues

sometime in the past few months, apple singapore's uber-tech-geek-salesman engaged the company in a warp-speed demo of the latest release of the apple operating system x "tiger". "panther" was the previous release, 10.3.9 being the last of that particular species.

at the time the demo was held, latest tiger was 10.4.3 -- but we were doing a controlled test on a few units of our render farm; and a cautionary email from our software vendor on the potentially fatal interactions of 10.4.3 and our main 3D software gave us pause. so we elected to go one release down: 10.4.2 -- and additionally, to use the client version so that we would not be saddled with the likely processor overhead of all the services that are installed with the server version.

in the fullness of time, i was able to run our standard benchmark on these few machines that had been inoculated with the latest strain of the operating system.

the numbers came in... ...and the numbers were bad.

i don't know, but it seems to me that whenever apple upgrades their operating system, there'll always be something broken among the stuff that was supposedly fixed, and some of that can be show-stoppers.

in our case, we run three successive versions of our main 3D software -- this has to do with version-to-version incompatibilities: lower version won't load files from higher version, higher version sometimes breaks features of lower version... ...but all three versions run well under os x "panther", under the control of our preferred render management software.

by way of a little background, the render management software is built around the concept of manager/slave dependencies. add to this mix the various operating systems and their insular user interaction/permission models. suffice to say that there is a user that is common to all three platforms we employ, and that user profile is the one that the render management system uses to pass jobs on to the rendering guts of our main 3D program. as you can probably guess, this kind of setup takes some time to set up and optimize (and indeed, may not even be perfectly optimized at this very moment). and all that effort has paid off, the farm runs without any major glitches (other than the xserve fileservers' mysterious dropping of mount points on random machines). on 10.3.9.

guess what. of the three versions (all of which were already ".1" bugfix releases), the first two would not render if the dedicated profile were not logged into the xserve. now that is a bummer -- it stands to reason that with an active user session, the operating system would therefore be allocating resources to the log-on, taking away compute cycles etc., that would otherwise be used by the render process. and that, in effect, is what we observed. with the active user session, render times for the benchmark were down across the board, worst being in double-digit percentages. with no user logged in, the latest version managed a single digit percentage loss.

web research led to a page on the development mailing list of our render management software. there, the main programmer opined that operating system resources that had been employed by the programmers of our main 3D software had been rewritten in the 10.3 - 10.4 transition, to the effect of running afoul of the unix permissions underpinning os x. so apparently, this is fixed in the last ".1" release, as it ran regardless of logon state on the xserve.

however, we still valued the previous two versions, for reasons stated above.

okay. regroup, reconsider. what if we tried the server version instead, and the latest build to boot? and so we set up an xserve with tiger server 10.4.4.

um. single digit losses, across the board.

talk about lesser of two evils. trade off "relative" ease of administration with effectively reducing the performance of the entire xserve farm by double-digits -- if we gave a hoot about backward compatibility (and we do, very much).

...what to do? i let the matter rest for a while, wondering how to draft an email summarizing all the numbers i'd gotten out of the tests.

and then recently, the uber-salesman began sending rather insistent emails about getting results from the tests so he could "optimize the configuration".

all right. shot a figure-filled email to him, right between the eyes. well... ...i didn't include any definite conclusions, so the matter remains open-ended.

and now, 10.4.5 has been released to the wild.

wonder if that'll do the farm any good.

australian fires in the sky

herewith are four pictures taken by louie of the second team entry in the first pyro olympics held near sm's mall of asia in one of the reclamation projects on manila bay...











it was a nice thing indeed to have seen this particular show -- turned out they won. makes me wonder what the other entries' displays looked like. when we got to the viewing area, there were some in the crowd muttering that the first entrant's display was lackluster (we did see parts of that show in the distance as we were driving up to the area). curious, since that entrant was china, and they invented the art form.

...

it's the light...

recently, i've noticed that i keep waking up between 4:30 to 5:30 in the morning. and this happens seemingly irrespective of the time i go to sleep, strangely enough.

now, this is no bad thing: waking up early = getting to work early = less undertime deduction = more money on payday. the unfortunate side effect is that since i've noticed over time that i need at least 7 hours of sleep a night to be useful the next day, waking up that early means that by early afternoon i get drowsy and can't focus on mind-numbing hyperspeed 3D video tutorials that i need to get through if i'm to get a handle on the particle engine of our main 3D app.

so, pros and cons of waking early.

by way of backgrounder, the room in the makati apartment where i stay has a curious quality. once day breaks, the light outside never varies much in intensity (short of thunderstorms and the like) -- it's as if the time outside the frosted jalousies is stuck in a permanent twilight (even at high noon). i suppose it has to do with the room's windows facing the backyard of the neighbor where there's a rather massive mango tree that overhangs even their other neighbor's backyard. all in all, save for the afternoon heat, it's a room where one could literally sleep all day in that twilight.

now, usually, a light is left on in the stairwell for those nocturnal occasions to the downstairs bathroom to take a leak. added to that, i generally keep a light on in the room -- a 25-watt lamp with a hemispherical shroud whose opening i have facing the wall. it's a less-glaring effect than having the light wash on the floor (and i can see the bulb while lying in bed -- no good).

last night, by way of a test, i turned both lights off.

well, whaddya know. woke up at 8am. and got to work at 10, for an hour's deficit. ugh.

so it may be the light that makes waking up easier(?). tonight i'll leave the lights on, and tomorrow will tell.

recap part 1: december 26, 2005

this post was supposed to happen first week into the new year, but an unforeseen event of significance upstaged it (refer to the previous post) -- no updates on that, and i somehow hesitate to ask.

so: the recap begins --

as i suppose is the way with trips that require more than one vehicle, an oft put-off trip to tagaytay began to take shape on december 26. of the establishments ensconced around the tagaytay ridge, the goal of the trip was josephine's, which was supposed to have an eat-all-you-can breakfast (and perhaps lunch) buffet. seeing as the assembly time was about 9-ish in the morning, breakfast was a moot point; so lunch was the target.

inevitably, the assembly process endured some kinks, so lunch was beyond reach too. so off to leslie's once more -- where it transpired that a goodly number of people also took the chance to have lunch among the clouds. so that meant that the scenic view huts were fully occupied. we then settled for a long table, and we were promptly disregarded by the harried waitering crew.

sometime after a stack of dishes met their untimely, clamorous end (a waiter slipped), we finally got our order in. sometime after that, food arrived. then the curious quiet of the really hungry descended on the table.

afterwards, the photo-op.

done.

next agenda was to make the run to the sm mall of asia (supposedly the largest in the world) -- where the world's first pyro olympics was scheduled to have it's opening evening at the bayside promenade next to the almost constructed mall.

so: from tagaytay to the roxas boulevard reclamation area in pasay city on manila bay. 3 hours. the traffic was agonizing. even as we approached the area, the fireworks from the china entry were already starting. parking, complicated by those who felt a curious need not to pay the 100 peso entry fee, was a complete mess. by dint of some luck, we managed to park all three cars, and began the long, long walk to where the firework festivities were to be viewed.

i didn't pay attention to the time spent walking, but it must have been anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes worth of a walk to get to the promenade. that's quite a ways. 2 kilometers, i'd hazard.

we got there in good time, actually, to see the australian entry light up the sky with their fireworks. on a comparative note, there wasn't the immediacy of the previous year's makati city new year celebration (the latter had more physical impact, you could feel the shockwaves from the exploding firework shells); but there was a rather nice variety to the show, not to mention the 30-minute length of the display. all in all, worth the effort.

all too soon, it was over. given that the immediate area around the mall of asia was gridlocked still, dinner was decided on. chowking, as it transpired.

thence we all went home and thereafter commenced christmas vacation (well, some of us -- i elected to go to work for the three working days that week).

i'll try to post pictures next time (with permission from the photographers, of course).

think

sunday just past, helping rather ineffectually in a long-overdue cleanup of the apartment in the wake of the downstairs office moving to another, larger, place across the street.

text message - my sister: apparently, my mother was thinking of visiting my gone-long-time father in the hospital. news was that he was suffering complications from some unspecified condition and had to be rushed to hospital.

notwithstanding massive inertia (haven't seen the man in over 21 years, the last time he popped into our lives after essentially disappearing years before), decided to go see him anyway.

the middle man in our brood of five was staunchly against visiting, and as it transpired, our eldest had gone the day before. the youngest i persuaded to tag along, recalling a statement our half-grandmother had said during a post-christmas impromptu reunion: go visit him, he's human too.

upon getting to the quirino memorial hospital, turns out that visiting hours were over, and the old guard was quite hard-nosed about not letting us in at all. my twin half-sisters were working themselves into picking a fight when the guards changed shift, and the younger one let us in with an admonition to not stay that long...

on the way to the ward, one of the twins gave us a brief heads-up: it was a tumor in dad's stomach, an endoscopy had been performed and they were awaiting the biopsy results in a week. the doctors were mum about the prognosis; the twins, having lost their mother to cancer two or three years back were prepared to assume the worst. naturally, none of this was to be mentioned to dad.

entered the ward...

after the initial surprise of seeing us start to troop in, he seemed to have gotten over the shock of not recognizing our eldest the day before, and he guessed it was me. we all assembled in the room; my mother, me, my sister, and our youngest brother. we dissembled about the reasons we weren't complete and proceeded to the small talk.

after the "mano po" bit, the youngest decided that he wasn't having any more of this, and left the room.

the bulk of the conversation that followed was borne mostly by my mother and i. my sister's husband was introduced; we answered the obligatory work questions; all the while i was studying my father's face and general demeanor.

he was so much thinner than i'd ever remembered him; but he didn't seem to be in much discomfort; except when the revelations came that we'd known about and had been meeting with his other offspring for the past three years without his knowledge... that surprised him, and he mentioned that he'd been thinking about us and introducing his other family to us -- except that his kids beat him to that punch via the magic of the internet.

he was also quick-witted, reacting to a comment my mother made about his drinking and smoking with a smile; a statement to the effect that it was, after all, "legal suicide" to be drinking a gallon of whiskey a day. he seemed to approve that none of us were smokers or drinkers.

at a certain point, i ventured that it was time to go; in the spirit of the non-disclosure of his likely condition, i said: "get well soon."

he exchanged a high five with my mom and afterwards he shook my hand, saying: "i'll have to, now that you're here."