tales of a winged horse

yesterday.

it was a trip that was long in the offing, and wierdly both inclusive and exclusive. initially, the invitation was given to few, but in the week or so before, the "net" grew -- though there were still omissions.

the "people's choice lancer of the year" of an officemate was effectively out due to coding issues, and another with a car who was also invited was somehow afflicted with a fear of the notion of going to the place of the winged horse.

so then we were left with one car, with a maximum capacity of five (driver inclusive). naturally, this put a cap on the "fellowship" for this particular adventure.

i plotted a course with google earth, the plan being to avoid edsa at all costs -- final route being: south superhighway, c5, julia vargas, ortigas, e. rodriguez, araneta avenue, and ultimately quezon avenue.

being the pessimist that i am, i proposed a 4pm departure so that we could catch the 6-9pm buffet that this anniversary celebration afforded.

perhaps unfortunately, i fell asleep just before 4; then one of the fellowship was taken with a bowel disorder, so we were down to four -- and we left at 5:30.

30 minutes later saw us past la salle greenhills, crawling to n. domingo. one thing about google earth is that it's definitely not a real-time constantly updated earth photo database. some of those pictures can be years out of date...

there was a portion of ortigas westbound that was completely blocked off due to some road repairs, so the traffic had to shift to the oncoming lane for a two lane counterflow -- three lanes into two, magnifying the congestion.

30 minutes to get past that, and another 30 minutes saw us to the winged horse establishment.

...things began to get a little screwy at this point. our sponsor, an officemate with the insider contact; had left a few details out of consideration -- one of which was parking. the establishment's parking was full, so we had to park the car a few buildings away, making a deal with the guards therefrom (for a little fee) to allow the parking. now, at this point, none of us had taken our midafternoon (so to speak) snack, so we were all hungry. it transpired that though indeed there was food, it was limited to one plate per person (but in our case we got a little short-changed; two plates to be shared between four of us), and each of us was given a complimentary shot of johnnie walker black. a glance at the food menu delivered another shock: everything was jacked up price-wise. case in point, a whole fried (spring) chicken was all of 1.3K. and the drink i ordered, a shot of bailey's, went for 400.

...good thing that there was this 6-9pm half price deal on food and drinks, but still.

so, scarf down my half of the roast calf plate, and try to make the bailey's last... unfortunately, alcohol on a nearly empty stomach and the hit was instantaneous. the surroundings receded into a dull haze of light and sound, and i was almost, though not completely, alone with my heartbeat thudding in my skull.

while the shows were going on (to the delight of my companions), i was therefore in a somewhat sedated state. oh, i could appreciate what i was seeing, but my mind was elsewhere, thinking about the life stories behind the "talents" and their circumstances being in such a place ("first class" establishment notwithstanding).

inbetween shows, there were numbers by a three-person (two women, one man) group called "the musical " something or other. the keyboardist was fairly decent, as was the female singer, but the guy was semi-disastrous: had a voice, but the poor diction even while singing was a blow to the ears.

then there was the special guest band, arriba. they were good, i thought. naturally, the perfectionist in me was wishing that a competent operator was at the audio controls as the singers could barely be made out over the instruments. they're a latin salsa inspired band (as the lead singer noted, i think), but one of the most interesting parts of their first set was that they sang a request -- and it was what sounded so much like a middle eastern song (i'm no expert on this), but it must have been close, so much so that the patrons who hailed from dubai and saudi got up and began to dance to it, a dance i've never seen before, involving mostly a rapid shaking of the shoulders coupled to (the only way to describe it) a sinous body motion.

after this set, it was close on midnight, so two of the heavy hitters began their routines on stage: chona, then kate. the former has her own poster on the wall of the corridor leading to the viewing room (where one could choose a "peggy sue" to table for an hour or so), so i figure she'd cost quite a bit for the companionship... between the two, though, i found myself a bit more inclined to kate.

our sponsor officemate had, in the interim, chosen a companion for the hour -- and so was lost to general (and difficult) conversation, given the volume levels that seem to be natural to such a place.

incidentally, the speakers are jbl eons, and they pack a mean (and clear) punch. they had four per installation, one group per side of the main theater. never quite heard yanni's "aria" pumped up at those bass levels before.

by about 12:30, some exhaustion was setting in, and with the arriba coming back onstage, it was decided to call it a night. also, the other driver, having had three beers, was likely feeling drowsy, so i elected to drive back (good that the alcohol haze had cleared by this time).

all said and done, was back in pilar by 2am.

so. what to make of all this? as i mentioned to another officemate, the upshot could be summarized in two words: illuminating and depressing.

oh. add to that: expensive.

new

...version of our render management system, that is.

we've actually been soldiering on with something that's quite a ways from the latest release: a version down and 9 incremental updates since the major release itself.

why fix what's not broken? well, this downtime between major efforts is as good a time as any to upgrade where we can (and there's a move to make the rendering setup external to this company) -- hence a need to consider the latest version of the management software to see if it can accommodate the notion of adding a "layer" between the artist and the farm.

recently, though, i've been more editor than sysad. with the tapering off of my edit workload (several projects out the door, so to speak), the time has now come to tie up some very loose ends.

loose, because i've left the work of divining the mysteries of the render management system to our "impossible man."

he's been referred to in previous posts... ...see if you can find them. hehehe.

at any rate, for the past three weeks, he's been trying to work out how to, well, understand the software to begin with. the first hurdle was installation.

it installed, but wouldn't work. now, remember that we have a heterogenous hardware setup: wintel pcs, linux pcs, osx macs. one fine day, he came down from his office and asked me to troubleshoot the installation on osx. in the course of checking the various potential show-stoppers, i noticed that he'd copied over the linux hosts list to the osx box.

this is not a good idea. this has to do with what each operating system expects to see in that particular configuration file. linux and osx, though being unix derivatives, do have their own peculiarities and in this instance the first few lines of the host list from a linux box prevented the mac from seeing the other machines on the network...

fixed that, and sent him on his merry way.

so what am i doing? well, now i've upgraded my machine to the latest version, so i can do a parallel investigation on the workings of the upgrade, just so there'll be a backup in case "impossible man" does the impossible again...

...but, boy, reading technical documentation can be such a headache, especially when there are so many other temptations afoot (read: battlestar galactica -- the reimagined series). :-)

great big bug

this morning. wake up to the alarm, deactivate. gaze blearily at the time -- and go back to sleep. about an hour later, to the noise of the distant chickens and dogs -- and the rapidly brightening sky outside the window (mango tree that used to bless the room in permanent twilight was taken down by a storm the year past) -- wake up and make my way downstairs to the bathroom.

kitchen light: on; dirty kitchen light: on; bathroom light: on.

odd sequence, you say? well, it's an old apartment, and sometime in the decades of occupancy someone felt the need to rearrange some elements (perhaps feng shui-related principles). the door to the bathroom formerly was directly on the landing at the bottom of the stairs, facing the stairs itself. this opening was walled up, and with the roofing over of the small concreted-over back yard (the dirty kitchen -- in more ways than one), the door was therefore repositioned to open from the new kitchen. for various now-unknowable reasons (though limited budget comes to mind), the roofing of the yard was accomplished with the least amount of materials: i.e., a few 2x4s, a few corrugated roofing sheets. the 2x4s were angled so as to provide a decent run-off for rainwater, but the side wall was not built up to provide any sort of sealing: the triangular hole was just covered with another corrugated roof sheet.

now why was all of that description necessary? well, just to set the stage for what followed early this morning. the roofing project does indeed make the yard fairly weather-proof, but as to other stuff like rodents, lizards and bugs, it's no proof at all.

so: we've got mice, rats, lizards, roaches, mosquitoes, and occasionally, great big spiders.

small spiders are ok with me -- the black house spiders, for example, or the small jumping ones. big ones i cannot abide...

...such as the one that was on the back side of the bathroom door as i closed it. in doing that, i managed to trap one of it's legs. taking slipper in hand, i missed hitting the thing as it scurried behind the large water drum that's on one side of the bathroom, where the door used to be.

hmm. can't take a bath with that thing lurking about. baygon in hand, i sprayed a good bit behind the drum, but no dice. the thing was staying put.

ah. tabo in hand, splashed water behind the drum. spider came out, heading for the lid. i missed again with the slipper, but the spider fell on the floor. i put the slipper on my foot, and as the thing made it's way to the door, i stomped on it.

...my foot bounced.

but i'd done enough damage that the thing curled up and rolled over.

ewww. i suppose it's a good thing that i didn't manage to splatter it's guts all over the floor...

it was the largest spider i've seen inside the house, actually. the others i'd seen before were somehow leaner and smaller, and a good swift whack with a broom was enough to disintegrate them. this one was a good two and a half inches worth of body length, never mind the legs at full extension. and strong enough to withstand a direct blow.

at any rate, just to make sure it was dead, i got some boiling water and poured it slowly over the carcass before washing it down the floor drain.

obviously i have a thing against large spiders, no?

...i know that they've a function in the great outdoors and all that, but i'd much rather they stay outside...

one of these days, will really have to consider ultimately fixing the dirty kitchen. but that's quite a whiles away, when there's budget to spare.

travelogue 2007.3d

the tamaraw beach resort is a nice place to be. it has several different types of accommodations from basic fan rooms, aircon rooms, to beach "huts" that are more small houses than anything "hut"-like. naturally, the rates go up from the basic (and shift into "high gear" from friday to sunday), but that's the nature of the convenience of it. ...you do get what you pay for, so to speak, but the basic fan room is all right with me -- after all, the point of a vacation is to get away, isn't it? no tv, computer -- okay, aircon is good if it's hot -- but strangely enough, given the resort's location on the beach and essentially at the foot of a mountain (i think) made nights really cool.

heck, i could sleep in the afternoon and not wake up with a headache (as usually happens to me if i do such a thing). ...or that could have been due to exhaustion from a lack of sleep the day before. nah, it's the heat that gets to me when i succumb to a siesta. so there: it's cool.

the plan was to rent 4 basic fan rooms, two people to a room. unfortunately, other concerns led one of the original 8 to back out, so there we were, the, hmm -- magnificent(?), nah -- seven of us, and four rooms.

now, in the haste of the planning phase, there was something that skipped my thinking entirely. one of our number was a girl. might have been tricky if we were 8, but with one less, she could have a room of her own. the decision was then made that all of us would chip in so that she wouldn't have to pay for the room completely -- we'd subsidize the share of her imaginary room mate.

but first things first. enter the resort. little sandy path between some single level structures. to the left, roofed and open sided area with tables and chairs; to the right, huts; straight ahead, through the coconut trees, the beach and the sea.

hmm. where's the office/front desk/reception?

strangely, there was a small sari-sari store at one end of the covered eating area. strange, because this turned out to be the place where you confirmed your reservation and all that. :-). well, why not, after all? multi-function. and, of course, tempt you with snacks while you're deciding on things and stuff about rooms and payments, and so on.

so, hand over deposit receipt (one of the steps to confirm the reservation was to deposit an amount of at least 2k into the resort's bank account at bpi). turns out the adventists had not of yet completely vacated the resort, so the rooms could not be made ready for occupancy post-haste.

good enough opportunity to try the food. captive market, yes, because white beach's mecca of food establishments was either a potentially pricey trike ride/potentially dangerous mountainside road trek/likely exhausting "batuhan" seaside walk away.

turns out that the food was quite agreeable to me. i had adobo and eggplant omelette (if that's the proper description for "tortang talong" -- weird, because everytime i go to puerto, i have a craving for this dish). the others, i forget what they had distinctly). i liked the adobo, there was a certain difference to the taste that was quite, as i noted at the beginning of the paragraph, agreeable with me.

so, nice place (but haven't seen the rooms yet, good (captive) food. things were looking up.

prices? well, on trips like these, my eyes glaze over the prices (high or low) - i just want to eat. next time i'll try to make notes. who knows, maybe do a review of the eating establishments just for the hell of it. :-)

travelogue 2007.3c

the old pier at muelle bay is way smaller than the new one at balatero, to be sure, but it did seem to suffice -- first time i ever went to puerto galera (sponsored by previous employment; first batch of artists plus significant others -- in my case i opted to bring along my sister) roro ferries were docking at the leftmost end of the pier itself. cars, jeepneys and small-ish trucks would drive off the boat, replaced by others for the return voyage to batangas. roll-on, roll-off...

this time, though, only the outrigger boats were docking at the pier. the bigger stuff was all at the new pier.

once off the boat (having decided to let the crowd disembark first), i made my way to the local SiKat ticketing booth to reconfirm the return (to make sure we had reserved seats on the bus back, mostly). lo and behold! ticket maiden is missing. now, i could have hung around, but the instant we got off the boat, we descended into a cacophony of tricycle drivers all making offers to spirit us away to wherever we needed to go.

this was disturbing what little equilibrium i had at the moment, made all the worse by thinking about something that was said at the manila ticket counter -- that we could rent a multicab (kinda a small microvan converted to semi-jeepney configuration) for 150 pesos. the tricyclers were all offering 150 per trike and that could only take four at the most (and there were seven of us).

we therefore made our way to the main road a short walk away, and i inquired of a multicab parked by the waiting shed for jeepneys and the like. 300 pesos.

predators all of them!

now, it just so happened that there were trikes near the shed, and they offered 100 per trike -- so that we took.

after an unknown period of time (i wasn't paying attention, actually), we motored by the last access roads to white beach, and began to labor up the hill that separated white beach from the beaches beyond. um. good exercise, if we were to walk it, but i doubt that we'd ever do that (especially at night, likely no road lighting in these parts.).

up over the crest, and at a low point in the road before it began to climb again, we finally made it to our abode for the vacation stay:


the tamaraw beach resort



to be continued...

travelogue 2007.3b

before the blue penguin (3, i think) set out for mindoro, the SiKat maiden announced that the boat would make two landings (if that's the proper term), one at sabang (magnet to scuba enthusiasts, and also the location -- so i'm told -- of a back street of, ahem, red light persuasion), and then to the pier at muelle bay.

myself, don't actually remember if i've ever been to sabang beach (faulty memory, natch); i dimly recall that one of the last previous-company-trips to puerto had us actually booked at a place on either the big or small lalaguna beaches.

...that time, a good number of us (myself not included) became spectators to what at first seemed a bit of horseplay at the shoreline that turned out to be a real stabbing incident between two suitors of a girl...

the victim was taken to a hospital somewhere; as strange luck would have it, he was also the cook of the place where we were billeted. the ultimate outcome of the incident no one ever found out, i think.

get to sabang beach in under an hour and a half. there is no beach.

...okay, there's about at most a 3 meter stretch of sand between the sea and the buildings that make their way almost to the water's edge. if not for the need for the boats to make it to the shore, the establishments could actually have marched all the way down to the sea, for a venice-type effect. but that might be difficult to engineer, to have the buildings stand and be immune from the gentle lapping of the incoming tide (and the occasional typhoon-enhanced battering).

so no venice on the shores of the verde island passage, then.

still and all, the almost inexorable march of commercial establishments from the hills to the sea and the mishmash of architecture does not an attractive result make...








good that we weren't staying there, and not that scuba was one of the affordable things to do on this trip.

after a handful of people disembarked, the penguin reversed out into the passage and we were on our way to the port of galleons. i've downloaded a map of the general vicinity of puerto galera, and there are two passages into muelle bay: the north and northwest channels. i'm not sure which one we took, but i'll try to pay closer attention next time.

our total transit time from sabang to the pier at muelle was under a half-hour (didn't really time it though).

and there we were, our starting point for our pre-holy-week vacation/outing.