Contraindications

rains and pours

2008-09-10T11:25:00.002+08:00

of course there's the unsettled weather, perhaps caused by global warming. a summer that seems to be hanging around all year long interspersed with the furies of tropical cyclones, and when those tempests are not to be found, afternoon or early evening thunderstorms.

...boy, those are really some thunderstorms. great cracking bolts of lightning and car-alarm-tripping thunderclaps amidst instant road-flooding deluges (both in las pinas and makati).

but that's not what this post is about.

i'd been feeling a little pressure in my left groin area (wrong side for an appendicitis episode). it wasn't painful, just somewhat uncomfortable. last friday, however, it turned into a pain, but not like the stabbing pain that lit up my back when my (former) kidney stone announced its presence some years back.

drunk a couple of tylenols and waited for the pain to dull, which it took an hour to. took a bath -- and a leak, and pink urine.

blood.

worrisome to say the least.

long story short, get to makati, drag housemate to makati med e.r. and get this looked at.

took a while, and took a while longer to get the result of the urinalysis. blood in the urine.

location of the pain seems to mean that the stone is near the bladder already, so may actually pass soon. to aid that eventuality, i was prescribed a 10-day regimen of little golden spheroidal gelcaps (at 3x a day). after which, see a urologist for further instructions.

hmm. this is looking to be expensive. at any rate, that's still next week, so just take meds and lots of water and hope for the best.

...and then this morning...

parking at the las pinas apartment has its own little thing going on, primarily because the person i refer to as "the green bastard" insists on considering the whole driveway fronting the units to be his particular right (and right of way, nevermind what godforsaken hour he feels the need to go out). also, he does not park in his unit's carport, which makes it difficult to park in our carport unless i reverse up the driveway.

whole other story. suffice to say i've made an arrangement with the landlords where i use the parking allotment of the first unit (where they stay).

back to this morning. thanks to an enthusiastic attendant at a gas station, who cleaned the radiator overflow bottle unasked (and managed to crack the old, brittle plastic), i've taken to filling up the radiator every few days. today, was another of those days. i took the car out of the "unit a" carport and parked it in front of our unit. stopped the engine, popped the hood, topped up the radiator.

car wouldn't start. engine would turn over twice, and then the dash indicators would die.

um.

commute to office, check online, batteries are in the 4-5K range.

so that's my rains and pours; looming expenses for test procedures and specialized medications -- and now the car also needs attention. could be just the battery, could be more than that.

ah, well.

scary

2008-03-18T09:06:00.002+08:00

dark, coming back from a jaunt to find the location of the end-of-month wedding...

south superhighway, heading north, just got down from the alabang viaduct.

seeing as i try to maintain a steady 60kph in the interests of fuel economy, i have taken the middle lane.

just then, up ahead. something. blinking, dim, orange. there's a car, stopped in the center lane.

i am being passed at that very moment on either side by people impatient at my lack of velocity, and there's a car behind me closing fast.

out of gear, brake and hit the hazard button on the dash. following car sees the blinking hazards and jinks to the left - car comes to a stop and there's a man there, just now setting up those triangular warning reflectors behind his 80's s-class benz. boy, his blinkers are sure dim.

with the road behind clear, i go to the left and head off, noting that there's an 80's bmw 3-series in front of the benz, and a wrecker truck in front of the bmw.

geez, the wreckers could have at least been the ones to put out the reflectors, or have better warning markings or flashing lights or something on their vehicle.

much later, closer to home; only then do i notice just how much i was stressed by that incident.

monday

2008-03-17T10:26:00.002+08:00

sometime in the past two weeks, an officemate handed me a little card that entitled the bearer to a free training session at the boxing gym nearby.

so: borrowed gloves and hand wraps from jo last saturday, all set for monday, then.

you know the saying about the best-laid plans? well...

not that all was in perfect readiness, mind. i'd left my workout shorts at the office, for one. for another, i overslept. then there was the crawling traffic from sucat to the alabang interchange. then there was the monday morning reactivation of user accounts (that i've yet to find a way to automate).

all said and done, i finally managed to show up at the gym a full hour later than was likely good for me (and the workday to follow): 8am.

so i go up to the gym, get to the counter, and...

...the building's water pump had just gone kaput earlier, so no post-workout showers available.

hmm.

were i a little more superstitious, i'd think that i wasn't fated to box my way to better health. hehehe.

da picz

2008-03-08T09:19:00.002+08:00

gorilla, no mist

big birdie

tyger, tyger, pacing fast

and fast asleep

taal volcano island, another view

...long way to fall...

top of stairs...

view from the bottom

lord of the beasts

zoo on the ridge

2008-03-06T11:39:00.002+08:00

tagaytay ridge, that is.

once more, borrowed the handy little casio camera of jose with the intention of revisiting a zoo on the tagaytay ridge. it's actually part of a hotel called residence inn -- i'd been there god knows how long ago and didn't even remember where it was located.

the internet was less than useless insofar as a map of establishments on the tagaytay ridge, so it was an "ask when we get there" kind of thing.

the plan therefore was to leave bright and early (with makati housemate glenn in tow), have lunch at the bag o' beans and then inquire of the local populace where this zoo might be found.

now this would make the second sunday in succession that i'd be driving to tagaytay, so i decided that it would be a good "control" test too for something i'd noticed the previous trip: the car seemed to get excellent mileage -- provided one did not exceed 2000rpm in any gear (which equated to 60/70 in 5th). needless to say, that kind of velocity had others zooming by on either side, but what the hey.

at any rate, got to bag o' beans, lunched, and asked of the policeman/traffic aide outside where we might find the zoo. he didn't have a clue.

the only information i got from the web search was that the establishment was around the kilometer 62 marker or somesuch. in which direction, i had no idea. therefore we decided to ply the route to the people's park in the sky (which happened to be the end destination of the previous trip).

hmm. past the junction, past the rotonda, past the santa rosa road -- still no kilometer markers to be found. and no residence inn.

beyond picnic grove, on the right side of the road, finally a marker. it was in the 50's so that was good. onward then.

all the way to people's park. still no residence inn.

finally, glenn got out and asked one of the parking wardens at the park if he knew where the zoo was.

well, what do you know. it was just beyond bag o' beans.

back, back, then.

all the while not exceeding 60kph.

and then we found it. entrance fee was rather steep (200 pesos per -- then again, i have no idea what the fees are for other zoos). pictures next post.

picture taking done, another fairly leisurely drive back to makati.

i did my calculations and ended up with at least 15 kilometers to a liter. wow, twice the mileage of my weekly commute.

so the car can get quite a ways on a tank of gas, as it were.

just takes a heck of a lot of discipline on the gas pedal.

anger management

2008-02-21T11:39:00.002+08:00

best intentions notwithstanding, to date the render farm hasn't seen too much use. ergo, the best time to do some administrative housekeeping and all that.

sometime in the past months, the farm had been regenerated (the tech's term for a fresh install of various os'es). not surprisingly, the impossible man's idea of a regen involved taking some shortcuts and precious little by way of communication/consultation...

suffice to say that some whole steps were left out - and those are the things that i've been spending the last few weeks sporadically addressing (between editing and workstation troubleshooting).

in a nutshell, i made sure that each machine in the under-100-strong farm had the proper user and password; copied over the temporary database and set permissions on the folder structure; verified host lists for the whole farm system (license servers, job servers, render units); and did some render benchmarks to check if the system was usable.

so far so good.

in the latter regard, i also finally managed to inject a whole bunch of in-house code into the render system's submission script (after a call-for-help email to the software's programmer...).

the circumstances surrounding that bit of coding eureka was odd indeed. i had actually been sitting on the tip that the programmer had given for a week or two. until one day, as i came into work, an officemate (who had taken a personal mouse home the day before - without telling me) announced the need for a replacement or wouldn't be able to work. i inquired as to why that had been necessary, and the snappish reply that the mouse was "personal" after all took matters swiftly downhill...

long story short, replacement mouse was found, more ill-considered behavior and words were expressed, a heated mutual apology then transpired.

however, it takes me quite a while to descend from the plateau of heatedness to which i had levitated - oddly enough, to take my mind off the bad trip morning, i decided to take on the task of grafting the non-working code to the submission script.

lo and behold.

the script finally worked.

although i am happy to have worked that programming thorn out, the notion of having to fly completely off the handle and then redirecting the anger to solve the problem is not something i'm looking forward to applying at the next coding roadblock...

?

2008-02-11T14:44:00.000+08:00

leaf

2007-10-26T12:38:00.001+08:00

once, as all leaves were, it began as a bud on a branch. heeding the call of relentless evolution, it began to grow; cells differentiating, specializing. till, at some stage, it had unfurled there; a minor miracle on a twig connected to some branch that in itself was connected to the trunk and thence the roots in the earth.

and from those roots came the water and trace minerals, up, in defiance of gravity by capilliary action; to the leaf where by chlorophyll's might light was converted, combined with the water, carbon dioxide split - and from that chemical reaction the food came to being, that food that the tree would grow with.

one wonders at the events without that the leaf, indeed the tree, would be a mute, deaf, blind witness to. it may be said that the leaf would be naturally attuned to the light, that source of power for the chemical reaction within. but there were also the other forces, some of nature: rain, wind, earthquake, fire...

of fiestas and marching bands, of incessant honking and the diesel rumble of jeepneys and trucks, of conversations between myriad humans, of the twittering of the birds; the nigh-microscopic pattering of insects and the like - of these the leaf might only have trembled, perhaps aware at some cellular level...

and if, by some stroke of random chance it was not bent into service as a webbed home for a colony of ants, nor for a colony of spiders, the leaf spent its life alone among it's brethren in the sun...

...there would be a time when by some clock of chance design its workings would begin to falter, and the flow of water and nutrients from the twig would begin to wane...

and there it would be, still attached by cellular bonds; but those were now brittle with the onset of decay.

and then, a gust of wind, and that bond was broken. now the brittle thing gave in to the force of ever present gravity, physcially held aloft by the impact of millions of atoms of gas in the atmosphere rushing along in that selfsame gust; leaf spiralling ever downward, but not to the earth, no, not at this time.

it fell, and came to rest at the junction of metal and glass, at the point where a car's hood met the windshield.

the driver got in, early morning. car started and began to move. of the little brown papery thing no attention was paid; there, lying just before the wipers.

and then it caught the driver's eye. as the car got onto the highway and began to speed up, somehow the leaf did not blow away. there was a pocket of still air there, at the junction of the hood and windshield just before the wipers.

somehow this little observation made the driver smile. wonder how long the leaf will stay there? all the way to the office, perhaps.

but then, circumstances demanded an abrupt lane change, and of a sudden the leaf was gone.

some accidental mornings

2007-10-16T08:25:00.000+08:00

i'm not sure i mentioned this before, but ever since i got the deed of sale for the car, it seems to me that nearly everything else on the wild streets has a propensity for hurling it/themselves in front of me.

...either that or i'm not paying adequate attention.

take yesterday, for example. my commute from makati to alabang requires that i use the south superhighway cloverleaf interchange at edsa. to that end, i take a few turns in the innner streets till i get to a point just shy of the onramp of the bridge. now, this being a place where drivers operate on the notion that giving way is an alien concept, getting on the onramp can be an exciting thing indeed between the cars rushing for the side road to take them to edsa and the vehicles committed to getting on the bridge with all speed unabated.

so: i get car in position, look left for a reasonable opening that won't require me to gun the engine to get into the traffic flow...

just as i get the car moving, and swing my head to the right so that i can see where i'm going, there's a guy on a bicycle directly in front of the car.

gaaah!

good thing i didn't jam on the gas. but that left my nerves queasy the entire drive to work.

must remember to look both ways all the time.

...

and today, on the corner of our street and evangelista, there was an accident between a 1992-era lancer and the previous generation cr-v. based on the geometry, the cr-v was crossing evangelista, and the lancer was in either no mood or condition to give way, resulting in the mitsubishi mashing its front against the left front quarter of the honda. the impact must have been significant, as the car's front had crumpled to the front wheels.

on reflection, perhaps the lancer was overtaking one of the jeepneys that habitually clog that portion of evangelista that choose not to get in line and then crawl along, picking up passengers. if that was the case, it then becomes no surprise that the cr-v and lancer had their "meeting". if not, and it was the result of the no-give-way mentality, then that's all the more unfortunate.

either way, for all you drivers out there: look both ways, and drive defensively...

perhaps not wise...

2007-10-13T14:07:00.000+08:00

...to continue eating at a place we call charcoal

it's a burger joint near the office, and i'd say the burgers are decent enough; the rest of the menu i really can't speak much of - other than to say, perhaps, that if you're hungry, it will do.

at the very least it's a bit different from the daily fare at the other eateries on the street.

now, this is not the first time that elements of an insect-like persuasion have been in or near food in charcoal: once before, there was a tiny roach in someone's coffee...

but this was a sort of eye-opener, as if the roach-coffee wasn't enough.

just had lunch there, and my technical co-worker's order arrived first, a roast beef burger. as he's eating, i notice another small roach on a walkabout, antennae twitching as it obviously smelled the food. now, there's a bit of tilework on charcoal's interior, and to this my eye was drawn.

first, one, then two and then more pairs of antennae began popping out of the bottom of the tile band on the wall. i stopped counting at 8 pairs and we then moved to another table.

...apparently, a regimen of regular insecticide application may not be part of the place's operational must-do's...

but that's just an assumption on my part given the evidence this day.

so it's either mcdo or hotshots or brothers for a burger fix from now on...

car.want.attention.NOW

2007-09-22T16:08:00.000+08:00

the car is, for want of a better word, good.

i suppose one could say that it's been quite good to me (in addition to being good for me, in the sense that mobility is a good thing, mostly).

...never mind the gas cost and maintenance and registration and stuff that's part of the car-owning world...

...and speaking of maintenance, the car has only had two events of that nature in my limited ownership experience of it. the first time was on santolan coming home from a visit to the mum. the clutch went to the floor and stayed there. some pumping of the pedal got it unstuck, and the car was drivable long enough to get to makati and finally became immobile as i parked in front of the apartment there.

long story short, had it towed to the casa, incidentally near santolan, clutch master cylinder replaced, and working well to this day (knock on wood).

today, as i turned into the street where our office is, shifted to first, rpms to 2000, let clutch take up, and then back into the clutch to slow for the one and only hump on the street.

rpms maintained at 2000. hmm. prod the gas pedal. engine immediately dies.

um. start car. rev to 2000, let gas go. rpms sink to 1500.

okaaay. we've got a problem. get to office, unload bag, get back in car, and proceed to auto repair joints next to alabang town center.

on the way there, tried not to think too much of the sound of the car "idling" at 2000 rpm.

so, repair joint is open, good. describe the symptoms, and go and have breakfast.

coming back, they say the car is fixed - they jigged about with something called a "co"? and vacuum, and lubricated something or other.

while we were there, i remembered something that another corolla-owning officemate had recounted, something about the engine supports and a feedback vibration loop in clutch actuation.

well, since i was there already, might as well have it checked. bingo, one of the four supports was broken, and visibly so. no option there, replace.

and the morning goes by waiting for the part to come in.

i'd also had the aircon looked at, but the quotation is kinda steep, so i'm holding that off till i have a reasonable fund buffer.

going back, i still have some juddering in the clutch when engaging first on slight uphills. its either me or the clutch, but might as well add a clutch checkup to the list of repairs for the next time.

later we'll see if the fix to the carb holds...

on the fifth day

2007-09-07T10:54:00.000+08:00

...of the 10-Month Project.

backtrack. on day 3, my mind was mush.

today, as 9 am rolled in, i heard the sound of a stream of fluid onto a soft surface. turned to look, and there was a thin line(?) of water coming from the edge of an aircon access panel overhead, and it was pattering onto a corner of the sofa/bed that i have behind me.

get sofa/bed out of the way, call downstairs to locate utility man; who grabs a pail from the last (unused) row and places it under the leak.

now, this aircon has been running since the start of the week. used to be that i generally would turn it off when i go home, but lately, as eleven rolls around i am in too much haste to be away that i've neglected this little ritual. so it seems that leaving the aircon on 24/5 (so far), means some sort of drainage problem for condensation in the unit.

so: before leaving, turn off aircon.

other than that, the only news to report is the success of a little personal programming project that i hatched up over the past three days - automating a potentially tedious task (which involves typing essential information that is to be overlaid on rendered animation .avi files - for director's benefit when viewing projects).

i now have a mongrel script that takes the information from a text file and composites it onto the .avi in question, at the same time scaling the output and encoding it into quicktime (for a better fit with the mac editing station and software).

...and there we are. day five, and i await further stuff for edit...

pressure

2007-09-03T13:07:00.000+08:00

...so to speak, is on.

and now, the work/blog equation shifts firmly into the "work" side; although at present, as the edit-person in this enterprise my main inputs are at the beginning and mostly end of project arcs, i still await the pieces of the puzzles that i need to put together to begin the storyreels.

in the meantime: i have migrated the workstations on our floor to the latest version of the render management software (a sunday implementation - best done when no one else is working, naturally); the extant 12 render farm units have had some tweaking done to some aspect of their operating systems.

also, i have gotten some traction out of a tricky bid to prove a concept workable for a business i seem to be a part of building. yay for me. it involved apache/php/perl -- which meant a whole lot of online searching for code snippets to accomplish what it was that needed proving -- and appparently it was proved enough for the powers that be. now it is for the programmers in the other divisions to expound on the concept (though i do hope they consult back to us to make sure that they're not barking up the wrong tree -- the barking/wrong tree part is frightfully easy to do, and i've seen how that works first hand, in the old company. didn't help that the lead programmer in that effort was so intractable about his code over the needs of the user.).

anyway, onward!

rain rain

2007-08-18T11:28:00.000+08:00

that's the house on the corner of palosapis, and its reflection in the floodwaters...

its been raining like i've never remembered it these past few weeks. and the weatherpeople were on the cusp of declaring a drought. but that was before a couple of supertyphoons skirted the "philippine area of responsibility" typhoon tracking zone.

based on the tracks of the storms i've seen (two, so far), the storms coalesced, then began their westward journeys, and then bounced somehow, ending up in a more northward track heading to taiwan and/or japan's southernmost tip.

this, in some senses, is a good thing, seeing as the southern part of luzon has yet to recover from one of the storms of late last year - and these howlers are even more powerful than last typhoon seasons.

skirting or no, they seemed to have enough power to "intensify" a periodic weather phenomenon called the southwest monsoon which is active this time of year.

end result, rain. lots of it.

on a positive note, the dams that provide hydroelectric power to the luzon grid are now mostly over their critical levels, one dam in fact posting a water level rise of 14 meters over these past two weeks of monsoon rain.

...heck of a lot of rain, that.

amazing weather, truly. global warming? hard to ignore the signs.

...such as a flooded street (the incessant downpours are also hard to miss).

atmospheric astronomica

2007-08-13T12:29:00.000+08:00

this is about something called the annual perseid meteor shower.

it was scheduled (well, as schedule-friendly as these things can be) to peak the night of august 12-13, although supposedly, it could also be seen early morning on the 12th.

the mechanics are, on the surface, simple enough. the earth, in its yearly sojourn around the sun, runs into the dust left behind by periodic comet temple-tuttle.

now, imagine that. the earth in its relative hugeness, running into a trail left behind by a dirty snowball a few meters wide, and this has been happening for years beyond count (well, years before someone noticed that the shower of seemed to originate in the constellation perseus -- hence perseid meteors).

not sure about the orbital mechanics preventing the earth from running into the comet temple-tuttle itself, but that may be fodder for another post, somewhere if ever down the line...

anyway, set the alarm for 3am sunday, take a hell of a long time to get up, decide to push through with the plan (having earlier informed others by text of the probabilities of the show come 4am). drag long-suffering makati housemate along, and drive to the sucat interchange and cross to the eastern service road, parking by a road next to the commercial outpost i refer to by the presence of a figaro's on its topmost deck.

the eastern sky is dark and cloudfree, and i can't make out where to look for the constellation even with my handy-dandy sky chart. also, the place gives me the creeps, as the road down to an unknown village is unlit except by reflected floodlight from the commercial establishment's parking lot.

failure of nerve, and decide to drive on to the office where, by the light of the other buildings finally discover a means to identify the constellation of choice.

sum total, see no meteors; though glenn did see a satellite of some sort, and this area being where it is as part of the airport's holding pattern, several airplanes going to a fro.

get back home as the sun rises, and check the web. yahoo informs that the main peak should be 9-sunrise sunday night.

now, if it's a good enough shower, it should be visible even in light-polluted makati...

...i recall when living in mandaluyong that there was the beginning of an excellent meteor shower (though don't recall the month) with an intriguing effect: almost as soon as the shower began in earnest, all of a sudden, the sky clouded over.

sunday night, the sky was completely cloudy -- i went outside periodically to check.

there was a strange effect, though. don't know for sure if the meteors had anything to do with it, but even in the absence of thunderstorms in the vicinity, cable reception got scrambled several times.

i do know that one way to track (and count) meteor activity, is to listen to the radio emissions they make as they get pulverized by the friction of their passage in the lower atmosphere. perhaps that emission during a storm is enough to scramble the digital signals from the cable company link satellites or something...

anyway, so much for that.

there's supposed to be another shower sometime in september -- have to look that up, and we'll see how that works out.

3:30am, saturday and sometime thereafter

2007-08-06T09:00:00.001+08:00

...the doorbell goes off. well, it's a buzzer, actually. and it's situated next to the light for the "backyard" area, and therefore directly under my window.

jump off my sofa/bed; lights, get a shirt on, fumble for keys. make it to the door, but none of the keys seem to work in the deadbolt. geez. upstairs again, get my car keys (which for sure has the front door key too), fumble that into the deadbolt and get out.

all the while, the buzzer stays on.

in this haze, i'm wondering what the hell this could be all about. heck, green car of unit "d" isn't even in, and i've parked on the street so that i don't have to be woken to let the green car park next to their unit.

make it to the gate...

...there's someone there, and he's managed to open the pedestrian gate. he grabs (rather unsteadily), a styro cup of take-out coffee from the ground and then does a double-take as he sees me standing there looking at him.

then he makes a sign with his free hand, index and middle finger up, but crossed one behind the other? as he makes his unsteady way past me, there's a whiff of a smell i associate with someone having drunk quite a bit of alcoholic beverages...

he goes to the door of unit "b," gets keys from somewhere on his person, and lets himself in.

...what the heck was the doorbell all about, then?

anyway, just to be sure, go into the street to check on the car.

get back into the apartment, have difficulty going to sleep.

...

fast forward to today. from makati, headed first to pilar to get a change of pants (there was a hole in a, shall we say, strategic, location on the pair i'd had on -- needed to exchange it for one that was less, um, hole-y). :-)

get into apartment, and pump motor goes on. eh? knock on doors, no sign of occupancy. got changed, and began to check the cr's out, to see if there's anything amiss with the plumbing. downstairs cr, check. upstairs, check. master bedroom cr -- the faucet in the sink is running; a minor stream, but more than a trickle. hmm. wonder how long it's been left this way. likely whole weekend. oh well.

leave apartment, locking up, just in time to see a strangely familiar figure leave unit "b". hmm.

by the time i get the car out to mercury, he's midway down the street and a tricycle has just ignored his hail.

stop the car and wait. as he passes, i ask if he's on his way out and he needs a lift.

thinking back, this must have been so strange; but we get past the oddness of it when i ask if he's from our street, and he mistakes me for the guy from unit "d", but i say i'm from unit "c" and off we go.

turns out that the 3:30am buzzer was his brother, louie (and he was plastered). this guy's name is rex, and they're all siblings in unit "b," which is really his sister's, but their mother doesn't want her all alone out here, hence the brotherly companionship.

rex does apologize for the early saturday rousing, and we're at the pilar exit to alabang zapote, and off he goes to wherever he works (which is in pasig, didn't ask specifically where).

and thus begins another day at work.

electrotomfoolery

2007-07-17T12:48:00.000+08:00

the pilar apartment is kinda shy a few electrical outlets. this was they way its always been, ever since we moved in.

case in point: the ground floor has provisions for about seven power outlets, but only two of them were installed with the appropriate receptacles (one in the kitchen, the other beside the front door).

now, having gotten my hands on a tv and dvd player (courtesy of makati roomie glenn), it behooved me to attempt to make use of the other blank outlets. so i got a bunch of receptacles just like the ones already installed (at a reasonable cost, seemingly).

one day, went home a little earlier than normal to maximize the sunlight (have to turn off the power mains before working on electricals, after all). get tools ready, open one of the packages...

...hmm... ...no screws...

after a while, it occurred to me that these units were designed to take solid wire -- you just had to plug the end into the provided holes (and hoped that the mechanism inside would grasp the wire firmly).

okay. opened one of the outlet blanks, and looking at the coiled wires within -- and my resolve left me. best leave this to the (semi) professionals. off to unit "a," and the landlords then. this time, no beer (thankfully!) as the brothers were on their way out to pick up a childhood friend who'd appeared out of the blue after 20 years...

electrician was not available on such short notice, but their "multi-talented" handyman was about (he could open car doors without the key...).

hmm...

anyway, lets see how he does. by this time, though, the sun had gone down, so it would be an electrical job by flashlight.

i showed him the power outlet in question, and the destined receptacle.

he pulled the wires out of the cavity, and with a pair of pliers, cut off two lengths of wire from the coils within. i know the pliers had insulated handles, but still...

turns out the house uses stranded wire. he stripped the insulation off the ends of the wires he had liberated from the wall, and used these to bridge the connections between the two sockets in the receptacle. at this time, he asked for the power mains to be shut, so i did that.

working by the light of my handy-dandy ledlenser flashlight (very useful thing indeed, many thanks to jo who made the purchase possible - by being on hand to loan me the cash. hehehe), the handyman proceeded to install the receptacle. he cut off more lengths of the wire, and essentially spliced the receptacle into the wiring circuit: power going into one plug, across the bridging wires, and out the other plug (so to speak). then he pushed the entire assemblage into the cavity.

power mains back on, and test.

right socket, fan runs fine.

left socket, i think i hear the muted sound of sparks, and the compressor of the ref behind me begins to make a chugging sound. i hastily unplug the ref, and thank the handyman for his work...

and away he goes.

okay, working quickly -- power mains: off. remove cover plate, unscrew receptacle...

i said before that the receptacle is designed for solid wire...

what he'd done was to take the stranded wire ends and twisted it, and then plugged that into the requisite holes in the backs of the plug assemblies.

however it happened, as soon as i got the receptacle freed, one of the "out" connections had come free...

oh boy...

(to be continued)

car (un)economy

2007-07-13T07:54:00.000+08:00

perhaps its a survival mechanism (or just old age, hehehe), but i do have a tendency to literally not think too hard on many matters (although i do get tripped up every now and again and edge into semi-obsessiveness).

case in point: car's fuel economy.

have had the car for a while now, but i never (up to a few weeks ago, at least) tried to figure out just how many kilometers per liter of gasoline the thing actually consumes.

the concept is simple: at an opportunity to fill the fuel tank, zero out the trip odometer; and then at the next full tank, note the number of liters put in, and divide the present odometer reading by that amount. hey, presto! kilometers traveled per liter.

now, the first time i seriously tried this, it came to a point where i needed to partially load gasoline (else the tank would run dry) before i could afford a full load. so what i did was to sum up all the fuel amounts (two partial fills, and a full tank), and divide the distance traveled by that figure.

the number that came back was low. very low.

this led me to question the approach, but for the life of me i couldn't shake the notion that there was some error in the logic of the sum of partial and full loads to divide distance by.

so, next pay period, take the car to 1/4th tank, then fill.

take distance, divide by fill amount. um.

the previous figure: 7.4Km/L. this time: 7.5Km/L.

so, either approach works (depending on available cash), but either way, the car guzzles gas.

there are a bunch of options available (when spare cash is available, of course): a new carb (from really cheap to breath-takingly expensive), that "xaos super turbocharger" fuel-saving gizmo, or a full on engine change (about as much as the hyper-expensive extra-special model-specific carb).

or: drive less.

hmm...

g-live and the k310i

2007-07-12T16:55:00.000+08:00

this is quite irritating.

"g-live" is a free globe service that pops news and public service announcements on the phone (but doesn't save them in the phone memory -- supposed to be a "good" thing).

i'd never heard of it before (though web research indicates that's its been in existence since last year).

first indication that something was afoot was yesterday, when the phone popped up two "message sent" screens though i'd not typed anything up, nor had i anything in my outbox.

next thing i know, these info things start arriving; news, and stuff. several times a minute.

nothing on the globe web site mentions g-live and how to get rid of it, though g-live itself seems to give hints.

catch being this: you're supposed to go to the globe services menu, select g-live and select activate or somesuch.

well, the k310i, for something that globe sold, has no globe services menu.

i'd just charged the phone early yesterday, and now the phone's down to a third of battery capacity; all because the phone lights up (naturally) with the damned multiple messages per minute.

bloody hell.

beer fueled rent payment conversations

2007-07-05T10:15:00.000+08:00

charlie the landlord wasn't home the day before, so the payment of rent had to wait a day. inasmuch as that day would be a wednesday (day before coding day), i elected to go home early (better to sleep early and all that).

park car, enter compound, their door is open. okay, charlie's in. requisite greetings, and invitation to have a seat while receipt is made. someone who i've seen before (turns out to be charlie's nephew) comes in and...

...beer.

this time, i politely managed to nurse just one beer until way after it had gone flat; whereas they (the nephew who had instigated the early beer consumption had drunk two and had left - to be replaced by julius) had upwards of three or so apiece.

jose had dropped by the apartment for some stuff, and had gone back to the office; and i was still nursing my beer.

haze of conversations half-remembered, except one story that's just too scary to commit to these cyberspace pages. on other fronts, charlie'd been to south africa in the times of apartheid, seen the "big pit" at kimberly... nephew asked what i do for a living and drew a complete blank when i described my line(s) of work...

ten o'clock, and i made my exit...

strangely enough, sleep did not come easily last night.

had to drag myself out of bed, got to work, slept, had breakfast - and now the headache is coming on.

...must find a better way to deal with visits to unit "a" (just say no?) or, as jose suggests, bring my libation of choice handy when i do go drop by...

first encounter

2007-06-27T12:55:00.000+08:00

...with william gibson's neuromancer.

it was the late eighties, i can't be any more certain than that. at that time, i was hanging out at a little "computer store" in b.f. homes paranaque that sold (nudge nudge, wink wink) computer games. this was also the near the opening of the p.c. age, but at this time it was already the p.c.-xt that was becoming the must-have. 8 or 16 megahertz, as i recall (and where are we now? gigahertz). the 5 1/4" floppy was still the medium of choice (360Kb capacity), the 3.5" microfloppy at 1.2Mb still rather rare.

at that time, the games were still very much MS-DOS based, and one of them in particular caught my fancy. oh, there were the lord british ultima things, and the leisure suit / space quest stuff, but this game was different.

the game was neuromancer, and it was published by interplay.

i'd always been interested in computers ever since i saw the texas instruments ti-99/4a way back in '83 (third year high school), and i'd used a commodore 64 while working as an encoder for a pastor at a local church; but their games were more reflex-based (and my reflexes in that regard suck. hehehe).

this game was different. it was more cerebral, in a way (although it did have its arcade-like moments - especially when dealing with a.i.'s). kinda like a mystery (though no dead bodies), with a computer hacker as a protagonist. this concept clicked with me and while the graphics were clunky (EGA resolution at best), the challenge of upgrading "your" hacking skills while uncovering the mystery both inside and outside the "matrix" certainly gelled with my nerdish and science fiction inclinations.

all i can say in hindsight is that it certainly took a good chunk of my time getting to the end of the game...

funny side note: computers in those times had a "turbo" button. this was one of those games where activating that function actually sped up gameplay. not fun when dealing with a.i.'s out to "flatline" you.

they never did a sequel, though.

for me, the sequel to the story was to happen many years later - i found the novel on which the game was based on.

and that's another story.

.75 over

2007-06-26T10:14:00.000+08:00

sunday afternoon was devoted almost exclusively to rearranging the ground floor furniture (and the dirt underneath said items) to finally set up (partially) a home entertainment system that was obtained from a barkada gone stateside.

to that end, a huge, semi-heirloom buffet table was set up next to the ground floor windows to take the full weight of the 29-inch tv - and all the other furniture in the room had to be relocated elsewhere to accommodate.

that effort ended at a late hour, and after that i had some data wrangling to do: moving gigabytes of data from and to my usb hard disk (semi-reference material for a project of ours).

read: slept late.

monday's dawn, and early-ish to work. spent most of the day figuring out why my dvd burns of an esteemed gentleman's data kept dying on verification. turns out that the media he'd purchased would fail if the data exceeded 4GB in size... ...funny for something marked 4.7GB capacity, but you get what you pay for.

now, there was this late movement afoot to watch the (likely temporary) re-release of "meet the robinsons," but i was feeling the siren calls of the land of nod and hence decided to go home at dismissal time to get a sleep on.

...the best laid plans of mice...

no sooner had i closed the apartment gate behind me and passed the door of unit "a," than the screen door opens. it's charlie, one of the landlord brothers. in the course of the pleasantry exchange, i decide that now would be a good time to discuss a cable connection for the 21-inch tv displaced by the events described earlier. he invites me in and we continue the conversation - and he sets an opened beer before me.

i've been invited to their little drinking sessions before (often when they see me pass by their door on my way in), but i've almost always found a way to beg off, bar once before: they were commemorating their late father's birthday, and i could find no way to excuse myself. that time, they served vodka with lime, and between the three of us (two brothers and me), we polished off a whole bottle of absolut.

okaay...

i do warn him that one beer and i'm a goner...

anyway, his brother julius arrives, and their drinking begins in earnest. me, i manage to nurse a beer, and 3/4ths of the next after that.

wide ranging conversation. salient points: their ancestry is of pre-world war european aristocracy - genealogy was purportedly traced back to even napoleon bonaparte. charlie is 62, julius is 50 (and youngest of the brood). i'm still not sure what charlie does for a living, but he certainly does travel a lot. julius is a purser at an airline where the ownership adheres to a particular accounting precept of not releasing money on mondays...

ten o'clock rolls around (my, how time flies), and i make my semi-staggering exit. at this point, i've gone over my previous one-bottle-instant-sleep limit.

i drink two glasses of water before turning in, and sleep comes easily.

but the headache on waking up, oh man. gonna be a loong day. hmm. i forget if we came to an agreement about the cable connection. oh well...

stairwell by sunset

2007-06-21T12:05:00.000+08:00

2.5 sec exposure, f3.3, iso 50
exposure noted by jose, crop suggested by paul

little things: update

2007-06-21T06:58:00.000+08:00

...on the topic of recharging:

i generally charged my nokia phones without much consideration (in the days before lithium-ion batteries, it was supposedly fearfully important to fully discharge the battery before recharging lest the dreaded "memory effect" rendered the battery functionally useless - which it did, in time, regardless: it was just how much time you could keep the battery alive before replacing it).

the k310i is different. recently, i noticed that even if i kept the phone plugged to the charger overnight, it would never give the "battery charged" indication text. the battery icon in the top right corner would just have this "lightning" zigzag graphic overlaid on it - and it wouldn't go away so long as the charger was connected.

now, not having read the manual thoroughly (my eyes tend to glaze over while doing this), i decided to test a notion that popped in my head. what if charging the phone was similar to charging a cybershot battery in-camera?

so: turn phone off, plug charger, connect to phone.

in about two hours, the screen lit up with the the battery charged text.

...hmmm. i wonder if this is going to be a boon or a bane...

clouds under clouds

2007-06-20T14:05:00.001+08:00

road trip: through a casio's eye

2007-06-20T12:00:00.000+08:00

road trip 20070611 part III

2007-06-19T09:56:00.000+08:00

after the unlikely castle, we went on. still the same twisty road, but after a while, it began to straighten out. it was at this point in time that i noticed that together with a seeming lack of habitation on both sides of the road, there was also a singular lack of gasoline stations on this particular road. so: good road for daytime driving - not good for running out of gas or night driving (or running out of gas while driving there at night).

the night driving bit? there's something about the aiming mechanism of the right-hand headlamp - the beam is aimed down; i'd had it adjusted, but the thing is busted because before long, the beam was back to its droop. so i'm not too confident about driving in non-illuminated countryside roads with half of the car's illumination capability devoted to a distance about a couple of car lengths in front of me.

at any rate, once the road straightened out, we got to a t-junction which offered the choice: left - lemery/taal, right - calaca.

left it was. and then the signs: shell, petron, caltex some distance ahead. and jollibee, too.

there was a time i was using petron to fuel the car (i'd tried shell, but my unscientific impression was that i either got bad mileage, or somehow the stuff evaporated too quickly in the tropical climes of this country). petron lasted longer by the same impression, but the car would run roughly, especially cold. then, vaguely intrigued by the promises of a tv commercial, i tried caltex at last. hmm. car runs better. then there was the tune up. car ran even better.

hmm. can anything be said about all this fuel tomfoolery? perhaps i'd have to run some sort of benchmarks, but that'll take some doing (and i'd have to stick to a repeatable schedule in terms of driving). some other time, perhaps...

so, caltex it was, and it was also the last station before the arch proclaiming entry into lemery. put in 500 pesos of gas, and decided to take a leak as well. hint to future travelers: if you happen to use this gas station's cr, either put on insect repelling lotion beforehand, or bring a can of bug spray and blast the place before entry. mosquitoes, huge, and lots of them. peeing while surrounded by whole bunches of those things is... ...interesting... ...to say the least.

lemery then. from the standpoint of the main road, its not much to look at. similar in effect to what i think of as "strip towns" that seem to build along a main (provincial) highway where most everything flanks said artery. not much by way of striking anything.

side note - asking for directions. we stopped at a hardware place and glenn asked how to get to taal (just to be sure). we were told that all we had to do was turn left after the bridge. seemed simple enough... no, we didn't get lost, but we did pass a bridge. and there was an unmarked road leading left. could that have been it? the uncertainty kept me driving forward. perhaps we'd see a sign... ...which we did, at the very end of the road, just past another bridge. the thing about instructions is that there always seem to be assumptions about familiarity with local landmarks - an assumption that are likely wrong, else why ask for directions in the first place?

at any rate, we took the left turn, and hit paydirt. it felt like a time warp, as the houses flanking the road displayed their ancestral origins: primarily bahay-na-bato architecture, stonework lower stories surmounted by a wooden upper floor, some windows of which were still what looked like capiz shells in gridwork wooden frames. they were also quite notably brightly painted ones...

...not sure if that was the practice way back when, but it certainly livened up the place.

streets, though, were thoroughly modern, if narrow. well paved concrete, two lanes; and no sidewalk to speak of.

i was itching to take pictures, but there was no visible place to park the car to do so.

one right, one left, and suddenly that was it. the old town had fallen away, and modern bungalows (with signs advertising balisongs for sale) on either side.

okay, u-turn, back. i stopped just before the final turn back out, next to a park. glenn got out to ask the tambays where we could get to the church... turns out i was parked just before the ramp to the basilica (i wasn't sure if it was an entry or exit - it wasn't clearly marked which). good thing the car has a fairly tight turning radius, and i lumbered up the ramp in 1st gear.

and there it was, the taal basilica.

signs and portents

2007-06-18T16:20:00.000+08:00

i don't remember precisely where we saw it, but somewhere near the beginning of the calaca/taal diversion trip, there was a sign by the side of the road:

jollibee 32km. (or something like that, a rather huge number)

wow. imagine what kind of effort that would be just to go to a jollibee in these parts...

road trip 20070611 part II

2007-06-18T16:16:00.000+08:00

after what seemed like a short while, we were soon passing a structure that most people refer to as the "radar." i've always found it curious - why would there be a need for a static-antenna radar installation on the tagaytay ridge? there was a sign, but again i was paying more attention to the road - glenn read it out as we passed. to wit: it was definitely a military installation, but instead of a radar, it was the home base(?) of a radio communications regiment or something.

and as we passed, the "special device" picked up a burst of communication. hmm...

before long, we were faced with a choice: calaca or nasugbu? we'd actually gone a bit past the calaca fork, but something about the nasugbu road gave me pause. it was under an arch, and beyond that was a lowered-pole arrangement (similar to railroad crossing barriers) that blocked onward progress. okay, calaca it is. also, at that point the notion of a goal destination finally crystallized: the calaca fork was off to the left (southwards). we might be able to get to the storied taal town itself if we went that way. now we'd find out if the signs to direct us that way existed...

now, just as we got on the road to calaca, on the other side was a sight that could, for all intents and purposes, be a harbinger of things to come: there was a 10-wheeler dump truck that was half off the road in a small ditch of some sort. it seemed to be "fresh," as there was no crowd of curious bystanders around it - or it may have been the fact that the truck had also broken an electric utility pole by the roadside, and the upper fragment thereof now lay on the top edges of the truck bed.

however, i quickly put "portents of doom" out of mind, and proceeded onward.

a long and winding road... :-)

two lanes of asphalt, twisting and turning through a sparsely populated, thickly greened area. it may have been anywhere from 15 to 20 kilometers long, with no turnoffs that i noticed, i was just having too much fun driving. not that quickly, though. with the ups and downs and twists, i rarely got past 3rd gear, and i don't remember the engine even making it to 3000rpm, so the average speed must have been in the high 40's (kph).

the low-ish speed was good, of course, given the number of turns and fairly blind ones at that.

all in all, i don't remember a better drive. most of my driving is actually long straight highway stuff, so this twisty stuff was a refreshing change.

and somewhere in the middle of it, the areas on either side of the road opened up, and there on the left was a castle perched on a hill some distance away. that was so remarkable that i slowed down and parked just off the road on a little level area of grass.

glenn got out and crossed the road to take pictures; i stayed in the car just then, thinking that i could take pictures with the borrowed-cam(tm) on the way back.

after a while, glenn came back and showed me the pictures he'd taken. interesting, and also for what was not visible (from this side of the road anyway).

there be a dragon here.

and off we went again.

road trip 20070611

2007-06-13T16:38:00.000+08:00

i've never given the practice much thought, but just the same, i was expecting something of the kind to happen; and it did: the holiday aspect of independence day was moved to the 11th (a monday), from the 12th (a tuesday, the actual commemoration of the event). so that made a three-day weekend (well, for the rest of the working populace that don't have a half-day saturday at work).

given the prevailing heat in the metro - notwithstanding the official start of the rainy season had been announced a couple of weeks past - i'd felt that it'd be nice to have lunch in tagaytay on sunday and thereafter while away the afternoon taking pictures at various photo-ops. however, something about a late saturday night leading into a late sunday wake-up put paid to that.

instead glenn (makati housemate) and i decided that a look-see of the new ayala mall right next to sm city (north edsa?) was achievable. in the spirit of killing two birds with one stone, we decided to go to sm city first, park there, pay a bill or two, and then walk over to the "trinoma."

suffice to say, it's kinda bewildering (but then again, any new place would be); kinda large, kinda curvy within. right now, my impressions of the place can still be mutable. let's see what the next visit or two will bring...

monday dawns, bright and early. i'd intended to leave at 9, but glenn has some work-related emails to churn out; so i do some pre-flight checks on the car: tire pressures, windshield fluid reservoir, radiator and catchment bottle (?); attempted another unblocking of the left-hand side windshield washer nozzle...

10am, and we are off. ...to the local caltex station. add about 700 pesos worth of gas (takes the gauge about a needle-width above halfway). should be good enough. so, a few turns later, are on the cloverleaf and heading south on the slex. the car is fairly quiet at speed (average 80kph, or about 2500rpm in 5th). there is little by way of traffic, the only slowdowns are where the lanes divert to one side or the other around areas where the slex is being resurfaced. in fact, i took one such diversion and managed to miss the shell megaplexreststop thing on the right. but no matter, we were making good time. the only bit of uneasiness was with the exit. i've never driven enough to tagaytay to constantly remember which exit to take (santa rosa, as it turns out), or even how many exits past alabang it is (didn't manage to count this time, either), or what the exit immediately before is (just to get ready to make the lane change).

santa rosa exit, past two stoplights, and the two-lane road to tagaytay beckons. with some mobile chicanes (trucks, tricycles). nevertheless, an hour and ten minutes from setting out, we were at the bag of beans. made good time, indeed. the expected congestion was nowhere to be seen - which is good: i haven't quite gotten the hang of clutchwork in heavy traffic.

bag of beans is an interesting place; how best to describe it? hmm. i really ought to make notes and take more pictures with the borrowed-cam(tm).

to find the place, coming from the santa rosa road, you can find the place past the main rotonda and then a main junction and then a "reverse fork" in that two roads merge into one. past that fork (and keep the fork in mind when going the other way), on the right, there'll be a stretch of gravel between the road and a highway fence (metal rail on concrete posts, to keep cars from falling down the slope). that stretch of gravel affords the parking for bag of beans. typically, you'll see the cars parked before you see the sign itself. the sign itself is beside the shop that is practically the place's only presence on the road. flanking the shop, though, are two gates by which you descend into the establishment proper.

one could call it a restaurant in a garden. there are two main dining areas that are enclosed by screens, and a couple of other roofed though open air "huts." first thing you see coming down the left-hand stair is a large bird cage... ...and my memory fails me for the other details. i will endeavor to provide a more detailed account next time i happen to swing by there.

on to the food. the sign says "bag of beans" and "english pies and bread." that would be their specialties, then. i'd tried their apple pie before, quite nice. this time, though, being very hungry - skipped breakfast - i ordered the first thing on the menu that caught my eye. grilled salmon. glenn had porkchops and something called "mushroom clear soup."

being ravenous, once the food arrived, i dug in immediately (although i did have time to fiddle with the camera's macro mode while waiting, subject being a lone flower in a bud vase on the table). no pictures of the food, though. food was good.

off on a tangent: as a result of the tune up and oil change episode, the car was running quite well. wikipedia has it that the car's engine has 97bhp. now, i have no idea how that compares to other cars in terms of response, but once or twice when called for on the way up, the car did appreciably move with alacrity when i got on the gas pedal more than usual. (i rarely venture past 2000-2500rpm on the tachometer - this time, overtaking, i managed 3000-4000rpm, and it didn't take a long time for the needle to get there.)

anyway, lunch done, and we got back in the car. pulling out of the parking, i wondered aloud what was there on the right. see, last time we went to tagaytay, there was the mother of all traffic jams i've ever remembered on the ridge. i did recall that there was an unbroken line of cars heading to and away from the road to the right.

interesting prospect. so, instead of heading back to the junction and rotonda, i decided to follow the road wherever it led...

...more next time.

reunion

2007-06-10T22:30:00.000+08:00

that's a new dessert from starbucks (new to me, anyway. i generally used to go for either the chocolate eclair or waffle with cream and strawberry or a clone of italianni's tartufo).

they call it a strawberry cheescake, but its more a fusion of cheescake (the lowest two levels) and a strawberry mousse on sponge cake (the upper two layers) glued together by strawberry jam.

suffice to say that i like it.

but that's not what this post is actually about.

anyway, she is one of those souls who were on the good ship 557 nueve de pebrero which at one point was sailing towards a date with some kind of destiny that was not to be -- courtesy of some ex-disney icebergs.

interestingly enough, she was the p.a. to the first director of the outfit; and then departing to come back as a liason to the animation council something-or-other.

either way, but more often in her latter role, we would have coffee breaks near the pantry - i'd have coffee, she'd have coffee and her smokes...

shooting the breeze with her was a particularly pleasant way to while away the time...

she departed for good; quite a whiles later the good ship foundered on the rocks of, oh, good intentions perhaps, but most likely sterling incompetence on the part of the captains thereof.

we've been in text contact on and off these past few years, and have met at least once in the intervening period. in the interim, she's had the recent expression of a genetic disorder that was (and probably remains) life-threatening; but is now under some sort of control by medication.

turns out that (and isn't this sometimes the case) it could have been worse; but as it stands, life can be good.

chance had it that she was going to the town center one fine day; and so we had a lunch meet - and i had that dessert during the time we spent.

...and it was a three-hour lunch, so to speak.

a pleasant reunion to be sure.

third molar

2007-06-09T10:49:00.000+08:00

...is out.

about two and a half years ago, had a molar pulled from my upper left jaw. since i elected (budget considerations) not to fill the void resulting from the extraction, it meant that the second and third molar were now free to move forward into the gap.

didn't think too much on this fact (bad idea, ultimately) until at some time in the past (don't remember precisely when), i was eating some lapid's chicharon (cracklings?) and bit down hard on a chunk thereof...

...and felt a cracking as a piece of the stuff got wedged in the gap between the 2nd and 3rd molar. ouch.

since then, it's been giving me grief on and off, which i duly numb into submission by judicious doses of mefenamic acid...

but earlier this week, me and a couple of friends were dining (hah!) al fresco at the local donut joint and i espied across the street the unusually-named 1770 dental clinic. granted, i pass by it everyday going to work, but it doesn't really register. hmm. so, while waiting for my order to arrive, i risked a quick visit and inquiry, and before i knew it, i was scheduled for an extraction today.

again, the local anesthetic prior to the three-prick syringe-delivered anesthetic. inasmuch as the tooth was already loose, there wasn't too much of the sense that the dentist was wrenching too hard - she was just twisting the, what, pliers(?) one way and the other, and then the tooth was out.

not bad at all.

interestingly enough, the molar had only one root. she noted that 3rd molars are typically problematic, and the one root effect may simply be that the two roots had fused.

another interesting fact: her birthday is right after mine.

hmm...

fully synthetic (snake?) oil

2007-06-05T14:21:00.000+08:00

earlier today, 7:30am saw me around the alabang town center area. hmm. the day before, i got the name of a local auto shop that an officemate recommended for their tune-up services.

threading my way through the parking around the church beside the town center, i drove slowly from one end of the auto shops that lined the edge of the parking lot until i saw the name of the shop under the awnings. "mac-r," though the banner above the awning read "mc clain" something or other.

strangely, they were open at this early hour. well, am here, might as well go for the long-delayed tune up and change oil (the last time i did that was january 13 of this year).

add to that the fact that the car had been idling poorly ever since a late night visit to someone called gorgeous lady to pick up some "contraband" for distribution to interested parties... this lady happens to live in a place called, aptly enough, moonwalk. after that trip, something happened to the carburetor's state of being such that the idle with the aircon on was about 500rpm, a far cry from the previous 1K rpm or such. rough, to say the least.

as a matter of fact, the saturday of the photo trek ii, after the fuel visit to the gas station (that had no mechanics present that day), i took screwdriver in hand and fiddled with a, well, screw on the assembly - and got the car to idle at about 700rpm with the aircon on (but 1200rpm without - oh well).

so, time to hand the car over to the professionals. i opted for replacing the air filter, fuel filter, oil filter, sparkplugs... ...and went for the fully synthetic mobil 1 oil.

needless to say, this spiked the estimate considerably, but the pitch was too good to let pass: 10,000km or one year before the next change, whichever comes first.

hmm.

indeed we shall see. the car runs so much better now, with a considerable increase in response to the gas pedal's prodding.

let's see if this is all just psychosomatic... tune in for further details.

interesting side effect

2007-06-04T14:29:00.000+08:00

sunday afternoon: threaded my way through the oddly shaped parking lot of the "centennial terminal (2)" of the ninoy aquino international airport. i was going to call it oddly "arranged," but a quick google earth look-see reveals the, well, bigger picture.

the airport itself is laid out in as a parallelogram, with one of the sides in line with the main runway. in the rough center of the layout is the v-shaped terminal building: two wings/arms; south wing for domestic and north wing for international services of philippine airlines.

between the arms of the vee, the various parking zones surrounding a circular area containing the air traffic control tower and a lower building that seems dedicated to massive cooler/evaporator airconditioning units. public parking is essentially to the west of the atc circle.

entrance to the parking is at the west sharp tip of the parallelogram, with various arrows painted on the access road hugging the perimeter indicating traffic flow. the "oddness" of it is that the parking rows cut straight "vertically" north/south across the parallelogram's long east/west axis.

which means that turning into a parking row necessitates a more than 90 degree turn, close on 120 or so, i guess. minor quibble, i suppose - but the car is small. i wonder what it's like for the bigger denizens of the streets (american suv's, for example).

i was there rather early - hopefully to watch a few planes taking off or landing - and also to escape the oppressive heat in the makati apartment. i was planning on spending a few hours in the car, engine and aircon running, listening to some music courtesy of a teeny mp3 player attached to the car radio via a cassette interface with wire and earphone jack. (the car's radio is a hit and miss; sometimes it works, most times it doesn't - hence the investment in the cassette interface.)

okay. park car, insert cassette, power on. i attached the mp3 player and was working my way through stellastarr*'s harmonies for the haunted album and fiddling with the volume control when there was a slight burst of static, and then a voice.

what the hell?

a woman spoke, saying something to the effect: "cebu pacific (number) please expedite your approach, incoming traffic 24-a."

i'd heard jargon like that before, seeing as i visit a certain website full of aviation videos, some videos of which include air traffic control chatter.

amazing! somehow or other, the car radio was picking up the atc communications. in my excitement, i texted a friend about it. i then disconnected the mp3 player. still the voices came. sometimes, i could even hear a few planes' communications with the tower, mostly asking for "pushback."

as a test, i ejected the cassette. a radio station came on, but poorly (not surprising, seeing as i almost never tune to any stations at all). the atc voices were stilled. popped the cassette back in, and they resumed.

interesting. wonder what it is that's making it work.

anyway, at that time i decided that i might as well see what action there was out there for a while. securing the car, i made my way to the end of the domestic wing and saw a cathay 777-300 and a singapore 777-200 take off in succession. there were also a bevy of philippine airlines a320's taking off.

and then a philippine airlines a330 landed.

that was most likely the flight from bangkok. so i made my way to the arrival area of the international wing...

anyway, an interesting afternoon, to say the least. and a bit of trivia, too. or maybe it was just that shift, but all the atc controllers i heard that afternoon were female...

photo trek ii: the evidence

2007-06-04T11:30:00.000+08:00

that's a bird, not dirt on the lens...

it's me (my shadow, anyway)

look! airyplanes!

same plane, a second or two later. it's likely an airbus a330-300

photo trek ii: american war cemetery

2007-06-04T10:28:00.000+08:00

i was unable to join the first photo trek, held on the previous sunday, due to some sort of intestinal distress -- i'll leave it at that: no more details necessary. hehehe.

saturday afternoon was full of sunshine with puffy white clouds in a nice blue sky, jose commented upon the quality of light favorably. i think it had been raining sporadically the whole week, so there was the promise of that happening on the photo trek.

after lunch, i sunk a k's worth of gas (premium, as it says on the filler flap), and we left the office around 3-ish, 3 of us and 2 to follow.

not knowing precisely where the venue was (jose knew the way, but with entry from edsa to mckinley of forbes park - i was, however, keen to avoid edsa at most costs on a saturday afternoon), so prior to our departure i opted to use (again) google earth to map out a likely route.

the american war cemetery, from the vantage point of the satellites that take the google earth pictures, is a circular arrangement of roads just south of the larger arrangement of circular roads that make up the "fort" development on the former reserved lands of the fort bonifacio military reservation. that selfsame circle-within-circle road arrangement also makes the place look like an archery target from space. um. best not follow that line of thinking too far out...

therefore: slex, c5, go under first bridge, turn left, follow road to t-intersection, turn right, and turn right again at the first instance of a tall condominium complex. easy, no?

easy enough, but a potential hell on the clutch leg. slex's northbound saturday sucat/bicutan/c5 tollgate slowdown was in evidence at the time, but not so bad really. at least there were gaps in the crawling to reach the maximum 80kph limit. and the up ramp to the c5 tollgate was more manageable than the last time (a wedding in a place far far away). i virtually crawled the car up in first and had to only disengage the clutch a few times.

out of the gate, find bridge, turn left (when the rest of the driving public deigned to let me through, that is: giving way is a foreign notion to filipino motorists). snaky road with another cemetery to the left - forgot to pay attention as to what the name of the place was.

at any rate, a few turns later (and one blocked road), we came unto the venue.

...and discovered that we had just about an hour to take pictures. one semi-wrong turn later, got to the parking lot, and jose and a were out like shots, getting their picturing on.

on my end, secured car, and got myself to working the borrowed camera. all in, i was taking shots on automatic; if something caught my eye, activate camera (asa/iso pre-set to 50) and adjusted shutter speed between 1/125 to 1/500 to get a decent enough exposure per the lcd display.

not too much thinking involved... hehehe.

unfortunately, by the time the other 2 were finally near, the place's wardens(?) were shooing all the guests out for closing... so one of them took some pictures at the mini-mall we ended up eating at a dining establishment thereof (hossein's of persian kebabs).

all told, took 25 pictures. may post them later, after resizing to blog-friendly size. and it didn't rain at all. :-)

roaches

2007-06-02T08:29:00.000+08:00

decided to go home to pasay/makati last night. housemate over there was in bangkok for a conference, and the sublets of the other room were likely as not to be in parts unknown. not to mention that i forgot my handy-dandy large umbrella the last time i was there (and might need it today for the photo trek organized by our estimable photographer-in-residence jose).

so, after a few hours of grappling with the strangely flaky broadband internet connection (the rampant thunder and lightning storms of late may have something to do with that), decided to finally hit the sack around eleven-ish.

one-thirty am or so, i feel that prickling sensation between my left shoulder and my neck; that sensation that can only mean a roach is crawling on me. bolt upright, brushing my shoulder with my right hand and look for the offending creature. nowhere to be seen. move the pillows, still nothing. i gingerly sniff my hand - and there's the acrid whiff of roach on it. rubbing alcohol takes care of that, but now there's more work to be done.

now, there's a light on, a fairly weak one (10 watt incandescent), the theory of operation being that roaches are negatively phototropic -- so they should steer clear of the room. so much for theory. i opened the main room light (a twisty 20-watt compact pl flourescent) - lo and behold! perched on the jalousie frames were three roaches; the adult kind, winged and able to fly. good thing that i keep a can of insect spray next to the bed. DIE, you buggers! each one of them got a good, solid blast from the can.

they erupted into flight. oh boy.

one flew straight at me - reflex brought the spray can up, and whoosh, the roach flew into the emergent cloud of bug spray and dropped to the floor with an audible thud. then they scampered out of sight.

urgh. i lay me back down to sleep (with the main light on), and as i was drifting off, i heard through the pillow (!) faint scratching sounds. one of them was back on the bed, and scurried off to the side. i proceeded to blast the area between the bed and the wall.

then a few minutes of peace. once more, lie down. no sooner done than a roach emerges from between the pillow and my knapsack (which i had placed on the bed), calmly cleaning its antennae between its, what to call it, mouth parts. okay, this is getting ridiculous. slowly, i reach for the can of spray, and blast the roach in one unbroken stream as it scurries away the lenght of the bed.

geez, will i ever get any sleep?

just then, the roaches begin to run up and then fall down off the walls. one of them falls just beyond the foot of the bed. lying on my stomach on the bed, i decide to watch it die.

it lies on its back, legs spasming to get it upright; but the end result is akin to a rowboat with only one oar, it just spins in place. i get the bug spray and drench it in chemicals, but its still very much alive. wow, these things are tough. no wonder its posited that they'll survive a nuclear war that may wipe humanity out. just then, another roach joins the spinning-rowboat-party. blast that too.

minutes pass.

still ticking.

i'm getting impatient. right, get the rubbing alcohol, and liberally wet them with it. in moments, they've stuck their necks out (wonder why) and have stopped moving. personally, i think they drowned in the alcohol that i poured on their abdomens (as their breathing is accomplished through holes in their sides, i believe -- may have to wikipedia that).

after that insecticidal incident, no more roaches were noticed by me. or maybe i was too tired to notice after i fell asleep again.

really have to find a way to address that house's roach/ant/rodent/spider problem...

a failure of imagination?

2007-06-01T08:54:00.000+08:00

a few days ago, a friend mailed me a link to some cool moon facts

diverting and educational all in one, especially at that time of day (round about the 3pm mark -- when the not-enough-work-ennui effect is strongest for me).

i've always liked astronomy, though i doubt i could ever sink my mind into the mathematics that underlie much of the science in it. i rather go for the imagery that the bevy of astronomical instruments (and the astronomers that use them) serve up for the edification of the general masses.

as a matter of fact, here's a site that i visit every day for my astronomical image fix (updates after lunch, though)

so where does the title of the post come into this?

it has to do with the "man in the moon" -- a particular pattern that the brain imprints on the arrangement of dark "seas" on the moon.

i don't see it.

little things

2007-05-31T06:55:00.000+08:00

i've had my new-new phone for about two months now. its a sony ericsson k310i. it came free with a low-cost (relatively) pre-post-paid cellphone line account. "pre-post-paid" you ask?

its like a pre-paid cellphone credit system, except that you pay at the end of a billing period; and instead of a line system of certain minutes free calls and a number of free texts, it has a fully consumable amount for either voice or sms. only after you exhaust that pre-paid amount do you get charged as a line would be for going over the limits.

...seems like a good deal so far.

now on to the "little things" bit.

this is my first sony ericsson phone, coming from a long line of nokias of various "trim levels". the k310i, is, unless i'm mistaken, based on the symbian series-60 platform (just like my late lamented 3230). however, somehow or other the s-e developers have been able to get a good deal of performace out of the platform - the interface is downright zippy compared to the nokia (even to 6030 i initially replaced the 3230 with).

its taken some getting used to, but thus far its been a pleasant experience.

little things i'm appreciating:

- the "return" key - the function of which is to basically exit a given menu level (e.g.: menu -> messaging -> inbox -> sms. each '->' is a level deeper.) the nokia phones have two ways out of a menu level: the "exit" soft key, or the "end call" key. the "exit" key has to be pressed once per level, the "end call" boots you out completely. on the k310i, the "return" key works both ways: you can press once per level or you can press and hold and are out completely. much more convenient, methinks.

- the shortcut for silent mode. on the keypad, its the "#" key. press and hold. et viola! silent mode. better than menu -> settings -> profiles -> silent -> activate (on the nokia).

still and all, its the early days with the phone.

i'm sure i'll get to the niggling bits in due course.

rain+street=river

2007-05-30T09:26:00.000+08:00

after a bout of table tennis with the guys, head to the office, then off to apartment to sleep.

dropped of one of the officemates at a local bus station across 7-eleven, make a u-turn and went for the alternate route into the village; dropped off another two officemates at the tricycle line.

now, all through this homeward trip, the rain had begun to fall - cleared off the windshield by the rather loud wipers (have to get that looked at). and the rain got harder.

i think i noted in a previous post that the street the aparment is on floods at the merest hint of rain (okay, i'm exaggerating). but this was no mere hint of rain. it drummed quite loudly on the car's roof. make the final turn - flooded street. um.

okay, 3-point turn, tires making that sloshing sound through a few inches of water. am now positioned with driver's side close to the gate. ...get out?

looking through the windshield, at the neighbor's house; there's a little flat roof extension (for a purpose i can't divine at the moment) -- what caught my eye was how the rain reacted upon hitting this piece of corrugated metal: it flashed into spray, effectively lit up by the amber street light of the corner lamp post.

oh boy. getting out now would be an invitation to an instant drenching. backed the car up a few meters to clear the gate, and decided to stay put till the rain slackened.

...that took about 30-odd minutes of thumb-twiddling, watching the water level rise to almost the top of the curb.

rain ease, get out, into apartment. after a while, check on the water level. remember the point on the wheel to where the water rose.

earlier today, took a measuring tape to the wheel. six-odd inches. another two inches, and the car would have been on its floorboards in the water.

food for thought.

shrek the t[hi|u]rd

2007-05-28T10:03:00.000+08:00

ah. what can one say?

to their credit, a hell of a lot of work went into doing this film. the amount of detail is amazing.

story-wise, though, it's likely best to have an [open|uncritical|deactivated] mind when going to see this one.

under pressure

2007-05-25T09:48:00.000+08:00

interestingly enough, i was just going over my older posts and something caught my eye -- particularly the march 12, 2005 entry on plumbing.

now, i'm not sure if i've ever blogged on the rearrangement of the office; but if i have, bear with me -- it sets the stage for the current, well, situation.

imagine a shoebox kind of layout. 1 unit wide by 3 long, say. lengthwise, divide into two areas, 2/5 and 3/5, with the smaller division (marked by building pillars) on the left side (consider this from a viewpoint directly above). the left side is further divided into four: 1/4th as office, 2/4ths as workspace, and the last 1/4th as a pantry/restroom space.

the video group got the undivided 3/5ths of the floor on the right side, 3D got the 2/4ths on the left (with space taken out by the stairwell/landing/elevator).

it was ... cozy.

well, in the fullness of time, the 3D group got a chance to expand, manpower-wise, so the groups shifted around and we got the bigger space.

somehow, in line with my multifarious dabblings, i ended up with a row of my own for the meantime -- seeing as i have essentially two workstations to deal with: a pc for stuff, and a mac for editing. this row, for the purposes of the layout, is one shy of the western wall.

above me is an aircon unit.

which, whenever there's a power interruption/trip/surge/whatever, trips its breaker. somehow, this being alabang, these energy transients happen frequently enough for the aircon to be not working longer than working.

recently, after some discussions and a long wait, the aircon had been fixed (though i don't really use it unless it gets really hot in the row -- my dowell round box fan suffices most days).

one day in the last week or so, though, i came in early and decided to activate the aircon for a change. the daily peak temperatures had been in the region of 36C or so, and i felt that some cooling would be nice.

...imagine my surprise to see the aircon control panel and the power outlet hanging on their wires outside their wall receptacles. the aircon control hole in the wall had a black garbage bag arrangement to a 5-gallon plastic jug; the power outlet hole had a blue pvc tube leading to another 5-gallon jug. the jugs had water in them, and the carpet was wet.

which brings us back to plumbing.

seems that the pressure tank (which may have been installed with the building's refurbishing) had overcome some of the 20-year old piping in the structure. water had now managed to make it's way into the electrical pipe runs.

not fun.

how are the apartment and building incidents connected? other than the plumbing issues, not really.

maybe its just the mind seeing patterns where none exist.

ear plugs

2007-05-23T10:59:00.000+08:00

interesting. i had seen them before, going around greenbelt, at the abenson avant place.

of late, have been looking for a fairly good set of earphones as the somic sm002 headset/mic that i use at work is showing signs of age (a distinct rattling when playing higher frequencies). granted, the somic was chosen primarily for the low price; but it's been a pretty decent performer all the same.

the best earphones i've ever used (not owned) were a pair of sennheiser's at the old studio -- but they cost a bundle, and not affordable at the present. i did, once, get a low-ish-end sennheiser with enhanced bass response (meant for dj's), but that selfsame characteristic made for ear fatigue over long durations. i ended up passing it on to my youngest brother, whose younger ears i figure could appreciate the booming performance.

recently -- and another addition to the unaffordable column of things-i'd-like-to-get -- i'd been looking at the bose quietcomfort line of noise-cancelling earphones. other than the breath-taking near-30k price point, the other detail that gives me additional pause about the matter is the fact that they are powered earphones. after some thought, of course they would be. something has to drive the noise-cancellation circuitry after all. so they have, i think, detachable lithium battery packs that give about 15 or so hours of, well, quiet, to enjoy music by.

so that'll be another rechargable thing to stick into a socket somewhere sometime. man, these things can add up.

but then again, not like i'm getting those things anytime.

which brings me to the ear plugs. bose has some in-ear earbuds, priced in the 5k range. um. a4tech has a similar pair (naturally without patented bose technology etc), for 499 pesos.

hmm. go with the low low price.

i tried 'em yesterday, here at work. amazing. you actually stick them in your ear and they stay put by virtue of a rubber doohickey that seals and suspends the thing in your ear canal. and that seal also manages to remove most of the ambient sound around you.

now, you may ask, why go for the in-ear design? well, i've used other earbuds before, but there's something about the structure of my left ear -- no matter the design (or even size) of the "bud," it keeps falling out.

the performance is quite good, and the noise isolation too.

...but for all that, the selfsame isolation would make it a dangerous thing to be using in the great outdoors with your mp3 player while, say, jogging -- you won't hear anything coming.

so: here in the office -- or at home, good. outdoors, the isolation is both a boon, and in the wrong circumstances, well, you can likely extrapolate...

last tale from the place of the winged horse

2007-05-21T10:20:00.000+08:00

...i promise.

if there were a sour note to the entire evening - literally - it would have to be the in-house tri-weekly entertainment group called - strangely enough - the music wisdom. (finally got the name off the invitation to our sponsor-officemate.)

they were a trio: one man and two women, one of the latter serving as the musical accompaniment on a programmable keyboard. to the keyboardist's credit, she was able to adequately simulate the music of the songs they were covering, late 70's early 80's stuff.

the lead female singer was also passable, with decent lung power when called for, never mind the mispronounced lyrics every now and again. the lead male, the less said the better, although here's a highlight i recall: "wish to thank the employees and the mungement..."

good thing that arriba took over. these folks were good.

and so that's it.

lakes of the sun

2007-05-13T19:59:00.000+08:00

...at least that's how babelfish.altavista.com translates lagos del sol from spanish to english.

yes, the oft-delayed and relocated company finally came to pass. and it was ultimately held at the lagos del sol resort on the shores of lake caliraya in laguna.

incidentally, lake caliraya is artificial, constructed in 1937 by an american. by damming the cavinti valley of the sierra madre range, this resulted in the creation of the lake, allowing hydroelectric power generation. the lake is at an elevation of about 1,200 feet above sea level (or about 700 feet lower than the altitude of tagaytay city). (information in this paragraph courtesy wikipedia).

...now, after some googling about that eventually led to wikipedia and then some handy-dandy calculator work, i learned that temperature goes down by about 3C per 1000 feet altitude gained. which means that in the lowlands, if the peak temperature is the recent average of 36C at 2pm, it would therefore be 32.4C at the elevation of lake caliraya. which is still quite hot, actually. its a good thing that the winds never let up when we were there.

anyway, trip assembly time was 5:30am with a 6:00am departure. lack of sleep notwithstanding, make it to the office, and after a quick side trip to the local mcdo for a takeout breakfast (idea of j, and a good one) board the bus...

...and are expectedly delayed, by the order of 50 minutes, as we await one notable straggler; and the impossible man decides to just then accomplish his royal morning duties -- is almost left behind but for the quick thinking (darn! oh well.) of his seatmate.

9:11am sees us at the gate of the resort. interestingly, close to a decade ago, i and three others drove to the shores of this lake (with outdated instructions, missing the road up, finding a restaurant that served sizzling snake, backtracked, found the lake, rented a boat, fished and caught nothing, drove back to the metro) -- and the route the bus took held nothing familiar at all. wow, my memory is really full of holes. hence the blog. hehehe.

i mean, i should have remembered the circuitous and snakelike road up to the lake, but even that didn't register any recollection.

anyway, the resort: nestled among the mountaintops (which is what they really are) surrounding the lake, a bunch of low buildings (which appeared to be made of wood) with the main activity centers (reception, gift shop, swimming pool, gym, ping pong and billiards) clustered together near the entrance parking. the main dining hall, though, was separate; reached by a long-ish stairway at what might be the uppermost extent of the property, the balconies afforded a good overview of the entire resort.

overall, a good place to revisit (though i don't have an idea of costs at the moment).

now, it has to be admitted, that i approached the whole office outing thing with more than a little trepidation. for one, it was never made explicitly clear just what went into a company outing (seeing as in our entire almost-three year existence this would be the first ever). previous get-togethers had been team building exercises (attended the first and second, missed the third) and i wasn't looking forward to more of that.

it didn't help that the second reschedule of the trip included a rigid schedule for the day's activities. eat, swim, lunch, group games, swim, pack up and go.

so, though the day didn't turn out that way, i have to say that it was hardly relaxing to wait for the shoe to drop; to hear the announcement of forced socialization...

at any rate, the day was spent mostly in the shade of one of the shoreline trees, in partly alcohol-fueled conversations, with an hour's break of ping pong when the table was freed up (there being only one table).

boy, did my knees hurt after that impromptu exertion.

upshot of it was that the next day was announced as a holiday, too.

all in all, a good day.

interesting, too: the sexbomb dancers were there, shooting for some tv series of theirs. wonder if anyone caught it on the tube...

music from... tales of a winged horse

2007-05-07T12:18:00.000+08:00

i'd heard this song before. i was never quite sure where at first. it seemed that it was on the tv, perhaps one of the commercials of the earth communication office, but, finding their website and watching their psa's, the music wasn't there.

i'd also tried amazon searches, but with no idea who sung it, or the title, you can imagine how much like the proverbial needle-in-a-haystack search it was. a lyric search was equally fruitless, as the song had lyrics that were in some foreign language, and a phonetic rendition certainly couldn't find any matches on google (and i tried).

today, whimsically, while the mac was busy moving 24-odd gigs of edit data to the server, i launched itunes to see what kind of music there was on the network. interesting choices here and there. among which was a playlist entirely composed of sound effects.

and then, one of the shared libraries had a list of enya's songs, and there was an entry there that i'd never seen before (and i've a collection of most of her music).

adiemus - enya.

hmm. hit play. wow! found it!

after some googling, it turns out that it's not actually by enya: it was sung by miriam stockley and the adiemus singers; just that the song itself was included in an album called 'pure moods' together with some other new age music (enya inclusive).

...and this cd, apparently, is in the possession of the spinner of the place of the winged horse...

at any rate, that's the connection.

and here's the music itself, with lyrics following (see if you can sing along). hehehe.

enjoy!

Ariadiamus late ariadiamus da
ari a natus late adua

A-ra-va-re tu-e va-te
a-ra-va-re tu-e va-te
a-ra-va-re tu-e va-te la-te-a

Ariadiamus late ariadiamus da
ari a natus late adua

A-ra-va-re tu-e va-te
a-ra-va-re tu-e va-te
a-ra-va-re tu-e va-te la-te-a

A-na-ma-na coo-le ra-we
a-na-ma-na coo-le ra
a-na-ma-na coo-le ra-we a-ka-la...
a-na-ma-na coo-le ra-we a-ka-la........
ah-ya-doo-ah-eh
a-na-ma-na coo-le ra-we a-ka-la.....
a-ya-doo-ah-eh...
a-ya doo a-ye
a-ya doo a-ye

****
A-na-ma-na coo-le ra-we
a-na-ma-na coo-le ra
a-na-ma-na coo-le ra-we a-ka-la...
a-na-ma-na coo-le ra-we a-ka-la........
ah-ya-doo-ah-eh
a-na-ma-na coo-le ra-we a-ka-la.....
a-ya-doo-ah-eh...
a-ya doo a-ye
a-ya doo a-ye
---
a-ri-a-di-a-mus la-te
a-ri-a-di-a-mus da
a-i-a na-tus la-te a-du-a.

A-ra-va-re tu-e va-te
a-ra-va-re tu-e va-te
a-ra-va-re tu-e va-te la-te-a.

A-na-ma-na coo-le ra-we
a-na-ma-na coo-le ra
a-na-ma-na coo-le ra-we a-ka-la...
a-na-ma-na coo-le ra-we a-ka-la........
ah-ya-doo-ah-eh
a-na-ma-na coo-le ra-we a-ka-la.....
a-ya-doo-ah-eh...
a-ya doo a-ye
a-ya doo a-ye

ya-ka-ma ya-ma-ya-ka-ya me-ma
a-ya-coo-ah-eh mena
ya-ka-ma ya-ma-ya-ka-ya me-ma
a-ya-coo-ah-eh mena
ya----ka--ma me--ah
a-ya-coo-ah-eh mena
ya----ka--ma me--ah

trip or not to trip

2007-05-03T17:58:00.000+08:00

...there was supposed to be a company outing tomorrow, which in itself was already rescheduled from a previous set date.

it was meant to be a day trip, with a departure hours before sunrise, to a province about four to six hours away north. black sand (or volcanic ash) beaches, fronting the south china sea...

oh, and scheduled events. hour for breakfast, hour and a half swimming, hour and a half lunch, hour and a half group games!?, hour and a half swimming, an hour for afternoon snack / pack up, then home back to here in the south of the metro.

i do wonder why it can't be just a free-form activity: bring people there, mingle or not, eat (definitely), swim maybe, sunburn always a possibility.

the structured activity bit, perhaps works for some; not really for me (and, i suspect, most of us on the, shall we say, artistic, side of things).

at any rate, email came in just a while ago: trip rescheduled, but no specific date (initially was supposed to be thursday to friday next week).

anyway, and so the suspense continues.

tales of a winged horse

2007-04-26T12:37:00.000+08:00

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

2007-04-24T14:19:00.000+08:00

...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

2007-04-23T15:00:00.000+08:00

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

2007-04-21T22:38:00.000+08:00

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

2007-04-10T16:22:00.000+08:00

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

2007-04-01T10:23:00.000+08:00

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.

altavista search result: sikat

2007-03-28T14:36:00.000+08:00

das boot

travelogue 2007.3a

2007-03-28T10:06:00.000+08:00

the trip was a go. naturally, there were eleventh-hour jitters, most especially of our technical wunderkind when word got around that the director (one of the original trip proponents) would be pulling out due to other pressing concerns.

however, a few words from me (okay, maybe not so few (",) ), may have tipped him into the committed camp.

in the interim, while we were polling final numbers, i was on the phone to the accommodations, and the integrated bus/ferry round trip service to and from puerto galera. ultimately, seven of us signed on to the trip. so, seven seats on the bus, and 4 budget rooms reserved.

now, the original plan was monday to thursday, but the resort told me that the adventists had booked the place to the rafters on the 18th and 19th, so our schedule moved from tuesday to friday -- which, for me, gave rise to a very stressful monday indeed.

that had everything to do with sequentially-revealed-edit-related issues which saw me getting to the apartment at 11:30pm; packed and then slept at 1:30am; and an assembly time of 5:00am at the pilar 7-eleven for pickup by a van arranged by one of our number.

that last one was deemed necessary because the bus/ferry service set out from ermita -- so we had to go there. and early enough for breakfast before the estimated four-odd hour total travel time. got there, we did. breakfast, we did: i, in the hotel lobby; they, at the local nearby chowking.

the breakfast called "continental" was essentially a collection of bread (french baguette, croissant, dinner rolls, and plain toasted white sandwich bread) with butter, a slice of mango, and brewed coffee. odd, but i was ravenous -- and the croissant and rolls were good, though.

the bus/ferry service, called "SiKat", was something that i'd been using (with my makati housemate) times in the past when there were comets in the sky and the time to chase them to puerto galera's white beach. the service consisted of a tourist bus and a dedicated ferry boat to the puerto galera pier at muelle bay.

that ferry used to be (i say "used to," because the time previously, when the china crew came back and wanted to go to galera, the ferry was replaced by a "fast boat" called the blue eagle, i think) a catamaran style boat, with large-ish areas to walk around, and an integral bar/dining nook. i actually have no pictures of the boat itself, but i'll see if i can get one sometime.

anyway, the trip to batangas pier was a slumberous one as fatigue set in almost as soon as i sat on the bus seat. when we got to the port building, the line i was expecting at the baggage check was nowhere to be seen. hmm. then i saw it. x-ray machine! progress! at least it was quick.

i was expecting the blue eagle again -- and it was nowhere to be seen. in it's place was the blue penguin. hmm. all the "blue" monickers: blue eagle, blue pelican, blue penguin... what's that say? i have no idea.

the blue penguin was, in the mode of the other non-roro/supercat/seacat boats that ply the batangas to puerto galera route, a scaled up twin-outrigger banca. okaay...

one of their primary benefits, though, is the capability to make beach landings (something the SiKat itself could not do) -- and the other; speed. batangas pier to puerto galera in under an hour and a half. the SiKat would do that in two hours, a similar pace to the roro boats.

off we went then, blue penguin style.

back

2007-03-28T09:54:00.000+08:00

jose, that is. after his medical "vacation," came to work yesterday.

welcome back!

beddie bye

2007-03-15T13:39:00.000+08:00

of late, in the wake of the punctured airbed, have been going home to pasay on a daily basis. day before yesterday, however, sleepiness overcame me before the trip home: ergo pilar.

just in case, brought along my little bottle of rugby contact cement (purchased to fix a flapping sole-front-tab-thingie on one of my rubbershoes) with the aim of perhaps fixing the airbed in macgyver fashion.

right. inflate bed. bed inflated. lean bed up on wall, topside facing wall. running my hand over the suspected area of the leak reveals nothing. okaay... so far so good.

sleep.

awaken to bed half-deflated. better than the last time, when i actually was on the floor. this time, there were a couple of inches of air keeping me, well, aloft.

ah. decision time.

lunchtime sees me off to the local sm mall, and i purchase something that i've been looking at for months now: a buy one take one deal on a foam-core folding sofa/bed (single size, as far as beds are concerned) - and a less than ideal sofa.

but the thing about it is that it folds into four sections and can be used momentarily as a sofa -- so it actually doesn't need to be stored away when not in use as a bed. as a bonus, in my room at the pilar apartment, folding it into a sofa reclaims me some precious floor space.

so there's a good thing. also another thing, but that'll have to await a later post, when i can best figure out how to describe what happened next.

and the airbed? i may yet find time to locate and fix the hole (the thing could still be useful); but for now, its deflated, folded, stored away.

pictures end

2007-03-13T07:26:00.000+08:00

found it:

spectrum on carpet
mid-november 2006

now, i've made some noise about the slowness of the camera in general. so this photo comes as a bit of a surprise:

morning sky above pilar apartment
mid-november 2006

what's the surprise, you ask? well, here's a crop of that image:

what's that, up in the sky?

i would've expected the airplane to be just a blurred line - but there it is. identifiably so.

...and less than 30 days later, no more phone/cam.

although there used to be a neat little cybershot that i used to borrow, it was lost to a miscreant at a festival not too long ago in baguio city.

pictures end.

a pixel out of place; snaps from the past

2007-03-12T15:24:00.000+08:00

get to work fashionably late (just in time for lunch, actually), and open the good ol' spam-filled email.

it's also a good thing that the open source email client i'm now trying out has an adaptive spam filter, so a majority of the spam goes to a folder of my choice and doesn't clutter up the main inbox.

one email. last week's project again. client would like a little white dot expunged from a certain part of the edit. it's never been noticed before, email says; could we therefore address it?

as a matter of fact, it's always been there. it's actually a graphic element scaled down to zero pixel dimensions prior to scaling up to full dream bubble glory. but zero pixel size in the compositing software apparently doesn't equate to invisible enough, so the white dot. my feeling is that the little "blemish" is the least of anyone's concern, but client has now made it the q.c. to-fix of the moment...

...so fix do i. fiddle with some layer visibility in the timeline editor, hey presto! pixel banished.

which leads to save, export, and later, encode to playable dvd -- but the latter only when they ask.

===

now back to an old topic: drowned camera phone, or the pictures therefrom. now, i like pictures; though taking pictures with an eye for composition and all that currently escapes me. so my pictures are serendipitous little things, with very little forethought involved.

of late, going through the home hard disk, came across a few snaps i took with the phone during it's tenure with me.

forthwith:

view during one of the impromptu tagaytay trips

taken at conspiracy, during jose's solo exhibit
(unless my memory's totally failing me)

sunset beams walking back to the office from merienda

there was one little image that i was looking for, somehow i can't find it at the moment - a little line of light across carpet, refraction from the office main door's glass panels.

when i find it, i'll post it.

long day... and a diagnosis

2007-03-10T09:58:00.000+08:00

expectations fulfilled: a very long day indeed. less ennui than normal, though: one of the projects had come back with a minor revision.

brief history:

in the course of the past week or so, the client had decided that the songs that were part of the project would benefit from some "sing along" text, complete with bouncing graphic, to enable the target market to, well, sing along.

that part i was more than happy to leave to the edit group on the other side of our floor.

once the overlay text was done, i put it into my edit and discovered that there were portions where the transparency part of the video would disappear. odd, but no matter: it only happened at the beginning and end of each overlay video, so that was easily edited out.

so, that done, export edit as playable quicktime and call it a day.

...then, as mentioned earlier, minor revision looms on the horizon.

turns out that the text that was given to the edit crew to use was wrong somehow. a couple of phrases, where one would pause in the song, ended with colons. this, client could not live with. funny, client supplied text to begin with.

anyway, edit redoes text overlay; and to be absolutely pendantic on the matter, includes faithfully all punctuation given with revised lyrics. including quotation marks.

and now edit software decides to put a spanner in the works. this time, whenever the text disappears (instrumental parts of the song), the transparency decides to vanish, leaving a black video over my edit.

troubleshooting, i export the entire project off the editor's machine, and open it on the mac that i use. fiddling around with the sequence settings resolves the issue, though counter-intuitively. made sense later, thinking about it. if one were to need to export a video with a transparency channel, make sure the sequence is set up beforehand to output that way (codec, bit depth and all that).

so, that done, export playable quicktime, take that quicktime and make playable dvd project, burn dvd -- and day is done.

make my way to pasay (haven't addressed issue of deflated bed yet), and receive a text.

...the diagnosis.

not the original expectation (which is good), but still worthy of concern. i call up, and the matter seems to be on track for a resolution; and that is very good.

still and all, i pray.

a new dawn, punctured bed

2007-03-09T12:33:00.000+08:00

continuing events from previous post

i wake up just shy of 4am to an unexpected, though perhaps not unforeseen event. the airbed had deflated. not quite 2 years of use (naturally way over the warranty period -- which, come to think of it, may have just been a month; or was that the not-satisfied-replacement-period?). hmm. i re-inflated it with the included handy-dandy airbed inflator doohickey and laid back down on it.

couldn't go to sleep. whenever i would move from a particular position (lying flat on my back, centered width-wise on the bed), an annoying high-pitched whistle would start up. for a seemingly tiny sound, it could be heard distinctly over the whoosh of the box fan at the foot of the bed.

by dint of a little experimental moving around, i gathered that the hole was towards the end with the air valve, and at the bottom surface. likely, at least. will have to run a test to see for sure.

now, thinking about it, the house has now been through 3 of 4 airbeds purchased of like manufacture (we got them all from the same store). louie's gone through 2; but his floor is wooden parquet (and the likelihood of splinters), while mine is grouted tile -- so i don't know; maybe just material fatigue over time.

options? back to the store to inquire about a repair kit (though in louie's experience they were not available at least one time that he's asked), or buy a new, non-inflatable bed. um. have to think about that.

being awake, decide to get on with the daily pre-flight stuff (medications, ablutions, etc.,) -- just on a lark (rarely if ever am i awake at this time). jose's already up; expectorating. inquiry reveals that at least he did get more sleep than recently with that one dose of syrup; and he goes back to his room.

by 5:30, i was ready. taking my leave with a text to jose, i was off.

got to the office before full dawn broke; a new day, a long one, loomed ahead.

sickness on hold; sickness developing

2007-03-08T10:24:00.000+08:00

the full onset of the flu seems to have been arrested somewhat, but there are the niggling symptoms left over: periodic stuffy nose, and a cough that pops up from time to time.

the more irritating aspect is the cough, so i decided to use the flavorful cough suppressant on that -- while at work. next thing you know, drowsiness kicks in, and i end up taking a short nap.

...and as happened before, woke up feeling lousy; and elected to end the day as soon as 6 rolled around.

got to the apartment and slept as soon as i got in.

sometime around 10-ish, jose arrives. waking up, i go downstairs thinking that it might be a good idea to imbibe another dose of the syrup.

jose's at the dinner table about to have a snack, and he and i end up having a wide-ranging discussion on symptoms and sicknesses and things of that nature; turns out his condition may have taken a turn that requires more than self-medication: i'm of the admittedly-non-medical-professional opinion that hopefully it may be something less than it looked at the moment -- but agreed that he would benefit from an md's attention (and given that our 5k-strong workforce's doctor's waitlist was longer than comfortable for a checkup), he decided that he'd best see their family specialist the following day. somehow got him to try the flavorful syrup (least it could do was to enable him to sleep longer between bouts of coughing...).

having more or less talked him into tiredness, we repaired to our rooms for the night.

also, having taken that dose of syrup, i end up in a dreamless slumber, interrupted by something i'll discuss in a next post.

assumptions: part 2

2007-03-07T10:00:00.000+08:00

continuing from the last post, but on an entirely different subject (with assumptions still part of the picture).

yesterday afternoon, got a call from the technical manager. in the weeks past, i was supposed to set up a little laboratory rig; a mini render farm for his analysis and other stuff. however, since i had that overflow of edit/composite work, this was something that was put on my backburner. the call brought that initiative back to the fore.

now, i had already (in fits and starts) managed to set up the bare bones of the mini-farm: his machine had the software installed, configured - though not working for reasons i didn't want to delve into all that deeply in my extreme busyness; the two slave units were semi-configured, one of them refusing to allow root access (odd, that; but it's os x).

in the course of the conversation, i mentioned to him that i had used the ip address he emailed me (xx.xx.xx.66) in the host files of the operating systems that the render management software relied on to make reliable connections between machines. to my surprise, he mentioned that his ip was actually 62. what the?! i made the point quite plain that it was quite involved to change ip addresses once they had been set up; that at least six machines needed to be re-configured if he were to insist on using 62 as opposed to 66 as he had last specified. and this may be one reason the render management software refused to consider his machine as a valid client.

...so he changed it back.

upstairs i went to his office, and did the rest of the configuration there. still not recognized. as a last resort, i had him force his network card to full gigabit from its default auto setting. this seems to have made a difference: now his machine validated.

on to the slave units. it wouldn't verify either. i asked him what networking switch he had attached the units to. turned out that it was 100base-T. okaay. told him that somehow the render management software had problems traversing gigabit/fast ethernet connections, and that he would need gigabit for this to work. reconnect, he did therefore.

once that was done, that machine validated. okay, now we have a minimum farm. one master, one slave.

okay, run render test. fail.

troubleshoot. this is a fresh os x install, yes? he affirmed. i checked the mounts. no servers that we used at present were mounted. riiiight. okay, go to weird utility for the purpose. it declined to accept either admin or root and the password that had allowed the login in the first place. wtf?

okay, use his alternate login, it accepted the password, authenticated with the weird utility, and i mounted the servers. reboot. login. check mounts? present.

run render test. fail.

i looked at the error log. the render component was not present. i turned to him and asked: "i thought this was a fresh install?" it was. turned out that he had cloned an older system disk, one without the latest version of the render component we used - which also explained why the new mounts were not present. arrrrgh. installers? he didn't have one. downstairs i went, got mine, upstairs, installed it, left the cds with him.

run render test. work.

downstairs i went, thus ended the day.

moral of the story? in his case, never assume.

assumptions: part 1

2007-03-07T08:55:00.000+08:00

...there's a saying somewhere...

anyway, yesterday was a bust insofar as getting much work done was concerned.

most of the day was actually spent waiting for a client (or representative thereof) to provide a graphic file of their logo for watermarking purposes on their video project. that watermark was necessary as the finalized versions were to be sent off somewhere to be dolby certified.

to that end, my requirements were fairly simple: high-resolution image file, with a transparent background (on the assumption that this was a simple to understand request). the transparency was necessary as having a rectangular surround on a half-faded logo over video would look unprofessional in my estimation...

first pass: 500x277 pixels, jpeg image file. um. no transparency possible there.

second pass: 627x378 pixels, tiff image file. ugh. it looked like a cropped version of the previous submission, scaled up. the aliasing on the angles and curves of the logo were incredibly obvious -- and somehow the transparency requirement was still not in evidence.

in response to the pm's email, i finally made specific my request: photoshop file, 3 layers (text, logo with shadow effect, white or no background at all).

let's see whether third time's the charm here...

flushed away redux

2007-03-05T12:46:00.000+08:00

first:

Dreamworks and Aardman Part Ways
http://www.twitchfilm.net/archives/008918.html

then:

DreamWorks Animation's Profits Flushed Away (third item)
http://us.imdb.com/news/sb/2007-02-28

and recently:

It May Be a Royal Flush, After All
http://us.imdb.com/news/sb/2007-03-01

what, if anything does it all mean?

the situation just seems somewhat ironic, is all.

oh, and a bit of trivia about the gestation of the movie (taken from imdb.com):

According to Peter Lord, co-founder of Aardman, this film's original concept involved pirates, and was pitched to Dreamworks soon after the release of Chicken Run (2000). However, Aardman were told that there was no market for pirate films (this was before 'Pirates of the Caribbean' was made), and were told to modernize the concept. By the time the writer had done this, the project was temporarily shelved to make way for the production of 'Wallace & Gromit in Curse of the Were-Rabbit'.

oh well. at any rate, i really liked this movie, never mind that it wasn't box office boffo in the states.

flushed away

2007-03-05T07:41:00.000+08:00

...the aardman/dreamworks movie, that is.

it is, to quote the "great" toad in the movie, diverting.

i don't think i've ever laughed so hard watching a movie in recent memory (then again, i managed to miss the second shrek in the theaters, not to mention the recent rash of animated comedies).

if you can, watch it.

worth the time, i think.

sickness

2007-03-04T02:55:00.000+08:00

a week or so back jose had been sick of the flu, and he was out an entire week.

there's been a bug going around these past few months, and i suppose it was just a matter of time before it had made a complete round of the office.

tangentially, yet somewhat related to the topic at hand, thursday was muntinlupa day; a declared non-working holiday. previously, there were rumblings afoot that the entire department (or a majority thereof) could take advantage of this holiday to take a four day break out of town to recharge batteries drained by the seemingly unending deadlines of the previous half-year before plunging onward to the next project on the horizon.

if there was a catch (and isn't there always?), it was that friday and the saturday half-day would be counted against leave credits available. there was an option, however, to save the leaves for a later date...

as it turned out, a previously mentioned galera trip fell through; and several decided to delay the leave-taking to that later date (to be determined, but tentatively weekend after first payday of march). being undecided at the eleventh hour, i went with going to work on friday after all.

not that there was much work to be accomplished, really. mostly surfing (with a little bit of system administration: where did all the space on the servers go?).

unaccountably sleepier than normal after lunch, i gave in to the drowsiness -- turned out to be a bad idea: i woke up from the nap feeling feverish; and going to makati after work was a real challenge to stay awake long enough to make it.

...so that's the connection: not taking the long weekend virtually results in maybe getting sick from the office bug...

saturday dawns with clogged nose and coughs. sneezes result in joint aches. uh-oh.

now, in times previous with incipient flu-like symptoms, i would just consume lots and lots of pinapple juice, and that would suffice to prevent a worsening of the situation. not this time, though. by the afternoon i was feeling pretty lousy. housemate obliged a request to visit the local mercury drug and came back with a couple of mats of nasal decongestant, a pain/fever reliever, and a bottle of vicks cough suppressant (which, for a cough medication, tastes rather good).

...so there we have it. almost really sick (hoping it doesn't take me out like my friend mentioned earlier), but with the means to hopefully nip this in the bud.

behind the curve

2007-02-28T08:37:00.000+08:00

i suppose it's better late than never, but i do tend to be behind the curve on admittedly many matters that can preoccupy the group at work as a whole.

...such as, say, the heroes television series.

there are many reasons for the, well, unwillingness to indulge, not the least of which is i almost never take the time; preferentially just surfing, staring blankly into space (not necessarily the night sky), attempting hopelessly to clean out the junk in my cubicle...

of course there is the amount of work that i periodically find myself inundated in -- which is not a bad thing, just stressful in the most powerful sense of the word.

which can lead to situations that peak, as it did last week, at having 4 22-minute projects to churn out of edit (on a machine with precious little drive space for a feat of that magnitude). there was, naturally, murphy's law to contend with too.

but somehow in all that, there was a little spark, a little time to take a peek, give in to some temptation. during the hours of rendering video in final cut pro, i finally decided to watch the miniseries of the reimagined battlestar galactica.

there is another reason why i shy from the vicarious involvement with serial media -- it affects me. Not the least of which my blood pressure.

so, watching the galactica miniseries was difficult at first, as the dire situation unfolded; whatever empathy i can muster was drained full force by the show's end. and yet, the show was a revelation. attempting to show real people in a sci-fi end-of-world milieu television serial was actually quite gutsy (especially given that the show's re-creator was originally of the star trek franchise -- the home of sci-fi cosmic resets), and compelling.

still difficult to watch, but i'm persevering.

now just starting on episode 6 of the first season... it's been wow! all the way so far.

once that's done, maybe there's something to that heroes thing. next stop.

cold spell and electrified water

2007-02-06T08:12:00.000+08:00

it has been cold of late.

intriguingly, metro manila and tagaytay have low temperatures separated only by one degree these days. imagine that. tagaytay ridge temperatures right here in the metro (both in makati and here in las pinas), add wind chill and it gets even colder.

therefore: get a plug-in drop-in-bucket type water heater. i had not paid close attention to these gadgets, having gotten a red one (deep well type) at the start of the stay in the las pinas apartment. after a while, i had taken it to makati, and had always wondered if it really took 20 or so minutes to boil 3 liters of water...

and now the cold spell, and a need for heated water in the mornings here in las pinas. so, another red one was purchased, and the effect was, well, electrifying.

not that i got myself electrified or anything like that, but the way the device worked was worth some description. either that or the particular unit i purchased, within the bounds of manufacturing variability, was more different, somehow.

instructions for use: plug in, and then dip in water-filled bucket.

plug in: it began to hum. eh? i didn't recall that of the first red one.

dip in bucket: the entire bucket began to hum deeply, kind of like the noise made by those large-ish transformers that metalworking shops use to power arc welders. ?!

add to that, crackling, popping noises within the device itself, and a readily apparent flow of heated water.

hmm. and a bucket of boiling water in 6 minutes. well, about 3 liters worth of water in a bucket.

interesting.

now to try and see whether the "nawasa" type will do a similar water electrification act in makati.

phone cam etc.

2007-01-08T22:30:00.000+08:00

it was actually an overreaction in response to the "transfer of ownership" of my previous phone, a nokia 6610.

let's see, nokia 3230, megapixel camera (1.2 actual, not 1.3 as claimed on the unit itself), radio (never used), mp3 playback, 3gp capture and playback, expandable memory (up to 1gb, so saith a vendor at the Alabang Town Center's hall of cellphones). 6MB onboard memory (thousands of text messages!) - never found a way to transfer them to the included 32MB rs-mmc card, though.

the camera was semi-useful, in a very slow way - at least at megapixel resolution. in hindsight, it did seem to be quite zippy at the low default resolution, but i felt that it was absurd to have the megapixel capacity and not use it. unfortunately, the "shutter speed" at 1.2 was on the order of 5 or so seconds, so any action was a definite hit and miss situation. people needed to keep very still for photo-ops. night mode was even slower and much much grainier. all in all, a camera of dubious utility at its highest settings. consider it a camera of the very last resort, when nothing else will do or is available.

now, the sony ericsson k800i is another matter altogether (drool...) - but that's a completely other price league away.

this unit was my first symbian phone, part of the series 60 platform by that mobile phone consortium. coming as i did from previous nokia "native" operating system phones (3210, 6610), the difference in speed was remarkable. ...in a negative sense. the phone, likely taking it's cue from the camera, was slow -- requiring a "deliberate" approach. my housemate who has a similar phone has been able to hang the unit by being too fast on the keys.

one does adjust after a while, but there were times that the lack of speed was aggravating.

...note that most of what is written heretofore is in the past tense.

and for one good reason: the phone has died.

interestingly enough, prior to the demise of the phone, i had actually learned something new about it. well, the odd resolution that the camera provided, anyhow. it took pictures at a resolution of 1280 by 960 pixels. this had always struck me as a little off, because the standard 4x3 should be 1280 by 1024 pixels. one day, looking over the pictures that i had managed to save (slowly) over the pop-port usb cable, and wondering why pictures of my brother's car featured vertically squashed tires, i decided to try scaling the pictures to 1024 pixels high.

lo and behold! the aspect ratio issue was resolved. which did not answer the question of why the phone camera took vertically flattened images to begin with.

but that was the learning. a day later, the phone drowned.

unseasonal storms: milenyo

2006-12-12T16:56:00.000+08:00

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

2006-10-16T09:10:00.000+08:00

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

2006-06-04T16:33:00.000+08:00

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)

2006-04-17T13:02:00.000+08:00

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

2006-02-04T12:30:00.000+08:00

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

2006-01-27T16:32:00.000+08:00

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...

2006-01-24T10:14:00.000+08:00

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

2006-01-20T10:45:00.000+08:00

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

2006-01-10T09:17:00.000+08:00

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."

marked contrast

2005-10-21T13:22:00.000+08:00

previous night, attack of back pain - likely caused by hours on end sitting in bad chairs (story of the computer-related-employment-employee's life). get some medicated patches, apply a couple to small of back, take a couple of biogesic pills, get some sleep.

awaken late, for some strange reason. hence, breakfast late -- miss the mcdo supersizemebreakfast option, end up with the freshly cooked single piece chicken mcdo with rice. considering the mind is in a breakfast frame, the meal does not go down well: left half of the meat on the drumstick.

late, therefore taxi (if no bus appears).

naturally, all the buses that show up are of the lucena/batangas variety, grab a taxi.

...it turns into the most restful taxi ride i've ever taken (and that's not a bad thing, surprisingly). the driver maintains an unheard of velocity in the vicinity of 60kph. everything was zooming past on both sides -- he also maintained the slow lane on the expressway.

fascinating. most taxi drivers are of the gung-ho variety, for whom every inch gained on any other vehicle is an advantage worth taking to an excess; not this one.

it actually gave me time to think on a short film that might be worthwhile making -- as opposed to paying attention to a driver's lane-wayward excesses.

late to work, yes. and strangely refreshed and unstressed. hooray for 60kph.

a palawan adventure ... continuation

2005-10-11T15:05:00.000+08:00

strangely enough, the post of which this is a continuation is almost a full year old. "the mind wanders/my very own titanic adventure" was posted all of october 27, 2004.

now, what brings this back to mind? well, looking through some pictures that i'd scanned in quite a whiles back when i was still in the employ of a previous company, i came across some that were taken during that particular holy week trip.

following are some snapshots from that sequence of events...

White Beach, somewhere near Puerto Princesa -- just a single short tricycle ride away. this has nothing to do with the image sequence that follows. just a nice picture, i think.

from image left to right "leo" (refer to post in october 2004 archives) , paul, and me. this is where the trek to the underground river begins. taking the picture is nash, one of paul's then-fiancee's officemates at the legend palawan. why trek to the underground river? hmm. i'll have to think about that.

however the reasoning came about, it was also decided to take the jungle trail, as opposed to the monkey trail (which offered more seaside views, as we found out in a subsequent trip). it was actually quite adventurous, having nothing to follow other than the evidence of a path through the rainforest (and some marked trees) to tell us which way to go. sometime during the trip, we came upon huge boulders (or so they seemed) that flanked the path for a ways... some large enough to have little hollows beneath that could conceivably be used for shelter... for man or beast alike. never thought to check for snakes or other stuff like that.

the rest of the trip was actually quite a blur. i do recall that at a certain point, when the trail resumed going uphill, we four were laughing uproariously at the prospect of an imagined "sari sari store" just beyond the next rise. and the hill after that, and so on. weird, in retrospect, but that's just the way it happened.

ultimately:

the end of the journey is at hand. beyond the ever-downward stairs bridging awesome chasms (awesome to the tired mind, anyways) was the park at the mouth of the underground river. at this point we had also managed to chase away a rather territorial monkey who laid claim to a piece of railing and hissed and spitted (kinda cat-like) as we approached. next time, i'll bring a water pistol.

in summary: a fun time was had by all.

the unplanned trip, part 3a

2005-09-28T11:24:00.000+08:00

the mall.

it is, by sm standards, one of their smaller malls. perhaps a bit larger than sm centerpoint. it does have a singular feature, one that is shared by no other malls that i know of (and have been to) in the sm mall empire: it's got this open air chasm, if you will, in the center of it, topped by a permanent industrial-scale translucent tent.

makes sense, really. less airconditioning load, given the generally cool weather year-round in the city of pines. i noted that a given corner of the atrium on any given floor had at least one of the coffee chains represented. starbucks on the first, next to the main entrance, seattle's best on the floor above, and on the uppermost floor, facing west, i think, was figaro. of the three, the upper floor coffee joints had the benefit of the balconies that flanked the building on eastern and western sides.

in terms of the view, figaro had the best.

also, with the prevailing winds, figaro had more than it's fair share of the prevailing westerly winds, which meant a fair amount of wind chill. thank heavens for their coffee (decaf) and their rendition of black forest cake (which seemed to be more moist that most versions i've tried at coffee places).

now if they only had better outdoor seating (seems like the aluminum extrusion thingies that cibo also favors), it would be a fine place to spend literally hours just watching clouds roll in over the bowl of the city proper.

thus went the rest of that afternoon, a cup of coffee and a slice of cake helping the time slip by.

incidentally, and as glenn mentioned, clouds are warm.

surprising, really. stood at the balcony railing as a wall of white poured over the western hills (peaks?) and obliterated the view of the city below. the wind that drove the cloud had the bite of wind chill, and not a few drops of rain. but when the cloud finally made contact with the mall, the wind actually died and i could feel that warmth that glenn spoke of.

...then it began to rain in earnest. back to the coffee and cake.

a quite interesting though fairly uneventful afternoon. which, from time to time, is a good thing.

writ large on a bus

2005-09-21T11:15:00.000+08:00

to be god the glory

thunderbirds are ... stop

2005-09-18T20:06:00.000+08:00

a few days back, a dvd of thunderbirds (the remake of the marionette tv series of the sixties), came across louie's desk, courtesy of one of the composers in the company's music division (we're a semi-one-stop-shop for multimedia production, so to speak).

neither of us had caught the movie during it's theater run (hard to remember why, if it was because we were busy, or due to the potential for the movie's being a dud courtesy of the director...)

later that day, while i was on a search and destroy mission for temporary files on his home computer, louie decided that it may be time to give the movie a look-see. at that time, joe also came in, so we three ...

... suffered.

it was, plainly said, horrible. at times, it seemed that i was watching a bad local movie, so lame were the situations, so centered on the teenage component of the cast, so set up with "moments" where they could throw off some "witty" quips while time stopped, then resumed as soon as their "cute" moments were over.

ugh.

i am not surprised that it bombed.

cafe by the ruins (the unplanned trip, part 3)

2005-09-17T10:42:00.000+08:00

the plan: lunch at the "cafe by the ruins"

we left the red lion inn at the stroke of noon, and somehow decided to wear our jackets (which turned out to be a good thing, as we found out later) -- though at that moment, with the sun shining through sparse cloud cover, i felt somewhat foolish for being overdressed given the heat.

another sub-40-peso fx taxi ride and there we were at the cafe by the ruins. strictly speaking, though, it should be called the cafe "in" the ruins, seeing as the entry to the establishment is actually one of the arched doorways of the former governor's residence in the city of pines; it had been bombed to pieces during the japanese retreat of world war ii (so i read somewhere).

it's a small-ish place, no more than 15 or so tables, but it's a nice place to be nevertheless. especially that it began to drizzle as soon as we were seated.

cafe by the ruins, seen from the furthest alcove -- you can see the remnants of the ruin's wall and the two arched doorways beyond the people seated at the tables

view outside the alcove at what may have been a garden of sorts

one of the light fixtures close-up

the rest of the place

so, cool weather, made cooler by the rain. even the slightest breeze had a bite to it.

to the food:

ingredients-wise, i had a white fish in coconut milk with ginger and malunggay leaves, paired with native red/purple rice -- i forget what the dish is called. glenn had a pasta with crab fat and pan de sal with quesong puti. definitely a food trip, and good. ...and, going against the grain after my recent-ish bout with something acronymized as g.e.r.d., i had a cuppa fresh barako coffee...

neat fortification against the natural airconditioning of baguio.

lunch, to reiterate, was good. have to go back there sometime. as to the coffee bit, the diuretic effects were quite pronounced, no doubt exacerbated by the chilly weather. so off to the comfort room, then. where i noticed the signs.

note on the signs: as i recall the menu had a short introduction about the establishment, and it said something to the effect that the owners envisioned it also as a hangout for artists, and there were quite a few artworks about the place (which, sad to say, i didn't take pictures of. my phone/camera is just not handy enough to take pictures without a fair amount of hassle -- a blogworthy topic, to be sure.).

but to give you a sample of the art, here are the signs for the male and female rest rooms:

after lunch, the unplanned trip continued. took a jeep and got off around burnham park. where, it transpired, there were few people.

odd, memory serves that burnham park is one of the most congregated (if that's the proper word) places in baguio, practically one of the only open spaces in the city for people to use. it could have been the drizzle, true, but the place was really sparsely occupied, few boats making lazy circles in the rectangular man-made lake. especially odd that it was the beginning of the weekend.

we walked around the lake, avoiding enterprising salesmen of various trinkets. i was not keen on boating on the lake, so without much ado, we decided to see what shoemart baguio was all about, having heard that one of it's features, an open atrium, had caused some grief at the outset, during a rare direct typhoon hit to the city.

the walk to the mall, set on what seems to be one of the highest points in the city (site of the former pines hotel, i'm told -- that burned down years ago to some loss of life), was quite an exercise. add to that the fact that no straight way to the place was immediately visible. so it took about 30 minutes of walking to get there.

once there, we discovered where everyone who should have been at burnham park went.

they went malling.

more later.

another spur of the moment

2005-09-15T14:01:00.000+08:00

view from the rented hut at leslie's tagaytay

rainy day that saturday, much like today. except that there were some spots of sun amidst the downpours. someone felt the need to see the sunset from the tagaytay highlands, and a bunch of us were sufficiently energized by that notion to pile into a car and drive off down south.

naturally, there were some fits and false starts thrown in before the trip actually got underway, but underway we were, at about 2 in the afternoon.

after about an hour, we were ensconced in one of the rentable cliffside huts of an establishment by the name of "leslie's". the view from our particular hut, as per the picture, was framed by two other huts with uninterrupted views of the volcano on an island within a lake on a larger island. i figure that the square structures on the water are fishpens of a sort, though how fish survive in the acidic water of the lake (which is itself a caldera lake, if you stop to think about it) is unknown to me.

after some photo shenanigans, lunch was had at about three, and the food was good, and the wind, chilly.

hooray for impromptu trips.

incidentally, the trip's instigator didn't see the sunset. we repaired to the picnic grove to see the "nature walk" i think it's called, and sunset was therefore hidden from view when that particular time rolled around.

...perhaps our next trip should be to the breakwaters at manila bay. at least the sunset there ought to be a sure thing to see.

the unplanned trip: just get on a bus: cheap accomodations

2005-09-13T14:59:00.000+08:00

continuation...

4 am in baguio city. the sky is impressively clear, and the air is cold -- breath condensing cold, as we speak of where to go while debarking the bus and plunging through enterprising taxi drivers handing out little slips of paper with accomodations writ thereon.

glenn, having spent quite a whiles in this collegiate city in his college days, suggested someplace that was reasonably priced, with hot water shower facilities (a plus, in the frigid early morning temperatures baguio is known for).

so off we went, fx taxi diesel roar through the ups and downs of the streets of baguio, to corfu village. see other places with big signs note that their rooms are available for 1,800 a night. expensive...

after a short trip, we arrive i know not where. the web lists the place as either "aussie (or attic) hotel and pub", while the sign says "red lion inn" and "corfu village rooms" (i think).

taking the semi-obvious entryway, the ostensible information desk is empty. glenn makes for the bar inside and lo and behold, that's where you get information about the room rates and availability (or it may have been the late hour that caused the info desk to be unmanned).

800 pesos per night per room, with complimentary breakfast thrown in.

see the room, quite oddly shaped, somewhat like a skewed trapezoid, one window, an american style fan with lights and droopy wooden blades, tv with cable, double bed, door to c.r/shower.

what the hell, lack of real sleep on the bus ride over, take it.

he takes the left side of the bed, i the right.

sleep till breakfast, somewhere around 9 or so; unlike what happens to me in the metro when i sleep during the day, i wake up without a pounding headache. hooray for natural airconditioning!

take a bath. shower is odd in the sense that it has a heating device/shower head at the end of a pipe sticking out of the wall in the equally oddly shaped bathroom (a consequence of the fact that the room is situated in a part of the building that has a sharp diagonal wall relative to the rest of the structure).

instructions are above the sink's mirror. something like "turn shower knob four revolutions and then when water is at desired temperature, turn back to adjust heat". hmm. so i shivered while waiting for the rushing stream of water to get warm -- which it didn't, even when the device was making that boiling water noise that you get from electric airpots.

on a hunch, i turned the shower knob until the flow was reduced to a trickle akin to the effect of water draining from a small can with a bunch of holes in the bottom... ...at which point the water began to warm up.

so, hot shower, sort of. but better than the arctic blast of refrigerated water that would have been the alternative.

got dressed up for baguio adventure, woke up the roomie, and watched cable tv as he got himself all refreshed and all that. the only real alternatives on the cable were cnn, bbc, and discovery travel and leisure. cnn/bbc were all on the katrina disaster, discovery travel and leisure was all global trekker (nee lonely planet). refreshing to see the latter show, which was a mainstay of destiny cable when that was the cable provider i'd had when i lived in mandaluyong...

...at the makati apartment, the cable provider is sky. they don't have discovery travel and leisure.

the breakfast was decent enough (i had the "longsilog", which is to say: native (skinless) sausage, garlic fried rice, and scrambled egg, plus their brewed coffee), not bad at all.

and after that, we repaired to the room to discuss the day's adventure. some more cable tv, and then off to the "cafe by the ruins" for lunch.

hmm. a food trip. seeing as there wasn't a real plan of activities once the ascent to baguio was made, a food trip was all right with me.

i'll have to see about how to include pictures with this blog. think i'll ask joe.

to be continued...

jeepney moment

2005-09-09T10:49:00.000+08:00

late to work, due to spending the night in the makati apartment as opposed to the las pinas one. after the de rigeur mcdonald's supersize me breakfast (big breakfast with muffin -- as opposed to the rice i normally get), walked about a kilometer and a half to the most opportune spot on the south superhighway near pasay road to get an alabang-bound bus.

instead of broiling in the sun at the late hour (best time to be walking there is around 8 am, in the shade of the skyway), the walk was made bearable by the threatening overcast sky. got a rare "juaymah maureen" bus (for that time, anyway. they usually come along once an hour), again mostly empty for their return trip to alabang.

went to the jeepney terminal at the alabang market and got on a zapote jeep.

i got on the shadowed side of the jeep, close as possible to the entrance/exit and immediately had an odd impression of the guy one person shy of being behind the driver. he had a very pinched face, highlighted by the hollowness of his cheeks, and his eyes struck me as somewhat downcast, yet darting about.

his long-sleeved pullover shirt was probably once very colorful but now was faded and quite thin, fabric-wise.

as is natural on a jeepney, the farther from the driver, one has to hand off the fare to passengers inbetween...

...and he took the fare, doing something strange. maybe it was a matter of timing, but i recall his receiving it with his right hand, but he then made a motion with his left hand to give it to the lady next to the driver; who was at that very time giving someone else's change back.

in that odd exchange, his left hand, fingers closed, just tapped the lady's left shoulder as he got the change with his right hand.

i really don't know why i was looking at this entire happening, but it struck me that he didn't pass my fare along at all.

the situation got stranger when the lady with the driver began to make a fuss over the fare from a passenger opposite me, asking where it was.

he mentioned quite loudly that he'd already passed it, and he had -- though i didn't notice to whom he handed it to. in the intervening period, people had gotten on the jeep, hiding colorful-faded-shirt from my view.

he got off at a stop next to a road that led to a "depressed" area, and i lost sight of him as the jeepney sped away.

mixed feelings on my part. perhaps it was just a matter of timing, but with my senses still raw over my previous loss on a jeepney, it lent a kind of unease about this kind of public transport.

granted, the amount was very small, but still...

not sure i'm making sense.

the unplanned trip: just get on a bus.

2005-09-08T10:51:00.000+08:00

every once in a while, discussions come up in the office about going out of town on a weekend, be it just a day trip or an over-overnight at a beach resort somewhere (typically down south).

naturally, multi-person pre-arranged trips will take the successful confluence of various conditions to happen, and more often than not the trip simply evaporates into the ether as one or more proponents see to other, more pressing, matters.

on my end, self-inflicted pressure to be out of the metro for a weekend had been building ever since before my rather odd birth day.

harkening to something louie said about just jumping on a bus to somewhere, me and my roommate decided last friday night to just go to baguio. no firm plans, no nothing. off he went to the bus station to see about securing seats on the last express bus, and i did little other than stuff some clothes into a duffel bag; enough for a three-day trip, just in case.

express bus: i was also considering a trip down south to my comet-viewing haunt of white beach in mindoro's puerto galera area. but that would have entailed a bus/boat/tricycle trip one way and the reverse order of that the other way (naturally) -- and i was looking for the least hassle on this particular occasion, so the north-bound bus to baguio seemed like a good idea indeed. the "express bus" part is another inducement -- otherwise, aircon or no, the bus would have paused at every conceivable stop along the way. that would stretch the nominally six-hour journey to god knows how long.

i wasn't in the mood to be that patient.

the last express bus of the day was scheduled to depart at 11:00 pm. more time to consider what to bring or not: we decided not to lug along his megapixel digicam -- bad idea, as it turns out, but that's the way of a spur of the moment trip.

to the bus station, then. good thing i insisted on being early. i'd forgotten to consider the effect of "office time" versus "philippine time." turns out that office time was ten minutes late, oddly. if we'd been on time according to my watch, we'd have missed the bus entirely.

at any rate, bus left on time (their time) and being a late hour, we cleared the metropolis in under thirty minutes: pasay to balintawak via edsa, and thence to the privately operated north tollway. i suppose the massive increase in toll fees are worth the "world-classness" of the construction employed on the tollway. the trip was smooth and uneventful (short of the rain, but that's a given for this period of the philippine seasonal dichotomy), highway traversed in an hour.

i tried my best not to sleep (not that there was anything to see out there, really), but the sandman did his work and consciousness fled not long after the bus had departed the tollway and began negotiating the national road network heading for the mountain fastnesses of the "summer capital" of the philippines.

every once in a while, i'd wake up as the the bus did some sharp sideways transitions during overtaking maneuvers. on this matter: victory liner (the operator of the bus we were on) has a motto to the effect that they bring you to places "faster and safer."

the "faster" part was not in doubt, given the super-sharp overtaking maneuvers. we'd come up to a clot of slow movers, and the bus would shift left, then shift right after overtaking up to three vehicles in a line. immediately after that, something would flash by on the left. fun! not.

back to sleep. hard.

woke up as the bus did it's one scheduled stop somewhere in tarlac or la union, i don't remember for sure. probably the latter. it's a stop that's owned by the bus line itself, so i'm told. i'll take more notes next time.

soon enough it's the ride into the mountains. slept for a few bits, except where the g-forces of the bus negotiating switchbacks would wake me up by either pressing me against the windows or against the seat bolsters such as they were.

back to sleep.

then i wake, and i notice stars in the sky as we come up and there's a carpet of sodium pinpricks in the distant dark. we're almost there.

bus station. glenn (roommate) notes that the victory liner facility is new to him, situated where the old pnr office was. odd, i thought. a philippine national railroad (presently semi-defunct) office in baguio? i could hardly imagine their ancient hardware making that climb.

time was 4:00 am. a five-hour trip. a full hour shorter than expected. "faster" indeed.

i am glad, though, that i didn't get a ringside seat next to the driver. i figure that the climb into the mountains would have been hair-raising indeed (had i a head of hair to raise, at any rate).

so there we are. baguio. now what?

to be continued.

how do i feel

2005-07-15T10:29:00.000+08:00

july 15, 2005. friday.

the loss of a cellphone may not matter, in the final analysis, in the greater scheme of things that one can call life.

one could as easily just have lost one's life in the defense of property (cellphone) as can be readily observed in those morbid single paragraphs in the crime sections of daily tabloids.

the inevitable reflex of the mind, to rationalize: it could have been worse. as it was, all it was, really, was a couple of gents (hoods?) staking out a likely target, making well rehearsed moves, and emerging with their prize.

as i told the production manager, hopefully their families (if they had any) would benefit from the cash influx obtained by the sale of my cellphone.

or i could equally wish them all visited by a plague of misfortune.

but that's not how the world operates, such as it is. property and ownership can be a fleeting thing, it just depends on chance at times.

and retribution? we'll never know.

all i know is that if there's a next time, when someone sits beside me in a non-crowded jeep a trifle too closely (and somewhat forward, too), it's time to check the pockets.

a couple of chocolate eclairs and a short cafe mocha for lunch

2005-07-08T17:12:00.000+08:00

...odd as it may seem.

but that's not what this entry is about (sorta).

this makes twice this week that i've indulged in having a couple of chocolate eclairs as my "pastry of choice" to go with my default short cafe mocha fix, and calling that "lunch".

both times, there were some flies doing their thing in the airconditioned enclosedness of the starbucks at alabang town center.

...wonder if they ought to invest in an active bug zapper device, like the one that sits outside the italianni's across the way, sending flying bugs into the netherworld with an almighty "crack!" and a brief flash of electricity arcing across closely spaced wires with the bug forming the completed circuit...

back to the starbucks. a day or two before, one of the flies managed to land on the backside (from the vantage point of my coworker, that is) of a particular chocolate cake that he'd fancied on for his lunch thing. to the effect that he studiously avoided that part of the cake thereafter, leaving a thin wall of icing and cake standing on the saucer when he was done.

today, he decided to go against the grain and went with some sort of flakey pastry triangle with meat filling as opposed to the dome cake ("tartuffo" as per italianni's) that he'd liked the first time he tried it.

no, the flies did not land on the pastry.

the fly landed in his drink.

it was some sort of tea in boiling water, and as he was stirring a couple of tablespoons of honey into it, a large-ish fly (of the metallic-colored variety that sometimes hang in the still air of some mornings, perhaps asleep on the wing) swooped in (attracted by the honey, maybe) and likely got overwhelmed by the scalding steam from the tea...

...and was instantly stilled in the freshly boiled and brewing tea, with none of the thrashing about that most winged bugs indulge in when trapped by the surface tension of a drink one is nursing at the moment.

suffice to say that he had the drink replaced post-haste.

...there. just a random moment of, well, randomness.

dessert review: coffee bean and tea leaf

2005-06-14T10:07:00.000+08:00

desserts have always had an appeal for me, ever since i grew out of my candy bar/chewy choco chip cookie phase. time was, i was in the habit of having two slices of cake a day -- with the inevitable expansion of the waistline that's been so difficult to remedy (laziness and all). well, when i was doing the indoor wall climbing bit, that was a step in the right direction -- reversed by the magical musically-disappearing kidney stone (but that's a tale for another day).

back to dessert. whenever i try a coffee place, i inevitably have an order of dessert tacked on to the almost invariable cafe mocha something or other. suffice to say that i'm partial to starbucks' interpretation of that particular variant...

...but back to coffee bean and tea leaf (mighty distracted am i today).

in times past, i have been stung by the rather offputting cafe mocha interpretation of the bean. and the tiramisu sucked big time. and something that had raspberry and sponge cake sucked even bigger time than the other: imagine, if you will, raspberry in white sand and that's the textural extravaganza that was that dessert.

and now, a reprieve. on the coffee front. ice blended black forest mocha. it was decent. and the white chocolate raspberry cheesecake, quite good, and surprisingly, given my other strikeouts.

so there. i can at least recommend this particular dessert from coffee bean and tea leaf. give it a try.

the way of pain

2005-05-22T17:25:00.000+08:00

we've had problems before. to recap briefly, our main server got zapped and good by an unforeseen interaction of meralco power, an uninterruptible power supply, and the building's generator. good thing we had backups. bad thing we had a gremlin in the studio. impossible man. whenever he says that something is impossible, it's a good bet that he's done something. in that case, it was to add new hard disks to the backup server's raid box without first backing up the data to a location that had space enough for the task. end result: 60% of backup lost.

fast forward. almost two months to the day that main server went down. came to work in a star wars frame of mind ("i have a bad feeling..." etc). officemate says that it was the result of a weekend spent watching the extended version of "return of the king" and then shooting the breeze with barkada during impromptu reunion of sorts. however that works, the foreboding was soon to be proven somewhat prescient.

11:30, main server begins to fail.

no power outage. remote access reveals that raid is not visible to server. first line of action: reboot. server comes back online -- still nothing. time for the good ol' physical inspection. in the cold room's antechamber (i suppose it could be called), i find troubleshooter and his colleagues -- working on a different problem. he was unaware of the main server's behavior, impossible man still not having informed him. i turn around and i notice that the main raid box has all it's drive access lights steadily lit. that can't be good.

at that time, impossible man shows up. he himself is surprised at the news. i opine that this does not bode well for the future of that particular server architecture if it just ups and flakes out on whim. my suggestion is to shut down the server and raid for a while (over lunch break), give it a rest, and then see what happens when it's powered on again.

back to my floor, and thence to a mac i use for remote checking on the servers. i launch a raid administration utility to see which of the four raids was powered off.

three were on, one was off. the name of the one that was off gave me chills. i recalled that earlier that morning, impossible man was going to format the raid of the machine whose name the raid bore. back to the cold room. oh no.

backtrack: the mac server/storage solution comprises two parts, a "head" or server, and a raid box that is the storage. the raid box is connected to the storage by high-speed link; but is a separate computer in its own right, and remotely controllable and accessible even from machines that are not it's primary "head". also: four "heads" and four raid boxes stacked alternately starting at the bottom of a rack. primary server/raid combination at the bottom.

the bottom-most raid was powered down.

connect the dots. since the main server's raid had the name of the machine to be formatted, this was the likeliest combination that spelled disaster. i raised this likelihood to the production manager, who spoke to impossible man, who (naturally) uttered the word "impossible" and even tried to deflect any blame my way. at this point in time i backed off. i made the observation that, yes, the machine could indeed have crashed of its own volition. we would just have to see if the machine comes back after being powered on. then we would know either way if it was a system stability on the server/raid part, or idle hands at work.

...this "my word vs. his" is getting to be tiresome.

after lunch. raid powered on. i notice that the names of the raid have been changed, as reflected in the raid admin utility. how decent, and after the fact as usual. ok, let's go have a look see. click on the now-renamed main server raid, check on disk status.

initializing 5%.

he had actually formatted it. honest mistake, or whatever. he had formatted our main server's raid. 4 terabytes of hard work: restoring from unlooked-for backup on render farm; checking and verifying database integrity; a month of full-on rendering. poof.

again, luckily i had a full backup (minus that week) on another server. but still...

strike two...

...third time's the charm.

ugh. methinks i shall not dwell on that possibility.

it's the destination...

2005-05-13T14:43:00.000+08:00

...not the journey.

admittedly a twist on that old saw.

however, in this instance, it does hold true. the project has now finished (indeed, at the end of last month). in relation to a previous post (april 1st), where i noted that we had two months to get to the finish line, it turned into one month after all the post-black thursday negotiations were done.

as fate would have it, i still had a spreadsheet from the very beginning of this venture which allowed some sort of projection on hardware requirements based on total frame count x projected layer count x reasonable render time per frame.

initially, this spreadsheet had resulted in a farm numbering in the low 40's (not 42 - of course that would have been neat in hindsight and a hitch-hiker's guide to the galaxy sort of way).

we initially ended up with 25, of which one died (strangely enough, unit 13), and one was taken away to be a combination license and job server for our render management software. so that makes 23. and that number stayed until march the 17th.

two months shrunk into one, and the spreadsheet came up with an additional 40 dual-processor machines to add to the current farm to make the deadline. now, during the course of the project, we had been sporadically testing samples of render units from various vendors and we were settled on either an either intel or amd solution.

we'd also tested the dual g5 solution from apple and found it a third slower, so i didn't really consider it a contender.

catch being, with the time (two weeks to obtain and test and setup), only apple's asia retailer had the numbers we needed readily available... ...a point perhaps worthy of some thought.

so we are now the largest installation of dual g5 rack-mount computers outside of biological research facilities.

think projected addition plus a third more, to make up for the per-unit shortfall.

after all is said and done, we finished, we made it. how we got there, the hardware story is above.

the human angle, perhaps others can inscribe.

have to admit that i'm not really looking forward to administering such a host of hostile machines (a triumph of form over function in most all it's respects) - but it's a living, after all. a challenge. a potential heart attack.

(",)

wonder what other turns our hardware future may take.

the hotel coffee shop

2005-04-16T15:32:00.000+08:00

...at the dagupan village/garden hotel.

now, don't get me wrong. the food was okay. not exactly stellar, but not bad at all, perhaps mainly due to the fact of the convenience of it: the entrance was just across the corridor from room eleven, where we were staying.

for the four days we stayed at the hotel, breakfast was always at the coffee shop.

they've got fried chicken that's almost at a par with max's, and their sinigang is of a different persuasion, perhaps in the ingredients they used to attain the sourness of the soup. myself, i just had the fried chicken with another viand (which i don't recall at the moment -- that's how memorable, or not, that other dish was). and that was dinner on the first day.

back to the breakfast bit. four out of four times, i asked for scrambled eggs to go with my breakfast choice (whatever that happened to be at the time: corned beef hash, or bacon...). all those times, i heard the waiter call the kitchen to specify such an egg treatment.

and every time the breakfast arrived, surely enough, the eggs were prepared sunny side up.

most interesting. apparently, the word scrambled means nothing to the good folks over in the hotel kitchen.

...and that's the tale of the hotel cafe. perhaps next time (if there happens to be a next time), i'll just mosey on over to the kitchen and scramble the eggs myself.

vacation tale to be continued.

random vacation events

2005-04-10T10:39:00.000+08:00

departure time scheduled midnight; departed office 1:30 -- like the nation's flag carrier 'plane always late'? then again, the dynamics of individuals being what it is, it can be a minor miracle if plans start off without some sort of hitch.

especially for such a plan as very little planning at all. the only constants were the fuzzy destination of pangasinan (a province i'm almost sure i'd never visited before) and the route we would take -- edsa to the new north tollway beginning to end through tarlac of the cojuangcos (cory et al) to the goal at the end of a rainbow (well, not quite).

the final roster was not effectively known until the eleventh hour (literally).

and so the black and white company set forth northwards. south expressway to edsa, quite uneventful (which is always good). the mazda3 is a very nice car to be in. wish i had one.

edsa to north expressway (now privately operated, with tolls perhaps fit for a first-world nation to boot. then again, ever were the lopezes wont to stick it to the common man). the upside is that it is quite an improvement over memories of the previous state. now if it only went further than it does at present...

first pitstop at the shell complex on the northward lane. cinnabon and coffee for me and louie, and the others went to kfc, as i recall.

thence to the end of the expressway -- a much shorter trip than memory serves up. oddly enough. either that or people really drive like the blazes on the tollway these days.

after the end of that particular private road, i get completely lost. the pilot of the black mazda3 is now only following the four round taillights of the white civic ahead (the car of the production manager, piloted by her significant other). its a good a time as any to memorize the license plate of the lead car...

...to while away the time, louie had many tales to tell -- of particular interest was the one about a charlatan's effects on a barkada. life indeed can be stranger than fiction.

however, there came a point when the pilots of the cars could not resist the call of the sandman much longer. at the first opportunity, the company stopped at a gas station and parked; and most went to sleep. i could not, seeing as the cinnabon coffee was still at work.

sunrise saw us still at the gas station, and then we proceeded onwards.

somewhere on the road, i saw a sign. the name escapes me now, but the rest of the text certainly remains: "...and his dynamic orchestra." hmm. it struck me that the sign was affixed to the gate of a fairly sized house. hard to imagine a dynamic orchestra in there. we were going a mite too fast for me to read the rest of the text. maybe next time.

onward, onward...

...and got lost. we took a turn just one corner shy of the proper turn (a left; we took a right). it was a while before the lead car noticed something unfamiliar about the locale and inquired of a local... so a u-turn was made, and off we went again, to the unusual strains of biblical passages set to a moaning cadence on some local am station. some time later, that station fell to silence, and the radio was tuned to a talk show where the host had a wierd habit of hitting something, and not a drum, to punctuate his commentary. very strange. but not so strange as one comment made: 'si hudas, hinudas si hesus.' well, what else could he do, being the namesake, the progenitor of such an act?

back to the main road, left turn, and more turns out of memory, and we came upon our dwelling for the course of the trip. i suppose it could be called the 'dagupan garden/village hotel,' as it had both names, one on top of each other, on the entry sign.

so that's where we were. dagupan. memory attaches the name to a rather severe earthquake in a previous decade, and yes, indeed they had had one.

we were shown to room eleven, just across an entrance to the coffee shop.

the coffee shop, now there's a tale. but for another day.

sacrum triduum

2005-04-01T21:53:00.000+08:00

perhaps it's funny that in the face of an overtime-filled flog to the finish line two months hence, that when an opportunity to take a vacation pops up, all the more the need grows to be elsewhere, even for just a few days.

that and black thursday, and the impulse grows. granted, the decision to be away was announced a week before the events of march the 17th -- perhaps that made the time away all the more precious. a few moments of calm before the storm, so to speak.

another trip (and the wierdness that accompanied it throughout) i've mentioned in the past (and, admittedly, haven't gotten back to continuing that tale -- someday). this time, though, was something of a first. primarily because it was a road trip. other times, other trips, have been made over longer distances via the public transport system; planes, boats (and an odd catamaran-type thing called SiKat), bancas of various largish sizes, jeepneys, tricycles -- but no trains (leastwise, none of the variety run by the philippine national railroads).

two cars, 7 adults, 2 children. the destination, pangasinan. where precisely, i didn't know. but that was all right by me.

more later.

paradise found

2005-04-01T15:26:00.000+08:00

well, not quite.

now we are faced with the aftermath of the company's black thursday, where the main server got zapped, and good, by the untested interactions between meralco, an uninterruptible power supply, and the building's generator.

turns out that the systems had been tested in following fashion: interrupt meralco and ups keeps power, interrupt meralco and generator activates. they had not been tried with all three in one test.

after some investigation, apparently in the haste to finish the building, the generator was wired to the ups with three identical black wires, so there was an issue of polarity (no at-a-glance way to tell which wire had to go where). so what actually happened was that meralco power went out, ups kept power on to the computers, generator came on after that -- and sucked all the power out of the ups' batteries.

...and the render farm was writing data to the main server's hard disk array.

one massive ouch.

four months of work, locked in the server, inaccessible. but we're fine, we've made backups, right?

not quite (again). i'd made a preliminary backup of our working data -- and filled up a hard disk array on another server. since we hadn't been able to get another server/storage solution, another backup was made, this time by my technical co-worker, but only of scenes that had been finalized. in this way, we were able to back up the entire project's most important data, or so we felt.

then that dark thursday rolls around, and therefore we have two backups, yes? my backup is only of the first 7 sequences, the scene backup is of the whole project. we ought to be fine.

not.

turns out that the server where we had stored the scene backup had been offline from monday that week, ostensibly to add more hard disks to the array. also turns out that the idle hands that had offlined the server had not backed the data up to some other location prior to adding the hard disks (and there was another location, with space to spare). so then the impossible had happened. we lost 60% of the project scene backups.

apple singapore troubleshooter comes in, and gives us no new hope. the system is well and truly screwed.

it is quite bleak indeed.

then, during one of the meeting-filled days that follow, where we are discussing a more redundant (hence safer) means of data management, something occurred to me.
we actually had a third, unlooked-for, backup. it was a natural offshoot of our 'localization' render process where scenes and images that a render job needs are copied locally to the render machines to eliminate network-incurred penalties.

there was a very real possibility that inspite of some blundering hands and limited inital backup space, the great majority of the shots that were finalized and rendered were intact and could be retrieved. i took the matter up first with my technical co-worker and he was enthused by the prospect.

later, i told the boss that i may have found a way to retrieve the project from almost total re-working, and he was really pleased. and he made a joke to the effect that if what i said was true, he'd treat me to a haircut. except that i'm bald... ...so i said that i'd really rather have a car...
...he thanked me for my honesty in that regard (after the thanks for saving the project), and said that that could be arranged. we'll see...

so the upshot is that prior to march 17, the project had made it to just over 95% completion -- and as of last week, after clogging the network with gigabytes of data from all render machines, and sifting through all those gigabytes, we had come to a point close enough to 95% of project data reconstructed.

a good thing, to be sure.

now comes the rendering. or re-rendering in this case. we have the project, and lost all the rendered image files.

still and all, much better than zero.

from a state of near-utter disaster, this is some form of paradise indeed.

rains and pours

2005-03-18T16:28:00.000+08:00

best blog this so i don't forget.

the day: thursday, march 17, 2005.

under the influence of the off-season typhoon auring, rains sweep into our corner of the metro. now, in our old building, such rain was cause for concern, as the electrical grid there seemed unusually reactive to wet weather. it would rain, and then the power would go out. not good for computers in general, and servers in particular, to have power outages whilst in the middle of extensive hard-disk activity (moreso for servers).

couldn't possibly happen in the new building. we're state of the art, so i've been told.

somewhere about an hour to going-home-time, lights flicker -- it rained just a while before. building's uninterruptible power supply kicks in -- computers all stay on as the building lights go dark. outside, the generator starts up -- and all the computers die. odd, but at the time no one was really concerned...

...until it was discovered that in the course of the outage, the main server had been impacted. seems that in the process of writing to the raid, the power outage had scrambled a file somewhere in the vastness of the array's terabytes of storage with the end result that the raid could no longer be accessed by the host computer.

odd, also, that such a seeming inconsequence as a single file system error would bring the whole server down like a pack of cards. small wonder that other hardware/software solutions make up the bulk of the internet hardware backbone.

for heaven's sake, not even the os-supplied raid administration or disk repair tools can seem to fix the error, and we're now approaching 24 hours since the event. for a fix, even the support line (so i've been told) could only offer that we ought to use a third-party disk repair tool -- and be prepared to wait three days to see whether we've lost anything.

so here we wait.

plumbing

2005-03-12T10:06:00.000+08:00

interesting, in an odd sort of way. in fact hadn't considered the matter at all -- the matter of the upstairs bathroom leaking into the nearby room on the same floor.

landperson said that it was because there had been no grout used in the shower floor drain installation. okay, took him at his word, and waited the requisite day or so for the grout to dry up prior to use.

the day of testing dawned, and there was another puddle of water in the other room.

hmm.

okay, now this doesn't make any sense. the shower floor is about an inch or two lower than the rest of the bathroom floor -- which is level with the rest of the second floor. so how is drainwater going up so as to puddle on the other side of the wall?

so, experiment time.

took a bath, this time though, in the old tried-and-true 'tabo and bucket' fashion.

end result, no puddle -- so far. from the indications, then, is that it may not have been the floor drain non-grouting that was the culprit, it may be that the piping to the shower head is leaking under pressure from the pressurized water tank.

we'll just have to see later, when we get back from work.