Ako si “poorboy”, laking probinsiya. Napadpad sa maynila para mag-aral. Marami akong hindi alam dito sa maynila at gustong matutunan. Maraming ka-inosentehan o ka-mangyanan, yan ang sabi nila. Noong dumating ako dito tuwang-tuwa ako sa naglalakihang building at iba’t ibang sasakyan. Whew! grabe kakaiba talaga dito sa maynila. Una ko noong gustong matutunan eh sumakay ng LRT. Hindi ko kasi alam sumakay ng LRT, yung naaalala ko pa nung bata eh yung token hehehe… Masaya ako nung nakatungtong ako dito pero takot din dahil madami akong hindi alam. Hindi ako nahihiya na aminin na wala akong alam sa mga bagay bagay kaysa magkunwari ako. Mas gusto ko nang natuto kahit na minsan napapahiya at least sa susunod alam ko na at may baon na akong dunong. Isipin mo na lang sobra ang tuwa ko ng nakasakay ako ng elevator hehehe paano sa probinsiya escalator lang pinagkakaguluhan na doon. Maraming masasayang bagay na nakakatuwa pero magulo. Maraming taong judgmental pero marami rin gustong tumulong. Haaayyy, masisi mo ba ako kung walang mga bagay na ganun sa probinsiya? Well, sa ngaun alam ko na lahat yan kaso may mga bagay pa din sa akin na nakakagulat paminsan minsan…

Tulad ng nangyari sa akin nitong nakaraang araw… Pumasok kami sa isang sikat na mall at balak sanang mamili ng aking kabiyak ng shades sa isang bigating store… mga 26k lang naman. Habang nasa store kami na yun nagtanong sia sa akin kung bagay ang salamin nia na napili eh ang sabi ko “ang panget, mukha kang bangaw”…. tsaka sabi ko ang mahal naman niyan… Paglabas namin ng store pinagalitan niya ako kasi daw pinagtinginan kami doon. Kasi daw pangmayaman na store yun kaya dapat wag kong sasabihin na mahal ang isang bagay. Pangalawa mali daw ang reaksyon ko na mukha kang bangaw. Nakakahiya daw kasi…
Sa isip ko naman ano naman ang masama kung magpakatotoo? Hindi ko naman kailangan makihalubilo sa mayayaman at mas naman siguro sila para makihalubilo sa akin. Kailan ko ba na umasal ng tulad ng mga reaksyon nila? Sabi ng kabiyak ko “judgmental” daw ang mayayaman, matapobre at mapanglait. Sabi ko naman hindi naman siguro… So, dapat daw umasal ako ng tama dahil mundo daw iyon ng mayayaman. Pero teka, shop lang naman yun saka bangaw at mahal lang naman si nabi ko… Sabi ko “Bakit ang mayayaman ba hindi nagsasabi ng bangaw o ng mahal?”. Sabi niya “OO” daw. Maghanap daw ako ng ganun sa FORBES. Hmmmm sadya bang matapobre ang mayayaman kapag nakakita ng mahihirap? Mapangkutya ba talaga ang mayayaman sa maling gawi ng mahihirap? Para sa akin hindi katanggaptanggap yun… Kasi lahat naman judgmental… Lahat naman kahit mahirap nangungutya at nanghuhusga sa kapwa mahirap. Nature na yun ng tao… Diba? Ikaw naniniwala ka ba na mali ang magsabi ng BANGAW sa (rustans)? at magsabi ng mahal ang isang item sa (springfield)? Kailan ba talagang makisama ka sa mayayaman? O mas magandang magpakatotoo?

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As celebration for their 10-year anniversary, Yahoo! Mail will offer unlimited mail storage capacity starting on May 2007 as announced on Tuesday.

The free version of Yahoo! Mail (basic), which is used by majority of users, offers only 1GB of storage and limited features such as the limited 10MB attachments. You need to upgrade to Yahoo! Mail plus to get more features you want including a “virtually unlimited” 2GB mail storage capacity and larger attachments.

Yahoo! Mail used to be the “giant” in mail industry but when Google started Gmail, millions have converted to it as their primary e-mail provider. This was due to the larger storage capacity - 2GB - and several other great features.

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Gone are the days when people who sat in front of computers all day long are deemed to be crazy nerdy anti-social introverted computer geeks with no social skills. These days, these people are simply called… bloggers.. though they retained the adjective “crazy.” How else would you describe people who reveal their deepest darkest thoughts to the world through their blogs?

But anyway, I recently met four of these bloggers in Manila — Snglguy, Annamanila, Verns, and Prab — and they were definitely far from being anti-social and introverted, though they were all crazy. In fact, they were all chatty, gregarious, sociable, and rollickin’ people.

Read more in Toe’s Kurokuroatbp.

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An engineering student raised his hand and asked me: “If there is a God, why is there suffering in the world?” (Read on.)

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Canon recently released updates to their DSLR software suite. The Canon RAW Codec 1.0 for Windows Vista seems to be the most notable among the updates since it is a new addition to the suite. The EOS Utility 2.0 Updater for Windows is also a welcome update especially to the Windows Vista users who had troubles in making the older version of their EOS Utility work with their Windows Vista PCs.

More info at Shutter Box PHilippines :: Canon Releases Updates for DSLR Software Suite

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For those of us here who felt you’ve failed and did not finish well, I dedicate this poem to you all.

Imagineerings

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The Hilton experience.

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The other day, we were driving around with Katy in the backseat of the car. As we waited for a light to turn green in an intersection, a homeless woman approached our car begging for some money. Hubby, rolled the window and put some in the cup she was holding. As the woman walked away, she stopped by the backseat window and started waving and talking to Katy, who looked up at her while happily curled up on a soft pillow. Instantly, I felt my throat tighten as I realized that the little pup seems to be living such a comfortable life compared to this woman.

Read more at Ir-ruminations…

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Three months doing nothing but read IR texts, see an occasional movie, smoke cigarettes and swim in the vast ocean of the web is driving me insane.

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Inspiration from this essay comes Ash Identity’s Ranting’s post about Paul Graham’s Essay Why to Not Not Start A Startup

Paul Graham of Y Combinator comes up again with compelling reasons on why one should and should not start a startup - me? I did one a long time ago with MIB but I think it’s time to start one within the next few weeks - so look out world! Check out the audio here.

Anyway, Paul’s post got me shaking my head and laughing at myself and at his essay many times. I’ve never read a more challenging and at the same time funnier post than his essay. Funny, you say? Because I felt that he was not only talking to me but talking to a whole new generation of Filipino entrepreneurs that stand to make a lot of money and respect from the confluence of great IT talent, creativity and entrepreneurship that God has blessed our nation with. I’ll try to go through the reasons why I (or you dear reader) shouldn’t start a startup and see if it applies to me:

1. I’m too young - by Paul Graham’s standard doesn’t apply to me, I’m already 33 and the median age of the world is 27. I think I started by first start-up by accident in 1999 and I was 26 that time. So I actually beat the average by one year. I think after a 7 years of that first start-up I should start another one.

Score: 1 point that I should do a startup.

quote: There’s a reason we have a distinct word “adult” for people over a certain age. There is a threshold you cross. It’s conventionally fixed at 21, but different people cross it at greatly varying ages. You’re old enough to start a startup if you’ve crossed this threshold, whatever your age.

2. Too inexperienced - I’ve had experience in starting companies in the Philippines, Burma, UAE and Kabul. So I guess this doesn’t apply to me.

Score: 2 points that I should do a startup.

quote: So now I’d advise people to go ahead and start startups right out of college. There’s no better time to take risks than when you’re young. Sure, you’ll probably fail. But even failure will get you to the ultimate goal faster than getting a job.

3. Not determined enough - I think I’m more comfortable working on my own projects than on projects that are not my own.

Score: 3 points that I should do a startup.

quote: How can you tell if you’re determined enough, when Larry and Sergey themselves were unsure at first about starting a company? I’m guessing here, but I’d say the test is whether you’re sufficiently driven to work on your own projects. Though they may have been unsure whether they wanted to start a company, it doesn’t seem as if Larry and Sergey were meek little research assistants, obediently doing their advisors’ bidding. They started projects of their own.

4. Not smart enough - Paul says that “If you’re smart enough to worry that you might not be smart enough to start a startup, you probably are”. Well by taking that test, I think I’m smart enough. I’ve learned that I would need a team of people who can do the stuff that I can’t do if I’m going to succeed at what I want to put together.

Score: 4 points that I should do a startup.

quote: Silicon Valley can warp your perspective on this, because there’s a cult of smartness here. People who aren’t smart at least try to act that way. But if you think it takes a lot of intelligence to get rich, try spending a couple days in some of the fancier bits of New York or LA.

5. Know nothing about business - I’ve had enough experience trying to make money and making money from businesses that I had almost zero experience. Some businesses that I tried to do were so new that the people I was partnering with were telling me that we had no mentors because we were the only ones doing what we’re doing at that time. So I guess, I have fun NOT KNOWING anything about the business I’m getting into.

Score: 5 points that I should do a startup.

quote: So why do so many people argue with me? I think one reason is that they hate the idea that a bunch of twenty year olds could get rich from building something cool that doesn’t make any money. They just don’t want that to be possible. But how possible it is doesn’t depend on how much they want it to be.

6. No cofounder - I tried to do this once but by circumstance I got a cofounder. My take on this? It’s good to have a cofounder that you can bounce your ideas to and also to rescue you from your mistakes or crises every now and then.

Score: 6 points that I should do a startup.

quote: Not having a cofounder is a real problem. A startup is too much for one person to bear. And though we differ from other investors on a lot of questions, we all agree on this. All investors, without exception, are more likely to fund you with a cofounder than without.

7. No idea - Most of my thinking time is spent on trying to think through on how something can be made more efficient. With localization, there are many Silicon Valley startups whose processes can be contextualized to apply for a very specific local settinng. Language and culture are a natural barrier for one startup’s processes to be adopted into another. You could probably do a Wiki to have intensive localization but I’m thinking of what Neurona does for the Spanish and Italian speaking business communities in the world.

Score: 7 points that I should do a startup.

quote: So even if the problem is simply that you don’t have a date on Saturday night, if you can think of a way to fix that by writing software, you’re onto something, because a lot of other people have the same problem.

8. No room for more startups - I’m a firm believer that the world is an open syste, that you don’t need a piece of the pie because you can have your own pie and that it’s better to swim in a blue ocean rather than a red ocean.

Score: 8 points that I should do a startup.

quote: A lot of people look at the ever-increasing number of startups and think “this can’t continue.” Implicit in their thinking is a fallacy: that there is some limit on the number of startups there could be. But this is false. No one claims there’s any limit on the number of people who can work for salary at 1000-person companies. Why should there be any limit on the number who can work for equity at 5-person companies?

9. Family to support - This is the reason I’m probably still single! Yahihu!

Score: 9 points that I should do a startup.

quote: What you can do, if you have a family and want to start a startup, is start a consulting business you can then gradually turn into a product business. Empirically the chances of pulling that off seem very small. You’re never going to produce Google this way. But at least you’ll never be without an income.

10. Independently wealthy - I’m not yet THIS independently wealthy so I guess this doesn’t apply to me!

Score: 10 points that I should do a startup.

quote: There is a bit of a problem with retirement, though. Like a lot of people, I like to work. And one of the many weird little problems you discover when you get rich is that a lot of the interesting people you’d like to work with are not rich. They need to work at something that pays the bills. Which means if you want to have them as colleagues, you have to work at something that pays the bills too, even though you don’t need to. I think this is what drives a lot of serial entrepreneurs, actually.

11. Not ready for a commitment - Frankly, I’d rather be committed on something I own that on just doing a job.

Score: 11 points that I should do a startup.

quote: If you start a startup that succeeds, it’s going to consume at least three or four years. (If it fails, you’ll be done a lot quicker.) So you shouldn’t do it if you’re not ready for commitments on that scale. Be aware, though, that if you get a regular job, you’ll probably end up working there for as long as a startup would take, and you’ll find you have much less spare time than you might expect.

12. Need for structure - I prefer to be organic about my processes at this point in time and I’d rather have people in my team to just focus on what they’re good at.

Score: 12 points that I should do a startup.

quote: How do you tell if you’re independent-minded enough to start a startup? If you’d bristle at the suggestion that you aren’t, then you probably are.

13. Fear of uncertainty - I like the adventure of doing something new and most of the time I do learn a lot and also make money on the side so far.

Score: 13 points that I should do a startup.

quote: I asked managers at big companies, and they all said they’d prefer to hire someone who’d tried to start a startup and failed over someone who’d spent the same time working at a big company.

14. Don’t realize what you’re avoiding - I realize what I’m avoiding and the last thing I want is a job.

Score: 14 points that I should do a startup.

quote: One reason people who’ve been out in the world for a year or two make better founders than people straight from college is that they know what they’re avoiding. If their startup fails, they’ll have to get a job, and they know how much jobs suck.

15. Parents want you to be a doctor - I used to want to be a doctor but after learning about a doctor whose first few patients died and people started calling him Dr. Death, I changed my mind. I then dreamed of being an aeronautical engineer or an aircraft mechanic when I realized that if you messed up, you actually kill more people in one instance than if you’re Dr. Death. So I decided to get a computer science degree instead. Hah!

Score: 15 points that I should do a startup.

quote: The parents who want you to be a doctor may simply not realize how much things have changed. Would they be that unhappy if you were Steve Jobs instead?

16. A job is a default - I’m so used to starting businesses instead of being employed that my default is to start a business. If I can start a business WHILE being employed then it’s much better because you have a safety net. Later on, you find out if you start businesses that your job is to START UP businesses.

Score: A perfect 16 points out of 16 that I should definitely start a startup.

quote: It’s exciting to think we may be on the cusp of another shift like the one from farming to manufacturing. That’s why I care about startups. Startups aren’t interesting just because they’re a way to make a lot of money. I couldn’t care less about other ways to do that, like speculating in securities. At most those are interesting the way puzzles are. There’s more going on with startups. They may represent one of those rare, historic shifts in the way wealth is created.

What would happen if the hundreds of thousands of Filipino IT practitioners decide to bootstrap their own startups and tap into the wealth of creativity and artistry of their fellow Filipinos? I think there’s new business and revenue model that can be made about this and solve the equation Art=Money. I’ll give it a try for the next few years and hopefully I don’t need to be single by then.

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“It needs no belaboring who ‘Hamlet Redux’s’ director is. Tony Mabesa is a multi-awarded director, actor, playwright and teacher who, in over five decades of prolific artistic work, has become a lion of local theater. Under his firm, steady stewardship, Dulaang UP, the official performing group for theater of the University of the Philippines, has staked out a robust position as the country’s most consistent interpreter of Filipino and world drama, as well as the birthing ground for generations of artists and performers who have enriched Philippine theater, movies and TV.”

That’s how I introduced Tony Mabesa when I wrote a feature on his then-upcoming production of “Hamlet Redux” in December last year. His last directorial work for Dulaang UP before “Hamlet Redux” was “Gabriela, an Oratorio,” which I chided in my review for being “neither particularly about Gabriela Silang nor an oratorio.” Meeting him for an interview months later meant, as you could imagine, being nervous as hell, given Mr. Mabesa’s fiery reputation. Would he upbraid me for my upstart opinions? Would he bark at me and cut me down to size?

Read interview here.

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This is my first time doing this.

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Last semester, I compared and contrasted my subjects to foods, this time, I’ll verdict them where they should go. And of course, my subjects are not divine, it was just the title. Lol.

CFE2 - Inferno

Yeah, inferno. I thought I’ll enjoy this subject because learning Theology has a new level in college. Thanks to my boring professor who always forgot to bring something very important in class and basically, she ruined everything! Muchas Gracias!

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Sa panghahalukay ko ng website na para sa mahilig sa horoscope, nakita ko ‘to: 

Daily BabyScopes: Think “Look Who’s Talking” with an astrological edge. Advice that speaks directly to your little Junior or Princess: “Be creative and try something new. Maybe rub your oatmeal in your hair.”

Daily CatScopes: Daily feline advice spoken directly to your kitty on whether to spice up their life by demanding a new brand of catnip, or getting motivated to deal with that annoying mouse under your house.

Daily DogScopes: How are the heavens affecting your dog? Advice written directly to your pooch on whether they needs to run all day or curl up in their bed and take a nap with their favorite.

…um.ok.

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Scorpio (Oct 23 - Nov 21)[?]

The Bottom Line

A friend has a great social idea brewing but needs your help with the planning.

In Detail

One of your most boisterous friends has a great social idea brewing, and he or she might want your help with some of the planning. This person isn’t quite on the ball with all the details — not the way you always are. Helping out will feel really good right now, so you should eagerly volunteer to do whatever you can do. Organization is something you will excel at today, and you can help make even the most complicated plan come together seamlessly.

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