Excessive Force: The Martial Law Parody

Photo taken from www.canada.com

In a country that has triumphantly launched the peaceful EDSA Revolution to seek freedom from a dictator that declared Martial Law, the assault on the Manila Peninsula to stop rallyists from asking President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo from resigning seems to be a leap backward into the the Philippines' Dark Ages. When more than 50 journalists covering the assault were arrested by police, doesn't it remind you of the time when the government controlled the media?

How do you justify blasting into a hotel lobby with a tank when the rallyists waiting for you are not even armed? That is extremely excessive force! There was no need to destroy property, there was no need to throw in the tear gas canisters! Has the government gone into the assault first, talk later mode?

The Filipino people have seen this before. The Filipino people have been oppressed by this for far too long. The Filipino people have risen above this once before!

Do you prefer anarchy and military rule to peace and democracy? Do you plan to bleed this country dry then destabilize it so that all our investors will find other places to bring their money to? What we are seeing certainly doesn't inspire confidence in your regime, Madame President. What exactly is your plan for our country?

We are all Filipinos. We are one nation. Why can't we act for the common good instead of destroying our country with every year that goes by? Why can't we remember that we conquered Martial Law peacefully once?

Five Thanksgiving Weekend Firsts

1. My husband and his long-time friend brought me to Hooters. Did you know that Hooters is actually kid-friendly? Although the servers did wear short orange shorts and tank tops, they were very wholesome - it was all fun and games. I had one grand patron margarita, a couple of glasses of water and coffee with a plate of chicken wings. My husband and his friend enjoyed several beers and photo opps with the Miller Lite ladies who were giving away posters that night.

2. We delivered our first batch of party trays (lengua estofado and leche flan), I advertised these party trays in a souvenir program that would be distributed this Saturday - hopefully we get a few more orders.

3. My husband and I went to Home Depot for their Black Friday Sale and I found the first power tool I saw for house cleaning manufactured by Black & Decker (ok, so I am not counting my Rainbow, because that's not sold at a tools store). I was very tempted to purchase one, it scrubs your floors, your bath tubs, countertops and sinks - and runs on batteries! How cool is that?

4. I gave my friends leche flan and ube halaya as thank you gifts for supporting my husband in their recently concluded fundraiser - people actually asked me how much they were so they can order from me in the future... I've never given away food as thank you gifts before although I have brought food to gatherings for taste-tests:)

5. I purchased my first set of Bose speakers - I originally wanted to get a very cheap Sony 5.1 home theater system with HD upconvert 5-disc DVD player for our living room TV, but my husband said that since it needed 1000 W it was going to use up too much electricity. While looking around Best Buy for bargains, I saw these displays of multimedia speakers. I was choosing between a Klipsch or a Bose set (they were on the same price range - on sale they were at par with the cheaper brands), but when I listened to the displays Bose clearly had better sound quality than any of the others. And just my luck, I found an open-box one and got $10 off! Note that I don't own a Tivo, I watch my missed TV shows online - on my PC. Now I have a great sound system to listen to my TV shows better - and I find myself putting on cds of music more often now while working on my side projects. This purchase is definitely well worth it!

Secure Programming - One More To Do...

The Secure Programming Council is preparing standardized tests for programmers to test their knowledge on incorporating security in their applications.

Although it will test basic skills like form input validation and session management that programmers should be well-versed in. It will also test knowledge of different encryption techniques, which I only learned because I took a network security course when I took my MS IT.

I think that they should think of educating the programmers first and then giving them standardized exams. Note, nowhere in their proposal was it indicated that they were going to offer secure programming classes/seminars to help get these programmers up to par in security.

I'm sure I'm ranting only because I find so many things to learn in my to-do list, what with porting my PHP 4 applications to PHP 5 - actually coding in PHP 5, using the stored procedures in MySQL 5, AJAX, and now secure programming... Let me just say, WAAAAAAHHHH!

Deep breaths, count to 10... Who says I'm not stressed?! I should have just stayed in chemical engineering. ACK!

A Thanksgiving Story

My husband and I had to make a batch of leche flan for our friends and family this Thanksgiving. Having left the researching of the recipe up to him, we had come home from the market with several cans of condensed milk - and only condensed milk.

So Erick had to run down our neighborhood Ralph's to buy evaporated milk while I started mixing the rest of the ingredients for the leche flan.

He came home smiling from ear to ear, announcing in his brand of awe and wonder, "Pangga, I made someone happy today!"

This is one of my husband's qualities that I love so much, he revels in the simple pleasure of knowing he has helped someone - whether it's giving his change to the homeless person on the street or getting a smile out of someone he's visited in the hospital. And that will be what he will tell me the minute he comes through the door, "Pangga, may napasaya ako ngayong araw! (I made someone happy today!)"

When he parked the truck at Ralph's, he noticed that one of the grocery carts left in the parking lot had a woman's purse in it. Someone must have left their purse behind, distracted by thoughts of preparing their thanksgiving meal. My husband brought the purse to the store manager so that if someone comes back for it, it will be in safe hands and not in a public place where anyone can pick it up and not return it.

On his way home, just as he was leaving the store, a woman ran after him. She was the one who lost her purse. She thanked him profusely, she was so happy that her purse had been returned to her - she even offered my husband money as a reward. My husband declined and wished her a happy thanksgiving. The woman cried tears of joy, she was so grateful for my husband who was a stranger to her.

When my husband came home and told me the story, I felt how happy he was at having done such a good deed. The woman's gratefulness was enough reward for him. I think very few people know this about my husband, how much he loves helping others. His father was the same way.

And I feel that our lives are blessed because of his good deeds. I must admit I'm not as trusting or as generous as my husband is, but I am learning with his example. I think I married a really great man - and I am reminded of this fact everyday.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

LA's Next Top Model 2 - A Fundraiser

Photos from the fundraiser my husband and I helped out last Saturday, November 17,2007, LA's Next Top Model 2.

"It was the most fun show ever! I was laughing from start to finish." - Rico 5

Good job, LA Chapter! Thank you for all your support.

Screengrab Add On for Firefox

Most of the web developers I know use Firefox as their primary web browser. I like it primarily because it opens one window and then all the tabs within that I'll ever need in one day - very much like the Opera browser we used in my old workplace.

The first IT company I worked for introduced me to the pure indulgence of Opera. Why do you have to keep closing your browser tabs only to open them again when you get back to work the next day? When you can close them all today and have Opera remember what was in each tab the next day when you open it again. One less thing to do when you're raring to start on that code you couldn't quite get to work right yesterday. Nice, right?

The only problem is you are usually developing for millions of people who have never heard of the Opera browser! Most internet users still use either IE or Firefox, and these are the main components of your daily web traffic. You want to give them a great online experience on their platform so even if you are programming in Opera, you have to test your styles and templates for compatibility with these browsers.

When I first worked in the US, I had to adjust to coding in dreamweaver instead of ultraedit, which was a very big adjustment AND to top it all off, I had to adjust to viewing my web pages in IE or Firefox.

Since they upgraded Firefox to the same one window design as Opera, I didn't really mind it as much. Except for the fact that Print Screen did not seem to get the whole webpage just what you can see. Being a visual group of IT developers, we struggled to get a printed version of the website to put notes in during discussions and to write on when we needed to change features, but with the advent of CSS formatting that became a very arduous task.

That is, until we discovered that Firefox had this screengrab utility that literally works as easily as a Save As utility. It saves the whole web page as an image, which was exactly how we needed it! I've installed firebug for future use in an online class, but have never really tried it out. I installed web developer which is supposed to make my life easier, never used it. But here was a tool I might actually use and it's such a simple application, you'd think they'd have it pre-installed with the original package! I guess not everyone has the same needs as we do here...

Considering our whole internet department still likes using visual desk calendars for tracking deadline instead of a purely electronic one, this is a great add on for our department.

Firefox is looking better and better with each passing day. Thank you for aspiring to be a truly open source browser.

Christmas Tree Ornaments

Someone had this really brilliant idea of buying Christmas ornaments as gifts this year after going into our on-campus bookstore. So I got a set of these beautiful angels shown above, a set of my personal favorite African American wood and metal angels that say (Hope, Love, Faith and Joy) and a set of gift-themed jingle buddies - I have an employee discount *sheepish grin*. Of course, someone intended them as gifts yet who wouldn't fall in love with these miniature masterpieces? I'll give you three guesses on whose tree they end up in this Christmas *wink, wink*.

These angels are from Roman, Inc., in case you want to get a set of your own. There's a Fontanini Nativity Set I have my eye on - here's hoping they don't get sold until we get that 50% discount after our Christmas Party!

I guess it's Plan B for those Christmas gifts...

Decline of the Dailies

A featured editorial in the New York Times stated that at least 300 newspapers have stopped publication in the last 30 years and that many of the surviving ones are struggling financially. Not long ago there was a story that the oldest newspaper ever printed has closed its publication.

I'm not a very avid newspaper reader. I only became a regular news reader when I discovered CNN.com and the Inquirer.net websites (probably why I didn't do so well in current events).

When I had a lot of time in my hands, I liked doing the Sunday Crossword, granted I asked my dad for most of the answers - I enjoyed the experience. When I graduated I used the weekend paper to look for job postings. When they deliver the paper, I usually go to the Lifestyle section or the Comic strips.

I think that with the changing pace of everyday life, people have forgotten the comfort of sitting down for coffee while reading the morning paper. Think about your usual morning, waking up late, queuing up at a local coffee shop for your caffeine shot on the go, driving/commuting to work and opening up your RSS Reader to glance at the morning's headline. There is simply no time for the hundreds of paragraph in a typical newspaper.

And a whole industry is declining because of this lifestyle change! In my opinion, the newspaper industry should find a way to adapt - to go online at the very least and gain the benefits of the rise of online advertising. Newspapers already have great content, they just need to manage and serve it up a little different from the way they're used to. Hey, the New York Times is online!

Curing Photos with Adobe Photoshop CS3

I bought a book a couple of weeks back entitled Adobe Photoshop CS3 for Photographers by Martin Evening. I got this 50% off coupon from Barnes and Noble and it was in addition to the 20% off on the book. I paid around $16 for a $50 book.

I have been meaning to read it since I bought it, but never got to doing so until last night when I was looking at the picture of our friend, Father O'Malley, who is celebrating his 50th anniversary as a priest. My husband and I had volunteered to produce a big portrait of him in a frame with the borders signed by all of the LA Chapter members.

My husband had a pretty decent photo of him with a great smile, but when I viewed it in actual pixels I noticed that his skin had broken out and in the harsh light his skin looked discolored.

I flipped through the book and found the section about the healing brush. I dabbed it on one of his pimples and it instantly lightened the redness, I dabbed it again and the pimple disappeared! I read further into the chapter and fixed the discoloration on our friend's teeth, brought out the color of his eyes, lightened and highlighted his eyes, took out the purplish veins, and yes, even some of his deep wrinkles.

Now I have used CS2 and tried to do this, but it was always too obvious when I did edits on faces. This almost automatically blended in my cures. I love the new CS3 Extended! And kudos to Martin Evening on a very informative and easy to follow book. I have always wanted to be able to cure facial imperfections in photos, now I can!

For anyone who uses Photoshop, check out CS3 extended. It's really really a step up!

Product Review: Neutrogena Advanced Solutions Facial Peel

When I woke up this morning my first thought was I should've done my facial peel routine last night. I've been trying this Advanced Solutions Facial Peel from Neutrogena for more than a month now to take away my pimple scars. The package says it will take about 8 weeks before you see visible results, but I have noticed the change after about week 2 - after 4 applications. Although it will not give you drastic results right away, I do notice how my pimple scars seem to be fading away.

And if you have done your research on such treatments, you'd know that this isn't the facial peel Neutrogena is marketing for removing acne scars. This is for anti-aging, removes the appearance of fine lines and renews the skin. I chose this over the treatment they had for acne scars because that had acid, this is acid free.

My husband is very particular on what I put on my face he reads the labels of all the facial products I buy - he even got me on the Neutrogena oil free facial wash to control breakouts. I have really sensitive skin, I break out very easily and he knows I really hate it when that happens.

I would recommend this product to anyone who has gone through really bad acne in their youth and are looking for ways to get rid of the red marks left by the experience. It's very gentle and it smells great. And for those, like me, who were used to going to a facial clinic in the Philippines - it's very easy to apply. All you have to do is clean your face. Place a thin layer of the facial peel all over your face, avoiding eye areas. Wait for 7 to 10 minutes and then with a small amount of water on your fingers rub your face gently, using just enough water to activate the microbeads for an exfoliating effect. Then rinse off and that's it!

It costs around $25, but I'm probably on week 7 or 8 already (I lost count) and I have just used maybe 1/4 of the bottle. You don't need a lot to get great results!

For more information about the product go to: http://www.neutrogena.com/ProductsDetails_262.asp?lProductLineID=13

Onion Skinned

Onion skin a.k.a. balat sibuyas is a term Filipinos use to describe someone who is overly sensitive to what other people say or do to them. The onion has paper-thin skin, easily pierced, providing no protection at all for the onion. In the same way, a person who is onion-skinned or balat sibuyas is someone who lets everything get to them.

Our spiritual leader once said, if you truly want to serve God and help bring people closer to God, you cannot be onion-skinned. Because when you are good, there will be people who will be envious and may say or do things to bring you down. A true servant will not mind what others are doing, a true servant will continue being good no matter what. Remember when Jesus was about to die He said, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do..." Now that's humility, to be able to forgive those who try to hurt you, to the point of trying to help them earn graces.

How will you bring people closer to God when you get mad at them every time they say something bad about you or do things that offend you? How will you help them earn graces if you are angry at them or if you do not want to be with them because they brought you down.

In society, there are people who cannot help but be a vital part of a team. It maybe because you have the right skills. It maybe because you know how to use your assets to reach a goal. And when people start realizing that they need you, that you are an asset to an organization then you will feel it. You will feel certain people trying to bring you down, though they may smile when they greet you. You feel how they struggle to minimize your role in the team. Maybe it is because they are scared of being too dependent and not be able to organize events without you. Maybe they are just being nice and know you are busy with work and your family. And the very worst reason? Crab mentality. Maybe they just don't want you to succeed because they want that top spot. They will step all over you to prevent you from getting to the top.

So you must resist the temptation to get angry and just serve. Serve with all your heart and play deaf or pretend to be blind. Let the bad things other people do wash over you and strive to do better. For you and not for anyone else... Learn to be tough, but never forget to love.

Too Many Things...

My days have been filled with too many things since they got my husband to agree to join that fundraising event for their chapter. I've been busy selling photo calendars to their church group, e-mailing all the business cards I have gathered from shows etc. for souvenir program ads and getting my friends to go to the event for dinner tickets. I've also designed several flyers for my husband's catering fundraising gig and his pressure washing service - still for the fundraising.

I've tried to get a little programming done for our planned web application - I'm learning PHP 5 at the same time - since it's so different from PHP 4 and I will soon port over all the code in our office to it.

Plus I have this Photoshop CS3 for Digital Photographers book that I am trying to start reading...

Yes, too many things... But I enjoy all of them. Yes, that's who I am - the eternal student of life, wanting to know how everything works and experience it all.

Location: Porch

I received two packages yesterday. One from my wonderful aunt, who sent my Adobe CS3 Web Premium via Fed Ex Next Day, which came promptly at around 1:45 PM. And the other, which I technically received at 5 AM this morning, after checking the UPS tracking website intending to complain about my delayed delivery. My package's status was "Delivered", and when I went to look for where they actually delivered it, the page simply stated: Location: Porch.

Granted that I live in a quiet neighborhood where you can leave packages on one's doorstep and they will be there when you finally realize you need to retrieve them, a knock on the door would have been nice. I was waiting for that package for a good part of the day yesterday! If I hadn't gone online to check my delivery status, I wouldn't have thought of checking my doorstep - and don't tell me 7:16 PM seemed too late to knock, that's the time indicated in the delivery report.

Ok, deep breath... The calendar was beautiful! I am completely satisfied with how it turned out, now convincing my church group that they want one for $25 is another matter all together. I am using it as a product sample for a fundraising project - in support of my loving husband, who was kind enough to say my design did look good even though I did wake him up at five in the morning to show it to him.

National Memory Screening Day 2007

The Alzheimer's Foundation of 
America is leading this year's 
National Memory Screening Day 
on November 13, 2007.  This is
to promote the early detection of 
Alzheimer's and related diseases.

 

My father-in-law had dementia before he died, dementia is caused by Alzheimer's and usually occurs in people 80 years old and above.  Alzheimer's affects a person's quality of life, it affects what a person needs.  When Alzheimer's is detected early on, appropriate intervention may then be arranged.

The screening site in Orange County, California is at:
Apex Research Institute
999 N. Tustin Ave., Suite 120
Santa Ana
Date: November 13
Time: 7:00AM-4:00PM
For Information: 714-542-3008

For information about other screening sites, please click here.

If you or loved ones are having problems with memory, please go for screening.