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Gawking at Google Earth’s high resolution sattelite photos of Cebu
City, I noticed the new markers that indicated places of interest. The
usual suspects were there, the Sto. Niño Basilica, Magellan’s Cross,
Fort San Pedro…. then the Rajah Humabon Marker?

Lo and behold! A place in Cebu City I had never noticed, let alone visited!

The marker is located near the Cebu Cathedral, right across its
museum (I didn’t know the cathedral had a museum, either). Apparently
it was put up to commemorate Humabon’s accepting Christianity as his
religion (in exchange for Magellan’s help in fighting Lapu-lapu).

Taking advantage of the Holy Week weekend, I hied off for the marker
hoping to take some photographs with what I thought was a half charged
camera. It was actually nearly empty, and a good thing as well.

Just like many important historical spots in Cebu, the marker is in
a bad state of disrepair. There is a small obelisk that marks God knows
what (a masonic symbol in front of a Catholic church? Hmmmm…..) since
its plaques had been removed. Behind the obelisk, a large bust of Rajah
Humabon that was made by an artisan of obviously little skill. It
looked like it was made of cast concrete. Beside the bust was a
homeless person doing the only thing he/she could do in the face of
his/her dire situation…. sleep. Around the perimeter were street
children and I was wondering when they would begin to pester me for my
change. Surprisingly, and possibly because I had dressed down for the
occasion, they didn’t.

I had gone to the monument hoping to relish in the discovery of a
place I had never been to, but instead, I found myself mourning, not at
the death of Jesus Christ, our Holy Week rituals are more for ourselves
anyway, but for the Cebuanos, and how we seem to cast aside those
objects that remind us of our history. The city library, the city
cemetery, Bantayan ng Hari in Mandaue, even Fort San Pedro at one time
have been victims of this neglect (and soon the Cebu International
Convention Center?).

Indeed, the city government doesn’t seem to have the gumption to
develop the tourism potential of the city other than support the
building of hotels. Tourism is the major draw for Cebu, and yet, we
seem to take more pride in showing off the squalor of such dubious
tourist spots as Larsi-an and Pasil rather than showing off Cebu’s role
in world history.

I have long dreamed of a time when Cebu’s cultural commission would
be given more teeth. Or perhaps a new commission could be created at
the metropolitan level to work on the development of our culture and
history. I dream of the area around the Cathedral, Pari-an and the
Basilica Sto. Niño being closed to traffic and becoming a place where
residents and tourists will be able to promenade without fear of being
molested, free to visit places that show off Cebuano culture like Casa
Gorordo.

Indeed, developing that swatch of Cebu’s downtown as a historical
treasure, could serve as the catalyst for the urban renewal Cebu so
desperately needs. It would give the Cebuanos pride in themselves (so
that perhaps they stop calling their city "Sugbo", a derogatory name
foisted upon us by Tagalogs in the Quezon administration), and the
wherewithal to work on the blight that plagues our City.

What’s with the color black? Black is a perfectly nice color for clothes, but not when people go all gaga over it.

Not
too long ago, Cebu was black crazy. Perhaps taking a cue from the black
NBA outfits (you have to admit, the black Chicago Bulls uniform was way
cooler than the red), everyone was wearing black. Black was everywhere!
On the street, in the classrooms. Black was, understandably, the
dominant color at the party scene.

Well, Cebuanos managed to carry it too far.

After one night of hard gaming in
the video arcade at the mall with my daughter. We looked around the
corner to where the party places were to find a FLOOD of…. BLACK! It
seemed like hell had taken over! From the perfectly delicious
mini-dresses to the pretenders who just slipped on black t-shirts over
their jeans (thus ensuring Cebuano’s reputation for under dressing for
a party), not a single soul seemed brave enough to wear another color.

Seeing
a party hardy friend, I couldn’t resist saying, and within earshot of
at least a half-dozen similarly coiffed party goers, "Gee, everyone’s
in black. WHO DIED?"

I’d like to believe that’s when Cebuanos started re-introducing other colors into their night life.

Manny wins a warm-up fight, and he’s celebrated once again as a national hero? Come on, I’m a big Manny Pacquiao fan, but somehow, winning a warm-up fight isn’t exactly an achievement that merits an audience with the President to me.

I think it’s time to put things in perspective, Manny still isn’t world super-featherweight champion. He fought Larios only to prepare for a rematch with… Erik Morales, whom he beat badly last time out, and who isn’t THE champion either.

In other words, Larios was just homework for an equally meaningless fight.

Dang it, Manny, don’t you think it’s time you went for the real deal? Look at this guy in the picture, the one who wears the REAL championship belt. Not that “INTERNATIONAL” belt you wear that shows you’re king of the second level division. Doesn’t he look good in the picture, posing like a true champion deserving of that belt?

Say, didn’t you beat him already?

Look, Manny, a rematch with Erik Morales isn’t that important. It’s all about a lot of HOT AIR. Yours and his. You should be fighting for a real belt in your next fight. Call the promoters and postpone the Morales match. You should be fighting Marco Antonio Barrera.

Unless, of course, deep in your heart, you know your win against him was just a fluke, and you’re too afraid to fight him again.

Wouldn’t you know it? He says he lost to you because he, “wore the wrong kind of gloves.” When did you last hear that lame excuse?

In the early days when Personal Computers had just started to saturate the market, life was simple for the neanderthal geeks. Back then, when a 286 cost P50,000.00 and the peso had real value, he only had two choices, either he had an IBM Personal Computer or he had a clone.

I got started on an 80 Mhz 386 AMD bag of chips with 4MB of memory (making 286 users salivate) with a black and white VGA monitor that I later upgraded to color. For some reason, even 3-D apps could run without a hitch on such low power. My favorite game at the time was Wing Commander 2 for which I proudly created a boot disk to take advantage of "expanded memory."

Back to the point. Since IBM created the fundamental PC design, the only "original" Personal Computers had the IBM logo proudly emblazoned on them. Everything else was a "clone". Reputable names such as Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, Philips (were there other names? and yes Philips used to manufacture PC’s, it was Philips’ advertising that in fact gave rise to the term "bag of chips") were considered "branded", but clones nevertheless.

Unlike IBM, Apple was more hesitant to release to the public the blueprint of its Macintosh, hence, there is no longer such thing as a Mac clone, allowing Apple greater control (and hegemony) of the quality of Mac products.

If your computer had been put together by your local neighborhood computer shop, it was considered "generic" or a "bag of chips".

Usage has confused the three terms, as people often refer to generic computers as clones. Well, esentially correct as ALL generic PC’s necessarily are clones. But we now know that not all clones are generic.

Well, this all has been relative peace and stability, because IBM’s personal computer business has been purchased by Lenovo Computers, China’s biggest manufacturer of *gasp* CLONES!

So what exactly is a clone now? If a manufacturer of clones owns IBM’s pc business, will anything branded "IBM" be considered a clone too? Are Lenovo clones already REAL personal computers? Should we just reduce the distinctions to "branded" and "generic"? Or "branded" and "clones"?

Does it really matter to you and me?

No.

Why on earth did I wite this?

Maybe I just had to get it out of my system.

I should write something more meaningful.

Next: HOW IBM LOST THE OS WARS, AND HOW IT CAN STILL WIN

More `puter stuff that everyone should know about. With the advent of the new motherboards that support the latest 64bit and dual core processors, POWER requirements have changed. This is one area where branded pc’s beat the generic "bag of chips". Since most of us scrimp on our pc’s, chances are that you have a computer assembled by someone you know rather than that nifty Hewlett-Packard on display. (Mac users: disregard the last sentence, you don’t know what the heck us PC geeks are talking about).

Fiddling around with my daughter’s spanking new PC that has one intake fan and two exhaust fans apart from the processor fan to cool that 3Ghz Intel monster, I was appalled to find it would not boot. Read that again: My daughter’s brand new pc WOULD NOT BOOT!

Looking through the see through casing, I could see a green light on. Not knowing what it was, I read the manual and found that it indicated the computer was on standby mode. Using that as a basis for browsing Intel’s website docs, I found that the likely problem was that the power supply could not generate sufficient standby power (at least 8A). The see through casing once again revealed that a twenty pin power supply had been plugged in a twenty four pin connector.

I asked my provider to change the power supply to which they retorted, ALL OUR POWER SUPPLIES are like that. Well, anticipating a lawsuit, I consulted with another provider and was informed that while I was correct with my analysis, my provider could not be faulted because practically ALL computer casings as of December 2005 had the wrong power supply for the new motherboards. "What we let our customers do," the nice gentleman said, "is pay an upgrade price for the proper power supply."

So I contacted my provider again and told them to contact me when they had the new 24 pin power supplies and as soon as they had one, I was more than glad to pay the upgrade price.

Why do I write this? Becuase, if you have purchased a generic "bag of chips" pc around december of 2005 to January of 2006, it is very likely YOU DO NOT HAVE THE CORRECT POWER SUPPLY. To determine if you have the right kind, perform the following test:

1. Turn off your PC. DO NOT TURN OFF THE UPS or AVR.

2. If you have an Intel motherboard or any other motherboard check if the standby indicator is on (located somewhere in the middle of the board).

3. Leave your computer on standby for up to 4 hours.

4. Try turning on your PC, if it does not boot, well you’ve got the wrong power supply. You know what to do.

There doesn’t seem to be any report about branded PC’s suffering from this problem. Can you imagine how much I wanted to hit myself on the head when a good friend of mine told me he could have IMPORTED a branded PC for me for the same price I bought my daughter’s system?

Having a background as a patents lawyer, I am pickier than most Filipinos about using pirated software, for despite increasing costs nowadays, I find it more and more difficult to justify doing so.

I always had a problem with people who, having spent P30,000.00 or more on the hardware, would suddenly turn stingy about the software. The major reason software piracy nowadays can’t be tolerated though is Freeware!

Yessirree! Free may be a word quickly vanishing on the internet, but surprisingly you can still get a lot for nothing for every need of yours, from the operating system to those little thingamajigs that let your computer stand out from everyone else’s. A few of my favorites:

OPERATING SYSTEM

UBUNTU LINUX

I had always wanted to try out Linux, but was aware of the cost of migrating all my software to a new Operating System. One day, my daughter comes home and asks me, “Dad, have you got Ubuntu?”

I laughed and thought she must have misspelled something from computer class. “What the heck is that?” And she told me I could get it on the internet.

So I surfed over to

http://www.ubuntu.com

and found a FREEWARE version of Linux! FREE!

OFFICE SUITE

So you haven’t switched to Linux because it doesn’t have an Office Suite? Check out

http://openoffice.org

and download Open Office. This is an Office Suite that has been rated by some editors as better than Microsoft Office and its word processor is compatible with Word documents.

The suite also comes with a presentation program and spreadsheet.

Making its debut as StarOffice, OpenOffice was offered as a free alternative when StarOffice went commercial. Practically twins, the major difference is that StarOffice comes with a database. At 6K only, StarOffice still offers more bang for the buck than Microsoft Office.

Both StarOffice and OpenOffice support all major operating systems, so whether you’re on Linux or Windows doesn’t really matter.

GRAPHICS MANIPULATION

GIMP

Alright, I’ll admit it, I did go through a piracy phase. The very last pirated program I used was Jasc’s PaintShop Pro. Come to think of it, you could still justify using a pirated copy of this program in the

Philippines

since they don’t sell it here…… but that’s another story.

Nowadays, I have a licensed copy of Microsoft PictureIt! (latest versions have been renamed to Graphics Editor or something) that I use together with a FREEWARE editor called the GIMP. You can get the GIMP at

http://www.gimp.org/downloads

Also available in both Windows and Linux versions.

DIGITAL IMAGE RECOVERY

I transferred some digital images from my Camera’s memory to an overloaded CD. Guess what? Although the file names were there, the pictures weren’t. And I had already deleted the copies from the camera. The solution? Downloading VAIOsoft Recovery Manager from

http://www.vaiosoft.com/download

The interface may not be as pretty as those of similar paid and free programs, but trust me, I recovered the most photos using RecoveryManager.

Windows only

ANTIVIRUS

Two flavors I recommend:

Grisoft antivirus at

http://free.grisoft.com

and

AntiVir Personal edition

http://www.free-av.com

Both for Windows but Grisoft seems to be working on a Linux version.

ANTI-SPYWARE

Spybot Search and Destroy. Download it at:

http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/index.html

ARCHIVING

Tired of WinZip nagging you to get registered? The original PkZip too epensive? Get ZipGenius instead at:

http://www.zipgenius.it

It’s Italian! Like Ferrari, Ducatti and Martini!

INSTANT MESSAGING

Okay, so all Instant Messengers are free. But unless you’re one of those guys who spends all his money loading up on memory so you can run all the IM’s, you’ll appreciate an IM that can handle ALL YOUR IM ACCOUNTS. ALL OF THEM, and IRC TO BOOT!

Using GAIM, from

http://gaim.sourceforge.net

I was able to reactivate an old AOL IM account and promptly chatted with my brother-in-law. As I also just got a new Gmail account, I entered my Googlechat ID into GAIM and voila! I now run these two services together with MSN, ICQ and Yahoo!

Unlike Zango, Gaim has no spyware and is available for Windows, Linux and other operating systems.

PRINTSCREEN

If you activated your cell phone voicemail just because your phone has a special button for it that would otherwise be useless, then you’re just like me and have been itching to get that System that is required to make your PrintScreen key functional! (It’s like an itch that goes SysReq! SysReq! SysReq!)

Unlike those guys who want to charge you, Gadwin offers for free its version at:

http://www.gadwin.com

Browse their website because their might be something there you can actually use.

I use Gadwin Printscreen to capture images off the internet that you otherwise couldn’t using Right click on the mouse. You can format what area of the screen to capture, and oh, did I mention it can Print the Screen? My daughter used the latter function when she needed to do homework on the visual elements of Microsoft Word.

MORAL OF THE STORY

Pirating software is completely unnecessary. And if you think you’re cheating Bill Gates, think again. If you use pirated Microsoftware, you’re only increasing the demand by making everyone else around you want to use Microsoft products and not pay attention to the options available. Demand grows, and the Microsoft Tax becomes a bigger burden.

Oh, and if any of these Software companies suddenly becomes a giant because of this article: Please remember me. I am after all a licensed broker.

Boxing day, or Saint Stephen’s day, is traditionally celebrated on December 26. Although there now seems to be a dispute as to the origins of Boxing day, I choose to believe the more Christian interpretation that it originated from the practice of giving presents to the less fortunate to commemorate Saint Stephen, one of seven men appointed by the apostles to take care of the church’s poorer members. Think “Good King Wenceslas”.

Sadly, boxing day has become more associated the world over with the infamous 2004 earthquake and tsunami, which is one of the reasons I write this piece, so as to help dispel the correlation of the day and the tragedy, which appears to be doomed to be remembered as the “Boxing Day Earthquake”.

Bad news aside, boxing day, while largely being ignored in the Philippines, took special significance for me this year.

My wife’s nephews had what was obviously a top of the line computer for its time, a Dell Optiplex 750Mhz that only had the basic goods. Gathering my old equipment, I managed to give them a 32 MB Nvidia Geforce PCI graphics accelerator (hard to find in this country) and an extra 320 MB of memory. I also installed a CD-RW drive my wife and I bought them for Christmas. Having the boys test it as soon as I delivered their upgraded PC, they jumped for joy when they saw how much faster their favorite game could run.

That it took so little effort to make them happy reminded me that it is much, much better to give than to receive. The feeling is priceless. This is a secret that is lost on too many of us, when we try to find happiness by taking what we can for ourselves, only to find that wanting can sometimes be much better than having. We ought to try giving more often.

Next year, I’m marking boxing day again.

Now that we’ve learned that St. Nick doesn’t have reindeer, and hopefully has successfully directed our attention to Jesus, and in answer to Pope Benedict’s call to give Christmas a more traditional meaning, I’d like to post an explanation, an interpretation if you will, of the Christmas carol, "Twelve Days of Christmas".

I first started posting this in the early `90’s before most people even heard of the "internet" on my hobby Bulletin Board System, My Shorts! BBS (so named in honor of Bart Simpson). The original was an ANSI file with blinking ANSI figures. At the time, making blinking colored ANSI was pretty cool. Although I can’t claim singular credit for publicizing it first, heck, I didn’t write it, I’m glad to see that it has made the rounds so that many have already read it by now.

Here it is:

Did You Know?

From 1558 until 1829 the Catholics of England were forbidden by law to practice their faith.  As a result of this ban the ingenious Catholics devised secretive and symbolic songs to teach their children the truths of their religion. One of the most successful and beautiful of these was the Christmas carol "The Twelve Days of Christmas".

The "Twelve Days" stand for the Christmas Season, December 25 to January 6. The "True Love" in the carol is God himself, who gives Christians special gifts on each of the twelve days.

"On the first day of Christmas, my true love game to me, A partridge in a pear tree"

The "True Love" in the carol is God himself, and the first gift, "a partridge in a pear tree", symbolizes Christ (the bird), who gathers His young under His wings. The tree harkens back to the Tree of Paradise, which Adam lost by sin and Christ promised to restore.

God’s first gift, therefore, is His very own son Jesus…

"On the second day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, Two turtle doves…"

"Two turtle doves" represent the sacrifice which a Jewish family had to make at the temple upon the birth of a son. Our sacrifice is the Divine Liturgy…

"Three French Hens" symbolize the three gifts of the Magi to the newborn Messiah.  They also may mean the three gifts of Faith, Hope and Charity realized in the birth of the Savior.

"Four Calling Birds" makes us think of the four evangelists whose four Gospels call us all to the Bethlehem manger of the Redeemer.

"Five Golden rings" suggests the first five books of the Old Testament, the Law or Pentateuch, which Christ came to fulfill and complete.

"Six Geese-a-Laying", ungainly but working, suggests the six days of the week, when humanity labors and brings forth the fruit of the land.

"Seven Swans-a-Swimming" reminds us of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit or even the seven works of  Mercy.

"Eight Maids-a-Milking" represents the eight beatitudes that are the nourishment of Christians.

"Nine Ladies Dancing" recalls the nine ranks of angels or the nine fruits of the Holy Spirit as mentioned by St. Paul in Galatians 5:22.

"Ten Lords-a-Leaping" clearly signifies the Ten Commandments…

"Eleven Pipers Piping" refers to the eleven Apostles, now without Judas, proclaiming the Good News of Jesus Christ to the world.

Finally, "Tweleve Drummers Drumming" reminds us of the twelve articles of faith of the Nicaean Creed.

We cannot help but marvel at the courage and faith of these English Catholics, as we read "The Twelve Days of Christmas". And then we think of our Christian brothers and sisters who are forbidden to practice their faith in some parts of the world. And we praise and thank the Lord for freedom.