here is BB gandanghari, a.k.a rustom padilla, a former matinee idol who married the cute carmina villaroel. people only learned that they were married pala when the news broke out that they split up. some tongues wagged and said that the sudden split was caused by a bedroom scene — the wifey found gay husband in bed with a MAN. but the wifey was mum about the whole break-up. didn’t offer any explanation. kept quiet all these years…well good for her.

BB gandanghari says rustom is already dead. that BB gandanghari is finally free.

“Rustom was an obligation. Living as a man, whether as a straight or as a gay man, was suffocating for it is not an expression of what’s inside of me; it was an obligation required of me. Rustom is the Emperor’s New Clothes tailored using the finest threads…

…I’m a woman expressed – not trapped – in a body called male. I’m a newly-born child; I’m still learning how to walk, finding my voice, exploring the world as a tenderfoot…”

and i heard from showbiz insiders that papa (err…mama) p*olo is itching to “do a rustom” but his contract with a*s-cbn is keeping him from doing so. but the lolah is reportedly dying to come out of his/her glitter closet.

tsk tsk. they even had to fabricate a story that he has a child out of wedlock — who is reportedly a spitting image of mama p*olo’s sibling. Other Half’s cousin in the US is friends with mama p*olo’s friends. and yes, she’s a queen, they said. with multi-colored hair back then.

pity. people should be free to choose how to live their lives. viva la bb gandanghari!

sounds like the end of the world, isn’t it?

unless you’ve been hiding under a rock the last few days, you know that weather here in manila and the rest of luzon has been crazier than usual. after days sweltering heat, we got drenched in torrential rain that wreaked havoc on metro manila streets and our health.

i barely recovered from flu (due to extreme heat), here comes the crazy weather again, resurrecting my asthma. been coughing like hell for more than a week. then i got drenched one day this week, ruining my leather shoes. i was forced to buy flip flops from a store in the quiapo underpass because i couldn’t tolerate my squishy shoes…

according to PAGASA, it’s just a “tail-end of a cold front affecting Luzon. Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) affecting Mindanao…”

no typhoon.

but rains are supposed to come on may or june pa…but then, who’s complaining? at least i’m no longer frying in my own oils and sweat.

i feel his pain…

“What do you do if a spam email sneaks through the system?

If you are smart, you just hit delete.
If you are dumb, you reply to the spammer, which confirms that you have a working email address to spam in the future and sell to other spammers.
If you’re an ignorant f*ck, you reply to the spammer and CC: your administrator.

I haven’t had one spam email in over a year because I have been careful managing my email address.

Today an end user undid all that in a few seconds...”

the grumpy admin made me laugh in some weird way. in a painful way. although i am not an IT person (i just try to learn along the way), i can feel this guy’s frustrations with inept users. and boy, those end-users in grumpy admin’s blog would really make you tear out your hair.

what ticks me off is that some people depend too much on other people to do a simple job for them — and stop learning. i mean, it’s as simple as exploring a web page (“where do you find the ____?”) or a functionality in their web-based email (“yes, you can send a carbon copy to other people; it’s below the ‘To’ field”).

and they get royally pissed off with system admins for blocking sites. hey, there are ignoramuses in our midsts who download a lot of crap that infect our system.

but i have to be patient because not all end-users are like me who still keeps on learning or studying. i started out as a noob who knew nothing and moved on to learning how to change the proxy settings on my internet/network connection manager and now tweaking operating systems to my liking. (maybe i should try that puppy linux to resurect an old pc at home to donate to our highschool…)

i’m not saying that end-users should try to be IT guys. the thing here is, people should start using logic (see the grumpy tech support) and try to learn simple things by themselves, like plugging their computers properly or scanning and removing viruses using their antivirus software.

i remember harassing our IT admin/server guy named ryan (yes, crystal, that ryan who always muttered under his breath about YM hogging so much bandwidth) about this and that several years ago…

then moved on to harassing the IT guy named jeff in the government office i worked for (he was the apple guy in the IT department since we writers/layout artists had macs then).

by harassing them, i got to know more about the simple stuff i could do myself.

then there was this IT guy named dan (also in that govt office) who helped me build a cheap desktop that is still running to this day. we built it for only P10,000 — with an AMD duron processor (a Pentium 4 rig then cost P30,000, — without the monitor — as another coworker who built the pc with dan found out).

one of the reasons why that desktop is serviceable up to this day is that i slowly upgraded some of the components myself to keep the machine from completely breaking down. i always keep the system clean (free from all those crapware) and the whole machine physically clean (vacuuming and brushing away the dust inside will keep the air flowing and keep it from being toast).

**now that support for windows xp is officially dead and probably windows 7 won’t run on my ancient pc (i have yet to try the beta release), i have to explore ubuntu jaunty jackalope as an alternative OS. i was forced to move to XP before when drivers for win 98 weren’t distributed anymore — same would happen to XP).

anyway, because i can empathize with what IT admins are going through, i am reluctant to call our office IT people for help. if i can fix it, then i will fix it first before i go hollering for help. anyway, i’m using my own laptop at the office so it’s better that i am the one who will troubleshoot things like networking problems. i seldom ask them for little things (only the network key or proxy settings) — as they have bigger problems to deal with. like last week, our servers went down because of a pesky worm. then our news wires terminal went pfffft.

but the oldies and the perpetually ignorant people…they’re making these IT people their personal alalay (assistants) or something! “A, do this and do that!” or “HEY, my pc is not working!” just to find out the pc is not plugged.

so when a fellow reporter asks for help about connecting to the network, i help them out before they come calling our IT people. usually it’s just about the proxy settings.

one day i made a mistake of mentioning to one of the IT people that we should shift to linux to make our ancient machines work faster (our editorial/desk asst.’s pc had only 64mb of RAM and adding more RAM crashes it!). hey, newspapers are bleeding, you know, and we don’t have budget for new hardware and new licensed software that microsoft is forcing down our throats! new macs cost an arm and a leg so our layout artists are still stuck with power mac G4s.

i couldn’t make out his face/reaction. then said he doesn’t do linux.

then to my horror, i suddenly realized the amount of work that they would have with linux. no, not with the OS itself but with the people. i could only imagine the numerous calls about this and that not behaving like microsoft windows…

yes, i feel for you, grumpy admin.

it has been so hot in this city that stepping out the front door (for whatever reason) is already a chore. to make matters worse, i travel during the hottest time of the day (from 12 nn or 1 pm to 2.30 pm)…

and now i have asthma, which is kinda killing me.

i tried to be a cheapskate at my own health’s expense. i tried to sleep with just the electric fan on since i figured running the aircon at night is too expensive.

mali ang akala ko.

now i’m coughing my lungs out because i insisted on the fan. and because of that i always wake up hot and sweaty = i’m sick.

lesson learned: manila is not elbi that you can survive with just an electric fan.

–

the tri-media is swarming with ted failon stories that i can’t seem to shut it off (since i am in the news business). using the information i gathered from different news sources, i can easily conclude that his wife committed suicide because of shame i.e. for squandering their life savings.

but then DOJ sec. raul gonzales (who was always at war with our justice reporter) says he received a text message about ted having an accomplice in killing his own wife. then he lambasts the PAO chief for responding to a request for assistance.

text message? i mean, hello!!! even a reporter knows that a text message is not enough evidence to conclude that there is indeed foul play.

but then cleaning up evidence is stupid if it was indeed unintentional. every media person knows that…

on the other hand, if ever the husband was angered by the wife’s handling of the family’s finances, he could have just gotten a annulment instead of going through the hassle of hiring someone/having someone to kill the wife. di ba?

a friend recently just related to me that she separated from her husband because of his money/gambling habits (up to the point of stealing money from her). the process was painful but well, divorce was better than killing her husband, isn’t it? or is it?

on the other hand, killing your spouse out of rage is may be rather satisfying…

–

my bestfriend and i are having visa nightmares.

we’re both applying visas for our trip to japan by the end of this month but the embassy is giving us troubles in terms of documentation requirements, which involves forcing her mom to go to the kyoto city hall and asking for certificate of alien something something and asking the NSO for a fresh copy for her mom’s birth certificate…

i was even asked for a photo of me and my bestfriend to prove our relationship and a photo of her mom and me to prove we really know each other. at the last moment yan ha, when i was submitting requirements. i searched for the closest internet cafe i could find in the middle of mabini st. in malate so i could download and print those effing photos.

WTF?! why can’t they just post all these requirements on the embassy’s website or with the accredited travel agencies so we applicants wouldn’t be running around and wasting so many precious hours trying to reconstruct our relationship with the person we’re gonna stay with?

as a highschool classmate related to me over facebook chat (he’s in japan now, finishing his PhD), “mahirap pag galing sa third world.”

and mygod, it’s just for an effing 7-day vacation!

maraming salamat sa mga TNT for making our lives miserable.

–

it seems like my passport stamps were not enough (mainland china visa, taiwan visa; thailand, hong kong (twice), singapore stamps). it seems like all my paper assets were not enough. it seems like the nature of my job is not enough to convince them that i do not have any intention of being a TNT there nor i had a history of being a TNT.

i could only just imagine the hassle of applying for a US visa…

no thank you. that was why i was not endeared to apply in the first place when there was no compelling reason for me to go there. just imagine shelling out at least $100 (or is it already $200?) to apply…

and to think a friend who was in europe a couple of years ago was able to apply for a US visa without so much effort (she was finishing her masters degree in belgium).

i repeat, mahirap pag galing sa third world.

–

so to conclude this entry, i may or may not able to go to japan by april 28. period.

i thought installing my nokia 6120 as modem on my asus eee pc running on easy peasy 1.0 (ubuntu 8.10 intrepid ibex with eee-control instead of eee config) would be easy.

i was dead wrong.

spent the whole day figuring out how i would be able to connect to the internet using my 3G cellphone via Smart.

my OS recognized my cellphone as a modem but the problem is i couldn’t connect to smart. i thought i have to tweak the settings but i didn’t know the gateway/address and such…then i found it through this website.

i wonder why all the local telcos are not providing us those information to help all those people like me who have shifted to linux. i mean, it’s just as simple as posting the apn settings on their website. duh. it took a foreigner to help me out.

Philippines

here are some screenshots of how i configured my connection. through intensive internet research, a little experiment and a leap of faith, i was able to connect and surf the internet via Smart 3G on my cellphone.

plug in your cellphone (when you plug in your nokia via usb, a connection prompt will appear then choose PC Suite. i just don’t know how it would be for other phones). go to network configuration>mobile broadband then add. the network manager will recognize your phone (or even your USB modem like huawei or zte that globe/smart/sun use). at first it will display nokia 6120 (or your cellphone model). the photo here shows “SMART” since i’ve already changed the name of my 3G connection via cellphone.

change connection name and as mentioned above, the APN setting for Smart is “internet” and just leave username and password blank.

then click IPv4 Settings>Routes

then click Add>Gateway then type the DNS as indicated above. click ok.

when you’ve finished setting up your connection, make sure that your cellphone is plugged in then right click on the internet signal icon on the toolbar above and it would show you the various available connections. i turned off my wifi antenna (Fn+F2 using if you’ve installed using eee-control) then clicked on “Smart”, my newly configured 3G connection.

voila! my laptop is already dialling Smart.

–

oh yes, i spent my Holy Week doing geeky stuff. didn’t go to the beach. didn’t go to elbi. didn’t come out of the house. Other Half and i just stayed right here and drove each other crazy. when cabin fever was setting in (Maundy Thursday), we took a short drive just to get out and went home shortly. my husband was already turning into a human TV/DVD as he spent hours watching those movies that had been stuck with us for years.

then friday, Other Half suddenly had a craving for Wendy’s. we drove to cubao but the branch there was closed. we went to philcoa, but no wendy’s. we turned right somewhere near the iglesia ni cristo along commonwealth then we ended up in katipunan. still no wendy’s. he settled for red ribbon.

thus the passing of a once-a-year vacation when printing presses stop. *sigh*

pasok na naman bukas.

it’s just Holy wednesday and yet i think i’m having cabin fever already.

i tried resuscitating my old blah oil painting and made it angrier and darker. still not in the mood for that so i ended up with just a painting with a darker mood.

i think i already lost it, the urge to make art. don’t have the talent for it anyway.

maybe i’ll try cross-stitching tonight.

goodluck to me.

ubuntu linux has been a hit and miss affair. but so far i’m not really missing the regular scanning duties when running windows. yesterday i was able to network my asus eee pc running on ubuntu (easy peasy 1.0) with our windows-based network at the office. so far so good.

and here’s one funny video that shows the annoying windows errors that i encounter A LOT.

frustrating, isn’t it?

i guess i have already stressed that our wedding was affordable (see sidebar) and we did not rack up any debt because i planned the expenses quite well (and planning on a limited budget is what i am good at since i practice that everyday; my salary is so miniscule i want to cry so sanay ako magtipid).

anyway, i came across this article on the simple dollar about affordable honeymoons.

i originally wanted a beach honeymoon (coron in palawan or boracay) but Other Half insisted that we go out of the country since the experience would be richer and the cost would be the same as going to boracay or palawan.

actually, he had a point there…when i checked cebu pacific at that time (february 2007), he was right. although we did not get the cheapest seats since it was already february and our honeymoon was supposedly june 1-3, the airfare was relatively cheaper than regular fares (i.e. booking flights just weeks or days before).

then we booked our hotel and airport-hotel transfer online via octopus travel, advertised on cebu pacific’s website at that time. Other Half and i surfed the octopus travel website for hotels with reasonable rates but are in a good location (i.e. near train stations).

eventually we picked mayfair garden hotel (now called largos hotel) in kowloon. the hotel is clean, tidy (cute, i should say) and really affordable. plus it was just near the jordan MTR station. we didn’t need fancy hotels since we would be out for the whole day during our 3-day stay in HK.

total damage? around P7,000 for 3-day, 2-night stay for both of us. that amount would only cover a day and a half of stay in boracay.

what my husband i did was to book the earliest flight to HK to maximize our stay. when we arrived in the morning of our first day, we dumped our bags at the hotel counter for check-in later and we went sight-seeing immediately. actually it was more of a walk-a-tour within the vicinity.

the bus (airport to hotel transfer, one way) may have been a little expensive but it saved us a lot of time and effort since we still didn’t know how to get to our hotel and around kowloon. at the airport, we got the 24-hour (or was it 48-hour?) MTR ride-all-you-can tickets to save us from the hassle of buying train tickets at every stop. plus it saved us some HK dollars.

the key to being frugal when on vacation is having a spending ceiling everyday, on every item. like for example, we won’t be spending so and so dollars for a single meal per head. sometimes we splurged (that damn gelato at victoria peak was expensive!) but we had to make up for it by buying really cheap trinkets for souvenirs for family/friends instead of the high quality stuff.

it’s not really that stressful to watch your spending when on vacation, especially when you’ve been doing it everyday (as i have) for the past 10 years. it was like i’ve just been doing that on auto mode.

at the end of the day (when we get back to the hotel), i did an accounting of our expenses for the day since we had to have enough cash for our trip back home. the worse thing that could happen to you is run out of money in a foreign country. we had to have extra money, enough for a one-way fare (even though our tickets were already paid for), just in case of emergency.

that way, we also had enough money for shopping (shopping for clothes in HK is the best!) since i budgeted it well. being frugal does not mean we were depriving ourselves of the little pleasures in life.

to cap our trip and experience what HK has to offer, we visited a museum. visiting museums is a great way to get to know a foreign country. the stuff in HK are not as good as those in the Shanghai Museum (and certainly not as great as those in Taiwan — the best Chinese museum) but still noteworthy (esp. the contemporary art). and it just cost us HK$10 each.

and if you really want to save money, try the restaurants in malls instead of the stand-alone restos. that was what i discovered in my second trip to HK.

in singapore, my husband (we weren’t married then yet) and i crashed into a friend’s home for 3 days. in return, we treated him to a “package tour” (the cable car tickets to sentosa with entrance tickets to several attractions). we ate in malls and hawkers’ stands (Other Half is still hung up on Old Changkee). we went to bookstores, to Ikea (sori, wala nito sa pinas eh). we walked to death. we went to church. we tried to “live” in Singapore.

locally, we tried the packaged tours. it’s cheap and reliable. quite safe, too.

there are so many ways to have a vacation without incurring debt or wiping out your savings.

–

the reason why i suddenly wrote this? my bestfriend and i are going to kyoto, japan later this month*keeping fingers crossed* if the japanese embassy gives us visas!

i’m planning our trip carefully. japan — even in recession — is still very very expensive.

and have committed to ubuntu/linux.

 

i got tired of scanning my 3 pcs over and over. i wasted 2 weekends just scanning and looking for trojans that i could not remove with various tools. i realized i cannot spend the rest of my free time just cleaning my PCs.

my PCs’ infections got really bad up to the point i had two anti-virus programs running at the same time plus an anti-malware thing just lurking if the two programs fail. (thanks a lot to Other Half’s flash drives that always bring those pesky virus from the office. they have symantec or some antivirus installed but these never get updated — govt office thing, you know. just imagine my nightmare whenever he inserts these little critters into our desktop that is networked!)

in addition, i resorted to removing worms/trojans/whateverdevilistherelurkingmessingupmywindows through the command window. yes, i was doing it manually that causes a lot of headache.

that’s not the best way to live, i thought.

hence, i’m running easy peasy 1.0 (rebranded ubuntu-eee) on my asus eeepc 701. (eeebuntu, the less clunky version has a slower boot up time).

i tried cruncheee (crunchbang linux for eee pc) but it i was having trouble with the user interface. the openbox (the “windows manager”) was fine but whenever i install new packages (that’s programs for you, dear windows users), the openbox did not show the newly installed packages so i had to manually tweak it.

codes. codes. a lot of codes.

and i misspelled or missed something so i totally messed up openbox. i ended up without any means of opening my programs (openbox is the only way i can see and open my programs unless i use the terminal and do a lot of sudo sudo ek-ek or the run dialogue that was also missing from the messed up openbox).

if not for my stupid mistakes with tweaking openbox, i would have stayed with cruncheee since it is a tight OS install and i have the freedom to choose what packages to install (no office suite — so i can do away with the bloated open office and have abiword instead).

but i had to have a running laptop with me on wednesday (i was playing around with cruncheee since monday) so i was forced to install easy peasy (it took forever to download eeebuntu). there were a few niggles but ever the tweaker i am, i patiently customized the OS to my liking.

i am using the netbook remix (well, easy peasy uses NBR by default) since i am too lazy now to mess around with other windows/menu managers. plus this OS works out of the box.

i decided to get rid of songbird (too heavy for a 4g SSD, over 100mb) and installed my all-time favorite multimedia player, VLC (just less than 35 mb). i have to get rid of the sound recorder but i have to figure out first its package name and reduce the risk of uninstalling *something* really important.

i also got rid of several open office programs and just retained openoffice.org impress (equivalent of ms powerpoint), installed gnumeric in lieu of openoffice.org calc for spreadsheet.

and installed abiword and uninstalled openoffice.org writer.

i also got rid of stuff that i know i won’t need (and with 4G of SSD, you suddenly realize that there are a lot of stuff you DON’T need) like bluetooth (my 701 does not have any), palmOS software, etc.

all you have to do is type these in the terminal

    “sudo apt-get remove [name of program]“

or if you want to uninstall, including the packages

    “sudo apt-get –purge remove [name of program]“

after that, you can clean your OS (with all the uninstalling you did)

    “sudo apt-get clean”

and

    “sudo apt-get autoremove”

it’s like cleaning your cache and registry in windows, respectively, without a separate program to do it.

if you want it the harder way, you can use the synaptic package manager (if you can’t still wean yourself away from the windows-style of doing things or if you don’t know what package to install or uninstall).

but i find the command line easier to do when i know what i want to install and uninstall. (yes, i am already a sell-out. hehehe)

easy peasy is still clunky and needs to be polished (hopefully with the new release). i have to fix some stuff (i have OCD when it comes to my computers) but minor irritations are better than being a slave to antivirus scanners.