We spent much of our time talking about college—the subjects, the schedules, and the ways of life that we will have to get used to once classes begin. Some of us are going to Xavier University in Cagayan de Oro; others, to MSU in Marawi and Iligan; at least one will attend Silliman University in Dumaguete; I and three of my classmates will go to UP Diliman; two of my classmates, to UP Manila. It’s a full-blown diaspora.

Wherever we will go, we will inevitably change; meeting new people, making new friends, and adapting to new places will definitely do that to you. I wonder what our reunion ten, or five, or maybe even two years from now, will look like. Will we still laugh our asses off to no end, or will we just stare blankly at each other, making small talk and thinking, “I used to go to school with these guys. What happened?”

People change. I know I will. If I took a picture of myself today and looked at it a few years later, I would not be able to recognize myself. What more with my high school friends? Everything stopped at Graduation Day; our latest memory of each other will be the hugs and the youthful smiles we exchanged before we set off our own separate ways. When we see each other again, we will not know what to expect, so we will expect for nothing to have changed. But that won’t be true. Everything will have changed.

The last thing I will remember of some of my friends is an evening spent in our classmate’s house, belting songs from our parents’ heyday. During our reunion, we might hit the karaoke again, or take another afternoon dip in the local swimming pool. Bob Ong said it well: we might be able to revisit the places and sing the songs of our youth, but we will never be able to visit the time again.

©2010 Deantastic!. All Rights Reserved.

The National Grid Corporation of the Philippines says the outages are caused by low water levels in hydroelectric power plants and not a disgusting and insatiable hunger for power of the political kind. Apparently the country is suffering a dry spell of some sort (it rained as hard as dog dung this afternoon and yesterday, so I wonder how they can say that), and as a result the power plants are producing much less electricity than we need.

I find it hard to buy this explanation. It doesn’t help that the rotating brownouts began right around the time when the presidential race was beginning to really heat up. In other countries, it might seem implausible to think that power interruptions would be deliberate and that they would have something to do with elections, but this is the Philippines, a nation that has, for nearly a decade now, been under an unbelievably, pitifully self-serving administration. This is the Philippines. Our ancestors fought to free us from abuse by foreigners, only for our own countrymen to abuse us generations later. This is the Philippines, where politicians have one hand gripped tightly on a rostrum in the Senate as they passionately condemn dishonesty and corruption, while the other hand helps itself to the nation’s coffers. This is the Philippines, where a promise made to the people on national TV means absolutely nothing. This is the Philippines, a country that boasts that it is well on its way to becoming a first world nation by 2020 while one of its highly urbanized cities suffers daily power interruptions. In the Philippines, everything has become possible, from votes magically multiplying to public funds quickly and inexplicably disappearing.

Sometimes, I go through the newspaper and have to wonder if we’re absolutely sure we’re not living in a psychedelic Alice-in-Wonderland universe. In the darkness of my bedroom, during the frequent nights when there is no power and nothing to do, I’ve begun to wonder more and more.

©2010 Deantastic!. All Rights Reserved.

That, in retrospect, was the first mistake I made as a self-hosted blogger. Over the holidays, without prior notice, PhilHosting apparently restored their mySQL databases from ancient backups. That resulted to the loss of all the precious blog posts I had written after December 4, and a whole lot of annoyance and agony.

What’s more, soon after that, a bigger problem followed: the blog became inaccessible from my home Internet connection, making it impossible for me to mitigate the situation. This wasn’t my fault, I was sure, because I couldn’t even publish a post explaining why several of my blog posts had suddenly disappeared.

My first instinct, of course, was to contact their technical support service in the hope that they could at least give me back access to my blog. Well, turns out, these guys like to vacation, too. They announced this on their homepage:

12/23/2008: Philhosting is close on Christmas Holidays. All account and technical inquires/request will be process on January 5, 2009 when regular office day is resume. Thank you and Happy Holidays!

That’s an exact quote, copy-pasted from their homepage (in the bottom-left of the page, under the ‘News & Updates’ heading). Yes, their grammar was bad, albeit not half as stinky as their service.

So I had no choice but to wait for these guys to return from their hiatus before I could open a trouble ticket, which would then take days for them to process thanks to their snail-slow reaction time. With that in mind, I found it a fruitless effort to send a strongly-worded email to them (plus, it would corrode the spirit of the holidays I assumed), so I waited until January 7 to seek assistance from them (just to give them time to transition from vacation mode to help-my-client-with-his-site-problem mode).

They responded about 24 hours later, asking me to “please visit your site no [sic]” and advising me to provide them my cPanel login data so they could “check your back up if disabled”. I’d regained access to the site by this time, by the way. Okay, I thought, and obliged with their request for my login credentials.

I assumed they wanted my login info so they could go into the more technical corners of my cPanel to untick a checkbox that said “disable backup”. Instead, they followed up one day later saying that admin had actually “temporarily disabled the bak up [sic]“.  They said that I had to request them to provide me a link with which I could download a full backup of my site. Sounds like a complete reversal of roles, with me having to request something from them, yes? Plus, couldn’t they just have provided me a link to the backup then and there instead of making me beg for it first? What, does their internal bureaucracy prevent them from assisting their customers?

Still, I decided that remaining calm and polite was still the best way to go. On January 9,  I opened up a separate trouble ticket requesting for a full backup of my website. I have yet to hear from them. Big surprise.

Sick and fed up with PhailHosting, I decided to go ahead and purchase webspace from Page.Ph, another reputable Pinoy webhost. This blog is now hosted on my Page.Ph virtual server, and while it took them quite some time to process my account, everything’s been going smoothly so far. I hope Page is a better webhost than PhailHosting.

If you Google around, you’ll notice that I’m not the only unsatisfied PhailHosting customer out there. Here’s a short rant from two years ago at Fubar Genre (with what looks like a planted commenter making an appearance). Three days into the New Year, Aaron Roselo posted a rant about PhailHosting, as well. Ed Arevalo plurked his frustration with PhailHosting recently, too. Technogra.ph covered the story, and another rare satisfied PhilHosting customer praised the host in the comments section. (Ironically, I tried to visit said satisfied customer’s website and wasn’t able to access it, LOL.) There’s more where that came from, and hopefully a lot less to come.

So that’s it, my own PhilHosting horror story. *shivers in fear*

UPDATE 1/14

I’m assuming someone over at PhailHosting read this rant, because at noon today I received this message in my inbox. It was a reply to one of my trouble tickets.

You have already stated that you friends can access it.

http://webhosting.info/webhosts/tophosts/country/ph?pi=1&ob=RANK&oo=ASC

If you click through the link, you’ll be taken to a page with a nifty bar graph that ranks PhailHosting as the number one webhost in the country by market share and total domains. I was amused. Obviously, it was their snarky, prideful way of saying “you’re wrong.” Uhm, you might have the biggest market share, but based on my experience, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you give all your clients the best service you can offer. (Sure, you might be accomodating to the big companies that host their sites on your servers, but you leave the little guys out in the cold. Way to go.)

And in response to their nonchalant “You have already stated that you friends can access it”, that’s true—my friends could access it. But I couldn’t. I checked my antivirus and firewall programs, and my website wasn’t blocked on any of them. I’d also been able to access my site for brief periods of time (and when I say brief, I mean three minutes brief). That means it’s most probably a problem on your end. Your unwillingness to fix it or even to give me suggestions on what to do to fix the problem just indicates the crappiness of the service you offer.

PhilHosting. Hosting fail. Customer service and satisfaction fail.

©2010 Deantastic!. All Rights Reserved.

November just hasn’t been a particularly writing-conducive month for me. I’ve been pretty busy with stuff—I emceed at a school pageant, went unwired for a whole week in Tandag, and had something quite drastic happen to me in life. My writing mojo’s really ditched me. My winning the RSPC was a Higher Power’s fault, not mine.

The pep talks, albeit well-written and witty, haven’t brought back my mojo.

The historic election of Barack Obama hasn’t massively inspired my novel-writing, either.

Although I’m usually not the type to give up easily (or am I?), I think it’s safe to declare my first attempt at writing a 150-page novel in 30 days a complete failure.

Better luck next year.

(Please don’t follow my example. Go on with your NaNoWriMo article. Just because acheiving the 50,000-word mark by November 30 has become an impossibility in your case doesn’t mean you should stop writing forever. May the Writing Force be with you.)

©2010 Deantastic!. All Rights Reserved.

iPhone 3G box

As an early birthday gift, my folks got me the iPhone 3G this week. Woot! It’s an amazing cell phone—a computer in your palm, really—and I was literally jumping for joy when I first coddled the device in my hands.

I won’t write a review. We’ve read enough of those. I’ll praise the iPhone instead. With the 2.1 update, reception’s pretty alright, push email is beautiful (although imperfect), and the variety of apps you can get in the App Store—many of them for free!—is amazing! I’m having fun lightsabering and lightering on the phone right now.

The fact that it’s also a pretty awesome iPod doesn’t hurt, either. With 8 gigabytes of storage—as much as my now neglected iPod nano—I now have enough space to stuff the phone with my music, videos, podcasts and whatnot.

Its 2-megapixel camera is not as bad as you think. It can’t take a lot of money shots, that’s for sure, but it’s perfect for capturing the everyday memories you want to preserve. What boggles me, though, is why Apple never bothered to include video capability on the iPhone, a supposedly ridiculously easy task for a tech company that has innovation plastered all over it.

All things considered, I’m a happy camper. (No unboxing video; my mom purchased the phone for me at 5 PM, while I was having Statistics at school.)

Math Jingle

Classmates during practice session

The section I belong to bagged Second Place for the Math Jingle competition during today’s Math Festival. Not bad, in my opinion, considering the fact that we only began practicing seriously at the end of last week. No video coverage (at least, not yet; my classmate took videos and will probably upload them to Multiply, like, soon), no pics of me emceeing at the program. Sad fez.

DSPC

Once every year, the Department of Education holds school press conferences in the division, region and national levels as a way for campus journalists such as myself to showcase their talents and potential. The Division Schools Press Conference for the division to which my school belongs will begin next Wednesday, and being my school’s representative for the Feature Writing competition, I’ve got a lot of preparation to do. This is probably going to spell a busy day ahead for me. Fushazzle. The things you do for [the] love [of writing].

Obama inches ever closer to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

It was thought to be an improbable campaign, but Barack Obama’s grassroots movement for change is now on the verge of winning the White House. After mopping the debate floor with McCain twice, he has a six-point advantage according to CNN’s latest polls. The Electoral College map shows that he has 264 electors on his side—just six shy of the 270 needed to clinch the presidency. I remember checking the map a couple of weeks ago, and back then Barack only had 250 electors. If 14 electors could be gained in a few weeks, then think of what could happen between now and November 4! With swing states trending towards the Democratic nominee, we can probably see where this race is going.

©2010 Deantastic!. All Rights Reserved.

My baby, my sexy sexy baby.

Globe Telecom is releasing the iPhone 3G in the Philippines this Friday, which means only one thing: me wants. Yes, I know gas prices are skyrocketing. Yes, I know that the “standard” cup of rice at the local eatery has shrunk.

But mewants the iPhone 3G.

Why, you say? Why lust after the iPhone 3G when my Nokia E65 is perfectly fine? Here’s why:

• My E65 isn’t perfectly fine. For one, it’s been with me for about a year now, which is eerie by the way given the fact that I usually wreck or lose a phone three seconds after I get it.
• The iPhone’s chic, hip, and high-tech.
• It’s an Apple product, and that automatically means it has quality. (The only Apple product I own as of now is an 8GB iPod nano.)
• Many more reasons.
• mobile phone + iPod + GPS + handheld gaming device rolled into one.
• Dude, it’s an iPhone. You shouldn’t need any more convincing.

My Nokia’s been very laggy as well after I updated its firmware. Its four-way navigation button’s silvery surface is peeling away (and rusting a bit). In short, I need a new phone.

To be more specific, I need an iPhone.

So, I’ve been “accidentally” dropping my E65, slamming it onto walls, and whatever else would wreck the damn thing just in time for Friday. Yes, I’m desperate.

A prepaid 8GB iPhone costs Php37,599.00. From what I understand, you would still have to use a prepaid Globe SIM card together with this phone, and I’m a Smart Telecom user (more textmates, more offers, better rates) right now. But if my folks would get me an iPhone, I’d convert to Globe instantly. Bam Wam Shablam.

*takes glass of water, spills some on Nokia E65* Oops, ’twas an accident, I swearz. I can has iPhone nao?

©2010 Deantastic!. All Rights Reserved.

Anyway, yesterday was Friday, but there were no classes for some reason. A few of my friends and I took the opportunity to watch this summer’s most anticipated blockbuster ever, The Dark Knight.

Look, I’m no movie buff, so I don’t think I’m in any position to impartially critique the movie. So I won’t. Here’s the deal, though: all things considered, the ticket for the movie was probably one the best Php50 (~$1.xx) I’ve ever paid. It had an elaborate, if difficult to follow, plot, and its creators put in all the little details that’d make you smirk. The late Heath Ledger who of course starred as the Joker in the movie played an impeccable role. He mastered the American accent so well you would’ve never guessed he was an Aussie, and as always paid meticulous attention to every little detail of the gruesome character he played. It’s the fruit of the marriage of love, politics, power, big guns, and heavily-armored cars that turn into kickass motorcycles. If you haven’t seen it yet, you very well should.

The 2008 Olympics commenced today with astounding opening ceremonies at the Bird’s Nest in Beijing. Two hundred five countries will participate in this year’s 10-day games. All I can say so far is that the folks over there did one hell of a job with the opening ceremonies and I don’t think I’d be surprised to see the Olympics held very smoothly, despite all the buzz about Tibet and stuff.

In other news, the European Organization for Nuclear Research has decided to postpone assploding the world. Their Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, which was supposed to start up today, will now be started up on the 10^th of September. I was reading through the CERN website’s press release for the LHC, and amidst all the geeky words I couldn’t find any reason why they postponed it. Anyway, this should give all the paranoid nerdazoids out there enough time to pack their bags and move to Mars before the world is gobbled up by a dark hole.

I first heard—or more specifically, read—about CERN and its LHC when I read Dan Brown’s novel Angels and Demons, which was the prequel to the controversial The Da Vinci Code. Long story short, the machine smashes tiny particles of matter together at crazy speeds to learn more about the universe. (Hey, don’t look at me. Look at the lab-coat geeks over in Geneva.)

In the meantime I’ll try to finish up at least one blog post for your perusal within the next week. However, periodic exams are fast approaching, and while I will try my damnest to conjure something up from within the forgotten corners of my coconut, I cannot make any guarantees.

Let me take this opportunity to invite you to use Skribit, the little widget you’ll find on my sidebar just above my footer. You can use it to suggest blog topics for me to write about, which is great because I’d love to write about what you want me to write. Go on, let ‘er rip!

‘Til next time,

Dean

©2010 Deantastic!. All Rights Reserved.

I write for many reasons — to while away the hours, to keep my writing skills sharp, to express my feelings. Today, I am again held in a trance by my notebook computer because a question just popped in my mind.

What will become of me in fifteen years’ time?

I have asked this out loud before, and my peers have discouraged me from thinking about it. I’ve got my whole life ahead of me, they say. And they aren’t wrong. At thirteen, I still have so much of the world to explore, and so much of my life to live.

But perhaps my greatest fear is that I will live it the wrong way, and that I will look back and regret my actions. Haven’t we all felt regret before? That little, “I wish I did that instead of this.” Didn’t we, at some point, ask ourselves how our lives would’ve turned out had we made a different decision? I have always been afraid to make a wrong decision Now, as I enter the audacious teenage years, and as the rest of my life is starting to unfold, I feel the need to make a plan, to plot things out, so that I live my life to the fullest and the way I want to. I feel that my life is better off prearranged, so that I would not need to worry about it anymore. In other words, I’d be better off without a risk to take.

But today, as I was reading Paulo Coelho’s novel By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept, I came across these sentences which told me that having a prearranged life would probably not be the best thing in the world:

You have to take risks…We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.

Pitiful is the person who is afraid of taking risks…because when they are finally able to believe in miracles, their life’s magic moments will have already passed them by.

“Magic moments” will be understood by those who have read By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept. Essentially, these are moments in our life when a “yes” or a “no” can change it forever. To quote the book verbatim, magic moments

“may arrive in the instant when we are doing something mundane, like putting our front-door key in the lock; it may lie hidden in the quiet that follows lunch hour or in the thousand and one things that all seem the same to us.”

I feel that this was speaking directly to me (although it is highly improbable). If my life were plotted out prior to my actually living it, then everything I would do would become “just another task”; my magic moments would go unnoticed. I realize that although a prearranged life would be devoid of the precariousness and unpredictability of a life lived spontaneously, it would also be devoid of the thrill of a spontaneously lived life. This leads me to another quote from the novel By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept:

“The person who is afraid of taking risks…perhaps will never be disappointed or disillusioned; perhaps she won’t suffer the way people do when they have a dream to follow. But when that person looks back…she will hear her heart saying…’So this is your heritage: the certainty that you wasted your life.‘”

I do not want to waste my life. Taking risks is better than having wasted a whole lifetime. I have a dream to follow, and I will follow that dream. I will stumble, and I will get bruised. I will fall seven times, and get up eight.

What will become of me in fifteen years? I will become an accomplished person. A bruised person, but a learned person. A person with failures, but with even more accomplishments. My heritage will not be the certainty that I wasted my life; instead, it will be the certainty that I lived my life to the fullest.

©2010 Deantastic!. All Rights Reserved.