Filed under: Brain Scrapings | Tags: canada, directional, election, politics, us
So Canada is officially having an election in October. I woke up this Sunday morning and listened to the first election speeches from all the federal party leaders. Jack Layton’s was by far the funniest. He kept on saying “We have to move forward, not backward!” It definitely reminds of another election line:
My fellow Americans. As a young boy, I dreamed of being a baseball, but tonight I say, we must move forward, not backward, upward not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom.
Watch the end of the video.
Filed under: Internet Scrapings | Tags: blocked, dubai, flickr, twitter, uae
Just past 3PM in Dubai right now and I want to go to the old part of the city. The 45 degree afternoon heat is what’s stopping so I decided to go online for a while to pass the time until it gets cooler. I always check my flickr and my twitter accounts but for some reason it is blocked in the UAE.
Here’s the official reason:
We apologize the site you are attempting to visit has been blocked due to its content being inconsistent with the religious, cultural, political and moral values of the United Arab Emirates.
Their reasoning feels highly dubious. Others say it’s due to commercial interest or stamping out potential political unrest. In any case, it’s just weird and strange. So no photos or updates from me anytime soon. Although, I’ve read that you can access the sites at the airport or at the hotel. Let’s see if that’s true.
Filed under: Brain Scrapings | Tags: bilingualism, coffee, crowd, elitism, english, filipino, pretentiousness, shop
Originally uploaded by julymale
There’s just something about fast food chains that is not conducive to writing. A burger joint near my grandmother’s house has free unlimited Wi-Fi that I could use. Yet, I choose to go to a coffee shop that’s about an hour away and involving multiple transfers. Inspiration probably hits me when I can actually hear myself think. With my suspected ADHD, the cacophonous chatter and the crowds easily distract me. People watching entertains me. (Reality show junkie in hiding?)
Although I find coffee shops relaxing, they carry an air of pretentiousness that I find really annoying. It’s a phenomenon that I’ve observed the world over. Take the crowd in the place I am in now, part of what used to be one of the most posh malls in Manila. “English-speaking crowds” fill the tables. For the life of me, I cannot understand why so many Filipinos, especially those with money, abhor or refuse to speak in plain Tagalog (or whatever local language they know). They insist in talking in English when speaking in Filipino is completely fine and acceptable.
In front of me is a father, looks like a successful businessperson. Yes, I eavesdropped on his phone conversation (all about business) and looked over his laptop (spent a lot of time on the PSE website looking at his stocks I assume). He could talk in both Filipino and English yet when his sons came in, he would only talk to them in English. Question is why?
I asked a coworker before who had a similar upbringing about this phenomenon. His father, an executive at a very reputable international company, told him that it was useless to speak Filipino. English is the lingua franca. Okay, I don’t dispute the fact that you do need to learn English but if you are going to live in the Philippines please learn and use the language. Bilingualism is something to be proud of.
Is speaking English something that would separate you from the masses? Separation from the masses attracts attention and sometimes trouble. One of the things you avoid when traveling is to stand out from the masses. You don’t want to be the one person walking, looking lost, and nose inside a guidebook.
I am always amazed by people’s reaction that I could still fluently speak Tagalog. As I’ve told many people, my purpose for speaking English is very utilitarian. I speak English in Canada because most people I know outside the Filipino community can only speak English. When I go home or go out with my Filipino friends, I speak Tagalog.
Okay, rant over. I wasn’t even supposed to write this but quoting Peter Griffin, it just really grinds my gears. The coffee shop crowd sometimes isn’t the most accepting people in world. I do feel bad by being part of it on occasion. Good thing a cute set of ABBA songs are playing on the coffee shop radio. Oh how can you not feel cheered up by Waterloo.
Filed under: Food Scrapings, Road Scrapings | Tags: entrepreneurship, food, ingenuity, isaw, philippines, street, travel
Three o’clock in the afternoon is a special time in the Philippines. It even has its own name, oras ng merienda or simply time for afternoon snacks. Think of the Spanish siesta but in Filipino form. Children are just about done their classes, while the early day workers are already coming home. A myriad of street stalls start coming to life. Their owners start promoting, cooking, and hawking their products for their prospective customers. Here’s when you see Filipino ingenuity, entrepreneurship, and gastronomic adventurousness.
In terms of entrepreneurship, those selling street food are not rich businessmen or those with capital looking for something to invest in. Most of them are ordinary people who are trying to make ends meet. Stall owners are usually women who either by chance or fate could not get office jobs. They are mothers who have time to spare in between housework or grandmothers trying to help their families survive.
Their ingenuity comes from the brilliant products they sell. Grillers of skewered assorted meats are the epitome of merienda stalls. By the way, assorted meats is a euphemism for discarded meat product such as isaw (general term for either chicken, pig, or cow intestine), betamax (blocks of pigs blood), balun-balunan (chicken gizzard), and tenga (general word for ears but in this case pigs’ ears). What most people will discard, others will find a way to use them. It’s the old trash-treasure adage. Each stall will then have its own recipe for a thick sweet (matamis) sauce and a sour vinegar (suka) concoction that you can dip your meats in. Sugar, vinegar, and a couple of other spices and you are set. No business plans required in this industry.
Honestly though, the most important aspect of merianda time is the gastronomic delight it presents to those willing try them. Tenga if done well gives you a strange crunchy, chewy, and sweet flavour that is paired well with the vinegar cocktail. Isaw flavours vary depending on the source animal. Chicken isaw looks solid but has a delicate texture that just melt in your mouth after one chew. My personal favourite is cow isaw that comes in large rings. Okay, I can’t really describe how they taste due to my limited flavour vocabulary. It just proves though that in many cases food is something to be experienced not described. Many people might find it strange but most though only need to get through that first bite. Chefs receive years of training to cook things like sweetbreads but stall owners just simply grill them until they look done.
Talking about them makes my water. I haven’t even started to describe items such as turon (banana filled spring rolls deep-fried with sugar), fish balls, and ice scramble (a very simple shaved ice dessert). Merianda is special in many ways but more importantly it shows that eating local food is cultural immersion in one of its purest forms.
Filed under: Road Scrapings | Tags: chaos, clean, organized, philippines, rain, travel, water
Three days in and I have experienced 2 full days of monsoon rains. A certain smell floats around the air just before the first drop falls. Moist. Humid. Cooling. Words you don’t commonly use for a scent. With temperatures boiling the asphalt road, the rain releases the heat from the ground making it a bit more uncomfortable to stay here. Looking outside from my grandma’s old house, I then see how the rains actually encapsulate the Philippines in all its “glory”.
Monsoon rains are something indescribable, something that needs to be experienced. Raindrops create a deafening cacophony of taps on rooftops and road. West coast rains are just embryotic compared to the power of a tropical storm. Streets flood and as covered by much of popular media, houses and villages do get destroyed. Much in the same vein, the streets of Manila are the same.
Rules do not apply on the road, everybody contributing to the creation of chaos. Cars weave in and out of the littlest piece of asphalt on a two-lane street in order to get to their destinations as quickly as possible. People do much the same but are just more vulnerable than their metal counterparts. Jaywalking is illegal. Just the same though, might as well say “que?” when it is mentioned. Smog settles both on your skin and into your lungs. Escape is impossible. Breath but not too much.
On the other hand though, the rains also cleanse. The dirt and grime are washed away. The weather cools and makes living a bit more bearable. And if you think this is a little bit too dramatic, try just standing in the rain. Feel your skin cool and the water replacing the sweat on your body.
People, even the poorest of the poor, still find reason to smile. Laughter is as abundant as the heat. Compared to other countries, people live in questionable conditions. Yet these same circumstances are the same ones that will remind you, you don’t need a lot to live. What we consider necessity is actually luxury. We do not even think about our necessities. People here live with what they have, work hard to get more. Everybody complains but that’s just people trying to create a better life for themselves and their family.
Filed under: Internet Scrapings | Tags: illustrator, photoshop, psdtuts, tutorials, vectortuts
It’s only been a couple of months since somebody told me about a wonderful Photoshop Tutorial site, PSDtuts. Frankly though, I’ve never been a great lover of Photoshop. There’s too many features, too many things to do that I wouldn’t even know when to start. The layer system is a bit unwieldy and it can be a bit destructive. Anyway, PSDtuts was such a wonderful resource with easy step by step tutorials with pictures! I added it to my RSS reader.
Illustrator though is my weapon of choice ever since I learned how to use it. I found it simpler to use and the non-destructive aspect of vector graphics elated me to no end. I Googled for an Illustrator version of PSDtuts but nothing came up that really appealed to me. Although there are tons of resources out there, just recently I learned how to actually create opacity masks and transparency gradients. Lo and behold, I wake up this morning and my PSDtuts feed showed this headline: Vectortuts has officially launched! Oh joyous day! With only one tutorial at the moment, I am hoping more will come everyday an I’m sure it’ll get the 9 rules seal.
I am officially an awful person! I was thinking of playing around with Photoshop CS3’s very powerful photo stitching feature and thought about all the photos I planned to make into panoramas. Oh my god, I dug through my folders and I have just been awful with organizing my photos. As of today, I have about 30 folders worth of photos that I haven’t even looked at or organized. It’s so overwhelming and I know that I’m overwhelmed because my head is starting to hurt.
I was so good about a year ago but school got in the way with my flickr posting. I just rediscovered my photos of my trip to Newport, Rhode Island and I still have two days worth of photos to go through for that. I also blame my short attention span, leading to me posting a picture a day before. I slowly moved up to 5 photos a day and then now I am up to 12 photos a day. Yikes! Help please!
Filed under: Internet Scrapings | Tags: boringness, estrategy, hall, interestingness, learning, town, ubc, university
I’m at the UBC e-Strategy Town Hall right now, listening to the keynote by David Wiley. I was writing something about the correlation between the interestingness of education with iTunes U and the boringness of academics last night. It’s funny that a sort of mindmeld happened when David Wiley said the best line of the day.
If a student’s emails is more popular than you or your lecture, you don’t deserve to be there.
THANK YOU DAVID WILEY!
Filed under: Brain Scrapings, Internet Scrapings | Tags: education, ipod, itunes u, learning, open, podcasts
I noticed a pattern with my 5 years of education at UBC. First year was characterized with perfect attendance, even with pending papers and exams on the horizon. Second year was not much different but I had my first experience with the phenomenon called truancy. Third year saw self-debates about going to class, which I went due to my sense of filial responsibility. Fourth and fifth years saw the inevitable decline of my class attendance. Although I did skip classes that I know I could download notes from or if I was severely disinterested in the lessons.
Recently I bought a new Macbook and it came with a free iPod Touch. It was my first iPod, so I was really free from this hoopla about the device. People would tell me about the podcasts they listened to or the new band they just discovered. I didn’t really understand any of these. At any rate, I decided to actually download some podcasts recently and listened to them while on the bus. It was interesting and then I decided to download some more.
Lo and behold, I stumbled into iTunes U. Think edutainment and lectures but podcast form. I discovered videos, speeches from famous people, topics on current events and issues, etc. I devoured them. I downloaded more of them. I searched for them. It’s really funny that now I am out of school and I am learning more than I should. This actually reminds me of the reason why I went to class. I went to class because I didn’t want to read my course books at home. I only read something while being on the bus. Once I get off I never opened a course book again. Some books are totally dry and a bore to read. I can’t think of a more positive way to describe a lot of academics’ teaching styles. If professors question why students abhor going to class, I going to say something right now. No matter how important your lessons are, if you are boring the hell out of everybody, all your students will question the proper use of their time by being in your class. If you were in our place, you would think of the same.
I am surprised why aren’t educational institutions taking advantage of this technology? It something new for students to try. The current student population is already carrying devices like iPods, why not try to reach them that way? Commuting takes a significant chunk of my time during the day that listening to something interesting as a discussion on the ethics of food. I just finished a downloading spree that included a speaker series of world leaders and a documentary on Sierra Leone. Why couldn’t my classes be these interesting?
Filed under: Road Scrapings | Tags: cheap, costs, delhi, dubai, india, tickets, travelling, uae
I’ve got my trip planned out until July or all the way up to India. The next step, going to Europe, is proving a bit difficult. I’ve decided to fly into either Athens or Istanbul and then move west to France, Spain, and Portugal. Now the costs and a little of context.
My friends are leaving India on a Thursday morning and I will be alone on my way back to Delhi. Tickets are much more cheaper if I fly from New Delhi. On the other hand though, if I leave Friday the tickets are about $200US more expensive. I thought about staying in India for the weekend and leave Monday. I just don’t know what to do and the costs of staying would turn out to be the same anyway.
My other option is to fly to Dubai on a budget airline and stay there overnight or a couple of days. I want to go around the Middle East but it is not the cheapest destination. There are no budget airlines flying to Europe on the weekend either. None that I know of though. So the costs would still be around the same as flying out of India on Friday.
I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of days now and I think my blood vessels are about ready to pop.
