Kind of a busy week for me again, so the week kind of passed me by quickly. It’s August! In one month it will be (PH) Christmas season! It feels like July went by more quickly than other quarantine months.
My stuff:
A bit of consulting work. Reworking the old charity side project still ongoing. I was hoping to finish all the changes last week and next week would be testing and deployment, but stuff got in the way (and estimates may have been a bit off), but the spillover is small and we should still be fine for finishing everything next week.
Blog: Traditional blog posts, usually longer than other types, with a title. You can subscribe to an RSS feed of this list.
Aug 2020
Jul 2020
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The world: hm. I was a bit busy this week, so I wasn’t paying too much attention, so I don’t have too much to rail against today. Well of course, things are still ongoing. There’s still the pandemic, fascist police state philosophy continues to rear it’s ugly head in the US, PH gov’t continues to be dumb, etc., but this week seemed a bit tame comparably. On 26 Jul 2020 12:00am I wrote: Pandemic thoughts and updates, July 26 edition:
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Just in time for #JRPGJuly, I finally managed to complete my platinum run for Final Fantasy VII Remake! Spoiler-free review first, then the rest of the sections are no-holds barred. (Click to view full-size) 22 Jul 2020 12:00amView postClose Spoiler-free review The game is a fantastic retelling of the original FF7’s Midgar section. The plot largely tracks the original, except greatly expounded. More plot details are added to expound on character details and backstories, especially for supporting characters like Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie, and even for Shinra corporation itself. -
My country: There are days when I have to consciously temper my rage at the shenanigans of this government. I can’t write about them today. My stuff: This week’s pandemic notes. Had a busy work week again; at the same time I also picked up an older charity project where the client asked for UI updates. Had issues with running the old code, and it was small enough, so I decided to rewrite it in a new tech stack.
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I was going through some old emails and found some receipts for things I had purchased from the iTunes App Store for my iPad, and I wondered how much have I actually spent on apps/games on the App Store? I went through all the receipts and decided to write mini-reviews for each item as well: Purchase Date Name Price (USD) Still Available on App Store? Notes 2010/10/30 Alien Blue HD - Reddit Client (Unofficial), v1.
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My country: Friday afternoon the House of Representatives voted to deny the franchise application of the nation’s biggest broadcaster ABS-CBN. This despite all agencies of the executive testifying that the company had no violations. Justifications cited were mostly personal reasons. The Palace claims they remained neutral on this issue, but no one really believes that. Probably not even then. What now, Philippines? My stuff: This week’s pandemic notes.
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So recently Github secretly rolled out a new feature where you can create a file named README.md in a repo named github.com/<your github username>/<your github username>, and that markdown file would be rendered on your Github profile page. It means, you can now put basically anything you want on your Github profile! I just read this post from Simon Willson about using this new feature + Github actions and a Python script to automatically generate and update his Github profile.
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My country: Friday afternoon the president sighed the controversial “Anti-terror law” that vastly expands police powers, allows people to be arrested without warrants on mere suspicion of terrorism etc. Interesting timing, right after China applies a new anti-terror low to Hong Kong (and rightly gets castigated for it by countries all over the world) and also right after the PNP (who promise not to abuse their newfound powers) are under criticism for killing some soldiers in a misencounter and tampering with the crime scene to cover it up.
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In several places on this site (like if you click Photos in the menu up top), I have a grid-like view of a list of photos/images: (Click to view full-size) 1 Jul 2020 12:00amClose I used to just have each thumbnail open the post permalink on click, with the anchor set to the image itself. The image would be shown in full size inline of the post.
Jun 2020
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My stuff: This week’s pandemic notes. Easily the most annoying thing this week: our broadband modem conked out Wednesday night. Customer support isn’t super responsive for local telcos: I called their support line the next day (support line is not even available 24/7!), got put on hold for 45 minutes TWICE before they agreed to send a repair crew over the next day (Friday). Friday morning I got a text that the technician visit was actually scheduled for SATURDAY morning.
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I had been meaning to quit Facebook for more than a year maybe, but I kept putting it off. The main reason being that I like having backups of my own digital data (still very much a pack rat), and Facebook’s social media export is less than ideal, for me at least. Less than ideal why? It doesn’t include a lot of content I would like backed up, including: comments on my posts (there have been some good conversations with friends over the years I would prefer to preserve) things I’ve reposted from other people content of certain groups I’m members of (again, mostly for some interesting discussions over the years) pictures posted by other people that I’ve been tagged in For a while I looked around for scraper programs/scripts to this for me, but none really did what I wanted.
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My stuff: This week’s pandemic notes. Some days still hot, but weather beginning to turn for the better. Sleep kind of better and a bit more regular too. Did my quarterly medical checkup this past week (slightly delayed). No issues, but I need to do an FBS test for next time. Sleep schedule kind of settling back into my usual biphasic sleep. Although the second phase seems to move around a lot… Not much work-wise the past week, and a bit more family-related expenses.
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Surprisingly, no new crises have emerged during the past week. I think. More of the same crises, carrying on. Last Friday was the PH independence day holiday. I didn’t feel like celebrating. It doesn’t feel like we are free. In any case, a protest rally against the yet-to-be-signed terror bill took place at the university that morning, inspite of threats from the authorities that it wasn’t allowed. The protestors spaced themselves out and everything.
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It’s a bit interesting, this mentality of “I can’t trust this person because they appear to be a goody-goody do-gooder, they’re probably fake or have ulterior motives!”. I’m no psychologist, so idle speculation thread: Quoted gangbadoy's tweet: So, apparently they DO message! Nice. Happy Sunday, everybot! (Click to view full-size) 7 Jun 2020 8:43amClose It makes you wonder what kind of trauma this person must have experienced in his life, to automatically mistrust people who present as good people; were they betrayed by some person who initially presented as a good person?
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The world isn’t letting up. The virus is still around, but both the US and my own country have gotten distracted. The US is in its second week of police brutality/black lives matters protests. Meanwhile, our government took on a sidequest of trying to enact a wide-ranging and easily abusable anti-terror bill, triggering some smaller (by comparison to the US). I haven’t written about the terror bill, mainly because I haven’t had the opportunity to dig into it too deeply.
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Alright so someone responded to my previous post on quitting facebook asking why I’m quitting facebook but keeping Twitter. This is a fair question; after all, Twitter also makes its money off targetted advertising, can also get you addicted to engagement (likes/RTs), the Twitter app can also be dumb, and there can also be a lot of toxic people on this platform. So here are my reasons for keeping Twitter, and you may also get some tips for improving your twitter experience:
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(This will be cross-posted to my Facebook account.) It’s been long overdue, but I’m quitting Facebook. Why? It’s not you, but it’s not me either. It’s Facebook. There’s a ton of reasons for quitting Facebook, but here are some highlights: Facebook is dumb. The site is barely usable and the app is a big battery hog. And posts don’t even support formatting so now you’re getting this one in Markdown.
May 2020
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It seems difficult to write about stuff today, when the world seems like it is on fire. For historical context, for the past few days the USA, presumably a first-world nation, has been in the grip of massive protests and riots and police brutality following the murder of a black man by four police officers was captured on video and went viral. Basically, many states are responding to protests against police brutality with… police brutality.
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A recent post on Cory Doctorow’s pluralistic blog had a really good take on the general worldview of “the right”, describing it as “mafia logic”. I’m going to quote a huge chunk of it here: This follows perfectly from the second definition. The purpose of the law is to protect the rightful rulers, so the law can’t – by definition – punish them. And it is “mafia logic.” Holbo was talking about Michael Gove – a UK Tory Minister – excusing his the Prime Minister’s advisor Dominick Cummings repeatedly breaking the quarantine rules that Cummings is responsible for creating and enforcing.
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I’ve basically been using GMail as my main email account since I first got access in 2006ish. “Main email account” means I use it as the primary access point for all my other online accounts. GMail was certainly revolutionary when it came out, and had a lot of benefits: it was fast, easily searchable and had a lot of free storage. But in the modern day, there are significant disadvantages to using GMail:
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A while back I got an export of my Foursquare/Swarm data. If you’re not familiar, these were a pair of apps that were used for “checking-in” to particular locations, with a sort of gamification system where if you checked in at a place often enough, you would earn points and eventually become “Mayor” of the venue. The idea being that owners of those venues might give some benefits to those who check-in often at those locations (AFAIK, this never really caught on in the Philippines).
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A bit of brouhaha a couple of weeks ago after the National Telecommunications Commission ordered the country’s biggest broadcaster ABS-CBN to cease operations because Congress had been remiss in renewing their franchise.. This despite the NTC earlier promising they can operate provisionally while the franchise renewal is being processed, a change of heart apparently due to a legal opinion by the SolGen. Some thoughts: “Bias” The speaker of the house says:
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My stuff: This week’s quarantine notes. the weather has been so hot lately, I’ve taken to shifting my sleep schedule to afternoons so that I can maximize the use of the air-conditioning to when it’s most needed. It also helps me be more productive, since I can get more things done if I’m awake during the cooler hours of the day. I think I’m more looking forward to the end of summer than the end of quarantine.
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Previously. In the most recent weeknotes, I mentioned this post about bringing blogs back to the internet and the ensuing discussion on Hacker News. Some further thoughts on blogging based on the HN discussion: On Traffic and Engagement Someone mentioned that one of the reasons most people stop blogging is that it feels like there’s nobody reading their work. This reminds me of a convo I had with a friend a couple of years back when he saw one of my blog posts.
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My Stuff: This week’s quarantine notes. Work: A bit of Laravel work, and a bit of server management and deployment. Nothing too ridiculous. Watching: Haven’t watched much this week. There was the really great Justice League Dark: Apokolips War which came out last week. Apparently it’s the last one for the DC AMU, or this particular timeline at least. Quiz: We are now up to 3 locally produced online quiz nights per week, which seems like a lot because we only used to attend 2-3 live events per month.
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I mean, that’s true in general of course. But it certainly seems much more true in these pandemic times. Before all of this waves hands arounds frantically, people had a general sense of routine and predictability about their daily lives. It varied person by person of course, but many people had regular things like a steady job that kept them occupied for most of the week, a school where their kids could go off to most days, maybe a favorite bar or restaurant they visit every week or so, church on Sundays, friends you saw every other weekend or so, malls or stores they would pass by regularly, and so on and so forth.
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My Stuff: Early this morning I took a walk outside for the first time since the lockdown started. Previously I had only gone out for groceries and meds. Only for less than 30 mins, and only in our subdivision, walking up and down the street. It’s good to be walking again, although this short and limited route is quite boring and full of neighbor’s dogs barking at me, so I’m not too fond of it, but it’s better to get the habit started again since I’ve been feeling the fatness piling on due to the quarantine and the lack of exercise.
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Last week, Wizards announced that they were sunsetting DCI numbers and Planeswalker Points, this felt like an appropriate time to do a retrospective on my 25 years playing Magic the Gathering. Strap yourselves in, this is going to be a long one! The Early Years I started playing MTG in my fourth year of high school, so that’s around sometime 1994-1995. The most recent expansion releases at that time were The Dark and Fallen Empires.
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First week of May. At least two more weeks of quarantine remain. COVID19 Diary still exists, only updated every so often. I stayed in the entire week! The week was slightly more productive than the last one, at least in terms of personal projects. I moved a couple of them forward. And also spent a bunch of time spring cleaning and moving stuff around here on the site. Details to follow.
Apr 2020
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I was reading this post about how to respond to the “Nothing to Hide” argument against the concept of privacy. The quoted DuckDuckGo blog post lists some pretty good reasons, but I thought I’d expound on some thoughts as well. The core of the “Nothing to Hide” argument is that if you, personally, have nothing incriminating or illegal to hide, then you don’t need to worry about privacy intrusions. The argument is used mainly to justify things like state-sponsored surveillance, but might also be applicable to data collection activities by large corporations such as Facebook or Google.
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I’ve had the good fortune to be on the interviewer side of technical interviews much more often than I’ve been the interviewee. I’ve been doing a few more of these over the past couple of years and made some notes, so I thought I’d talk about technical interviews for a bit. Caveat: these are largely based on my own experiences, in the local environment here in the PH. Technical Exam / Screening Many companies will ask applicants to undertake a technical exam before letting them advance to further stages of the recruitment process.
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It’s the last week of April, but thanks to an extension, we are still in for three more weeks of quarantine. The COVID19 Diary is still being updated sporadically. Only went out once this week, for groceries. We tried to buy a bit more than usual, hoping to reduce the number of times we need to go out. We also celebrated a couple of birthdays in the family, through a zoom call, complete with the grandkids blowing on a candle from across the internet.
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Unless you’re working at a small shop that only serves local clients, software development these days is often an international endeavor. That means the aspiring software developer needs to be able to work with and get along with people of different cultures. In the company I worked with, most projects back in the day we would have a person from the foreign office in charge. Their roles were either as project manager (PM) or system analyst (SA).
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This week went by quickly, for some reason. And despite the fact that it’s summer, the rains have started coming in early, although only sporadically. inb4 “the world is healing” The COVID19 Diary is still being updated every few days. Actually went out 3 times this week, once for groceries, and twice for meds for the parental units (one would assume they would coordinate so I can just buy everything in one go, but nooooo.
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Just last month, I wrote a method of implementing element toggles using a pure CSS approach. While that post was educational for me, it turns out there was an even simpler way of doing things. I found out about it when I read this post by Jamie Tanna. Apparently the details and summary tags already support HTML toggles, so we can do this with neither CSS or JS! I’ve updated the spoiler tags on this site to use this new method.
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A while back one of the biggest leaks of personal information in history was made by hackers accessing the Commission on Elections database here in the Philippines. More than 50 million voter registration records, including information such as full names, date of birth, address, among others. A small percentage of the data leaked also included email addresses and even passport numbers. The hack exposed more than half of the country’s population to the possibility of social engineering and other exploits.
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For most of my time working on software projects, it has always been for bespoke projects. Bespoke basically means a software program or package tailor-made for a specific client. The client provides all the requirements, the team fleshes out more details and specifications, some prototyping may or may not ensure, and implementation proceeds thusly. It’s relatively straightforward compared to product development. I only started getting involved with “product”-like projects over the in the latter half of my career as a software developer.
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I stopped updating the COVID19 Diary for a few days (last update was on Maunday Thursday), and I feel like that was a healthier choice overall. It helped that nothing significantly newsworthy happened over the long weekend. (Well, there’s still thousands of deaths worldwide, but somehow our bar for “significant” has shifted quite a bit.) Our lockdown has of course been extended to the end of April. I expect it will go beyond that though, likely the earliest chance for things to start going back to normal might be by June.
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It’s naked CSS day, so the site looks super bare-bones today! Inspired by Laura Kalbag and Eric Meyer. Trying out the site without the CSS made me realize how I wasn’t setting width and height for the svg icons I was using, so they became huge when the CSS was removed. I also rearranged the templates so the footer is at the end of the document (previously it was being put there by CSS). -
My COVID19 Diary is still ongoing, and I have yet to find a solution for the TOC. Today is Palm Sunday. I’m writing this early in the morning, so IDK yet how the church will adapt the usual fanfare to this whole pandemic thing. The summer heat has begun to settle in during the last few weeks of quarantine. I can’t sit without a shirt or rest or my arms anywhere without sweat threatening to accumulate on the contact surface.
Mar 2020
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My COVID19 Diary is still ongoing, although that TOC is starting to get unwieldy. Need to think of a better UX solution for that. “Time is meaningless under extreme enhanced community quarantine” (Click to view full-size) “Time is meaningless under extreme enhanced community quarantine” 29 Mar 2020 12:00amView postClose I know it’s probably unrealistic, but I’m hoping the lockdown somehow gets lifted sooner rather than later.
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(Too late for the theatrical release, but it’s tradition for comic book movies, so here we are.) Overall: Totally watchable, maybe slightly better than Suicide Squad for me. Somehow still fits into some kind of DCEU continuity (after Suicide Squad) the movie is really centered around Harley, to the detriment of the other characters. I can understand why they titled it the way they did, and I can appreciate the effort to have Harley carry a Birds of Prey introduction to the masses.
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Drew Devault wrote a great post/rant about the reckless limitless scope of modern web browsers: I conclude that it is impossible to build a new web browser. The complexity of the web is obscene. The creation of a new web browser would be comparable in effort to the Apollo program or the Manhattan project. For the past year or so, I’ve been thinking about contributing to an open source project.
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I originally had this as a tweetstorm/rant, but it ended up quite long, so I’m posting it to the blog too. It is mostly frustration at how poorly the people in charge are handling things. Instead of asking for more budget, the govt should be telling us first how they are planning to spend the money they are already allocated, which they claimed was sufficient. Instead of saying we can’t do mass testing because of limited kits, they should be telling us about their plans for getting more testing kits, ppes, hospital capacity, etc.
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Past week has been difficult productivity-wise. I mean, the isolation isn’t really a problem for me since I’m usually at home anyway. But it’s difficult to find the energy to be productive about anything. It’s like the whole pandemic situation manifests as a lingering ball of anxiety in the back of my head. My parents are prayerful and hopeful that things get resolved quickly, but I’m not super optimistic - I think it’s likely to go long.
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“It’s chaos, be kind” - Michelle McNamara on the world. Current events: This past week has been… challenging to say the least. Especially if you’re the sort who experiences anxiety over the smallest uncertainty. I was originally going to write about local COVID19 happenings in this space, but it ended up being way too many words. I spun it off into a separate post, and intend to update it periodically as events unfold.
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This post will largely be about the effects of the COVID-19 virus on my country, the Philippines, including government and society’s response, largely from a personal POV. It’s actually a bit difficult to write about, but I figure it’s something I would like to be able to look back on in the future, so let’s give it a shot. The reason it’s difficult to write about is that events are unfolding and changing rapidly, and a lot of things are still unclear.
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Some gaming things I’m looking forward to in the coming weeks: 12 Mar: Historic anthology 2 and return of Historic ranked in Magic Arena. Looking forward to new cards being added to the Historic pool! 18 Mar: Release of Federations DLC for Stellaris. I’m not planning to get the DLC, what I’m looking forward to is the accompanying free patch since one of the promises is improved late-game performance, something which made playing this game very annoying during the past year.
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Since I stopped being a full-time employee at the end of 2015, I’ve missed around four years of monthly SSS payments. This isn’t really that big a deal, since I’ve already paid more than 10 years of premiums, I’m already guaranteed to get a pension from SSS when I reach retirement age. However, this past January I decided to resume making SSS premium payments on a voluntary basis. I had to research a bit and ask some friends about the whole process, so I thought I’d document it here both for my own recollection and in case someone finds it useful.
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The Week That Was: The COVID19 pandemic is starting to pick up steam, both internationally (including the US) and here in the Philippines. The Trump administration seems to be handling things poorly, which would be typical to expect of an administration not used to transparency or integrity. For all our sakes they need to get their act together. The PH government appears to be doing slightly better (assuming no hidden epidemic), although their messaging still seems to be all over the place.