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A blog is a website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries, typically displayed in reverse chronlogical order. A single entry is called a blog post.

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2023 March

  • March is ending, and the cool amihan winds have left us to our scorching hot days. Summer is truly here. My Week I spent Friday through Monday in Singapore visiting friends. Just arrived early this morning and basically slept all day. These are my excuses for why the weeknotes are coming in very late. The trip itself deserves it's own post, which I'll try to get around to soon. The rest of my week was prepping and packing and being anxious for the trip, and trying to fit in some errands before being away for a few days. Nothing much

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  • My Week I visited a friend in the hospital last Thursday, and it wasn't anything life threatening but I noted the visitor rules are still super strict despite the currently low occurrence of COVID in the country. The time frame when visits are allowed is limited to one hour per day, and only one visitor gets to visit each patient (supposedly for a maximum of 15 minutes, but there's no way that's enforceable). While it's inconvenient for the visitors, some of the hospital staff mention it has the added benefit that the hospitals aren't so crowded. Filipinos are super family-oriented

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  • My Week It's the second week of March, yet for some strange and nice reason the past few days have not yet been that hot, with the mornings and evenings a bit nippy even. The last gasps of the hanging amihan holding on before eventually giving way to the brutal summer heat. I suspect I won't have a lot to write about today. My week wasn't particularly busy, but was littered with reminders of how the universe has no particular obligation to respect one's plans. Globe gave us our first internet outage of the year this week. This time it

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  • I think I found this book via a recommendation somewhere and just dug into it assuming it would be one of those productivity / self-help books about making the most of our scarce time on this world. It turns out it's actually more of a philosophy book about accepting our all-too human limitations, emphasizing that we can't do everything we want and we can't control the future. I enjoyed the book a lot, so many parts of it just spoke to me and I found myself nodding vigorously and highlighting quotes liberally. It addresses one of my great weaknesses: my

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2023 February

  • A Quote "Everything happens so much" Horse_ebooks My Week February is ending, time marches on relentlessly. This past week was mostly about family for me. An aunt came in from the province to stay with us for a bit. My dad and pamangkin #3 celebrated their birthdays. We all met up at an upscale mall yesterday to celebrate, and it's always fun when all the cousins get to hang out and play together. Our President, in his wisdom (?), decided to declare the 24th a holiday on the night before, upsetting a lot of people. My niece told me she

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  • While digging through some old work chat logs (from 2011, more than 10 years ago!), I found some interesting advice I was giving to some junior developers in our company about how to handle and prioritize the increasing workload (number of tasks) they were being given. I thought it might be worth sharing. The below are all messages from me, extracted from the chat logs, with a light touch of translation for those parts in italics, since like most informal discussions at offices here, a lot of it was in Taglish. 03:12:17 I was discussing with someone the other day

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  • Some random thoughts: Texting before calling A while back a shop took down my phone number so they can text me (their words) when it comes in so I can pick it up. A few days later, they notify me via a phone call instead of a text, the nerve! (At the the time I was outside pleasantly enjoying a hotdog sandwich.) Society can't seem to get the hang of the fact that many people don't want the inconvenience of being interrupted by a phone call, I'd like an update / upgrade to whatever protocols mobile phone calls and SMS

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  • (Cross-posted from the TriviaStorm blog) Shutting Down The Twitter Bot Sad news today, as Twitter has announced that API access will no longer be free startong on Feb 9, 2023. Sadly this means the end of the bot's run on Twitter which started in Feb 2017. Almost 5 years! It was fun while it lasted. The Twitter bot will run until it can't. Migrating to Mastodon That was the bad news. The good news is that a version of the trivia bot is already up and running on the fediverse/Mastodon networks. You can follow the bot at https://botsin.space/@triviastorm. It follows

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2023 January

  • Four weeks in! January is nearing it's end. Time still flies faster than I expect. Middays are starting to get hotter, but the nights are still pretty brisk, making nighttime walks very comfortable. My walking discipline has been very good the past week as well. Finished the last of this batch of start-of-year medical errands this week. A lighter load, mostly teleconsults and routine check-ups. After this, the medical errands should be sporadic until they all come together again in April. On Jan. 30, 2023, 1:47 p.m. I wrote: After we finished the first jigsaw puzzle a while back, Ma

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  • This past weekend was the Lunar New Year, which is only for people who live in countries that have a moon. Someone told me recently that the term "Chinese New Year" is outdated and kind of racist, so the preferred term nowadays is "Lunar New Year". That's fine I guess? I don't think Filipinos are likely to change their wording regarding this anyway. I'm also easily confused nowadays because when I was young the greeting was always "Kung Hei Fat Choy", but these days there are a lot of variants. As shared by my mom from an unknown source: Just

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  • I walk a lot. A couple of days ago I was thinking about how I'd been a walking a lot even when I was young. Since I now have Google Maps, I can check the distances of the routes I used to walk! High School Google Maps tells me my high school is around 3.7km away from where we lived back then. I am sure I walked that whole distance at least once, but not often. What I did do fairly regularly was walk down Agham Road and BIR road to my favorite spot on East Avenue, which should be

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