2017 June
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Random thoughts while walking at night: The structure of government can be a bit analogous to the structure of a software development project. The Constitution is like the requirements for a project. It's kind of high-level and (I believe) shouldn't be too detailed. Supposedly the requirements are written by the client. For a country like the Philippines the client is "we the sovereign Filipino people". Slight tangent: I used to know this guy who was one of those rabid "we need to amend the constitution" types and he asked me to review a "mathematical model to track the budget as
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Some time ago a friend from high school invited me to her daughter's debut. And I had to proxy for her daughter's ninong and maybe give a few words on what it means to become an adult. My first two reactions were (1) wow I'm so old one of my batchmates has an eighteen-year-old daughter; and (2) what the heck would I know about becoming an adult? (I guess (3) was "oh, it's a debut, so it's formal and I have to dress up? I hate dressing up.") I mean, don't get me wrong. I certainly consider myself an adult.
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A while back I wrote about my experience coding and maintaining an in-house web framework at a previous job. It was a full-stack web framework. We had libraries for front-end Javascript up to server-side database connections. And the entire stack was tightly coupled. But while the framework was serviceable, it was almost always behind modern trends in web development. I always felt like we were playing catch-up. And as a developer I wanted to widen my horizons and try out more things. So more than once I had discussions with higher management about using open source web frameworks in some
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"Grabe naman kasi ang ginagawa nyo sa pasahero" (This is too much for the passengers), she said. She was a short, old lady trying to get to the front of the bus so that she could disembark. But like most city buses in Metro Manila during rush hour, the bus was filled to the brim with people, many of them standing tightly packed in the aisle, holding on to handrails on the bus ceiling or the nearby seats. Her young son, a short boy of maybe 14 years, weaved through the standing bodies packed in the bus's aisle to retrieve
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I don't really play Magic regularly anymore; Last year I only played Standard because I was Q'ed for the WMCQs. But when there's a local Grand Prix, oldies like me crawl out of the woodwork and try to believe we can still do well in a tournament with minimal prep. Grand Prix Manila 2017 was to be Standard format, held on June 2-4, 2017, at the SMX convention center. At the start of the year I already knew I would be playing in this year's GP Manila, but since I hadn't played Standard for well over a year, I didn't -
So last April my friends and I took a second trip to Japan. This time we mostly stayed around Tokyo, while taking a few days off in-between to visit Fuji, Hakone and Nikko. I like Tokyo, so I'll talk about Tokyo for now. I've only been here twice, but I could imagine myself living here for an extended period of time. It solves my top three problems with Metro Manila: overly hot weather, poor transportation options, and poor internet. Both visits I found the temperatures to be within the generally agreeable range of around 5-25 degrees celsius. The low end
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My first Persona game was Persona 4 Golden on the Vita -- a fantastic game. After that I dived into Persona 3 Portable and eventually the spin-off games Persona 4 Arena (and Ultimax) and Persona Q on 3DS. So it was no surprise that one of the game releases I was most looking forward to this year would be the next numbered game in the series: Persona 5 on the Playstation 4. Like P4G before it, the focus is on the school life of a young man forced into a new environment, interspersed with some good old JRPG dungeon crawling. -
I haven't been blogging too much recently. I got busy for a while and had to skip a few weeks, and then general laziness prevented me from resuming a regular posting schedule. (Hopefully that ends now.) Most of the time my ranting was on social media, which got me thinking: Is writing on your own blog still useful in this day and age of social media? I've been blogging for a long time -- my archives say 2002 -- waaay before Facebook or even Twitter came around. If for some reason you felt like digging through my older posts you'd