The second ANC Leadership Forum is interesting on a very different level than the first. In this round, the guests were Former President Joseph Estrada, Sen. Loren Legarda, Makati Mayor Jejomar Binay and MMDA Chairman Bayani Fernando. Sen. Panfilo Lacson was supposed to be there but he backed out again and this time he also announced that he was withdrawing his presidential bid for 2010, citing his lack of funds as his reason. However, many are speculating that he struck a deal with the government that he would back out from running for president in exchange for easing him out of the Dacer-Corbito murder case. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is true because of the timing of his announcement — Cesar Mancao, who is supposed to be the state witness for the trial just arrived in the country then. Anyhow, the leadership forum pushed through without Ping and the University of the Philippines School of Economics was jampacked with students and teachers alike wanting to witness the forum live. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can do so here.

Listening to the guests, you would really see their different visions for the country. (more…)

I saw the ANC Leadership Forum being aired in ABS-CBN last night, which reminded me that I haven’t blogged about it yet, which I should have done right after I watched it on ANC when it was first aired. Anyway, for those who didn’t know about it, ANC (ABS-CBN News Channel), together with the Ateneo School of Government, hosted a leadership forum on May 11 for the aspiring presidential candidates of the 2010 Philippine elections. The guests were Senators Francis Escudero, Richard Gordon, and Mar Roxas; Pampanga Gov. Ed Panlilio; and Defense Secretary Gilbert Teodoro. Senator Panfilo Lacson confirmed his attendance but backed out before the event. They also invited Vice President Noli de Castro, and Senators Manuel Villar and Loren Legarda but the three probably didn’t confirm. If you haven’t seen it and you want to get an idea of what transpired, visit the following links:

• Countdown to 2010 - An ANC Leadership Forum part 1
• Countdown to 2010 - An ANC Leadership Forum part 2
• Countdown to 2010 - An ANC Leadership Forum part 3
• Countdown to 2010 - An ANC Leadership Forum part 4
• Countdown to 2010 - An ANC Leadership Forum part 5

Now for my opinions. (more…)

I am going to promote it here mainly because it’s our site. My boyfriend and I created a website called personalads.com.ph and we want you to be the first to use it. It’s a site where people can create personal ads for free and it’s perfect for all the pinoys out there are looking for new people to connect with. Whether you’re looking for textmates or for new friends to add to your friendster/facebook/multiply account or, if you’re more daring, for new peeps to meet and hook up with, you’ll find it here. That is, if someone has the courage to post his or her ad first! You see, we don’t want to put any dummy data in and we don’t want to spam other people’s sites and forums either. So I’ll just encourage you, my dear readers, to post your personal ads and hope that when I visit the site again tomorrow, there will be a long list of pinoys wanting to socialize and interact with each other. :)

A great Filipino was laid to rest yesterday. I didn’t get to write about his death and it’s impact on me earlier because I was catching up with work. So I’m taking my time now to write down my thoughts.

I learned about his death last Friday while I was at work. I was in a meeting when my bf sent me a message saying Francis M. has died. Of course I couldn’t reply to him that instant but the minute the meeting was over, I messaged him back. He said it was announced at Eat Bulaga that Francis passed away at 12 noon that day. I found myself in a state of shock really because I had just visited his blog the day before. Yes, you could say that I was a bit of a fan. Growing up, I found it totally inspiring listening to his music. I don’t have all his albums though; I just have a cassette tape of FrancisM and that’s it. But I followed his career, from Eat Bulaga, to his photography, to his directing of music videos, to his t-shirt company, to his fight with cancer. I guess this is why I was saddened by his death, he shared so much of himself when he was alive, it’s such a shame it will all now come to an end. He still had so much to give, so much love, joy and hope to share but sadly his time is up. So now, it’s up to his children to continue his legacy, and up to the Filipino people to remember and never forget what his life and his music has been about. If all of us could just live out the same love of country that this great man has shown in his life then his death would not have been in vain and we would emerge a better people and a better nation.

Thank you Francis for teaching us how to be truly Filipinos!

There were 2 winners in last night’s lotto draw so they will have to divide between them the jackpot prize of 347M, the highest pot amount reached ever since PCSO started the national lottery. I bought a ticket for that draw but I didn’t win. Even so, I find myself feeling very grateful because my sister has undergone a successful cataract surgery. Just an update on my post last week, it was really fortunate that her thyroid tests did not reveal any problem so she was cleared for operation by her endocrinologist and was admitted last Thursday. She had her operation last Friday and she was discharged from the hospital last Saturday. Now she still has to wear goggles to protect her eyes from dirt and prevent her from rubbing her eyes, but she can already see clearly. She walks even faster now because she can already see where she’s going and she doesn’t have to worry about bumping into furniture and other things. I also noticed that her posture has improved, she walks more upright and now looks directly at the person talking to her. Another good news revealed by the ophthalmologist was that her retinas are still intact and does not seem to be affected yet by her diabetes. Tomorrow she will have a follow-up checkup and by next week she probably won’t need her goggles anymore.

So even if I still have to look for money to pay for the debts we incurred for the operation, seeing the smile on my sister’s face makes it all worth it. Of course, a little help from winning in the lottery wouldn’t have hurt.

Let me just note that I’m loving the weather we are having lately. Quite a bit chilly and without the excessive humidity. Kinda like not being in the Philippines at all. Or maybe this is how the weather is like in the northern provinces and other places in the country with high altitude. But there’s a catch with having this kind of weather in the lowlands — the food crops get “confused” and the whole harvest cycle gets messed up. So as much as I like this weather, I’d rather have food on my table than a perfect weather. I’ll just enjoy it as much as I can before everything gets back to normal, I hope. (more…)

I saw this in my PayPerPost qualified opportunities and I just thought I’d try it out. It’s a site where you can get blog photos that are high-quality and free which you can put on your webpage without having to worry about the images eating up your webhost’s disk quota. That’s because the images are hosted at www.acobox.com!

I looked for an image I can try out on this post and I saw this. It reminded me of my elementary days at Montessori where we learned geography by putting together a wooden puzzle of the world map. If you’re wondering where the Philippines is, it’s the red group of islands just above the blue group of islands (Indonesia), located at the south east :)

I know, it’s a little too late for that. But hey, the Chinese New Year is still upcoming (Jan. 26) so I’ll just shout out an advanced greeting for that. Kung Hei Fat Choy!

Now that that’s out of the way, you may be wondering where I’ve been. Let me see. (more…)

This post is a bit overdue because we went to Manila Peninsula’s Chocolate Buffet last Oct 24 and I’m only writing about it now. So forgive me if I don’t give the details of our chocolate encounter. I’m hoping that the pictures would suffice to show you what a wonderful evening we had! (more…)

Entrecard has deleted my account with them. First time was when my site went down this weekend. They sent me an email saying that they deleted my account because it was in violation of Rule #10 of their blog quality standards: “URLs must be valid: Sites with URLs that do not work or are wrongly typed will be deleted.” I myself didn’t know that my URL was not working. It turned out that my webhost moved to different servers and even though I already changed the DNS in my domain registration, they still have some maintenance work to do. Anyway, my site was immediately restored yesterday so I emailed Entrecard, asking for reconsideration. Now, I get another email from them saying that my account will remain deleted because they reviewed my site and found it to be in violation of Rule #4 (Content must be original: Reproduced content does not provide the specific qualities we are looking for in the Entrecard network. This includes both sites that use legitimate reprintable content such as "free articles", abstracts and public domain content as well as illegitimate, illegal content such as stolen content or scraped feeds. Duplicate content, such as posts that appear on two or more blogs belonging to the same person is also unacceptable.) and Rule #5 (No full-screen ads or popups: Blogs that include full-screen ads or popups will be removed. This includes any popup window that appears when the site has finished loading or when clicking to view an article. It is OK for links to display a popup window if the user clicks a link, e.g. FeedBurner email subscription, but popup ads or forceful messages asking people to subscribe without clicking anything are intrusive and therefore not allowed.). I’m sure I have disabled the full-screen ads in my site and I haven’t put in any popups so I don’t know why I’m in violation of Rule #5. I do recognize that I’m violating Rule #4 because of my News content (News Snapshots and Recent News) but I’m not about ready to give up that one. I visit my own site because that’s where I read about the latest news happening around the world. Now I don’t know if my readers like the layout of my home page. Would they rather see the blog part at the top? I might change the layout next year, move around some stuff and lessen the ads. But that’s for next year; I don’t want to change anything now. So I guess I would just have to let go of Entrecard. Maybe I’ll reapply next year. Or maybe not. I’ll miss my droppers though. I just hope they have BlogCatalog or MyBLogLog so I can still see them when they drop by.