This is how my music studio looks as of now.
This song from the 1980s has been haunting my memories so I decided to look for it on Youtube and learned the chords in one night.
Broken Wings
Author Archives: admin
Elementary students had better excuses
The hearing of Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr’s disqualification case before the Commission on Elections (Comelec) was slated for today. The coward was a no-show. The criminal has been convicted of tax evasion by the lower courts several years ago and now he faces three petitions for his disqualification. He keeps on submitting dubious documents as he tries to worm his way out of this one.
I wish this was a satire or a joke. BUT IT IS NOT! OMG! Even my kids could make up better excuses than this. *facepalm* People online are joking that we now have a new Covid variant called Zoomicron, which can be transmitted through Zoom.
No, you can’t make this up. It’s too stupid. But here it is, it’s all over the news.
One of the Commissioners is now livid.
They want to delay this as long as they can so he can continue to run even though he is a convicted criminal.
Meanwhile, we stocked up on KN95/KN94 masks because double masking with surgical + cloth for a better fit doesn’t cut it anymore.
Yep, the growth is exponential. Good luck to all of us. I was chatting with a source last night and he projected that we will be hitting 50k cases by Monday and then 100k towards the end of the month. By Feb this will taper off but before that, all of us would have caught it by then. He told me he already stocked up on oxygen tanks and meds. Forget about hospitals, he told me, we are incapable of getting help from the hospitals now. I told my sisters that they should make sure the oxygen tank at home is filled up just in case my mom gets hit again.
So 2022 is like a repeat of 2021, only that we are just too tired of the shit of last year. Year 3 of bullshit. So people are now turning to little things like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson taking on Cookie Monster on Twitter for some amusement.
I envy my cats. No stress, no problems. The only stressors they have are my two-legged children disturbing their peace.
As Twin I said, in her next life she wants to be our cat.
Action of one, affecting all
Berjaya Makati Hotel Statement
Berjaya press release sent to my mailbox today
January 6, 2022
The order by the Makati City Hall closing down Berjaya Makati Hotel’s operations based on the suspension order issued by the Department of Tourism is without legal basis.
For one, the DOT order is not yet final as the hotel will appeal it within the fifteen-day period it is given. Meanwhile, the suspension is not in effect. Secondly, there is no law that penalizes a hotel for not reporting a guest who jumps quarantine. There is nothing in R.A. 13322 that is applicable to the hotel. Thirdly, we must be accorded due process and be allowed to explain before any penalty is imposed. We have not been given our day in court by the Makati City Hall.
On the operations level, if we close down the hotel immediately, where do we send the 150 or so quarantine guests we have at the moment?
The whole country is on war footing in effect against the pandemic. Every quarantine hotel, just like ours, serves a strategic purpose especially with the lack of rooms while the virus rampages throughout. To close down a quarantine hotel for no legal reason is to close down a hospital just when it is helping to win the war. There is no benefit to be gained by such regulatory posturing when national interest and public health are on the line.
One selfish/entitled act of one affects everybody. This Gwyneth Chua has wreaked havoc on a lot of businesses and families. The people whom she infected have reached La Union and have affected a restaurant that was forced to close down. (No Omicron in La Union despite Chua contact testing positive)
There are stories floating around about her parents bribing staff of the hotel so she can skip quarantine (ugh! Parents condoning selfish acts!) but are not proven.
“In fact, her friends asked why she was already out partying, instead of being in quarantine [in Berjaya Hotel], and she claimed to have ‘connections’,” according to Tourism Secretary Bernadette Romulo Puyat in an interview with this paper. She identified a bar in Poblacion, Makati, popular among millennials, as one of the venues where Chua allegedly partied with friends.”
Business Mirror
This is the problem with the third-world country like the Philippines: the small fry with money can behave like they own the country. Such small-town thinking.
So now we’re grappling with several thousands of daily cases again. I don’t know how long we can wait for the kids can get vaccinated before omicron gets us again.
I have already signed up for my girls’ vaccination and hopefully they can get the first dose before the month ends.
We just logged 17,220 new cases today with a positivity rate of almost 37%. Sigh. Here we go again.
We’re so tired of this. There should be vaccine equality now worldwide or else we will battling this virus longer than we should.
Elsewhere in the world, Japan to declare quasi-state of emergency amid rising COVID cases while EU daily virus cases top 1 million for first time.
And so it begins again
There’s an anecdote by a guy on Twitter about being in a mall in Makati that is now almost empty and workers are waiting for customers to come so they can collect commissions enough for fare to go home later that night 😓
Lockdowns are not the answer especially when it’s the poor who are going to be hurt. We don’t have to go on lockdowns. The government just needs to speed up vaccination roll out and the boosters. Like in our barangay, we are only allotted less than 500 shots that we had to share with other barangays. The patients would have to queue at 5 am just to be able to get that slot. Since I am sick now, I would have to forgo since 1) I can’t physically have the booster shot because I’m sick; 2) I may end up endangering other people by spreading what I have (I’m not sure if this is already Covid or just plain colds). Even antigen tests are hard to obtain. My high school classmates in our chat group are asking where can we buy home test kits because none are readily available here. 🤷🏻♀️
Look at that high positivity rate.
This is horrible. Many people will be without work again and won’t have means to feed their families. What we need are more free or affordable tests and not checkpoints!
This government is useless.
Flu medicine shortage
Everybody is sick right now due to the drop in temperature plus people were up and about during the holidays like the pandemic is just a distant memory. Good thing I was able to stock up a bit when the girls were battling colds, plus I had some medicines when I prepared for Delta surge last year. However, my stock is dwindling because I am down with colds as well.
But of course DOH had to say something like that to prevent panic buying. The reality on the ground is, everything is sold out now. Even Zennya has sent a message through their app that says Covid tests are fully booked that’s why they’re extending their operating hours until 11 pm to accommodate requests.
I ordered from Bayer’s page on Shopee several tubes of Berocca, which helped me to recover from Covid. In case we get COVID again, I still have Lianhua here but so far we only needed antihistamines and Sinupret forte for our colds and cough. Nasal sprays have done their work on the kids while I am still torturing my nostrils with it.
And oh, teas are wonderful, not just the one with caffeine though (my shrink forbids me as it will clash with my meds).
Because I’m so paranoid, I’m no long going out and I’ve used my Puregold app to order groceries. My problem is fresh veggies. Let’s see if I can drive tomorrow to UP for that.
And this is what I’m talking about the localization of social marketing strategies, just like the communication of disaster mitigation and awareness on the local government level. The government and developmental workers shouldn’t use a bullet approach of one-size fits all. It’s never going to be effective. In the AKAP stages of social marketing (Awareness, Knowledge, Attitude, Practice), you need to be able to communicate well on the Awareness level and Knowledge exchange stage for Attitudes to change and push them into favorable Practices (in this case, getting their vax). If people don’t receive the message well on the Awareness stage, how can they even accept the Knowledge? They will just reject it.
Sheesh. These people should employ development communicators if they want something to happen. I remember writing some proposal for tuberculosis innoculation project of WHO though I cannot remember if I did this for graduate school or for an employment exam.
Anyway, the localization approach was the reason why the zero polio campaign was successful–until Duterte came along–because the DOH then was employing something right at that time. I miss Dr. Juan Flavier for his pro-development, proactive, and pro-poor policies at DOH and at the Senate.
DOH is such a mess right now.
First working day of the year, newish keyboard
I had been feeling dissatisfied with my computer keyboard as the keys keep getting stuck. I knew it was because it was dirty and it has been a few years old (probably six years old or more?). I had been window shopping for keyboards online and the ones I like are a few thousands of pesos…something I could not justify yet given that my current Logitech keyboard is perfectly serviceable.
Then I tried cleaning it myself.
With Youtube, a lot of patience, a stick vacuum cleaner, alcohol sprayer, a lot of cotton buds, and Wipeout (which you can get from any cleaning supplies section of a hardware or supermarket), I started disassembling my keyboard.
Before 
After
Before 
After
And for the love of God, if you’re anything like me who gets lost in mall parking spaces and wandering around trying to remember where I parked my car, PLEASE TAKE A PHOTO OF YOUR KEYBOARD before disassembling it. You may forget where the quotation marks and the colons are placed.
No, I didn’t forget to take a photo of my keyboard since one guy whose tutorial I watched reminded me of it. I could only imagine my frustration trying to piece back together my keyboard without a photo to guide me. This guy, didn’t take a photo so he swapped keys and had to take off the keys and put them back in again. So it’s kinda assuring to know that I’m not the only one who’s dumb like that.
Here is the video to show you how to lubricate the keys of a membrane keyboard. I don’t know if it’s the same for a mechanical keyboard but he warned that the clackety-clack of the mechanical keyboard may get muted if you lubricate the keys too much. It did turn by formerly clackety-clack keyboard silent now.
I saved myself about PHP 2,000. If I didn’t solve the key-sticking problem by cleaning my old Logitech keyboard, then I would have been clicking my way into buying that Logitech K580 that I could also use with my iPad 9
Oh well, it was an unnecessary expense anyway.
There were a lot of cat hair underneath the keys. My cats love sitting or lying on anything that I am working on or working with, which includes keyboards, the printer, or my iPad.
I love my little monsters anyway.
