Happy Easter

Aside from Christmas, the Holy Week serves as another occasion when family members gather together. If you have a family as big . . . rather, as huge . . . as mine, you’ll always look forward to holy weeks when kinsfolk reunite and bond together, especially with the homecoming of family members who permanently reside in other cities or abroad.

I consider holy week gatherings as an opportune time to update each other with information on the whereabouts, the preoccupations and the achievements of family members. Save for some challenges which may have been encountered in the past year, it’s still tremendously a nice exercise to count a lot of things we are thankful to God for - - like new graduates who’ll soon become professionals and of high-yielding business endeavors undertaken by relatives that add substantially to the wealth of one’s clan.

* * * * * * *

I have never failed joining processions of the Santo Entierro whenever I am here in Dipolog on Good Fridays. I just do not know if procession organizers have failed to notice this, but it seems that in recent years, our processions have become similar to Alay Lakad and other ordinary local parades. I am particularly referring to the very fast pace at which people walked, as if everybody were in a rush to finish the procession quickly. I even had to control my laughter after a Carmelite nun unintentionally bumped me as she tried to overtake and block my way. I am therefore humbly suggesting to our parish’s procession committee to make the route shorter next year, and the pace slower, so that the faithful public could recite their rosaries or psalms more solemnly. We hope we can come up with a sacred, somber procession rite in the future just like what we see in Vatican. Just praying . . .

* * * * * * *

Ever wondered why we celebrated holy week relatively early this year compared to past years? According to the encyclopedia, “Easter”, which is a Christian festival commemorating the resurrection of Jesus Christ, refers to the Sunday immediately after the first full moon that occurs on or after March 21. Take a look at the 2008 March calendar. The full moon falls on the 22nd of March and the nearest Sunday after such date is March 23. So there you have it, blame it on the moon, our Easter Sunday this year comes unusually early. It comes even before the school year ends.

* * * * * * *

There are a number of things and activities which we associate with Easter celebration. Most usual are beach picnics when people compensate food sacrifices they had during the lent with “eating all they can” salvo. To all picnic-goers, please don’t forget that it took you months and thousands of pesos to whiten your skin, just to have it burnt with an hour of sun exposure at the beach.

* * * * * * *

A few days after Easter, we expect to see the much-awaited results of Philippine Bar examinations. I know of some Dipolognon bar exam takers who, I am sure, are now starting to dispose nervous tensions. That’s normal guys. When you successfully make it, you’ll feel a bit taller, and you’ll have that great career twist in your life. Good luck, and congratulations in advance.

* * * * * * *

Tomorrow, March 24, is the opening of the week-long Zamboanga Peninsula Regional Athletic Meet. To the general public, try going to the ZDN Sports Complex at ZNNHS and see a great make-over of the place. To all athletes, officials and visitors from other provinces and cities, feel the warmth of Dipolognons’ and Zanorteans’ hospitality. Welcome to Zanorte!

* * * * * * *

The darkest hour in this world happened on the first Good Friday more than 2000 years ago. After that darkest hour, the brightest moment followed. We call such brightest moment today as Easter Sunday. May you embrace with much rejoicing the most important truth in the Christian world - - - that Jesus Christ is risen . . . that He is alive . . . and that He lives in us. Happy Easter to all our TP readers!

Minding Your Own Business by T2 Julz March 23, 2008 - Tingog Peninsula

Ken Lee

BULGARIAN IDOL

Idol Aspirant: I'm going to sing Mariah Carey's song "Ken Lee" and after that....

Judge 2: What song?

Idol Aspirant: "Ken Lee"

Judge 2: Ken Lee?

Idol Aspirant: Yes

Judge 2: Don't you mean "Without You"?

Idol Aspirant: No

Judge 4: Go ahead then, go ahead

(And here she goes....)

No one ken to ken to sivmen
Nor yon clees tojo maliveh
When I gez aju zataveh na nalechoo more
New yonooz tonigh molinigh
Yon sorra shooo
Yes ee shooo, ooo

Ken Leee
tulibo dibu douchooo
Ken leee
Ken lee meju more
Ken Leee
tulibo dibu douchooo
Ken leee
Ken lee meju more

Judge 2: What was that language?
Idol aspirant: English

WTF...

Paolo Bediones: Janina, how are you?

Janina San Miguel: I'm fine.

Paolo Bediones: Alright, so you won two of the major awards - Best in Long Gown, Best in Swimsuit, do you feel any pressure right now?

Janina San Miguel: No, I don't feel any fressure right now.

Paolo Bediones: Confident! Alright! Please choose a name of the judge.

Paolo Bediones: We have Miss Vivienne Tan.

Vivienne Tan: Good Evening.

Janina San Miguel: Good Evening.

Vivienne Tan: The question is, what role did your family play to you as candidate to Binibining Pilinas?

Janina San Miguel: Well, my family's role for me is so important becos der was da wa- they're, dey was da one who's... very... Haha... Oh I'm so sorry, Ahhmm... My pamily... My family... Oh my god... I'm... Ok, I'm so sorry... I... I told you that I'm so confident... Eto, Ahhmm, Wait... Hahahahaha, Ahmmm, Sorry guys becos dis was really my pirst pageant ever b'coz I'm only 17 years old and ahahaha I, I did not expect that I came from, I came from one of the taf 10. Hmmm, so... but I said dat... my family is the most important persons in my life. Thank you.

How to Beat a Cyber Bully

Note: I just want to share this; got it from Yahoo!

See how this company rescued a woman from online harassment.

Web of Lies

When your online identity has been tarnished, Reputation Defender will help you clean it up.

By KEVIN SITES, FRI FEB 22, 2:26 PM PST

When Salina Rahim saw the MySpace page she nearly reeled back in her chair. The name and photograph were hers, but the profile description was complete fiction.

“I would have been horrified, absolutely horrified, if any family members had seen that,” Salina says from her tidy, one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles.

The profile described the exploits of a lusty “cougar” obsessed with sex and on the prowl. Even the book section read, “I’m too busy trying to please men to read books.”

It was piled on heavy enough, she said, to sound like it came from the imagination of a man — her rejected ex-boyfriend. To increase her torment, he took G-rated photos she had given him and added X-rated images of other women he found on porn sites.

Salina Rahim hired Reputation Defender to help her take on an online impersonator

Problems like Salina's are by no means limited to MySpace. With the explosion of social networking on the Web, many people maintain profiles on multiple sites, giving potential cyber-bullies plenty of targets.

And the task of removing unwanted personal information from the Web can be daunting. Just this month, a report in the New York Times highlighted the difficulties some users encountered in fully deleting their Facebook profiles.

For Salina, a modest 35-year-old fashion design student born in Great Britain to Indian parents, it was a devastating blow to her good name and reputation. It was also potentially dangerous — 75 MySpace users emailed her looking for a “good time.”

Salina confronted her ex-boyfriend and says he admitted to creating the profile. She decided to get a restraining order against him, which provided some protection against future harassment but did nothing to destroy the bogus MySpace account. We contacted the man named in her restraining order, but he claimed not to know her.

Next Salina emailed a generic MySpace customer service account but says the response left her confused and didn’t help bring down the page. That’s when she contacted a company she had heard about on a TV talk show: Reputation Defender.

Less than two years old, Reputation Defender is the brainchild of a savvy, shaggy-haired 29-year-old Harvard Law School graduate named Michael Fertik. He had the foresight to see potential value and profit in straining out some of the garbage that flows thick in the Internet’s information pipeline.

Michael Fertik founded Reputation Defender to help clients take control of their online identities

“A lot of the stuff that is put on the Web … that victimizes our clients has a strongly censoring impact on their lives,” says Fertik. “They don’t want to go out anymore, they don’t want to date, they don’t want to go to class, they don’t want to go to work.… It can take two or 20 minutes to destroy someone on the Web, and it can take hundreds of hours to repair it.”

In Salina’s case, Reputation Defender got the fake MySpace page destroyed within six weeks.

"Think of everything you put on the Web as a possible tattoo." — Michael Fertik

Fertik says the company uses a cooperative approach, finding the right person within an organization and appealing to them on a human level, rather than threatening litigation.

While some clients like Salina are trying to stop the spread of lies on the Internet, others are simply trying to clean up past indiscretions that have become part of their online identities — drunken or revealing photos, for example, that could torpedo future employment or relationships.

It works like this: Clients fill out a personal questionnaire that will be used in Reputation Defender’s deep search techniques. For a subscription of $9.95 a month, you get a monthly report of where and how you’re popping up on the Web. Don’t like what you see? For $29.95 per item, Reputation Defender will attempt to get it destroyed.

Reputation Defender employees scour the Internet for content about their clients

Not everything can be erased — government documents and media articles are off-limits as a matter of company policy. And if you’re a killer or sex offender trying to hide the trail of your shady past, no deal. Fertik says his company won’t take on convicted felons, but that doesn’t stop violent criminals and pedophiles from trying.

“Oh, every three days we get approached by some kind of crook or another who asks us to remove some evidence of past crime, and usually we just kick them off the system right away,” says Fertik.

He says the inquiries from the criminal sector of the population are a natural by-product of being a pioneer in the Internet clean-up business. And while Fertik’s company won’t help them, he believes there will be less ethical ones that will, either through illegal hacking of records or aggressive bullying and threats of litigation.

But to emphasize just how complex and fluid this field is, Fertik says he approves of some Internet companies who take on clients trying to clean up past episodes of juvenile delinquency.

“If you had an incident with alcohol when you were 15 or 16 and you know it was a mistake and you cleaned up your life and you moved on and now you’re very productive and you’re in graduate school and you’re on your way to a great career and then all of a sudden the Web remembers, this could end up hurting you.”

But this raises a serious question, one critics of Internet clean-up companies like Reputation Defender often pose: Does their work actually censor the Web’s defining characteristic — the free flow of information?

Fertik says he simply provides a level playing field for his clients. The Internet, he argues, provides an extraordinary long shelf life for unflattering words and images and gives attackers who know how to game search engine algorithms an advantage.

“I think that what we are doing is helping a search engine make sure it’s finding the best and most accurate and most reliable results -- instead of someone’s claim about the fact that maybe you smell bad,” says Fertik.

While a new Pew Research study shows that people are much more aware of their online identities than they were in the past — one in three Internet users will search his or her own name, for example — Fertik believes that really protecting ourselves means approaching the Web in a more thoughtful way.

“You should be really, really smart about what you put on the Web,” says Fertik. “Think of everything you put on the Web as a possible tattoo. Think of everything on the Web as a possible imprint on your forehead, as a possible scarlet letter for yourself that can just hang around your neck like an albatross.”

But for innocent victims like Salina Rahim, who get smeared by someone else, the offending material may be gone but its impact still lingers.

“I don’t really interact or participate in the social networking Web sites at all,” she says. “I just feel that that can come back and haunt you.”

Producer - Jamie Rubin

Video Editor - Steve Neilson

"California teen" photos courtesy of the Catsouras Family

She Made It

Congratulations, Lynnie (my younger sister) for passing the December 2007 Nursing Board Exam! We're so proud of you. My kudos also to the rest who made it.

Among the top performing schools in the country, it is Silliman University which produced the most number of newly-registered nurses. Congratulations!

The top performing schools in the December 2007 Nurse Licensure Examination are the following:

A. WITH 100 AND MORE EXAMINEES

RANK SCHOOL NO. OF EXAM. PASSED PERCENTAGE
1 Saint Louis University 146 144 99.00 %
2 Xavier University 233 229 98.00 %
3 Silliman University 321 312 97.00 %
NOTHING FOLLOWS----------------------


B. WITH 30-99 EXAMINEES

RANK SCHOOL TOTAL NO.
OF EXAM. TOTAL NO.
PASSED PERCENTAGE
PASSED
1 Trinity University of Asia (Trinity – Quezon City) 41 40 98.00 %
2 Mindanao State University – Marawi City 76 74 97.00 %
University of the East Ramon Magsaysay Memorial Medical Center 31 30 97.00 %
3 Palawan State University – P. Princesa 57 54 95.00 %

In a New Package

In selling products, packaging is essential. Customers get attracted to certain products because of quality packaging. When two companies manufacture the same type of product, the one which uses better packages always makes higher sales, holding other things equal. In practice, when companies already experience a plateau sales level, they sometimes resort to innovations on the package, rather than on the features of the product itself.

In political circuses, packaging is essential, too. This is how I make an analogy on the exposè made by Rodolfo Noel Lozada, Jr. regarding the scandal-ridden National Broadband Network Project. It’s the same story by a new personality, similar to the business strategy of offering the same product with a new packaging.

When asked by the press if Lozada’s exposè was really explosive, Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita said it is the same old story as that made by disgruntled businessman Joey de Venecia, and almost of same substance as the piecemeal testimony of CHED Chair Romulo Neri. The difference is that this time around, the “performer” in the person of Jun Lozada delivers the story, complete with dramatic projection, side-lighted with a kidnapping interpretation of a supposedly requested security measure.

Quite an effective performance! What Joey de Venecia and Romulo Neri failed to bring about, Lozada successfully delivered with a significant impact. Click na click sa takilya kumbaga. Kaya nga siya tinawag na “star” witness, dahil kumikinang ang kanyang pagka-bituin. And that’s why nuns and priests volunteered to take part in the support cast. Ambitious politicians, publicity-hungry civic society organizations, opportunity-driven business groups and other parties are following suit. Indeed, it could be an all star-cast, well-directed production.

* * * * * * *

I am still skeptical, however, and I am still discerning on where this political circus is heading. Before I will be totally misled by the crying guy’s indiscriminate namedropping, l would have to take note that Lozada also had lots of questionable deals when he was still the President of the Philippine Forest Corporation. My idol in the Senate, the ever-bombastic senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago, pitched various strikes on the credibility of the whistle-blower. With Santiago’s cross-examination antics, I am made to believe that Lozada does not deserve to be totally believed.

* * * * * * *

A few members of the influential Makati Business Club (MBC) disclosed that they received threats and harassments from a Cabinet Secretary; that their businesses would be closely scrutinized by government authorities if they continue to take part in anti-GMA moves. “If you want a fight, we’ll set the BIR loose on you”, thus reported the national dailies last Friday. If these businessmen do not have something to hide, and if they rightly and honestly pay their taxes and government fees, there is no reason that they would be threatened. What about our local businessmen? Would they be threatened too if the present LGU administrations will exercise their regulatory functions over the former’s business activities?

* * * * * * *

The Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry (PCCI) has not yet made public its position on the NBN controversy and on calls for PGMA to resign. Rather, PCCI keeps itself busy with its institutional development activities, one of which is the holding of a “Business Chamber Management and Development Training” for local business chambers under its umbrella. Dipolog Chamber of Commerce and Industry (DCCI) President, Mr. Edgar Bagarinao, and Executive Director, Mr. Ernie Rojo, are going to Cagayan de Oro this week for such an activity. We hope DCCI will practice, when they come back, what the seminar speakers will share to them. I would be more interested in how DCCI, among its various functions, would proactively play its role of representing the business sector in addressing corruption in the local level, and in reducing costs of doing business.

(Tingog Peninsula February 17 issue of Minding Your Business, by T2 Julz)

Kung Hei Fat Choi!

Kung hei fat choi is Happy New Year in Chinese. The year 2008 is designated as the Year of the Brown, Earth Rat, according to the website chinesefortunecalendar.com.

The Rat hours are from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m., Fortune Angel noted in its website.

The hours cover late night and early morning. In the Western zodiac, The Rat’s equivalent is Sagittarius, the art-of-fengshui website said. It reign begins Feb. 7.

In character, the wikipedia said Rats are leaders, pioneers and conquerors. They are charming, passionate, charismatic, practical and hardworking. They have with great leadership and are the most highly organized, meticulous, and systematic of the 12 signs.

Generally, art-of-fengshui said, Rats do well in advertising, law, and politics.

They will do well as counselors, entrepreneurs, researchers and writers. Rats shine in industries such as hotel, music, mass media, beauty, fashion and film.

What about famous Rats? From common knowledge and from springreetingcards.com and gotohoroscope.com, here are some A-list Rats.

Mickey Mouse, Mighty Mouse, Cameron Diaz, Remy (from the film Ratatouille), Charlotte Bronte, Speedy Gonzales, Mata Hari, Olivia Newton-John, Louis Armstrong, Shirley Bassey, Hugh Grant, Charlton Heston, Kris Kristofferson, Sean Penn, and Burt Reynolds.

For sure, people what to know what the forecast for the year. Here’s an overview from the website proastro.com

RAT. Rats will feel restless and their romantic relationships will be unstable. They may end an existing relationship and start a new one. Rats will have a lot of changes in their life this year, a good year.

OX. This year, the Ox will have stability, fewer changes and excellent interpersonal relationshipzs. The Ox’s career will be improved indirectly, especially if you have in a partnership.

TIGER. The Tiger is said to have a year of mobility, meaning you have chances to move home/office, travel and experience different changes. The Tiger will also travel on business or for leisure more often than usual.

RABBIT. This year, Rabbits will be blessed by the strongest star of positive relationships, Hong Luan. It will bring excellent love, luck and also it will enhance interpersonal relationship, which indirectly help a Rabbit’s career.

DRAGON. The Dragon will enjoy excellent interpersonal relationship and stable love relationship. Yet, there are signs of “torturing” in the Dragon’s marital life, which can bring love life problems.

SNAKE. The Snake will have an ordinary year with stable luck, i.e. without any conflict or any union shown in the constellation chart. There shouldn’t be any unexpected complication happening to the Snake’s personal or occupational life.

HORSE. The Horse is said to have movements and changes this year. In other words, the Horse is especially like to move home/office; travel or experience change in 2008. Such changes could happen to a Horse’s relationship.

GOAT. Goats are prone to gossips and arguments this year. Yet, the effects of “harming” are so mild they can almost disregarded. Luck would depend more on which season you were born.

MONKEY. The Monkey is in excellent terms with everyone and enjoys stable love relationships. Although there isn’t any specific lucky star in the Monkey’s constellation this year, the Monkey would still get help from others.

ROOSTER. Unattached Roosters have nothing to lose. They would just be annoyed by the many potential dates and they don’t know how to make a choice! This year, Roosters have double luck in relationships.

DOG. This year, the Dog will enjoy better social status and get hold of more authority, which is more advantageous for wage-earners. All wage-earners are entitled to chances of promotion.

PIG. You experienced a lot changes last year in terms of love relationship, living environment or career. If you have moved home or changed your job, such changes are settled and you might just work with them.

(Courtesy of SunStar Cebu)

I'm Back! :-)

Hello guys and gals... I missed you all... This is my first blog entry for the year 2008. It's been a long time! :-) The holiday season is over and yet I wasn't able to share with you how memorable my Christmas and New Year celebration is....

Chinese New Year is just around the corner.... Kung Hei Fat Choi! :-)

We traveled to Hong Kong via Cebu (Cebu Pacific) last week with my friends. The funny thing is it's our first time in Hong Kong -- all eight of us. We don't have any tour guide nor someone who could assist us. The temperature outside HK International Airport was about 12 degrees Celsius and it's kinda cold for us who are used to the tropical climate of the Philippines. Riding CityBus N21, we were able to locate our temporary abode in Mong Kok, Dragon Hostel, a very affordable yet decent lodging place. The front desk guy is a Pinoy, so we were able to have a smooth transaction.

First day was spent mostly in HK's scenic spots and at the Night Market.




















Second day, we went to Disneyland :-)
















Macau was our destination on the third day....















The Venetian was truly magnificent....




















On the fourth day, we had a "world tour" at Mainland China....


Eiffel Tower





















Denmark
















Egypt
















Netherlands

















and much more....



Our final day was spent at Ocean Park...
















And we finally arrive home :-)