Facebook Phenomenon

I've had FaceBook account for a long time, I just didn't have people to connect to for so long.

FaceBook launched before Friendster, but for some reason, Friendster became more popular in the Philippines. Friendster is now widely used by most students. Maybe this is the reason why the older people that I know have switched and/or started using FaceBook.

Apart from being constantly inundated by slumbook-like responses to quizzes and surveys, I actually find it convenient to keep updated with the day-to-day lives of friends and acquaintances. It's just the responses to the slumbook-like quizzes and surveys that annoys me...

Another thing I've been liking about FaceBook are the games! There's a whole bunch of them made by Zynga. From racing, spacewars, pirates, to mafia games, they've got quite a collection. And I've found myself spending a large amount of time just clicking away at them!

Maybe it's time to switch to MySpace. I've had an account there since it launched but I've never actually tried to use it... Maybe they have the same games by Zynga over there...

SanPabloUnlimited.com Launched

I finally launched the website SanPabloUnlimited.com that I've been thinking about for some time now. It's supposed to promote the city of seven lakes as a top tourist (both foreigners and locals) destination south of Metro Manila. It also offers classified ads and a forum to help the local residents reach out to each other and facilitate their business-to-business needs.

After thinking about it for a month, I finally bought the domain, paid for hosting, downloaded packages, and created the site.

As it turns out, designing a site is not that easy! There were a couple of times when I noticed that the website was turning into a blogsite and not a community portal. I should thank my friend Gina some more for berrating me and making me realize that fact.

If you love San Pablo City, or at least if you feel like you have a need to give back a little bit to it, please support the site by participating in the forums. The best way to drive traffic to the site is by driving to the site yourself!

Went to Market-Market

I went to Market-Market today, it's a big mall in the Fort Bonifacio area in Makati. I was amazed at the number of people who choose to walk slowly in the middle of an aile effectively making slowing down everybody else behind them.

This careless attitude became even more apparent inside the grocery. A lot of people were leaving their carts in the middle of the ailes, and even in the middle of aile intersections! I am reminded of the nature of jeepney drivers who park and wait for passengers in the middle of road intersections, I guess they do this to make themselves visible to more potential passengers, but inside the grocery? And are there that many people who drive jeepneys and who buy their groceries at Market-Market on Saturdays?


Is it so hard to park a grocery cart beside the item that one is looking at? Is it so bad to at least be considerate enough not to cause any inconvenience to other people when we do the stupid things that we do?

Internet Business 101

This is my test posting for today. I've been trying to find ways to monetize this site.

Thank you Dumaguete for a wonderful vacation!

Thank you Dumaguete for a wonderful vacation!

We were supposed to meet up with Mike Feeney (expat proprietor of a local dive shop) at the airport at 8:30am and then proceed directly to Apo Island, he was nice enough to offer that extra bit of service so we could get the most out of our vacation. Because of a delayed Cebu Pacific flight from Manila, he had to proceed to Apo Island but without us. We arrived at Dumaguete 2 hours later, checked in at the hotel and got connected with Dive Works instead.

It was already 2pm and we really wanted to get wet so we went to DuCoMi's Pier. (DuCoMi is short for Dumaguete Coconut Mill, a big operation for coconut based products) Wonderful dive site! We parked right beside the beach, got dressed there, dragged our tanks out and at 3pm we made a shore entry. It was initially sandy/mucky and basically barren unless you knew where to look, until we got a little deeper and things started becomming more interesting. When we got to the pier, it was almost surreal! Every pillar is encrusted with soft corals and stuff. There was a sea fan that grew wide enough to reach from one pillar to the other, probably two meters, underneath the pier. We were dragging our tanks out to the water again by 5pm. We were told there are plenty of frogfish down there but we didn't see any on our two afternoon dives. But we did see so much more that we haven't seen anywhere else that we forgot about the frogfish. Click here for pictures of our dive. Everyone has seen corals and coral beds and reef fish and all that, but not everyone has been underneath a pier, and Ducomi's Pier is one dive you need to do when you're in Dumaguete!

We stayed at Hotel Palwa, thanks to Rhoody for the recommendation, and we weren't disappointed. It's clean, well staffed, has amenities, and is in the middle of the city. Wifi speed is decent, and the food is good. We'd stay there again when we come back (note that I used "when" and not "if".)

We went diving at Apo Island on Sunday and Monday. I have to say it is the biggest concentration of corals I've ever been to. They were in every place of every dive we did out there. We went to a coral garden, we went to a coral wall, we went to a coral canyon (yes it looked like a mini canyon with cliffs and a valleys and it's huge), I think we even got lost! We chased a couple of turtles who were trying to get cleaned (but they were not harmed in any way), we pulled at the tail of a banded sea snake, we watched fish swimming in schools and other fish just playing hokey. (This isn't enough to describe the beauty that we saw out there. Maybe a couple more pages for a full blown magazine article... Link to pictures from Apo to follow...)

Our last dive on Monday afternoon was at Masaplod North dive site, another marine sanctuary at Dauin where we saw a bed of garden snakes, various rays and other bottom crawling critters, surprisingly diverse anemone, and got chased by a pair of trigger fish. All that and more from another shore entry dive where the farthest we got from the beach was maybe 30 meters out and 15 meters down! Click here for more pictures from the Masaplod North dive site.

We rented a scooter for cheap and just drove around the city on Tuesday. We ate at San Rival Bakeshop and ended up taking home 10 boxes of their SansRival cakes back to Manila. Once in Manila, we realized we should have packed much more! We also went up to Valencia and walked around Forest Camp, a beautiful place stradling a fast flowing fresh-water stream.

We met up with friends whom we haven't seen in years, and basically fell in love with Dumaguete and the lifestyle and the people and their pace that we started asking for prices on housing and possible business opportunities!

It's been more than a month since we arrived, we haven't paid off all the creditcard bills that we accumulated but we're already planning for our return trip, hopefully that happens this December. I'd like to see how Christmas is like in that gentle city.

Watched the Batdude at IMAX -- such a big disappointment

What else is there to say? IMAX -- it was huge! That initial screen with the buildings and the view gave me vertigo, and I don't have vertigo, but maybe now I do.

Somehow, with all the bat-hype that everybody else gave that bat-movie, I felt kinda cheated because it didn't quite measure up to what I was hoping it to be.

To the true bat-fans out there who actually bat-read the bat-comics and the bat-books, I share your grief. You know what I mean. Somehow, the movie version of a book/comic is supposed to try and stay true to the original story, even to the origins of the nemesis. And what's with the bat-cave?

To those of you who aren't "batties" (as in like "trekkies"), how'd it turn out for you?

We went to Dumaguete, click here for pics.


We went diving at the pier of Dumaguete Coconut Mill (DuCoMi). click here for pics.

I'm still uploading pictures of our dives at Apo Island. Wait for those...