I was talking to some friends telling them how sad and lonely I am lately. Understandable since it’s the new year and 2008 is pretty uncertain for me with masters application and not knowing for a while if I l get accepted or not. I often walk down Ayala Avenue with a blank stare lost in deep thoughts. Then I thought about what I could do to take my mind off this and one option immediately crossed my mind: buy a new gadget.

I have fallen into the pit of consumerism a long time ago and I could never climb out again. New stuff really does make me happy and when I think about the last time I felt contented was when I bought my iPhone back in September.

So what it is that I bought this time around? Well, it’s something that I don’t really need but I’ve been wanting to buy roughly a couple of years ago. An Xbox 360. I just thought I could totally justify buying it now since we now have an HDTV, DSL connection is pretty fast and I have a bit of cash saved up for “emergency”.

I bought Halo 3 as my first game because, you know, why not? I am also planning on renewing my Xbox Live gold subscription for a year after the free trial expires because the online aspect of the 360 is pretty awesome and the console feels lacking without it. At 2000 pesos a year, it’s not really that much of a burden financially.

There is also a service called Gamehopper which is basically like a Netflix for games for Metro Manila residents. At 600 pesos per month, you can rent any game you want, one at a time and they deliver the games for free. I cannot comment on the service yet since my subscription won’t start until the end of the month but they have an OK selection of games. Their website is crappy though but if they happen to have excellent service and I get the games that I want then I won’t complain.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with my purchase as it does fill the void on the times that I have absolutely nothing to do. I only get to play with it for an hour or two on weekdays though because my mom has to watch all those stupid ABS-CBN teleseryes and they want to see it on the big TV which I don’t get because it doesn’t really make much of a difference since it still in standard definition. (Breathes…)

There was a break-in in our apartment. Well, not exactly at our apartment but in another one on the same floor. This is where my mom’s friends from the States are currently staying in temporarily for a week. Talk about bad luck.

They all went out today so my mom could treat her friends to a nice lunch at Dampa in D. Macapagal Blvd. I also left our place to hang out with my friends at Rockwell. I returned home later in the afternoon and saw that there’s a whole lot of stuff scattered on the stairway. Clothes, shoes, bag of snacks and an empty luggage. The dwellers from the third floor said that there was a break-in and I should go to our place and check to see if we lost something. We were spared, probably due to the fact that my dad always keeps our place secured with at least four locks. My mom’s friends weren’t so lucky.

They returned home shortly, shocked and devastated, upon seeing the mess as nothing like that have ever happened to them. They did not know how the robbers were able to get in and there were no signs of forced entry. They were glad that they have brought their passports and money with them and the robbers did not get anything valuable, only bags of snacks, candies and canned meat products that are supposed to be given to their relatives as pasalubong. Maybe the robbers are planning to put up a store of imported goods to rival Duty Free.

This is not actually the first time that something like this happened in our building. Someone broke-in through a window in an apartment on the 3rd floor, stealing all their mobile phones. Still, we are thankful that no one was hurt in both occasions and those filthy, dirty, low-life creatures chose to steal things when no one’s home.

My uncle had a probable theory. Sometimes there are men who look like they have just escaped from prison, knocking on our doors asking us to solicit some money for some cause. This happened a couple of times before Christmas. My uncle said that they are probably surveying the place and see if there are things worth stealing then they come back when they are absolutely sure that no one’s home. I know that sounds a bit too paranoid but I’ve seen these so-called “solicitors” and you just have a gut feeling that something’s not right with them.

I can’t wrap my head around why these kind of people exist. We are here working our asses off trying to earn a living and in just minutes, they take what we have bought with our hard-earned cash so that they could enjoy it for themselves.

Just always be careful. If you live in a particularly shady part of the city, do whatever you can to keep your place extra secure. You just never know when these things might happen.

I have been hearing about the free WiFi blanketing Power Plant Mall and nearby areas in Rockwell Center, Makati. Great news considering Globe WiZ and Airborne Access’ hotspots in the mall are very spotty and limited only to a number shops.

I decided to do a little bit of shopping there today since I’ve got nothing better to do on a Sunday anyway. After trying on a few shirts but not buying anything, I went to Seattle’s Best to get some coffee and maybe read some of my RSS feeds. I took out my iPhone, sniff some WiFi in the air and there on the top of the list, WiGO Free WiFi. I connected, tapped on my Google Reader bookmark and was taken to a nice blue login page. “Sign-up is free!”, a button happily announced so I tapped on it. There it is, the catch: I have to install something called WiGObar.exe. An executable file on my iPhone? I know there are dozen of third-party apps for iPhone but I highly doubt that the WiGO guys were able to come up with an emulation software to let it run a Windows executable file.

Great. Mac users (and Linux and every other device that isn’t running Windows for that matter) are left out again. They seem to be forgetting that Rockwell is a Mac users haven. They now have a beta version for the Mac and you can get it right here.

For the sake of this blog post, I decided to give WiGObar a whirl when I got home on my Mac through VMWare. I registered, downloaded the 500-something KB file and ran it. So, what does the WiGObar do? Serves up banner ads. Surprised? Here is how it looks like:

Doesn’t it remind you of AllAdvantage and those get-paid-while-you-surf services back in the late nineties? Couldn’t they think of a better way to serve ads to their users and not take precious real estate from my screen? That bar is on top of everything and when you try to move it, it will always bounce back to that spot.

I know I should not be complaining since it is free for us users after all but jeez, that thing is hideous. I can think of better alternatives such as contextual text ads or maybe that same bar but one that appears and disappear after a set amount of time. For now I would rather pay for my WiFi, thank you very much.

So I was walking home yesterday listening to Shout Out Louds, lost deep in my thoughts when all of a sudden I saw something lit thrown in front of me. I was taken a back and without much time for me to figure out what it was, it let out a huge BANG making me squeal like a cat whose tail just got stepped on. Firecracker. Before I get the chance to assemble myself, the kids who did the throwing hurriedly ran off to avoid the wrath that I might have inflicted on them. I happen to have taken this quiz and found out that I could take on 15 five year old kids at once.

Seriously, who thinks that firecrackers are essential to having a wonderful New Year’s eve celebration? Do anyone really believe all those voodoo-drive-away-the-spirit crap? How about welcoming the new year with an amputated hand, do they think that’s lucky? And oh, don’t even get me started on these so-called PVC pipe gun which not only lets out a huge bang that could give an old lady an immediate heart attack, it also can give you an extra crispy burnt face. Ever since I was a kid I have always hated firecrackers and never even touched one. The whole point why boys at that age try to play with one is so that they can prove that their all tough and brave and I grew up not caring what people around me think.

Of course, parents are all to blame in this. They just let their kids go off and do whatever they want thinking those firecracker-related accidents shown in the news won’t ever happen to them. And as far as I can tell, most people who actually light up and play with firecrackers are those who can barely eat three meals a day and yet they go off and buy the loudest and most dangerous firecracker that they can afford.

I might be going out on a limb here in saying that I appreciate what the local media is doing to let the public know the dangers of firecrackers. I also did not have the knowledge before that the Department of Health is working towards to make the Philippines firecracker-free by 2010. Until then, I’m taking a cab home, at least until after new year’s day.

If you know me personally, you probably already know that I am planning to take up my masters in Sweden next year. If not, then yes, I’m just crazy that way and as with most students wanting to study abroad, I want to be exposed to a culture totally different from ours and live by myself in a foreign land.

Enough about that, this entry is really about PhilPost or Philippine Postal Corporation. If you believe all the stories of lost and extremely delayed mail and parcels, you have to be an idiot to trust sending items of value through them. But I’m different, I tend to think that only people who have negative experiences are the most vocal about it and the majority who did not have any problems at all would think nothing of it.

According to studera.nu, the site where you can apply for most universities in Sweden, you have to send your documents by regular mail. I may be overanalyzing it but I think they mean no couriers since the address is a PO box. Having planned this for months, I did my research and was overwhelmed by the horror stories people have about PhilPost. Even my friends are saying that their office are just filled with corrupt postal workers who just use all our mail as scratch papers for computing their ridiculously overpriced charges. Despite all of that, I have decided to trust them with my future (I guess, you could call it that) and use the service.

After my documents are ready and sealed in a brown envelope, I took time off work to head to the EMS branch of the Post Office in Pasay. Luckily, it’s just a single jeepney ride away from where I live. They told me that it will cost around 1500 pesos and will reach Strömsund in a couple of weeks. Sounds reasonable enough so I gladly paid and they handed me a receipt with a tracking number.

The PhilPost website seems to be stucked in 1999 so I never expected to find a page where I can track my mail. The Track & Trace section under Customer Guide just shows you a lame ‘under construction’ graphic and as far as I can remember, it’s been displaying that for more than a year now. I don’t mean to brag but I could probably get that up and running in less than a week, probably even a day.

So, it seems that the only way I could track my mail is wait for it to reach Sweden and get scanned by Posten. As I can be a little OC about this, I keep on checking the site almost every 30 minutes if it will show up there and not be collecting dust in a back room at PhilPost.

2 weeks have passed and there is still no sign of my mail. I got really worried and thought about just sending another one through DHL which will be horrible as I have to deal with my previous school’s bureaucracy all over again. I later found out that there is a problem on Posten’s english version of the site and entering the same tracking number on the Swedish site bears a result. Turns out, it was delivered to the recipient only in only 5 days! I let out a huge sigh of relief thinking my documents are in their hands now, ready to be judged.

I am not saying that the horror stories about PhilPost are not true. It’s just that the few times I have used them, including sending and receiving huge packages with items of value to and from abroad, my experience have been very pleasant and they deliver mostly on time. There may be corrupt workers stealing valuables from our mail but there are also honest and good ones like Mr. Floro “Pol” Camote from this Inquirer story published in October. I bet most people chose to ignore that when it came out.

Image Credit: Walang Magawa.com