THIS IS NOT A POEM

Time indeed is way too busy being time. It doesn't even mind that it has left me behind. I slept last night and woke up this morning, and suddenly realized that there’s no more waiting. For the days they zoomed to make up months. Twelve months to a year, oh how time flies! And now I’m here, wondering why I try my best to make these lines rhyme. Guess you’ll agree with me if I say that it seems like yesterday when the last one came our way. But this time I really hope my wish comes true at last. Fate please allow me 'coz I already have a pass! In case you're wondering what I'm talking about, oh it's nothing just a book fair, the biggest one we've got. It runs for five days; this year's starts today. Its name's MIBF, Manila International Book Fair. 

Haay, mukhang malabo na namang makapunta ako. Tsk tsk. 

AT THE END OF THE WORLD...

At the end of the world
I will be there with you
And we'll throw a party to celebrate
The things we used to do

Like living life, breathing air
Running your fingers through my hair
Oh, this isn't fair

At the end of the world
I will hold you so close
So we won't notice the destruction
Of all we used to know

We will close our eyes
As the waters rise
We'll float away and you will say
"Oh, isn't this nice?"

Ah, at the end of the world
We'll be together, be together
Ah, if I can spend it with you
Then the end of the world don't matter at all

At the end of the world
We will kiss for the last time
And we won't feel the earth collapse into
A mess of flood and fire

We'll be making love
As the sky above falls down over us
We'll be the luckiest ones

At the end of the world
I will be there with you
And we'll throw a party to celebrate
The things we used to do

At the end of the world
I will be there with you
And we'll throw a party to celebrate
The things we used to do

 

So strange. This song kept playing in my head all day.

 

(Lenka's "End Of The World". Lyrics from azlyrics.com.

THE DAY I FINALLY GOT MY UMID CARD

Just in case it hasn’t reached your radar yet, UMID stands for Unified Multipurpose Identification System. It has been around since 2005, as it was that year when Executive Order 420 was signed and ordered that all Government-Owned and -Controlled Corporations issuing ID cards undertake a “unified” multipurpose ID system to cut down on cost in producing multiple IDs that carry the same or related information.

Four years after, four government agencies inked a memorandum of understanding towards the joint implementation of the UMID: the Social Security System, the Government Service Insurance System, the Home Development Mutual Fund (Pag-IBIG) and the Philippine Health Insurance Corporation (PhilHealth).

The UMID, however, has at its core the ID system of the SSS, which began issuing UMID cards in July last year. And so, just in case you’re wondering, this is why new members of the agency no longer receive the bluish SSS ID when they apply for one. Parenthetically, this also goes for those who are included in the applications backlog recently reported to have reached 600,000+, as the SSS card production facility conked out in April 2010 after 12 years of service.

Well, we can say that I was one of this backlog’s casualties, having my ID application done December of 2010. I remember having waited for about nine months before following up my application and learned that it was yet to be printed in October and delivered the following month.

November came; however, no SSS identification card was delivered. I waited for the next three months, thinking that I might finally get it anytime soon. But the inconvenience of not having a valid ID to present during financial transactions led me to yet again personally inquire about my ID’s status at the state insurer’s main branch in Quezon City.

Turned out my UMID card was indeed sent last November. Since that nothing was returned to them, I was told to go get a job order from their registry office on the second floor of the back building. My UMID card was probably still in the possession of the QC post office, they acknowledged, and that it would be better if I could just personally get it from there.

To cut the long story short, I finally got my UMID card a little over a week after that. The hunt, marked by grating long queues and waiting that felt like forever, was an eye-opener for me: when it comes to these kinds of things, don’t just wait.


And yes, it does have “the microchip.”

R.I.P. STEVE JOBS AND THANK YOU

I have always looked up to Steve Jobs, the "greatest computing technology maverick" in my book. That is why I felt like I lost another of my "Ernie Baron" and "Tiya Dely" when I initially learned from Yahoo! a few hours ago that Jobs, after fighting his disease for quite some time, succumbed to cancer today. I'm so sad. He was only 56.

It was probably three years ago when I, through Pinoywap (a mobile interactive community), happened on this commencement speech delivered by Jobs at Stanford University in June 2005. I remember being moved and inspired after reading it; it's definitely one of the best addresses one could ever know of. I even had his speech's farewell message "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish" posted as my Friendster shout-out for a long time.

So I'm sharing the said speech with you guys. I got this transcript from this site this time. It's quite long, but it's really really worth reading.


I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.


Same to you, Steve Jobs!

(Image from apple.com)

I WANT TO GO TO THE MIBF, BUT I CAN'T!

I sometimes hate the fact that I don't have the fiscal capacity to be able to buy the things that I want, especially books. I love reading them and know they are an investment. But I'm the type who would always go for "what I need" rather than "what I want." That is, if I had to spend my hard-earned money for myself, new clothes would always top the priority list. Don't think I'm a fashionista or whatever because I'm obviously not, but I honestly don't own that much clothes either.

I also believe that most bestsellers are pricey and so that's a sad thing. Unfortunately, I haven't developed that propensity for picking the most worthy from visiting book sales. So that's another sad thing for me.

This is the reason why I usually resort to borrowing books from friends and opt to ask a book as Christmas/ birthday/ farewell gift. Well, let's just say that I've got an arsenal of pretty generous bookworm friends for me to be able to read the whole Harry Potter, Twilight and Hunger Games series and a lot more must-reads. Yeah, they think I'm not the kind who would add to the wear and tear their precious books have already suffered. Big thanks for that.

Urgh, so much for an introduction! I could have come up with entirely different – and a positive one for that – intro and title here had I dropped by the 32nd Manila International Book Fair in SM MOA, which ends tonight at 8. The reason why I was not able to albeit I really wanted to see it? Oh you have to read from the top to know why, I guess.

ALWAYS REMEMBERED

Today, America and the rest of the world are remembering the 10th anniversary of 9/11 with various activities, most of which are focused on honoring the 3,000-odd victims and heroes of the terrorist attack.

LIFE.com, which "represents the most amazing collection of professional photography on the Web," shares its piece of the commemoration pie by presenting 9/11: The 25 Most Powerful Photos – "25 most stirring, visceral photographs from that day...from the likes of James Nachtwey, Joe Raedle, Spencer Platt, Mario Tama, and other celebrated photojournalists (and one intrepid amateur)." And indeed they are "the pictures we remember: wrenching, indelible photographs that tell the tale of a still-resonant late summer day that changed everything."

One of them though really made me teary-eyed. The pain felt by the man in the picture is so palpable.

NEWS MAKER

The country's commemorating the National Heroes Day today, also exactly a week after the bloody tourist bus hostage at the Quirino Grandstand. So much public outcry came (and is still coming) on the heels of the said mishap that left eight Hong Kong nationals dead, particularly blaming the local police and the government for being 'too late the hero.'

Call me apathetic, but I do remember having regarded the situation trivial upon seeing the news on TV that early afternoon. Others actually thought the same. My officemates and I, during our coffee break, never put a thought on the safety of the hostages but rather on their need to eat and to use the loo. We trusted the authorities to handle the crisis well, as much as the 20-odd hostages believed that they would go safely back home at the end of that day.

The situation oddly seemed so easy to deal with. The hostage-taker Capt. Rolando Mendoza, a dismissed police officer, though appeared to be armed did not look like he was capable of killing or even hurting his captives. This was further affirmed by the survivors who said Mendoza did tell them early on that he did not intend to hurt anybody and just wanted to have his case be heard again in the court, for him to be reinstated in the service and be able to receive his benefits. He was also plausible enough for releasing at least nine of the hostages amid the requests for him to do so. These actuations of Mendoza somewhat told us that this guy was indeed willing to be cooperative, which, if considered otherwise would have sounded like an underestimation of him. Nevertheless, for the hostage crisis to last for virtually 12 hours let alone for it to end in a carnage was unexpected yet very wrathfully disappointing.

Now, different groups point out who's at fault. The media was partly censured for not having a set of rules in covering hostage crisis as the hostage-taker turned out to be closely monitoring the live broadcast news on the bus's TV. Interestingly, I heard someone opined that TV networks should have had a delayed broadcast of the news then. Not a moot point, I guess.

About three to four years ago, if I may digress, our class conducted a lecture on hostage crisis management as a final requirement in one of our major subjects. It was basically for us to know what role media has in such situations. We invited a police officer, a Manila's finest, to give the talk. His introduction was that of a hypothetical question: Two brothers are arguing over who has the right to have the one and only banana placed by their mother on the table. If you were the mother, what would you do? If I remember it right, our guest speaker was the very same person who tagged himself as the self-imposed negotiator during the Quirino Grandstand hostage-taking incident. Right, it was Yebra. I also remember him explaining this 'stronghold' stuff, which is the cordoned off area where the hostage-taking actually takes place. I do hope my memory serves me right on this: the media is not allowed inside that 'stronghold.' Not ever.

The PNP, on the other hand, was atop the list of who's-to-blame for being inept on crisis management, therefore adding weight to the force's burdens nowadays. Pardon me for including this here, but the same 'someone' (opinionated eh?) also remarked that the local police instead are highly skilled with containing strikes and the like, being exposed to such great a deal of political and social affairs during the preceding administrations. Whereas, likewise during those times, they were not appropriately trained to handle hostage crisis. On this let me add that we ARE NOT actually new to these things, having witnessed them on the news — or, for some to 'have been at the right moment at the right time,' even personally — in the past. Now one wonders why we still have not learned and improved.

Deemed as a sign of contempt for what happened, the Hong Kong government issued an advisory urging its people to refrain from all travel to the Philippines. Consequently, flight bookings to Manila from mainland China and Hong Kong were down, as cited by some newspaper reports. Needless to say, the tourism-related firms, even in just a short span of time, swayed to losses. It's very saddening, however, that some Hong Kongers took it out on our common people, the Filipino domestic helpers working in Hong Kong in particular (rational thinking is not in abundant supply lately, don't you think?). On a personal note, I do find it very rude that some folks had even bad-mouthed the President's seemingly always-smiling face. Even that?!

Nobody wanted such tragedy to happen. These unfortunate events could happen to anybody, anywhere, anytime. It's just that one happened in our place, to us. Let's just pray for the repose of the fatalities' souls and for everything to be 'OK'. Then let's move on... to making another news, but this time, a literally good one.

CONFESSIONS OF A SELF-DISENFRANCHISED

Tomorrow, May 10, 2010, is Election Day; but here I am, feeling such a "loser."

Wanting to scale down my nonchalance over the country's political sphere, I had sunk my teeth into election brouhaha these past weeks (that I so much believed in).

For one, I made myself aware of considerable lowdowns on the nine presidential aspirants and the eight "vice-presidentiables." Thanks to the country's top broadcasting networks and several newspapers' efforts to provide each candidate's profiles for voters to get to know them better, well that is besides the candidates' efforts per se.

I liked the concepts of Channel 2's citizen journalism campaign "Boto Mo, i-Patrol Mo: Ako ang Simula" and its counterpart in GMA-7 "YouScoop" and the "May Magagawa Tayo." Both aimed to instill a social responsibility in Filipinos to push for clean elections. These campaigns, in particular, actually got me thinking that this year's Election Day is "quite" a big deal, let alone that it's going to be the first automated one in a large scale. Everyone has been apprehensive, and I think that's normal, considering that this event will be "a crossing over our Rubicon" (to borrow it from a columnist's wording). There are just some who have overimaginative preconceived notions, but we can't blame them either.

I did mull who the "best" candidates to vote for were and if a chance to personally endorse them to people I know was there, I had gladly grabbed it. I likewise followed at least some election-related stories in newspapers, the pre-election surveys in particular (well, I was actually "compelled" to, given that my job is to "read" news stories everyday).

Everything’s been set. I have this "small" problem though: I did not register to vote.

Fine, I am a loser. I accept the degrading label (which was actually the outright reaction of a friend when I told her I was not a registered voter). I am hurt, too, when I hear someone say that nonvoters don't have the right to complain about the corrupt government officials, ineffective public infrastructures, deficient health care services, and whatnot. I'd defend myself by insisting that I'm a taxpayer, which actually is effective in making me feel better about myself at times.

Despite of this particular shortcoming on my part, I pray for a peaceful Election Day tomorrow. I also salute every group and individual involved in this life-changing exercise. And I do pray that my bets would make it. Oops! Ok, I pray that the deserving ones slugging it out either for national or local positions would make it. Though I know I won't literally be a part of this big occasion tomorrow, I wish a lot of Filipinos would be.