The Social Cholesterol

Posted by BA on April 20, 2012
Posted in: Everyday Life. 2 comments

Recorded in the history of human sufferings is a cancer of so malignant a character that the least touch irritates it and awakens in it the sharpest pains. Thus, how many times, when in the midst of modern civilizations I have wished to call thee before me, now to accompany me in memories, now to compare thee with other countries, hath thy dear image presented itself showing a social cancer like to that other!
-Jose Rizal, Europe 1886

Most people say that the Philippines is sick, having a kind of cancer of sorts. The kind that slowly eats the country from the inside slowly halting development, and eventually, killing it.

But for me, it’s not what perfectly describes what our country has.

You see, cancer, is currently impossible to cure. Unless one takes away the infected chunk of their body, the cancer will slowly and surely spread. Another popular treatment, chemotherapy, exists. But then again, it involves massively killing off the bad cells before they could further divide, killing the good cells along with them.

So how to get rid of cancer? You kill a part of the whole.

So if the Philippines has cancer, we have to kill off a chunk of the Philippines?

I think not.

I believe, that what the Philippines has is cholesterol. Too much of it.

What happens when a person has too much cholesterol? Cholesterol slowly builds up in a person’s blood stream, particularly in the arteries, where blood is pumped from the heart. As more cholesterol is accumulated in the arteries, it becomes harder for the oxygen-rich blood to travel the body. Eventually, the cholesterol blocks the arteries totally, resulting in a heart attack, and then death.

The Philippines, has through the years, accumulated lots of this bad cholesterol, and thus, development and progress have been slowing down. What’s worse is that it seems like (some) Filipinos have been indulging with cholesterol rich activities, effectively making the country more and more sick each passing day.

So how to we get rid of cholesterol? Discipline. Lots and lots of discipline.

I have once been diagnosed with too much cholesterol in my blood. I was told that the only way to get rid of it is a lifestyle change. I should start to avoid anything that has high cholesterol. I should start exercising more.

The problem is, it’s the cholesterol-rich food that are very tasty. So it has been very hard for me. But then again, I was able to pull it off somehow. My bad cholesterol levels dropped 1/3 from its very high value.

I envision a Philippines that purposely avoids eating bad food that increases its social cholesterol. I don’t think that we have to kill anybody to make our country as glorious as other countries around the world.

We just need a lifestyle change.

Another Year

Posted by baracoma on April 2, 2012
Posted in: Music, Personal, Thoughts. 1 comment

Outerhope – Twenty Years
All the stories we haven’t written
Planes are circling in the distance
Wondering what’s in tomorrow’s paper
I’ll be certain if you could write the pages of our stars

I’m writing this exactly a day before I earn another year. And it has made me wonder, in those twenty plus years, what have I been doing with my life? What am I doing now? What will I be doing with my life?

And as always, things are very blurry. Because however you tediously plan your life, how much structure and order you try to follow, entropy will increase and increase because it simply can. And that is something that we cannot control and can never will.

What can we do about it? We’d only be certain if, as the song said, we write the pages of our stars. Because no matter what life throws at us, in the end it would be us who would be writing the pages of our stories.

So here’s to another year, which I dedicate to myself, the past, the present, and the future. :)

Auto-reconnecting wget downloads upon disconnection.

Posted by baracoma on March 31, 2012
Posted in: Uncategorized. Tagged: , . Leave a Comment

Over the past year, I have grown to love the wget downloader. wget, according to their website, is a “free software package for retrieving files using HTTP, HTTPS and FTP, the most widely-used Internet protocols.“

One of the main advantages of wget is that it’s simple, yet it’s very powerful (the complete features of wget can be found in their site). However, since it’s invoked using a command prompt or terminal, not many non-geeks use this function, mainly because it can be quite intimidating. 

But downloading using wget can be as easy as just simply typing “wget URL_of_file” in your terminal. The magic comes with the commands you append to your wget.

One of my most favorite wget functions is its ability to do certain things: first is that it can continue incomplete downloads, and second is that it can automatically reconnect whenever it is disconnected. This can become useful, say, you are downloading an image of the newest Ubuntu distro, or an image of the Windows 8 preview. These files are more than just a few hundred megabytes, and if you have a poor internet connection, downloading can be quite a pain in the ass.

To invoke an auto-reconnecting wget download in your terminal, type the following command,

wget -c -t 0 --timeout=60 --waitretry=60 URL_of_file

Let’s explain what each command does.

  • -c allows you to continue downloading a partially downloaded file
  • -t 0 means you will retry the download for an infinite number of times until it is completed
  • –timeout=60 means wget will abort the download if no new information has been received for the past 60 seconds
  • –waitretry=60 specifies the time after the aborted download before wget resumes the download

I was successfully able to try this set of commands last night when I tried downloading the Windows 8 developer preview. Around 2 gigabytes within the download, we lost our internet connection. A few seconds later, wget automatically retried the partial download for me (with the + symbols representing the partially downloaded chunk of the file.

Image

wget has a lot more functions, which are listed in their documentation page. You can try mixing and matching certain commands to help accomplish your downloads.

Won’t Stop ‘Til It’s Over.

Posted by baracoma on March 24, 2012
Posted in: Music, Personal. Leave a Comment

This evening I found myself listening to different tracks by The Temper Trap. Well particularly the one linked above, which has been on loop for the past few minutes now. While overdosing in the rich layers of guitar-work intertwined with the simple, repetitive, but deeply touching lyrics, I couldn’t help but feel something inside. And this prompted me to write what I felt as a Facebook status.

This song is full of happiness. Of warmth. Of being content. Of being in the moment.

How else can I describe his song? It’s like feeling busog.

It was then that I realized that just by posting it as a status, it was actually against what I was feeling at that time. Just by sharing the link and typing a few words, I did not at all feel busog. And then that feeling prompted me to tweet.

Sometimes I miss my artsy side. That’s why I love going out for videoke.

Yet tweeting still did not feel as if I was busog. It was not at all fulfilling. It felt cheap. It felt like I was cheating myself.

The song always made me feel a whole lot of  different emotions. It fired up a lof of memories. It reminded me of Cubao. It reminded me of a kiss. It reminded me of a broken heart. It reminded me of awkwardness. It reminded me of beginnings. It reminded me of you. It reminded me of being busog. And I was acknowledging that just by posting it as a status or a tweet?

And that’s when it struck me. I haven’t really been being me all this time. Looking back in the near past, it seems that I haven’t been putting much effort and investment in myself. I have been focusing too much in trying to save the world, in trying to make a change, that I have ended up letting my personal growth go stagnant.

Have I abandoned myself?

Judging from the near past, it seems so.

I used to be elaborate. I used to find color in the simplest of things. I used to write about it. I used to write about how I felt. I used to sing about how I felt.

Yet now things have been reduced to the cheap status messages, links to other posts, quick and easy photos, reblogs and tweets.

So what now?

Having realized all of these, I have resolved to reviving former myself.  I’ll try getting back into getting creative. Into running, perhaps. Into writing, definitely. And I’ll start by reviving this blog.

Because I won’t stop until it’s over, I wont stop to surrender. :)

Setting Windows Update Proxy Server Settings

Posted by baracoma on March 16, 2012
Posted in: Uncategorized. Leave a Comment

Just a quick note and reminder for myself (and to anybody interested as well).

The university I study/work in is a little restrictive on our internet use. We have to go through proxy servers just so we could browse the internet. While it is a good idea to filter students’ use of the internet (ie no Facebook during school/work hours) it can pose a problem when you’re trying to update your Windows using Windows Update.

Windows Update does not follow your proxy settings in the Internet Properties tab in Control Panel. So when you try downloading your updates through a proxy, the download does not start at all.

So how could you set your Windows Update to connect through a proxy server? Try the following steps.

  1. Start an elevated command prompt. Click the Start menu, type “cmd”. When cmd.exe pops up, right click, and “Run as administrator.” Click “Yes” when UAC pops up.
  2. Reset the proxy settings by typing netsh winhttp reset proxy
  3. Once reset, type netsh winhttp set proxy http://your.proxy.here:portnumber. For example, in UP Diliman’s case it’s: netsh winhttp set proxy http://proxy8.up.edu.ph:8080
  4. Start downloading your updates.

Remember, this does not automatically reset. So whenever you connect to a direct internet connection (no proxy), you’d have to run the command from Step 2 again: netsh winhttp reset proxy

Hello world!

Posted by baracoma on January 3, 2012
Posted in: Uncategorized. 1 comment

Welcome to WordPress.com. After you read this, you should delete and write your own post, with a new title above. Or hit Add New on the left (of the admin dashboard) to start a fresh post.

Here are some suggestions for your first post.

  1. You can find new ideas for what to blog about by reading the Daily Post.
  2. Add PressThis to your browser. It creates a new blog post for you about any interesting  page you read on the web.
  3. Make some changes to this page, and then hit preview on the right. You can always preview any post or edit it before you share it to the world.

Quit Bullshitting, Sky Internet

Posted by baracoma on February 12, 2011
Posted in: Rants.

Our internet has been dead at peak hours (for us that’s 12mn to 6am) this past week. Fed up, I resorted to calling our provider, Sky Internet. We’ve been losing precious hours and a few pesos finding alternate internet sources at such odd hours.

First call, it was a recording of downtime at areas such as Ortigas, Pasig, etc. Not hearing our area in the list, I called them again so I could speak to one of their agents.

Finally an agent answered. Before he could ask for my name I asked why we had no internet at our area, Loyola Heights. He didn’t answer the question, but instead, went for protocol and asked for my name. I gave it, and I also gave the name that was attached to our subscription. He then asked me where I was located despite me telling him that a few minutes ago.

He asked me to hold for a while, as he would be checking with their technicians to see where Internet would be down.

It was a good five minutes before he came back. The first thing he said? He told me to reset our router.

I said I’ll do that later since our router is upstairs.

He said try connecting the laptop to the router.

Again, I said I can only do that later.

Furious, I asked him if I did all those, if my Internet come back.

He said no, he wasn’t sure if those solutions would work.

It was then when I started ranting and rambling about how much precious time and money we wasted because one they couldn’t provide what we paid for, and second, because they won’t tell us straight if there was a problem.

I mean, if you’re the provider, and you know something is wrong, you should tell the user straight to the point that something is wrong, not blaming it on the user’s hardware.

He should have said, “sir we’ve been having problems” not “sir you should do this and this and that and shit” while covering up what has been happening.

GAHD.

30 minutes later the Internet was back up. Yes I restarted our router, but that was long before our connection came back up.

Dear Sky Internet Philippines, do your job. Quit bullshitting your users. Please deliver.

For other Sky Internet users, Internet at midnight to morning apparently has been erratic since Feb 7. WTF.