Slow September, Fast Hours

This is my day: I wake up, get some breakfast, work on the computer, have some lunch, work some more, merienda (and maybe take a nap after merienda). The kids arrive and I stop working when they do. After dinner, I continue working till around I don't know what time. Get some sleep and then I wake up with a start.

This has been the longest September I have ever experienced. The funny thing is that the days seem to go by so fast. Is it me or am I in some kind of a time warp where time suddenly has a mind of its own?

Weirder and weirder.

And moving forward...

Something happened two weeks back. My wife died. I'm writing this now hoping that I can move forward as I have not been able to. Dying is like a hump for the survivors. I admit I could not let go because I don't know how.

I was working that night. And it was a pleasant surprise that the kids and Lilia went to bed early. Around 10pm, Lilia had to get up and pee. Passing by the open door she saw me still working and told me to get some sleep lest I get sick.

Two hours later, I heard a bang with her on the floor prone with her hands across her chest. I turned her on her back and I tried to revive her. Didn't work. The past two weeks have been a blur.

It seems that everything is moving so fast.

The house is a mess. Two renters moved into the apartment on the house's ground floor. And we had to move our things out of there. We haven't cleared out Lilia's things. But we were able to pack her clothes. These would be sent to Bolinao for distribution there.

(For several years now, my parent's have been bringing old clothes to Bolinao, almost twice a year, for distribution to relatives who are not as well off as we are. The rest of the family pitches in and segregates old clothes for this purpose.)

On the advice of friends, the kids and I have done some re-arranging. We've taken out some chairs. These are now being used by one of the renters. We've put the computer in the living room. So when I work at night I am sitting with the couch to my back. That's where Lilia died by the way. And I just have to keep looking behind my back at the sofa.

The last photo we had together was during the storm.

I took a work-at-home internet-based job so that I can watch over Lilia. The daily commute was a good two hours in the morning and more than two hours in the evening. That was not good. And considering that she got hospitalized in June, I thought that working from home was a no-brainer. Three weeks later, I find myself at home and alone.

I haven't been listening to mp3 songs lately. Most of the songs are downers or from Kenneth's emo playlist. It would have been okay if it was Kenneth playing the guitar, then Darwi and I would be singing along.

I am not into a depression. I am staring at it and keeping away as much as I can.

But after two weeks, I still can't let go. I don't know how. I am not a teetotaler, but I'm no drinker either. My focus right now is work and the kids.
They're teenagers now, with Kenneth a freshman fine arts student and Darwi graduating from high school. They should be able to take care of themselves if I leave them at home. But I'm not very comfortable leaving them.

We've had some household activities which we do as a group. These were all Lilia's tasks before. She didn't give these tasks for us to do. Now we do the household tasks. But poorly.

How do I let go of a twenty year marriage?

I've known Lilia for 25 years. Deep she is. That one has seen the future. And she has seen the now. Lives in both she does.

Lilia sleeps on the couch. She has her legs elevated as well as her head and torso. Kinda awkward methinks. The legs have to be elevated because of her allergy and varicose veins. Her upper body has to be elevated because she has an enlarged heart. Every so often she groans and moans from a bad dream, and I have to wake her up. (On the other hand, I also have those dreams where I literally cry out for help for somebody to wake me up.)

We've got a small place. Two bedrooms, one was formerly occupied by the kids and the other by me and Lilia. I asked Kenneth to move out of the other bedroom and room with me. I guess I did that so that I won't be afraid of sleeping. We don't close doors here. Never been a habit.

I'm moving forward. But I still have this very physical pain in my chest.

Sometime soon it won't be as painful. I hope.

--Andoy
3 Sept. 2008

Missing Photos

I never gave it a thought that a website will disappear. But then
again, it was bound to happen. That's the reason websites are not
cited in academic publications: because website contents can change,
the link can disappear or the whole web page disappear.

So now I have a bunch of blog entries without any links to pictures.

Moving forward, I have two choices, suck it, or do something about it.
I choose the latter: I'll recreate the postings using another photo
site on the web. In a leisurely fashion as I would be trying to find
the pictures first. And then post them on the photo website. This
would take some time.

Meantime, I've been busy. Writing. This could be a full-time job.
And working from home.

-- Andoy
Antonio Castellano, Jr.
Cell No: +63 915 466-3214

{thesaurus: (n.) an small extinct lizard with a large vocabulary.}

Boston Wins and I am Looking Forward to Next Year

Final score: 131-92. Boston wins the NBA Championships. Lakers can go home and lick their wounds. Maybe next year. I just hope the next Celtics-Lakers finals doesn't come along in another 21 years. I'm
looking forward to another Celtics-Lakers NBA finals next year. And hopefully with different results.

-- Andoy
18 June 2008

Sorting Serial Numbers... huh???

I've had experience with various customers over the years, as I've been employed with several IT vendors usually on the delivery end. But this is the first time I've encountered a client which wants the machines' serial numbers sorted. I have no idea what relevance the sorted serial numbers have on their system, but the reason cited is because the company does their own asset tagging and want the items delivered to be sorted. I don't understand. Really, I don't. The reason I say this is because companies (specially large companies and government offices) have asset tags with property asset numbers. These are the ones with relevance. Other numbers printed or written on the tags are supporting to the property asset numbers. In that case, the machine's serial number's significance is to ensure uniqueness.

Looking at it from a different viewpoint, why are the machines not sorted according to serial numbers once these are shipped out of the vendor warehouse? One reason I see is that this ensures that machines from any single batch are distributed randomly across several vendors. This ensures that if there's any problem with a batch, no single customer takes the brunt of the error. Imagine if you bought a whole bunch of electric bulbs all from one bad batch, and these start exploding one by one, you would have to ask yourself why all of this happened to you, and to you alone? It starts getting personal from there. Batch randomization makes sense for the manufacturer.

Serial number sorting isn't so bad. Ten items in a box gets sorted pretty fast. But if the delivery gets to the point of thirty boxes of ten items per box, this starts getting pretty messy pretty fast. How about 2,000 items, with ten machines to a box? Or one set of three different items, each with their own serial numbers, and the order is for 1,000 sets? And you have only four people to sort these out? The only intellectual exercise you have here is the planning. Implementation gets to be pretty dumb, rote and repetitive pretty fast.

Just another rant.

--Andoy
18 June 2008

Linux Experiment Ends... due to the hard disk

A while back I installed Linux on my home PC. It was okay, an old Fedora distro. No problem it works fine and I really wanted to play around with it a bit. The real problem was that it was installed on top of WinXP using a third hard disk. A 4GB hard disk which is more than five years old, maybe closer to ten years old. Another thing going against the experiment was that I still didn't have internet access at the time I installed it. Would have wanted to see the performance on the net. That would have been fun.

But after this and that, and the hard disk being beyond the expected lifetime, it was beginning to show its age. At first the disk sounded very old school, like an old IBM 360KB floppy disk during boot up of an IBM XT compatible (going a wheezy/nasal "ka-zzhinng-eh ka-zzhing-ah hheengg heengg heeng"), or worse, sounding like a 10MB hard disk from thirty years ago (like a chicken with sore throat clucking "tock-tock-tock ka-shheeeghuee ka-shheeeghue"). But this only happened about once every hour or two after being booting up to Windows.

For about two weeks, I was thinking of deleting the third hard disk and reverting back to WinXP boot up. Okay, I procrastinated. And then I got busty last week, with Lilia at the hospital, I only spent about two to three hours a day at home taking a nap and changing clothes. (The kids weren't home, they were with my parents.) The PC was still running fine, except for the intermittent sounds from the third hard disk.

And over the weekend, the hard disk with the Linux OS died a natural death, from old age.

Which left me with a PC which could not boot up. Good thing I had a ready of things to do, to uninstall Linux. Simple enough to find the XP install disk, then going to the recovery console and running FIXMBR. Well and good, but for a while there, I forgot the administrator password and had to type in several possible passwords before hitting on the correct one. FIXMBR done on the console and rebooting I was able to have the PC up and running WinXP.

Next hurdle was the second hard disk. It was tagged by Windows as unformatted. I was about to give several names a call before I remembered that the internet was up and running. A simple search for a utility to "unformat" a partition, a little effort at understanding the command-line text-based interface, with almost literate computerspeak/technicalese and a reboot, and the hard disk was recovered without a problem.

So there, I found out how easy it was to uninstall Linux on the PC. Just needs some patience. A lot less patience than if you were uninstalling Windows. By the way, though installing Linux does need more technical knowledge, it's a lot less of a chore than theautomated install process for Windows.

So now I am back to a single OS machine. I'm still going to go back to Linux sometime soon. Or maybe using a second machine or even a third PC. I can wait.

-- Andoy
17 June 2008

The One Ring

After more than five years of telling myself that I will have my ring fixed, I finally did.  I had the ring cut and taken off my finger.

I have only one ring, the only piece of jewelry I wear, and that's my wedding band.  It's just there on my right ring finger.  Sitting at the base, like a good ring should be.  Unobtrusive.  Sometimes I twirl it around the finger.  Otherwise, it is not noticeable.  Except for the slight pain as it presses on the muscle.  

After the ring was cut and taken off, I found out that it was two (ring sizes) too small.  I have not taken it off for more than eight years.  Or ten.  I'm not sure.  But I remember that it had been pressing painfully against my finger for a long long while.  It might have started pressing on the muscle around the time I stopped taking it off.  Which was around the time I gained 10 pounds in a month.  And then added another 10 pounds, also in a month, five or so years later.  I weighed about 115-120 pounds when I got married.  I'm now at 140 (hovering between 136 to 145).

Every so often these past few days, I still feel round my right ring finger, as if turning a ring round the base of the it.  I feel the scar there.  It should clear up soon.  And the finger is getting some width (and muscle) back.  There is still the slight pain.  And if I press on the scar, it is still a bit tender.

I am told that this would be temporary, and the pain would go away in a month.  I hope so.  But I guess the scar would be there for a while.

-- Andoy

16 June 2008

Lilia's hospitalization

Lilia was hospitalized this week due to cellulitis of her right leg.  It sounds painful, looks painful and personally, I don't want to find out how painful really is.  Suffice to say, that Lilia was crying when she told me how painful it was.  At which point I told her we should get her to a hospital and in which case, the more she cried, begging me not to have her confined.  We compromised on a visit to a doctor.

She was prescribed antibiotics at first but on the follow-up checkup, there was no other alternative but to be confined in order to have the antibiotics administered intravenously.  After several days of that, her leg had improved.  She was discharged this morning, but with still a regimen of oral antibiotics for the next few days.

The main reason she doesn't want to be confined is because she is still traumatized after her prior stay in the hospital due to a gall bladder stones complicated by pancreatitis.  That was painful.

She's out now.  And taking another maintenance medicine.

--Andoy
14 June 2008

... and a month and a half later, Lakers and Celtics go to the dance

A while back, I wrote about the Lakers and Celtics meeting for the NBA Finals.

This should be fun.

-- Andoy

2 June 2008

Irene's Birthday

Posted pictures from Irene's birthday:  Evolving stories, poems, pictures, images...

Irene is now based in Singapore and she planed in last May 18, her birthday for a two-week vacation.  Original plans were for a family outing.  But one thing leading to another, not all us siblings were there.  Will be posting pictures from the outing next time.

-- Andoy

26 May 2008

A disk crash and a recovery

My hard disk crashed last night.  In a way, I was expecting it as we've just moved and the PC got moved around more than most items.  I was actually prepared for it, I had a backup and recovery program which made weekly incremental backups.

That was not the problem.  Things started going weird from there. I have three hard disks on the PC:  the system disk; the data disk; and a Linux system disk. (For one reason or another I have not been able to access the two other disks when using Linux.  I have not had time to experiment on it.)  These are three physical disks with single partitions each.  So I am pretty sure that the chances of a hard disk crash for all the disks at the same time is very slim indeed.

First thing I did, once I found out that I couldn't boot up on my primary, I tried to reboot using Linux.  But since it was riding on top of Windows, it did not boot up.  Just a lot of hard disk activity.

Next, since I have the backup program, I tried to find the recovery CD first.  And since we've just moved and the data CDs have not yet been taken out of the boxes, I have not had the time to do a cursory (ocular?) inventory.  On the first pass, I wasn't able to find the recovery disk.  I had to resort to the OS install.  Booting up from the install disk, I ran into an error message I have not encountered before:  a blue screen with a short message, the gist of which was "hardware error" with a hex number on the next line.  No other line followed.

At which point, I tried to change the hard disk data cable connections, doing different permutations, taking out one hard disk, changing BIOS settings, changing boot up settings.  I had to have a break.  To calm down as it was getting to be very frustrating and I was on the verge of a panic attack.  I didn't have the time, nor the energy to fix a big problem.  That would have to wait till the next weekend.

After watching some TV, and some snacks (corn puffs), I went back to the CDs.  Finally found the recovery CD, and was able to start work on the data recovery.  Insert the CD, boot, choose the backup file and wait.  After a relatively long wait, which should have felt like a short wait, the system disk was recovered and the PC was able to boot up just fine.  However, it turns out that the last full back up I had was last December, with weekly incremental backups. I had to mount the last incremental backup (made the evening before we moved).  This made the backup a virtual drive.  And I had to copy the files from there to the system disk, which turned out to take much longer.  I copied several folders last night.  And I will have to copy several more till I can get to where the PC was two weeks ago.

All in all, a much shorter exercise than prior experience with hard disk recovery.  But it could have been a much shorter procedure, if the full backup was more recent.

Once all of the recovery is done to my satisfaction, I would have to set the full backups on a more frequent schedule.

--Andoy 
5 May 2008

A New Residence

In the past twenty years, this would be our seventh residence. But it would be more from scratch than ever before.

My brother bought the house last time he was in town. It was a three-door apartment at that time. And what he planned was for me, my siblings and Mama and Tatay to live there. My family would be living on the second storey, my sister and her family on one of the ground floor apartments and my parents and brother in the other one. Several months down, this is just about to come true. Me and my family is moving in. The rest will follow as events have overtaken the plans.

The original plans included some renovation to the structure: raising the first floor roof and ceiling; adding a veranda on the second floor; increasing the area of the second floor; minor plumbing repairs; electrical rewiring; repairing some of the walls; etc. Not much really but it does sound like a lot.

Instead of all of those things, we're moving in with practically just a more livable improvement. We had the second storey floor repaired. It does need a flooring surface, like linoleum or vinyl tiles. The bedroom doors have to be replaced. Currently these have been removed. The rear wall needs to be replaced. hmmmm And the front door, which looks like a gate, should look like a front door.

But it is livable. It is a viable residence. Something we could repair and renovate as we live in it.

We can't bring everything with us. The china cabinet for one. And I'm not sure at all if we need all the cabinets. Or if we have space for them. The computer would most probably be placed beside the TV and beside the sofa. Which is just beside the dining table. hehehe

No, I am not complaining. I am actually and truly grateful and enjoying myself. For all the right reasons. This will be home. As did all the prior six residences.

--Andoy
26 April 2008

NBA Finals. The possibility exists...

At this point where there's a lot of popular players across a lot of teams, and there is no single team with a conceded advantage, anything can happen, and any team has a chance to win the NBA Finals.  However, after having said that, it is a wonder that nobody has talked about the possibility of the top two teams after the regular season fighting it out for the Finals.  Against all historical data, nobody is talking as yet of a Celtics-Lakers (or Lakers-Celtics) Finals.

The thought that this is being pushed out of the collective consciousness is a wonder.  It can be explained by the simple fact of popularity.  There are other teams which are more popular.  And these two teams have not been heavy contenders for some time now.  But not this year.  Start of the year brought Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen to the Boston.  They have been looking tough since the start of the season.  

And just when the trade deadline was coming along, Los Angeles got Pau Gasol into the fold.  This was supposed to be a project which might bear fruit in the near future.  Looks like the future came a little early.

Celtics-Lakers.  The continuing rivalry which by the looks of it will continue for at least another three years or until the contracts of the stars run out and comes time to rebuild again.  Something to look forward to.

I'm a Lakers fan, but if the above match up does happen, Lakers in six games.  Or Celtics in seven.  I really doubt anyone can win against the Celtics on a seventh game this year.

-- andoy

25 April 2008

Kenneth and Darwi, updates

Kenneth has decided to go to St. Scholastica's college to take a up Fine Arts.  He informed me about this during the weekend.  This is good news, I guess.  That ends the speculation as to course and school.  He was accepted to Music Education at St. Scholastica's as well as Computer Science to FEU-East Asia College and at Mapua (Makati Campus).

Darwi's birthday today.  Happy Birthday!  She's sixteen.  I'll be posting new pictures of her soon.  She'll be in her senior year in high school and should be taking college entrance exams soon.

--andoy

14 April 2008 

Another page layout edit

wala lang. hehehe I just thought I'd shake things up a bit. But not too much.

--andoy
12 April 2008

Not Dead Yet

The phone's demise was badly reported.  It's back and working.  Only yesterday did I find out that it does not charge through the USB if the connection is also being used to transfer data to and from the computer.  In fact, it seems that the phone is using up its own power when connected as a USB flash drive, it does not draw power from the computer.

So there.  I tried my luck in connecting the phone, again, and for the nth time to the PC hoping it would get recharged.  It did.  And it's working fine.

Now to keep in mind to keep it charged.

--andoy

10 April 2008

Dead Phone

My phone died.  Or maybe not yet dead.  Just that I can't charge the batteries.  First the charger died a week ago.  I was forced to borrow Darwi's phone.  She's got a charger, whereas I would be forced to charge my phone via a USB connection on a computer.  I intend to get a new charger, but wasn't able to get around to it last Saturday, being too tired from work deploying terminals to Zambales.

Now after several days of charging via the USB, the phone dies.  I am not sure why but it might be related to USB problems on some PCs.  There are some motherboards which USB power have destroyed USB devices.  I should know.  I had a USB flash disk fried because of such a USB connection.

Strategy now is to try other computers and see if the phone would charge.  Would have to go buy a new charger soon.  Soonest being Saturday.  Or when I can spare the money.

Meantime, I can receive text messages and calls (I think) using the office-issue phone, but I can't use it to make a call or send SMS.

Communication wise, I am isolated. Not good.

--andoy

The Mt. Samat Adventure

When I was growing up, Mt. Samat was the venue for the annual celebration of Araw ng Kagitingan, formerly Bataan Day, commemorating the day Bataan fell to the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II.  The Mt. Samat Memorial shrine was built in the late 1960's.

I was within the area about two weeks ago and just had to make a quick trip to the site.  I was with a team deploying EFT POS to a chain of LPG stores in the Bataan area, and we were within an hour's drive of the memorial.  We left the store at Orini just past 4:00pm, went to Balanga to withdraw money from the ATM (it being the only place in the area where there's an BPI or Landbank ATM.  And were at the highway crossroad to Morong by 5:00pm.  I was with Tony, the technical guy and Mang Louie.  And while on the way, we were also trying to search for a convenience store or sari-sari store where we can buy some bottled water.  Mang Louie noticed a fruit stand offering buco juice.   We had fresh buco juice, straight from the buco.  We left the roadside stand around 5:30 or thereabouts.

Off we went to the shrine.  Not getting lost as there were landmarks all the way to the intersection, With the van climbing, we noticed that there were no traffic on the road up the mountain.  We only saw one group of hiders going down, a couple on a motorbike also going down and a road crew painting lanes.  It was already 6:00pm when we got to the gate where a big sign said "Touring hours from 8:00am to 5:00pm."  Only thing to do was to turn around and take some pictures along the way.

Obviously, that was the first time any of us had ever gone to the shrine.  hehe  All in all, it was fun.  Didn't get to see much of the shrine, but the road trip was great.

--andoy
8 April 2008

Holy Week and TV

When I was younger, Holy week TV was practically non-existent.  The only thing you can watch would be Father Peyton's Rosary and the Stations of the Cross series.  And that would not show Jesus's face.  Of course there would be the biblical movies in theaters, and on some TV spots.  Movies like "The Robe", "Samson and Delilah", "Ten Commandments", etc.  Nowadays, there's series marathons.  Admittedly, I got caught up in one of the marathons. And "7th Heaven" is addictive, it makes sense and a whole lot more fun to watch end to end.

 

There was a time my family filleted and dried their own daing for Holy Week.  That was something.  Specially considering that in those days, samaral (barangan) was a low priority buy and not very popular fish in the 70's.  There was even that one time when we dried fish roe (samaral) for Holy Week.  I can't remember when was the last time I had dried fish eggs.

 

There was also one other thing which we did before, and that was to go to one church and pray upon the Stations of the Cross.  Sometime back this changed with a lot of families.  There was more mobility, people wanted to be away from home, in a way, and still be in the Holy Week mode, those with cars started visiting churches, as much as possible, it became a sort of church pilgrimage running around town and the nearest provinces going to twelve churches.  Twelve churches?!!  I find it hard to understand as the concept and tradition of Visita Iglesia loses meaning when you spend more time driving and travelling than praying.  Just my take on the matter.  If some people think that way, that's their problem.

 

Times have really changed.

--andoy

21 March 2008 

Recruiting Freshmen

This past Saturday, my son Kenneth took an entrance exam for BS Computer Science at a school in the university belt.  I've heard of developments within the school and how it has practically spun out the Computer Science program to a new college, complete with a new building and other facilities.  In fact, the new college is quite aggressive in asserting it's position as a serious place for training future IT professionals.

I was surprised that the entrance exam was free.  Surprised because the university has an entrance exam fee for its other courses.  That's okay, by me.  There were other surprises:  the exam is done through a PC, results to be given out after an orientation and tour of facilities.  There was even a free lunch for the examinees (and their parents/guardians who were waiting for the exams to finish.) 

I didn't take part in the tour of facilities and laboratories as I was at an internet shop coordinating to fix a problem at a client site.  (One tech guy going from one client branch to another, three of them in fact, and another one by phone support; and another guy at the Makati office updating the data on client/server software.  While also on the line with the client PM to fix the GPRS connection with their provider.)  But that's a different story I would rather not go into.

Like most of the new IT schools, the college is a collaboration between IT companies and the (older) university.  Though I don't really buy the definition of courses that they gave (which is the same definition of courses a lot of the other colleges and universities have given):  BS Computer Science is for the traditional course heavy on theory and languages, whereas BS Information Technology focuses on "new" technology, specially web-based or internet technology.  All in all, this is one aggressive school.  I just don't know if Kenneth would choose this and the course.


--andoy
17 March 2008