Essays from the Weekend

  Image from Apple Once upon a time, a friend of mine, let’s call her Rachel, felt miserable because she got realized that she got sucked back into being hooked on social media for the past few days. She had been on a social media break for months. It felt liberating not feeling that strange and persistent impulse to reach for her phone and mindlessly scroll. It felt like she got a God-given time refund of a couple of free hours each day. It was peaceful. It was peak contentment.  Then she had her last day with her company, and, feeling a little sad she couldn’t say goodbye to her work friends in person, decided to add them on social media so that they could maybe keep a digital connection alive while they wait out delta before having drinks in person. She posted a picture to commemorate her last day too, her first post in almost a year. It had likes. Interesting. The feeling of wanting to check likes came back. People kept adding her. Pretty soon she found herself reaching fo...

I’m still shaken over the news of former President Noynoy Aquino’s passing. I admired the man and how he operated on pure integrity of character during his term. His appointees all seemed so principled, full of integrity, incorruptible. “Walang wangwang” - who could forget that, when people with connections didn’t really get ahead of the rest of us? The showstopping economic growth of the country? The “do the right thing” mentality that the government and the citizens rallied behind? I didn’t vote for him when he ran for president but he easily won me over, even though he was imperfect.   The Aquino nuclear family accomplished so much — his dad, incendiary opposition senator whose death sparked the EDSA People Power Revolution; his mom, who led the traumatized country out into a new democracy; and PNoy who again shone a light on the goodness of the Filipino people. The newspapers generally stop there but I’d like to add: Kris Aquino, the top individual taxpayer of the country for s...

My new set-up for personal projects. Credits to M. This is a tech review for people who are considering to buy either a laptop or a tablet. I have gone on a major research expedition for the replacement to my prematurely-dead Macbook. There was a lot of studying going on here because I know that the companies behind consumer tech ads and reviews will want to create needs in us where there originally was none. We’d want to value the products we have and don’t want to be tempted to buy things we don’t need.  So after my first and last iPad was the iPad 2 from several years ago, I bit the bullet and got an iPad Air 4 with a Smart Keyboard folio and Apple Pencil 2. I could use a personal device after my Macbook died last year.  I was considering either a Macbook Air or an iPad and took quite some time in deciding. It all boils down to: laptop or tablet? Tablets are fun but can it do everything a laptop can do? After backing up everything from my hard drives into the cloud and mont...