All posts by Jay

About Jay

Blogger/Writer. Advocate of causes. Geek.

#PulisAngTerorista

Opinion, , , ,

Once more #PulisAngTerorista is trending on Twitter because of the most recent incident of road rage, assault and even cocking a gun involving a retired police officer who was driving on the bike lane.

Last night, the Quezon City PNP had a press conference to ‘address the matter’ where a couple of things smack of further impunity by authorities and their former members – only the retired police officer who pulled out a gun was present, the bike rider was not present, out of fear for his safety and that of his family, and the QC PNP once more acting like a spokesperson for their erring comrade.

From the posts of lawyer Raymond Fortun, who is now taking on a crusade to make the retired police officer accountable, it’s clear that the victim had already been silenced by fear as he has refused to file charges and pursue the matter altogether. Adding insult to injury, the police officials at the press conference had the audacity to declare that “anyone is free to file charges” like a veiled threat to anyone who would go up against their authority.

All this after 17-year-old Jherod Jemboy Baltazar was gunned down by incompetent and trigger-happy policemen. Another minor, a 15-year-old kid ended up with bruises and injuries after being beaten up by the Navotas Maritime Police.

Remember all these when you consider that the public is paying for the pension fund of police officers with no contribution from them when they were still on active duty. You’d think that abusive and corrupt police are only present in the US hence the outcry “ACAB”, in the Philippines, #PulisAngTerorista

Problems with Converge in Cavite

Converge no internet connection

Just in the second month of having Converge as our primary ISP here in Cavite, we’ve already experienced an outage that lasted almost 12 hours. The following day, the connection was intermittent. The most frustrating of all is how difficult it’s been to contact their Customer Service, regardless of the channel.

I first reported the outage through their official Twitter account, and they responded after 5 hours! Tried to call their hotline and the feature to automatically generate a support ticket failed to work. So I patiently waited for almost 15 minutes to actually speak to someone, but when they were about to create a support ticket for a tech visit, the call got disconnected!

What I feared finally came to pass, it’s really hard and frustrating to get a reliable and responsive ISP outside of the capital.

Someone who does not find value in putting up classroom decorations clearly has no business being the Secretary of Education.

When UP Diliman made headlines for having more than fifty percent of this year’s graduating class finish with Latin honors, it raised a lot of eyebrows from both members of the UP community and outsiders. Author Butch Dalisay who teaches at UP has weighed in on the peculiar issue, attributing the seeming generosity of the prestigious state university with Latin honors to the relaxation of academic policies brought about by the COVID pandemic. Citing a few studies critiquing the Latin honors system, he’s on point in saying that the time has come to find a better way of recognizing and rewarding academic achievements. In general, the problem also exists at other education levels.

A place for your words, thoughts, and content

Daily dose, ,

Eleven years since Jon Udell asked where have all the bloggers gone, I still find myself asking the same question from time to time. We all know the answer to this, the rise of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, the defunct Google+, TikTok, Instagram, etc has captured the online conversation. Google didn’t help when it killed off its Google Reader app.

But thanks to Scott Hanselman, the realization that one should continue to blog and do so on your own domain instead of putting it all in one or scattered across walled gardens would ensure that you have control of and ownership of your words.

Just look at the mess Twitter is now in. Musk rebranding it to ‘X’ is just but the latest evidence that social media platforms will come and go, and each time one goes under after going through ‘enshittification‘, what happens to all of your content?

With a blog, there will always be a place for your words, thoughts, and other content.