All posts by Jay

About Jay

Blogger/Writer. Advocate of causes. Geek.

No AI was used in writing this blog

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When the AI revolution broke out, my timeline was flooded with AI ‘gurus’ with all the praise, tutorials, and hacks to maximize it for work and in particular writing. Never mind that most of these ‘experts’ were once ‘crypto bros’ when cryptocurrencies were all the craze.

Anyway, I kept an open mind and even got excited about AI because for a moment I was hyped with the prospects of how beneficial these neural networks would be for me, thinking at long last, this could help me get back to regularly publishing content again.

When I finally got the chance to try out ChatGPT and Google Bard to write a draft blog post, the thrill quickly evaporated. It’s not that the results were bad, heck I said to myself “I finally found myself an editor”. It’s just that the reading of the output felt like it was no longer my work. I could not find my voice in it, immediately I knew it wasn’t my work anymore. It felt unauthentic.

So that was how I quickly reverted back to my own words and writing process. Don’t get me wrong, it didn’t turn me into an AI naysayer as there’s genuinely some value in using it. Maybe I just used the wrong prompts and need to learn more about how to better use it, and I will. Just not for my writing.

Instead, AI has helped me with ‘spit-balling’ ideas and supplementing online searches, which pretty much suits my needs. As for my writing, it’s still just me, my notes, and a blank screen or piece of paper.

Thirty-eight

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After almost a decade, I’m celebrating my birthday back in my hometown and in the house where I was born. The move from the city has been full of challenges but there’s not been a single day of regret ever since. With the worsening climate crisis, getting away from the urban jungle has been a gift for the family.

While the writing, podcasting, and building scale models are still on hiatus, the anxiety from not being able to continue with all of it has been less severe. In fact, the anticipation of getting back at these has been a positive force as it has helped me stay focused on settling down back home and getting through the difficult times.

The other day, the thought of adding more books to my home library was so tempting that I couldn’t help but consider it. Moreover, I am determined to make a good start on my reading list for 2021.

Call it baby steps if you will, what matters is I’m still moving on a trajectory rather than standing still.

While not much has been published on this blog since last year, the advocacy on social issues has been consistent on my social media accounts. The next step is getting it all synced with this blog as centerstage and happening on a regular cadence.

There was a mention of a health concern in last year’s birthday post, to which I’m glad to report that a very positive step has been taken to address it thanks to a wonderful, brilliant, and caring doctor. The prognosis is very good overall and there’s a very strong chance that by my next birthday, I would be in a much better state. I intend to talk about it more on this blog in the coming months.

To everyone who will take the time to send me a greeting today, a big thank you!

Globe Broadband vs PLDT FibEr

Daily dose, ,

A month ago today, we finally moved out of the city and back into my hometown of Silang, Cavite. Aside from figuring out where to put all of our stuff in a much bigger house, one of the things I worried greatly about is getting decent fiber internet service.

Back in Taguig, our PLDT Fiber service of almost 7 years has been mostly reliable and fast. Globe wasn’t available in our neighborhood so Converge became a secondary service, a backup that is so crucial for remote work and online classes.

I tried to get our PLDT Fiber service transferred to Cavite but to no surprise, the process became a lengthy ordeal and ended up being abandoned because it turns out that it’s not available in our new address.

Fortunately, my sister has been on Globe Fiber and she told me that the service has been virtually great and reliable for some years now, so we’ve decided to split the bill and upgrade to a faster subscription of 800Mbps to accommodate the additional users and devices we’ve brought with us.

So far, Globe has not been a disappointment. Except for one inconvenience, we cannot ignore, even when there are a couple of us using the network, we’re only getting roughly 400Mbps connection speed. Half of what we are being billed monthly.

We’ve already reported this to Globe and this afternoon, one of their technicians dropped by to check the connections and the modem. He agreed that our connection speed should way above 400Mbps so he escalated it for further investigation. So now, we wait yet again for the issue to be resolved.

The entire experience just reinforced a couple of observations; first, the quality of internet connection varies largely from one area to another, and second, the state of an ISP’s provider in the area will influence the quality of the service.


So this would be my answer to anyone who’d ask ‘Which internet provider is better?’ It depends, literally on where the location is.

Home Network upgrade

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Working from home has been the norm since the pandemic began so having a fast and reliable internet connection has become as important as electricity and running water. Part of improving the home office setup is upgrading the home network in three metrics: redundancy, stability, and improved performance.

For redundancy, I’ve signed up for Converge’s FiberX service as a backup for the primary connection from PLDT. For much of the latter half of 2020, PLDT’s uptime had been really problematic – the connection would go down at least once a month, and worse, it takes more than a week for it to be fixed. Mobile internet wasn’t just enough for our connectivity needs and using a prepaid data connection was too costly.

TP-Link TL-R605 Gigabit Router & load balancer

Having two separate internet connections meant it was time for a load balancer, so I bought a TP-Link TL-R605 SafeStream Gigabit Router. It would also save us from the trouble of manually switching networks whenever either one goes down. It allowed for a near-seamless switch from the 600Mbps PLDT connection to the 300Mbps connection from Converge.

Mercusys Halo H50G WiFi Mesh

Sometime around October last year, I replaced the TP-Link Archer A6 AC1200 with the Mercusys Halo H50G WiFi mesh kit to eliminate dead spots around the house and for better network stability. To complete the upgrade, the existing wired connections were replaced with CAT6 ethernet cables to take full advantage of the Gigabit ports on the load balancer and the WiFi mesh units.

What’s wrong with the existing CAT5 cables that usually come with commercial routers? These cables aren’t really designed to handle network speeds faster than 100Mbps. ISPs today provide modems or routers or a combo box that is future-proof – equipped with Gigabit ports so that they can offer subscription speeds faster than 100Mbps should a customer decides to get an upgrade or give it out sheer generosity.

Switching to CAT6 cables would fix that and allow you to maximize the bandwidth of your subscription especially if it’s above 100Mbps as in my case because the combined speeds of my two connections are above 100Mbps.

The upgrades have been worth the investment as our home network has been more stable and able to let us work, study and stream HD content on multiple devices without worries.

Building bandai’s 1/144 Millennium falcon

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One of the ways I made good use of sheltering in place when COVID first hit the Philippines back in 2020 was to get serious with building model kits.

Bandai Millennium Falcon

It started when I decided it was the best time to build the 1/144 scale Millennium Falcon by Bandai which was a birthday gift from my wife back in 2021. This kit is based on Han Solo’s infamous ship as it appeared in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

Along with the awesome kit was a set of Tamiya acrylic paints, brushes, and clip holders. After going through hours of tutorials on YouTube, I then bought the other tools and equipment needed: primers, thinners, an airbrush, and even DIY’ed my own spray booth.


More than the final output, the process of cleaning the parts, putting it together, mixing paints, and fine-tuning my newfound airbrush skills was meditative and helped me keep anxieties at bay.


It even helped me with my writing as building the Falcon really got my creative juices flowing. Too bad that most of the writing at the time wasn’t for this blog so this time around I’d kick off the new year with my journey into building model kits.
Funny side story: I spent at hours painting the inside of the Millennium Falcon’s cockpit, which was my first crack at detail painting with a fine paintbrush, paying great attention to the buttons and knobs on the console only to realize that most of it would not be seen from the outside once it’s fully assembled! Paints used were from Tamiya, Armored Komodo, and Vallejo.

Spent hours painting this only to realize much of it would be hidden from view lol


Still, it was another aspect of building model kits that I thoroughly enjoyed – shaking hands and eye strain notwithstanding. Weathering the kit was the part that I enjoyed the most as it allowed for greater creativity in terms of telling a ‘story’ of what the Falcon has been through and the places it’s been to. It also allowed me to get away with small mistakes here and there.
My pictures do not give the kit justice as Bandai did an excellent job with the details and quality, it’s the closest thing I could get to being one of the model builders at Industrial Light & Magic, making something that will be used for filming.


Naturally, the next kits I built after the Millennium Falcon were also from Bandai’s Star Wars line. So expect more posts about building model kits on this blog from here on out. Until next time, Happy New Year!