noel alanguilan

nakapangingilabot
creepy
san pablo city, laguna

part of the lost rolls

a photo of my brother, gerry. i can’t remember if i asked him to look try to look serious or angry to lend some “drama” to the photo.

he said it was one of his old creepy stares.

i believe this was taken in san pablo city.

mirienda
snack
intramuros, manila

part of the lost rolls

basag
(broken glass)
manila

part of the lost rolls

the chamber
fort santiago, intramuros, manila

this was one of the chambers which used to store powder magazine but was later converted to prison cells for hundreds civilians and guerillas arrested during the second world war. their remains were found  after the battle of manila.

this photo is part of a folder of black and white film that i misplaced more than a decade ago. i recently found the film and had them digitized. i think a lot of the shots are worth showing off so i’m starting a series called the lost rolls where i will post most of the photos here. with the exception of my name and resizing the the scans to fit the blog, the photos were not altered in any way.

pick your poison

windows 7 is coming and most people running xp or vista will be upgrading sooner or later. i’ve been reading up on what it would take to upgrade windows xp to windows 7 and most of the answers point to more money for both hardware and software and quite a handful of hours for the upgrade itself.

windows 7 essentially has the same system requirements as vista–1ghz processor, 1 gig of memory, 16 gig of drive space and 128 meg of video memory on a vid card that supports at least dx9. this is the “official” system requirements. the “unofficial” requirements are a bit higher–1.6ghz cpu and 2 gig of memory–if you want an acceptable level of performance. if you want zippy then you’d have to spend for a faster cpu and more memory. most people would want zippy so it may be better and more convenient to get a new computer. really. but don’t take it from me.

if you want to know if your current computer can run windows 7, microsoft has conveniently provided an upgrade advisor which you can download and run in your windows computer. don’t forget the grain of salt.

upgrade times range from an hour and a half to 20 hours. some may take longer. the fastest way is to do a clean install from windows xp to windows 7–at least that’s what microsoft recommends. put the dvd in and have it reformat the whole drive. of course, you have to save your data first and then reinstall your applications later but i think a clean install is still better than 20 hours of upgrade time. besides, i think its a good idea to do a clean install on a new operating system.

so, a few hours after posting that i will leave facebook for at least three weeks, and i’m already wondering what pictures this friend posted or what that friend wrote as his/her status. terrible really.

i do get e-mail updates from facebook whenever someone sent me facebook mail directly; if someone made a comment about my status or any of my pictures or if someone added or confirmed me as a friend. but that’s about it.

i got to see one of my facebook friends the day after i started this experiment and she made the one-eyebrow-is-higher-than-the-other look asking, “why?!?” and i said, “nothing. trip lang (a whim). its an experiment of mine.” insert devilish grin here.

its been ten days and so far i found out that i use facebook to keep track of my friends and what they are up to–at least what they want to share to their friends–in one place. facebook makes it easy to keep in touch with friends. this is especially true for the ones that live beyond the bounds of metro manila. i don’t have to go to several other sites just to see how donnie or cherry are.

i don’t even play the games anymore. maybe i just don’t find them interesting enough or if they’re my cup of java or not; or maybe i’m just getting old. one in every while i just want to go out into the real world and take photos.

i also recognize fact that maybe more than half of the people i know are not even in facebook but for those that are it is a good venue for global friends to get together and tell everyone else who’d care to read that we’re fine. or not. never mind what the critics say about privacy. we always have the choice of what to put in there or leave out so if you want to keep it private then leave it out and don’t digitize it. we also have a choice on who can see what we put in.

i also learned, strange as it seems, that i find it more satisfying to give friends a call and hear their voices on the other end of the line or send a quick e-mail directly to the person. personal preferred. one can say that you can always use skype but not all of anyone’s friends is skype savvy as lola techie. it is always, always a happy occasion to get snail mail from this friend of mine. not everything digital is fun. its just more convenient. yeah, old school.

and i did find more time to spend on this blog which is a good thing. i have this tendency to neglect it.

ultimately, facebook is just another way of getting in touch with friends. its just done differently.

so now i’m calling the experiment and i’m happy with the results that i got.

up 4:45am. got robin ready for school. prepped a cereal breakfast. robin had bad tummy. made him stay home and get some more sleep. back to bed. woke to rain. said a little prayer. the world needs it. coffee with cherry. cds playing. everything but the girl. linkin park. lene marlin. wash dishes. read about ibm storage systems. fixed bed. updated cherry’s to firefox 3.5.3. ordered pizza. spicy chicken. baked potatoes. played with ubuntuone a bit. took some photos. saw a white pajero being towed. cough and sniffles going around. still drizzling. bought medicine. and chips. and dark chocolate. and turon. net surfed. saw six 30″ monitors pushed by one video card. read some gossip taken with some salt (the pictures are often more interesting). short nap. warm bath. shave. dressed. i have to get new slacks. 32. omg. 5:30pm. drive. terrible traffic. its the rain. parking was easy. impressive show. cecile’s piano sang. lisa’s pirouettes were wow. imelda was there. greeted tess. vegetable dinner (more or less) near midnight. drove home. checked mail. marvelled at the universe. fixed bed. slept by 1:05am. its another day.

friends in fb: thanks for the greets. i will get in touch with you one way or another as soon as my little experiment is declared finished.

pagod (tired)
in a jeep somewhere in quiapo
2009.06

mum
san pablo city
june 2009

its out with three critical security holes patched and a handful of other bugs fixed.

get yours updated.

for some of you who could not wait for ubuntu 9.10 to get their firefox upgraded to 3.5.x and followed jun auza’s firefox upgrade path (the second option), here’s the command i used to upgrade to 3.5.3:

wget -O - http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.5.3/linux-i686/en-US/firefox-3.5.3.tar.bz2 | tar xj -C ~

like i said before, this worked for me. it may not work for you. the risk is yours.