Tales from the crypt

All Saints’ Day started ominously enough with a column by Andre Palma on the Inquirer: Ultimately this day is one of remembering. While Palma chose to remember the cars he drove growing up, I chose to remember something else.

I tagged along with my dad to Baliwag on our annual visit to the family grave. Of the five or six names there, the only tomb I’m familar with is of my grandfather’s, who died in 1992. I was all but nine years old then, and we weren’t exactly what you could call close. I hardly knew the guy. All I really knew was that he was a doctor and he was born in 1919.

At my dad’s ancestral home in Baliwag, with the de Leon clan at the dining table, we were talking about my granddad for what seemed like the first time ever. Well, perhaps not, but it’s the first time I remember hearing anything more about him that I didn’t already know.

It was a surprise learning that he never intended to become a doctor; he simply took the course because his parents wanted him to. What he really wanted to become was an engineer. That didn’t stop him from placing within the top ten of the board exams, though. It seems he didn’t practice medicine; the ancestral home has obvious traces of being a pharmacy once. Tita Vik said that once in a while, he’d observe structures and buildings and comment on how they could be made better. Whenever he did that, he was in a world of his own.

A little segue here: My cousin Carlo is currently in his third year of high school in La Salle Greenhills, and he was asking me about college, entrance exams and my experiences at work. (Good lord, he’s already much taller than I am at 5’10”.) He says his forte for now is geometry, while chemistry is something he could be better at.

When I asked him about what he was planning to take up in college, he didn’t pick any particular course—all he said was he wanted to extend his grasp of geometry, and a BS Math degree is out of the question. When I told him he might have a future as an engineer, his eyes lit up in agreement. After hearing my granddad’s story, he remarked the will to be an engineer might have been passed down to him.

It was a day of remembering, all right. I’m very thankful for it.
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Normally, the North Luzon Expressway is transformed into a crawling parking lot on holidays like All Saints’ Day and the end of Holy Week. So you can imagine my surprise when on the way home, the traffic stayed in the Cagayan Valley road leading to the towns and cities of Baliwag, none of it leaking into the NLEX.

Using the NLEX is expensive: even with a claimed lower cost per kilometer than the SLEX I’m all too familiar with, the stops up north are spaced much farther apart. However you can really see where the expense goes on the NLEX. The asphalt is smooth, the four lanes are wide enough for Americans to be comfortable with, and the traffic jam I was expecting to get stuck in was nowhere to be found along its length. With Pinoys being Pinoys, there are still idiots who don’t know what a passing lane is, but even so it’s surprisingly manageable. There’s even an electronic toll payment system called the EC-tag, mimicking the more popular E-pass of the SLEX.

All I can say is...wow. If this is the price of progress, I’ll gladly pay. Just don’t count on me making frequent trips to Bulacan or Baguio all by my lonesome.
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In the halcyon days of high school I used to buy the US edition of PC Magazine—it was still relatively cheap at PhP150 or so. This was one of the expenses I had growing up that, in hindsight, was ultimately utterly pointless. I was too poor (or rather not willing) to spend on the latest processors, CD-ROM drives and graphics cards, although being the gullible geek I was at the time I was amazed just reading about them and what they could do.

My old prof Gary Mariano had a point: He buys computer magazines only when he’s looking for upgrades to his computer or shopping for a new one. After that, he ignores them completely. The point is simple enough: Everything in a computer magazine is intended to make you feel like your system is obsolete.

Over time, the peso weakened and the US version of PC Magazine became hideously expensive. So not long ago, PC Magazine Philippines was born, published by Hinge Inquirer Publications (also known, rather arrogantly, as “hip”). It sells for PhP100 and is considerably cheaper and thinner than the ad-packed US version. You already know about how I’m looking for a new monitor, so I decided to buy the recent issue.

I wasn’t prepared for the irony that awaited me. Art Ilano’s column “Next Wave” had a piece called “An Embarrassment of Storage Space,” and it talked about the pointlessness of Blu-ray and HD-DVD, the much-ballyhooed optical media of the near future. “Blu-ray and HD-DVD are coming,” he says. “Now just what are we going to do with them?” Unlike the migration from CD-ROM to DVD, where DVD movies brought extra features, Ilano says there’s no compelling reason to move up to these new disks with huge capacities.

I am amazed. Here’s a guy who writes for a magazine that is determined to make me part with my money in the endless pursuit of better computing and avoidance of obsolescence. But here he was, preaching a different gospel—a gospel of the pointlessness of some of the technology we are influenced to buy.

Color me impressed.