My usual monthly bill is P3,000 – P3,500. I was really shocked last month when I saw that my bill reached P4,600+. I was already bracing myself for a P5,000 bill for April but man I almost fell out of my seat when I opened the Meralco envelope. My bill shot up once again to P7,300 even if the consumption isn’t too far from my previous month. Now this is what you call epic fail.
Inside the bill is a letter from Meralco explaining that it isn’t their fault and that the increase stemmed from generation charges. If this is the case then we should all look at DENR and the government for a solution to this. What will the Philippine government do to stabilize the prices of electricity? Or will these be the “normal” rates from now on and we can’t do a damn thing about it anymore?
If there is a Presidential, Senatorial, or whatever debate, this should be the question that should be asked: How will you resolve the energy crisis and the soaring electricity bills?
To those who share my outrage, please do join the FACEBOOK PROTEST AGAINST this. We already have more than 30,000 fans as of today.
I recently stumbled upon a talk giving by Benjamin Zander on TED. His talk made such a powerful impact on me that I wanted to write about it and share it with you guys. Zander is an orchestra conductor for more than 20 years and he’s a highly sought after speaker on leadership and classical music. Before anything, I’d like all of you to take some time to watch his video. The entire thing is 20 minutes but believe me when I say that it is worth every single kilobyte download.
Powerful. Just powerful.
Two things in his talk struck me the most. The first is his concept of “shining eyes around us”. Zander shared that the shining eyes represent touching lives and “awakening possibilities” inside other people. I’ve been thinking about this concept a long time now even before I watched Zander’s talk. Touching the lives of others by showing compassion, kindness, and love can be so rewarding and it just fills you up inside with so much happiness.
One of my goals in life is to make so much money just so I can keep on blessing people because sharing and giving can be so addictive! Real happiness (not artificial lol) is the most powerful drug ever made on this planet — and I think that was intentional on the part of God. Guess what? Genuine happiness is not found alone, it is a product of giving, sharing, and loving. Acts that need to be done with other people. You can’t find happiness by yourself. You find it in God who then sends people that surround you and together all of you will lift each other up and move forward to prosperity.
Secondly, he mentioned the idea of “saying things that can only stand as the last things you say to a person”. I can personally relate to this because I remember my experience of being shot 3-4 years ago. I was quickly losing consciousness and I was desperately trying to gather my strength to talk to my girlfriend who was there. I was literally summoning every last bit of power I had to tell her that I love her and that I was sorry because I might not be able to be with her anymore. Looking back, I am so thankful that I was given that chance to talk because if I did die that day at least I would have said something meaningful to the person I love the most.
It should be the same with everyone. Like what Zander said, it’s impossible to do this for everyone, but it is definitely worth trying to do.
God bless and I hope all of you have a great week ahead!
I’ll try to pick up the slack with my political blogging especially now that the elections is just a few weeks away. I’ll try to complete my list in the next few days. Anyway, this post is to publicly declare my support and my vote for Liberal Party senatorial bet Ruffy Biazon. Ruffy was one of the first senatorial candidates that we had a blogger event with and his effect on the bloggers was really memorable. We had lifestyle and mostly apathetic people who don’t get involved with politics but after the blogger event they were all transformed into Biazon supporters.
More than his professional background, I think Ruffy’s appeal is his inherent, sincere, and genuine heart for service. This guy is the REAL deal. He’s not hiding any skeletons in his closet. All he wants to do is to serve the Filipino people. In that same blogger session, I remember Ruffy told us that he had an accountability mechanism set-up. Ruffy attends Victory church and he will be having his elders and peers make sure that he won’t stray from a righteous path.
As a congressman, Ruffy has authored and filed numerous bills, all of which make good sense. Here’s a more detailed professional background which I got from his official website:
PROFESSIONAL BACKGROUND
In 1992, when his father ran for a seat in the Senate, he handled the retired general’s campaign. Eventually, Senator Biazon won and Ruffy was taken in by his father as his Chief of Staff, the youngest in the Senate at that time. He acted as the Senator’s alter ego for three years until 1995, when Senator Biazon was victimized by Dagdag-Bawas operations in the elections.
He has principally authored a total of 78 bills and resolutions in the present Congress. Now in his third term of office, 23 of his authored and co-authored measures were enacted into law. Among these are: RA 9211 (Tobacco Regulation Act), RA 9262 (The Anti-Violence Against Women and their Children Act), RA 9208 (The Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act), RA 9502 (The Cheaper Medicines Act), RA 9504 (Tax Relief for Minimum Wage Earners Act) and RA 9507 (Socialized & Low-Cost Housing Loan Restructuring and Condonation Program) and RA 9520, also known as the new Cooperative Code of the Philippines.
I strongly urge all of you to include Ruffy Biazon in your list when you vote on May. He will be a blessing for the country and we need more people like him in government!
The Liberal Party has been getting a lot of negative press from their mayoralty candidates in the past few months. First there was a candidate who was arrested for allegedly selling drugs. A few months after that, Quezon City Vice-Mayor Herbert Bautista was charged with plunder for supposedly using 30% of his budget for “food and drinks”. Another questionable bet is Manila Mayor Alfredo Lim whose son was caught in a buy-bust operation for drugs but was miraculously freed and the case was dismissed even if he was already caught buying drugs. Now the bet of the Liberal Party for the mayorship of Las Pinas was nabbed for Estafa. Continue reading →
I’ve been toying around with the idea of using this blog as a platform to really encourage volunteerism and nationalism. If there’s one thing I learned it’s that we can’t just rely on our leaders to rebuild the country. If we want a better Philippines it has to start with each and every single one of us. I’m sick and kinda fed up already with the slanderous and negative campaigning which several parties are doing so I’d rather focus on the positive things in the country for now.
Juan Country draws in more than 10,000 unique visitors monthly and it even reached more than 50,000 at peak months. If only 1% of that were to do something once a month, that would be a great service to the Philippines. I’ll try to come up with ideas on what to do in the next few days. One of the things that came to mind was partnering with Habitat for Humanity or Gawad Kalinga.
Let’s live up to the statement “Where I’m from, everyone’s a hero.”
My electricity bill came in a few days ago and I was really shocked to see it reach P4800. My usual bill is around P2800-P3000 and I was actually expecting my April bill to be slightly lower because I was out most of the time last month and I was even trying to cut down my air conditioning use. Apparently, I’m not the only one who experienced this. Right now this topic is one of the hottest issues being discussed online on Facebook as more Filipinos are starting to share with one another how bad they feel that the rates suddenly jacked up. Bloggers such as Noemi Dado and Chuvaness have also written about this issue.
This increase is just INSANE. We’re already having rotating brownouts, summer heat, and now double bills? That’s a triple disaster right there. If you’re one of the people who feel outraged by this, then please do join the online protest on Facebook. Here’s the link:
I was on my way to a Tweet Up event in Greenbelt when I saw hundreds of people wearing orange shirts in the Cafe Havana area. I saw a couple of friends from Havoc Digital and some bloggers so I dropped by and said hello. Apparently this was a Manny Villar flash mob! However, that’s not the big news that I want to share. A few minutes later, a sea of people wearing green also came by. I was expecting a clash between the Gibo and Villar supporters but what I saw almost brought me to tears.
I believe I should say this in Tagalog because it has more meaning if I do so.
Walang gulo nangyari. Yung iba nagakapan, nag-bigayan ng mga campaign materials, at nag-kamayan. Sa panahon na ito na puro siraan na lang at batuhan ng dumi, nakakatuwa na makakita ng mga tao na gusto lang talaga gumanda ang bansa natin.
Sa mga sumali dun, kahit supporter ka ni Villar o Gibo, isang malaking saludo para sa inyo.
I’ll be giving two 45-minute talks this coming Saturday, April 10, at the Make Money 2.0 event which will be held at Victory Center, Promenade, Greenhills. The first talk will be about how to build your personal brand through social media. I’ll be discussing how the rules have totally changed and that you need to adapt if you want to boost your career or business. Social Media can play a crucial role in changing your life, you just need to know how to do it.
The second talk will be how to make money through blogging. This will actually take off from the initial Personal Branding talk because there are so many ways to make money through blogging other than the usual advertising networks like Google Adsense.
My good friend and mentor, Janette Toral, will be handling the talks on E-commerce and Online Freelancing in the first part of the session.
Janette giving a talk during the first Make Money 2.0 event
The seminar will basically give you guys an overview on how to use to web not just for farmville, but as a tool that will change your life for the better. The event will start on 2:00PM and will end at 6:00PM. The fee is only P650. CLICK HERE TO RESERVE YOUR SLOTS.
MVP’s speech debacle is turning out to be a blessing for the COMELEC since the public isn’t talking too much about the overpriced folder procurement issue which was raised by Senator Pimentel. To those who don’t know about this let me explain briefly what happened. The COMELEC was set to purchase 1.8M folders at 380 pesos each. This is the official response of COMELEC based on the article posted on Inquirer.Net:
MANILA, Philippines – The Commission on Elections (Comelec) decided to recall its decision to award the contract for the procurement of 1.8 million ballot secrecy folders to OTC paper supply after finding out that each would cost P380, spokesperson James Jimenez said on Monday.
Jimenez said the Comelec made the discovery two weeks ago and was investigating how the amount got approved.
He also said the actual contract was not yet drawn up when the poll body found out how much each folder would cost.
“The direction [of the en banc] is toward the cancellation of the award,” he told reporters.
Here are my questions for Mr. Jimenez:
1. You said that the amount was approved but the actual contract was not yet drawn up? That’s a bit inconsistent?
2. Who is responsible for approving the amounts for projects like this?
3. You said that the COMELEC found out about this two weeks ago. I don’t think it takes a genius to figure out that 380 pesos per folder is insanely overpriced. Why didn’t COMELEC shoot this down at the get-go?
I can’t fathom how this deal got through unless there’s a long line of corruption which extends all the way to the top. Hopefully that’s not the case.
A few days ago the Inquirer broke a story about why Gilbert Teodoro resigned as party chairman from LAKAS-KAMPI-CMD. The story said that first gentleman Mike Arroyo reportedly called up Gwen Garcia in Cebu so that her family and group would support Nacionalista standard bearer Senator Manny Villar. This news story can drastically affect the outcome of the upcoming 2010 elections. We all know that the Arroyo’s endorsement is a “Kiss of Death”. What bothers me though is that the politicians and the voting populace is at the mercy of media. There is no way for LAKAS, Nacionalista, or even the people can verify the veracity of this story. We just have to believe that there were sources from inside LAKAS itself. The published article said that the writer had undisclosed sources from LAKAS-KAMPI-CMD.
If I wanted to destroy Villar’s ratings, all I have to do is to keep on bombarding him with the Villarroyo allegations. What’s stopping someone from posing as a LAKAS member or paying someone within LAKAS to say the lines above to create this story? Note that I am not defending Villar in this article. I’m just alarmed at how we can be held hostage and beholden by “undisclosed sources”. Isn’t that the practice of show biz columns? Blind items?
Some Traditional Media pundits score bloggers for not being professional and ethical in their work. However this recent article is a prime example of how irresponsible journalism can adversely shape the future of the country.
I am all for press freedom but I am totally against irresponsible reportage.
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