Today I learned...

That it takes almost two hours to teach a five-year old how to download a picture from the Internet...

It's like this... after chatting with River for about a half hour, Ashvin followed his 'Kuya' in chatting with me. Now, Ash, just like any other five-year old boy, needs to know everything about something he is currently doing, and after only five minutes of chatting, he asked me to give him a "download". Well, Ash is not new to chatting. We chat with him almost everyday, and he's already familiar with signing in and out, turning on the webcam and the voice chat facilities, and many other features of the Yahoo! Messenger that other adults wouldn't be able to learn in their lifetime. Maybe he heard it from his Kuya, who is in himself another tech-savvy boy, maintaining his own Friendster site and also doing other techie things on the Net, but Ash is very curious about downloads right now...

And so, I told him that I will send a picture to him. It is actually one of his pictures... taken just before we left once again to travel and work far away from them, and the one where he is bragging about his new shoes just before going to school. The initial steps were kind of easy... I just transferred the file, asked him to accept the file (which he missed the first time by clicking 'Decline' instead, so I transferred it again), and told him to wait until the file transfer finishes. That part was completed with minimal glitch, and everything was fine. And then...

After completing the transfer, I asked him if he saw his picture and he said he did not see anything. I told him to open the file and he said what button to press. I told him to describe to me what he sees in his YM window, and that's when the trouble began... Ash couldn't find the file, and much more he doesn't know where and in what folder it was saved (well, what can I say? He's five years old!)... I asked him to put the camera in front of the computer's screen so that I could see his YM, but it didn't work (of course...) I asked him to call his Kuya River, but River seems to be doing something and is unavailable for the moment. Alice joined the fray already because Ash is starting to get tantrums and we can clearly see him crying on the webcam. We've done the process again (transfer file)... then repeated it once more...until Ash got completely into fits... Alice decided to call them on the phone, talk to River in a strong voice (so he helps Ash), and finally solve the problem.

When River arrives, we repeated the file transfer one last time and it took only five minutes for Ash to learn how to download his picture from Yahoo...

Well, sometimes you have to learn things the hard way...

Pacquiao Land Once More

Today, Filipinos are once again gathered in that land of unity called the Pacquiao Land... well, that is not mentioning the fact that it is not only there in the Philippines that Filipinos are glued to their TV sets, but indeed, in all lands where Filipinos thrive, Pacquiao Land rules today!.. a colleague at work was asking me this morning if there's any news yet, obviously he doesn't have the Pinoy TV at home, and he's hoping someone from the group is a subscriber, which turned out no one is... with that, we just relied on the breaking news from Inquirer.net and hope that tonight, somebody will upload it on YouTube so that we, unfortunate ones, can at least watch the recorded versions of the fight... that's the problem when the fight's beamed by a network rather than TFC, and you're outside of the country during the event...

Anyways, so much for the (no sense) ramblings... as expected, Pacquiao did win the fight, although it was not what Filipinos are hoping for. As you can see, we wanted it to be an exclamation mark... sort of punctuating Barrera's retirement with a knockout. But it wasn't meant to be. It was probably because of the fact that he had to shed three pounds the day before the actual fight, or maybe it was - based on persistent rumors - because of the distraction (about Ara Mina?) he had during training, that he never really perfected his arsenal of weapons to bring Barrera down. Well, a win is still a win, as we say, and Pacquiao winning another fight is indeed good news for us. For the Pacman personally, it is a saving grace. After the bitter defeat from last election's battle, the Pacman had some sort of redemption in winning this fight, and we should see his popularity, which had waned during the last few weeks, soar again in the coming days.

For most of us, well, it was another day of unity for a country and a people mired by never-ending bickerings and divisiveness. At least, even for just a day, the Pacman once again becomes the Filipinos' hero... the only one that can unite them...even if it's only in that place called the Pacquiao Land.

Canon in D Major

Several nights ago, while Alice was busy looking for some songs to be added to her Friendster site, she came across a nice classical piece which quickly got our fascination. The piece turned out to be Johann Pachelbel's Canon in D Major, and in the next few hours we had downloaded more than a few arrangements of it. The piece had since became Alice's default audio for her site. We had selected some beautiful arrangements and would like to share them with you. You may want to visit our family's site at http://lontokfamily.multiply.com for these pieces. (copyrights of the pieces are reserved by their respective owners.)

Johann Pachelbel's Fast Facts:

Johann Pachelbel was one of the great organist-composers of his day, a man who could count Bach's teacher among his pupils (He taught Johann Christopher Bach who gave his younger brother, Johann Sebastian Bach, lessons in music). His life was tinged with tragedy and hardship - his first wife died with her baby son in the plague of 1683, and he had to flee from the French invasion of Stuttgart in 1692 - but he settled in Nuremberg and his second marriage produced seven children, two of whom became musicians, one an instrument maker and one a painter. His church music is highly regarded and innovative in the way it links the pitches of the notes to meaning - steadfast faith denoted by repeated notes, for example. His lilting Canon in D is a throwaway little piece by comparison to his big sacred works, but its charming grace has made it a favorite filler of compilation CDs. The canon in D major was written in or around 1680. Pachelbel was born in Nuremberg in August 1653 and died there on March 6th, 1706.

Where you may have heard of Canon D:

- films such as Father of the Bride and Ordinary People
- some TV ads
- Coolio rap single in 1997, The Farm single All Together Now used in Euro 2004, Go West by the Pet Shop Boys
- in shopping malls
- in the funeral of Lady Diana Spencer

Sound Trip, Part 2

Yesterday, while preparing for our weekend ironing chore, Alice decided to organize her iTunes song list in her computer. There are songs that are repeated, primarily due to re-copying and re-updating of the list over time. Since she is currently 'crazy' over Pachelbel's Canon in D Major, she wanted to add a few of the good arrangements of the piece which she downloaded several days ago to her iPod, and thus before doing so, she needs to organize her iTunes list so that no songs can be repeated in her iPod. While at it, she decided to play our favorite songs done by local artists.. and so after quite a while, we had another sound trip there...

As I already intimated, sound tripping gives you varied emotions... when you're listening to your favorite songs, certain memories flood your thoughts, and you cannot help but just let them flow. Yesterday was the time to reminisce important events about me and my family... it was the time to remember precious events I shared with my kids... it was the time to rewind events of my life once more...

Sometime when you're listening to music and you're rewinding your life again through your thoughts, it cannot be helped that both good and bad memories will come. Good memories are always welcome... they serve to refresh both your body and your soul, and make you face life in a brighter perspective... bad memories... well, you cannot do away with them... good thing about them is, they give you important lessons in life... lessons that helped mold your character, if not made you a better person altogether...

Yesterday, aside from the ironing, I have done another important thing with the help of songs I listened to... that is, meditate about my life again... time and again, I need it.

Friends

It's always nice meeting and talking with friends...old friends that you haven't talked to for a while especially. Yesterday, while chatting with my kids, I chanced upon a friend who was also my student in the graduate school sometime ago... We chatted for a while - the usual pleasantries - and then the conversation later turned into our respective jobs. He said he's currently in the middle east, working as a lecturer in a college there, and right now in the second year of his contract. He further said it is quite boring there, sort of being inside the jail... Well, he said, that's primarily because there's just nowhere you can go to whenever you get that extra time to spend on leisure. (I guess that's the perennial dilemma of OFWs in the middle east). Anyways, he said that he's currently looking for a better job, maybe in another country... one in which he can bring his family, he says, so that he'll not be homesick anymore... we talked for a quite a long time... probably because both of us had nothing to do anyway to spend the weekend rest time, and probably because somehow, when you're in a foreign land, chatting with an old friend is really a time that you can treasure... I told him also about my job, and how I'm having the same emotions as his because I'm far from my family, and other trivial things an old friend will tell another old friend when they talk to each other again after sometime. We parted saying that we should always keep in touch, so that at least we can pass important 'trivial' information between each other :)

The same thing happened to Alice today... while preparing to chat with our kids, she chanced upon an old friend whom she met as a co-scholar in Sydney... they talked about many things - family, friends, work - and they also chatted for quite a while... Alice found out that she also visited Singapore last summer for vacation, and it was unfortunate that we were not able to see each other there, and probably spend some kind of a reunion there. Anyways, she's inviting us to come and see her place, probably in the summer, and Alice said we'll give it a serious thought. Alice and her friend even swapped new pictures of their adventures to further update each other of each one's new experiences... they also parted ways promising to keep in touch, and chat with each other again...

Friends are indeed treasures... they provide that extra 'push' so that we could go on happily with our lives, and continue with our own journey... chatting with old friends fill some space in our lives and somehow make it more colorful... meeting them even in the web after many years still brings us fond memories that provide more colorful pictures to our lives, both then and now... that's one purpose of the Net we should be thankful about.