Caitlin's Face Swells Up

Its a sunny Sunday morning. Cols and I were getting ready to go to church. We're all excited for our trip to Bellarocca Resort in Marinduque tomorrow. Before heading down to the kitchen for breakfast, I passed by the kids' room. As usual, Ethan is already up and about playing with his train while Caitlin was still lazily sleeping.

Their ate Marlyn told me that Caitlin's lip seem to be swelling. I took a look and was shocked at how swollen her upper lip was. Her forehead also look deformed. Since William just had an allergic reaction the other day and his lips swelled up aso, we figure Caitlin must also just be having an allergic reaction.

Just the same, we decided to bring her to Medical City's ER for checkup. Imagine our shock when the doctor said that she should be confined for at least 2 days due to an infection! Since that part of the face is rather dangerous, they did not want to take any chances. There goes our vacation! Caitlin started crying when we told her we're calling off the trip because she was the one most excited with this. I called up Dad, who is with Nikki at China (and supposed to be coming home tonight) to tell them the situation. It was all agreed that we just have to move our entire trip to a future date.

So while Cols took care of admitting Caitlin to Medical City, I went to the ZestAir ticketing office at the old domestic airport to have our flight rebooked. I advised Bellarocca's General Manager, Mr. Jan-Michel Gautier, about the situation and he graciously offered us an extra night since the villas are available anyway! So instead of moving our Mon to Wed trip to next week, I moved it to Sun (Apr 25) to Wed (Apr 29).

Rebooking the tickets cost about P27k, but the extra night at Bellarocca will more than make up for it. Our vacation at Bellarocca hasn't even started and yet, I can already sense the excellent service that we will be receiving once we get there. The generous offer of Mr. Gautier was unnecessary on their part, and goes to show how far they will go to make sure our vacation will be perfect. Looking forward to being there next week!

Manny Pangilinan Plagiarizes at AdMU Commencement

I've been following the news thread regarding PLDT Chairman Manny Pangilinan (better known by his initials "MVP") in recent weeks with much amusement. MVP gave the commencement address at Ateneo de Manila's college graduation ceremony on March 27. What made this speech particularly controversial is that it was learned that several portions of it were copied from speeches delivered to other graduation ceremonies.

These fragments were found in graduation speeches delivered by known personalities such as Harry Potter's J. K. Rowling, Oprah Winfrey, Barrack Obama and talk-show host/comedian Conan O'Brien. So meat of MVP's speech was a veritable copy-and-paste of other people's speeches. This plagiarism incident might have gone unnoticed if it were not for the fact that it was delivered in a school of higher learning, no less.

The whole incident was so embarrassing that MVP offered to quit his post as Ateneo's chairman of the Board of Trustees. Being a busy person, it is expected that MVP does not really write his own speeches. Amidst the controversy, rumors came out that his ghost writers were actually former AdMU students themselves. This was later denied in a news article.

MVP's offer to resign was denied by the Board (probably out of delicadeza also). This did not go well with several faculty and staff. A statement was issued by these concerned staff, and I have to admit that I agree with their position. Allowing MVP to resign is actually the honorable thing to do and saves face for everyone. Denying his resignation offer puts him in a more awkward position with future events.

Thankfully, MVP insisted and even returned the doctorate degree awarded to him. A week or 2 later, he gave another graduation speech at FEU(?). I'm sure he learned his lesson this time and had it proof-read first. :)

Clash of the Titans 2010

We watched Clash of the Titans 3D at Greenhills Theater with Nikki and Leslie. This is a remake of the 1981 movie of the same title; updated with the latest CGI effects, and of course, rendered in 3D. Unlike Avatar which was really intended to be in 3D, Clash of the Titans was not. It was only converted into 3D during post production. So it did not really make full use of the new media. It seems that all new, big movies are now coming out in 3D. I guess its the movie producers latest ploy to bring people to watch on the big screen instead of downloading the movie and watching it on standard 2D.

Clash of Titans is a retelling of the story of the demigod, Perseus. This movie is very loosely based on the original Greek tales. Unlike the 1981 version, this movie pretty much made up its own mythology with disregard to the original stories. Perseus is played by Sam Worthington. This guy seem to have popped out of nowhere and into the lead role of several recent major movies including Terminator Salvation and Avatar. Other major actors in the cast includes Liam Neeson (as Zeus) and Ralph Fiennes (as Hades).

This version explains that Zeus got Danae pregnant to spite her husband, Acrisius, who was waging a battle with the Olympian Gods. When Acrisius found out about the bastard child (aka. Perseus), he had him and his mother put in a casket and thrown into the sea. In the more classic story, Danae was the daughter of Acrisius. When the oracles foretold Acrisius that one day, the son of Danae, will kill him, he had the boy and Danae killed.

With the 1981 version, Perseus' love interest was Andromeda -- the damsel-in-distress who was going to be sacrificed to the sea monster. With the 2010 version, his love interest became Io, who in the original Greek classics, had nothing to do with Perseus. Also, the sea monster here is the Krakken, reminiscent of Pirates of the Caribbean. Of course, 'krakken', is a generic Scandinavian word that refers to some sea monster (most likely giant squids in the North Seas). But here, the Krakken is the beast controlled by Hades who used it to kill their parents, the original Olympians.

Pegasus, the famous winged white horse (and not the Gentlemen's Club over at Quezon Ave., hehehe) has metamorphosed into a black stallion with wings in this version. And there's not only one of these winged horse, but apparently an entire herd that graze together. Then there are new character additions -- the desert djinn's that saved them from the giant scorpions and accompanied them to the underworld to the lair of Medusa. Even though this CGI-enhanced Medusa was more nimble, she did not seem that scary and felt cartoonish.

For all its cheeziness (at least, by today's standards), the original 1981 Clash of the Titans, was a much better movie that left a deeper impression on me as a grade schooler than this latest incarnation.

The Apple and Adobe War

The escalating Apple vs. Adobe War is starting to get interesting. It seem to have started with Apple's decision not to support Flash on their iPad and iPhones. Apple reasoned that they want to stick to the standard HTML5, which is not that widely supported yet. Apple batting for open standards seem anachronistic. After all, no computer or operating system is more closed than Apple. So why all these hullabaloo?

More recently, Apple changed the terms of use of their developer platform by requiring developers to code natively in C/C++ instead of using cross-platform frameworks. This further fueled the war with Adobe who was set to launch a Flash-based cross-platform framework that makes applications run on the iPhone without natively coding for it.

One conspiracy theory is that Apple does not want 3rd party application frameworks to control the schedule of application deployment. They reason that if developers decide to support a cross-platform framework like Flash or .NET, if the framework does not keep up with the updates of the OS (ex. the upcoming iPhone OS 4), developers will be at the mercy of these framework providers.

In a rare email reply, Steve Jobs tries to rationalize it also by saying that applications developed on top of cross-platform frameworks seldom work as well as those developed natively. A lot of developers are not happy with Apple's decision. But strangely, small browser maker Opera was approved entry into Apple App Store despite being a competitor of the built-in Safari browser. I don't know if their media hype to get Apple to put them into App Store made a difference. They supposedly put up a counter that shows the number of days their app has been posted for approval by Apple's staff.

Google Search Ranking Now Considers Site Speed

SEO followers have been hearing about Google's plan to use the speed of a website as part of its page ranking algorithm since late last year. This was finally admitted by Google today in their official blog post. The blog post claims that this new factor does not carry as much weight as the relevance of the page. It further says that fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed code. This new factor also affects only English-based searches so far.

Google added a Google Site Performance tool at its webmaster toolset. It analyzes your web site and provides data on the average load time, graphs out how the site has improved or slowed down over time. It also offers suggestions on how to speed up your site.

But does this whole thing actually make sense? To me, the relevance doesn't really seem to be related to site speed. Big companies can afford to get lots of bandwidth. But does that make their sites more relevant than the thorough research of some student in some small university?

Easter Egg Hunt @ LGV

Leslie and William arrived early this morning (Nikki and Allison arrived first about a month ago). William was looking forward to his annual Easter Egg Hunt. Since this is the first time he's spending Easter in the Philippines, Nikki suggested we just do the egg hunt at our large garden.

From LGV Easter 2010

We started a bit late (around past 5pm) because it was quite hot, and William had to take his nap since he is still adjusting to jet lag. But the kids were all excited and energetic with the event.

Holy Thursday @ Thunderbird Rizal

Since we had to plan ahead for a place to go to at Holy Week, and with Grandpa still at the hospital (before he passed away), we chose a nearby resort -- Thunderbird Rizal. Its part of an international chain of resorts. The Rizal branch is just about an hour from our house. So we figured, should anything catastrophic happen to Grandpa, at least we can easily come back. Of course, all of that is moot and academic at this point.

We had lunch at home first before heading out around noontime. Finding the place was not really difficult. I took the Cainta route instead of the Antipolo/Marcos Highway since I'm more familiar with that way. We arrived at the resort past 1pm.

Because the resort was fully booked the day before, the housekeeping could not cope fast enough to clean the rooms after checkout for the next guest to check-in. So we ended up waiting at the lobby for about an hour. All the other guests had to undergo the same hassle and people were constantly following up the front desk for the availability of their room. Mom, Dad, Nikki, and Allison arrived about half an hour later than we did, but they also had to wait at the lobby.

From Thunderbird Rizal

We finally got our adjacent rooms around 3pm. We were situated at the second floor facing the mountains and Laguna Lake in the far distance. Since it was really quite hot, we passed the time a bit and went to the pool around 4pm.

From Thunderbird Rizal

Ethan made big improvements. Even though he is still wearing his armband floaters, he was practically fearless in the pool. He would constantly go up and jump into the pool. When we last swam in Rockwell, he would be contented to wade by the shallow pool and would not even attempt to swim with the armband floaters. I don't know what he ate, but he's a completely new kid in the pool!

At night, we had dinner at the Chinese restaurant (no big surprise since the folks were with us). Food was pretty lame. Nothing to write home about. As part of our stay, we got a couple of P100 "free money" for the casino (yes, there's a casino in this resort). I tried it at the baccarat table and lost both coupons. I figure its not my lucky night so I did not add in real money, and instead, just went back to the room.