Hamilo Coast Beach Club

Dad brought us to the soft opening of Hamilo Coast's Beach Club today. We took the Previa there for a 3-hour ride. We left Valle Verde around 9am and got to Hamilo Coast by noon. The last time we came here, the beach club was not yet finished. Now, its fully operational with a restaurant, a pool, and huge changing rooms.

We had lunch at the club house restaurant. They served buffet. The food was not fantastic considering the price. But since there was something like a 50% off introductory discount, it did not come out too bad. The buffet also extended from lunch up to the afternoon snack.

It was a really hot day today. But the kids and I went swimming in the pool. The pool, in my humble opinion, was not that fantastic either. Rockwell Club's pool is much better. We initially started at the wading pool, then Caitlin wanted to swim at the bigger pool.

Much to our amazement, Ethan wanted to jump in also into the big pool. While Ethan loves to play in the pool, this is the first time that he actually wanted to swim in deeper waters. In Rockwell, he only likes to stay in the wading area and would cry if you try to bring him to any spot where he cannot step on the floor anymore. So this was a major improvement for him.

After the pool, Caitlin and I did a quick run to their beach area. The sand was no contest to Boracay. It was brown, and I suspect its not natural also, but was probably transported here from another area. We had some snacks afterwards and headed home since there was nothing else to do. We stopped by Tagaytay to buy some fruits, and got back home by dinner time.

From Hamilo Coast Soft Launch

Lower Gas Prices @ Shell C5

Gas prices for unleaded and E-10 (ethanol blend) are starting to creep up again. Cols was telling me that she saw E-10 being sold at the Petron along P. Guevarra at only about PP30/liter (that's about PHP3.00 less than all the usual Shell stations that I frequent). I told her that she must have been mistaken and that maybe she saw the price for diesel.

In any case, I passed by the Shell along C5 (the one beside SM Hypermarket) this morning and I noticed that their published prices are also about PHP3.00/liter cheaper than the usual ones. Then a little bit further down the road, the Caltex right by the Green Valley Country Club exit of Valle Verde 1, also sells gasoline at that lowered price.

It seems that these gas stations are not directly owned by the gasoline companies. Rather, they are franchised stations. This leads one to wonder -- how can franchisees afford to sell gasoline at PHP3.00/liter cheaper than their supplier when their cost is higher. Presumably, they have to pay for royalties, etc. Those multinational oil firms must really be raking it in. The government should do more to pressure them to stop increases prices again.

Free Undelete Tool for Windows

I downloaded a wrestling special over Bittorrent yesterday. It was split up into multiple RAR files. I did not notice that it was actually split first into 3 x large AVI files (each 700mb+), before each AVI was further sliced into multiple, smaller RAR's. After I spliced back the first AVI file, I immediately deleted all the RAR files thinking that was it.

I transferred the AVI onto my 2GB Kingston USB and played it on our Philips DVP-5166. The 5166 can play videos natively from a USB unlike our older Philips DVDR3455H, which can only display still JPEG images from USB. One major drawback of the DVP-5166, as I found out, is it does not have a fast-forward play option! So you really have to go through all scenes. Pressing "next" takes you to the next chapter or the next video file. Bummer!

Incidentally, I found out that our new Samsung Series 5 LCD TV can play JPEG images directly from a USB also. In fact, the quality is way so much better as compared to playing the JPEG images via the DVP-5166, which further converts it into analog component video before feeding it to the TV. By connecting the USB direct to the Samsung TV, it displays it natively in digital format using its much higher resolution.

Anyway, going back to my original story -- after watching the AVI file, I realized that its only the 1st part of the whole video. So I quickly went back to the PC to try and recover the deleted files. Alas! Its no longer to be found anymore from the "Recycle Bin". I would need to download the entire 2GB+ files again from torrent. Arggghh!

Then I remember an undelete tool that my brother-in-law gave me last month when he came to visit. I was then trying to recover some videos from the store because of a theft incident. The software is FreeUndelete 2.1 by OfficeRecovery.com. Its free software and it works great! I was able to recover all the deleted files and saved myself having to wait another day for the download to complete via our Bayantel DSL.

Yet Another PictureShop Client Sighting

I had my third PictureBook customer sighting today! After church, we had lunch at a restaurant that we frequent along Wilson St. in Greenhills -- Hai Kang (formerly Hong Kong Harbour Restaurant). Mom saw a little girl and as commenting about her hair accessories. When I looked at the girl, she was being carried by her dad who looked very familiar to me. Took just about a second for me to recognize that I've seen him several times from the photo books and photo puzzles that his wife has order from us. And sure enough, I recognized the woman beside him immediately also!

I dragged Cols to go over their table and introduce ourselves. This customer has been one of our very first customer and she has been a loyal "suki" of ours already. Even more coincidentally, her daughter has the same name as ours.

I also blogged about my previous two sightings:

• http://dickchiang.blogspot.com/2008/08/yet-another-picturebook-customer.html
• http://dickchiang.blogspot.com/2008/07/fortuitous-meeting-with-picture-book.html

I Passed The CEH Exam

I took the EC-Council Certified Ethical Hacker v6 exam this afternoon. The exam was scheduled to run from 1pm to 5pm. To make sure I won't be late, I had lunch at the Goldilocks across the training center. Since there was no place to park in that area, I parked at Makati Cinema Square and walked a short distance to Marvin Plaza where my training school/testing center Infotech Xchange is located.

The test comprised of 150 questions. The 4 hour time allotment is really overkill. I finished it in about 2 hrs or less, and got a score of 88.45% (passing is 70%). Its an odd figure because some of the questions have multiple answers. So I guess if you don't get to choose all the correct options, they pro-rate it.

The questions focused more on the theoretical/conceptual aspects of hacking. The reviewers that I downloaded were pretty helpful. In fact, I would say that the time I spent going through all the materials from cover to cover for the past couple of weeks was probably not really necessary. Going through the reviewers with explanations on what the correct answers are proved to be much more effective even though I only started going through them yesterday afternoon.

In any case, I am now an official EC-Council Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH v6)!

Another BDO Programming Stupidity Bug

I previously commented on the seemingly low IQ programming that went into BDO's Internet Banking.  Well, I encountered a couple more recently:

1. To simplify my payments to Yellow Cab Central for our supplies, I wanted to stop issuing checks, and instead, just pay them via direct transfer to their BDO account.  So naturally, I went to BDO's e-banking facility to do that.  There is an option there to do 3rd party funds transfer.  The blank field prompts you for the account number, then you specify the currency, then the amount.  Very straightforward.  I entered YC's BDO account number and the system kept giving me an error about the currency not matching with that of my account.  I'm sure we're both PHP accounts, so I called up support.  It seems that their 3rd party funds transfer requires that all accounts that you want to pay to, must first be enrolled so that they will appear in the dropdown list.  So my question is -- if that is a requirement, then why did they even bother to put a textbox field to let people enter adhoc bank account numbers.  And furthermore, why is the error message saying currency mismatch when it should be saying something like "3rd party account must be registered"?!
2. In that same 3rd party payment page, there is a textbox field where you are supposed to type the amount you want to transfer.  They require that the user enter the amount in "NNNNNN.MM" format with no commas to separate thousands/millions.  Surely parsing something like a comma should be trivial.  In any case, I tried copying-and-pasting a figure from my Excel spreadsheet and I didn't notice that there was a trailing whitespace.  When I clicked the submit button, the BDO web application complained about amount should only have 2 numbers after the decimal point.  It took me some time to realize that it was treating the blank/whitespace as another digit!!!  Surely trimming whitespaces is really trivial when it comes to field validation.  But no -- I have to manually delete the space so that the system will not think there are 3 digits after the decimal point.

As far as I can tell, BDO's system runs on Java.  I know because there have been times when their site would return a very descriptive error showing a JVM stack trace. :P

The LGV Home Theater Mystery Solved

For some time now, we've been wondering why the door of our home theater "mysteriously" gets locked.  According to Yaya, she never locks it.  And Cols always think that I'm the one locking it.  I've been tempted to review the DVR recording just to see why its locking itself.  Of course, Cols has her usual "haunted" theories, which I don't really buy.

Anyway, today, I was transferring some camcorder recordings to the Philips DVDR, for further burning to DVD-ROM.  Then Ethan and Yaya came in.  That's when I noticed that when they open the door, they push it all the way to the wall.  Since there is no door stopper, the door handle bumps the wall, which in turn, causes the lock to be pressed.  Voila!  That's what is causing it to lock!  So that finally disspells Cols spooky theory.

From LGV House Blessing