Quaere Verum

Reposting this for whatever good may come out of it. :-) Anyone here interested in purchasing a plot of commercial land located along Commonwealth Ave. in Quezon City? It's my father's property, and it has a lot area of 2,844 sqm., with a number of residential improvements. The frontage is a bit on the small side, at 14 m., but it directly faces Commonwealth Ave. The lot has been on the market for quite a while, but since the real estate market has been down for some time now...well you know how it is. Just in case you're interested, or know someone who is, please feel free to leave a comment or to email me at ronallandottk@yahoo.com . To cut the hassle, would prefer to deal with direct buyers only. Sometimes it can be quite hard dealing with a multitude of brokers and middlemen...you know how that is too. :-) You can also call 9315575 if you have any inquiries. Siteplan of the property. Aerial view. The road at the top of the photo is Commonwealth Avenue. Here's a tigh...

I observe with mild interest and amusement as a number of men manhandle a locked Ford Expedition into a parking space just behind the building I work in. Checking the time I figured they spent more than half an hour jacking, tugging and pushing at the shiny mass of metal, with their strains finally coming to an end with the large SUV being coaxed into one of the parking spaces. Querying one of the security personnel, I was told the the vehicle was forcibly repossessed after the owner failed to make the payments on the vehicle. Apparently the owner wasn't happy about his SUV being repossessed, so he neglected to unlock the doors, much less give them the keys. As if it really mattered whether he gave them the keys or not. It's a tad ironic, don't you think? A towering 4x4 such as a Ford Expedition, in the vast majority of cases, is really nothing more than extravagant status symbol, an expression of affluence, an utter display of the triumph of decadence over practicality. We...

The past few months my son has been having problems with his Sony Ericsson K310i , specifically with the unit shutting down intermittently even though the battery wasn't discharged yet. "Automatic shutdown" was my son's term for it. Over the weekend, the cellphone finally decided to give up the ghost, showing nothing than a continuously blinking white screen when powered up. Not wanting to be stuck with a high tech paperweight, and with unit still under warranty, I promptly called up Globe Handyphone for advice on how to have the cellphone serviced. I was instructed to bring the malfunctioning unit to a Sony Ericcson service center, and as it turned out, the closest service center to my location is the Sony Ericsson Concept Shop in SM North EDSA. My son and I were off to visit it the next day. I was never a Sony Ericsson person, as I've always preferred Nokia cellphones instead. The thing with Nokia is, if you know how to use one model, then you wouldn't h...

If you're wondering why I haven't posted anything new lately, it's because my computers at home were all down until only a few days ago. Went through a couple of hardware upgrades which, unfortunately, didn't really go as smooth as I was expecting them to turn out. The first upgrade involved the video card of the PC my son uses to play games with ( Athlon XP 2400+, 1.5 GB RAM, 256 MB Radeon 9550 ). He started complaining over the slow frame rates he was getting with some newer games, particularly the resource-hungry RTS World in Conflict . The game is actually playable when using low graphics settings, but there's nothing quite as pathetic as playing a computer game with all the settings turned down to low. After some research, I figured the GPU with the best bang-for-the-buck was the NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GS , with its 12 pixel pipelines, 5 vertex shaders, and a core running at 400 MHz. All I need now is to find one, particularly one which runs on an AGP bus. I soon...

What's wrong with this picture? I guess we Filipinos were never really good at following rules.

I've won! I've won! - NOT. The past several months I've been getting quite a number of text messages on my cellphone informing me that I have won a sum of money in some sort of raffle, and instructing me to call back and look for the person whose name was mentioned in the message. If it sounds to good to be true, that's because it is. This is what is known as a text scam . Text scams first came out a number of years ago, with the rising popularity of cellphones with SMS capability (and consquently the number of suckers who own one). Presently, with approximately 30 million cellphones all over the country, scams like these are quite common. This message is obviously bogus, and was designed by some unscrupulous souls to appeal to the avaricious and gullible among us for the purpose of scamming them into giving up hard currency, for processing or facilitating the release of their so-called "prizes". Sadly, a lot of people have already fallen prey to this modus op...

Its been a quite a long while since I blogged about religion, so I was pleasantly surprised when blogger Sadiq Alam sent me the link of his latest post through email. You can read it here . The message is simple. God is always with you, whereever you are. You can read the rest of his blog here . Maybe I should blog about religion again. :-)

And the top ten reason to quit playing RAN Online , from 10 to 1, are: 10. Availability of newer and better online games. Frankly I don't have much experience with other MMORPGs, but I've heard and read lots of positive reviews over some newer online games, such as Perfect World , Lineage II , and Granado Espada . Yeah, it may be hard to give up RAN Online after all those months, but you never know. It may be about time to move on to some other MMORPG. And who knows? The service and support may even be better. 9. Poor return of investment. You play for hours on end, for months, perhaps even years, and eventually you get that high level character you've always wanted. Now what? You could try selling your account, but not only is that prohibited by e-Games , you'll only get a small fraction of the money you invested into making that character in the first place. Well, you do get bragging rights against lesser characters, but the satisfaction doesn't last. No matter ...

I guess I spoke too soon. Less than 24 hours after I was first able to log on RAN Online and the other e-Games websites, again I am plagued by the dreaded connection error dialogue box: Well, I knew it was too good to last. I don't know. The urge to quit playing is becoming so strong I'll probably succumb sooner or later. Actually I'm already what they call "semi-retired", that is, I only play when I get the itch to do so, and whenever time and opportunity permits. I was only compelled to go out of semi-retirement so that I could level my INT swordsman all the way to 127 and learn the newly launched 127 skill. Thankfully, during the brief period with which I was able to connect yesterday, I was able to succeed in achieving my goal. But now that I have accomplished what I set out to do, and with e-Games being plagued with connection errors, I wouldn't be surprised if I just disappeared from the RAN gaming community. Such a shame really. To be perfectly hone...

After almost five days, I was finally able to log in e-Games ' web servers. While I'm definitely relieved that I was able to access my e-Games accounts, the experience nonetheless has left a bad taste in my mouth. The bottom line is, the less than stellar service and support of e-Games to its customers still leaves me extremely disappointed. Apparently, a lot of other e-Gamers feel the same, as my posts relating to e-Games' troubles have seen higher than average traffic lately, indicating that dissatisfaction with e-Games' quality of service has grown beyond its internal forums and has spilled over into the internet at large. I'm taking this topic to heart for several reasons - firstly because of my personal stake as player of RAN Online , and secondly, the perpetual complaints against e-Games' services represent virgin territory as far as our local legal system is concerned. As an advocate of the legal profession and soon to be (hopefully) a member of the Bar,...

After talking a number of times with different e-Games support personnel and browsing a number of different forum sites (like this one ), it turns out that the reason why I couldn't log on RAN Online or any of e-Games' websites is because e-Games is having connection problems specifically with subscribers of PLDT's myDSL service. Apparently subscribers of different ISPs are not affected, as far as I know. So, the bottom line is, if you want to play RAN Online , or at the very least log in any e-Games website and your ISP is PLDT myDSL, tough luck. I've tried refreshing my connection so my router can obtain a new IP address, but it still doesn't work. Nothing does. And it's strange, because other than the fact that I can't seem to access e-Games' web servers, my internet connection is perfectly fine . If it weren't for the fact that I play RAN Online , I probably wouldn't have noticed. I can log on on virtually any website in the world, and yet...