Too funny. I was just reading last year’s final entry, which was written while waiting for Starbucks 6750 to pull down their rollups. It was remarkably concise, the important bit being just these two paragraphs:

I’m excited because next year is going to be huge. Huge, I tell you. I don’t know how yet, or what it will involve, but I know when at least.

I’m writing this down now so I can look back on this in December 2005, while lounging in my throne room, and I can laugh and say, "Man I was so right."

Honestly, I cannot remember what "huge thing" I had in mind, although all things considered, 2005 was a pretty good year for me. I was fortunate enough to work on two big web projects, one for Ayala Land International and another for Red Ribbon, as well as two smaller ones, for the Ad Congress and myHomeland. I also ironed out a long-term relationship with a UK-based marketing firm, redesigned Highfiber and Guttervomit, and debuted B&B and oKs. Currently, I’m still doing about 80% of the work myself, but I am slowly learning to spread it around.

Still no throne room though, although the past year has seen me redefine my benchmark for success somewhat: I think I’d like to lounge in a yacht instead.

I love new year’s resolutions: by their very nature, they are about as reliable as gas prices. This is mainly because we have no idea what the next day, week or month (let alone the next year) will bring, and a new year’s resolution is essentially an assumption based on nothing but wishful thinking.

With that in mind, I have tons of new year’s resolutions this year:

1. I will slowly, slowly quit smoking.
   Or I will cut down to the point that I can stop smoking when I’m alone. (This will probably just end up with me hanging around with more smokers though, but there’s no ‘logic requirement’ on these resolutions anyway.)
2. I will finally, finally build something important.
   Not that highfiber isn’t important, or oks. Or guttervomit (which is very important to me). But I want to build something that actually has a positive effect on either a) the online habits of the wired Filipino, b) the offline habits of the wired Filipino or c) our economy. A bit ambitious, but hey, a couple of weeks ago I successfully hosted a party in Victoria Court with 30 people who met each other online. As far as I’m concerned, the world is my fucking oyster.
3. I will finally, finally get a real office.
   This one has been exactly 4 months in the making (and by the time we actually get around to doing it, it’ll be double that). I’ve been itching to relocate for so long it hurts to think about it.
4. I will finally, finally move out of the house.
   I am dangerously close to that dreaded "25-and-living-with-my-mom" border line I set for myself, and with all of the other things I’m trying to accomplish by this coming year, it looks like I will probably miss it by several months. The primary reason for this, apart from well, not wanting to be 25-and-living-with-my-mom, is that since I’ll be moving my place of work (see resolution above), I should move my place of residence as well to match.

So that’s what I’ve got for 2006. What are your resolutions?

What can I say about this movie that you weren’t already expecting?

Well, I suppose that depends on exactly what it is you expect from the nth entry into this signature horror series. I was expecting something ridiculous and fairly nonsensical personally, and … well, I certainly wasn’t wrong.

As is the tradition with SR&R, the movie is split up into 3 separate stories, each one with a different set of characters, director and overall tone. The first one is a real piece of work: fakey occultist Ai Ai de las Alas is hired by a poorly-coiffed (she’s wearing a nasty wig) Gloria Romero to contact the spirit of her dead grandson, who died a year ago in front of their house’s poso (hence the title). Ai Ai has a small team that helps her make her seances more dramatic, but they are picked off one by one, by the most terrible visual-effects glop that you are ever likely to see in a movie. I can’t stress this enough; the red goop that pours out of the poso and envelops the principal characters is like "Revenge of the Killer Strawberry Jam."

(Yasmine Kurdi, by the way, is particularly comely as Romero’s nurse-slave, not because she’s a good actress or anything, but because I like the idea of having a totally docile, completely obedient starlet for a housemaid. Not that that had anything to do with the movie, of course.)

The second vignette, Aquarium, features the fattest incarnation of Ara Mina known to man, made all the more obvious by the fact that beside her, Wilma Doesnt looks bereft of a third dimension. After finding an aquarium in their new condo, Ara Mina and her faithful husband Ogie Alcasid decide to keep it for their annoying prat of a son to play with. Never mind that a cataract-ridden old granny keeps coming out of nowhere to whisper threats and warnings, or the fact that in the middle of the aquarium is a paper-mache mask that would make Jim Carrey blush. (Yes, that was a spoiler.)

When a tubero is killed while trying to fix their condo’s pipes (which for some reason, requires him to climb a ladder and poke around in the crawlspaces above the room), the story pretty much fell apart for me. Not that it was all that good to begin with, but come on. Being strangled by seaweed is a stretch, even for a movie of this quality.

Given the caliber of the first two vignettes, I didn’t have a lot of hope left for the last segment, Lihim ng San Joaquin. Fortunately, the producers had the good sense to save the best for last (although I mean that relatively, of course). Lihim features Tanya Garcia and Marc Anthony Fernandez as a couple trying to start a new life in the countryside … a countryside that just happens to be infested with uruk-hai-like aswang. To say that this segment is more polished than the preceding two would be a vast understatement, but it does suffer from some of the same problems: an anemic special-effects budget and a plot that is little more than a mishmash of various other, better horror movies.

That said, the first half of Lihim, which introduces the landscape and principal characters, is expertly done and would probably work better as the first act of a full-length feature than of this 30-minute amputee.

So there you have it: another year, another filmfest. I should probably try to watch another one tomorrow to fulfill my yearly quota, but the available choices are a bit uhm, uninteresting. Maybe I’ll just watch Mulawin and get it over with, I don’t know.

Saw a bit of the World Pyro Olympics this evening. I say "a bit" because the closest my friend and I got was about 3 or 4 kilometers from the actual site, and not for lack of trying either.

We left Quezon City at a little past 6, arriving at Taft Avenue in less than an hour’s time. Things seemed to be going pretty well until we hit Pasay City, where traffic was reaching Woodstockian proportions. The 6-laner leading to and from the as-yet-unfinished Mall of Asia was reduced to two, with cars parked and double-parked on both sides of the road. Blue Wave, the quaint little resto complex along Macapal Highway, was like Eastwood City on Fete night. All around me, families were hopping out of their vans and SUVs, breaking out foldable chairs and coolers and laying claim to picnic space on the sidewalks or traffic islands. Vendors, beggars and snatchers alike were having a field day. Two academic-ovals away, Russia was showering the sky with fire. I resisted saying, "Well, at least we’re comfortable inside the car."

Eventually, after over an hour in this impromptu Black Nazarene procession, we decided to call it a night and turn back. As we drove off, I noted sadly that the United Kingdom had just started their performance. Friggin’ brilliant.

This is officially the first acquisition I’ve written about that actually had anything to do with physical items:

FUJI Photo Film Co will buy an Avecia Group unit for 150 million pounds (US$260 million) to become the world’s biggest supplier of dye and inks used in inkjet printers.

Tokyo-based Fuji Photo is expanding on expectations that demand for inkjet printing will rise as more consumers print digital photos at home.

Avecia supplies ink to Hewlett-Packard Co and Canon Inc. The chemicals maker said it had sales of 36.1 million pounds last year.

Of course, the whole digital photo craze is a direct result of two phenomena, i.e., affordable digital photography, and social photo-sharing. Since I’m against printing in general (with inks or otherwise), I believe this to be more of a transitionary step for Fuji Photo, than an evolutionary one. The true evolution –probably at least a decade away– would likely involve one of these babies instead, which will put an entire industry into the ground when it reaches maturity.

SEO by the Sea has a really interesting post detailing all of Google’s acquisitions since 2001. Unfortunately, no amounts were given, but the author did go to the trouble of listing the relevant patents and abstracts where available. Here’s the list in a nutshell:

Android (August 2005), software for mobile telephones
Akwan Information Technologies (July 2005), an R&D center in Brazil
Dodgeball (May 2005), social-networking software for mobile devices
Urchin Software (March 2005), Web Analytics software (became Google Analytics in Q3 of this year; this is coincidentally the app I use on our webserver, and is easily the best in its class)
Zipdash (December 2004) Provides navigation assistance for road traffic on mobile in real time by GPS.
Where 2 Technologies (October 2004), Internet mapping
Keyhole (October 2004), imagery by satellite
Picasa (July 2004), software of management of photographs on line
Ignite Logic (May 2004), design of turn key legal sites
Genius Labs (October 2003), Biz Stone was Genius Labs
Sprinks (October 2003), paid advertising
Kaltix (September 2003), Research on personalized search, from Taher Haveliwala, Glen Jeh, and Sepandar Kamvar
Applied Semantics (April 2003), contextual advertising
Neotonic Software (April 2003), email customer support
Pyra Labs (February 2003), editor of Blogger, blogging platform
Outride (September 2001), a Xerox PARC spinoff, data-mining and semantic analysis
Deja.com (February 2001), Purchase of their usenet archive and other assets, which become Google Groups

I’ve been playing Texas Hold ‘Em Poker online like mad these past couple of days, partly because I’ve been sick (and thus, unable to leave the house) and partly because it’s one of the few games I can play while "working," and wouldn’t you know it, playing online is totally different from playing in real life.

The most obvious difference is that you will likely be using play money if you’re just starting out. I’ve only played at CardPlayerPoker and PokerStars, but I imagine it works in generally the same fashion at the other providers: basically, you’re given 1000 chips upon sign up, with which you can join any of the play-money games (there are usually over a thousand games running concurrently, so you’ll never have trouble finding a spot). All your winnings become part of your bankroll, and you can use them to join bigger and bigger games (although still within the play-money zone). In case you lose your chips completely, they’ll be automatically refilled so you can play again. Sounds like a great deal? Well, sorta.

The play-money dynamic makes No-Limit Hold ‘Em a bit weird, to say the least. For one thing, nobody is afraid of an all-in. I’ve seen people join tables and just go all-in every round, hoping to catch a miracle flop (fortunately, you can only bankrupt yourself up to 3 times per hour, so annoyances like this will inevitably self-destruct). The other major difference is that about 80% of all the players that joined pre-flop will see the river, even those with the slimmest drawing hands. This means you have to be aware of even the least likely of possibilities, and bet accordingly. (This evening, for example, my Queen-high flush got trounced by a 6-10 straight flush; how often does that happen in real life?)

It took me two days of going bankrupt every 15 minutes before I figured out how to play at a decent level online. The annoying thing is that the stuff I’ve learned is unlikely to be useful in the real-life games I play with my friends every weekend. But here they are anyway, because it’s fun to list these things down:

1) Play stupid. Don’t make big raises and expect people to get scared and fold. Don’t attempt to get someone to "bet into" you, because chances are, they’re holding better cards. Don’t take checking as a sign of weakness; most of the time, they just do it because everybody else is doing it.

2) Don’t make big raises, even when you’ve got the nuts or premium cards in the pocket. The blinds are normally at 5 and 10, so anything over a hundred is a fairly large raise, especially pre-flop. The idea is to keep the game steady. When you’re playing online, tilts start at the click of a mouse, and you don’t want to set anyone off and then have everyone join in. The reason why you don’t need to raise is because you will make a decent profit just by getting everyone to call (because nearly everyone will join each round), which brings me to my next point:

3) Join each round. Play everything you get, even the 2&7’s. However, only do this if you followed rule #1 and #2 to the letter. Because nobody is raising, and because you are making small bets, it doesn’t hurt to lose 10-30 chips to see a flop and/or a turn. Obviously, you’ve got to know when to quit as well, but I’ve won some really huge pots with the worst hands that just magically morphed into trips or full-houses over the course of the round. As long as you’re only burning a small amount of money with the wasted rounds, it’s alright, because the payoffs tend to be really big as well.

4) Don’t look for tricks. This one was the hardest idea for me to get rid off. Generally, you want to treat every bet as a genuine one unless you are up against an obviously stupid player. If someone bets heavily after the flop, you should take that to mean that he hit something. Don’t waste money trying to catch bluffs because other people will do that for you (almost) automatically.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of others ways to confuse your opponent than by bluffing, and this is why this rule is tricky to follow. Checking when you have the nuts is something I see a lot of, for example, as well as quietly calling after a big raiser every round. So although you can rest assured that bluffers will be caught, slow-players will often get right by you. The good news is that if you pay attention to rules #1 and #2, misreading the occassional slow-player will rarely cost you the game.

And lastly, the most important lesson I’ve learned from playing online, which coincidentally serves to highlight yet another way that the internet-based game is different from my real-life one: 

5) If you don’t like the table, leave. There are literally thousands more out there for you to choose from.

Fascinating essay I picked up via Om Malik’s blog this morning, about where broadcast TV is headed in the year 2006:

[…] the biggest problem for broadcasters is their crumbling core competency and the shrinking value propositions they offer to both viewers and advertisers. The natural ability of the Internet to distribute unbundled media is disrupting broadcasting’s basic business, and that will accelerate in 2006.

I’ve believed for a long time that TV is a dying industry (my foot-in-mouth prediction puts TV’s life expectancy at, oh, 10 years* tops) and I think that our two big networks here in the Philippines will have some rude awakenings in store for them in the next half of this decade.

In my mind, there are two big reasons why TV is on its way out:

1) It sucks to have to wait for a specific hour every week to watch something, and then have to wait again for a rerun if you miss it. TiVo and DVRs are a solution to this, but they are collectively attempting to fill a gap that shouldn’t exist in the first place. The Web allows us to broadcast everything on-demand, why aren’t we using it? Because we can’t monetize it? Web advertising is infinitely more targeted and relevant than anything TV could ever pull off. Because bandwidth is expensive? Push your content through the P2P. Because it takes a long time to download an entire 44-minute episode? The high-end PLDT DSL packages can pull those down in under an hour. Imagine what it’d be like a decade from now.

2) It isn’t called an idiot box for nothing. It can’t interact with you, it can’t predict what you’d like to see next or more of, and it will show you as many commercials as it can get away with without getting penalized. This is stone-age tech, and with platforms like IPTV just waiting in the wings, I’m not jumping the gun when I say that this dog has had its day**.

To be honest, I can’t wait. I want my kids to grow up in a world where they choose which shows to melt their brains with, and then peruse ads plugging contextually-relevant products to poison their bodies with, and then order the whole damn thing online and charge it to my credit card like any reasonable child-of-the-future would do. Anything is better than the crap we have right now. Hell, RSS + Bit-Torrent (or even, god forbid, paying for videos one episode at a time over friggin’ iTunes) is better than the crap we have now.

*10 years in the Philippines. I’d say 5 years for the first-worlders.
** 3 idiomatics in one sentence. New record, kids.

With Maxtor being under financial pressure over the past couple of years due to a string of quarterly losses and manufacturing problems which resulted in having to shut down production for a short interval earlier this year, it was only a matter of time before it was snapped up by one of its competitors. It happened today, as hard drive manufacturer Seagate has agreed to purchase its rival Maxtor for US$1.9 billion.

How long Western Digital will be able to hold out against the combined forces of Seagate and Maxtor? As of the second quarter of 2005, Western Digital was in the #2 position with 17.6 percent of the global market for hard drives. Seagate was #1 with 30.5 percent with Maxtor coming in fourth place with 13.5 percent. With the new, larger Seagate poised to control nearly half of the global drive market, how long will it be before some of the other, smaller players join forces?

I came across this one pretty late, I know. Read the full article at ArsTechnica.

So there I was, 15 minutes before midnight, shivering under 2 blankets and wheezing through stale lips. I could hear fireworks outside and the sound of a party going on next door. As I reach for a family-sized box of tissues there’s one thought going through my head: "Thank God it’s not New Year’s."