While my wife was here on her Philippines vacation, she had cable TV installed in our house. She didn't just get an installation done; she had the installation done in three rooms: The living room, the master bedroom, and my son's bedroom.
What would you define as government and public services in the Philippines? The obvious answer would be things like water and electricity. The not-so-obvious answer would include residential telephone services and other services that are necessary for the majority of the public (and sometimes a minority of the public). Services do not have to be government-run or government-owned in order to be considered public services.
What follows are a few my experiences and observations while residing in Olongapo City, Philippines.
When you hear of websites that get thousands of unique visitors per day, wouldn't you like to get a piece of the action? Even a small piece of the action? If you concentrate on link clustering while writing, on a continuous basis, you'll begin to receive website traffic like that. It won't happen overnight, but it will happen.
If you don't know what link clustering is, you need to read Courtney Tuttle's article, "Introduction To Link Clusters". He gives a detailed description of what link clustering is all about, and I'm going to give you a real world example in detail.
I'm going to use my previous article, "Broadband and High Speed Internet Choices in Olongapo City, Philippines", as my example. In a future article (probably within a month), I'll report the results of my efforts.
The high speed Internet choices are somewhat limited in Olongapo City, Philippines. This is especially annoying to foreigners who've been "spoiled" by fast and solid connectivity before moving here. I'm one of those foreigners, an American living in the Philippines.
I think the best way for me to describe the high speed Internet choices here is to give you some of my history with high speed Internet Internet, both in the US and here in the Philippines. I'll summarize the list of choices at the end.
I was going to title this post as "The Return of Dumb and Dumber", but thought it was better to leave that alone. Back in November, Dumb and Dumber spent some time at my house checking my internal wiring and such. They didn't fix my DSL connectivity problem.
A few days ago, I mentioned that I had spoken to "Doofus" as part of my first gray matter exercises post. On the day before yesterday (it's after midnight now and I have to remember which day I'm on), an unnamed technician called and asked if my connection was working right then. I told him yes, but that it wouldn't be in a few minutes. He said he'd check some other things. Since I didn't get another call within a couple of hours and the end of their work day was nearing, I called "Bonehead" and told her that I lost the connection less than 5 minutes after the unnamed technician called. I did more than banter with her; I exercised my balls of steel and had her apologizing multiple times. I explained that I'd been dealing with this crap for more than 4 months now. She assured me that the situation would be resolved soon.
I was up all night after that for 2 reasons: 1) Nighttime is only time I ever had a stable connection, and 2) My wife calls me on the IM at night and keeps me tied up for hours. Yesterday morning, after sleeping a mere 3 hours, my mother-in-law rudely awakened me by ringing my doorbell many, many times. As I staggered to the front door, ready to swear at the top of my lungs, I spotted Dumb and Dumber through the window standing off to the side. She was saved from my wrath.
After Dumb and Dumber spent more than 4 hours checking wiring again, they found a grounded wire at the nearby junction box. The ground was between that junction box and the primary junction box about a half-kilometer away — it wouldn't have affected my connection in any way. Dumb and Dumber thought they had the situation resolved with that and hooked their company laptop to where the line comes into my house, bypassing any wiring to my jacks. They got a connection on the first try and one of them had the audacity to tell me that the problem was with my internal wiring somewhere. Yeah, sure, right. He changed his tune when the connection suddenly dropped about 3 minutes later.
I went away (in order not to expose my temper) while they talked to the main office. In fact, I left the house and went off to visit neighbors. About an hour later, one of the technicians called me out on the road and told me the situation was resolved. I went back inside and they explained that they changed a line at the ISP, a port at the ISP, and the IP from the modem to the ISP and everything started working properly. In other words, they put my modem on a different node. In one of my past lives I was an IT manager for a huge telemarketing company, so I knew the nature of the problem from the very first time it happened and explained it to Doofus back then. It took them 4 months to figure it out themselves. The problem is that an Internet cafe was put on the same node with me back in September and it ate up all the available connections during the daytime hours that it was open for business.
I spoke to Doofus on the phone just before Dumb and Dumber left and verified that the connection was working. Is it fixed yet? I won't be sure until a week has passed without any down time that isn't caused by external forces such as a power outage, high voltage spike, or something of that nature. I have my fingers and toes crossed, my lucky rabbit's foot is losing all its hair from all the rubbing and my good luck pendant is starting to tarnish. I can only hope for the best and if everything works out, I will not longer be blogging as a vampire.
My apologies to Robert Burns (1759-1796) and John Steinbeck (1902-1968). The phrase is in print in various forms, but always includes "Of Mice and Men". It's based on the famous poem by Robert Burns and summarizes this thought: No matter how carefully a project is planned, something may still go wrong with it.
I have a writing schedule that I try to maintain. It seems like every time I get it into sync, something happens to cause it to go out of sync. Yesterday, as I finished up a blog review, I felt a fever coming on. Let's put it this way: It took me out. The only explanation for it is that I had been playing with nieces and nephews a few hours before and I must've caught a virus from one of them. Anyway, I was out of the game for more than 12 hours.
I have more than 10 articles in various stages of completion. I have 8 blog reviews and some website reviews pending. I don't know if I'll ever catch up. Today is Sunday, the day of the week that my broadband connection doesn't die on me at all. It's the day I normally do all my web research and catch up that which needs to be caught up. As I sit here, blowing my nose every two minutes and profusely perspiring as a result of medication, I don't think I'll be doing what I need to get done today, although I'll try.
Prior to moving to the Philippines, I used to pride myself on the fact that I took ill no more than once per year, usually during the flu season. Since I've been here, however, it seems I get hit by something every single month. I should expect it; this is the tropics and some of these viruses only exist here. I'm just wondering how long it will take to build up the antibodies that everyone here already has.
My DSL connection was intermittent and so bad for the last 24+ hours that I was lucky to have a connection for more than 60 seconds. When I said excuses are like anal sphincters, I didn't know that excuses from SubicTel were the only thing they knew how to do well.
I called them on Tuesday. They showed up today, on Friday afternoon. There were two technicians. "Dumb" plugged his meter into the phone jack and saw that I didn't have a connection. He sent "Dumber" to the main junction box to refresh the wiring (replace corroded connections, etc.) while he refreshed the wiring outside my house where the phone line comes in.
When all of that failed to correct the problem, Dumber called the main office. I listened to the exchange, as difficult as it was since he spoke no English, and realized immediately that he was clueless when he turned to me and asked me if I had the PC going through a router. I looked at him and could barely contain my laughter. Instead I said, "Um, no, do you see a router?"
What happened next nearly made me flip my lid. Dumber was on the phone with his main office and they told him to see if he could use the web browser after they made some adjustments. He was sitting at my PC and closed Firefox. He then started searching through my start menu and couldn't seem to find what he was looking for. He turned to me again and told me he wanted to get on the Internet. I pointed at the Internet Explorer icon in the quick launch area of the task bar. He clicked on it and it came up. Of course, Google Search is the page it was set for and it was being displayed. He then typed the word "internet" in the search block and clicked search.
After 30 minutes of watching him do various things, none of which were related to the actual cause of the problem, both Dumb and Dumber got up to leave. They both told me to call the main office at the speed dial number of 179 if I had any more problems. Then they left. I can't tell you if my connectivity problem is resolved. It seems to be working right now. I guess I'll find out within the next three days (it always works on Sundays).
I'm just wondering what kind of education you need to have to work at SubicTel. How could they send a technician who doesn't even know what the Internet is, much less how to navigate the web? I feel extremely insulted by their lack of technical knowledge, so much so that I'm not giving them another chance. The next time I have a connectivity problem, I'm heading to Globe to get set up for their wireless connection service. If it turns out that it works for me, I'll take the DSL modem and the assorted wiring and drop it all off at the SubicTel office as quickly as I can.
