Daily Report: Camiguin Island Trip Day #2

Another day in paradise. We had breakfast on the veranda of our bungalow with the sound of waves, crowing chickens, and tweeting birds. After that, our rented motorcycle arrived.

First, we drove into the town of Mambajao ("mom-BA-how") which is the small, clean, and antique capital of Camiguin Island. There, we went to lunch at The Rooftop, owned by a Dutch fellow named Gelt. He has a wonderful deli there, and a large selection of imported meats, cheeses, and other items. He also had, much to my amazement, dill pickles... the first I had seen in The Philippines. The hamburgers they cook at The Rooftop are really quite good. Stay away from the Mexican food though.

Gelt is also building a hotel on the third floor and the rooms seem quite nice... although why anyone would come to Camiguin and stay in a hotel room in town rather than a bungalow on the beach, I couldn't imagine.

There really are a lot of foreigners living here... perhaps as many as in Cagayan De Oro. However, CDO has almost a million people in it, while Camiguin has less than 50,000. Add to that the tourists, and you have a very visible number.

Camiguin seems like a nice place to live. You can take the fast ferry and be in CDO within 2 hours (plus time spent getting to the ferry). There are flights to Manila three times per week as well. Bohol is also only 2 hours away by ferry, and Cebu is a few more hours beyond that. The major problem I see with life on this island is getting your hands on cash: The ATM here only dispenses 4,000 pisos at a time: Those withdrawal charges add up fast.

After lunch, Epril and I drove out to the hot springs, which after White Island are the second best feature this island has to offer. I have to give the proprietors credit with the "design" they stumbled across: They took the little gully through which the hot water flows, cemented the bottom to make cascading pools, and added rocks to make walls, steps, and walkways. Then they covered the entire place with a net to keep out the leaves, giving the place a shadowy, private, and yet mossy and still wild/jungle aspect to it. It wasn't altogether dissimilar from bathing in a Roman ruin. And the water was simply wonderful, about the temperature of a bath.


After that, Epril and I went back down the hill and bought 10 Camiguin Island T-shirts for $2 each... one for everybody in the family.

From there, Epril and I went to Soda Swimming Pool, which was supposed to be a mineral spring, but was just plain water. (It may have been a proper mineral spring at some point in the past, but all evidence of calcium, salts, gas, carbonation, or other geological filtering of the water has disappeared as of my visit.)

Then, it was back to Golden Sunset Resort where Epril and I were served a lovely steak dinner out on the beach-side patio for our anniversary. There was candlelight and our own personal waiter. Very, very nice.

I've had internet access the entire time we were here at Golden Sunset: I just brought along the wireless Globe internet box from home and plugged it in, and it connected to the nearest Globe tower and all was ready to go!

Daily Report: Nice Weather

One thing about the Cagayan that is nicer than Pattaya is the weather: It's about the same temperature, but here there are actual blue skies. For some reason, Pattaya is the world capital of haziness; the white sky... or at least the so-light-blue-as-to-be-white sky. Almost every day so far here in Cagayan, there has been some blue sky to enjoy. In Pattaya, I would say that there were only 60 or 80 days per year with even a fraction of the sky above being cloudless and showing some true blue... and only 20 or 30 days per year with greater-than-50-percent clear sky.

I got my first "full" electric bill today. Including the Jumbotron and air conditioning run on high all night in one bedroom, the cost was 4,000 pisos ($100, 3,200 baht). Some people had warned me to expect very high electrical bills... but I don't think that is too bad. It's approximately the same as Thailand, if I were to guess.

I had a fair morning of work, and then for lunch, Susan made pork chops covered in a very tasty wine sauce that reminded me a bit of plum sauce. We watched the end of the first season of "24". I had seen it already and knew how it ended, but the girls were kind of gobsmacked. I think it sort of put a damper on their afternoon.

In the evening, Epril and I went out to Citibank to get some cash. (It's the only ATM in town that gives out 30,000 pisos at a time.) I went to the Sony Center in Limketkai to see if they sold this: A home computer that primarily functions as part of your television, with a Blu-Ray player built in. Unfortunately, as with several Sony products here in The Philippines, this one was exorbitantly overpriced, especially since the one being sold in The Philippines isn't as good as the one on the internet. (The Sony MSRP price of the internet model is 65,000 pisos; the Sony Philippines price of the older-generation version is 100,000 pesos... an $800 difference.) I really don't know why they do that, especially when they are selling the same stuff in Thailand for the "right" price.


As the sun sets over the
Cagayan River Valley, smoke
from food cooked over open
flames wafts over the trees.From there, we went over to Spooks for their Friday night expatriate family buffet. I met a nice guy named Kevin who was opening up an internet café in the town of Villa Nueva, close to Epril's town of Jasaan. My friend Ross became my hero by picking up for me on his trip to Cebu a bottle of Drambuie (price was 1,300 pesos... slightly less than Thailand) and gave it to me during dinner.

After that, I went over to Racks for 2½ hours and shot pool while Epril, Susan (who came down into town after dinner), and a new friend of Epril's, name Marifel (who is internet-dating a Norwegian guy chat-buddy of Epril's) went out and did some shopping. With only about 10 hours of practice under my belt, my pool game is already about 50% back to where it used to be, which is surprising. I thought it would take a lot longer.

It Will Last This Long

I wondered 6 months ago how long BluRay and HTDV at 1080 lines of resolution would last, with 2000-line ("2K"), 4000-line ("4K") resolution (and higher) digital programs being available for broadcast in places like movie theaters.

It took about this long.

In the coming months and years, Sony hopes to change the way we experience 3D video. The prototypes displayed today at CES are all still a long way from production, but they do give us a possible glimpse into the future of 3D.

The first is fairly obvious in design, but difficult in practice. At CES today, Sony showed off a new 56 inch 4K LCD, a 46 inch 2K, and a 24.5 inch 2K TV, all feature 3D, and all do so without glasses.

But the technology is not easy or cheap to produce, and the sets can still run into the thousands of dollars for even a basic model. Another issue is that the special screen on the TV that makes the 3D possible needs a much higher resolution to match the output of the current generation of 3D, so you need the super HD quality of a 4K TV, four times the resolution of current HD TVs. Again, the cost becomes wildly prohibitive, and 4K TVs are still running several tens of thousands of dollars.

So, what shall we peg it at, in today's fast moving technological universe? 5 years? 7 years? How about: Riiiiight about the time you're thinking about replacing your old 40-inch HDTV that you bought in 2010?

Effort To Convince Sex Workers To "Go Straight"?

CBCP has an article up talking about a new effort to "teach" kids here in Cagayan De Oro not to go into the sex trade.

Good idea: Convince girls that it is somehow better to slave away in a restaurant for 60 hours per week for 1,000 pisos than to sit for 15 hours per week in front of a webcam with a sex toy for 4,000 pisos.

Good luck with that.

Not until The Philippines gives women a tool more powerful than sex to lift themselves out of poverty — and not until the result of having that tool is something better than a dollar-a-day shit job in the mall — this country can waste all the hot air on nostrums like this as it wants: it won't do a bit of good.

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UPDATE:

And if you ever needed any more evidence that I'm right on the mark with what I say, check out this piece of news:

The 15 "cybersex women" who bolted from a government facility the other day have pressed charges against the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) and the social welfare department.

They said hauled off from an establishment in Kauswagan last April 23 without an arrest warrant. They also alleged that they were pressured into signing a document against two Swedes. They said NBI agents told them they would be jailed for 20 years if they did not cooperate."

Yes folks, these are the women... well, 15 out of 18 out them at least... who Annabelle Ricalde claims were "rescued" from the evil Swedes.

As noted in the comments section of that link by Dick Mellon, some of the girls are even making compassionate visits to the Swedes in jail... while at the same time pressing charges against the people who "rescued" them.

Yeah: These girls are definitely going to be receptive to the idea of giving up their high-paying online sex gig because some Filipina feminist tells them to.

Well, fortunately, some of these girls have found new employment at other cybersex dens in the city. Unfortunately, I'm sure that the know-nothing, brain-dead, do-gooder feminists of CDO — who assuredly don't face the problem of poverty and lack of education that the "cybersex" girls do — will ensure that these girls are soon once again in jail, threatened, and unemployed in short order. Let justice be done, eh?

I'm Sure You Won't Miss That Money

The $85 billion that the federal government spent saving AIG from sinking represents exactly $283 for every man, woman, and child in America. Every man, woman, and child in America was forced to shell out $283 because a private business made very bad business decisions.

It's one thing (although still not acceptable in my eyes) when farmers or airlines are on the verge because they can't compete in the modern world, and the federal government helps them out. It's a completely new level of government funding of poor private business practices and weaknesses though when the federal government saves a private business from it's own stupid mistakes.

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UPDATE:

Looks like the new price tag is $700 billion... You just spent $2,333 because Wall Street financial tycoons were too greedy. Well, I've been bitching that the $700 billion we've spent so far on the 6-year Iraq war could have been better-spent domestically. Here's my reward.

(And yes... I'm well aware that the alternative not spending $700 billion, and doing nothing instead was likely much worse. Perhaps the 3,000 or 4,000 people who were making $3 million or $4 million per year off of these deals might be "encouraged" to kick in just a little extra instead. What ever happened to The Stupid Tax?)

I Wonder How Long Blu-Ray and 1080 Will Last

I was pondering this today: There are already computer monitors out there that put out more than 2000 horizontal lines of resolution, and there are already home projectors on the market that do the same. In your home in the distant future (or as close as your local cinema today), there are movies playing at 4000 lines of resolution.

So, knowing that 2000 lines can be done today, how long before we start seeing a push for that resolution?

I say this because I was watching the U.S. Open at 720 lines on my 60-inch television last night. With my 20/20 vision, I can see a huge difference between a 720-line broadcast and a 1080-line broadcast. When the 100-inch-plus televisions start becoming popular in the next 5-8 years (and don't tell me they won't; we all know better) a crystal clear 1080-line picture that is spread over 4 times as much screen real estate is going to start looking even fuzzier than the 720-line picture on a 60-inch screen. (And don't tell me we won't be sitting as close; we all know better.)

Since the only ways that the television companies make money is to sell televisions, they have to keep coming up with new reasons to buy televisions: New features, new technologies, and (most importantly) bigger numbers... bigger screens, bigger resolutions.

I give 1080-line pictures until about the year 2025 before they go to the 2K format. For Blu-Ray, I give the format a much longer shelf life, since it already has enough space on it to hold a 2K movie. You can expect the Blu-Ray storage medium to last for another 15 years beyond that, I think.

Well, I'm just pondering on my lunch break. Back to work I go.

Daily Report: De Profundis

A great day today. I was down in front of the TV upon waking to watch Game 7 of the NBA finals. I haven't watched a basketball game for real since moving to Asia, and haven't been an NBA fan since the Houston Rockets' 1994-1995 two-season dominance... but I rooted for The Celtics because I'm an East Coaster... more "Beacon Hill" than "Burbank".

After that, it was up to the Jungle Perch where I busted out a fabulous 3 hours of work (and doing what used to take 5 hours before my professional rejuvenation as of late). I'm finally — I think; after 2 years — getting my groove back at work. I'm past the mental anger and hangup of earning half what I used to for the same amount of work, and I'm now finding a new cadence and way of focusing myself for the duration of my workday that is succeeding. Of course, I think that is the fourth or fifth time I've claimed something like that in the last 2 years, so that claim may seem a bit shopworn, but the fact is in the days before my computer crashed — and especially the 3 weeks since its return — I've had a marked and sustained increase in my work performance.

Anyway, being payday, it was off early from work and in to town. How nice to be back to a regular paycheck again after my computer's unexpected demise. So a visit to the ATM, and then Epril and I treated Warren and Jen out to food at Siam (the Thai place) and then went and shopped at Robinson's. I spent 4,000 pisos and didn't come away with much: There was a bottle of vermouth and a jar of olives for my martinis, razor blades and shaving cream, 2 kilos of chicken and a half a kilo of pork, a small block of cheddar cheese, and a bunch of cleaning supplies. Then, of course, there were the usual "nickel and dime" items that filled out the list... but still not much.

After that, it was back to Warren's house where I looked at the plans for the new house he and Jen are going to be building out on the golf course, and advised him on a bit of web publishing for his job.

Then it was home with Driver Chris, with a stop at Jollibee for ice cream along the way.

Like I said: A simple, well-played day.

Daily Report: Jungle Jil PR and Marketing

I was quoted extensively in the second Hunt-Songcuya article today. I tried to get a plug for the blog in the newspaper so that my quotes would be attributed to "Jil Wrinkle, local expatriate and author of Mindanao's most fantastic and widely read blog, Jungle Jil," but instead I was just put down as "Jil Wrinkle". Sigh.


About half of the guys in this
picture are the Jungle Jump-
ers. (I'm not sure which though
because they don't have their
jerseys yet. Team picture will
come in a week when the team
uniforms arrive.)I now own a basketball team. George Steinbrenner, eat your heart out. Actually I just donated 4,000 pisos to the local Kimaya league team for their uniforms. I've named them the "Jungle Jumpers", but I think that it really is pointless because everybody just calls them "Kimaya." Oh well. I'm taking everybody on the team out to get "junglejil.blogspot.com" tattooed across the backs of their necks next week.

When I used to live in Houston, I was a big Rockets basketball fan. Thing was, whenever I turned on the TV to watch a game, The Rockets would start to lose. If I turned off the TV, the Rockets would make a comeback and win. (The Rockets went on to win 2 NBA championships and I never watched a game... radio only.)

The Jumpers had their first game with me as team owner tonight. When I arrived at The Big Vagina (the local basketball pavilion decorated with a rather gynecological-looking giant cement clam) at halftime, my team was ahead 24 to 22. When I left at the beginning of the fourth quarter, my team was down 36 to 39.

After I left, they came from behind to win. Seems like I'm destined to give "blind support" a whole new meaning.

Anyway, for everybody else who isn't a jinx, you all should come out to Jasaan (or just walk over, if you're already here) and enjoy a nightly basketball game. They are an enjoyable way to spend an evening. There are at least 2 games every night, starting at 6 p.m.

Daily Report: Final Touches

Today was a fine day of work. It sucks having a job where one day you make $40 per hour, the next day you make $10 per hour... with absolutely no difference in the amount of effort or zeal you put into your work. I remember doing a sales job after I graduated from college, and it was the same soul-sucking experience where effort had absolutely no correlation to reward.

The furniture arrived today... all of it. So hence, you get the photos you've been waiting for.

First off is the living room. The couch is custom made by the local furniture maker. As you can see, the arm rests are tables, and there is a table built over the cushion as well. If you look closely, you'll see that the surround sound speakers are built into the couch as well. The grey paint is a little bit more blue than I wanted. Most importantly though, is that the 6-feet by 6-feet measurement I made turned out to be too small. I'm going to have some benches built to stick on the ends of the couch to provide more seating. I also still need to buy a dining room table for this room.
Next is the kitchen, a work in progress. We're going to have the furniture guy build a back wall for the stove that turns into a bit of a counter. That's Kirko the houseboy hard at work fixing the clogged drain. The plumbing needs so much work.

Here is the bedroom. The bed is another custom piece, with the headboard all hand carved. The stain is a little too dark. I wanted more of a white maple color. Now I have to find something to hang over the bed to match it. I also have to buy Epril a table for her boudoir, and then all of the things on the little widow seat will be stored away.
Here are the wardrobes we had made in Epril's boudoir. The gray paint really picks up the blue of the curtains. I made a dumb mistake and forgot to buy an air conditioner with a remote control... Epril can't reach the switch up there, and I can only reach it by opening the door and standing on the ledge there. Also those boxes in front of the air conditioner are "functional". The cold air for some reason seems to blow primarily off to the left of the picture, which isn't where we want it blowing. The boxes direct the air.

Below is the TV room. There is still a coffee table coming and a TV stand. (The TV is off to the left.) The wall hanging and piece covering the window seat are silk tapestries I bought in a mountain village in Laos.

The view from my office this evening.
AJ playing. Epril, Mom, Ednil, and
Doreen enjoying the wireless internet.
That's Inday in her school uniform.The family was hanging out on the terrace this evening. Little AJ was brought round by his mother too. It was nice to sit here and work and listen to everybody enjoying the house.

For dinner, we had spaghetti, and I watched some History Channel. No dogs barking tonight, which is a great sign of the accommodating nature of my neighbors.

So anyway, here's a list of all the things I plan to get for the house before I consider it fully furnished: A dining room table with chairs; a knickknack table, a bar, and a café table with chairs for the sitting room off the living room (not photographed yet... it's still filled with boxes); a bench for the front porch; a makeup table and chair for Epril in the boudoir area of the master bedroom; a bit of carpet for the stairs and upstairs hallway; a wicker table and chairs and a bamboo bench for the terrace (plus more plants); and, some additional paintings and wall hangings. I also need some blinds for my office.

The nice thing is that all of these things are amazingly inexpensive here in The Philippines. The bed, the couch, and the wardrobes you see in these photographs combined cost about $800. The coffee table and TV table for the TV room that are on their way should cost about $30 together. All in all, when we're finished, Epril and I will have spent about $4,000 for all of the appliances, furniture, and decor for our home this year (plus about $8,000 last year... with the 60-inch TV). Until we buy a house of our own, that will be just about it for our domecilliary expenses.