Month: April 2008

PNB and Allied Bank Merger

Philippine National Bank and Allied Banking Corp., which are both owned by tycoon Lucio Tan, have approved a plan to merge to become the country’s fourth largest bank in terms of assets. The merged bank will retain the name Philippine National Bank.

A Picture Worth A Thousand Pictures

Western Digital

It’s a Western Digital My Book Premium Edition 500GB, that used to hold thousands of my pictures ever since I bought my Canon EOS 30D. Add to that the thousands as well of audio, video, programs, and data files. This is the picture that’s worth a thousand pictures.

Save for the images uploaded and saved in flickr, this is what remains of my photos… of Deuts.NET Photography.

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The Tax Reform Act, A Decade Old

Republic Act 8424 (Philippine Law), otherwise known as the Tax Reform Act of 1997 or the Revised National Internal Revenue Code (NIRC) of 1997, which became effective in 1998, is already more than a decade old law. It’s basically a comprehensive law that covers all national taxes from income tax for individuals and corporations, estate and donor’s tax, value added tax, other percentage taxes, excise tax on certain goods, and documentary stamp taxes.

The law is old enough that, as a matter of fact, certain provisions have already been revised just like the income tax for corporations and the Expanded Value Added Tax. What marvels me is why there’s no change, or at least any proposed changes underway (none that I heard of), in income tax for individuals.

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The Ubuntu Experience

I’ve been tinkering with my laptop for the last week or so, and finally I was able to dual boot with Linux Ubuntu (Gutsy Gibbon v. 7.10) and Windows XP Service Pack 2. The result of which, as I was trying to show in my last post, is an OS X desktop look:

Deuts Desktop

I’ve searched the web for any help on how to do it, and so far the tutorial by Shailen Sobhee offered the greatest help, especially with the ability to choose at which operating you want to boot upon start up. I just wished though that from the start (not just in the comments section), he should have offered the procedures on how to partition (using the Paragon Partition Manager) the original Windows installation, that way I could have avoided losing my original installation (you see, I’m running a packaged Windows XP software into my machine with a systems recovery partition). Anyway, if you follow his tutorial, I suggest that you read through including the comments to know better. Nevertheless, it was a good and informative tutorial.

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Filipinos on Top of the World

Related to the article I posted a while ago, here’s another article written by Edel Mary D. Vegamora, the CIA Country Coordinator for the Philippines.

(Note: this was originally posted in her multiply blog, “From Edel’s Observation Deck“, which is the same article published as a pdf file in the IIA Philippines website. The article was reposted with the permission of Ms. Edel Mary herself.)


FILIPINOS ON TOP OF THE WORLD: GOLD MEDALLIST & GLOBAL AWARDEES
Written for IIA by: Edel Mary D. Vegamora
CIA Country Coordinator-Philippines

In the midst of the present local political controversies, further aggravated by the disturbing developments from the U.S. impending recession, which have brought about a string of panic not only in North America’s but also in Europe’s financial markets, then creating this growing threat to asset values and liquidity (as in the case of a reputable investment bank having to be bailed out of its liquidity crunch leading to its eventual sell-off), and then bringing these to bear in our local financial markets, and while several financial institutions are presently encountering an unexpected steep fall in sales — ah, this tiny bit of news, about ordinary Filipinos establishing their mark in the global arena, is most welcome, something quite different, a breath of fresh air, indeed, must I say, against the murk of panic and depression.

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Gmail + Thunderbird + Addons

The ultimate combination to suit your daily email needs. All these for the total price of nil –nada –nothing! Now, what more could you ask for?

Creating a gmail account is free. It offers pop and imap access (of course, imap will always be better than pop) to enable you to access your email and send messages using a desktop email client like Thunderbird (ditch Microsoft Outlook), as well as 6.5GB of message storage space (so far).

Mozilla Thunderbird is likewise free, created by the same creator of another internet tool and browser, Mozilla Firefox. Setting up Thunderbird to fetch and send gmail messages is easy. Just refer to this tutorial and you’re ready to go.

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