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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Sidenotes in Deuts.NET

While I was cleaning my site for broken links, here are some I learned:

  • This is what zooomr has become. It’s supposed to compete with flickr, but how can it compete when your photos once hosted in them are gone. This is what actually happened to some of my photos in zooomr. Those were not the ‘masterpiece’ type of photos, but hey, they serve as a documentation of my life. Poor photos, poor photo sharing site.
  • News sites to avoid linking to when creating posts: Yahoo! News and Manila Bulletin. Why? Because they can’t maintain static pages for their news articles for quite a long period of time, a year or two you’ll find broken links in your blog posts.
  • Successful / implementation for my permalinks. All posts now appear to have a / in the end. This will definitely affect search engine referrals and ultimately traffic. But hopefully, all will be back to normal soon. Nevertheless, I’ve prepared a friendly 404 landing page just in case one would get lost, with the related posts plugin to refer them to the nearest, possibly related, article.

Awaiting WordPress 2.5

This site is proudly powered by WordPress (WP).

Wordpress LogoWith lots of updates going on into the core of wordpress install, particularly with the upcoming WordPress 2.5, a lot of features are being introduced. I’m afraid there will come a time that WordPress would not be as lightweight but functional as it used to be. WordPress users are asking for features left and right specific to their needs. The WordPress team, it appears to me, are moving towards satisfying all those requests by the various users in one package, that is WordPress.

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Bear Stearns at 2.4% of Book Value

Could this be how bad the recession in the US is right now?

Bear Stearns Cos., one of the largest global investment banks and securities trading and and brokerage firms in the world, entered into a deal to sell its business to JP Morgan Chase & Co., another investment banking company, for 236 million dollars or equivalent to $2 per share, which translates to only around 2.4% of its book value.

Bloomberg and other business news magazines and websites are all over the issue.

To illustrate how bad this deal is, the deal was sealed last Sunday (March 16, 2008) at $2, Bear Stearns stock last Friday (March 14) was trading at $30, more than $60 last week, and more than $150 last year. Moreover, the Company reported a book value of $84.09 in the fourth quarter of 2007.

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