Category: General

HSBC-Qatar Banking Experience

hsbcWhen we were new in Qatar, we were scouting for a bank that can accomodate our banking needs especially for payroll account purposes. A legion of the banks here offer high levels of average maintaining balance, until we found out about the service by Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC). HSBC offered no (zero/nil) maintaining balance for employees of pre-determined employers, and our employer was one of them. So we grabbed that opportunity and eventually learned about its lousy service.

  1. It is one of the slowest, if not the slowest internet banking site.
  2. Its CSR presumes you know nothing, and I mean nothing, about internet banking. They won’t believe this and that error happened when you performed this and that transaction.
  3. You can’t transfer QR 1,000 or more in a single transaction even to your another HSBC account. Even when paying your credit card bills online, you need to repeat the transfers if your bill reached QR 1,000.
  4. Their system doesn’t recognize if you have already paid your credit card bill before the due date. They will autodebit your current account (except if you have nil balance) on the due date for the amount of the bill, even if you have paid it already in full prior to that day.
  5. No real-time detail of credit card purchases. You still have to wait for your billing statement to examine the details of your credit card purchases.
  6. More. I know there are more, but that I can’t remember them now. I’ll just have to update this or post in another entry in the future.

A Blogger’s Prayer

In this season of reflection, I offer you this blogger’s prayer:

So compassionate, so faithful, so loving You are Our Father.

We ask You to increase our faith and our love for You that we may use blogging as an instrument to fulfill Your purposes. May we become bloggers of truth and promoters of peace.

Help us to be steadfast in our Christian commitment that visitors may find in our blogs a source of encouragement and inspiration. Give us strength to proclaim Your word, that we may play our part in breaking down the walls of hostility in the world and use our blogs to strengthen the bonds of friendship, solidarity and love.

Make our hearts meek and humble
that we may treat our readers as friends, not as unique hits,
that we may strive to change ourselves for the better more often than we pimp our site templates,
that we may find more time to ease the pain of someone in our own home than to reply to comments left by strangers,
that we may interact with our next door neighbors as often as we chat with our blogrolled friends,
that we may be more concerned about helping the less privileged than about the number of subscribers to our RSS feeds.

Deliver us, Father, from spams and viruses, from pride and selfishness, and from the temptation to replicate images without permission and copy ideas without crediting the original authors.

May we always be united as a network of bloggers and friends working together in Your name. May our blogs lead us closer to You.

We ask all these through Christ, Our Lord. Amen.

This prayer was actually the invocation at the successful Philippine Blog Awards last Saturday by Fr. Stephen Cuyos, which eventually drew a lot of controversy, especially to the non-believers. Fr. Cuyos is a blogger/podcaster who writes and talks about faith, and who is also into open-source technology, and Linux. Ain’t that cool?

I wondered before that if there could only be a priest who writes his homily through blogs, I would surely find it a good daily read. In this age of technology, surely the internet can be an effective medium to spread the good news of the Lord.

Check out Fr. Cuyos’ blog and podcast.

Only in Qatar 101

In this post, and maybe some more in the future (that’s why the 101, because there might still be 102, 103, and so on), I would like to point out some singularities of living in Qatar. Some of these may not be particularly unique only to Qatar, but as it is different compared to my beloved Pilipinas – anyway, I’ve only lived in these two countries so far.

  1. Camels – being a desert country, I thought I would see a lot of camels around. However, this is not the case. Instead, you only see camels as exhibits in certain places. As a matter of fact, camels were already replaced by Land Cruisers on the road.
  2. Roundabouts – this country is just simply full of roundabouts. You’ll see them almost all over Doha, the capital. Did it help ease out traffic? Well maybe before, but not now with the volume level of cars and trucks swarming the city.
  3. Drainage System – obviously because of the scarcity of rain in this country, government failed or maybe just simply ignored provision for drainage system.
  4. Street Names – from the looks of it, every street has a name. However, if you ask people about the street names or mentioning the name to a taxi driver, they wouldn’t know. They’ll just give you a blank look. Obviously, they don’t know the names. Even the major roads like the C-Ring, D-Ring, etc., they are not familiar with. You’ll have to rely on the use of landmarks if you want to go from one place to another. By the way, all offices and houses have PO Boxes. That’s where postal mail will reach you.
  5. Construction Everywhere – wherever you go in the city, you’ll encounter construction going on. What’s annoying, though, is that in some cases it seems like eternity before construction is through. Just take for example the construction at the side of the road of the Toyota Tower (Al Abdulghani Tower), at the corner of C-Ring and Airport Road, since we arrived here more than 6 months ago, the construction is already going on. Until now it’s not yet finished. A friend even suggested before that it should have been finished before the start of the Asian Games, but now Asian Games is long way over, and it’s not yet done.
  6. Foreigners outnumbering the locals – going around the city, it won’t take long for you to realize that indeed foreigners outnumber the locals.
  7. Qtel – apparently they are the only telco in the country, providing telephone, mobile phone and internet connectivity. I’m just glad we already have our ADSL connection (at last!), at least I had a break from waiting long minutes over the phone for the customer service representative to pick-up, while you don’t really have a ground at which you can voice out your feedback about their service.

Well, so far those are my collection. If you are also in Qatar or maybe have been here and you want to add on the list above, just leave a comment below. More pecularities to follow as I encounter (and take note of) them in the future.

Registered Voters’ List

Many bloggers are just whining about the list of registered voters in the National Capital Region being published in the internet. You can see the list here.

The issue is that the list contains the full names, registration numbers, birthdays, and complete addresses of the registrants. They claim that it’s a violation of the right to privacy.

What do I think about it? Well, I think so, but anyway, I’m not registered in NCR. But I did see the names of my aunts and cousins. What about you, did you see your names in there?

Update: It seems that they have already brought down the pdf files from the server, and as such it’s not accessible anymore.

Update: Yes, Comelec takes down online voters’ list. Read the news here.

When Philippines was Discovered by Magellan

You might have not noticed but we’re celebrating the 486th year of the discovery of the Philippines.

You wonder how I knew? Well, it’s in the song of Yoyoy Villame:

On March Sixteen Fifteen Hundred Twenty One
When Philippines was discovered by Magellan
They were sailing day and night
Across the big ocean
Until they saw a small Limasawa island.

Enjoy the youtube video:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhegdwwvpEk]

To continue with the song:

On March Sixteen Fifteen Hundred Twenty One
When Philippines was discovered by Magellan
They were sailing day and night
Across the big ocean
Until they saw a small Limasawa island.

Magellan landed in Limasawa at noon
The people met him very welcome on the shore
They did not understand
The speaking they have done
Because Kastila gid at Waray-Waray man

When Magellan landed in Cebu City
Rajah Humabon met him they were very happy
All people were baptized
And built the church of Christ
And that’s the beginning of our Catholic life

When Magellen visited in Mactan
To Christianize them everyone
But Lapu-Lapu met him on the shore
And drive Magellan to go back home

Then Magellan got so mad
Ordered his men to camouflage
“Mactan Island we could not grab
Cause Lapu-Lapu is very hard”

Then the battle began at dawn
Bolos and spears versus guns and cannons
When Magellan was hit on his neck
He stumble down and cried and cried

“Oh mother, mother, I am sick
Call the doctor very quick
Doctor, Doctor shall I die
Tell my Mama do not cry
Tell my Mama do not cry
Tell my Mama do not cry”

That’s the end of Magellan in the island of Mactan long time ago ladies and gentlemen

So, how do I say it, Happy 486th Discovery of the Philippines!? hehe

Fluorescent Lamp

I’m not exactly sure actually whether it’s true that indeed a Filipino invented the fluorescent. They say that it was written in textbooks in elementary and high school, but that I didn’t encounter.

Here’s what the wikipedia have to say:

Many believe that a Filipino named Agapito Flores was the original inventor of the fluroescent light. It is reported that that he received a French patent for his invention and sold it to General Electric, which made millions of dollars from his idea. Flores however presented his patent to General Electric after the company had already presented the fluorescent light to the public, and much after it was originally invented.

On the other hand, about.com detailed the timeline on the invention of the fluorescent.

So what now becomes of those textbooks, if there’s a claim like that indeed?

Tigbauan Church

The Tigbauan church was just featured in Explore Iloilo. This is not the first time that Tigbauan was featured in that site. But this time, the pictures are just simply awesome!

I wanted to repost some of the pictures here, and I hope the people from Explore Iloilo won’t mind. Anyway, it has watermarks on it.

Tigbauan Church

Tigbauan Church

Tigbauan Church

I really encourage everyone to visit the site and explore the beauty that is, Iloilo!