Snacking

7:31AM

Damn. It.

I just had another hard drive failure yesterday.

This time it was my 500GB Seagate GoFlex Satellite, that wonderful portable drive with a battery that transmits via wifi as well, so you can use it for storage outdoors completely unconnected by any sort of wires, making it perfect for, say, iPad use, which was what I bought it for.

I originally got it for almost P10k at a store in the SM North mall years ago. Imagine that.

These days you can get an external drive with twice the storage space at about a fourth of the cost. As in a 1TB slim at P2.5k. What the hell was I thinking? Well, then again, those were the heady old beginning years of portable, powered storage, and things came at a premium. I don’t really regret buying it at that price; it’s served me well.

I was using it as a temporary fix for an earlier hard drive failure that happened two weeks ago, while I went about looking for an inexpensive new one, using it as a temporary Time Machine backup drive for my big iMac. Now even that fix has tanked.

I really have to get a new external drive. Really.

Again—Damn. It.

9:20AM

All right, now we’ve gone and done it. We got ourselves declared the city with the worst traffic in the world. See here.

Of course I don’t dispute it. Manila does have the worst traffic in the world, bar none. It comes from too many cars, and too little roads. Secondarily, from lack of discipline. It wouldn’t be so bad if we only followed the rules, but most Filipinos are thick-headed and look out only for themselves.

I don’t feel it much these days, because I sold my car and take public transport. I feel it when I take the cab sometimes, but my commutes are usually short, and for the long ones, like to the Makati Commercial Center or downtown Manila, I usually take the train. The few times I have to travel during rush hour and the trains are packed, I take the air conditioned bus and just sleep through the traffic.

But often, even the short rides are unbearable. Sometimes, the short 2.5 kilometer jeepney rides to Cubao take 30-45 minutes, particularly during rush hour. I could literally just hoof it, and it would take much less time. Believe me, because I’ve actually done it.

When you have to sit out hours-long traffic to traverse what should take you 30 minutes, you know something’s definitely wrong. Even President-Elect Rodrigo Duterte is planning to exercise emergency executive powers to finally solve the problem, I hear. I didn’t vote for you, but good luck, sir.

I’m reminded of one particularly horrible day when I was coming home from work and still drove a car. We were living in a quiet subdivision near Congressional Avenue back then. I was relatively near the house already, but the damn traffic wasn’t moving at all.

I got to maybe just six blocks from the house, and that was around 6PM. By 8:30 I had just moved a few car lengths ahead, and by 9:30 I decided to just leave the car on the curb and just walk home and come back for the car later around midnight.

I came back around 12:30, and the traffic still hadn’t moved much. I couldn’t believe it. I just went home again and slept, and came back at 6AM. Sometime in the early morning the traffic had cleared, and Congressional Avenue was nearly deserted, with just my car up on the sidewalk. I drove it back home and took the friggin day off.

I never did find out what caused that jam, and I never will. But when the world says we have the worst traffic in the world, I believe it.

4:20PM

I was watching the latest episode of Braindead from CBS (delayed) on my system yesterday and when it ended, Mary Elizabeth Winstead says in a voice-over, “Stay tuned for scenes from our next episode.”

And… nothing.

The end credits roll, but there are no scenes from the next episode.

And there never are. Not in Braindead, nor in any other show that I download and watch.

It’s always like that. A voice-over tells us to expect scenes from the next episode, and it’s never there. It’s like a rule instituted by generations of uploaders. Never include the scenes from the next episode. Never include them. And there are the generations of downloaders who’ve learned to live with it.

I ask the uploading guys—why the hell not?

Why not simply include the damn preview? It’s no skin off your nose. It just adds another extra, what, thirty seconds to the file? What’s the harm in that?

I mean, everyone’s got a right to see the scenes from the next episode, right? It heightens expectations for the next week’s download, for one thing. In my book, that’s always welcome.

Ay, nako.

Wala lang. Just ranting. Walang magawa.

Now back to regular programming.

9:26AM

It’s the friggin’ dead zone as far as new TV shows are concerned, and I hate it!

I have software that automatically downloads these shows without any intervention from me, and I used to come home to at two or three new episodes of my favorite American television shows every day. Sometimes there are more than eight or nine of them, and I have to go to bed without seeing them all.

But now, there’s none, and it’s been that way for the past few days. Even The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is on a break, and I’ve lost even that this week.

This system’s been my go-to entertainment fix for a few years now, in place of watching cable or broadcast TV, or watching DVDs and blurays. Every day, there are at least a few episodes available: The Big Bang Theory. The Blacklist. Blindspot. The Flash. Supergirl. Suits. Arrow. NCIS. The Walking Dead. Family Guy. Stuff like that. (I realize most of these shows are mindless, American pop fodder, but hey, it’s my life, and I’ll watch what I want.)

They’ve all aired their series finales and gone on their breaks. The other shows who’ve been on breaks haven’t premiered their new seasons yet, so I’m effectively stuck in replay hell, save for the odd show on the odd TV cycle sked, like Inside Amy Schumer, or those debuting off the normal cycle, like Preacher.

But dammit. there’s virutally nothing to watch, and I’m forced to just go back to work on my backlog of stuff or watch, God forbid, regular cable and broadcast TV. Or just sleep.

Wala lang. Just ranting.