Baguio, Feb 2007

Last weekend was one of my few free-from-work weekends, and when my parents told me that they were going to Baguio for the weekend, and since I, by nature, am a free loader, I didn't hesitate to tag along. We were supposed to stay at the Camp John Hay Manor but it was fully booked, so we stayed at the John Hay Suites instead (my dad knew some people who gave us company discounts) . John Hay Suites is a yet to be finished hotel right beside the Manor. And since it was half finished, room rates were still low, and they were still a little bit in the process of "smoothening out" their operations. We found this out the nice way when they mistakenly led us the deluxe suite instead of the regular room that we had reserved :D

They eventually discovered their mistake, and we moved to a room that was still pretty nice and had a great view (smaller bathroom and no dining table and a mini-kitchen, but still good.)

Baguio in February is really nice. The weather is great, just the right dose of coolness, there's fog everywhere during the early morning, the sun is out in the afternoon but it never really scorches the way it does in Manila, and the evening air is just so cool and crisp, making coffee sips twice as soothing. And did I mention that the yearly Panagbenga is just round the corner? So yeah, the flowers were all out in bloom.

This weekend sure was enjoyable and relaxing.

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And there's no better way to get back from a short weekend vacation than to get great news from work! Great news for the moment at least. :-P

Battered but not bruised

It was hell week in the office. Our team was in crisis mode as we tried to clean up the big mess that fell comfortably on our laps. Since we deal with applications on production environment (meaning it's already being used by the customers for their day-to-day operations), everything and anything that doesn't go right (whether it was our fault or not) is critical and must be resolved immediately and in a sense, every passing minute is a deadline.

I’ve also just recently recovered from a crisis of my own. If you’ve been reading some of my previous posts, you may know that my laptop crashed. I lost my files and had no access to my email, which is extremely frustrating because I rely so much on emails for a huge chunk of my work.

The good news is (after almost a month of despair,) my laptop is now back up to working again, finally! But now my next tasks are to sort through a back log of more than a thousand emails, and try to recover/recreate my files. Of course, in these bad times, Murphy’s Law never ceases to succeed. The people in IT support were able to recover some of my files. The ones that they weren’t able to recover were files that I put under the category “Important”. (I’m not blaming them though, my hard disk crashed, and that’s not their fault.) I’m just trying to roll with the punches the best I can.

The weather’s been really nice lately. It’s not too sunny even in the afternoons and the temp has really dropped to lower than usual; I don’t even have to use the electric fan all that much.

Why am I talking about the weather? Something about silver linings and all that.

Roger and Serena

are the Australian Open 2007 Men's and Women's Singles Champions (or at least in Serena's case, doubles).

Roger Federer won the 10th grand slam title of his career and is well on his way to equaling (surpassing?) Pete Sampras' record 14 grand slam titles. And he also won the Aussie Open without losing a set. That's seven best-of-5-set matches that he won in 3 sets, and three of those 7 matches were against opponents ranked in the top 10. Now that's domination.

A couple of years ago, Serena Williams was the Federer of women's tennis. She was completely dominating women's tennis, even winning all four grand slam titles in a span of one year (Roland Garros, Wimbledon and the US Open in '02 and the Aussie Open in '03.) Of course, injuries and a seemingly lesser interest in competing put a stop to her domination. She had her worst tennis year last year, when she only played 4 tournaments (although she did reach the semifinals in 2) and dropped out of the top 100.

But now she's back. And she's playing great. And to prove it, she bitch-slapped world number 1 Maria Sharapova 6-1, 6-2 in the Aussie Open final.







And I bet every female tennis player with the exception of Justine Henin-Hardenne is scared.