How I cope . . .

As you know by now, I love living in the Philippines. But, like every foreign environment, there are things I miss. I’ve rambled about several of them in an earlier blog that concluded that most of the losses are manageable.
Of course, finding solutions has taken a bit of time, but my life is almost whole now. I say “almost” because I’m still finding “work arounds” for some things.
I’m a heavy reader and a bit of an information junky. Creating or finding new information sources has been a bit of a challenge but many things are now falling in place.
Larger metropolitan areas like Manila have pretty good cable television networks. Unfortunately, we live in a new subdivision that hasn’t been wired yet and we’re getting by with satellite television. Our provider, Dream Networks, has a pretty good lineup and many familiar channels are available. We get the History Channel (Asia) and Discovery as well as Star Network which carries many of my favorite shows and a movie channel. Movies are a year or two out of date and I’ve seen many of the “first run” movies before. But watching them again is a mindless past time when I’m too tired to do anything else.
Dream Networks also has a good selection of news channels. I watch the NBC nightly news whenever I can tear my wife away from Filipino soap operas and both CNN and BBC News are available around the clock. We get neither Fox News nor the CBS evening news, but I’d largely weaned myself off them before moving. Don’t be offended Katie, but I prefer more substantial reporting.
DSL is a popular Internet solution in the Philippines and a few folks are coming to think of Internet access as a fundamental human right—at least I do . Sadly, our subdivision is yet to be wired. After promoting an “integrated wireless community,” our developer has reneged on the promise and says we’ll have to wait for broadband to the home. Effectively, that means waiting until PLDT lays lines and the developer says they will be in place by the end of November, 2009. Curiously, the local PLDT folks apparently know nothing about the promise so we’re temporizing.
In this case, “temporizing” means relying on a 4G wireless service called WeRoam. It sort of works, sometimes! Typical connection speeds are on the order of 10 kbps. Know how long it takes to load a typical web page at 10 kbps? I hope you never have to find out. And, there are a couple other kickers; the phone number we were given for customer service is out of service, they don’t respond to emails, and even in the best of times the service cuts off every few minutes requiring a reboot to reestablish a connection. Of course, the clock doesn’t stop clicking when the service disconnects so we’re paying for connection time while playing solitaire.
Sorry if I sound a little grumpy! I’m offline now because the modem cannot connect and I don’t know when I’ll be online again.
Ah well, there’s one good thing about WeRoam. I’m spending more time walking my dog than usual.
Seriously, we do have an Internet connection occasionally. In addition to checking my emails, updating my website, and posting an occasional blog entry, I catch a lot of news when I can. WashingtonPost.com, NYTimes.com, and LATimes.com fill my need for news and left-leaning commentary but I balance things with Fox.com and Yahoo news.
In moments of connectedness, I also download a variety of podcasts. From PBS, I get Bill Moyer’s Journal and I’m also fond of NPR’s Science Friday along with NBC’s Meet the Press, This Week in Tech, and This Week with George Stephanopoulos.
I’ve also grown fond of my e-book. It’s an older, RCA model nearing the end of its life, but continues to serve me well. The only real deficit is that it uses RB formatted texts and only a handful of publishers that still support the format. I’ve just about exhausted the selection on the Baen Free Library, but I’ve recently purchased a handy program, ABC Amber PDF Converter. ABC Amber converts PDF documents to the RB format and I read now a lot of classic literature digitized by the Gutenberg Project as well as archaeological literature from the Internet Archive.
Oh well, that’s life in the Philippines. I see the contractor next door has decided to dispose of refuse on my lot and its time to go vent my frustrations on him.