Cut Internet Cables, Vicious Viruses and One Poor, Lonely Ned in the Philippines

Note to Self:  Don’t ever, ever, EVER drink an entire 1.5 liter bottle of Diet Coke in one afternoon again.  Not getting to sleep until 4 AM is not something we want to be doing again anytime soon.

How’s Ned?
I have gotten a few inquiries into how I am, so I thought I would briefly acknowledge them. In short, Ned is a bit sad, lonely and depressed – you know, the usual state that everyone experiences after a relationship ends.  What’s even worse is that Ned now apparently prefers to have himself referred to in the third person.  This sorry state of affairs might even be more troubling than the lingering melancholy.  Not to fear though, loyal readers, for Ned is going to do his best to resume talking about himself in the first person again as soon as humanly possible!

DSLR Photography
As some of you know, I recently took up DSLR photography.  I’m not very good, but along the way I have somehow managed to shoot a few good photos from among the hundreds I have taken.  All the pictures that you see in this blog entry have been shot by Yours Truly.  (That’s Ned in the third person.)  A few of them might even be considered pretty good. 

YouTube Shite
YouTube is still hitting folks with its “not advertiser friendly” nonsense.  Basically, if any videos are determined to not be ‘advertiser friendly,’  you won’t make any Adsense on them. A few weeks back, I woke up to find eighteen of my videos had been deemed “not advertiser friendly” by the mysterious automated algorithms YouTube utilizes to make such determinations.  A bit piqued (my content is pretty much all G or PG rated), I took YouTube up on their offer to have the videos “manually reviewed” and after a few days, they were all once again approved for Adsense.  Then, after my last Livecast, I got hit once again and requested a manual review.  YouTube did whatever it does (probably another ‘bot’ algorithm) and sadly concluded that the video was indeed not ‘advertiser friendly.’  There is no appeal process after a review, so I was pretty much farked.  This pretty much sucked, as I actually put a good amount of work into prepping for the weekly Livecasts – you can see just how much work goes into the ‘Casts by looking at the last two write up’s HERE and HERE.  I will probably still do the Livecasts, but I just won’t put as much effort into them.  Ass, gas or grass, baby – no one rides for free!!

TRICARE Providers
Timothy White was nice enough to forward the link for TRICARE providers in the Philippines.  If you are a US military veteran and want a listing of where you can go to take advantage of your stupendous military health insurance, simply click HERE to get taken to the Philippines Tricare Site.

Thanks,  Timothy!!

Nasty Bugs
No, I’m not referring to the murderous Huntman spiders shown in my last video vignette – I’m talking here of the virulent virus that has been bouncing around the Philippines and leaving a lot of folks bed ridden.  The variant I got hit with left me with a nasty fever for about four days (alternating body chills and overheating) and sucked the life out of me for about a week and a half. The worst part, though, was the sore throat. It was actually the most severe one I have ever had and it eventually got to the point where I couldn’t swallow solid food.  A $10 USD trip to my dependable Philippines doctor got me a few ‘ahhh’s’ and ‘mmmm’s’ and a five day prescription for Prednisone which IMMEDIATELY took the throat swelling down and allowed me to eat once again.  Yippee – food is good!

Internet Woes
All of the Philippines is experiencing internet slowdowns and outages due to undersea cables being damaged during the typhoon that hit north of the Philippines on August 29.  PLDT and Sky released statements acknowledging the issues and noted that the undersea cables might not be fully repaired until mid-October.  The damage seems to have come from a few large freighters their dragging their anchors during the height of the typhoon which resulted in the cable cuts. I have noticed issues with my own PLDT since, particularly when it comes to Facebook.  Thankfully, I only use Facebook to post Philippine Dreams stuff, so I don’t really have an issue waiting five minutes for the page to load.  What I do have an issue with are the intermittent outages that occur when I am trying to research content for the other sites that I actually work and get paid for.  Waaaaaaah – poor Ned!!! (Dang, third person once again.)

Vendetta Band and Flip Flops
Saturday nights at Flip Flops restobar has become part of my weekly routine.  There’s a usual crew of porenyers that swing by there and chow down on some pretty good grub while listening to the sweet sounds of Vendetta, Flip Flops Saturday night house band.  You might have seen some of the videos I posted of them covering Tattooed on My Heart and Don’t Fall in Love with a Dreamer. They were filmed on my D5100 in low light (with the wrong settings) and the audio picked up a lot of background noise (our dinner crew clowning around and laughing), but despite this, I think the vids convey the quality of some of the live music to be encountered in the Philippines.  The two female vocalists are Marichu and Janet (Janet was absent during the video but is now back) and the two male vocalists are Loloy (on guitar) and Judy (power lead vocals that make the ladies swoon).  Marichu has her own YouTube channel and I think she is going up to Manila soon to take part in a national singing contest/tryout.  Yeah, she’s that dang good.

NOTE: For some reason, Flip Flops recently stopped serving filtered (purified) water as ‘service water.’  I discovered this when the waitress brought over a ‘service water’ and I took a sip.  It tasted awful, and the waitress confirmed that it was indeed tap water.  Caveat emptor, my friends. (Although technically, you are not buying anything when you are getting free service water, so the term might not actually apply…..) Hopefully at some point, Flip Flops will once again offer purified service water. 

OK, so that’s it for this blog entry.  Stay safe, be well and keep dreaming that Philippine dream!

Ned