Articles

As Filipinos living in Japan, one thing that we really miss from home is eating unripe mangoes.  The mangoes that are available in Japan are imported from other countries and most, if not all, are already ripe.  There's nothing really wrong with ripe mangoes but for many Filipinos nothing beats the taste of sour, crunchy, mouth-watering green mangoes.  So when Cerg happened to find some green mangoes in a nearby supermarket, she bought them all! (Only two mangoes were left so she took those two.) When Cerg sent me a text message saying she was able to buy big green mangoes, I imagined something like our large Philippine varieties such as carabao and pico mangoes.  I was wrong though because the mangoes looked more like giant Indian mangoes.  Fortunately, they tasted like Indian mangoes too.

It's been a long time since we last bought a CD album.  With the availability of online music stores that sell by the song, we can select and buy only the songs that we really want, leaving out those that we don't.  But with the new album of Charice, there's nothing you would really want left out!

A few weeks ago, Cerg and I happened to watch the initial episode of the TV comedy-drama series , translated in English as "The Japanese Language Unknown to Even the Japanese".  Many foreigners living in Japan will surely be able to relate to this drama series. The drama depicts the experience of Haruko, a former "charisma" shop assistant who is looking for a teaching position at a regular high school.  Haruko's former teacher who is temporarily admitted in a hospital promised to introduce Haruko such a position on the condition that Haruko would first handle a class for her for three months while she is still in the hospital.  Haruko accepted the deal not knowing that the class consisted of foreign students.

Recently, some of my friends have been unknowingly sending strange emails from their Yahoo accounts.  The emails, which contain a link to a suspicious website, are being sent to all email addresses registered in their contact lists. If you've been victimized like some of my friends, you might think that someone has hacked into your account.  However, because of the viral way and the extent to which the problem has spread, it is more likely that a virus or automated spam bots are the culprit.

Two of our client companies have reported a problem regarding the financial software that we are providing them.  We had not been able to reproduce the problem in any of the computers in our company so we had a hard time fixing it.  It was not until after 3 weeks and lots of coffee and tea, that we were able to finally solve it.  The culprit? 's design of the new in . The problem was that a piece of code, which was supposed to run when the Ribbon is loaded, had not been executing as otherwise expected.  Apparently, our clients have been using our software on a small screen resolution and this has resulted in opening in a small window.  When opens in a small window, the Ribbon remains "out of sight", that is, it doesn't get loaded at program startup (figure 1). It is only when is resized to a certain threshold size that the ribbon appears and enters " 's mind" (figure 2).

Yesterday, it was again my turn to lead our Department Chorei.  In case you didn't know, chorei is the Japanese term for the morning assembly or ceremony that is popular among many Japanese companies. Basically, chorei is like the flag ceremony in Philippine elementary schools.  There is, however, no flag (and flag-raising, of course), no singing of the national anthem, and no reciting of panatang makabayan.  These are replaced instead by the reciting of the company vision and mission, attendance checking, and countless bowing.