racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

A few days ago we bought an inexpensive Philips AZ1021 Sound Machine, which has a CD player and an AM/FM tuner. With full-fledged mini and micro component systems at my living room and home office I initially had second thoughts, but given the attractive price of PhP 1,700 (less discounts; price is equivalent to about US$50) I thought it wouldn’t hurt to have one more. I intended this for use in the bedroom, and for Caren’s and Cate’s preschool classroom (their CD player was giving out already).

What’s great about the AZ1021 and most other portable Philips CD players is that they can run on batteries.

Little did we know we’d be very grateful for buying the tuner/CD player that day. We woke up from our sound sleep Saturday night to howling winds and with the power out. I knew there was a storm coming, but I didn’t know it will be hitting Metro Manila directly.

So I dropped in six “C” cells and tuned in to one of the reliable AM stations (DZMM, 630 KHz) to monitor the happenings around the country. Our other tuners at home were either FM-only, or were AC-only, or both, so the Philips was the only one we could use to tune into radio news (except for the car’s AM/FM tuner, of course).

And it turned out we were hit pretty strong. Typhoon Frank was already aground, with storm signal no. 3 in the Metro, bringing about a lot of casualties and injuries here and elsewhere.

And during those times, you would hear the radio commentators/news anchors urging people to go out and get battery-operated radios. You sure would appreciate small pieces of low-tech in these times of crisis.

I’ve been offline since the morning of Thursday, September 28th, 2006 due to the typhoon Milenyo. Our power was cut off 7:00 a.m. and the phone line came down a few hours after that. I just heard this evening that the power and DSL connection are already up, so I can hopefully be able to get online later this evening. I’m just checking up my email inbox to see if I missed anything important.

Isulong SEOPH

I’m at Ortigas, by the way, having some coffee and dessert in the aftermath of the Isulong SEOPH contest awarding. Our entry placed fifth!

Too bad we didn’t get to win the iPod Nano raffled off, though.

The crowd at the awarding wasn’t the usual blog meetup crowd. Well, okay, it was about 50% of the bloggers’ crowd, and the other half comprised the SEO people who were (likely) not really into blogging.

I’ll write about this later on, with some pics to boot. Right now, I’ll be enjoying a cup of coffee and some cake with my lovely wife.

(Just had to get online after three days’ being off the grid.)

Update: No power again!

Looks like I spoke (or wrote) too soon. Only a few hours after power was restored, it’s down again in our area. Must be some transformer that overloaded. Am now on battery connecting via dialup (trying to get in touch with Meralco via their website, but to no avail!). Sigh.