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For me, Apple means Wozniak, Alexan, and Obet

Doing piegraph on Apple ][ clone
An Apple II clone used two external floppy disk drives – one for the system or program disk, the other for the data files. The monitor could be a plain TV set or a green monochromatic CRT display.

Let me get this straight. Like the rest of the world touched by Apple computers and devices, I mourn the loss of Steve Jobs, as a very intelligent person, and as a visionary designer and marketing guru. But much of the tributes I read coming out after his death are too effusive and at the same time generic, mostly saying nothing new and simply repeating what has already been said in recent years.

To be honest, within a few hours after his death was announced, I had started to suffer a surfeit of tributes to Jobs. At the same time, these tributes lead me to think about how my own computer philosophy was shaped by Apple, however indirectly and incompletely.

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Awesome storms and our obsession with landfalls

Author’s note: This article was first published on my GMANews.TV blog in October 2009. I felt that it remained relevant and so decided to revise and re-submit it to Nordis Weekly. Now that residents of Luzon have just gone through destructive typhoon Pedring, it seems appropriate to report it again, this time in my own Iraia blog.
An airplane's view of the wall of clouds that line the eye of a cyclone. Within the wall, the weather is calm and clear. Notice the blue sky seen from inside the eye. Photo from NOAA.

It is typhoon season once more, and those of us in media who have to file reports on a daily or hourly basis know how it is to be on typhoon-tracking mode—to be familiar with PAGASA terminology, to have some sense of geography, and to be on our toes for those instant weather bulletins.

This triggers in me a memorable if somewhat tragic time in October 2009, when my colleagues and I at GMA News Online were trying to keep up with reportage on two successive typhoons, Pepeng and Ramil. Continue reading “Awesome storms and our obsession with landfalls”

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Lessons from the underground press of the martial law era

“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”

That quote might be a startling, almost cynical take on the meaning of press freedom. But it was a respected American journalist, A.J. Liebling, who coined the now-famous aphorism. The terse statement was supposed to emphasize the harsh realities of capitalist ownership behind the noble expectation that journalists freely exercise their right, nay, fulfill their duty, to always provide the public with honest information and informed opinion.

In any case, little did Filipinos realize just how painfully that saying would apply to them on September 23, 1972. On that fateful Saturday morning, we all woke up to find no newspapers delivered to our doorsteps or sold on the sidewalks. We twiddled our radio sets (in my case, set just right beside my pillow, the better to hear the early morning news), asking with great puzzlement why they only emitted static noise on that morning.

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