The Moment You Finally Check There is always a small moment of hesitation before checking grades. You log in.You find the page.You hover over the link for a second. Even when you think things are going well, graduate school has a way of surprising you. Sometimes pleasantly. Sometimes not. So this week I checked my midterm grades for the Spring
The Moment You Realize Nothing Is Moving There comes a point when you realize you are writing the same story over and over again. Different headline.Different politician.Same damn outcome. For a while I wrote a lot about Philippine politics. Corruption, dynasties, performative outrage, the usual cycle of promises followed by disappointment. At first it felt necessary. Maybe even useful. Writing
Something interesting just happened in the world of maps. Ask Maps and immersive navigation were recently introduced by Google as part of the continued evolution of Google Maps. The announcement was described in Google’s official blog post, “Ask Maps: Immersive navigation powered by AI,” published on the Google Blog. On the surface, it looks like another shiny feature. AI answers
The Academic Finish Line After Fall 2026, something strange will happen. I will officially be done with school. Not “taking a break.”Not “considering another program.”Not “thinking about a certificate.” Done. At that point I will have earned two undergraduate degrees and two master’s degrees. That is already more time in classrooms, lecture slides, discussion boards, and research papers than I
The problem started the way these things usually do. Crystal Reports stopped working. The server was reachable. You could ping it. SQL Server was up. Nothing obvious was broken, yet reports refused to run and kept throwing SSL and connection errors that looked vague enough to be annoying but serious enough to block real work. Ping working did what it
It Starts With Good Intentions Spring break begins the same way every year. You tell yourself this will be the week where everything gets organized. You will get ahead on readings. You will outline papers. You will clean up your notes and maybe even get a head start on that project that has been quietly sitting in the syllabus since
While I was watching some CCNA tutorial videos, I noticed something strange. The instructor was clearly speaking, the audio meter was moving, and the volume icon on my Ubuntu laptop proudly claimed it was at 100%. And yet the sound was barely audible. This is not the kind of problem you expect in 2026. We have gigabit internet, cloud computing
Spring break is upon us. So what does a grad student and full-time IT administrator do when escaping the usual cycle of late nights, research papers, production systems, and those mysterious alerts that only happen at 2:17 AM? We game. Because after weeks of debugging networks, writing GIS papers, and explaining (again) that yes, rebooting sometimes fixes things, the only
It’s been a while since I posted about Linux, or networking, for that matter. Between grad school and work projects, blogging about networking and Linux kinda took a back seat. But I’m still working on improving my networking and Linux chops, along with everything else. The learning never really stops… yay. (Yes, I am somewhat still able to find gaps
When people talk about evictions, the conversation usually focuses on numbers. We hear about eviction rates, percentages, and housing statistics. But those numbers rarely show where these problems are happening. That is where Geographic Information Systems (GIS) become useful. GIS helps us move beyond simple statistics and see the geography behind social issues. By mapping eviction rates, we can start