Fall does not arrive with leaves. It arrives with latency, pop-up reminders, and professors who post the syllabus three days late and still expect you to be early. There is no chill in the air. Only dread. The kind that smells like old textbooks and tastes like stale coffee. I return to battle. Again. Another graduate program. This time in

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It’s 1 a.m.And ZzzQuil doesn’t work anymore. Not because I’m not tired, but because this isn’t the kind of tired that medicine can fix. It’s the kind that buries itself deep in the bones—quiet, heavy, and always lingering. The kind that keeps you floating between memories and regrets long after the rest of the world has gone to sleep. Most

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We say we are proud to be Filipino. We sing the national anthem with our hands over our hearts.We post old photos on Independence Day.We say “never again” every February, then forget it by March.We tell foreigners about our resilience like it’s a badge of honor, not a wound.We say “Mabuhay ang Pilipinas” — but we’ve long buried the soul

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We’re addicted to shortcuts. We want to be Southeast Asia’s next tech tiger, build AI-powered public services, and throw around buzzwords like “blockchain-enabled procurement” — when most agencies still rely on photocopiers older than Gen Z. We love to say we’re “leapfrogging” into digital greatness. But newsflash:You can’t leapfrog if you haven’t even built the pond.Some communities don’t even have

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“A Brittle and Fragile Future” by Vinton Cerf – Then, Now, and Why It Still Hits (Especially If You’re the IT Guy) Back in 2017, I was still working as a Software Tester—writing test cases, clicking buttons until they broke, and logging bugs developers swore couldn’t possibly exist. I was also a dutiful subscriber to Communications of the ACM, because

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I was supposed to be on a study break. You know, reviewing Azure firewall rules, maybe poking around Wireshark like a good future cybersecurity engineer. Instead… I went on YouTube.Big mistake. Huge. A video popped up: “Old Manila in the 1960s — A Glimpse of the Glory Days.” Cue vintage cars, clean streets, people in barong casually walking down Escolta,

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Because once a graphic designer, forever everyone’s formatting savior. So apparently, if you used to be a graphic designer……and then went into IT, networking, cybersecurity, GIS, database admin, Zoom hosting, and surviving Windows Patch Tuesdays… That doesn’t matter. Because the minute someone in the office hears: “Oh yeah, Teo used to do design work…” Boom. You now own the entire

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