Fats, Vitamins and Minerals

Alwin’s 7th birthday today and he’s having a birthday party on Saturday. So I quickly made a greeting card for him, a drawing of Edward and Maria’s tails on the front and inside are Edward and Maria greeting him a happy 7th birthday. When I gave it to him he asked what he might be able to do with it - my goodness! I suppose he was expecting a real gift. I told him he’ll get his gift on Saturday. My partner and I got two books for him, one about making prints and the other about games (indoor games, outdoor games, thinking games).

In the meantime, I have accepted defeat with regards to my blue-dress-in-progress. Obviously, I will need much more time to finish it, let alone figure out how to structure and shape it. Quite tough, really, since the blue dress is very very soft and the crocheted layer can get rather heavy, thus pulling the sheer soft underlayer down in an unflattering shape.

So, it will be my new white crocheted skirt for my auntie’s 75th birthday on Friday (and not Saturday as I earlier thought, how stupid! )

Work on my ukay-ukay* blue dress is moving along but rather slowly. I truly hope that I’ll finish it in time for my auntie’s 75th birthday celebration. It’s a formal dinner dance party and my partner already has his barong tagalog ready. We bought the barong together nearly two years ago especially for the BSP book launch. It proved very useful since my partner was able to use it again for a conference in Chungli, Taiwan.

Anyway, below is a photo of the crochet layer I am making for the blue dress. Hopefully, it will prove to be very useful for other special ocassions too.

If the dress doesn’t make it by Saturday, I do have Plan B. I could instead use the white filet crochet skirt with one of my old knitted tops, and then that lovely embroidered shawl that Jen gave me in Taiwan.
In the meantime, in between crocheting, I have been busy reading up on the computerized elections debacle. Quite a distraction from what I was doing earlier which was a piece on the intellectual property rights regime and the arts.

I must admit that I have become a horribly slow worker. I used to be able to work within deadlines, work best under pressure, but now … I read somewhere that open-source initiatives worked best under conditions of no pressure especially since there are no commercial motivations for pursuing the work.

Recently, I received invitations from friends to participate in some art conferences in Singapore and Germany. Initially, I accepted but later begged off. In the midst of my crochet, writing, cooking, I imagined the assumption of the tasks at hand for the events. I entered into a sphere of panic. My stomach rioted. The space between my heart and my stomach felt like it would collapse. I couldn’t eat properly.

Worse of all, I couldn’t continue my crochet properly.

And I love my crochet work.
Things are much better now, that conference responsibilities are unburdened. Perhaps another time. Or perhaps I really can’t rush around with too much work anymore, and have more satisfaction without the pressure.

My partner met Estrella Solidum at the supermarket a few weeks ago. An expert on the ASEAN (known as “Ms. ASEAN” ), she wrote the definitive book on the subject (I tink shortly after her retirement) and now has just finished the manuscript for her memoirs. She is 79 years old. Few months ago we met Ding Roces at Heber’s house and he too is writing a new book.
If I live up to 79 that would be 40 long years away, nearly another lifetime. Maybe I’ll write that book someday, surely I’ll make thousands of dresses and Prince Edward bags. Maybe I’ll soon visit the Green Book Center in Tripoli.

But for now, I have a blue dress to finish for Saturday. I hope.

Ukay-Ukay is Visayan for “sift through” or “dig up.” Up north the term is wag-wag, “to dust off.” You find the best bargains by digging them out of a pile and dusting them off. But the imagery is vintage 80’s or earlier. The business has come a long way since then.
In the trade’s early years, ukay-ukay referred to garments shipped to the Philippines as donations from some charitable group to help refugees and calamity victims. Soon enough, overseas workers learned to collect used clothing, preferably with designer labels, before it got to the Goodwill stores, and send it to the Philippines in balikbayan boxes. Entrepreneurial friends and relatives would buy in bulk, then sell by the piece to the public.
Traders also persuaded non-government organizations to act as allies. The NGOs would obtain government permission to receive hefty quantities as donations, supposedly for distribution to needy communities, and therefore shielded from heavy tariffs on imported products. This is how the ukay-ukay vendor can sell through flea markets and tiangge at rock-bottom prices.

- From Ukay-ukay, Jaime S. Ong /

I have taken a closer and calmer look into the computerized elections issue and have written replies to the PCIJ Special Feature on Elections 2007 below. Sorry about the previous post, having been quite emotional over the issue when I first read the article by Ruben Canlas. The debates on the electoral process is extremely important and should be taken seriously by all citizens.

My comments re: The Case for Computerized Elections by Ruben D. Canlas, Jr.
PCIJ Special Feature http://pcij.org/i-report/2007/computerized-polls.html

“(Or, If We Can Use Cell Phones to Vote for Stars, Why Can’t We Use Them to Vote for Our Leaders?)”

Why? Because the country’s leadership is not a variety show or a song contest. But some people (especially those in the business of selling cell phones and compuerized voting systems) seem to think otherwise and want us to think otherwise.

“Our electoral system scores very low in the evolutionary ladder, second only to the plastic ballot boxes I recently saw being used in Africa, and voting by a show of hands.”

An MIT/Cal Tech study done in 2001 shows that manually counted paper ballots are the most accurate system out of the 5 systems used in the last 4 presidential elections. They are totally verifiable, and first-world nations across the globe still use them, including Canada which counted their last presidential election in four hours. (from http://why-war.com/news/2003/10/25/abriefhi.html)

“Last April, the commission even caused ripples in the global geek ecology when it invited hackers all over the world to try breaking into the Internet voting system, which runs from July 10 to 30.”

No hacker will take this bait. If a hacker/cheater wants to compromise the system, he/she will do it on election day.

“In contrast, in an electronic process, computerized ballots and returns can be embedded with encryption keys that give off a warning signal when they have been compromised. The Comelec could also opt to publish the process on the Web. Citizens could then visit the site to independently check the results. They could review electoral returns in their precinct and even their own ballot (by entering a personally registered password).”

No amount of encryption can protect votes from the most basic of problems that can happen with computerized systems: software programming errors, and power shutdowns. A denial-of-service attack can put a server down, and a crashed Meralco cable (accident or otherwise) can keep you from voting, checking your votes on the website.

And there are ways of rigging ALL methods of voting: the paper ballot system, the lever machines, the punch card system. But the most sophisticated rigging can only take place with computerized systems. Why? Because you can rig much more votes at once. That’s what computers are good at: the processing of millions of data in an instant.

How? See Bev Harris, BLACK BOX VOTING. Chapter 5. “Cyber-Boss Tweed. 21st Century Ballot-Tampering Techniques.”

“Instead, government could have preferred to use Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). FOSS will cost a fraction of the price tag of a patented system. It will also allow many techies to join in the process, check the software for security holes, and patch it efficiently and at less cost to the government.”

Even with FOSS, computerized voting systems are the least transparent of the various other methods of voting. Within the current paper ballot system, it takes no special technical training to see that there is something unusual going on in every step of the voting process, from casting of ballots to hand counting. But with computerized systems, recognizing vote fraud will need special training. So, if, as the author says, “cheating already exists in our election culture, whether technology is there or not”, then why should we change to a technology that only makes cheating more invisible? Why should we change to a computerized system that only makes the process of proving fraud more difficult?

The author says: “In fact, we can use the strengths of computers to solve the most persistent headaches we always face during elections: slow count, high costs, miscommunication, and recurring human error.”

Then I see no need for computerized voting because all these “persistent headaches” can be addressed with the current paper ballot system. Speeding up counting should NEVER be taken as an excuse for lesser transparency and taking the electoral process itself (and not just the computer code!) more and more away from public scrutiny. Why should I want to have a candidate declared a winner as quickly as two days when that means taking away my right to see the ballots actually being cast and the counting and canvassing actually done by people on the ground?

I prefer that, as is happening now, vigilant citizens are protesting what they see as vote fraud in their various precints, cities and regions. Our right as citizens go beyond simply casting the vote; we need to guard our vote all the time and that is our duty. Watching the COUNTING PROCESS is our pleasure, and that should never be taken away from us.

“Let’s be clear on one thing. In the real world - as it is in the electronic world - nothing is absolutely secure. … The same reasoning applies to the digital world: we can conduct electronic transactions with an acceptable degree of security and risk.”

So, what is the argument for computerized elections other than the interests of our business and political fascists?

Fatima Lasay
korakora.org

PS. Computerized / automated voting systems should be declared illegal because they hide the crucial counting process from public view, when law deems that vote counts should be public and open.

Just saw this article and I can’t believe the amount of idiocy in it. Sorry I can’t help it but this is just unbelievable.

“PCIJ: The case for computerized elections
Ruben D. Canlas, PCIJ, 05/20/2007 | 11:06 AM

WHEN IT comes to new consumer trends and communication technology, we Filipinos are always at the cutting edge. Our fashion mimics the latest from the West. We quickly took to texting, blogging, and Friendster. The children of our wealthy and middle-class families sport iPods and PSPs, while the rest of us use hi-tech mobile phones to vote on Philippine Idol and play SMS contests. Ironically, while we have toppled government leaders by texting, we cannot seem to use technology to vote them in place. Our electoral system scores very low in the evolutionary ladder, second only to the plastic ballot boxes I recently saw being used in Africa, and voting by a show of hands. Our system is in dire need of a makeover, one that is worthy of the Internet age. Even the Commission on Elections (Comelec) thinks so, although it somehow always shoots itself in the foot every time it tries to bring up the subject. The good news is this July, Comelec is finally going to test an Internet voting system with Filipinos working in Singapore. The plan is not exactly flawless, but it’s still a step in the right direction. As expected, too many naysayers complain loudly whenever computerization and elections are mentioned in the same breath. Their main beef: computerization will make cheating easier. If their assertion is accurate, how come no politician has ever tried stealing via Internet banking?”

Some quick notes about the PCIJ article:

1. The US, which is at the top of the abovementioned so-called “evolutionary ladder of electoral systems”, employs computerized elections and is in deep shit. Why on earth are so many Filipino people, after being kicked, lied to, cheated, robbed and raped by the US government, continue to see the US as a progressive land of the free?
2. We didn’t topple a government through texting, it was the desire and mobilization of the people and ESPECIALLY the military support for the public outrage that forced Erap out of power. Besides, if this took place hundred years back, we’d have used smoke signals to gather people for a coup, a rally or an orgy.

3. And here is where all logic curl up and die!!!!: “Their main beef: computerization will make cheating easier. If their assertion is accurate, how come no politician has ever tried stealing via Internet banking?”

NB. I hope to be able to write something more indepth with regards to “computerized elections” and fervently hope that we don’t go down the path of institutionalized fraud as what seem to be taking place in what people like the author of the article above call “progressive countries like the US.” To be very honest, I still cannot understand how even so-called educated Filipinos continue to extol the US, the American lifestyle and the American way. For me, the American Land of Opportunity is so well summed up by HL Mencken in his classic essay “On being American”, where he writes:

Here the business of getting a living … is enormously easier than it is in any other Christian land—so easy, in fact, that an educated and forehanded man who fails at it must actually make deliberate efforts to that end. Here the general average of intelligence, of knowledge, of competence, of integrity, of self-respect, of honor is so low that any man who knows his trade, does not fear ghosts, has read fifty good books, and practices the common decencies stands out as brilliantly as a wart on a bald head, and is thrown willy-nilly into a meager and exclusive aristocracy. And here, more than anywhere else I know of or have heard of, the daily panorama of human existence, of private and communal folly—the unending procession of governmental extortions and chicaneries, of commercial brigandages and throat-slittings, of theological buffooneries, of aesthetic ribaldries, of legal swindles and harlotries, of miscellaneous rogueries, villainies, imbecilities, grotesqueries and extravagances—is so inordinately gross and preposterous, so perfectly brought up to the highest conceivable amperage, so steadily enriched with an almost fabulous daring and originality, that only the man who was born with a petrified diaphragm can fail to laugh himself to sleep every night, and to awake every morning with all the eager, unflagging expectation of a Sunday-school superintendent touring the Paris peep-shows. (From the Wikipedia entry)

In the meantime, I include some relevant links below on the US automated elections, and recommend to read Automating the counting of votes can make things worse and Computerizing future elections by Roberto Verzola.

Some relevant info:

How They Could Steal the Election This Time - Ronnie Dugger
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040816/dugger
On November 2 millions of Americans will cast their votes for President in computerized voting systems that can be rigged by corporate or local-election insiders. Some 98 million citizens, five out of every six of the roughly 115 million who will go to the polls, will consign their votes into computers that unidentified computer programmers, working in the main for four private corporations and the officials of 10,500 election jurisdictions, could program to invisibly falsify the outcomes.

Democracy In Danger — Computerized Elections and Institutionalized Vote-Fraud
by Lee Goldberg
http://www.analogzone.com/nete0721.htm

A Brief History of Computerized Election Fraud
http://why-war.com/news/2003/10/25/abriefhi.html
Victoria Collier | Truthout | October 25, 2003
“Squadrons of shiny new Touch Screen Trojan horses are being rolled into precincts across America. Not, as we are told, to make voting easier or more accurate, or to help disabled people vote privately, or to save America from the dangers of hanging chad and butterfly ballots — no. The real reason America is being flooded with billions of dollars worth of paperless computerized voting machines is so that no one will ever again be able to prove vote fraud.”

Vote fraud research
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
The book Black Box Voting by Bevis Harris is available as PDF.

I stayed over at my mom’s last weekend, to pick up some mail and see how everyone’s doing. Four of my brother’s five kids were there. It’s always fun and lively having kids in the house.

Also the time to inspect the plants, and flowers are blooming. Particularly nice is the plant that my partner and I grew from seed in a pot and that Gemma later transplanted to the ground at the back of the house. This is probably the second time that it is blooming. More pups are sprouting from the ground too.

And the real surprise are two large onion-like flowers in lovely red color. One grew in a pot at the side of the house and another in front among the pots of tigertails.

The cactus was also a pleasant surprise, wildly letting out pups all over!

Then of course, I had to look for George. Lazy old George. I couldn’t find him and looked everywhere. Then when I started looking in the garden for nice things to photograph, there he was, asleep among the tigertails! According to Asel, he started sleeping there since mice (or probably rats) began hiding in the garden.

And when I looked for Fortun, I caught him about to go to the neighbor’s. Our cats usually go out for toilet activities.

Got up early today, quarter to six. When I looked out the window the white flowers of the calamansi tree were in bloom!

I made some changes to the blog’s design today - apart from switching to the old colors, I changed the banner image to something really bright and yellow - the luscious seed of a sweet ripe mango.

Missed by typhoon Amang, but the day it was closest the country, I woke up around 6AM and felt like I was in a surrealistic dream. Everything was, in the most objective sense, quite ordinary, but the feeling of strangeness was overwhelming. Everything was strange. The room, the objects in the room, the trees outside, the wind, the sounds. Although the only truly strange thing was that it was overcast and breezy, strange because it was officially still summertime, I thought it worryingly strange that there was not a single human sound outside, when mornings should be full of the sounds of humans talking, calling to each other for breakfast, playing, readying for the day.

I could only hear the sound of motors outside - the jeepneys, tricycles, motorcycles, and I thought deeply how wrong it was. Then there was the sudden sound of a car passing and voices of people in it shouting, having fun it seemed. Even that sounded like they were being massacred, escaping from something horrible.

Only several days later did I realize that the surreal feeling was not only due to the prospecting typhoon, but was because I felt strongly that the mornings should sound like it does in Purok Malakas in General Santos City.

There, everyone woke up very early and by 5AM the folks are preparing for breakfast, or off to work and the kids are playing noisily. Our closest neighbors didn’t seem to own cars so there was rarely the sound of automobiles but only the occasional sound of the tricycle with arriving passengers. In the calmness, you will always hear the birds and the wind. At night, there seemed only one house with one airconditioner and so the calm night air was rarely disturbed by stressful humming. It was so quiet at night that the sound of the refrigerator sounded to me like the roaring of a monster, and the water cooler/dispenser sounded like a stove heating up.

That near-typhoon morning I must’ve been missing GenSan.

But the sounds here at our apartment blocks are beautiful in their own way. It is always pleasing to hear the sound of the ice shaver near the streets where they are selling halo-halo, cool refreshment for the summer. It is less frequent now since it has been raining and has gotten cooler.

And the sounds of drama, excitement among the neighbors: late last night was the long sad crying of a young girl and the soft consoling sounds of elderly people, perhaps her parents.

The various sneezing sounds now have personalities attached to them when I hear them. Whenever possible, I proudly and loudly contribute my own.

The dark blue car parked at night on the sidewalk next to our window made horrible alarm sounds whenever a large car passed near it. Now the sounds are not horrible but rather funny. So ridiculously funny that someone sets his car alarm on perpetually at night so as to announce to the sleeping public that he has a new blue car with sidewinders.

At around half past 4 in the morning is the melodius singing of the white-browed fantail. This morning was different, the fantail was on a tree right next to our window and I could hear another sound, another bird, replying with a lizard-like call at the end of the melodius song. I have heard an angry fantail once, and I saw my cat George immitating the sound of this angry call while looking at the bird.

Lizard sounds starting at 6PM is always a source of amusement for me, when, as folklore says, all the lizards go down to kiss the ground. Later in the evening are the cicada sounds, some incredibly loud. And most amusing were the cat sounds late at night. The fighting and mating sounds are most impressive, some can sound feline at the beginning and transform into almost human sounds. One of the most impressive was a long feline call that ends with a loud baby-like cry. Really fantastic, nearly an inspiration for the mythical tyanak.

I love sounds. Sometimes the sounds are unbearable, but I love sounds.

Several years ago when I still ran a BBS (it was on-line from around 10PM to 8AM), I loved hearing the sound of the modem, the sound of my computer’s hard-disk as somebody logs in, and the sound of the texts and ansi graphics scanning down the screen. Sometimes I lay in bed just listening, and often even knew who was on-line just by the sound of the screen and the harddisk.

In the Cold War, Russian spies could supposedly decipher a message from the sounds of a teletype machine or an impact printer. With wireless communications these days, I guess one doesn’t really need a good ear anymore.

And I love smells too, except that there is too much pollution here. The smell of evening flowers in the gardens here around the aprtment blocks are beautiful, as well as the various cooking smells. But my sense of smell often gets knocked-out for reasons still unknown to me. I wake up and cannot smell anything for several hours sometimes nearly the whole day. Perhaps an advantage when it comes to unwanted smells, but not really any defense when it comes to air pollution and inhaling particulate matter.

For now, it is enough to relish the world of sounds…

After hundreds of years, I finally finished (I think) the white crocheted skirt that I started working on nearly two months ago. I have been working very slow so as not to stress my hands. Below is a photo of Maria peeking under the white crocheted skirt and a photo of myself (looking awfully nerdy!) wearing the pink and beige skirt which I crocheted 4 months ago. This last photo was taken by my partner few days ago when we visited the rooftop parking again at SM North EDSA. With me in the photo, of course, is Edward.

It has been quite a while since I posted anything on this blog under the “Needleworks” category. Even Edward hasn’t been able to update his Crochet and Computability Blog! Anyway, the pattern for this pink and beige skirt is based on the Easy Scalloped Skirt by Monica Welle Brown at Crochet Today. The pattern is so easy to do, it is most suitable for beginners. All I did was make the skirt shorter and use thicker yarn (so the openwork in the pattern is not too obvious and so one need not use a lining for the skirt).

The waistband part of the skirt consists of rows of double crochet and the top is lined with scallops. The body of the skirt consists of a pattern made up of three rounds of stacked shells joined together with chain stitches in the third round. Each shell consists of “2 dc, ch 2, 2 dc” in the same stitch or space.

The pattern for the stacked shells is:
Rnd 1 Skip beginning ch-3, *(2 dc, ch 2, 2 dc) in next dc, ch 2, skip next 2 dc; repeat from * 26 (28, 30, 33, 36) more times, end (2 dc, ch 2, 2 dc) in next dc, sk 1 dc, ch 2, join with sc in first dc – 28 (30, 32, 35, 38) shells.
Rnds 2 and 3 Skip next dc, (2 dc, ch 2, 2 dc) in ch-2 space of first shell, *ch 2, (2 dc, ch 2, 2 dc) in ch-2 space of next shell; repeat from * 26 (28, 30, 33, 36) more times, end ch 2; join with sc in first dc - 28 (30, 32, 35, 38) shells.
Rnd 4 Skip next dc, (2 dc, ch 2, 2 dc) in ch-2 space of first shell, *ch 3, sc in ch-2 space between 2 shells two rounds below, ch 3, (2 dc, ch 2, 2 dc) in ch-2 space of next shell; repeat from * 26 (28, 30, 33, 36) more times, end ch 3, sc in last ch-2 space two rounds below, ch 3; join with sc in first dc.
Rnds 5-7 Repeat Rounds 2-4.

By using a larger hook for the next rounds, the shape of the skirt is created. And the colors are made by dropping the main color (pink) and then picking up the alternate color (beige). Improvising is really quite easy, and one can use more colors if desired. Also, perhaps I can do this pattern again using a thinner thread since this is quite thick and can be uncomfortable in warm climate.

Although I like the pink and beige skirt, I really like more the new crocheted white skirt I finished today - the bottom part is patterned after a corset-cover yoke design and the upper part is my own pattern in filet crochet. I will place the pattern on-line soon.

In the meantime, I am starting a new project - an openwork layer for a very sheer blue dress that my partner and I bought from the ukay-ukay few months ago. If I finish this on time I might even be able to wear it to my auntie’s 75th birthday celebration.