KENNETH PORIO | the blog

 Maria Ressa , outgoing ABS-CBN News and Current Affairs chief, was featured in a special episode of ANC's STORYLINE . The stories that shaped her, from her childhood, her education at Princeton University, her stint at the Probe Team, her career at CNN, and her leadership in ABS-CBN News. I watched this episode on ABS-CBN while I was staying in a relative's house in rural Panabo City. I tweeted that whole evening about the powerful messages Ressa has shared in that special. She is beyond compare when she relayed this statement, to quote: I am a journalist... I am also a Filipino. Another quote, relating to the August 28 hostage crisis: Women have more balls than men .  That's to relate women currently leading TV news organizations in the country, namely Maria Ressa in ABS-CBN, Jessica Soho of GMA and Luchi Cruz-Valdez in TV5. Enjoy watching the 3-part video on YouTube. Feature in this blog is the first part of the special. KENNETH

CNN's Christiane Amanpour on Maguindanao massacre, last November 24, 2009. She interviewed Maria Ressa, former ABS-CBN news chief and former CNN reporter, and Mustafa Haji Abdinur, Somalian journalist. What on earth spurred this massacre in southern Philippines?  -Christiane Amanpour Part 1: Part 2: KENNETH

November 16, 2004. I was back from school. From pissing off another classmate, and happy serving the Chinese department. I glued to the TV. Looking at very graphic scenes. My young mind wondered what it was. It was from a hacienda. Haciendas were a teleserye fantasy. Rich people live there. But no . I was wrong. The real people who live in these fields were peasants, struggling for living. Ang maralitang mamamayan. Nais makamtan ang kapayapaan. Laban sa mapanupil na kapitalista. Huwag kaming palayasin , hiyaw ng mga maralitang manggagawa, ngunit ang pamahalaa'y bingi sa kanilang sigaw. Gunshots. Bang. Bang! Stones. Klunk. Klunk! Blood and Gore. Splat. Splat! And death laughed at them. Twelve farmers. Two children. Drowned by their own blood. Good riddance to their lives, Gloria taunts them. But we will never bade goodbye to their struggles. It's still there, crying in anguish and pain. Where is katarungan? Saan na ba siya? She may be ...

March 2010. I flunked my final examination. I ruined my practical laboratory exam. I almost destroyed an IC. I wanted to pass...but it was not enough. Just because... ...my mind was jumbled between 0101 0110 1010 1010... ...and John 14:12, and Philippians 4:13, and Romans 13:1. ...between an adder-subtractor, ...a cup of Java, ...and winning souls and making disciples. I lost the battle. I was perked up. I was drunk. But I didn't sober up. I didn't recover. Five. Cinco. Cinque. Go. Wu. Lima. Singko. I made another failure. June 2010. Done with the failure.   I'm looking at new possibilities. Fell in love with Scheme. Fell in love with Prolog. Fell in love with Ruby. Fell in love with Python. Fell in love with PHP. Fell in love with MySQL. Fell in love with Maxima. I was so in love with languages. Again. Felt like the C was a stone's throw away. Then I moved on. I wanted to enjoy life before I leave this school. So, I shar...

Sinabe ko na nga ba... Windows is as evil as Mac! Nang sumulpot si Linux in the computing world, with its many distributions or flavors, biglang naiba ang pananaw ng maraming mamamayan sa paggamit sa personal computer sa kanilang sari-saring pamumuhay. Sumulpot ang maraming Free and Open-Source Software na naging pang-kiliti ng masa sa kasalukuyan katulad ng Mozilla Firefox, OpenOffice.org, GIMP, Audacity, at iba pa . At habang nangyari ang mga ito, Windows was having thoughts to partner up with Mac due to the increasing competition against the FOSS movement. So they did. Kahit pangit pa rin tingnan ang Windows 7 at kahit nakaklula ang mga graphics ng Mac OS X 10.7 Snow Leopard, they are still closed-source, proprietary software!  Linux, along with its FOSS peers, is persecuted by the increasing aggressiveness of proprietary software providers - bilking users of their freedoms and their money. While these worldviews of these major operating systems differ, there i...