KENNETH PORIO | the blog

Posible ba gayod ya man intiende y man habla Chabacano, mas quien Davaoeño yo?  After many weeks following the Zamboanga crisis, and watching TV Patrol Chavacano , one of their regional news programs produced by ABS-CBN, it seems I now would be able to understand the context of what has been said in each report, simply because I begun to figure out the grammatical structure of the Spanish-based creole. I don't know, but it seems I have this sort of inherent talent to pick context clues in languages that I am not familiar about. The languages of the Philippines are sort of close to each other, plus some of their words loaned from Spanish (owing to 300 years of Spanish rule) that it just needs your keen eyes and ears to learn what any local news reporter meant. Now after a few months on exposing myself to Chavacano news reports, I begun to pick up phrases like if someone died ( "con un persona el ya muri despues..." ), there is rain ( "...quien cay aguacero ...

There were times I just couldn't stand the stress of being in front of my dear lappie, typing and surfing the Web all day finding solutions to my dev problems. I mean, how can you survive staring at that Notepad++ window seeing those eye-straining lines of colour-coded code depicted in oh-so-boring Courier New . Like, can we just change the font to a more legible one or put some colourful character to it as a background? Or at those times when you were desperately looking for a decent WiFi connection around the city for you to download the latest IDE release, the latest XAMPP package, or the recent Ubuntu Linux version, wasn't it painstakingly done? That 800 MB installer through BitTorrent won't cut into your mobile broadband stick's data cap. What a shame. Or fixing the problem with your slow, outdated computer, making stress of repairable defects. The headphone jack is loose, the LCD screen border just cracked, you hardly press the Return key. Can't hel...