Mourning data loss

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Data loss hurts. Since most of the stuff I do is digital, it’s almost synonymous to losing valued notebooks, journals, and photo albums on which you’ve invested much time and effort to chronicle your thoughts and your life.

It took me a while before I decided to hop on the smart phone bandwagon. I waited quite a while before I decided to go for the Samsung Galaxy S4 when it was time for me to renew my mobile plan.

I was pretty happy with it for several months and never really had any issue with it. I love Android and how I can customize it to my whim and I pretty much synchronized all my digital data in it.

I have the 16GB model and since the operating system took nearly half of the storage, I placed a 32 GB Kingston SD Class 4 card in it to store documents and pictures. The 13 megapixel camera eats quite a lot of space at full resolution and highest quality so the SD card was just the way to go.

That was, until yesterday when suddenly I got the dreaded “SD card unexpectedly removed” error message. First time I got that error and all it was when I left my phone charging and apparently got a call. Checked the storage settings and the options for the external card was just grayed out.

So I did all the reboot, eject-reinsert card, take battery out routines to no avail. I used an external micro SD card adapter to use it on my laptop’s card reader, inserted it in other phones and USB dongles but all those couldn’t detect the card. I was really hoping that, at worst, there would just be some data corruption and that I’d still be able to recover some of my files but the mere fact that devices wouldn’t even detect the “presence” of the card meant it’s a goner.

I tried an old 4GB card into the phone and it works on the phone so I don’t really know which fried my card but this issue on Galaxy phones seems to be well documented regardless of brand or class of the micro SD card used.

It just sucks that my routine backup was scheduled yesterday afternoon, just hours before. I hindsight, I shouldn’t have skimped on mobile data consumption and synched my documents and photos to Dropbox so as to have automated backup redundancy.

Data loss is still a loss and I am in mourning.

Photo grab

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This Mark Joseph Solis guy is just unbelievable. No one wants to see other people take credit for one’s craft. He went full retard when he lifted other people’s photographs, entered them in contests under his name, won, and took home the prizes acceptance speeches and all.

Oh how UP netizens erupted at the news of a fellow Iskolar committed what is considered a heinous crime in the academe. (Remember when we all were up in arms when a senator allegedly lifted his speech from sources?) Almost no one finds his apology sincere or valid (except for this guy, who is probably as whacked as Solis).

Society will definitely shape one’s own morality but it can never be used as an excuse to justify an act of this nature especially since Solis is supposed to be educated. His moral compass is obviously malfunctioning. And what has the University got to do with it? Why should he always be introduced as a “UP graduate?” Why can’t he just be a thief?

As a writer, teacher, and student of photography, I find his actions deplorable. As an orphan, I find his excuse unacceptable.

Shallow draughts

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Having worked in the education industry (oxymoron?) for a decade makes me think of the little hypocrisies of what we do. Make it a case of semantics but what is really the difference of sharing knowledge for the enlightenment of the ignorant versus aggrandizing oneself as a guru after “shallow draughts.”

I really would like to avoid the trap of “a little learning.” Let the great Alexanders think alike.

A little learning is a dang’rous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.

-Alexander Pope

I feel that it’s more pertinent than ever. Especially with Google and Wikipedia and pirated books and Coursera. It is so easy to learn about something for free what you might have paid a pound of flesh for a few years back. To some extent, I think the Internet has been a far richer resource for me and the things I wanted to know than my nine years in university. But with all these at our fingertips (quite literally), how can we truly resist the entitlement to expertise?

Just yesterday, I joked at work about playing the role of experts and how we have a tendency of assuming that role after we “mastered” a Wikipedia article and skimmed through Coursera videos at 1.8x speed. And it’s true. Probably all of us suffer from that cognitive bias. But I guess there are differences between the generous and those just placating egos.

Humility for one. I have encountered respected personalities in their field shun the idea of expertise. Rather, they value their wealth of experience of both mistakes and successes.

Pragmatism is another. Context is key and knowing and telling audiences that things might just work most of the time and not all of the time encourages critical thinking first over haphazard doing.

Learning is yet another. Piggybacking on humility. Most of these personalities state that they continue to be students of their field. They continue to fail and they continue to learn from mistakes.

Finally, action.

Talk about drinking deep.

The Push

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Oh, the plateau. The realization that things have gone stale and stagnant to the point where you begin to sniff yourself just to check if you have started smelling of mothballs and mildew. I have been feeling that for the past few years ever since I earned my masters. Not that I am considering getting a doctorate since I have actually lost my drive in doing anything academic.

But it is that general lack of perceived growth and learning. Probably why over the past couple of months, I am becoming a seminar junkie. Credit the wife for introducing me to those one-to-two day seminars. We started out with a basic photography seminar and, just last week, a seminar on real estate. And we just signed up for a food photography class next month.

I was not a fan of those since, being a driven autodidact, I prided in teaching myself all the other skills that allow me to function in a myriad of ways in my life. Maybe it is the thrill of learning something new. Something different. But deep down, I know it is more of being schooled by people who are experts in their fields. (Yes. Amazingly, I do have the humility to admit that some people are smarter than me.)

I thrive well in competition. To push myself, I often find myself creating some friendly opposition just to see how I could rise above. I had been doing it academically since grade school when my parents pushed me with that way of thinking albeit in a more negative and destructive way. In high school, I “competed” against my good friend Abet. He got better grades than I did, graduated with higher honors but that pushed me to put in more effort in study. In college, a guy named Bryan and I had our game of paramihan ng uno just to see who gets more 1.0/A+ grades in a semester. I graduated with high honors.

People’s praise and flattery can get to you quite badly especially when they regard you as being really good at plenty of things. Thinking (and knowing) that you are the smartest guy in the room does not do you any favors. The moment that happens, it is the start of that creep towards stagnation and dusty death. Smug bastardy.

I want that push. I need that push. I miss that kind of jostling. The unfortunate thing is that I do not have that kind of character in my life. Family and friends do not count. You do not compete with your precious friends. You just do not.

Probably why out-of-my-field seminars are my meth these days. At least in those rooms, I am not the smartest guy.

Pigs

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A moment of slacktivism formulated in melancholy. Quick hits. Just to get the writing juices trickling. Again. Hopefully.

***

Today is Araw ng mga Bayani. Day of Heroes. I remain a history nut. I did conquer Philippine history quiz bees in my youth. However, a more mature and informed understanding of our history has led me to become jaded and a bit less proud of the narrative of the past half-century.

I guess all of these stories about Janet Lim-Napoles in this pork barrel scandal became the tipping point to many a taxpayer. There should always be a time when one just gets mad. Mad as hell. (Oh yes. Before The Newsroom, there was that.)

I did experience having to wait until payday to eat and it is one of the most unpleasant feelings any honest laborer could feel. As part of the middle class, I get livid, nay, incandescent with rage, whenever I read or hear about news of corruption. For far too long, I have parted with my hard earned money for earning it (income tax) and to buy anything (VAT).

Then you see how these people flaunt their extravagant lifestyles and wealth (the source of which have no other seeming logical explanation than through graft)… Gut wrenching. And what is up with every pro-pork politician referring to these funds as if they were entitled to the money. Such false sense of entitlement to impunity.

It’s our money, damnit. I need a money-back guarantee.

***

I agree that the pork barrel fund should be abolished but realistically, I think that our government needs widespread reform on how our taxes should be spent. Just to play devil’s advocate, if ever the pork gets scrapped, where do we allocate these funds? Back to the executive?

If so, then there should be foolproof safeguards that will ensure that no cent will be lost to graft. It’s not like the executive is graft-proof either.