Mike Villar: Rising Internet Star

At the time of writing, 73 people have died and over 300,000 people have been displaced by Tropical Storm Ketsana (local name “Ondoy”) that struck the Philippines with heavy, torrential rains on Saturday, September 26, 2009. (link)

Waters rose to as much as 5 meters high in some areas and the Philippines, seeing the worst flooding in over 30 years, was caught unaware. Metro Manila and 5 outlying provinces are now in a state of calamity.

Shanties were washed away and thousands of houses and vehicles were submerged and destroyed by the floods.

Even up to now, there are over 9,000 families taking refuge in evacuation sites and there are thousands of people stranded in the roofs of their houses waiting to be rescued.

[...]

It finally happened. Earlier this month, my family went ahead and hired a stay in maid. Now, this is not the first time that my household had a maid and there was actually a point in time when we had three. Five years ago though, after my parents retired, we had to cut some corners and the maids had to go.

It was quite a transition but, eventually, we were able to adjust and run a tight, clean ship. The fact that I’m a little on the obsessive-compulsive side made sure that my part of the house (my room, my bathroom and some parts of the kitchen) were clean. Really, I can’t sit still until all my shirts are stacked neatly in the dresser or until my bathroom floor is dry after I use it.

However, while my room and bathroom are orderly, I can’t really say they’re clean. You see, I’m really good with maintaining an illusion of order but I really don’t like to go down and dirty. I’m not, for instance, a big fan of cleaning glass. I’m not one to say “You know what, I just finished drinking beer and my glass coffee table is now riddled with circular beer stains because I didn’t use a coaster. You know what, where’s the chamois and the windex? I’m going to go crazy on this bitch!”

I’m also not a big fan of making my bed after I wake up as I see it as a pointless activity considering I’m going to mess it up again in a few hours when I turn in.

This is where Annie, our new maid, comes in and does her shit. For PhP 3,000 a month, she takes care of the dirty business. She makes my bed 5 minutes after I’m out of it. She goes crazy in my bathroom with her little bottle of Zonrox and scrubs the floor until it has this delicate luster to it. She makes sure my table is clean enough to eat rice off of. I’m telling you: this girl means business.

[...]

From what I have observed in myself over the course of me proposing to my girlfriend to now, there are two potentially devastating things about me that could turn my wedding, which is a mere three months away, into one gigantic clusterfuck.

Let me explain: preparing for a wedding isn’t exactly cheap–to put things into perspective, let’s just say that in the last couple of months, I have spent half of what I earn annually booking some of the suppliers I need for my wedding.

All of this would’ve been fine If I was doing really well for myself. Well I could probably say that I sort of am but then again, let’s not forget that I am also paying for the house I bought early last year.

Add the fact that the actual preparations are taxing both mentally and emotionally into the mix and you’ve got yourself the perfect formula for an obese, manic-depressive train wreck waiting to happen. So stay the fuck clear.

Anyway, to cope with all the financial and emotional stress that are weighing heavily down on me, I’ve stepped up to take in more work and made it a point to drink myself into a coma every chance I get.

[...]

Friends, I might be suffering from a medical condition similar to sleepwalking but far more embarrassing and awkward the morning after and deals significantly more damage to the sufferer’s dignity.

Simply put, upon reaching a certain level of drunkenness, I whip out my phone and send SMS to almost EVERYONE on my phone book. Worse, upon reaching an even higher level of inebriation, I end up whipping out my laptop to send messages to random friends on Facebook.

Most of the time, this isn’t a problem as the people I end up sending SMS’s and Facebook messages to are close friends who know me as someone who likes to dick around a lot when I’m drunk and simply scratch their heads and brush my messages off.

It sometimes becomes a problem because of the fact that, creepy as I am, I have managed to amass a contact list of over 500 phone numbers—if we met in a conference 3 years ago and you handed me a business card, chances are that I still have your number. I have the numbers of people from high school I haven’t spoken to since. Worse, I have really old phone numbers of people I don’t even remember meeting (mostly girls—whose listings on my phone only appear as first names).

And, like you probably have already guessed, I sometimes end up sending messages to these people too. Again, to be clear, the messages I send are mostly silly stuff like “yo” or “sup”, but sometimes I get slightly creepy and send out that occasional “what are you doing? I’m at home, wanna drop by for a drink?” There should be no issues with this if the recipient is a friend I speak to regularly; but, if it’s like a CMO of a company I met on a business dinner back in 2006, not so much.

Anyway, I was knocking back a few bottles at home by myself early this week. To cut the story short, the next morning, upon checking the sent items on my phone and my facebook account, I was greeted with two interesting message logs that both read like a lost season of Grey’s anatomy—both were a tale of a complicated romantic web replete with dialogues on the indignity of a struggling relationship.

The kicker—both SMS and Facebook exchanges were between myself and men.

The moral of this story: Do not, ever, trust me with your phone number. Doing so will only result in a clusterfuck of shame and awkwardness for everyone involved.

Posted via email from Rising Internet Star

This could be an open door for the content business. For instance, currently aggregators have to get their news the old fashioned way, through RSS feeds and news alerts that they retrieve throughout the day. That is not realtime news.  Using The Associated Press as an example, AP could post their stories to a HUB. In realtime, the HUB can update member websites so that they will always have information first, before any aggregator.   It may not take long for aggregators to recognize the new data on the member sites, but they won’t have it first.

The Internet is about to change

I never got everyone's obsession with being the "first" to receive news. With the current incarnations of the real time web only being able to provide raw, barely digestible, incoherent information at best; it's almost always better to wait for a credible news agency to aggregate and process everything into something more palatable and useful before being consumed.

Posted via email from Mike Villar: Rising Internet Star – Lite