Jack The Scribbler

Thanks, Nikka Corsino for this photo.

You just can’t please everyone.
Ask residents of Baguio City, the Philippines’ summer capital.
Everytime a couple of hicks from Manila come up and visit, the locals get complaints about the weather.
It’s either too warm or too cold.
If it’s too warm, they rant about congestion — vehicular and otherwise — and how Baguio’s weather, which attracts more tourists than it can handle, has become the city’s very enemy.
If it’s too cold, they complain about coming down with the flu and how people who live in the tropics aren’t really acclimatized to temperate weather.
If you believe these people, it’s never just right, up there in Baguio City.
Of course, I have a different opinion, having gotten parts of my formal and informal education in one of my favorite cities.
When I arrived last month, everything was perfect.
The weather was cool, the air was crisp, and my accommodations were — how do I put this? — on someone else’s tab.
I stayed in a standard hotel that offered a bathtub, hot water, cable television, and enough coffee to keep me awake for fourscore and seven years.
To what do I owe this undeserved privilege?
I was lucky enough to be chosen to participate in an energy conference organized by a non-government organization.
And no, it was far from being a summer junket.
It was — to use the term of my reporter friends — a nosebleed; one that lasted two days and temporarily stanched only by ice-cold alcoholic beverages.
All throughout the 48 hours, resource persons talked about ancillary charges* and indexation** as though these were widely understood by everyone.
The whole weekend allowed me to grasp these two concepts, however superficially.
Unfortunately, since discussions lasted until after supper, I was unable to hang out with my Baguio-based friends unlike last time.
It may have been all for the better.
After all, I had experienced enough misadventures to fill up a slapstick comedy movie a few hours before.
To reach the venue in time, I had to endure the Victory Liner Bus’s ticket lines.
It wasn’t pleasant.
It had the heavy flavor of a train queue during rush hour, complete with the stench of sweat and the stale air of impatience.
After finally being seated two hours later, I had to deal with a passenger who snored like a diesel engine.
And, upon arriving at three in the morning, tired, sleepy and irritable, I lost my notebook. Apparently, it slipped off my pants’ backpocket and fell onto someone else’s seat.
Good thing the bus conductor had the sense to keep it, failing to rid the world of the notes of an unrepentant blogger. [See: Picture of Conductor]
That single act of honesty made my weekend.
As a result, I was filled with good cheer all throughout the conference, helping create another fond memory of the City of Pines.
Up there in Baguio City, it’s always just right, if you ask me.

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From the Credit is Good but Her No-Good Friends are Too Cheap to Pay For Anything Dept. Photograph above was taken by Pauline Nikka Corsino. For more of her photos, visit her website. Thanks, Nikka.

From the Nosebleed Dept.

*Ancillary fees
These are collected by the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines (NGCP), the private entity now controlled by Henry Sy Jr. that manages the country’s electricity superhighway. These fees are for costs incurred in keeping contingency power reserves. These reserves are used to ensure that electricity service all across the country remains stable and uninterrupted, even in case of unexpected power plant shutdowns.
There are two kinds of contingency reserves — the first is the spinning reserve, which come from plants already turned on, ready to provide spare electricity at a moment’s notice should service be interrupted. The other, called a stand-by reserve, is expected to be ready to become a spinning reserve should the first be commissioned into service.

**Indexation
Since commodity prices go up due to inflation, companies also pay more for their maintenance and operating expenses, among others. As a result, they are allowed to increase rates to ensure a reasonable return on its investments, a practice known as indexing rates to inflation, a standard business procedure.
However, in certain power supply contracts, generation companies have based — or indexed — energy prices on costs of oil and coal — not inflation — even if there are no valid reasons for doing so.
In one case, a company pegged its local geothermal steam prices to world coal prices when the former, an indigenous energy resource, has no connection at all to the latter.
As a result, whenever coal costs in the world market went up, so did its geothermal steam prices. Result? Higher generation costs — and therefore increased electricity prices — for consumers.

(From lonewolflibrarian.wordpress.com)

Twitter makes many things possible.

It provides tips to clean your coffeemaker [See: Three things I learned from Twitter] or a link to a catalog featuring a series of Mercedes Benz cars — and their specs — produced for the American market in the 1960s (which I got from the person managing Donald Draper’s Twitter account.)

This latest blog piece — which includes what may well be my third  attempt at podcasting — was similarly brought about by Twitter.

In a tweet posted at around four in the afternoon of October 19, my Twitter friend @nicknich3 said:

No, it's not the lanzones we're talking about here. It's the tweet before that, my friend.

His tweet’s shortened link, in turn, brought this:

This reminded me of portions of the interview I held last June with some executives of Meralco, the Philippines’ largest electric company, regarding the firm’s Twitter strategy. [See: How Meralco got its Twitter name back]

During the interview, Kirk Campos, the company’s corporate communications staff, said that he once attended an internet convention in Manila which dealt with social media, including Facebook and Twitter.

According to Campos, a speaker in the event said that Meralco’s foray into Twitter was “a noble cause” since it was going to open the floodgates of complaints from its customers. However, the speaker said that without knowing that Campos, and his supervisor, Joe R. Zaldarriaga, the company’s media relations manager, was in attendance.

For more, you can listen to a three-minute portion of the interview, which lasted more than one and a half hours.

Twitter, Meralco\’s noble cause

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From the Give Credit Where Its Due Dept.
As indicated in podomatic.com, the website where the podcast was uploaded, the interview was held last June 22, 2010 at the Meralco headquarters on Ortigas Avenue, Pasig City, Philippines. [See: Podomatic.com] Among those in attendance included Campos, Zaldarriaga, and Ernesto A. Fraginal, senior manager of the company’s call center operations. No credit goes to yours truly for failing to embed podcast. What the $%#@*&^+~!

1) Vinegar is good for cleaning the coffee machine.

Or so says @FrankAdMan, a US-based Twitter user who, for some reason, decided to follow me (and I was prompted to follow him as well, introducing me to the Twitter accounts of Donald Draper, Roger Sterling, and Steve Martin etc.) [See: Donald Draper, Roger Sterling, and Steve Martin]
Run through about a mugful of vinegar to clear the gunk in the machine’s innards, he told me in a tweet. I did that just now, a warm Sunday afternoon, a year after I received the advice. Guess what? Coffee I just made tastes crispier, cleaner, all because of tips shared by users of a platform that uses no more than 140 characters.

2) “What fresh hell is this?” was an original quote from Dorothy Parker

While writing a review of Californication — which was later uploaded in hotmanila.ph in exchange for a hearty lunch — I had the mistaken assumption that the quote was first uttered by Kathleen Turner, who played Barbara Rose, in the War of the Roses. [See: Californication Review]
At that time, I had just bought old Rolling Stone magazines from a neighborhood garage sale. One of those issues featured a review of the movie in which the writer quoted Barbara Rose as saying exactly that, without referring to the feisty female of the Algonquin Round Table. [See: Dorothy Parker, Algonquin Round Table]
In Californication, Hank Moody — played by David Duchovny — uttered that same quote, referring to the cantankerous Sue Collini, also played by Kathleen Turner, the new boss of Moody’s agent, Charlie Runckle. [See: Californication]
I was about to point out that Turner ORIGINALLY uttered the same quote that was later used to describe her in another role.
Fortunately, the oversight was caught in time by @hotmanila and @sleeplessgirl while exchanging various Tweets. So much for my background in literature.

3) Last but not least, Twitter users can teach you a lot more about the world.

You just have to be patient.
Through this microblogging platform, I learned that @meralco — currently the Twitter handle of the Philippines’ largest electric company — was initially held and controlled by @nicknich3, an American electricity price analyst based in Cagayan de Oro by the name of Nick Nichols. [See: Nick Nichols' blog.]
Nichols later agreed to “return” the handle to Meralco during the height of typhoon Ondoy last year. [See: How Meralco got its Twitter name back]
Through his various blog entries — links of which were posted on Twitter — and direct message exchanges on the same platform, I was able to get an idea — however vaguely — of what the term “stranded costs” meant in the arcane world of the Philippine power industry. “Stranded costs” represent the portion of an electric bill that is used to pay for investments of companies that built power plants especially after the value of these generation assets may have changed due to a shift in government policy. [See: Stranded Costs in Energy Dictionary]
See? I’m learning something.