It occurred to me today that, due to some rearrangement of my finances, I almost had enough money to make me a millionaire in Pesos. Sadly the money was still in pounds and at least half of it disappeared to clear other debts almost as soon as it arrived.

This occurred to me while I was doing some budgeting, and I was budgeting because I finally have a contract. Not only do I have a contract I’m also now, apparently, on the Manila payroll. I think I now officially work here.

Sadly this means that I’m no longer on expenses, the company still pays for my accommodation, utility bills and so on. But now food, transport and day-to-day stuff comes out my pocket. Booze always came out of my pocket (mostly) so no change there.

The bill for the first ten days of the month leads me to discover that Manila isn’t as cheap as I thought, even discounting my weekend poker and pub crawling, it still mounts up. Maybe I’m just shopping in the wrong places, or maybe it’s just living in the capital.

It doesn’t matter anyway, I have to stop thinking in pounds, I have a monthly budget in pesos which is more than enough. Still whichever way I look at it, Manila’s a cheap place to live. Not expensive, just not as cheap as I thought it would be. Maybe I should just start winning at poker.

I guess I should add a bit about how I’m doing. Work is mad, Manila is fun, and I’ve finally moved into a nice new apartment which has internet. Not very good internet, lousy for Skype, but it’s still internet.

I know that’s not a great update but now I’m more sorted I’ll try and do some more posting about life over here. I must remember to take my camera out with me and get some pictures.

Blimey, it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything. I have the flimsiest of excuses.

For the first half of my long absence I was running around madly in Edinburgh trying to sort out the details of my impending relocation to Manila.

And Manila is where I’ve been for the second half of my absence. Everything’s going about as well as can be expected and I’m enjoying myself but I’m still settling in. Manila is one of those places where everything just takes slightly longer than you expect, so I still don’t have everything properly sorted out. Like internet access in my apartment.

Of course that’s no excuse, no ‘net access in my apartment doesn’t stop wandering to the nearest Starbucks (sadly as common here as anywhere else on earth), or just using the connection at work (until the reactive firewall decides to block the site).

My excuse could be that I’ve been too busy over here. It’s almost true, I’ve been thrown into the deep end of my new job and I find myself thrashing around trying to work out exactly what’s what while trying not to screw anything up too badly. Planning projects, inducting new employees, interviewing potential employees and – urk – talking to customers has actually kept me fairly busy.

But not so busy that I’ve stopped wasting a fair amount of time reading whatever junk websites the corporate IT department deems fit for my time (Facebook is blocked but Twitter is fine, I’m confused.)

And if I’d really been spending time settling in I’d have unpacked more than half the suitcases and boxes I’d brought over.

I had meant to head out to do something interesting this weekend so that I’d have something to write about today. I’d dug out the camera, charged the batteries, packed the guidebook and planned a bit of tourist trail.

And then it rained.

And I thought I’ll give it an hour and it’ll pass.

And then it rained harder.

And than, to hammer home the point, it rained even harder.

So I decided to skip the wandering around in the wet, and hung around watching the Discovery Channel. That would have been an excellent point to dart across to Starbucks and do write this post, but I didn’t.

I have no excuse.

The rainy season lasts for months, but hopefully I’ll be fully connected in a new apartment within weeks. Perhaps then I’ll find the correct combination of interesting content, motivation and free time to return to regular communication.

Or I’ll find a better excuse.

And so I find myself back in Edinburgh, for six weeks or so.

My calendar is already full to bursting, with every weekend spoken for.

I’m trying to do two jobs, and attempting to schedule workmen and various deliveries around my early morning calls back to the Manila office.

Add to that the various visitors and house guests I’ll have over April and the whole thing just turns into madness.

No wonder my body has given up and decided to give in to some nasty cold bug. Also no wonder that updates to this site have been non-existent.

Still, it’s all under control, planned and organised chaos, just the way I like it. Despite work doing their best to throw a spanner in the works by sending me to China for Easter weekend (I said no).

That’s about that, I’ve no idea when I’ll find time to write any more but I’ll leave you with this final bit of housekeeping.

This website has no wish to indulge in an extended ham-slapping with any other websites so I choose not respond to his thrown gauntlet with a surcial strike.

I will respond with a blanket bombing of barbarous baconisty: The Baconcyclopedia.

Hock and Claw!

I guess I’m still pretty bad at keeping this site updated.

Quick update first, I’ve still got lots of work to do — essentially trying to juggle doing my old job while learning to do my new one. It’s a little bit mental. I did get away at the weekend, but only for work. I was at a job fair in Cebu, interviewing (and recruiting as it turns out) various candidates. Hopefully I’ll have time to do a post about that, the fair itself was fun but the biggest revelation is what this country is like outside Manila. It’s the first time I’ve noticed that I must be only an hour or so away from what is basically a tropical paradise. Anyroads, more on that in another post — there’s some new photos up on my flickr site.

Today I wanted to briefly talk about where I live: Eastwood City. Sadly there’s not that much detail on the website, so have this badly photographed city map:

Click through and pull up the large size, you should be able to read the text to see what surrounds me.

It’s a weird little place, probably no more than a few km square but crammed with offices, apartments, shops and restaurants. Outside the area everything is notably more crumbling and dingy (and smelly), but inside it’s all polished and there are private police keeping things (mostly traffic) in check. I even saw a couple of shotgun carrying guards outside McDonalds a few days ago.

I quite like living here, my apartment (in Olympic Heights on the map) is a few minutes from the office (1800 building) and no more than five minutes from anywhere in Eastwood. Everything you need is here, food, cinemas, bowling, gyms, banks, shops, laundry, even a barbers shop. There’s three separate 24hr corner shops, they don’t carry that much stuff but there is a huge supermarket another five minutes walk down the main road.

The downside is tons of junk food, McDonalds, KFC, Pizza Hut, they’re all here and most are open 24 hours. Plus plenty of local variants and various restaurants and take-aways. None of it seems that healthy. Still, I’ll just have to slowly work my way round the various places and see what’s good (feel free to pick one at random and suggest I try it).

There’s even a second McDs opening in the Eastwood Mall — just in case five minutes was too long a walk to get your Big Mac.

Hmm, this post is almost as dull as a what-I-had-for-breakfast post (Honey Crunch Corn Flakes), but hopefully the map gives some impression of what the place is like. I’ll try and get some more photos of Eastwood and stick them on Flickr.

I’ve still not ventured far outside Eastwood on foot, I’m not sure there’s that much in walking distance but I do plan go for a bit of an extended walkabout to see the lie of the land.

More posts soon, hopefully.

I imagined that, living in Manila with few distractions, I’d have plenty of free time to catch up with various tasks, post multiple interesting updates and generally explore the area.

But I find myself sitting on the couch, with a beer, again. There’s no crushing boredom to inspire me to action, I have to be sensible in order to get into work at a sensible time and I’ve hurt my foot which is curtailing too much mooching around the area.

It’s completely different to my normal travelling where I feel compelled to do stuff whenever I can, since I know I’ll have plenty of time to do all that there’s no real urgency.

I don’t mind this at all, it’s quite nice, I know I’ll get round to things sooner or later and it gives me time to relax.

Which I need since each week seems to end with my employers deciding that I’ll be responsible for an extra aspect of work on the site, swelling my workload in an alarming manner from what I originally applied for only a few months ago. Interestingly they tend to drop this bombshell when we’re in the pub after work.

Sorry this is a bit of a dull update, I will have to make a special effort to go find some stuff to take photos of and write about, otherwise people will begin to suspect that I’m not really in Manila at all.

… but fortunately it’s way too hot to bake.

If it wasn’t, I’d bake this cake.

Well I’ve got no excuse not to update since I’ve spent the last two days mostly lazing around and doing very little.

I’m in Manila, for the next month, it’s about as hot as I remember, but I think I can comfortably live with it. I have my own apartment for the month and it’s pretty cool once the air-con has been cranked up (down?) for a while. Hit the jump for a completely uninteresting update post with some pictures.

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During a discussion about expanding into multiple social networks, see recent posts, a friend of mine said that this site “should be a one-stop shop for all things” to do with me. He has a point, as usual.

I think the other sites have their place, but I’m going to experiment with bringing content from other places back to here. And I’m going to try and do it without cluttering the current layout.

You may notice a little gray bar under the header, this is the first step, it shows my current Facebook status. If you can’t see the bar you’re either not on the main page or I haven’t updated my status for over a day.

In case you’re interested in how I did it, I used a modified version of the StatusPress plugin (modified to add code to check the age of the status message and remove some extra code I didn’t need).

Other things may appear or disappear as I test stuff out, let me know if you see something broken that doesn’t disappear after five minutes or so.

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time recently thinking about communications and how to keep in touch from distant lands. There’s no shortage of possibilities, there may be far too many.

Since Twitter seems to have gone mainstream, if being mentioned by Jonathan Ross in the short time before he’s lynched by the tabloids again counts as mainstream, I thought I might jump on that particular bandwagon.

So I now have a twitter account. However I am not twittering, I have yet to tweet. I’m just not sure I ‘get it’, but it seems worth a look.

Expect some activity there at some point, mostly because I’m playing with ping.fm to try and tie things together. It looks like a pretty neat service, if I can update everything in an easy way then I’m more likely to post stuff.

This may cause some odd entries to appear in places, but that’s part of the fun.

… are idiots.

There’s been years I’ve been disappointed by the winner of (Celebrity) Big Brother. This year is the first in time in ages that I’ve been surprised by the order that the final five leave in.

Was the rest of the country watching the same show I was? Everyone that voted for the winner should take time to experience what they’re feeling, remember it — that’s what it feels like to be wrong.

Ah well, I’ve just finished a kick-ass steak (with broccoli and blue-cheese sauce) and I’ve got a full glass of wine.

I’ll cope.