sacha chua living an awesome life

My mom reads my blog, and that’s absolutely terrific. =) I love
hearing her insights into the things I’m trying to figure out, and it
makes me feel even warmer and fuzzier because she’s my mom. Here’s one
of her recent comments:

“I want small groups, so no one can hide in the anonymity of crowds. ;) I’m tired of audiences. I want participants. I don’t want to hear presentations. I want to be part of conversations.” This kind of thinking is what is setting you apart as a teacher and as a student. I am proud that this is the way you think and feel, and I know you will try your best to bring out not only the best in you, but also the best in others, and you will acknowledge that the others are doing the same to you. We should approach each other, like you said, not in the traditional manner of teacher teaching and student learning. There is no reason why they can’t be both teachers and students at the same time. I believe that the most exciting times are when teachers and students discover “lessons” (learnings?) at the same time. When a teacher helps to bring a student to where he is by teaching him what he knows, the teacher is still where he is; and save for the additional information, the student is!

probably still where he is, but when they discover something together, both move at least a step higher in the quest for knowledge.

So many of my thoughts on education and other things come from my mom.
She checked out practically every grade school in the area looking for
the best school for my sisters and me, choosing St. Scholastica’s
College because it offered small group instruction with individualized
pacing. She pushed for the creation of a gifted program and then for
its expansion to include all students. She read to me until her voice
cracked: The Three Little Pigs, the Big Fish, One Fish Two Fish Red
Fish Blue Fish… And when I moved on to more complex material (having
figured out how to read The Three Little Pigs upside down), she left
interesting books lying around: kid-friendly encyclopedias and
references, books on business and career, even books on parenting
teenagers (which naturally I read from cover to cover).

She never dictated a career for me, but instead helped me learn how to
listen to the world and to myself. She never emphasized grades, but
instead emphasized the learning experience. That said, when I got
three Ds (got bored in my merit English classes for fiction and
poetry), she warned me that I’m going to have to work extra hard to
get people to overlook that on my record. ;) But she taught me what it
was like to love learning and to want to fill other people with that
love.

I love my mom. =) Give your mom a hug today.

On Technorati: family, mom, education

Random Japanese sentence: 猫は闇で物が見える。 A cat can see in the dark.

One of the good things about distance is that my mom and I get to talk
a lot more. Strange, isn’t it? I really enjoy our conversations. I
look forward to exchanging stories. She reads my blog every day (Hi
Mom!), so I theoretically don’t need to repeat myself, but there are
all sorts of things I don’t blog (gasp! gasp!), tangents on which I
find myself, and questions for which I like getting her insights. I
love my mom, and I’m so, so, so glad we get to talk. =)

On Technorati: mom, family

Random Japanese sentence: 私達はその猫をマドンナと呼んでいる。 We call the cat Madonna.

I received a beautiful bunch of red, orange, purple and white flowers
in the mail, from Mom, Dad, Ching and John, Kathy, Neko, Ollie, Lucas,
Patch, Picco, Mali, and the Adphoto staff! =) The bouquet came with a
vase (handy!) and a birthday balloon.
Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww… I feel really warm and
fuzzy!

Yes, yes, flowers are flowers and they’ll wilt after a while, but
they’re very pretty, and it was such a great surprise to receive them.
Besides, flowers tell other people that Something Special is Up, and
This Girl is Special. =)

On Technorati: mom, happy

I’m planning to get myself a domain name tomorrow to celebrate my 22nd
birthday. Geeky, huh? Well, it’s about time I got something like that.
For extra symbolism I should’ve gotten it last year, on my 21st
birthday, but hey—better late than never. Jijo Sevilla of
QSR Hosting has offered to host the
domain name service for me, like the way he’s currently handling
sacha.free.net.ph. I really owe him and Richi Plana a lot for hosting my mail and website!

For practical purposes, I will also get myself a 3/4 or knee-length
winter coat and perhaps winter boots as well. Yes, I know, it’s the
height of summer, but that’s a good time to start rooting through
vintage and second-hand shops. This is a hefty purchase, so I’m
treating it as an expensive birthday gift that will help ensure that I
have future birthdays. ;)

My friends are organizing a little Skype party for me tomorrow morning
(evening, their time). It’s nice to be loved! =)

I’ll blog some more tomorrow, but in the meantime, let me post letters
to two people who made all of this possible.

Dear Mom,

I really think that we should celebrate our moms during birthdays. It
must not have been easy raising me, and despite the fact that I seem
to be sorta doing well on my own (at least I can cook adobo!), a mom’s
job is never truly over, is it? <hug> I wouldn’t want you to ever stop
being my mom. I like having a mom: someone I can ask questions,
someone I can tell stories to, someone I can even disagree with every
so often because I know we’re going to make up really quickly. Thanks
for teaching me so many things about life. I love you, mom. Happy
birthday!

And it _is_ a happy birthday. I’m really happy that I was born, and I
think a lot of other people are happy too. I hope to make thousands
and thousands of people happy about that, and thankful that I had such
a wonderful mom.

<hug>

I love you. =)

Dear Dad,

You always tell me, “Remember, I gave birth to you!” I paid attention
during my biology classes, so I know that’s not _literally_ true—but
it’s truer than people might think. You _did_ give birth to me.

You showed me what it’s like to dream and to pursue that dream.

You showed me the sacrifices people make to do what they love, and how
they can help the world by doing so.

You showed me how to excel.

You showed me how to tell stories and how to get people excited.

You showed me how to get myself out of scrapes (and, err, how to get
myself into them, sometimes).

YOU GAVE BIRTH TO ME TOO!

I love you. =)

My parents totally rock.

On Technorati: mom, dad, geek

Mom said:

Neko is missing you so much that it wanted to cuddle up
even with me. I was having lunch yesterday when she approached me,
then jumped (ever so gently) on my lap. I put my hands up, but later
decided to touch her. she just accepted that. then that was a little
too much for me, so I stopped stroking her back, and she decided that
was enough – she jumped out of my lap – again without scratching me.
hmmmm… Neko and I are making progress.

there’s hope for Neko yet. =). there’s hope for me, too. =)

Awwww… Upon hearing that this is my fourth day with adobo in one form or another:

you better learn to cook something other than adobo. You can cook tapa. just get a thin slice of beef. marinate it in vinegar (white), soy sauce and garlic. cook the beef in the marinade, and when when almost done (before the marinade dries up completely), take out the marinade. fry the beef briefly, then put back the marinade, with onion slices , (round), cook just very, very briefly and that’s it. The sauce is yummy, and can flavor your rice. You don’t need a lot of vinegar and soy sauce, just enough to make the beef tender. Make sure the cut of the beef is across the grain. Here, you can buy beef slices really for “bistek” (which is Filipino for beef steak).=)

I love my mom. =)

On Technorati: cat, mom

My mom called me in a panic. “I just got this message from info AT
adphoto.com.ph saying that my e-mail account has been suspended.”

I grumbled. Yet another notice. Our e-mail had recently been suspended
because people weren’t deleting their old mail. I had just spent a few
days with ipowerweb tech support and
Adphoto employees working out the
issues. Another notice? I was going to track down and scold the errant
employee.

_After_ helping my sister, who paged me to come down so that I could
help her with the market study along the highway. And meeting my
friends. And tracking down that planner bug. ARGH!

My mom poked her head into the Internet room. “SACHA, fix my e-mail
now.”

Informal tech support people the world over know that when moms use
that tone of voice, everything else gets bumped down the priority
list.

I trudged over to her Mac and brought up the Ipowerweb help support.

Kathy called to follow up. My mom picked up the phone and said,
“Sacha’s here fixing my e-mail.”

“No no no, I’m just going to show you how to ask for help. Where’s the
message?”

“Why don’t you fix it first and then you can teach me how to ask for
help next time?”

“I _can’t_ fix it. It’s up to the Ipowerweb people. Where’s the
message? Okay. Hmm. Temporarily suspended… check account details…”
I didn’t catch any typos during my cursory glance, but it didn’t feel
like the other notices we’d gotten from Ipowerweb. The message felt
wrong. I read further. “Adphoto Support Team… Wait a minute, we
don’t _have_ an Adphoto Support Team.” I looked up. Sure enough, there
was an attachment named “account-details.zip” just begging to be opened.

“So what’s wrong with my e-mail?”

“Nothing,” I replied, disgusted. I reread the message. Clever of them
to work the first part of the domain into the message. “It’s one of
those fake messages with attachments.”

“Wait! How do I tell which ones are real and which aren’t?”

How do I explain that feeling of something being wrong? It’s a blink moment.

• Messages that ask you to look at attachments are immediately
  suspicious, even if they come from someone you know. Most worms fake
  the From: address to be someone you might now. Write the person who
  supposedly sent you the message and ask if that’s really the
  intended attachment.
• Don’t click on random links, too. This could open you up to more spam
  or attacks that exploit browser vulnerabilities.
• If the message says it comes from an automated system and you
  shouldn’t bother replying, see if there’s a human somewhere you can
  get in touch with.
• Tech announcements shouldn’t be coming from info AT adphoto.com.ph,
  but rather an ipowerweb account. This is particularly true when
  they’re announcements I don’t remember making.
• Make life easier for other people. If you send an attachment or link
  to someone else, include enough outside-the-computer information to
  let the other person know you’re human. For example, you could give
  some details about the job just finished.

I’ve had to enable e-mail access from the PCs. I’ve made the employees
promise not to click on strange links or attachments, and Internet
access is restricted to a set of government websites and the Adphoto
website itself. That should provide us with some modicum of protection
because there’s no way for them to establish a direct connection to
the outside.

With social engineers getting cleverer and cleverer, though, will that
be enough?

コンピュータがこの会社に導入されつつあります。 Computers are being introduced into this company.

On Technorati: phishing, mom

My mom’s amazing. Her interest in organizing information helped
professionalize the advertising photography industry here in the
Philippines. She told me how they exchanged forms with other
photographers, sharing with them the format for the cost estimates so
that clients would be able to find information easily.

Many of the forms we use haven’t been shared with other people in the
industry. I wonder when they’re going to do another forms exchange to
help other photographers learn how to manage their work? I really
admire the way my mom keeps looking for ways to improve the workflow.
Now we’re getting client call reports from the account executives. Way
cool!

I want to get into that sort of stuff. I want to learn how to identify
the kind of information we need to capture and design the forms to
make it easier for people to write things down. My mom’s still working
on finding a balance between asking for too little and too much
information. People skip fields if the form asks for too much
information. Hmm…

US laws say that blank forms aren’t protected by copyright because the
forms do not contain information in themselves. I wonder what our laws
say? Anyway, this is cool stuff. I want to do things like the D.I.Y. Hipster PDA templates…

何社製のコンピューターをお使いですか。 What make of computer do you use?

On Technorati: plans, mom