Martial Law, According To The 1987 Constitution

Section 18.

The President shall be the Commander-in-Chief of all armed forces of the Philippines and whenever it becomes necessary, he may call out such armed forces to prevent or suppress lawless violence, invasion or rebellion. In case of invasion or rebellion, when the public safety requires it, he may, for a period not exceeding sixty days, suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus or place the Philippines or any part thereof under martial law. Within forty-eight hours from the proclamation of martial law or the suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, the President shall submit a report in person or in writing to the Congress. The Congress, voting jointly, by a vote of at least a majority of all its Members in regular or special session, may revoke such proclamation or suspension, which revocation shall not be set aside by the President. Upon the initiative of the President, the Congress may, in the same manner, extend such proclamation or suspension for a period to be determined by the Congress, if the invasion or rebellion shall persist and public safety requires it.

The Congress, if not in session, shall, within twenty-four hours following such proclamation or suspension, convene in accordance with its rules without need of a call.

The Supreme Court may review, in an appropriate proceeding filed by any citizen, the sufficiency of the factual basis of the proclamation of martial law or the suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus or the extension thereof, and must promulgate its decision thereon within thirty days from its filing.

A state of martial law does not suspend the operation of the Constitution, nor supplant the functioning of the civil courts or legislative assemblies, nor authorize the conferment of jurisdiction on military courts and agencies over civilians where civil courts are able to function, nor automatically suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus.

The suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall apply only to persons judicially charged for rebellion or offenses inherent in, or directly connected with, invasion.

During the suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, any person thus arrested or detained shall be judicially charged within three days, otherwise he shall be released.

Only In The Philippines

...can you find an incumbent President running for a legislative position.

...can you find a past President who is seeking reelection because he was not able to finish his 6 year term.

...can you find 'nuisance candidates' running for President of the country.

...can you find politicians transferring from one party to another, just to get the best position to win the election.

...can you find politicians who still demand "royal" treatment, even though it's clear that when they took their oath into public office they promised to "serve the people".

...can you find someone who killed several people and still be given special treatment while behind bars.

...can you find a lot of actors and actresses seeking public office.

...can you find a politician who claims to be "one with the poor" and yet has never, ever been subject to experiences that those poor people had because he/she was born to a very wealthy family.

...can you find people who, despite the numerous natural disasters that came and went, still smile.

...can you find people who, despite having not enough money to buy food, own expensive cellphones.

...can you find a lot of latest-model cars plying the traffic-ridden streets, even though it's been considered a third-world country.

...can you find 5- to 10-year old city buses from Japan being cleaned and reused like new ones.

...can you find trains that have special coaches for female passengers that are not crowded, and yet not all women go to them.

Care to add some more? As the typical Filipino expression goes, "Bato bato sa langit, ang tamaa'y huwag magalit!" :)

How I Use Microblogs

Microblogs are quite the rage nowadays. You can just log in, post a short message, and then go ahead with your life. No need to write long articles, nothing that requires long reading, just a quick thought. With the 150 characters allowed for every post, it's short enough to fit in a basic SMS message! No wonder they have mobile versions of these available.

Short these posts may be, they still provide meaningful information for their users. I, for one, find these services indispensable. I've signed up for three of them, Tumblr, Twitter, and Plurk. Given three sources of information, how do I manage to post on three microblogs, you may ask. Let's see what kind of information I get from the three.

Twitter

This is the first among the three that I have subscribed to. I remember hearing about it on Leo Laporte's This Week In Tech (TWIT) Podcast (there was a time when they were fighting over the "twit" name).

A lot of popular personalities have signed up here. NBA players (CP3, Shaq, Mo Wiliams, Carmelo Anthony), TV/Media people (Ashton Kutcher), News companies (NY Times, CNN), and Web Personalities (Chris Pirillo, Veronica Belmont) are among the most followed. Topics range from personal notes and links to news articles to product reviews.

Similar to the diverse user set that Twitter has is the myriad of Twitter clients available for use in different platforms. TweetDeck and Twitteriffic is most popular for the desktop. Clients are also available for PDAs and mobile phones. Have I mentioned that you can also receive Twitter messages to your mobile phone?

Plurk

While Twittering, I learned about this about a year ago, and signed up as well. What's different here is that the posts are threaded -- replies to your Plurk messages appear in line with the original post. One more thing that's different, if not disorienting, is the side-scrolling timeline. Latest Plurks appear on the leftmost side, while the older ones get shifted towards the right. You can post pictures and videos as links, and Plurk shows a thumbnail of it. Plurk also has this karma system that goes up whenever you visit and post messages at the site often, and decreases it when you post and visit less.

Local people abound here in Plurk. I can say that 90% of all Plurk friends in my list are Filipinos. Everyday banter is what I encounter here. People talk about what breakfast they had for the day, how bad traffic is on a certain part of the city, who's cooking what, mall sales, etc. I read about what's happening around the city first on Plurk, even before it is shown on local TV or reported on radio.

No 'proper' Plurk client is available. There are stand-alone applications, but they only feed the data from m.plurk.com, the mobile version for Plurk.

Tumblr

Tumblr is yet another microblogging site. It took advantage of what Twitter lacks -- the ability to post information that is non-text. People can post photos and videos here. You can change the theme drastically, just like you would do a regular blog. So people who post mostly pictures can use a theme that would look like a photoblog that shows one post per page, while people who post messages and links can opt to use one of the default themes.

I don't really follow a lot of users here at Tumblr. I only use the service to store links to things that I find around the web. Whenever I need a link to something that I have encountered in the past, I go over to my tumblr site.

Which One For What?

If you would observe, I use each service because of the specific information that I get. I go to Twitter to get news from around the world, technology trends, and product reviews. I go to Plurk to know what's happening around the city (which is pretty helpful when typhoon Ondoy was ravaging the country). I go to Plurk to get links to sites I've previously been to.

It may sound too much of one thing, but in reality, subscribing to several microblogging sites gives me access to a lot of information, whether locally or internationally.

Why I shun MLM

My wife and I once tried Multi-Level Marketing (MLM), as we signed up for Herbalife a few years ago. Admittedly we were able to sell several packages, and were able to get favorable profit from it, but eventually we stopped.

Do the products work?

It's not that we don't believe in the product we were selling. I've tried the product before selling it, and I can be one of those who can go in front of a lot of people and say that the product is indeed effective. However, we find some things within the system that aren't 'fit' to what we wanted to achieve as a family.

Work, work

Initially, you can enter the organization as a seller (who does direct marketing) or as a 'supervisor' (who recruits other sellers). Either level requires that a fee be paid in order to be one. Being successful in either level would require us to meet a lot of people, follow up on them, and of course, getting them to buy the product or sign up as another seller. A lot of people are good at this, as I have some friends and co-employees who were able to make more out of it than their regular day job. As for my family, we simply cannot find the time to call out and contact others outside of our day job. We would rather spend time with each other after work. Surely there has to be another way to earn money without much manual labor, without affecting our day jobs.

Financial seminar

One time, our company held a financial management seminar. We were presented several options on how to manage our hard earned money -- store it in a bank, buy foreign currency, build our own business alongside our day job, invest it on our own in a large company, or have someone else 'manage' the investing process for us.

Those last two options rang a bell in my mind. I can invest my money in a company or two, monitor how the company handles its worth, and pull out my money if I see things not going well or if I see another company worth investing in. Not much manual work and the risk can easily be managed! I just need to look at daily trends in the market and call a person or two if I need to 'move' my money. I can still keep my day job, and I can be with my family after work.

Mutual Funds

So we went ahead and invested our money in a Mutual Fund company, as we don't have enough money to buy shares of stocks directly. A mutual fund company does the investing for you to several companies, and your money's worth is represented through the mutual fund company's net asset value (NAV). If the NAV goes up, it means that most of the company's investments were profitable. If the NAV goes down, the investments may be losing. Of course in the world of investments, this can happen day-to-day, and sometimes in a streak of a few weeks to a few months. What I did is that I monitor the NAV every 2 weeks just to see how the mutual fund company is doing, and to see how its competitors are stacking up.

How was it?

We were able to profit enough from our mutual fund investment to say that it was better than storing our money in the bank. Honestly, we were not able to profit as big as that of selling stuff from Herbalife, but we don't mind. We did our day job, stayed at home after work hours, and still our money's worth is going up. It's not a short-term, get-rich-quick scheme, but in the long term, it can prove to be worth the wait.

We pulled out our money to spend for our church wedding a year ago, but we plan on investing again once our 13th month pay and Christmas bonuses are given. I'm monitoring several companies right now so that when the time to invest comes, I can just go ahead and buy shares right away.

How I got into Photography

I was pretty uninterested with photography ever since I was a child -- no, it doesn't mean that I don't use a camera, it's just that a quick snapshot of what's happening would be fine for me. Back then, I'm concerned about the model of the camera not because I could take better pictures, but because my friends got one. The only camera I bought while I was single was an Olympus Centurion, an APS-film SLR fixed-lens camera that I got during my business trip to Japan (it's still working until now, it's with my parents).

Everything changed when I got married and we were expecting our first child. When I learned that we can give a camera to the hospital personnel in the delivery room to take pictures while my wife is delivering our baby, I knew I had to get a camera. I saved our baby's ultrasound printout (and got the whole process on videotape) with the thought that one day when my baby grows up, he will know what his parents went through just to bring him to the world.

While I was nonchalant in taking pictures then, by the time my baby went out of my wife's womb, I wanted the pictures to come out beautiful. Not only should they capture my child as he grows, but they should also come out in a way that they would be kept because of their quality -- not just because it is a picture of someone important.

What I got at first was a Canon Prima, a 35mm point-and shoot camera. It's enough to do the job, but we had to print out the film just to see the pictures. From that camera I learned that zooming to a subject and choosing a background that's very far would make the subject pop out from the background.

We got tired of using the camera to take shots and having a photo shop print them, so we got a Kodak CX5730, a digital point-and-shoot. Through that camera we learned the joys and conveniences of going digital. Ever since we had the shots stored on optical and magnetic media, and only printed the really good ones. We had lots of pictures taken during the span of time that we had this camera.

Having gone to several photography sites, read lots of magazine articles, and seeing some friends' shots, we decided that it is time to move to a DSLR camera. It is quite expensive, but we know that the investment would be worth it in the long run. We got a Canon EOS 450D along with the 18-55 IS kit lens, and a 50mm f/1.8 prime lens after a few months. Since then I've been more into photography as a hobby, and I could say that comparing my pictures then to what I have now, the quality is very much better. The DSLR camera gave me a lot of options on how I could compose my shot and what effect I'd want my shot to have.

Presently, I have accounts at Flickr and other online photo sharing sites. I have a lot of pictures taken of my son. Now that a new baby has arrived (just a few days ago), even our new baby (girl) can expect great-looking pictures to look at when she grows up.

I guess getting into photography for me is drawn out of inspiration. Now that I have a subject (my family), I have something to put my sights into. It's that simple.

Yet Another Blog Reboot

If you just came to this blog through a link for the first time, you may be wondering why I have this post. This is already my third try at making my blog worth reading to others. The first one was full of personal experiences, a diary of some sort, which is how a lot of people get started at blogging. After subscribing to Darren Rowse's 31 Days To A Better Blog (31DBB) and Janette Toral's Blogging From Home, I still find my blog 'uninteresting'. After giving it some thought, it seems that the problem is within me.

I don't speak my mind

The primary problem isn't really about what topic to write about, but rather which one I am willing to put up in my blog. I am quite an opinionated person, but I have yet to learn that habit of writing about it instead of 'letting them hear it from me'. Whenever I get into a writing streak I end up not posting the article because I have this unexplainable fear of people not being able to understand how I think. I guess that is why people like Charles Barkley gets respect -- they speak their mind no matter how others would react.

I lack focus

As a husband and a father of two kids, I find myself drifting away from my usual pursuits -- any parent can relate to me when I say that whenever I am doing something, I cannot focus on the task at hand because from time to time, a child gets your attention, chores need to be done, calls need to be made. I am easily distracted by things that happen around me. I'm not complaining, but I need to do serious task management and better concentration to be able to complete an blog article in a short span of time.

I am not committed to writing articles

Ever since I got into photography, I find myself putting more time to it -- so much so that my recent blog posts are links to pictures that I took and no stuff to read. I have created a separate photoblog to put all pictures there and get the main blog back to stuff that people can read. I have this 52 weeks project that's keeping me committed to taking pictures, so why not create a similar project that can keep me committed to writing?

So...

I am posting this article to share to others what is causing my 'blogging blues'. I know some of you may have the same dilemma but may not realize that the cause may be the same. If we wanted to create a really interesting blog, then we should start the change from ourselves.

Why Henry?

Ever since I started going to school and making new friends, people never fail to ask me this question.

"Why is your surname Henry?"

It's just a common name when you see it in forums that involve people from other countries -- but in the Philippines where almost everyone knows someone whose surname is Cruz, Bautista, Santos, or other Spanish-sounding names, mine is quite uncommon. That gets a lot of people curious.

My grandfather was a US serviceman during the second world war. He met my grandmother while the US forces were stationed here in the Philippines and bore a son, who became my father.

It's as simple as that. Sometimes people would just give this "Ooookaaay..." or "Cool!" reaction. However, some would ask further questions, like "Is he still alive?" or "Have you met him?". I don't mind, really, but there are times that instead of getting down to business right away, I end up telling them my grandparents' story before everything else.

It's funny to me that people sometimes call me by my surname, thinking that it's my first name. When I try to correct them, they chuckle and apologize -- and then later they do it again. So I thought it would be funny -- and informative at the same time -- that I use it as the title of my blog.

Remember, Henry's My Surname.

Who is Henry?

Call me Ronnie. I was born and raised in that well-known municipality of Tondo, in the city of Manila. This city is the capital of an archipelago called the Philippines.

I am an Engineering Supervisor for a software outsourcing company in Pasig. I specialize in developing embedded systems for printers and mobile phones. I’ve also been involved with other projects at work, mostly related with low-level programming. I am presently leading a team of developers who are taking part in firmware testing for one of our clients.

Through the years I’ve gathered enough knowledge to be able to blow up my computer, install another operating system other than what everyone else uses, make the perfect cup of coffee, clean the dishes real quick, and other crazy stuff I’d rather not tell here.

I am the moderator of the mit-micro yahoogroup, which is basically a mailing list composed of members of the Mapua Integrated Computer Organization (MICRO). The group has been online since 1999 and is 50-75 members (on the average) strong.

I have a degree of Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from Mapua Institute of Technology (Intramuros, Manila). I graduated April of 1997.

I am an avid Linux fan, and use Ubuntu Linux to power my home computer. For a time I took part in testing Kubuntu, the KDE variant of the Ubuntu distribution. However, my home desktop machine broke down, but that didn’t deter me from helping others with their Linux-related problems.

Last July of 2007 I bought a MacBook and am now exploring what Mac OS X has to offer. So far, all I can say are positive comments about it. Mac OS X may be a bit different compared to Linux in terms of the graphical user environment it uses, but its Unix roots (the security model, the shell, etc.) makes me feel easily at home with it.

I ocassionally participate in web forums and social microblogging sites. I go by the nickname raw_knee, which is a pun on my real name. I am currently one of the forum administrators for PCForums, an upstart forum.

I got married October of 2003. I’m a father to a really cute toddler and husband to a wonderful wife. Since then, life has gotten so much meaningful.

If you have comments, suggestions, or questions, you may reach me through email at ronnie[dot]henry[at]gmail[dot]com.

Contact

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ronnie[dot]henry[at]gmail[dot]com

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