Ilokanos Idiay Hawaii

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the Hawaii Office of Elections (their equivalent of our COMELEC) is using Ilokano in its website. Check it out here.

If that's not cool, I don't know what is. This is a good thing for people like us who worry about the loss of languages. This must also mean that a big majority of Filipinos in Hawaii are from the Ilocos, ano?

By the way, the idea for this post was totally stolen from Alvin of Digital Chain who blogged about Ilokanos in Las Vegas.

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Travel With DialaFlight

Are you, by any chance, planning a holiday but you have no idea where to go? Then check out Dial A Flight, a UK-based travel company which offers tons of information on different travel destinations around the world.

Maybe you should book a flight to Australia? This would be a good choice. As we all know, the Land Down Under has kangaroos, koalas, and the Tasmanian devil. And it has the Sydney Opera House too if you are into that "culture tourism" thing.

Now, if you are like me, i.e., financially challenged, you can only dream about vacations to exotic destinations. So join me in dreaming about going to Antarctica to watch those marching penguins. Or maybe we should dream about going to Tibet to help our Tibetan siblings in their campaign for independence?

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More Crazy Spam

Let's continue publishing the ridiculous spam mails we receive. As spam goes, here's one that's too good to be true:

From: ConcepcionchromicStaton@screenindia.com

You Need a Better Degree, and we can Help!
F A S T T R A C K D E G R E E P R O G R A M
No examinations! No classes! No textbooks!

Yeah right! One would be better off buying those fake diplomas at Recto. It wouldn't cost as much.

Now, we (or our email) apparently won 700,000 euros. Wow. I don't know how much that is in pesos. But I'm going to donate it to Barack Obama so he can finally beat Hillary "Vote for me because I am inevitable" Clinton. Here's the letter:

From: Mrs Barbera De Graft
Reply-to: Mr. Eddy Van Bakker

=================
Dear Winner,

We are happy to inform you that you have emerged a winner under the First Category of our staatsloterij Promotion. Winners were picked by computerized system, drawn from company and individual e-mail addresses worldwide. The draws is officially announced today 28th of January 2008.You have therefore been awarded a lump sum pay out of 700,000.00(Seven hundred thousand Euros), which is the winning payout for Category A winners.

To claim your prize Contact the Financial Claims Manager office with the underlisted informations as soon as possible:

Full Name,
Address
Country
ETC. ETC.

Kindly contact staatsloterij claim department immediately for due processing and remittance of your prize money to your destination.

******************
N.B: Disclaimer - This email is confidential and contain privileged or copyright information. You must not present this message to another party. If you are not the intended recipient you must not copy, distribute or use this email or the information contained in it for any purpose other than to notify us.
If you have received this message in error, please delete this email from your system.

Huh! And they even added a note (disclaimer?) which warns us to not show their letter to others. How earnest is that? Good luck with that, Eddie and Barbara. We released the cat out of the bag.

Anyways, as we stated earlier, we're publishing the email addresses of these spammers along with their spam not because we want anyone to contact them but because we hope that email harvesters will get their emails and send them the spam they so richly deserve.

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Izea Ranks

Hello fellow bloggers, are you looking for a blog ranking system? Then check out the Blog Ranks of izearanks.com.

All you have to do is sign up with izearanks, get a code that you embed in your xml/html template, save your template, and voila it will soon be up and running.

Izea will track your page views and visitors and come up with your blog's RealRank. Let's use From the Boondocks as an example to see how it works :-)

According to the above statistics, this blog's weekly average RealRank is 975 while it's RealRank today is 883. Basically, what this means is that of all the blogs registered with Izea, From the Boondocks lands in the 975 spot during the week. It's far from the Top 100 but we were in the 300-400 rank when we haven't shifted our focus to our other blog, kaigorotan.com.

Anyways, Izea also monitors the rankings of blogs in the different categories. I registered this blog as a "Political" blog and according to the Izea ranking, we managed to land in the Top Ten in the Top 100 political blogs. On average, we rank anywhere from 8 to 15 in this category.

Now, an interesting thing about this ranking system is that you can compare the RealRank of your blogs with other blogs in the network. Kind of cool if you'd like to see how your friends (and enemies hehe) are doing. If you are worried about revealing too much information, you have the option to hide your statistics (page views and unique visitors) -- but not your RealRank -- from the public.

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Welcome the Year of the Rat

Are you a rat? Then chances are you will be very lucky this year according to Madam Auring. Don't know how dogs like me will fare in the year of the rat but I'm hoping that it will be a lucky year hehe.

Anyways, I was watching TV last night when this activist from PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) appeared on screen and asked people to not trap rats in their homes. I was like, "Huh, lady. Are you crazy? Isn't your time better spent on saving pandas, baby seals, and the endangered Philippine eagle?"

Rats are rats. Like cockroaches, they are the most likely to survive a nuclear war. They have a better survival mechanism than us human beings. So why is PETA wasting resources protecting these pesky house rats?

Sorry PETA, I like you most of the time but rats are my number one enemy at home. However, maybe I'll get on board if you're going to do a campaign to protect ousted House Speaker Joe de Venecia so he can rat out the dirty details he knows about Gloria's cheating, corruption, and abuse of power.

I do agree though that field rats play an important role in maintaining balance in our ecosystem. So I will most likely ignore a field rat when I see one.

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