Archives

Saturday, October 11, 2025

Internet down

Converge has been down for almost 10 hours now it's ridiculous how they've not restored connectivity yet. On top of that, our supposed backup - Smart and GOMO - are both super weak today. Couldn't get any work done the entire day. Good thing I only had one meeting.

Anyway. Just another day in the Philippines, where services are bad and customer support is worse.

The other day I had a thought. We weren't really looking into greener pastures in other countries. I thought we had it good here. 6-figure salaries, stable jobs, comfortable lifestyle. But then I looked at our current pay and wondered how long is this gonna sustain us before we had to switch companies again and look for bigger salaries? I thought I could retire at my previous company cos the culture and the work is perfect, but eventually the salary couldn't keep up with inflation, and I had to leave. If I stayed there, we have to tighten our budget year on year because there's no way the annual increases are gonna match the rate of inflation. Every year we had to downgrade, find some way to limit expenses, or God forbid work another job (not going back there again).

Then I wondered about my colleagues in other countries. How come they were able to stick to a company for more than 5 years without complaining about the salary? How different is the salary structure here vs there that we had to jump ship every now and then to inflation-proof our lives? I don't want to keep changing companies. It's troublesome and you lose retirement benefits for it.

Then I realized maybe we should just move to a different country. A red state in the US, or Australia, or New Zealand, wherever there's opportunity. Maybe Bangkok. I don't know. The more I learn how we have it bad here, the more I get jealous of those who were able to migrate. 

I just don't know where to start.

Wednesday, October 8, 2025

New work laptop

I recently got a new work laptop after my old one was marked vulnerable due to having Viber Desktop installed 😅. It's the second time my laptop has been replaced in my three years in the company and I think it's because I kept installing Viber? Haha. I didn't know it was the culprit and I only learned about it this week.

Funny thing is, I got a new model which looks really nice. Seems like I got rewarded for installing illegal apps instead. Still freaking big and heavy, and the screen is more squarish, but it's all good. I couldn't request for a smaller laptop because dev laptops by default are all 15.6 inches. Oh well.

My laptop transfer this time feels more seamless. Thanks to OneDrive. I just had to wait for everything to sync and all my files are back in the same place. However I do need to reinstall everything else. UiPath, SSMS, Notepad++, Github Desktop, etc. And I need to setup my shortcuts again. What I failed to do is backup my Postman APIs so I'm feeling a bit upset about it. I should've created an account. Hay.

Oh wait this laptop feels a bit slow!

Hoping a restart would do.

Ciao for now.