About

I have lived in the city for several years, although I grew up in Vigan, Ilocos Sur, a town about 200km north of Manila. Vigan is a beautiful town, listed as one of UNESCO’s World Heritage Village because of the Spanish colonial houses and the old baroque church in the town center.

I studied medical technology but realized later that I hate hospitals. So I enrolled again in another course, fine arts, but realized again later that there’s not much money in it if you’re not exceptionally talented.

Then I went to work for the late Santiago Bose. Helping him create his large paintings in the late 90s was perhaps the peak of my very short career in the arts. He was the first person I met who had a laptop and internet connection at home. He let me play with it when we were not working.

Clicking around the installed programs, I came upon Netscape Composer and learned that (wow!) it let me create web pages. I searched the net for tutorials and stumbled upon Webmonkey (whadya know the site is still around) where I religiously read about html. I decided right then that I wanted to learn this new technology. To push me further, Santi came up with the idea that we should make a website for Baguio Arts Guild.

A few weeks of self-study resulted to this: http://members.tripod.com/in_the_bag/ (WARNING: the browser might popup an old realplayer plugin, that’s no virus so don’t panic.)

That is one ugly website. But that is where all this started.

Three years later, my new skill brought me to Manila, to work for an American expat. We created websites in a small home office. Another year later, my awesome skills brought me to Kuala Lumpur for a two-year stint in a market research company, as in-house web manager. For two years I updated the company websites and helped create online surveys for clients like Mandarin Oriental.

More than ten years later, I am working from home helping foreign clients bring their businesses online.

The internet has changed dramatically since I typed my first lines of code in Netscape Composer. Sometimes it’s hard to keep up with new technologies. No wonder the young ones now have to go to school to learn a trade that took me only a few weeks to master over 14 years ago.

My parents–who belong to a generation that believes a proper job needs a title and an office cubicle, does not allow for so many vacations in a year or waking up late in the morning–think that I haven’t progressed much in life.

I believe that this is a happier ending than being stuck in a hospital lab peeking at someone’s poop in a microscope.