The solar eclipse that will occur this Wednesday, July 22, is quite remarkable in some respects. First of all, this eclipse will be the longest total solar eclipse in this century—a longer one won’t occur until 2132. The longest duration of totality will be 6′39″ and the reason why this eclipse is long is because the Earth is near aphelion and the Moon is near perigee. This means that the Sun will appear at its smallest and the Moon at its largest. (It’s very easy to imagine that a large circle moving in front of a smaller circle will cover the smaller circle longer than if the two circles were nearer to each other in size.)

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That was pretty painless, withdrawing from my PayPal account to my BPI savings account, that is. And quite fast too! I initiated the withdrawal in PayPal last June 5, Sunday, and the amount was already credited to my BPI account by June 7. This is a far cry from the 5–7 days that PayPal indicated in their website.

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Last June 28, Maning, Rally, and I met a bunch of guys from the BMW Car Club to talk about OpenStreetMap. The meetup happened at Centerstage KTV along Jupiter Street in Makati. The KTV is owned by Mikey, one of the club’s members. (BTW, the KTV seems to be an excellent videoke place; it’s quite similar to Red Box.)

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Well, I would be had my previous passport not been due to expire later in November (and I’ll explain why in a bit). By tomorrow, I would’ve been in Amsterdam to represent the Philippine OpenStreetMap community at the 2009 State of the Map (SOTM), the annual OpenStreetMap conference that started in 2007. For this year, the organizers announced back in May a scholarship program to bring 15 mappers from the developing world to attend the conference and to show the world about OSM activities in their home countries. SOTM will cover the full travel and accommodation costs for these lucky people. Out of 39 people nominated from 19 countries, I was one of the 15 selected.

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For the most part I’m a big Google fanboy (well except for some things here and there). And because I’m nominally a web developer, I certainly will try to attend as many developer-oriented Google events as I can. The first event I attended was the Google TechTalk last November 2007 and the second one was the first ever Google DevFest Manila back in November 2008. So it should not come as a surprise that I turned up at the Google-Globe Developer Workshop last June 20. This event was held at Tech Portal of the really, really, really cool U.P.-Ayala Land TechnoHub in U.P. Diliman (see a rough map at OpenStreetMap ). Did I mention that the TechnoHub is really cool?

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I was invited to a pretty unique media/blog tech event in May. This was the Manila launch of Acer’s Aspire Timeline series which was held last May 25 while cruising on board the M/V Spirit of Manila in Manila Bay. Well, it’s not often that you get a chance to ride a boat and see Metro Manila from the sea so I grabbed this opportunity (taking a half-day leave from the office in the process). The pips from Acer joked that they did the cruise idea so that they’re guaranteed a “captive” audience. Heh.

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