A week ago, 12 people were injured when an office elevator in PBCom tower, Makati City malfunctioned and descended rapidly. Tips on how to survive in a falling elevator came to mind as I work on the 38th floor of one the tallest office buildings in Makati, but would those really work? This video by Debunked has the answers:
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Since November last year, I’ve been using GCash whenever possible – paying bills, online and even daily purchases. It’s been a great experience as the service has been reliable and convenient. Until last Friday, March 1.
I needed to pay for my PLDT bill and the idea of cashing in at 7-Eleven came to mind. At first I tried to use the Gcash app to generate a code but it failed and so I decided to use the CLiQQ stand instead. Walked up to the kiosk, generated a receipt, queued up at the counter, handed over the cash and walked out the 7-eleven store after taking the receipt.
An hour has passed and already done with buying the things I needed to cook dinner, I checked my Gcash balance and my cash in has not yet been credited to my wallet. No confirmation SMS that the transaction was successful.
Calmly, I searched for Gcash’s Customer Support hotline when I got home. Made 4 calls to 2882 yet all I got was a pre-recorded message saying that there is no one available to assist and that a call back was scheduled instead.
That’s when I started to get really worried. It seems that Globe’s customer service has not improved that much. Not enough representatives to answer customer calls and responses took longer than what is reasonable. Even the GCash Care on Messenger took hours to get any real reply. Emails to support@gcash.com was even worse with nothing more than canned responses acknowledging my first email.
Then the callback from 2882 finally came – Saturday evening, a full 24 hours after I first reported my concern. They advised of the following:
GCash Care took more than 24 hours to take action on my concern.
The transaction failed on 7-Eleven’s side – there seems to be an issue with their ‘connection’ to GCash that cashing in is still unavailable.
Bring the receipt with me and ask for a refund. However, this needed to be worked on by 7-Eleven customer service which took another day.
Finally, after 3 days, I was able to get the refund from 7-Eleven. So much for trying the ‘convenience’ of reloading GCash via 7-Eleven stores.
Lessons learned:
- Always keep the receipt – it’s proof of your transaction
- GCash transactions generate SMS confirmation/alerts within minutes. If no SMS comes in, then it’s most likely that something went wrong with your transaction.
- Have patience. Tons of it. Dealing with GCash customer support will definitely take a lot of time and if you have an urgent need for the money or the transaction, it will really cause a lot of stress.
It will also help move things along if you contact the customer support of the other organization involved in the GCash transaction, in my case 7-eleven. This experience has left me with the feeling that GCash has real limits contrary to what their marketing team says: things could easily go wrong any time. Despite the modern tools and services we have today, integration and synergy between separate digital services is still a work in progress.
How’s your GCash experience so far? If you’d had similar or worse issue, feel free to share in the comments below.
Disclaimer:
The author is not connected in any way to Globe, Inc, Mynt or GCash.
Most Filipinos grew up learning the song “Bahay Kubo” (Nipa Hut) as it’s one of the staples of folk songs taught to children. Remembering all the vegetables mentioned in the lyrics is often given as a trivia challenge especially to adults just to test how well they still know the song. Being able to list all is already an amazing feat.
A more difficult challenge, even for geeks, is knowing the scientific names of each vegetable. I remember kicking off our Taxonomy class with this homework back in college and it was quite a daunting yet fun challenge.
So to help out anyone, call it a public service, I share to you a table of all the vegetables in the song “Bahay Kubo” along with its respective scientific name.
| Filipino name | English name | Scientific name |
| Singkamas | Jicama | Pachyrrizus erosus |
| Talong | Eggplant | Solanum melongena |
| Sigarilyas | Winged bean | Psophocarpus tetragonolobus |
| Mani | Peanut | Arachis hypogaea |
| Sitaw | String beans | Phaseolus vulgaris |
| Bataw | Hyacinth bean | Dolichos lablab |
| Patani | Lima bean | Phaseolus lunatus |
| Kundol | Winter melon | Benincasa hispida |
| Patola | Angled luffa/Chinese okra | Luffa acutangula |
| Upo | Bottle gourd | Lagenaria siceraria |
| Kalabasa | Squash | Cucurbita maxima |
| Labanos | Radish | Raphanus sativus |
| Mustasa | Mustard | Brassica juncea |
| Sibuyas | Onion | Allium cepa |
| Kamatis | Tomato | Lycopersicum esculentum |
| Bawang | Garlic | Allium sativum |
| Luya | Ginger | Zingiber officinale |
| Linga | Sesame seed | Sesamum indicum |
The basic rule for writing a scientific name
- Use both genus and species name: Felis catus.
- Italicize the whole name.
- Capitalize only the genus name. (In the past you would capitalize the species designation if it was derived from a proper name, e.g., Megalonyx Jeffersonii, but now the species designation is always lowercased: Megalonyx jeffersonii.)
Hope this helps!
After four months of absence I’ve returned to blogging. Welcome to the new Ctrl + Alt + J! I must admit that it’s not been an easy path to this very first post. Since 2015, I’ve been battling a severe case of writer’s bloc, blogger’s bloc or fatigue. The steam has ran out. The engines have stopped. Drafts were not even being finished. Social media took up most of my time and energies. Around me my fellow bloggers have moved on to bigger roles in other platforms. Some like myself have just simply faded in the digital background.
Thankfully, the passion never died. The urge was still there. The need to express, examine, question and engage kept burning no matter how small the flame was. On the technical side, I’ve lost the original domain this blog was on and came to be known for. Fellow bloggers and the very few long-time readers would have noticed the subtle difference in what’s seen on your browser’s address bar as you’ve landed on this blog.
Also lost are 6 years of blog posts, comments, tags, links and other content. Saddening, true but I’m looking at it from a ‘clean slate’ angle. To truly move forward sometimes it’s best to just simply let go of the past. So you’d notice an empty or non-existent archives page. Soon though, there will be one and it will be filled with new stuff as the days will go on.
The best bit about this new version of Ctrl + Alt + J is that it’s now a secure corner of the web. That’s literally secure because you’d see in your browser’s address bar the “https://” protocol preceding my new domain. It’s my gift and commitment to you my dear readers so that you’d have a secure connection to this blog. Thank you for reading up to this point and I’d give your time back now as you’ve reached the end of this post. Hope to see you around in the many more posts to come along.
Oppo has grabbed headlines thanks to its new flagship phone the Find X and it’s brave new feature: Pop-up camera.
The pop-up camera is a design feature brought on by the device’s record-setting screen-to-body ratio of 93.8 percent. That record was previously held by the Vivo Nex whose ratio is at 91.24 percent. To get the most space for the screen, the front and back cameras along with the fingerprint sensor was put in a top section that extends from the phone’s body.
Check out this video by The Verge:
John Callaham over at Android Authority thinks the pop-up camera looks cool yet cautions on the problems inherent with the pop-up design:
All-screen smartphones look cooler, no doubt, but having moving parts and pop-up cameras on top may not be the way to go. The most obvious problem with these kinds of designs is the use of mechanical parts to go up and go back down. Moving parts can wear down and fail over time (anyone who has experienced the failure of the power windows in their car can attest to that issue). While Oppo and Vivo claim to have conducted reliability tests on the mechanical parts on the cameras in the Find X and Nex to make sure they won’t fail, we will have to see if that actually translates to the real world.
Zach Epstein at BGR writes outright that it’s an awful idea:
There are two simple reasons Oppo’s Find X design is a horrible idea. First, it’s going to break. If you drop the phone and it lands wrong, or if you get too much dirt or dust in the area that houses the motor, that mechanism is toast. Heck, even if you keep it clean and don’t drop it, we’ll probably see a relatively high failure rate over time. Once it breaks, you won’t be able to use the cameras or even unlock the phone with any biometric authentication until you pay to have it fixed.
Another point they both agree on is that these new hardware design features on the current generation of smartphones is due to the lack newsworthy features. While smartphone makers are currently at work on some really cool features like Samsung’s “foldable” device, it may be some years before we see new phones that have really groundbreaking features.
Until then, what do you think of the Oppo Find X’s pop-up camera? Is it really cool or just another terrible idea?