SMB Oktoberfest Street Party Schedules

The 'BER' months have started and the San Miguel Beer (SMB) Oktoberfest Street Parties starts today!Scheduled for today and tomorrow, Friday and Saturday - September 4 and 5, big bands will be playing at different venues. Beer prices at only P25.00.Party Schedules and Venues:September 4 (Friday)Plaza Burgos, Florentino St., Vigan City.Band: ItchywormsSeptember 4 (Friday)Paseo de Sta. Rosa, Sta.

Why there is such a trend for Standard UHBLED footprint 3mmx3mm?

Due to the market need for smaller package LED with more power emission, there is a trend of smaller packages that comes with 3mm x3 mm ceramic base UHBLED of more than 1 W in the market.

Rebel, XRE, XP and Oslon and more to come in months from these big player Lumileds, Cree and Osram.

The key advantages are that they can put more LEDs in a smaller area to emit more light.

They can have a comparatively smaller optic or smaller light guide for these light rays to emit.

They can have tape and reel format on these product for SMT mounting.

Final fixture can have more power with Multi-LED configuration especially for Illumination.

They can use automatic Surface mount machine for board level insertion.

The smaller Footprint will use less material and good for cost down on the LEDs Price!

The Huge K2 Type of LED will soon be phased out.

Sept 7 & Sept 21 are Holidays This Year

Malacanang has decalred Sept 21, 2009 as a national holiday in observance of Eid’l Fitr (festival of breaking fast) which marks the end of the fasting month of Ramadan.Sept 4 Update: Sept 7 is now also declared a holiday and considered national day of mourning for Eraño “Ka Erdy” Manalo's death (Iglesia ni Cristo Executive Minister).After two long weekends and three holidays in the month of

Something new

Two posts in one day? Summer must be nearing an end.

As you can see at the left hand side, I've joined the Waterloo-Wellington Bloggers Association (honeygarlic will appear on that list within the next few days, I believe).

Why? Because it gets us out there in the blogosphere.

This blog has always existed in a bit of a bubble - generally visited by people who know me and/or Dan personally, people who searched for something specific, or on occasion people who were drawn in through my advertising it on Twitter.

With the WWBA, we'll occasionally get visitors from another blog in the group. At least that's the hope.

Beyond all of that, there's another motive here. I am a big fan of local journalism, and the WWBA certainly falls in that category. As mainstream media increasingly cuts back on local coverage, it falls to the general public to start grassroots movements like this one.

I've visited every blog in the WWBA, and there's some quality writing being done. I'd like to shine a spotlight particularly on James Bow, Cut The Chatter, Dopplegangland, No Magic Here, and Yappa Ding Ding, all of which might find their way into the other blogroll in the sidebar when I get around to update that.

(Speaking of that other blogroll, Comfortable and Furious is finally being updated again with talk on politics and baseball. As much as he might hate my alleged partisanship and vice-versa, he's still a great read.)

So I'm now part of a Bloggers Association. We'll see how that plays out.

I can only imagine flawlessly.

--Ryan

(P.S. If anybody knows how to eliminate that whitespace at the bottom of the site, it'd be greatly appreciated.)

Electoral advice

So we're having an election in the next few months, unless the NDP is able to out-weasel themselves.

This would make the fourth election in five years. That's a lot of elections. I'm okay with that - and I think most people are - on one condition.

We get this one right.

That's a very large 'we', but I'll break it down for specific groups.

For the voters, keep up the good work. You're doing the best you can with the extremely limited information you're given. It'd be nice if more of you came out and exercised your democratic rights, but I can't really fault you at all for being jaded.

For the media...you've got a bit more on your plate. Realize that you're not in the business of giving free advertising to any party (or all the parties). Giving a balanced story is a nice ideal, but it shouldn't be adhered to at the expense of truth. If you're working on a story about a new breakthrough in cancer treatment, and the doctor you're interviewing refuses to talk about anything but the completely unrelated issue of emergency room wait times, do you run that interview? Of course not. So why run an interview with a politician who didn't answer your questions?

There is some evidence that the media is waking up to this fact already. For example, this clip of Conservative question-dodger John Baird from yesterday. It starts around 1:30, with a Francophone reporter I don't recognize asking a question and Baird answering a completely different one. Then Global's David Akin asks a question that sounds more like a scolding. Then the first woman complains that her question wasn't answered, and Baird still doesn't answer it.

This is all good. Politicians seem to think they'll get on the news no matter what they say - and maybe they will under the current conditions, but under ideal circumstances, politicians only make the news when it fits with the story the journalist wants to tell. If the Canadian media as a whole is ready to head back in that direction, we'll all be better off for it.

My final words of advice are to politicians, and primarily to Conservatives and Liberals (as well as those who work for them). It makes sense to think that the more you move toward the centre of the political spectrum, the better you'll do in the election. But that's not really the case - the more you move to the centre, the less likely you're going to give voters any real reason to vote for your party policy-wise, and the more voters you'll lose to parties further from the centre. You need to give voters an identity, a brand, something they can remember besides "that guy looks good on TV" - despite what some people think, the voters respond well to politicians who have well-communicated ideas.

Drop the attack ads. We can come up with our own negative perceptions, and you're not telling us why we should vote for you in any case.

Is this a pipe dream? Probably. But by putting our political culture in a position where it is seen as detached from the realities of the country, where elections are seen as a chore, where the media coverage is something to be manipulated rather than something to be achieved, our politicans are ensuring themselves of a no-win, catch-22 situation where significant policy won't come until a majority government does, and a majority government is out of reach as long as policy isn't proposed.

--Ryan

What was I going to SAY????

I hate when I lose my train of thought!  I was just thinking of what I wanted to post and now I've lost it....oh, I think I wanted to add my etsy info on here. I need to figure out how to add that link to this blog but for the meantime you can check out my things on etsy at wayway123-that's my shop's name.  I am obsessed with etsy.com!!!!  The people selling on there are so talented!  Good way to spend some extra time, if you have time to kill that is!!!  I have just painted another pillow cover and am letting it dry before I take any more pictures.  There will be pictures to come this week.

Multiply Chat Surprises Netizens

Social Networking Multiply got its users a surprise earlier in the day when they were greeted by a small chat function bar at the lower right side of their multiply.com account screen.The Multiply Chat serves to enable multiply.com users to talk or chat with other multiply contacts in real-time.Versus Facebook?Others view this new technology as a desperate attempt by Multiply to recover its lost