The instant I saw the trailer of My Sister’s Keeper, I was definite that I would watch it. I generally like action, adventure, sci-fi and disaster movies, but I have a soft spot for touching or even tear-jerking dramas. Heck, two of my most recent movie reactions on this blog—the ones on The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and 100—are such kind of films. And as far as touching dramas are concerned, My Sister’s Keeper does not disappoint. (I think I even shed a tear or two while watching the movie.)

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Some time ago, I came across a banner posted on an MMDA footbridge on the way to work. Instead of taking a photo, I decided to recreate the layout of the banner with the names changed to protect the guilty:

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Aside from being the tenth prime number, 29 is also the second sum (when only considering whole numbers) of three consecutive squares, namely the squares of two, three, and four. (The first such sum is 14, which is 1² + 2² + 3².) In addition, all the numbers in the sequence from 1 to 29 have at most 2 unique prime factors and that this is the longest such sequence.

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One of my managers at work knows that I love maps (she actually gave me four NAMRIA topomaps for Christmas) and so she told me a few months ago about this thousand-plus-peso atlas of Metro Manila that she saw at Fully Booked. Being the map geek that I am, I was of course quite curious. I was finally able to locate this atlas last month at Fully Booked Bonifacio High Street and discovered that it’s the first edition of the Manila Street Atlas by Periplus (see the Amazon listing).

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Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo!, is probably the most popular photo-sharing site on the Web. Flickr has support for geotagged photos and the site can display maps of photos using Yahoo! Maps. Unfortunately for many parts of the world, the Yahoo! map is quite lacking. To alleviate this problem, the Flickr team decided to use OpenStreetMap for the Beijing Olympics and also for last year’s Burning Man festival.

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Unless you were quite oblivious, a partial solar eclipse happened last July 22. If you didn’t realize that an eclipse happened, I can’t blame you since a partial solar eclipse is far, far less spectacular than a total solar eclipse. The sun is far too bright that the moon obscuring only part of the sun’s disc will have no visible effect on the daylight. So, it’s quite easy to miss the fact that there was an eclipse unless you were clued in before.

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Over the past two days, I have read plenty of moving, eloquent, and honorable pieces giving tribute to our former president. I wanted to write one equally as beautiful but then I realized, why should I agonize wanting to create my perfect essay to President Aquino? She was a simple lady and a simple tribute would do quite as well.

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