Coredump

I just got home from an all-nighter at the office. There’s still no electricity here, as in most parts of the metro. (Thank goodness for generators and redundant power backups at work.)

When I got out of the office building this morning and while riding a cab back home, I got a clear picture of the onslaught typhoon Milenyo had caused: shards of thick signage plastics, broken glass, leaves, branches (and tree trunks!) littered the main street. The steel scaffolding of a huge billboard fronting Club 650 fell over the steak restaurant there. Even the large Chikka billboard that towered over the Ortigas-C5 flyover was humbled by the typhoon. In my place here in Pasig, trees were uprooted and roofs flew off houses. The tarpaulin billboards that served as backdrops to the countless factories in the area were shred to pieces.

Too bad I don’t have a phone-camera (camera phone?) like Migs does — all these would have made good web copy. But I’m glad I didn’t get to receive Milenyo’s wrath first-hand. I was cooped up in the office since 3:00 PM yesterday with half our team. (Good thing there weren’t too much load coming from our Ireland and China teams, or we would have had a different kind of storm then.) And I’m thankful, too, that my family in the province were spared. I wouldn’t have known what to do had Milenyo hit the province instead.

(In the midst of all these, some things still worked — mobile phones, for one. Since I didn’t have electricity at home yesterday morning before going to work, my wife would relay typhoon tracking updates from TV through SMS. I also coordinated with other team members through text, and I got to compose a few offline mails using the remaining battery life on Mathilda. Heck, I even got to play a mean game of DotA — heavy graphics and audio at that — before she finally protested. {So, yes, richard, Dell can do that. ;)})