May pasok ba?

On Tuesday night, before the Metro turned black, I asked the question above over Twitter and Facebook, with much hesitation, as it would seem that I am the only one most interested in not attending my 8am Wednesday class. (which, in truth, had been the stuff of my typhoon daydreams since Monday, hehe)

The Inquirer today featured the overly simplistic site, www.maypasokba.com, which, in big bold letters, announced whether colleges and universities indeed have classes on windy, 'typhoon-y' days. However, the trouble with the site is that it makes blanket announcements different from the discretion given by the CHEd to school administrators to determine for themselves whether to suspend classes or not.

Anyhow, it is most worthy to note, that even if the above site did offer a detailed report on whether classes are suspended or not, it cannot be accessed because of the Metro-wide blackout.

According to the tweet of Ces Drilon, almost seventy percent of Filipino Facebook users were gone. Internet expert Tonyo Cruz (@tonyocruz) even remarked that billions of dollars worth of crops in Farmville (lol) got destroyed by Basyang.

In truth, my only refuge to have internet access last Wednesday was to sign onto the Blackberry Internet Service which thankfully was up, as Globe service was unaffected by the strong winds, unlike Sun Cellular which had lost all connection since Tuesday night. Truly, the Sun was down, literally and figuratively. Hehe.

The realization thus of yesterday's storm is - Information Technology cannot exist without electricity. Your Macbook pro will soon lose its battery charge after eight hours. Your Blackberry will use up its two-day battery life. And when all gadgets go dead, we're back to the handy transistor for news.

As we go back to Malcolm the morning after, at least there had been minimal damage to most of our countrymen, save for those who went missing at sea, and those whose 'karne-karne' in their ref were about to be 'panis' because of the more than twelve-hour blackout in many parts of the Metro.