Merry Christmas

It will be hot tomorrow here and here’s my warmest greetings for this season whether it’s cold or hot in your place.

Merry Christmas!

Christmas in Australia’s hot

While most of the world have to deal with snow and frost, Australia is bracing for hot weather in the coming days especially on Christmas when Perth is expected to be the hottest capital city in Australia at 38^oC, news.com.au reported.

While Western Australia Bureau of Meteorology said that this forecast “will be hotter than the previous five years,” it also confirmed that this month is WA’s coldest on record due to cold and wet conditions brought by easterly winds. Daytime could be warm but a cold snap could sometimes be felt during night time or early morning.

Some areas of WA have experienced an average of 45 degrees Celsius but the rest of December for WA is expected to be normal, i.e., warm as usual.

Multiply and ABS-CBN inks partnership

Early last month, social networking site Multiply inked a partnership with ABS-CBNi, the interactive division of Philippine media giant ABS-CBN. The agreement covers a multi-year, strategic advertising agreement. Multiply explained that “under terms of the agreement, ABS-CBNi will sell advertising and mobile services for Multiply’s Filipino users, with the two companies sharing revenues in the rapidly developing regional market.” “The partnership allows Multiply to monetize a significant portion of its traffic while still retaining a primary focus on product development and global customer acquisition.,” Multiply explained.

Some multiply users welcomed the development while some were skeptics. Some invoking loyalty to the network while some questioning the relevance of the deal to users. The bottom line of this story, well, Filipino users will now be able to receive localized advertisements just as users in Australia do.

Australia’s population now over 20M

Australia recently announced that its population has breached the 20 million mark reaching about 21 million in a recent official census. Western Australia was the fastest growing state in terms (both in population and economy).

News.com reported that “immigration accounted for 56 per cent of Australia’s growth, while 272,900 births minus 134,800 deaths made up 44 per cent of the increase.” This is a welcome news here in Australia as there were fears before that the country might suffer Japan’s predicament of having an aging population. The Australian government has placed incentives for couples who decide to have a child giving  a “baby bonus” of about Aus$4000 for a baby (dead or alive) and an additional weekly support (if alive).

On a personal note, I can personally say that the booming economy here in Western Australia is definitely felt at the household level. Almost everybody (even as young as 12) has a chance to land a job whether part-time, casual or full-time. Now, this is an economy working.

Back home, the Philippines has breached the 90 million mark. A July 2007 estimate was placed at  91,077,287. I can personally say also that my family back home are not feeling the fruits of the economic growth that the country is apparently achieving.

Busy, Busy, Busy… :)

Well, I might be stating the obvious but yes it’s been a very busy past few days/weeks but the good news is that my blogging hiatus came rewarded. A poster presentation that I gave at Uni was awarded the first recipient of the Geoff Griffiths Prize and my recent introductory seminar went well (thanks to my colleagues at the trailer trash who came to listen. ). So, many things happened in the past few weeks, Australia has a new prime minister (now I’m hearing some mates claiming to be proud to be Australians again!), Beckham-mania hit Australia while Trillanes “snapped” and holed himself with his mates in a Philippine five-star hotel, the Spice Girls were re-united and the US becomes the only developed country not to ratify Kyoto.

Thanks to Sasha, by the way, for the invitation to the Blogger Meet and Greet in Manila last 30 November. Well, for another obvious reason, I couldn’t honor the invitation but I would have loved to attend (maybe next year, given the chance).