Then you can nominate her or him for the fifth BPInoy Awards of the Bank of the Philippine Islands. Any individual or organization can nominate by writing a short article about the nominee, describing:

• how the nominee has contributed to the improvement of the Filipino community abroad
• why the nominee deserves recognition
• what is unique or exceptional about the nominee’s achievements

Nominations must be submitted to bpinoyawards@bpi.com.ph on or before September 15, 2010, addressed to Ms. Athena G. Balleza, Marketing Department, Overseas Customers Segment, Bank of the Philippine Islands.

Last year, the BPInoy awardees were:

• White House executive chef Ms. Cristeta Pasia-Comerford
• Dr. Eli Remalona, chief representative for the Asia and the Pacific of the Bank for International Settlements
• painter Mrs. Anita Magsaysay-Ho

For more info, visit www.bpiexpressonline.com.

I bought this one on the picture from CD-R King, where some of the cheapest electronic supplies are sold,  and it has been helpful.  It gives me up to 15 minutes of time to save my files or send a rush email before the PC finally gives out.

This UPS also has a voltage regulator, so it’s two-in-one. The white power strip beside it is also helpful and saves bits of electricity. PCs still use electricity even if they’re off but unplugged from the electric outlet. With the power strip, you don’t have to unplug anything everytime you stop working on your PC.

Related posts:

Freelance Writers — $5 Per 400- to 500-Word Article

Free HP Printer Scanner Copier with Smart Bro

If you’re a former OFW who paid membership fees when Philhealth was still called Medicare, most probably your record is no longer with Philhealth.  So when you want to be a member again, you will be applying as a new member.

You will use the new membership form, and you need to bring your birth certificate, your marriage certificate (so you can include your spouse as your dependent), and birth certificates (so your children will be enrolled as your dependents).  Bring original and xerox copies.

If your spouse is a former Philhealth member, he/she can’t be enrolled as your dependent even if he/she has not paid her membership fees for more than 12 months. This was my case. I was rejected as a dependent even if I haven’t paid for more than 12 months.

What I should do, according to Philhealth, is to write a letter informing them I haven’t paid my fees and asking them to allow me to accept me as a dependent.  I hope Philhealth will address this issue in the coming months, so this becomes automatic.

Here are the offices of Philhealth:

Main Office:
Citystate Centre,  709 Shaw Boulevard,
Pasig City
Trunkline:  637-9999
info@philhealth.gov.ph

Las Piñas Service Office

471 Editha Building, Alabang-Zapote Road,

Las Piñas City

Telephones:

5565374
5565687
8015256

Manila Service Office

Marc I Bldg., 1971 Taft Avenue,
Malate, Manila

Administrative – 5216776

Claims – 5232819
Collection – 5233959/5213610
Membership – 5217724/5239842

Caloocan Service Office

Remcor Bldg., Rizal Ave. Extension

between 10th & 11th Ave., Caloocan City

3652012

3652014

Quezon City Service Office

F.R. Estuar Bldg., 880 Quezon Avenue,
Quezon City

Office of the Branch Manager – 3323022
Collection Section – 3323024
Membership Section – 3323132
Rizal Service Office

The Brick Road Sta. Lucia East Grand Mall
Cainta, Rizal

6815111

Makati Service Office

ITC Building, 337 Sen. Gil Puyat Avenue,
Makati City

solp@philhealth.gov.ph

The minimum membership payment is 300 pesos (payment for one quarter, 100 pesos per month).  You can pay for 12 months or more.

For those in the Alabang area, the Philhealth office is near SM Southmall. If you’re coming from Alabang, it’s to your right, after passing Southmall.

And I got this job through Craigslist just this May.  The only minus-point is that the workload is not that much.

But the good thing is, in this new project I earn in just two to three days what I’ve been earning in 6 days in the project I’ve been doing for the past 18 months.  Also, the new project does not have a lot of specifications and keywords, and it has prospects of increased workload.

Fellow Pinoy freelance writers have been asking others to accept only writing jobs for not less than $5 per article of 500 words, in order to improve Pinoy writing rates in general.  But it has not been easy finding these clients that really send the payments.

A lot of freelance writing jobs on Craigslist are bargain-priced.  Imagine getting paid for one dollar (that’s only 46 pesos!) for a 400-word original, researched article?  And others even require the articles to be ready for spinning or with some other attached tasks!

Lastly, I’m thankful that I found a  client that didn’t scam me.  Recently, a fellow freelance writer wrote a lot of articles for a certain website, which suddenly disappeared, and which didn’t pay him.  He got the client through Craigslist.

By the way, this is part of the screenshot of my advance Paypal payment for the first 15 articles.

Pag-ibig does not consolidate the records of members whose employers are located in different Pag-ibig jurisdictions; it depends on its members to consolidate their records.

It takes months to consolidate, so start now.

My husband, who had two employers and who also continued paying as a voluntary member while working abroad, had to track his contributions and consolidate them in one branch before he was allowed to submit his retirement claims.

The dollar-denominated Pag-ibig Overseas Program, however, is really separate. You make your claims separately at the Gil Puyat, Makati branch.

By the way, my husband has paid more than 240 monthly contributions, so he was to able to file a claim. But he’s still waiting because of the consolidation process.

Whenever the power goes off, we can always turn to our gas burner or our Superkalan to cook our food. There is always the pamaypay or the shade of the mango tree to make one cool.

At work, as soon as the lights go out, the building’s generator automatically takes over.  If a certain online connection gives out, another Internet provider takes over.

But now that I’m working at home researching and writing articles for U.S. clients after being laid off by a U.S.-owned company downed by the U.S. recession, my income now is dependent on Meralco and Smart Bro.

Unlike a company, I don’t have enough funds to subscribe to even just two of Smart Bro, Globe, PLDT, Sun, Bayantel or Sky at the same time so that when one gives out, I can always turn to the other provider.

I can’t also have an alternative to Meralco because I can’t afford to buy my own generator.

This makes me totally at the mercy of Meralco and Smart Bro.

What compounds my problem if these services give out is the reality that I live in a mountainous part of Muntinlupa.  It is a beautiful area because it has retained its rural feel and people know and help each other.

But it is not conducive to home-based workers in relation to utilities. If either Meralco or Smart Bro gives out, we have to travel 10 kilometers to get to the nearest Internet cafe.  If one doesn’t own a car, one has to endure over an hour of waiting for the public jeepney or AUV to get filled up with passengers before it starts its journey down the mountain.

Additionally, because our place is on the highest level of the city, our Meralco lines are prone to disruptions whenever heavy rains, storms or lightnings occur.

To be fair, both Meralco and Smart Bro have served me generally well in the past several months.  But Meralco gets higher points from me because it has been quick in responding to disruptions even during nighttime. Since I started subscribing to Smart Bro last May 2008, the longest period I endured lack of Internet connection was 2 days.

This week is a record breaker for Smart Bro.  Since Wednesday, we have not had stable connection.  I had to go down the mountain every day and suffer the fees, chatter and inconveniences of an Internet cafe.

It’s now Saturday and the answer from the Smart Bro hotline officer is still the same:  Your base station antenna has problems.  What I couldn’t understand is why a big corporation like Smart cannot solve a problem related to an antenna on top of a simple school building for several days now.

To Smart Bro, and of course, Meralco:  kindly understand that the work place in the Philippines has been changing fast. There are now thousands of Filipinos working at home using PCs and the Internet, as can be read on blogs, forums and ads for home-based workers.

You have committed to give Internet connection and electric power to us as we pay your services on time, kindly continue doing your end of the agreement so we can keep feeding our families on time.

Note: At 10 a.m. Saturday, the Smart Bro connection was finally restored, worked for an hour, then went off again. Before it got dark, Smart Bro finally worked.

Most large banks now in the Philippines offer free Internet banking, and they offer lots of services that prompts you to say Wow.

However, in this article, I would describe only two, BPI Express Online and My BDO Internet Banking, because they’re the ones I use.

1. If you already have accounts with BPI and/or BDO, then you’ve
done the first step. Your savings account or checking account
would become the wallet from which you would get money to give
to your child weekly.

2. Next is to get an ATM card for your child, or ATM cards if you have more than one child to support.

If you get a regular ATM card, you are required to maintain a balance — 2,000 for a BDO account; 1,000 for a BPI Family account or 3,000 for a BPI account.

For most children, this maintaining balance is a temptation — a cake on the table ready to be consumed.

So the best option is to get a BPI Express Cash Card or a BDO Cash Card. Both of these ATM cards do not require a maintaining balance.

You can get a BDO Cash Card for only 120 pesos or a BPI Express Card for only 120 pesos also.

For OFWs, a better account is available — BDO Kabayan Savings. It only has a 100-peso maintaining balance, and it has other benefits too. More info for this account here.

OFWs can also get a BDO Remit Cash Card. More info on this here.

3. Then enroll your BPI savings or checking account with BPI Express Online or your BDO account with MyBDO Internet Banking.    You can enroll online and then print the filled out form to be submitted or sent to BDO or BPI. Or you can just go to your bank branch.

Just prepare your user name and password and be ready with your account number and your BDO or BPI cash card numbers.

4. After your Internet banking account is activated, you can plan and schedule when and how much money to put into your child’s cash card.

If your child needs 200 a day, you can reload your child’s cash card 1,200 or 1,500 every week. Just adjust the amounts when your child needs to pay the dorm or buy something.

Just tell your child that the minimum withdrawal for BPI Express Cash is 500 pesos and for BDO Cash Card, it is 200. Tell them to withdraw as much as possible from these banks’ ATMs to avoid ATM charges (around 10 pesos for each withdrawal).

5. For OFWs, Internet banking can save you remittance costs and
at the same time prevent your children from having access to large amounts of money, which can be tempting.  One-day millionaires among OFW children are common.

You don’t have to send money every month or every week. Just remit an adequate amount to your savings account and then transfer controlled amounts to your kids’ accounts as often as you like without paying any transfer fee.

For more details:

BPI Express Online

MyBDO Internet Banking

This is a special savings account for OFWs and their families in the Philippines.

You can open an account here in the Philippines, or abroad if you work near BDO correspondent banks.

• Can be in pesos or U.S. dollars
• Initial deposit of 100 pesos for a peso account or $100 for a dollar account.  (Update as of March 2010:  was changed to 50 pesos)
• No maintaining balance as long as you make at least 6 remittances a year. (Update as of March 3, 2010:  was reduced to one remittance a year )
• You will receive a passbook and an international ATM card.
• Additional update for seafarers: You can open a BDO Kabayan Shipping dollar savings account with passbook for only US$10.

Check BDO correspondent banks here.
BDO Remit Cash Card for OFWs

This card is similar to the regular BDO Cash Card,
but you can get this card abroad — in BDO accredited remittance
services.

This also has a higher load balance and deposit limit. While the
regular BDO Cash Card is limited to 10,000 pesos, BDO Remit Cash Card can be loaded with up to 100,000 pesos.

You can remit directly to this BDO Remit Cash Card account.

Your beneficiary can also check the status of your remittance
online at
https://www.bdocashcard.com/rts/remitinquire.asp

But that is water under the bridge now.

Some worse developments happened, and I’m now out of the company. Since the company is U.S.-owned, it was greatly affected by the U.S. recession.

It was good I had another job waiting, so I was able to continue paying our seemingly unending bills.  The Lord made a way for me.

We were given separation payments, but they were not as substantial as those given by multinationals.

Last January 29, the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) released its advisory on flexible work arrangements, allowing companies to resort to several types of work schedules to cope with the effects of the U.S. recession.

DOLE emphasized that the flexible work arrangements were better than total closure or termination of a big number of employees.

Among the work arrangements approved are:

Compressed workweek

A workday is increased to more than 8 hours,  so the usual number of 6 work days per week can be reduced, but the regular total of 48 work hours per week is achieved. The increase in work hours per day is not treated as overtime and the addition should not be more than 4 hours. This work day reduction should not last for over 6 months.

(Our firm used this to reduce the building’s electric and other maintenance costs and at the same time help cut employees’ transpo and related expenses.)

Worker Rotation

Employees are given work alternately within the workweek.

Forced Leave

Employees are required to go on leave for several days or weeks using their leave credits if there are any.

(The “if there are any” phrase seemed to mean that firms are allowed to implement extended forced leaves even if the employees have no more leave credits to use.)

Last December, when many of us were put on forced leave, the firm clearly was trying to avoid paying our unusually high holiday payments, although the bosses did not admit it. Through the years, we always did our best to boost our individual production 7 days before the Christmas holidays to receive big holiday payments. Last December, the firm was always talking about costs, more costs and cost cutting.

Broken-time schedule

Work schedule is not continuous, but the regular total number of work hours within the week or day remains.

Flexi-holidays

Employees avail of holidays at some other days, but there should be no diminution of holiday benefits.

Other flexible work arrangements

DOLE allows companies and its employees to explore other alternative arrangements.

Grievances

Differences in the interpretation of  flexible work arrangements are resolved by the company’s grievance mechanism.

If the grievance mechanism is unable to fix the differences, the grievance is referred to the DOLE Regional Office which has jurisdiction over the workplace.

Notice Requirement

Companies are required to notify their area’s DOLE Regional Office of their implementation of any flexible work arrangement.

DOLE Advisory No. 2 Series of 2009

Signed by DOLE Secretary Marianito D. Roque                                              January 29, 2009

You need a combined thesaurus and dictionary to help you with your writing some of the time. And of course, you want an easy-to-use, complete, current and accessible one. WordWeb is it. You will be glad you discovered it. The free version is as good as any dictionary on the Internet. You can download it and then put a shortcut on your desktop. For freelance writers like me, this is an amazing gift.

2. Blogger

Not only you can use blogger.com to host your sites, you can also use it to easily compose your posts or articles for other sites. For example, you’re writing for Squidoo which doesn’t have an automatic html feature, or you’re composing something for your Wordpress sidebar, and you need to put links or you need to put some words in colors or in better fonts, you just go to the Create New Post of your blogger.com account, click Compose and then create your posts or short notes. After you finish, click Edit Html, and then you have it, your short notes in Html format. Of course, Wordpress has a more sophisticated writing interface, but I’ve found that blogger.com loads and responds very fast for short posts and notes for my Wordpress sidebars.

3. Fotoflexer

This is one of the easiest free online editing photo editors I’ve found. You don’t even have to register before using it. Just upload your photo from your PC, or get it from other online photo hosts such as picasaweb, and then you can start editing your photo. Fotoflexer is good for non-Photoshop experts like me because it has an Undo feature that you can click many times. It also has Apply and Cancel buttons. When you try the tools such as Effects and Beautify, you can try clicking all options and then click Cancel if you don’t like the result.

4. Webmasterlabor

If you’re a freelance writer, you would like to make sure that your article is not exactly the same as any other article on the Internet. Surely, you wouldn’t like anyone to think of even just a taint of plagiarism when they read your article. Even if you know you wrote it on your own, it pays to check it. Just paste your article on the box, click Compare with Google, copy the number shown, click Compare and then wait for a few minutes until a new page appears. Click New and then you’d see if some of your phrases have duplicates on the internet. Of course, if you have the paid Copyscape service, you don’t need this. There are other tests, which I would describe in another article.

Notice: As of May 2009, this site has stopped its plagiarism checking service. As a substitute, I recommend plagiarism.detect. This needs registration and accomplishment of a short usage survey.

5. Create your Own Widget-Ready Footer in Wordpress

This article is specially mentioned, although there are lots of helps across the internet, because it was really helpful to me. It was just Copy and Paste, and some little tweaks in the CSS after. If you’re using a Wordpress theme that has no footer “sidebar”, and you like to have one, here’s a set of instructions very easy to follow. Just copy and paste. There is just one instruction there that you need to change– the codes that you need to paste on your footer.php. Just download the files the author is asking you to download. Open the footer.php in Word and then copy the subfooter block. This is the one you need to copy and paste on your footer.php. Perhaps the author just wants us to think a little and not just copy and paste and then sleep.