My Tatay Passed the Real Estate Appraiser Examination 2014! :D

First off, what is an appraiser? As Wikipedia puts it: 

"Real estate appraisal, property valuation or land valuation is the process of valuing real property. The value usually sought is the property's market value. Appraisals are needed because compared to, say, corporate stock, real estate transactions occur very infrequently. Not only that, but every property is different from the next, a factor that does not affect assets like corporate stock. Furthermore, all properties differ from each other in their location - which is an important factor in their value."

An assessor is for government properties, while an appraiser determines the value of private properties. An assessor is automatically also an appraiser, but an appraiser cannot be an assessor until he passes the licensure exam.

The licensure exam took place last July 13, 2014 at the Manuel L. Quezon University over at Quiapo, Manila. But before this day, Tatay had to take review classes from Cesar Santos that spanned a month of whole-day review sessions and he would even review at home. A few weeks prior the exam he would stay up until the wee hours of the morning just studying and solving problems. Imagine someone in his 50's who was still willing to go through all that effort to pass the exam... it was very inspiring!

I kept asking him if he was nervous but he just laughed it off and said he had faith in God. :D

Come exam day, me and mama were in full support of tatay and accompanied him to the exam venue.  Unfortunately there wasn't an allotted parking space, but we were lucky we got there early so we got to park right beside the gates. Mama didn't want to walk around the place so we spent the whole day just stuck inside the car. Thank goodness we had newspapers and other reading stuff so we didn't really get too bored. I think I even blogged there. Lol.

I managed to take a couple of snapshots from the exam venue so well here's what it looked like:

Aaaand before we knew it, the exam was over. The exam took one whole day (just like the UPCAT!) and  Tatay got tired so we headed over to Pancake House at the Mall of Asia to eat.

We only found out the results about a week after, but it appears that they already released it 3 days after the exam. Turns out the exam was harder this year, with just a 36% passing rate. Buuuut yeheees!! Tatay passed!! Yeahmeeeeen!!

You can find the complete list of successful examinees here:

http://www.prc.gov.ph/uploaded/documents/REA0714se.pdf

I am SO SO SO SO proud of Tatay! Of course we're really grateful for all the help that God has blessed us with, BUUUUT you have to admit that you really won't go anywhere if you don't put hard work into it.

So! If there are any real estate properties, both privately or government-owned, that you would like to have appraised, just contact me or hit the comments section below and I'll refer you to my Tatay, okay?? It appears that there's a lot of technicalities involved in these things that you really need a professional to work these out. My father is also a licensed real estate broker, you can visit his Sulit (Olx) page here for available properties (majority in Laguna, Cavite and Batangas area).

So yes, contact us! :D

Congrats again Tatay!

The PROMAP Manufacturing Learning Series

Back when I was still working, I've always been keen to observe how the industry operates both in the macro and micro scale, and I must say that I sure have learned a lot in 5 years. I liked the customer meetings because it allowed me to take a peek on what our customers problems were, and how multinational companies related to each other. I also liked the production floor meetings and chatting with operators, technicians, and facility personnel because I liked to learn how things operate at their end. Being a process engineer granted us that advantage and I tried to learn all I could from it.

And so in spite of my resignation last year, I wanted to keep myself updated somehow. This time though, I already had the time to look beyond the semiconductor industry.  Fortunately, I bumped into Dr. Richard Chu from the UP Eng'g, Chemical Engineering department, and the adviser of my college org Society of Manufacturing Engineers. He mentioned that the senior professional chapter had an upcoming seminar about Rootcause Analysis, so I decided to come last July 5 just to check it out.

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Rediscovering Newspapers

One of the activities that eat up a huge chunk of my online time is reading articles. Sometimes I catch up on news, sometimes I read on social commentary,  gossip, and whatnots like Buzzfeed, Thoughtcatalog, etc (my favorite is Lifehacker). While it is of course healthy to take a peep into the perspectives of different people from different belief systems, there are times when I think some of these are just carefully-worded junk. It's funny how people with twisted reasoning can gain sympathy and believers by simply relying on witty rhetoric. But then again that's what makes the internet interesting.

Even if I love reading these articles, I'm realizing that the overload of content and the fact that just about anyone can publish their work, is turning this end of online content into a pile of confused mess.  Just like how videos of cute dogs and cats can now be considered junk because there's just waaaaaaaaay too much of them. It can be tricky to sort through the ones with real value.

Even self-declared news websites can produce a lot of crap nowadays (though not all really). If in the pre-internet era you can trust all the facts you see in new articles, nowadays you'd have to take things with a grain of salt because they tend to make typographical mistakes, errors in citing references, and sometimes even their facts are just downright wrong. I don't really get what their editors are doing, but I think they're less strict on their online articles because they know that they can undo their errors by simply hitting the "edit" button. And all this while acting like arrogant journalists at that (*ehem*ehem*tamaan-na-ang-tatamaan*lol).

Anyway, this line of thought has prompted me to rediscover the one medium that has been grossly affected by the rise of online journalism - the newspapers.

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Of Work Dates and Coffee

This is one of those random blogposts that I blurt out just because. :)

I really like it when we have these working dates. It's when he needs to work on something and I need to work on something entirely different and we do it together. We just find ourselves a good coffee shop to crash in then spend a whole night minding our own businesses. I think it started back when I was desperately trying to learn the Matlab programming language and he'd stay around to teach me and watch me work my way around it. Eventually he realized he wanted to learn other things too while I sat and studied for exams and problem sets.

On of our earlier working dates at Starbucks Makati, December 2011

So the practice has gone on until now. We tend to learn in different ways: he likes video lectures while I'd rather read e-books and articles. We could never read together because I tend to flip pages too fast heheh!

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Behold the Loomband Craze!

Don't you find it fascinating that in the era of smartphones and Facebook, tiny little rubberbands in different colors have suddenly become a huge hit?

Loombands are pieces of colorful rubber bands that one can 'weave' and turn into happy bracelets. Rainbow Loom, the company that popularized loombands as we know it, was started in 2011 by a Malaysian named Cheon Choon Ng, based in Michigan. With only a $10,000-investment, Rainbow Looms have taken numerous playgrounds, classrooms, and homes all over the world by storm.

I personally don't do loom bands but I'm really fascinated by all these Facebook posts I see from friends who have become addicted with these. One of them is ate Flec, almost every weekend she posts one or two "themed" loom bands and people rush to buy them hahah. I love how she's able to mix and match colors to come up with really cool representations of various themes. Here are some samples (all photos taken from their Facebook with permission):

Belgium Origami

Red Velvet

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