Inspired by the success of the Tagaytay Mapping Party last May, OpenStreetMappers from Davao City decided to have their own mapping party this coming Saturday, July 4. This event is being spearheaded by George Tujan and Marloue Pidor, both of Neuraltech Innovations, an IT startup in Davao focusing on GPS and geospatial technologies.

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It’s been exactly five years since I wrote the first post here in vaes9. This also means that I’ve been a blogger for five years now. I’ve written anniversary posts for the first year and the second but I neglected to write posts for the third- and fourth-year anniversaries since the occasion was eclipsed by Lakbayan, which I launched on June 12, 2007. (That means that Lakbayan is now two years old!) So let me indulge myself as I write a fifth-year-anniversary post to celebrate this milestone.

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We Filipinos (should) all know that the Philippine flag is unique in that it flies its flag upside down (with the red on top) when the country is in a state of war. Well, to celebrate the 111th declaration of Philippine Independence, listed below are a few other bits of trivia about our Three Stars and a Sun watawat that you probably don’t know.

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It’s amusing that about a week after I derided Google’s Mapping Party concept, I was invited to attend one by Aileen Apolo, the Philippine country representative of Google, in behalf of Dante Varias and Leonel Foronda, who are apparently the two most productive Filipino Google Map Maker contributors. The event happened last June 3 at the Bubba Gump restaurant in Greenbelt 3 and it was attended by local bloggers and developers. (I guess I was invited because I am a blogger, a developer, and a Map Maker contributor all at the same time!)

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I announced last month that there would be an OpenStreetMap Mapping Party in Tagaytay last May 16. Well, this post is quite late but I’m pleased to report that the Mapping Party was pretty much a success! I actually already blogged about it at my OSM diary, but that is for the OSM audience and not for general readers. This blog post would be for the latter’s consumption (i.e., you!).

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If you’ve seen the TV commercials and the billboards (and maybe even the blog posts from your favorite local blogger), then you should know by now that Smart has finally launched their sorta Web 2.0 portal attempt called Sandbox. The slogan for this website is “Now everything’s in one box” and it tries to do just that. Sandbox aims to be a content download site, a social network site, a mobile blogging site, a marketplace (e.g. Digisoria), and what else have you.

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