Thoughts and Non Thoughts

The bicameral committee of the Senate and Congress has finally approved a reconciled proposal for the excise tax beginning 2018. For cars, the committee approved a four-tier scheme as follows 4%   - for cars costing up to PhP 600,000 10% - for cars over PhP 600k up to PhP 1 Million 20% - for cars over PhP 1 Million to PhP 4 Million 50% - for cars over PhP 4 Million It's a simpler scheme than the current one with fixed and marginal taxes. The more important question is : how will it impact car prices? Below is a graphical summary, showing increases (or decreases) based on current retail prices (as of Dec 18, 2017). If  you're in the market for a car in the PhP 2.5 Million to PhP 7.0 Million range, it might be worth waiting for January. Otherwise, there's a few more days in 2017 if you're eyeing a car outside this range.

It's in Taguig City, Philippines. It's even called Venice Grand Canal Mall . 😀

Noticeable difference on an iPad Air (1st version 2013). Well worth the upgrade. And the upgrade went smoothly too. I also discovered that the iPhone 5 won't upgrade to 10.3. Oh well...I think that would be asking too much. 😀

When traveling and you want to avoid bill shock from roaming charges, you can use Viber for calls, especially when there's wifi (say, in a hotel). Just don't forget to turn off "Viber-In Calls" on your settings. If you keep this on, your Viber calls could be diverted to regular roaming calls, with roaming charges.

This cart sounded best at a tracking force of 2.1 grams. It's the final touch to the fine tuning of the system. In audio nirvana right now.

Grabbed a few LPs from Burlington Square in Singapore, including the one playing above, along with some vacuum tubes. Now I haven't tube rolled in a long while, but neither have I spent a lot of time with my tube system, favoring instead the plug-and-play LSA integrated. But with a couple of hours on my hands, decided to try the Mullard 12ax7 reissues in the tubed phono stage (Jolida JD9). It was great. But like any system, you change one part you have to adjust the whole thing. So what started as a phono tube tweak turned out to be a changing of the tubes. Jolida JD9: Mullard 12ax7 reissues are in, Tungsol gold pins (New Sensor) are out. Tono Violin pre-amp: RCA black glass 6sn7s are in, Raytheons are out. CJ MV55: Svetlana EL34s are back in, Tungsol reissues are out. The result: bliss. Test records: Style Council's Café Bleu. Simon and Garfunkel's Parsley, Sage, Rosemarie and Thyme. Oh, and Ed Sheeran sounded great.

Update today to iOS 9.0.2 on the iPad Air went smoothly. Good experience so far. Apps such as Flipboard load faster. Overall much smoother, no jerkiness. Worthwhile upgrade.