Goodbye, American Dream

The other month we ended our dreams of going to America. My wife couldn't control her emotions when she wrote the formal withdrawal letter. She cried.



She is one of those nurses who had hoped of immigrating to the US. Her application has been pending for years, and yet we patiently waited. Most of her batchmates and friends are there already and she is one of the few left behind. Our priority date was May 2006 and as per latest visa bulletin, we're only a month away.

But passion died years ago, compounded with the expiry of her CG and IELTS. She failed the NCLEX twice and it had dampened her hope and desire. Though the exam can now be taken in Manila, she doesn't want to undergo another excruciating review and pay the expensive exam fees.

Also, hospital experience is now a strict requirement which she had none. She had applied at a nursing home which do not require hospital experience. But we heard lots of nursing homes in the US had closed because of their country's financial woes. It used to be that retirement and pension plans pay for the retirees nursing homes expenses. But these were all gone with the economic crisis.

We prayed hard for this plan and it seems that the answer was a clear 'NO!'. So today, we'll shift our dreams to somewhere else. I will no longer have to imagine working from home in Texas or driving a school bus in Idaho. We'll rebuild our dreams from where we are right now. Wifey and I have lots of things to do.

No More Chatbox

Today, I will delete my chatbox. It has not served it purpose anymore and has become the haven of spammers, and passersby who only want to promote their sites without leaving at least some sensible remarks.



In the past, when spammers were fewer and the bloggers were purer, we were not afraid of unwanted visitors. Now, times have changed. And it changed really fast. I think I could still blog without the chatbox. Most blogs don't have chatboxes anymore, and interactions are more on the comment portions.

So, if you want to leave a message here, you should know where the comment section is.

Google Panda Comes To Town

Months ago there were stories of a Panda roaming around the internet slapping and slamming websites that a lot of webmasters cried foul. I didn’t bother to check it as I was lost in my day job and in some other ventures outside blogging.

Those who are seriously into SEO would know by now what I meant by this Panda. Perhaps they’re already affected and didn’t know what kind of truck had hit them. Or maybe they are now aware that all their SEO works in the past might possibly go down the drain.

So in the controversially reliable Wikipedia I got info about this Panda:
“Google Panda is a change to the Google's search results ranking algorithm that was first released in February 2011. The change aimed to lower the rank of "low-quality sites", and return higher-quality sites near the top of the search results. CNET reported a surge in the rankings of news websites and social Networking sites, and a drop in rankings for sites containing large amounts of advertising. This change reportedly affected the rankings of almost 12 percent of all search results. Soon after the Panda rollout, many websites, including Google's webmaster forum, became filled with complaints of scrapers/copyright infringers getting better rankings than sites with original content.”

Are you affected by this? Me, I’m not sure. I still get the same so-so traffic. My SEO skill is too basic and kinda old school. This site is used to be at PR4, and now it’s PR2. I don’t think Panda hit the PageRanks as well.

Perhaps we can now say that the field is leveled with this change by the big G. This initial hiccup, wherein they say that legit sites got struck while some scrapers got lucky, will surely come to pass. It’s reassuring to know that we’ll be getting less and less of the garbage when we do our web searches. It's also bad news for those making money online out of these search engine pollutants.