TV commercial touting a pain reliever has appropriated a popular term commonly used by Filipinos when saying goodbye to friends and family. For ages, especially among the Tagalogs, “Ingat” has been whispered, uttered, or shouted out by people about to part company.

From the hunter-gatherer of pre-Hispanic times about to embark on his search for nourishment for his family and community to today’s OFWs about to depart for foreign shores, Filipinos have been hearing or saying “ingat” to each other. Part prayer for a loved one’s safety, part admonition to take extra care, “ingat” seems to always work to ease everybody’s worries and anxieties caused by separation.

While saying urgent petitions to God to send his angels to watch over their children, mothers say “ingat” to their sons and daughters who are leaving the comfort and relative safety of their homes to start their quests for knowledge or employment. The children, in turn, take comfort from hearing the word uttered by their mothers or other guardians. Somehow, armed with their mothers’ invocations of safety and care, they are ready to face the world.

Lately, we seem to have to say “ingat” to our loved ones and to each other with more urgency than ever before. I may be wrong, but recent events seem to tell me it is a brutally more dangerous world we are living in right now, inhabited by ghouls, monsters, and tyrants murderously more malevolent than their counterparts from earlier times.

And these monsters do not discriminate. They maim, they harm, and they kill both young and old. Hell, they even kill the unborn. They kill people to weak to defend themselves. They kill the strong and the weak. They rob people, they rob the whole nation.

It is a truly dangerous world. That is why, after every day of work, upon getting home safely at night, we all should say a prayer of thanks to the Almighty for watching over us, and keeping us and our loved ones safe.

We should always say “ingat” to each other. Not doing so seems like a careless folly, even downright heresy.

Samsung HDD Gobbles

Hard disk drives with cavernous storage spaces no longer amaze us. Today’s HDD vendors have got to add wow features to make their products stand out from the crop of data storage devices in the market. Zooming speeds for writing and retrieving data, obsessive dedication to reliability, and free miles maybe, all these have been used by HDD vendors to position their products against those of their rivals.

Samsung’s Spinpoint M7 internal HDD may not need any snake-oil gimmick to make itself shine brighter than its competitors. The 640GB 2.5-inch HDD, which is designed for mobile applications, comes with a 516Gb per square inch areal density for each of its 320GB platter.

Nokia Netbooks

Nokia recently expanded its product range to include a netbook or two. The Finnish mobile vendor, the world’s largest, seems eager to join the mini-laptop fray. And nobody can blame the company; not with the increasing number of computer manufacturers and OEMs launching their own mobile phones and smartphones.

Reminds me of a neighborhood convenience store, whose owners wanted to increase their earnings, which started selling bread and other baked products. The bakery next door, in retaliation, started selling products similar to those carried by the convenience store.

The previous analogy aside, only time can tell the wisdom, or lack of it, in Nokia’s foray to mini-laptopland.

That’s all for the meantime, folks. Join me again next time as we keep on watching IT.