1. Right side = northbound. Going away from me, toward Guadalupe. At night these are the red taillights.
2. Left side = southbound. Coming toward me. At night, white headlights.
3. The gray line down the middle = the MRT. No trains yet. More about it below.
4. THE RULE: If you can see the road surface between the cars, EDSA is moving. If all you can see is bus roofs, take the long way, or have dinner in Makati and go home after nine.
5. The yellow letters at the bottom are the date and time the picture was taken. If the time is old, the camera is resting (nights and Sundays) or our line is down. Don't worry, I'm probably already fixing it.
6. After 6:30 PM it's mostly lights. You can still tell: a river of lights that is sliding is good. A river of lights that looks like a photograph, even two pictures later, is bad.

From six months of looking out this window. Not official, just my own eyes and a lot of coffee. The cones are my Grabe-Meter: one cone, no problem; five cones, grabe, call home and say you'll be late.

Weekdays	What the cam shows	Grabe-Meter
7:00 - 9:30 AM	Both sides full and crawling, buses nose to tail. Everybody going to work at once.	3
9:30 AM - 3:30 PM	Usually moving. If you have a choice about when to be on EDSA, choose this.	1
3:30 - 5:00 PM	Filling up. The early birds are leaving.	2
5:00 - 8:30 PM	The worst. Northbound especially. Taillights all the way to the end of the picture.	4
8:30 - 9:00 PM	Loosening up. The camera says goodnight at nine.	2

And the special days:

When	Tony says
Friday night	The worst night of the week. Everyone is going somewhere, and they're all going there on EDSA. Five cones.
The 15th and the 30th	Payday. Worse than Fridays, because everybody has money in their pocket and somewhere to spend it. When payday falls on a Friday, stay in the office and order merienda (that's the afternoon snack). Five cones and a barricade.
The 'ber months	September, October, November, December. Here, once the 'ber months start, so does the Christmas traffic, and it gets worse every week until Christmas Eve. We're in it now.
Rain	Add an hour to everything. See the habagat picture below.
Sunday	The camera rests. But see the Y2K Sunday below for what you're missing, which is nothing. Literally nothing.

Next payday: Thursday, September 30. End of the month AND the 'ber months. You have been warned.

For our visitors from abroad (hello to the ones who wrote!): "number coding" is what everybody calls the vehicle volume reduction scheme. One weekday every week, your car stays off the road from 7 in the morning to 7 at night, and which day depends on the last number of your plate:

Today is Friday, so if your plate ends in 9 or 0, you are not on my camera today. Unless it's after seven, in which case you are, with everybody else who was waiting for seven o'clock.

Me, I don't drive to work, so coding is not my problem. My problem is the FX. For the foreigners again: the FX is the Tamaraw FX, a van that runs as a shared taxi. You squeeze in with strangers going your way and pay your share. From Las Piñas to Makati it's about an hour and a half each way on a bad day. On a good day, less. I'll tell you when I have one.

Everybody asks: what is that long gray concrete thing down the middle of EDSA? That's the MRT, the new railway. They've been building it down the median for years. Every Manileño who has sat in EDSA traffic since then has watched it grow, one piece at a time, while not moving.

Past my window the track is done. Now they're finishing the stations. The trains are supposed to run by Christmas, from North Avenue down to Buendia, and all the way to Taft next year. Buendia is just up the road from us, so by Christmas, if all goes well, the trains will come almost to our door. Next year they'll run right past the camera.

My wish list for the MRT:

• That the first train really does run before Christmas, like they say.
• That my camera catches one going by. I'll stay late every night for a week if I have to, and you'll be the first to see it, right here.
• That some of the people in all those cars and buses ride it instead, and one day at six o'clock the right side of my picture shows road.
• That I can take my son Marco to ride it from one end to the other. He's four, and every time our FX goes by the track he asks me when the train is coming. Soon, anak. Soon. (Anak is "my child.")

Tuesday, August 3, 3:20 PM. Habagat. The buildings on the left are almost gone, the far end of EDSA is gone completely, and nothing is moving.

In the habagat months, the southwest monsoon, the rain comes down so hard that the far side of EDSA disappears and the lanes nearest us fill up with water. You can't see the water in the picture, but believe me, it's there, and it's brown, and it's up to the wheels.

When the cam looks like this, my advice is don't go down yet. Have your merienda, finish your paperwork, call home. The water goes down eventually. Your shoes take two days to dry. The camera doesn't care, because it's inside the glass, warm and dry, while the rest of us are wading.

Sunday, August 22, 8:05 AM. One bus, a couple of cars, and a whole lot of EDSA. It has lane lines! Who knew.

Normally the camera rests on Sundays, like the rest of us. But on August 22 the whole MIS team came in for our Y2K tests. We rolled the test server's clock forward to December 31, 1999 and sat there with our coffee waiting to see what it would do at midnight.

While we waited, I switched the cam on, just to see. That's EDSA at eight in the morning on a Sunday: nearly empty. I have lived in Metro Manila all my life and I had to see it on a computer screen to believe it. Roderick said this is what EDSA will look like on New Year's Day 2000, because everybody will be home waiting for the lights to go out.

The server, by the way, went into the year 2000 with only a few complaints, and we have fixed them. We'll all be here on New Year's Eve anyway, just in case. Patricia says she'll save me some food.

Monday, March 15, 1999. Two weeks after the cam went up. Roderick took this with the company's floppy-disk digital camera.

Hi! I'm Tony Mejia, 36, systems administrator in the MIS department of a mid-sized insurance company. I'll leave the company's name out: this is my page, not theirs. When the network is down, everybody knows my name. When it's up, nobody remembers I exist. That's how you know I'm doing my job.

In the picture: that's me showing off the little round camera on the ledge. The beige computer on the desk beside me is the one that runs it, and the gray cable is the one Marco would pull out if I ever brought him to the office. Out the window behind me you can see a piece of the MRT from a different angle than the cam, and EDSA doing what EDSA does. Yes, I'm wearing my ID. Roderick says it makes me look like I'm about to inspect something.

I grew up in Sampaloc, Manila, took up electronics and communications engineering (ECE), and have been with this company since 1990, which makes me furniture. These days I live in Las Piñas with my wife Patricia, 31, who teaches grade school and says her pupils listen better than my users do, and our son Marco, 4, who thinks I go to work to watch cars. He's not completely wrong.

Credit where it's due: my officemate Roderick Bangoy, 30, a programmer from Davao, found the shareware program that stamps the time on every picture and sends it up to this page. Without Roderick, this would be a camera looking out a window and nobody knowing about it. Roderick says hi to his family in Davao, who check the cam to make sure he's really at work.

Some of you have written asking how we did it. It's simpler than you think:

Please don't ask me to move the camera. It is exactly where it should be, and the cleaning lady and I have an agreement.