A story of two gadget boys
This week we feature two techies who have more than gadgets in common. Elbert Cuenca and Aldrich Dayrit are both entrepreneurs with unusual names.
Elbert Cuenca, the restaurateur, is currently busy with Elbert’s Steak Room, an out-of-the-way dining place that has developed a cult following among
Aldrich Dayrit co-owns a fashion boutique called Religioso as well as a beauty salon called Studio 546 with his wife and her siblings.
Both are married to fashionable women. Elbert’s wife is editor Liza Ilarde, while Aldrich is married to Choc Religioso of the designing Religioso sisters.
Both are sworn Mac lovers and are members of Philmug (Philippine Mac Users Guild), which Elbert has chaired for the last five years.
And here’s the clincher: while Elbert is the first known owner of the iPhone in the
Both learned how to unlock the iPhone through online instructions.
(Technically, there should be no need to unlock those phones very soon when Globe Telecom offers the iPhone 3G to local customers in August.)
Besides being a steak man (check out http://steakroom.com/) Elbert is also a personal Mac trainer, meaning he teaches people one-on-one how to use the Mac.
Sounds funny if you’ve been a Mac user all your life, but there are people (mostly women) who want to make the switch from Windows and never touch the Mac until Elbert unlocks Mac secrets to them.
Apple fanatic Elbert says all his gadgets are Apple. His main machine is a MacBook Air which he carries around in his backpack. For the house, he has an iMac used mostly by wife Liza. And he still has a 12-inch Powerbook he can’t get rid of.
For music, Elbert uses an Apple iPod HiFi for his sound system and goes wireless using iTunes on his computer via Airport Express and Time Capsule.
He runs daily using an iPod Nano with a Nike iPod transmitter and receiver, although he found a way to use Mizuno trainers instead of Nikes.
Elbert was interviewed on TV for having the first iPhone in the
Surprisingly, he doesn’t own a camera but has a Leica on his wish list.
Aldrich Dayrit may strike you as a metrosexual upon meeting him. He carries a Louis Vuitton Damier messenger bag and designs menswear for their family’s Religioso boutique (http://www.religioso.ph/).
He’s not your typical Filipino guy as you will see by reading on.
I’m very impressed by his MacBook Air cover. It was custom-made by his wife Choc and fits more snugly than the Manila Mac case.
For material, Aldrich chose a car seat cover. I’ve told him to sell the case at Religioso, but Aldrich says it’s just a one-off. His wife doesn’t want to make more.
He shows me a Philips multi-media player purchased for $179 in the
Aldrich loves his Bose noise-canceling headphones which comes in handy during plane rides. “You cannot hear any other noise expect for the music,” he says, and he’s right. I am impressed. I’m also in like with the cute case.
He shows me a GPS he bought in New York but modified to use with Philippine maps, a Vertu phone he bought at the Hong Kong airport (he owns two of these) and a Nintendo DS Lite he uses, not to play games but to surf the Internet.
Another Apple fanatic, Aldrich owns two Time Capsules at home, an Apple TV, a Mac Mini, an iMac, and of course an iPhone.
Aldrich tells me how he became the first iPhone hacker, er, modifier in the
“Elbert got the first iPhone, I got the second, and I wanted it to work with a local carrier. So I went into a chat room talking about microchips. The chat turned into SIM cards, etc. and I studied along with them for a month,” he said.
Success came at
Aldrich ended up unlocking more than 500 iPhones and was the one who unlocked Elbert’s iPhone. Proceeds paid for his son Enzo’s first birthday, and hey, I was there and it was a big party, I can tell you that.
