Room With a Bangus

The Google Zeitgeist on "Filipina"

2005-05-22T23:57:00.000+08:00

(From Clair)Turns out, a Google search for the word "Filipina" throws back a slew of sites on dating and mail order brides. It's even worse for Google Image Search.

We don't have to take this sitting down. The Sassy Lawyer makes the following suggestion:

perhaps we can all write about our own definition of what a filipina is and then let’s provide the urls to the permalink pages then let’s point to each other’s permalinks. In a few weeks, google will show different results. :)

For best results, use “Filipina” or “Filipino women” as links to each other’s permalinks.

(Or maybe we can all put up a button that points to one site/webring.)

The Filipino Librarian has a starter set of good "Filipina" links.

If you have a nice definition/description, please drop it in the comments section of this post. I'll post it in the iBlog blog, as well as my 3 or 4 personal blogs.

Can Pinoy bloggers reverse years of google zeitgeist pollution? This is certainly a blog-worthy project :)

*********************************************
Merriam Webster: Filipina

The Times They Are A-Changin'

2005-01-29T01:31:00.000+08:00

By Bob Dylan

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'.

Sleep Anti-Patterns

2005-01-09T20:04:00.000+08:00

Everything in heaven is quiet, rubber-soled shoes. I can sleep in heaven
- Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

Something has punctured the glass ceiling of my well-ordered mental life. From a total sleep-whore, I now wrestle with the angel every night, my neurons misfiring with insomnia.

So I read about insomnia and sleep, and I came across this blog, presumably from a sleep researcher.

Until not long ago, just about until electricity became ubiquitous, humans used to have a sleep pattern quite different from what we consider "normal" today. At dusk you go to sleep, at some point in the middle of the night you wake up for an hour or two, then fall asleep again until dawn. Thus there are two events of falling asleep and two events of waking up every night (plus, perhaps, a short nap in the afternoon). As indigenous people today, as well as people in non-electrified rural areas of the world, still follow this pattern, it is likely that our ancestors did, too.The bimodal sleep pattern was first seen in laboratory animals (various birds, lizards and mammals) in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, i.e, before everyone moved their research to mice and rats who have erratic (un-consolidated) sleep patterns. The research on humans kept in constant conditions, as well as field work in primitive communities (including non-electrified rural places in what is otherwise considered the First World) confirmed the bimodality of sleep in humans, particularly in winter.

My New Year's Resolution

2005-01-02T13:18:00.000+08:00

I won't even try a recap of 2004. So many good/bad/so-so things. But I will get myself back on track this year. No more half-lives. Mistakes *will* be made, that's a guarantee. I'd rather be happy than right. (Image taken from The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy Official Movie Site)

Ditto

2005-01-01T13:18:00.000+08:00

If you believe that "whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger," then I'm made of fucking steel, baby.

Dear 2004, I love you, now please fuck off. Best, Heather.

Amen, sister.

People of The Year

2004-12-31T17:25:00.000+08:00

Yay. Us bloggers are Time Magazine's People of the Year (symbolized, rather ineptly, by a freaky green eye). We were everywhere, all the time, and across the political spectrum. We were down in the sands in Iraq, in the political arenas, in the tsunami-struck coastlines of Southeast Asia, and in the inner spaces of love and loss. We're the future and we're here to stay. Good work, and happy new year, everyone!!!

The Disaster in SMS

2004-12-29T22:00:00.000+08:00

Really disturbing SMS messages from Sri Lanka :

I'm standing on the Galle road in Aluthgama and looking at 5 ton trawlers tossed onto the road. Scary shit.
-----
Found 5 of my friends, 2 dead. Of the 5, 4 are back in Colombo. The last one is stranded because of a broken bridge. Broken his leg. But he's alive. Made...
-----
..contact. He got swept away but swam ashore. Said he's been burying people all day. Just dragging them off the beach and digging holes with his hands. Go..
-----
..ing with gear to get him tommorrow morning. He sounded disturbed. Guess grave digging does that to you.

More from ChiensSansFrontiers.

Meet My New Desktop

2004-12-29T13:16:00.000+08:00

I've had enough of the default settings of my PC (Luna theme, Bliss wallpaper) so I decided to spruce things up for the new year:

Click to see the rest of my desktop.

I used the leaked Royale theme and a Space Monkey ("ready to be shot into space, and willing to sacrifice himself for the greater good") wallpaper from deviantart. My favorite apps and folders are also upfront ready to launch.

The Netbeans 4.0 installer is also sitting on the desktop, waiting for me to decide if it's worth my while to try out programming for the Java 5.0 platform. Hmm. We'll see.

MMFF

2004-12-28T22:55:00.000+08:00

Local blogs are abuzz over boycotting the Metro Manila Film Festival. I've already had my say on this subject. My objections aren't aesthetic, although I've had a modicum of critical training(I took a couple of film theory courses) and I *do* make it a point to watch the MMFF offerings (except maybe this year, as I've got a ton of coursework to deal with) so yeah no "artsy fartsy" pontificating here, Mr. Torre.

I want the local film industry to succeed, but it's not going to be through a two-week influx of cash from a captive audience and distorted market conditions (no foreign films, 8 movies from the same producers)--- it's a quick and easy fix that's bound to produce diminishing returns. The MMFF is an indirect subsidy for the industry, which may let it get by for now, but it will be disastrous over the long run. Distorting markets closes the feedback loop which, although hurtful and disruptive at some level, enables firms to ultimately adjust and adapt. Rip-offs can only take us so far. Keeping the festering carcasses of the big studios on life support makes it harder for smaller, more agile players to break through.

Assuming the worst, so what if "the industry" dies? Good friggin' riddance. Ecologies have a way of rebuilding themselves from the ground up. Besides, that really won't stop people from filming their own movies. Good movies too. They don't have to be artistic in the pretentious, "european" sense. They'll thrive with or without the profit motive (though you could still make a decent buck off 'em if you want). Chances are, you already have the production tools (pssst, got a Digicam and a PC?) and a good enough distribution network (*cough* BitTorrent *cough*). Have a little faith, and take a friggin' chance.

The Day After The Day After Tomorrow

2004-12-28T09:48:00.000+08:00

As if the year was insisting that it *really* was the worst in a long while, we have the Indian Ocean Earthquake. Terrible, terrible news to wake up to. Untold numbers are still missing, and rescuers despair as they retrieve bodies stuck in trees. Wikipedia has an extensive article on the disaster, along with links to relief sites that are accepting online donations.

I have a friend, a radio engineer in Maldives who can't be reached, as the comms have been hit hard (I hope that's all there is to it). I hope you and your own are safe from harm.

The Year That Was

2004-12-27T01:36:00.000+08:00

For me, 2004 went something like this. Shit, man---I'm glad it'll be over soon.

Merry Christmas!!!

2004-12-24T20:54:00.000+08:00

Happy Holidays to all my readers (all four of you). I'm obligated to post the following excerpt:

“Forgive me if I am not justified in what I ask,” said Scrooge, looking intently at the Spirit’s robe, “but I see something strange, and not belonging to yourself, protruding from your skirts. Is it a foot or a claw?”

“It might be a claw, for the flesh there is upon it,” was the Spirit’s sorrowful reply. “Look here.”

From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.

“Oh, Man, look here! Look, look, down here!” exclaimed the Ghost.

They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.

Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.

“Spirit, are they yours?” Scrooge could say no more.

“They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!” cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. “Slander those who tell it ye. Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And abide the end.”

“Have they no refuge or resource?” cried Scrooge.

“Are there no prisons?” said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. “Are there no workhouses?”

Enjoy the rest of Dicken’s A Christmas Carol. Download the e-book. Or watch the Hallmark TV Special. This classic (and public domain) work hasn’t lost both its heart-warming charm and its potency as social commentary. A very merry Christmas to us all! And as Little Tim would have it: “God Bless Us, Every One!”

Standard Holiday Post (#3) : Merry Crystal

2004-12-24T11:11:00.000+08:00

Snow flakes and Snow Crystals
Bentley Snow Crystal Collection
Photographing Snowflakes
Ice Crystal Engineering

Standard Holiday Post (#2) : The * Bits of Christmas

2004-12-24T10:52:00.000+08:00

8 classic carols performed on 8 different videogame consoles and home computers:

01. Yerzmyey - Jesus Holy, Born So Lowly
02. Nullsleep - Silent Night
03. Vim - When A Child Is Bored
04. Paul Slocum - Up On The Housetop
05. Bit Shifter - Let It Snow
06. Goto80 - Last Christmas Hot Digi Rmx
07. Dma-Sc - The First Blip Blop Noel
08. Hally - Xmas Songs Arcade Punk Mix

The Standard Holiday Post (#1) : Santa's CIO

2004-12-24T10:32:00.000+08:00

The Register interviews Santa's CIO:

The reality of Christmas HQ is far from the pixies and fairies wonderland described in legend. Klaus must manage the terabytes of data and facilitate the Big Day (BD) or Christmas Eve. "We have tremendous organisation, logistics and planning for each year's timetable," he says. "I must make sure each child gets only what their record demands."

Backyard Mecha

2004-12-23T22:48:00.000+08:00

Alright, this guy is officially our new hero. He’s building an 18-foot tall robot (or “mecha”) in the backyard of his home in Anchorage, Alaska. The anime-inspired behemoth is actually a giant exoskeleton that you jump into and ride, letting you take eight-foot strides or, presumably, fight invading aliens. He hopes to have it finished by next summer and will demonstrate it by demolishing a few cars at the local racetrack. Somebody, please send us video. (From Engadget)

More pictures and details here. I'd like to say *wow*, but something tells me this is a hoax, or at any rate not as cool as it's hyped up to be. Striding/walking, something people take for granted, is really very complex to implement in terms of both software and hardware. Really serious stuff, gundam-style robotic exoskeletons---not quite yet for the backyard enthusiast.

Found

2004-12-20T01:34:00.000+08:00

The woman was Widow, Warrior, and Guide. She led him to the place where the roads faded, within sight of the valley. He was born there, after a fashion. There he first asked his true questions, and there he drew blood, and earned his keep of ashes.

"You are too late," she warned him. "Nothing will come of this but futile exertion, for the fighters too have returned to their homes, and no one is left to give you what you wish."

He nodded, and surrendered. No fires shone from where he expected them to be, and the wind carried neither music nor death, though he desperately yearned for either.

"I will return in the summer," he finally said, "be ready for me then."

And with that he turned and retraced his steps, carrying his last song back to the city.

for goodness and evil are two things
and yet variant,
but the quality of life as of death
and of light as of darkness is one,
one beauty, the rhythm of that Wheel,
and who can behold it is happy
and will praise it to the people.

-Robinson Jeffers, "Point Pinos and Point Lobos"

Lost

2004-12-04T21:57:00.000+08:00

"Congratulations. You're one step closer to hitting bottom."

First post for this December in this here blog. It's been a slow month. Always gets me down, this time of the year. I'm willing to bet I'm going to reach new lows this time around. Constantly exceeding expectations, that's me.

I can't find the time to write. No, that's not entirely accurate. I have oceans of time now. Deep and wide and utterly blue. But my words have lost track of the light, and they cannot find the shore.

Communism Baaad!

2004-11-28T23:37:00.000+08:00

(From BoingBoing) Hilarious and tres-cheesy anti-communist comic book from the 60's.

Aubernica

2004-11-27T23:10:00.000+08:00

See the NBA Brawl re-imagined as a picasso classic

Bangus of a Doubt Advisory

2004-11-21T22:00:00.000+08:00

The law blog is currently hosted at www.clickmomukhamo.net/bangus. Wordpress is a beauty, and I'm starting to really really love it (But where were you when I was banging my head, trying to make a decent CMS out of Lotus Domino?).

The archives comments, and categories are intact, though the comments are still loopy. Starting December 1, bangus.clickmomukhamo.com will refer to the new WP-powered site. Many many thanks to Mark!

Sexy!?!

2004-11-21T15:07:00.000+08:00

I'm A 1990s Geek

Cool, confident, and very powerful, you're the sexiest geek ever! Buckle in, your decade is one hell of a ride.

find your geek decade at spacefem.com

Office Fun!

2004-11-15T15:41:00.000+08:00

Download the posters below, print them and hang them in your office. Put them in normal places, where no one will suspect they're fake. Fellow employees willl be angry and frustrated feeling the unbearable weight of tiranic management on their backs. Managers won't dare remove them because there's always the possibility of it coming from someone higher than them. It's the ultimate office fun!

Download the rest of 'em

Philosophical Break-Up Lines

2004-11-14T16:58:00.000+08:00

From tar.weatherson.net/

Cornell students have started work on break-up lines of the philosophers. They’ve mostly associated lines with schools at this stage, but I think expanding to individual philosophers would be a splendid idea.

The Teleologist: We aren’t meant for each other. (P.K.)
The Deontologist: We aren’t right for each other. (P.K.)
The Consequentialist: We aren’t optimal for each other. (P.K.)
The Solipsist: It’s not you, it’s me. (P.K.)
The Empiricist: I think we should see other people. (P.K.)
The Rationalist: I’m not a priority to you any more. (P.K.)

To which I add:
The Legal Positivist: We better break up, or else...

Back to School

2004-11-13T21:34:00.000+08:00

Second sem of my second year in law school has begun. Pretty light first week, but now that the syllabi are in I expect the bloodbath to begin real soon. Subjects include:

- Administrative Law
- Labor Law 2
- Agency and Partnership
- Credit Transactions
- Civil Procedure

The law blog is moving to a new server (and a new content management system). For a preview, go to bangus.clickmomukhamo.net

OS-tans

2004-11-13T21:22:00.000+08:00

Really cute: Anime-inspired representations of your operating system. Here's mine:

It's Windows XP Pro!

Four More Years

2004-11-04T11:35:00.000+08:00

Of the world having to deal with an "invade now, justify the act post-facto" America. Oh well.

My Endorsement Goes To...

2004-11-01T15:34:00.000+08:00

He can take over your body! He can replicate! He can fly!

Last Song Syndrome

2004-11-01T11:10:00.000+08:00

EVERYBODY'S CHANGING
Keane

You say you wander your own land
But when I think about it
I don't see how you can
You're aching, you're breaking
And I can see the pain in your eyes
Says everybody's changing
And I don't know why

So little time
Try to understand that I'm
Trying to make a move just to stay in the game
I try to stay awake and remember my name
But everybody's changing
And I don't feel the same

You're gone from here
And soon you will disappear
And fading into beautiful light
Cause everybody's changing
And I don't feel right

So little time
Try to understand that I'm
Trying to make a move just to stay in the game
I try to stay awake and remember my name
But everybody's changing
And I don't feel the same

So little time
Try to understand that I'm
Trying to make a move just to stay in the game
I try to stay awake and remember my name
But everybody's changing
And I don't feel the same

Oh everybody’s changing and I don’t feel the same

Star Wars Masks

2004-10-31T11:24:00.000+08:00

Need a costume for Halloween but you're just not sure which Star Wars character you'd like to be? Download and print these masks originally from Random House Publishing's 1983 book, The Star Wars Book of Masks.

A teaser-poster for the last installment of the prequel is now available. A trailer's due on November 4. But, as the whole franchise has jumped the shark, and its director gone bat-shit crazy, I really don't care.

Trick or Threat!

2004-10-30T23:43:00.000+08:00

Who will ever forget the terrifying images of the American and British hostages held captive by Iraqi insurgents? In their orange jumpsuits and chains, these hostages drove home the human cost of this war—even before they were cruelly beheaded.

See the rest of 2004's Scariest Halloween Costumes

300---actually 400---Love Letters

2004-10-30T00:27:00.000+08:00

Sweet and transcendental, or sick and obsessive? You decide.

Literal Movie Posters

2004-10-28T00:31:00.000+08:00

From Something Awful (via kottke.org): What happens when you strip away a movie's title and replace it with a literal description of what its movie poster looks like?

If Architects Had To Work Like Web Designers...

2004-10-25T22:47:00.000+08:00

...
Please take care that modern design practices and the latest materials are used in construction of the house, as I want it to be a showplace for the most up-to-date ideas and methods. Be alerted, however, that kitchen should be designed to accommodate, among other things, my 1952 Gibson refrigerator.

To insure that you are building the correct house for our entire family, make certain that you contact each of our children, and also our in-laws. My mother-in-law will have very strong feelings about how the house should be designed, since she visits us at least once a year. Make sure that you weigh all of these options carefully and come to the right decision. I, however, retain the right to overrule any choices that you make.
...

See the whole article.

Fun with the Random Tabloid Headline Generator

2004-10-23T01:15:00.000+08:00

Long working hours can cause baldness in guinea pigs , study shows

God told me to attack politician with stick of rock , says terrified politician

Religious fundamentalists eat man with lettuce

Woman force-feeds self with potato peeler

Elvis found living in Iraq

Ghost of Queen Victoria told me to spank knife-wielding maniac with rattlesnake , insists politician

Give it a try

I wonder if it runs Excel...

2004-10-22T01:18:00.000+08:00

Hilarious 1954 prediction of what home computers would look like in 2004. The caption (see full image) states that ease of use will come through FORTRAN and a teletype interface. Well, with FORTRAN as your UI, what the heck do you need that steering wheel for!?!

Fevered Dreams

2004-10-21T17:44:00.000+08:00

Last weekend, the cough-and-flu combo I've held off during the finals finally overwhelmed my system and sent me to phlegmville. I knew I was sick because I started having really weird dreams:

- I was sailing in a barge full of logs with this dog. (2nd time I've had Benn in my dreams this month).
- I was already a lawyer, negotiating with ABSi management in behalf of my client Moby.
- I was holding a garage sale, but all I had for sale were tons of the same book (forgot which book)

Anyone care to interpret them for me?

I am PDF

2004-10-18T18:14:00.000+08:00

Which File Extension are You?

While I Was Away...

2004-10-16T19:24:00.000+08:00

Finals are over. I've been so overwrought with reviewing and taking the exams for the past two weeks, so now that it's all over I'm a bit depressed (I'm not sad to see the finals over, I just feel floppy from being stretched too far).

While I was busy reviewing, the world continued to spin on its axis, and I was a bit late on the following developments:

- The Accordionguy and The Redhead are engaged!
- The original Superman, at least for my generation---dies.
- Netscape turns 10. Netscape is dead. Long live Mozilla!

Beyond Usability

2004-09-19T19:24:00.000+08:00

Another thought-provoking post from Joel on Software, concerning the design of social interfaces: It's Not Just Usability.

Now, let's look at a successful social interface. Many humans are less inhibited when they're typing then when they are speaking face-to-face. Teenagers are less shy. With cellphone text messages, they're more likely to ask each other out on dates. That genre of software was so successful socially that it's radically improving millions of people's love lives (or at least their social calendars). Even though text messaging has a ghastly user interface, it became extremely popular with the kids. The joke of it is that there's a much better user interface built into every cellphone for human to human communication: this clever thing called "phone calls." You dial a number after which everything you say can be heard by the other person, and vice versa. It's that simple. But it's not as popular in some circles as this awkward system where you break your thumbs typing huge strings of numbers just to say "damn you're hot," because that string of numbers gets you a date, and you would never have the guts to say "damn you're hot" using your larynx.

Animal Sillitude

2004-09-19T19:12:00.000+08:00

I'm trying to cool off from a rather toxic weekend with some cool animal-related finds:

* Dude, there's a chip in my pork-butt.

* Cats demonstrate why judo is way better than karate.

Testing Testing

2004-09-10T14:20:00.000+08:00

Everything Shines

by Push Star

Hey, come this May
We'll be running in the sun again
Your time will come
You're just a young broken heart
Been out sleeping in the yard
How could you be so dumb?
All we losers stand in line
Just waiting for our time
Broken angel take that plane
And finger paint the sky
'Till everything shines
Everything shines
Everything shines
Everything shines
Old broken clock
Haven't heard your old tick-tocking
Now for much too long
And lonely jukebox
In the corner of a nightclub
And I need your song
All we losers stand in line
Just waiting for our time
Broken angel take that plane
And finger paint the sky
'Till everything shines
Everything shines
Everything shines
Everything shines
Everything shines
Everything shines

(The Truth About) Cats and Dogs

2004-09-02T22:19:00.000+08:00

While poking around Wikipedia, I found an interesting article on Laika, the first space-dog:

Laika (Cyrillic: Лайка, "Barker") was one of the Russian space dogs and the first living being to enter orbit, as a passenger on Sputnik 2, a Soviet spacecraft. Some classify her as the first animal to enter space, although animals had entered space during sub-orbital flights on previous missions.

Laika was found as a stray wandering the streets of Moscow, a female part-Samoyed terrier weighing approximately 6 kg (13 lb). Her name was changed from Kurdrajevskaya (Russian for "Little Curly"), and she was nicknamed Zhuchka ("Little Bug") and Limonchik ("Lemon"). The American press dubbed her Muttnik (a portmanteau of mutt and Sputnik).

Laika died on November 4, 1957, a few hours after launch from stress and overheating. Her true cause of death was not made public until years after the flight, with officials always stating that she was either euthanized by poisoned food or died when the oxygen supply ran out. Russian officials have since expressed regret for allowing Laika to die; to this date, Laika is the only living passenger ever to have been launched into space without the intention of retrieval.

Although Laika did not survive the trip, the experiment proved that a living passenger could survive being launched into orbit and endure weightlessness. It paved the way for human spaceflight, and provided scientists with some of the first data on how living organisms react to spaceflight environments.

That, and I found silly cat and dog blogs.

Ker-plunk!

2004-08-29T12:06:00.000+08:00

Read about our economy's trajectory to a bloody crash in this white paper, from the UP School of Economics.

Jihad and the Daily Grind

2004-08-20T14:13:00.000+08:00

If you're a young jihadist eager to join your local terrorist cell, hoping for a glorious and exciting time slaughtering infidels, think twice. Carrying on with a holy war can be as tedious and soul-sucking as any office job, as the emails seized from Al-Qaeda reveal:

To: Ayman al-Zawahiri
From: Ezzat
Folder: Incoming Mail—From Yemen
Date: February 17, 1999

Kind brother Nur al-Din [al-Zawahiri]:

… We don't have any guesthouses. We have bachelor houses, and the offices are there too. We called it a guesthouse hypothetically, and we don't have any bachelors except Basil and Youssef. And Abd al-Kareem lives at his work place.

If I buy a fax and we have two old ones, that would be wanton or mad.

Communication expenses were $300 before we started using the mobile phone—and all these calls were to discuss the crises of Ashraf and Dawoud and Kareem and Ali and Ali Misarra and Abu Basel and others, in compliance with the orders.

Renovating our computer doesn't mean buying a new one but making sure that adjustments are made to suit Abdullah's [bin Laden's] work. There were many technical problems with the computer. These matters do not need approval.

There are articles for purchase that are difficult to keep track of, so we have put them under the title of general expenses …

The first step for me to implement in taking your advice is to resign from … any relationship whatsoever between me and your Emirate. Consider me a political refugee …

W00t! Geek Stickers!

2004-08-15T15:59:00.000+08:00

From Jinx Stickers.

As taken from the Jargon File 4.2.0: "The grue, according to scholars of the Great Underground Empire, is a sinister, lurking presence in the dark places of the earth." If this reference brings you fond memories of possibly the best text-based adventure ever created, then you are truly a Vintage Geek.

Fallout!

2004-08-08T12:24:00.000+08:00

Still walking wounded after the three midterm exams I went through last week. It's really frustrating when all your efforts at reviewing don't translate to good exam results. The Insurance exam in particular was a heartbreaker. I read Vance, arguably the leading authority on the subject, and now I'm in serious danger of flunking because I forgot to refresh my memory on the enumerations given by some stupid and erroneous decision from the Supreme Court that nobody should care about in the first place (payment of premiums on credit? BAH!!!).

I just rationalize the difficulties by saying that studying law, like other knowledge work, doesn't scale linearly (see Frederick Brook's seminal work, The Mythical Man Month). That, plus treating myself to chocolate and looking at fractals.

Bangus --> Squirrel

2004-07-27T20:49:00.000+08:00

wala lang. blame the upcoming exams week. ;)

LOOK OUT!
ïòð

emer is a radioactive squirrel!!

From Go-Quiz.com

PDF Monger

2004-07-23T17:22:00.000+08:00

Check out the following documents in PDF format:

For kibitzers on the "War on Terror"

The 9/11 Commission Report.
The U.S. Congressional Report on Pre-war Intelligence Assessments on Iraq.

For lawyers and law students:

Holmes' speech on The Use of Law Schools (part of which is inscribed in marble inside Malcolm Hall).

Hostaged

2004-07-16T10:40:00.000+08:00

Yes. I too, am relieved that Angelo dela Cruz is safe (well, sorta). But I'm incensed over the fact that we have to be so fucking weak.

No. It's not a matter of male-warmonger-chestbeating pride. It's not even about the contracts. Central to the very purpose of any social order is to protect its people. Precisely to prevent the bastards outside the gate from grabbing our kin, dressing them up in orange jumpsuits and beheading them on video. And though this "rescue" appeals to us at an emotional level, it remains a gross disservice to that function. At the very least, we have given terrorists a major propaganda victory. Worse, we have given them an increased incentive to grab any of the millions of Filipinos in the Gulf, knowing that they could shift our policy, domestic or foreign, by taking our loved ones hostage. With great impotence comes great irresponsibility.

I'm tired of the apologetics and the moral relativism that place terrorists at the same level as freedom fighters. Mayhap it's time for a sober second look?

Link Monger 07-16-2004

2004-07-16T08:58:00.000+08:00

Majority of Iraqis still alive, Coalition states proudly.

Hulk Blog!

Know more about the financial ties between oil-giant Exxon and the climate-change skeptics.

Surowiecki on blockbuster movies and non-informative information cascades.

Stephen hawking seems to have cracked the blackhole information paradox (and lost a bet by his own hand).

Dry Ink on Dead Trees

2004-06-27T23:17:00.000+08:00

My friend, all theory is gray, but the Golden tree of life is green.
- Goethe

Classmates and friends urged me this week to try out for the Philippine Law Journal. I guess it's because I tend to write really nerdy stuff as well as say pretentious things like "it satisfies socially-accepted aesthetic standards" instead of "it's beautiful". The PLJ is, of course, the gold standard for law nerdity in the Philippines. It's not just a line in a resume. Membership in the Student Editorial Board of the PLJ means joining a pantheon, which includes the school's most famous (or infamous) alumni.

I've made my choice. I didn't sign up. Classmates are asking me why.

It's going to take up too much time. Precious time that I would rather spend living away from SCRA and Lex Libris. Time I would rather spend breathing and living.

I love studying law. I love tracing its subtle logic, its fictions and flows as a system of knowledge, as method and ideology. That is precisely why I can't reduce it to abstracting legal principles and commentary into dry ink on dead trees. I would rather talk about it on the ground with my classmates, in lively banter. I would rather write about it in my blog, where active surfers can reply can reply and debate. I want exclamation points in my discourse. Let's call it the Dean Carale style of lawyering.

And finally, I am perfectly happy where I am right now. So why rock the boat? :)

Programming Language Timeline

2004-06-20T15:15:00.000+08:00

(via kottke.org)

From O'Reilly comes a poster of the History of Programming Languages, plotting the evolution of over 50 languages on a color-coded, multi-layered timeline.

Now, if only somebody can keep track of our jurisprudence, I'd be a very happy camper.

Firefox 0.9 is out

2004-06-20T14:58:00.000+08:00

Probably very late with this one. I've upgraded my browser of choice to the latest version. The client is looking good and slick (just a 4.7mb download). All my favorite sites are still rendering fine.

Notes

2004-06-19T23:00:00.000+08:00

I'm turning my law blog into some sort of notes depository (Oooh...links to UN Conventions!). Blame my lack of time to come up with decent content. I'm trying to write something about the latest SC petition on the canvass. But man, talk about ars longa, vita brevis.

I'm still alive...

2004-06-18T19:24:00.000+08:00

In case you're curious. Two weeks into my second year in law school, so far so good. I haven't botched a recit (so far), and, unlike the shock-and-awe I got in the first year. I hope things will stabilize (more or less) soon -- at least enough to have one post a week for both this personal blog and the law blog.

A is for address-calculation sort

2004-06-05T22:45:00.000+08:00

Oohhh. I'm geeking out on the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures. Whether you're looking for the unassuming bubble sort to the hairier stuff like the Lempel-Ziv-Welch algorithm, this is the site for you.

Discon

2004-06-05T22:03:00.000+08:00

Lost my cellphone yesterday. I can handle the loss of the gadget by imagining its material aspect being broken down to constituent parts: microchips, integrated circuits, the silicon from the earth. What I grieve for are the intangibles: The obligation of stewardship that was given to me. The invisible threads that linked me to friends and family. The precious precious messages that reside in its memory.

To friends and family reading this, please help me rebuild my address book. If I'm important enough to live in your inbox. please send your name and cellphone number to emerson[dot]banez[at-sign]gmail[dot]com.

Link Monger 6-05-2004

2004-06-05T21:20:00.000+08:00

Gotta get these out before law school starts up and takes over:

Steven den Beste shares his notes on media bias.
The Namfrel-CIA connection!
Or, since we're into conspiracy theories, how about the Bush-as-Iranian-agent spin?
Tools to use in weighing the value of these theories before embracing them.
The toolkit in action: debunking the moon landing hoax theories.
How Disney is using Congress critters to legislate against competitors. Still think Mickey Mouse is cuddly?
Actual, non-ironic telephone instruction manual from days past.
Man goes crazy, bulldozes town.
On tape: Enron employees gloating over their shafting of consumers.
Movie reviews refactored: critiques of insultingly stupid movie physics.

Word

2004-06-02T22:35:00.000+08:00

Interesting article on how Microsoft churned Word, from the program's project manager himself:

We plowed on with Word97, adding features that Japanese users (and reviewers - not always the same!) expected, such as support for vertical writing, better Japanese input, etc. We simply went down the list of features that people could either tell us they needed, or that we deduced were necessary from our customer research. Word97 added another 20% to our share, and we even did a special Word98 for Japan, with only a couple of new features but a radically improved Japanese input method, and our share went even higher. About this time, Ichitaro underwent a total rewrite. For some reason Just Systems decided they needed to redo their whole application as "component software" (a fad at the time). You may remember this idea that you would be able to "buy" individual features of a product and plug them together to get the set you wanted. Hmm… Anyway, the rewrite took too long, and in desperation JustSystems put out a buggy, slow (over 30sec to boot - and Word was 8sec on the same machine) Ichitaro that actually had less features than the product it replaced. It also required more memory than any machines in the market had at that time (32MB, vs. the 8-16MB that Word required), so to use it you also had to buy extra memory. And their big tagline was "Now, componentized!". They were clearly pretty out of touch with their customers. Meanwhile, we kept going with Word2000, which really polished off the remaining things that people needed in Japan. I went to Japan every six months to meet with customers and understand their concerns. By the time we were working on Office XP (about the year 2000), the customers in Japan had largely dropped their resistance to Word. As they told me - "We don't see anything wrong with it. It used to drive us nuts but it's pretty good now.

Sigh. Reminds me of the Broadvision debacle we had in ABS-CBN. There was a time when the question of "why rebuild the entire codebase in the first place?" popped up in the initial technical and production discussions. But we were so enamored by the concept of a shiney new CMS and "personalization" paradigm that we were unable to look at things critically. Old code, in many respects, is better code---it's code that has been tested and debugged (and it's not as if code grows mossy or rusty). In retrospect, we should have just churned.

Design Eye for the Usability Guy

2004-05-31T21:56:00.000+08:00

A Fab Five of designers respond to the Jakob Nielsen's (in)famous guidelines by giving the Usability King himself a design makeover. Educational and funny. Just goes to show that good design and principles of usability can co-exist. Even Flash is used in a good way.

The 'Colon' in 'Colonization'

2004-05-31T15:12:00.000+08:00

From exile.ru, a Moscow-based alternative newspaper, comes an almost-funny (it hurts to laugh because it's true) if not disturbing view of Western expansionism (probably not safe for children or work):

The Greeks and Romans were honest about conquest. They divided the task into two parts: first you vanquish the enemy on the battlefield, and then you rape every single man, woman and child among the conquered. They were just as systematic about this phase of the operation as the campaign that preceded it. The troops may have been weary, but somehow they found the devotion to duty to impress their tribal superiority on their defeated enemies in the most direct, practical sense: by fucking them in the ass.

Among the nations conquered and buggered by Roman civilization was Britain. They, too, knew in their colons exactly what it was to be colonized. As the inhabitants were being rogered, they learned a valuable lesson, which they passed on to their distant descendents, the founders of the British Empire: being the soldier of a victorious empire means having a free pass to a giant rape-camp thousands of miles across, crammed with submissive, trembling victims of every age and shape. And every damn one of them is yours, to do with as you please.

I'd be rolling over the floor, right now, if I weren't a citizen of such a former "colony".

Hulk Multitask!

2004-05-28T21:07:00.000+08:00

Hilarious photoshop mashup of superheroes and dayjobs.

Downed

2004-05-27T20:05:00.000+08:00

Last Tuesday I went to the same 9-hour seminar The Paradox attended. I think one of the free meals (either the Salisbury Steak or the palabok) gave my stomach really bad juju. I was down with some sort of intestinal fever. Until now, it acts up when I eat anything too rich. Sigh. I'm subsisting on a soup-and-cracker diet right now. Lots of blog entries in the backburner. I'll be churning them out soon.

Blogging on the News

2004-05-24T11:06:00.000+08:00

Fox News catches up to the "Blogging Craze". Another sign of mainstream news media's increasing irrelevance. I can't wait for the TV Patrol feature (complete with Mark Logan V.O.)

Darlene Hill (who did the voice-over throughout the story) summarizes:

"Bloggers will tell you that just about everyone is into this: if you have something to say, whether it's social or poltical, just log onto the internet and type away. But EXPERTS say this way of communicating isn't quite mainstream--not yet, at least."

Oh, okay.

DARLENE: "Give it six months, and it will be."

Link Monger 5-21-2004

2004-05-21T22:21:00.000+08:00

Interesting links that I'm too busy to blog about at length for the time being:

A comprehensive database of Henson muppets
Ten stories that deserve more attention
Game universes and economic simulation
Troy in 15 (very funny) minutes

Maybe I should think about implementing a sideblog. Nah. Wouldn't have time when law school kicks in.

Bloginality

2004-05-21T13:19:00.000+08:00

My Bloginality is ISFJ!!!

As an ISFJ, you are Introverted, Sensing, Feeling, and Judging. This makes your primary focus on Introverted Sensing with Extraverted Feeling.

This is defined as a SJ personality, which is part of Carl Jung's Guardian (Security Seeking) type, and more specifically the Protectors or Nurturer.

In blogging, your journal will always be immaculate and have a touch of style. You may also feel overwhelmed because you want to be a part of everything going on. Because of your wonderful memory, other bloggers may come to you to ask about things you posted months before.

War(sim) is Hell

2004-05-21T13:17:00.000+08:00

What if real time strategy games finally caught up with the real thing?

12. I want mutinous units that chainsmoke hash and frag their Sargents and sell Heroin on the side and rogue commanders who go mad and shave their heads and set up fortresses in the jungle decorated with human skulls. I want to have to send a CIA assassin in to take him out. And then they chop up a donkey, for some reason.

13. I want factions. Not a simple alien vs. humans vs. bugs three-way war orgy. I want to share the map with powerful forces who are not friend or foe or anything else, a News Media, Private Corporations, asshole allies and friendly enemies, everyone jockeying for their own interests and me unable to bend over at any moment without turning my codpiece around first. I want a France.

14. I want fat, left-wing documentarians carefully editing the only the most incriminating footage, countered only by low-IQ country music singers crooning my praises while in American Flag-colored cowboy hats.

15. About every five minutes I want one of my helicopters to crash, completely on its own, for some fucking reason.

More sick and funny suggestions from The Ultimate War Sim.

The Google Operating System

2004-05-21T00:56:00.000+08:00

(Because I *did* promise to write on Blogger and Gmail)

I heart the new blogger. After years of languishing as the blogging tool equivalent of Notepad, Blogger gets new features (comments! individual post pages! conditional tags! ), and a slicker interface. No complaints so far (running Room with a Bangus just became more pleasant), except I still yearn for the day when I can initiate Trackback pings from Blogger the way I do from Movable Type. Blogger gets the features one expects from a modern blogging tool, while still maintaining the easy charm that makes it the platform of choice for newbies (or people who just want to get the job done).

Looks like the Google acquisition was very very good indeed for the Pyra folks, after all. For a while I thought Google just bought Blogger to kill it, or keep it in stasis. From the looks of things (anyone notice the new profiles feature?), Blogger might be Google's key community strategy.

Speaking of Google, I recently signed up for its free webmail service, Gmail. Privacy issues aside, I'm a big fan of all things googly. Plus, 1GB of mailbox storage isn't easy to pass up. I may never have to delete a message again. Ever. The threaded "conversations" and the search-don't-sort paradigm might take some time getting used to, and logging in takes forever sometimes, but it's shiny and new and has that fresh mail account scent. Years after the Internet Bubble burst, it's hard to believe that innovation and competition is still alive in the basic services department.

Surfing Blind

2004-05-20T23:09:00.000+08:00

The Paradox writes about discrimination as a dead-end. It got me thinking about how the web and personal computing in general is a no-entry zone for disabled persons. It's bad enough that the blind can't see web pages, it's worse when pages are so broken that they get in the way of enabling technologies.

I remember collaborating with Mark and April to develop intra-company quality standards for all ABS Interactive websites. We tried to distill principles of Usability, Accessibility, and Programming Best Practices to get the performance deserved by our surfers---including blind ones. Our ranks at that time were neatly divided into bitterly opposed fronts in the war of style versus substance. We wanted to tilt the balance in favor of machine-readable code (HTML, CSS, and XML) that can be processed by voice-browsers or braille converters. The good designers (like Mira), listened to our pitch, realized that the tradeoff was reasonable, and followed the recommendations. The rest scoffed at our ideas and continued with egregious, bandwidth-sucking evil Flash, proprietary plugins, and browser-specific DHTML. The Boo.com fiasco and the rise of web and wireless services eventually proved our ideas right. Usability and Accessibility is good not only for the conscience, it's also good for the bottomline (It is said that the US government was eventually forced to dismantle "separate-but-equal" apartheid not through moral conviction but because maintaining separate facilities had an unbearable overhead cost).

I wish we could have some legislation in this area (some US states, for example, mandate minimum accessibility requirements). No, I don't want to imprison designers who build Flash intros, Flash navigation, or (groan) Flash-only web sites---but nice suggestion, anyway :D

My Milkfish Brings All the Geeks in the Yard

2004-05-18T11:58:00.000+08:00

Damn right, it's better than yours.
I can teach you, but I'd have to charge...

Looks like my blogs beat 8,160 other web pages to claim the top spot in Google for the search term "bangus". And all without ever making a post about the wonderfully delicious fish itself. Many many thanks to the readers who link back. I owe you guys all the googlejuice.

Makes me feel guilty somewhat, though. People from all over are going to the world's number one search engine looking for fish, and they get either law nerdity or general nerdity. That means to a certain extent, I am not being responsive to my audience. One of these days I'd have to make an entry (or a proper About page) about bangus as milkfish. But where do I start?

Got Chakra!?!

2004-05-16T19:08:00.000+08:00

This summer's mediavore obsession is an anime called Naruto. No not the watered-down version they air on Channel 2. I watch the the Japanese series (with English subtitles) on CD.

Naruto features the adventures of Uzumaki Naruto, a young rookie ninja of the Hidden Leaf Village. Fresh out of ninja academy, Naruto seeks to validate his own "Way of the Ninja", become Hokage, and gain acknowledgment of the people, who continually shun him because of his dark past. The art and animation is beautiful (well drawn characters, detailed environments, and lots of epic wide angle shots with 3D pans). The story is a refreshing twist on familiar anime themes, with lots of self-referential, tongue-in-cheek humor. The music (mashups of pop, rock, and kabuki---punk shamisen!) provides a rich emotive background you normally wouldn't expect in an anime with ninja kids.

I thought I outgrew my ninja fighters phase when it comes to my anime selection, but this wonderful piece of work has managed to suck me back in. I've been thinking about it, and realized that like my previous nerd obsessions (Star Wars, Star Trek, LOTR, Dune, Wheel of Time), this series is a masterful example of world creation. Kisimoto Masashi, who first created the series in manga, places his interesting characters within a rich, self-consistent universe with its geopolitics, history, and paradigm for energy exchange. Thus, we have nations at war, with their alliances and double-dealings. We have a class structure of sorts, with those possessing advanced bloodlines on top of the food chain. And of course there's the Way of the Ninja, an ethical framework that impinges upon characters.

I give it my hearty recommendation. And if that's not enough, I invite you to surf by the fan sites below. If the extent and quality of the fan network is any indication of how good a series is, Naruto is already a winner:

http://www.narutochuushin.com/
http://www.narutofan.com
http://www.narutoinfo.com

(Props to The Paradox and The Oracle for introducing me to this anime and understanding my jutsu addiction)

Cab-Blog!

2004-05-14T12:54:00.000+08:00

Taxi drivers are like Barbers-on-Wheels, mobile transmitters of urban mythos. One of the funniest real-life taxi stories I've read so far has been posted over at The Paradox and Her Dreams. Go take a look :)

Towel Day

2004-05-14T10:19:00.000+08:00

Missed this one. Yesterday was the third anniversary of Douglas Adams' death. Three years since the Galaxy's Greatest Hitchhiker's untimely demise. Wow. I remember being genuinely sad when I first heard the bad news back in 2001. I'm a BIG Douglas Adams, thus the fish theme in my blogs, and my attempts at dry wit.

But it's not too late to pay your tribute. May 25 is Towel Day. To those who haven't read the hitchhiker series:

A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine soredly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you - daft as a brush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

(From The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams)

So carry a towel on that day to participate in the celebration and mourning. Or, if you're a strag, buy one of his wonderful wonderful works. It will change your life forever ;)

Testing

2004-05-10T22:40:00.000+08:00

The new Mail-to-Blogger feature. Hope this works.

Browsing like it's 1995

2004-05-08T22:00:00.000+08:00

I never thought I'd be excited about browsers and email clients again. Ever. The browser wars just gave me too much aggravation as a web developer from way back, and Netscape just botching it was just too painful. However, I finally responded to the online buzz, plus I wanted to test my favorite blogs on a standards-compliant browser. So, I downloaded Mozilla Firefox.

I was a kibitzer of the Mozilla Project from Day One, when Netscape announced that they were open-sourcing the Communicator source code. Although Explorer was already the de-facto standard at that time, I refused to count Netscape out for sentimental reasons. I had my first taste of web surfing with Netscape Navigator (Version 1.0, circa 1995, on a dinghy Windows 3.11 machine---anyone remember the days when TCP/IP stacks weren't built into the OS, and we'd open a Trumpet Winsock terminal on top of the dialer? Tres cool!) Who would forget the frisson of clicking one's first hyperlink? For me, it happened within Navigator.

Netscape Navigator was the little browser that could, before all the Java/Javascript, Plugin and ActiveX (and Collabra) crud got into the picture. Mozilla Firefox goes a long way from the initial disappointing Mozilla RC's, and recaptures a lot of the original Navigator spirit. The new layout engine is lean and fast, with a slick, no-nonsense interface. The featureset is reduced to a minimum---no more crud. Users can mix and match additional functionality for themselves via downloadable extensions. Plus, the whole browser is skinnable.

I liked the product so much that I also checked out Mozilla Thunderbird, an email client with the same ethos, and none of the security loopholes found in Outlook. The features are pretty robust, considering it's only a 0.6 release, but what really won me over is its ability to be "trained" to detect and seggregate junk mail through Bayesian Analysis. I get a lot of spam on my POP mailboxes---so far, Thunderbird puts them all to bed without false positives. Like Firefox, it has extensions and themes downloadable online.

Next post: blogging and Gmail.

Naruto Quiz Result

2004-05-07T08:43:00.000+08:00

Which Naruto Character are You?
quiz by orangeday.net

Kinda makes sense...but do my eyebrows have to be so darn thick?

Non-negotiating

2004-05-04T16:09:00.000+08:00

At the wake of an INC-endorsement of PGMA, Poe and Lacson enter into yet another round of last-minute talks to salvage the possibility of a united front against the administration. Parties have emerged from the marathon sessions without any real concession, and only a resource-sharing agreement for the last stretch of the campaign. Which is a pretty roundabout way of saying that these talks achieved NOTHING.

Game theory provides a framework for analysing the rational behavior of parties in a conflict situation. The assumption here is that a party to a negotiation is rational, thus he will choose outcomes that will maximize gains, and minimize losses. It also necessitates the assumption that the other party is likewise as rational. You cannot assume that the other side will be stupid or fall over himself. It's not a safe bet, under any circumstance.

But before coming to the negotiating table and considering tradeoffs, one must at least be capable of an objective (if not ruthless) evaluation of his position. You can negotiate from a position of weakness, if you are willing to settle for much less than you may have wanted. Thus, you can focus on the real critical objectives (get PGMA out), and let the rest go. Cost-benefit analysis is never easy, and there is no room for self-deception.

There is no point in these negotiations because both parties come into the table with mostly emotional, and little rational content. No one is willing to take an objective evaluation of the situation, or concede his relative weakness. There really is nothing to talk about. Only a lot of smoke and piss and fist shaking. Perhaps there never was.

That, and that there is no point talking to a iron-fisted thug, or a puppet without his own political convictions.

Fun Facts from Professor Labitag

2004-05-03T21:22:00.000+08:00

A high point of my first year in law school was having Professor Labitag for Obligations and Contracts. He knows both the blackletter law and gray areas that would inevitably pop out in the real world. And it's a joy to see his solution-oriented mind fashion trade-off matrices.

Another plus is that he's a human search engine. You enter a query, or a subject branches out from his last sentece, and hypertextually, he reveals a whole new world of fun.

1. "There are many kinds of animi. That's the plural of animus, ah? Animus lucrandi, animus solvendi, animus matrimonii... These are animi - ends with an I. When it ends with an E, well, ah, that's the cartoon!"

Read his other gems in The Paradox and Her Dreams.

I will consider myself lucky if I can get to be half the teacher this guy is.

Star-stricken

2004-05-02T16:20:00.000+08:00

We must be experiencing a serious shortage of stars, what with the major channels scrambling with extended audition sessions on primetime television. Yes, that is precisely what we all need. More stars. Because the old guard is being cycled to politics after serving their country through entertainment. Support the search effort! Turn in your star-potential friend today!

The Bangus of a Doubt

2004-05-02T16:16:00.000+08:00

If you're a law student, or simply someone who's interested in legal/political issues, I invite you to check out the repurposed and redesigned The Bangus of a Doubt. Subjects include cyber law, intellectual property, constitutional law, and legal theory. This is the first time I maintained a subject-oriented blog. I hope to get your feedback in the comments section of each article.

Can I just say...

2004-04-30T18:32:00.000+08:00

That I am currently roasting under the hot and humid Bulacan weather? I remember playing outside during summers when I was a child. We'd have a nice game of touch ball and habulang pulis and run around until sunset. These days, children run the heat of heatstroke just by taking a walk outside.

It will certainly be convenient to make inferences from my anecdotal evidence and rant on about global warming. Or a sentient Gaia warming up to fry the miserable human virus off her face. Or maybe aliens. But I just talked about educated guesses and incomplete information a while back, so we first have to establish a overall indicia of temperature then and now. I wonder if PAGASA publishes this stuff over the web. Time to fire up Google!

In Memoriam

2004-04-30T14:36:00.000+08:00

Yesterday I heard about two deaths.

Nick Joaquin is no longer with us. In a parallel universe, I digitized his voice while he read poetry. Perhaps we had some beer together, and he told me that my work is terrible of course, and that I will never become a writer, but I'm not so bad---so I can always try law :)

Another friend of mine passed away as well. In a parallel universe, we seized Makati with our mind bombs and our meme beams. We diverted electronic fund transfers of multinationals to relief organizations.

Surveys, Samples and the Sliver of Tokwa

2004-04-30T13:04:00.000+08:00

To guess is cheap, to guess wrongly is expensive
-Old Chinese Proverb

There's been a lot of discussion lately about the latest survey results on the presidentiables. As usual, the mainstream media fails miserably to inform and educate, choosing instead to feature soundbites from parties who speak either from a position of invincible ignorance (Bro. Eddie: The surveys are wrong because we managed to fill Ayala Avenue) or self-serving disregard for the truth (FPJ citing the surveys early in the game when he was ahead, and then crying foul when they started turning against him). Instead of discussing the results and the methodology in a rational manner, they resort to ad hominem, or conspiracy theories. I've been reviewing my old research methodology notes and readings, and I'd like to calmly evaluate the methodology before saying that the professionals who executed the surveys (some of them my friends and undergrad classmates) have prostituted themselves to political interests. Surveys are pretty accurate guides if you are properly informed that they are useful but imperfect scientific tools, not oracular visions from on high.

So at the risk of oversimplifying statistical theory, here goes nothing.

Imagine the voting population (or any population under study)as a bowl of lugaw (gruel). Every grain of rice is different (in terms of weight, shape, etc.), and there are of course bits of garlic and the occassional sliver of tokwa thrown into the mix but GENERALLY, the bowl of lugaw is homogenous. The ASSUMPTION is that this generality applies to people as well. We're all unique, yes---and there are deviants in the stew--- but when it comes to some behavior, we're not that different. We all wake up, take a bath, and eat lugaw. It's a massively extended version of the probability problem involving a coin toss. There could be an endless set of outcomes possible when you toss a coin---it could go on spinning forever, like in American Gods, it could fly out into space, it could be stolen in mid-air, it could land on its side. But GENERALLY, it will land heads or tail, and when you have enough coin tosses and keep track, you can see that coin-tossing behavior can be graphed into a neat curve with a 50-50 distribution between heads and tails. Surveys are based on the educated guess that at least some of our attributes and behavior fall within a curve, and are thus susceptible to statistical analysis. It's not necessarily correct, but it's better than nothing, and most of the important decisions in life involve incomplete information, when rigorous analysis is not practical or possible.

Let's go back to the lugaw example to discuss the merits and demerits of the survey method. Let's say that you want to determine if a bowl of lugaw tastes good. You don't have to eat the whole bowl. Or one-fourth, or half the bowl. You can take an itsy-bitsy teaspoon and determine through a sample. The possibility of making inferences about a large population through a small sample is what makes the survey so attractive as a research tool. Compared to full-on experiments, it's relatively fast and easy. There also lies its greatest weakness. If the sample is wrong, then everything is wrong and the results are utterly useless. There are many things that could go wrong with scooping a sample, either of lugaw or of voters. The most obvious are:

1) You're using chopsticks, or a hole-riddled spoon. Which means that your instrument---in the case of surveys a set of questions---is defective, and therefore fails to capture the information you wanted to get in the first place. The questions could be slanted to elicit a biased answer, or so vague that it elicits a useless answer, or no answer at all. It's a common source of error, and is sensitive to perturbations based on subject matter. It's probably easier to ask about television or dining preferences in a neutral manner than it is to inquire about political or sexual behavior. The trick is to frame the question as neutrally as possible.

2) You're using the right spoon, but you're conveniently scooping up only the garlic-y parts. A reliable sample must be random. And it's not just randomness in the "anyone who logs in to the survey web site" sense, because this sample is actually biased for those who have internet connections. Randomness here must fulfill mathematical criteria for randomness, and reduces bias to acceptable levels. Without enough randomness, the generality which enables us to make inferences about the population disappears, and the results are applicable only to the subpopulation actually surveyed. Thanks to advances in computational power, it's possible to frame random samples and verify randomness post facto even with off-the-shelf software.

3) You have a spoon and you scoop randomly, but it turns out not to be lugaw at all---but a mean, exotic, multi-layered Chinese congee. This one's a heartbreaker, stretching the methodology to its limits. There are instances when a random sample can't capture behavior accurately, because the homogeneity is limited---or not there at all. Because the real world is more complicated than a bowl of lugaw. If it's multi-layered Chinese congee, then you'll have to cut and scoop carefully across the layers. In a survey involving a multi-layered population, you'll have to use a stratified random sample, taking into account the relevant variable (such as sex, or age group, or economic class).

The Reason

2004-04-30T02:03:00.000+08:00

I'm not a perfect person
There's many things I wish I didn't do
But I continue learning
I never meant to do those things to you
And so I have to say before I go
That I just want you to know...

I've found a reason for me
To change who I used to be
A reason to start over new
And the reason is You.

I'm sorry that I hurt you
It's something I must live with everyday
And all the pain I put you through
I wish that I could take it all away
And be the one who catches all your tears
That's why i need you to hear...

I've found a resaon for me
To change who I used to be
A reason to start over new
And the reason is You
And the reason is You
And the reason is You
And the reason is You.

I'm not a perfect person
I never meant to do those things to you
And so I have to say before I go
That I just want you to know...

I've found a reason for me
To change who I used to be
A reason to start over new
And the reason is You.

I've found a reason to show
A side of me you didn't know
A reason for all that I do
And the reason is You.

- The Reason by Hoobastank

Nginig Mo Mukha Mo

2004-04-27T12:03:00.000+08:00

Last weekend I was able to catch part of an ABS-CBN/Studio 23 program called Nginig (Tagalog for "Shiver"), a "Mysterious Mystery of Strange Mysteries" kind of show (Think Magandang Gabi Bayan Halloween Special). The idea is to have Raymund Bagatsing and five questor-types set out to investigate haunted houses to get the 401 on the creepies, maybe even perform a low-level exorcism or two. They show typically ghost-y stuff: people getting into seizures, eyeballs rolling backwards, feeling strange things at the back of their necks, or going cold all over. Indicia of spirits roaming one's abode. OR epilepsy. OR maybe a draft from an open window, for crying out loud. Sheeesh.

I believe that the universe is stranger than we can imagine. I believe that there are things that science cannot explain. There is a gap in my belief system that can admit of the existence of ghosts, of psychic phenomena, even of chupakabra. What really gets me going is to resort to the paranormal at the first instance, without even exploring the limits of human reason. It cheapens real miracles, and stunts the ability to think rigorously and critically.

Take for example this one clip from another ABS-CBNNews show where they feature a "blessed" Sto. Niño figure---supposed blessedness arising from the fact that it keeps getting back on its feet no matter how hard you push. People have flocked all over, raving and ranting about this blessed Sto. Niño. They venerate the object and hail its owner as a modern-day prophet. What the host didn't take note, however, is that the Sto. Nino had a convex base, which allows it to shift its center of gravity when pushed in any direction. It's made to be self-correcting, like rolly polly dolls (or ships). It's a scam. But the possibility isn't even raised. No one bothered to look closer at the phenomena and use even basic science. Magical thinking at the first instance, from the people we're supposed to trust with our news and views.

I'd propose an anti-idiotarian version of this show, given a chance: A Scully to their burgeoning Mulder. Instead of people with third eyes or nebulous sensitivities, I'd have a crack team composed of:

1) a philosopher
2) an applied physicist/engineer
3) a doctor
4) a psychologist
5) a forensic anthropologist
6) a sociologist
7) maybe a lawyer, to prosecute the scammers

They'd backtrack the questors and re-evaluate the cases with a rational outlook. They'd take on the magical hypotheses point by point, whittling it down until we get a reasonable explanation that would not have to involve ghosts or elementals or the tooth fairy. If, and only if, reason fails us---then we'll concede that *maybe* it's something that goes bump in the night. Anyone else willing to take the challenge?

Death By Friendster

2004-04-24T00:06:00.000+08:00

I'm not sure whether to file this under "Declining Educational Standards" or "Signs of the Apocalypse" (they're correlative, at any rate). Some pre-pubescent snot in Friendster is trawling for girls with the following profile:

Well! I can describe myself as a silent but deadly like a wind. I’m so hyper hot! So, you must be careful about me. I’m very friendly to the people who can admit me as I am. I also play basketball, billiard and golf. I also crack jokes and dominance in story telling about xXx yeah "I love it so".

Ops! I can also describe myself as a peacemaker, troublemaker, love maker, relation maker, friendly maker, deadly weapon maker, fear maker, sex maker and all of the things that I can make it!

Physically! I'm normal not abnormal or other ill, I have eyes, nose, ear, hair (all parts of the body specially in middle of my body!), arms, feet, tongue, teeth, vermilion p**** and all part of my deadly body!

I want to met having a problem, so I can hlp something from them, and I like people who like me as I am. For more information add me

The identity of this grammatically-challenged Don Juan would have to be kept secret, for his and for all our sakes. For a while I just kept staring at the write-up, the way one stares at something so alien and horrifying. Arachnid reaction. But then I just had to post it---as a cautionary tale, and so that justice be done---he used the word "vermilion" for crying out loud, and these things i cannot let go.

The Web is weirder than we can imagine.

The Schoolyear in Music

2004-04-23T00:25:00.000+08:00

I'm trying to write something about the 1-hour *oral* finals (The SuperBurlyExam). Then it hit me that it really meant not just the end of Obligations and Contracts---not just the end of the semester---but the end of my first year in law school. How can I even begin to write about this? So many things have happened, so many changes. So much loss (of sleep, of weight, of sanity), and so much gain (of knowledge, of living and loving). Perhaps I can wite up something for the *knowledge* component of the whole trip and stash them in The Bangus of a Doubt (more on this later), but as for the emotive aspect---I am honestly at a loss for words.

For these things I'll need music. Maybe I'll just queue some mp3's then burn 'em on a CD when my CD-R drive gets fixed. Upfront I can think of the following songs:

For the 1st Sem:
My Baby Shot Me Down
Mr. Lonely
I Wanna Be Sedated
Save Me (The Smallville Theme)
Theme from Schindler's List
Gatekeepers Opening Theme
Separate Lives

For the 2nd Sem:
The Journey to the West (Princess Mononoke Soundtrack)
Angel (by Electrasy)
Fame
Evenstar
She Will Be Loved
Reason
Everything (by Lifehouse)
Neodammerung
Champagne Supernova (Oasis featuring Prof. FTH)

It's Kinja Cool

2004-04-20T22:59:00.000+08:00

Got myself a Kinja, account. I can keep tabs on all my favorite blogs through one convenient interface. I wonder how they do this? RSS? XML-RPC hooks with all the major blogging API's? At any rate, it's geeky-cool.

New Blog

2004-04-18T08:43:00.000+08:00

Check out When You Know - The Jovan & Charo Wedding Blog.

I'm in!

2004-04-17T21:45:00.000+08:00

Survived the last exam for the semester, nay---*the schoolyear*! The SuperBurlyExam involved staying for one-hour in a room while the professor trephinated you with questions on Obligations and Contracts. Unless I am blindsided by unforeseen circumstances---I will be a sophomore this June. I owe it to a wonderfully thorough and insightful review. Er. Ehem :)

But no, really---I am so camp-happy I passed Oblicon. As one would have it in mangled video-game english:

[Ripped off from joey]

Summer has officially started here in Room with a Bangus. I've installed Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield. I've cleaned up my room and my PC directories (several projects on and offline this summer---more on them later). There will be hot, humid days of coding and teaching and hopefully---*living* ahead.

But now I definitely have to sleep the sleep of the just and equitable. Text text na lang :)

Permalink

2004-04-11T20:13:00.000+08:00

Looks like clickmomukhamo.com is back. Somewhat. It's responding to pings and xmlrpc. FTP ain't working, plus some stylesheet refrences may be broken.

But don't look there for the latest and greatest. I've yet to work on its design (and position, content-wise). And Mark may have to deal with more back-end issues before it's back on its feet.

Better make permanent changes on your blogrolls kids. Room with a Bangus, as earlier stipulated, is here to stay. Life will happen here, in my room overlooking the beach. :)

Testing

2004-04-11T16:12:00.000+08:00

Again...Had publishing hiccups a while back.

Testing

2004-04-11T13:48:00.000+08:00

Testing w.bloggar...

Happy Easter!!!

2004-04-11T01:04:00.000+08:00

To all my Catholic friends, especially---but this also goes to the Protestants, Jews, Muslims, and Jedis in the audience. Holidays are over, now get back to work! :)

Talking about work, I'm almost halfway through reviewing Arturo Tolentino's annotation of Book 4 of The Civil Code (Harry Potter and the Gratuitous Commodatum). My last final exam is an apocalyptic oral confrontation with Professor Labitag (Obligations and Contracts). Classmates, I hope we all survive this one.

I'll get back to blogging full throttle after the exam. Lots and lots of fun up ahead this summer. Until then, it's mostly quiet. Mostly.

Network Effects

2004-04-07T19:05:00.000+08:00

Somewhere a .jpeg is posted. Its pixels are encoded into IP packets. My browser retrieves it, graphic routines painting it on a corner of my screen. The blogosphere just became more beautiful :) Thank you, digital camera! Thank you, Adobe Photoshop! Thank you, photobucket.

Plans

2004-04-06T07:41:00.000+08:00

This space is not just a temporary bunker site while we wait for clickmomukhamo.com to (hopefully) get back online. It's a power in itself, a PERMANENT component of the Bangus(TM) family of sites. (Oooohhh, such a blog I will have).

I'm in a hurry right now. See ya all later. Peace out.

Dream-Weaver

2004-04-06T05:03:00.000+08:00

Find me here, speak to me
I want to feel you, I need to hear you
You are the light... that's leading me
To the place... where I find peace again.

You are the strength... that keeps me walking
You are the hope... that keeps me trusting
You are the light... into my soul
You are my purpose... you're everything.

And how can I stand here with you
... and not be moved by you.
Would you tell me how could it be
... any better than this.

You calm the storms, and you give me rest
You hold me in your hands
You won't let me fall
You still my heart, and you take my breath away.

And how can I stand here with you
... and not be moved by you.
Would you tell me how could it be
... any better than this.

And how can I stand here with you
... and not be moved by you.
Would you tell me how could it be
... any better than this.

Cause you're all I want, you're all I need
You're everything... everything.

-Everything by Lifehouse

kazamm!

2004-04-06T03:47:00.000+08:00

we are back online, fellas...