Category: Miscellaneous

.asia Is Useless

First, Asia is varied and each individual country that makes it up is distinct, from culture to language to currency, religion, beliefs, political systems, socio-economic structures, economies, the way we look, eat, dress, etc, Each country pretty much has little to do with one another.

Second, that means a website using the .asia domain will have an unclear audience. Uzbekistan, for example, is in Asia. So is Iran, and yes, the Philippines. Even within just SouthEast Asia, there is little to share. I’m sure people in Myanmar and Brunei have about as little to share with me here in the Philippines as I do with those in Laos and East Timor.

Third: Conversely, creating a website or a section of an website that makes content for an international audience makes far more sense. In fact at the moment, a lot of websites already do this using either subdomains (http://philippines.domain.com) or subdirectories (http://domain.com/philippines), which can even be extended to specific sub-regions or cities (http://domain.com/philippines/cebu). In fact, why not get a new domain just for that purpose (http://www.domain-ph.com). These techniques perform essentially the same function.

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My Business Intelligence Article is on the SME Insight Blog

Hey I just noticed that my SME Insight article on business intelligence software is up on their blog.

I enjoy writing for SME Insight but my contact person there has resigned and I haven’t yet contacted the editor directly, which of course can be interpreted as my being lazy since there’s no reason why I haven’t done that. Ok ok I’ll do it after I write this.

I noticed too that they didn’t edit it too much, which is great. One of the primary reasons I stopped writing for a broadsheet was the cavalier way they were treating my articles, which I decided I had had enough of. I know that’s kind of vain but I care about my work and when I see it all rewritten by someone else, I’d really rather they remove my name because at that point it wasn’t my work anymore. Call me old fashioned but that’s the way I feel and when I was more or less told to put up or shut up, I decided it wasn’t working out for me anymore so I took off.

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Jun Lozada, You Have NO Friends.

Joker Arroyo blew his top at Lozada before he finished recounting how he had a meeting with the Senator’s wife. And as I watched at how Lozada started raising his patent girly voice in surprise, eventually leading to tears, I just had to wonder if Lozada knew what he was getting into when he got there. Apparently, judging from his reaction, he doesn’t.

Jun Lozada imho, is either naive or in denial. He clearly doesn’t see that in politics, he has no friends. As he declares how much of a fan he is of Joker Arroyo, the surprise in his voice at Joker’s anger was hard to mask. Lozada is a babe in the woods, and to his credit he admits as much. He is completely clueless to the fact that at this point, he shouldn’t trust anyone, because in politics it is every man for himself, each one looking out for number one. So if he really truly believes that Mike Defensor, Sec. Atienza, or anyone else amongst his proferred friends would not sell their souls to see him shut up, he’s sure to be crying even more in the days to come.

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On Keeping Focus

I worked all day on a special project for Kikay and as I write this I’ve spent approximately 20 minutes staring at the Internet wondering what else to do before the inevitably similar day tomorrow. Within that 20 minutes I finally wrote a ‘spiel’ to send to people interested in advertising at Mom Exchange, whose instructions I finalized a few days ago, no doubt again similar to this one in terms of busyness (yes another invented word. I just like making them up so shoot me).

At any rate, herewith are random thoughts from my vegged out mind minutes away from going beddy night night.

On my bedside is the marvelous One Hundred Years Of Solitude by – need I say who wrote it but I’ll say it anyway why not – Gabriel Garcia Marquez. A book which in my opinion, he probably wrote whilst on a perpetual narcotic induced high. Because Jesus H Christ, how could someone write something so magnificent as that. It’s the sort of thing you kind of drone on throughout, turning page after page before you realize that what seemed initially like a continuous tide of ill connected events is actually starting to frame itself into a story which is, without you knowing it, taking you on a ride.

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‘Astronaut Farmer’ Movie Review

astronaut farmerIf it weren’t for the spectacularly corny musical score, Astronaut Farmer would probably be a bigger hit. Instead, everytime a dramatic sequence or something of note occurs, we are treated to the cheesiest, cliche-est, overly sentimental, Kevin Costner-ish* , background music ever.

It’s not the worst though. That award, has to go to Jerry Bruckheimer’s creations, like The Rock, Con-Air, Glory Road, and countless others. If you wanna know what I’m talking about, he’s also executive producer of the fast – paced, constant music in your ear The Amazing Race. It works for a 30 minute show, but in a movie where a story has to be told you’ll start feeling as if it’s all just hackneyed camera trickery to fill up space. And besides, after 1.5 hours of blaring music with cut scenes one after the other it becomes unbearable. I’ve become so familiar with this style I’ve correctly identified his tv shows and movies from listening to the musical arrangement of the teasers.

At any rate I hate music that tells you when to start feeling sad or elated. That sort of stuff belongs in telenovelas like when ‘sad’ music is cued when the hero is faced with bad luck. It’s as if we’re being told that, at this point, to start crying, because we’re not capable of deciding this ourselves. Astronaut Farmer has a great deal going for it, but the music telling me what to do completely ruins the moment.

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Upgrading to WordPress 2.3.3 (waaay updated)

New WordPress Out Again!! And for the life of me, even if I’ve been webmastering in the wonderful of WordPress for years now, I still don’t enjoy the process of upgrading, unassuaged* by the fact I have to do it 3 times every time (I have 3 blogs, not including this).

At any rate, further investigation (highly recommended everytime a new release of anything – drupal, phpbb, etc., comes out), has shown an easier way.

It’s all, as always, on the WP Blog. Apparently most of the hullabaloo has to do with, to quote, an “XML-RPC implementation such that a specially crafted request would allow a user to edit posts of other users on that blog“, assuming you allow registration. Ergo, merely replacing the xmlprc.php file will suffice! Here’s the link to that.

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