A blog is a website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries, typically displayed in reverse chronlogical order. A single entry is called a blog post.
2021 September
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A while back I wrote about an app some friends and I used to play called Draw Something, where players made crude drawings using limited tools and the other player had to guess what the drawing was. While cleaning up some old photos during the past week I found another batch of Draw Something screenshots; I had forgotten that we had a second wave of playing the game back in 2017. It's fun to look at these screenshots and see how the drawings were made and guess what we were thinking of back then. This app may or may not -
Just another week. A quote: "Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants." – Epictetus The world: As of the 16th, we are now piloting this "alert level system with granular lockdowns" in Metro Manila. The alert level system is basically changing the ECQ/MECQ/GCQ nomenclature to numbered alert levels (a sensible move, which took them more than a year to figure out). Granular lockdowns have been implemented by LGUs even before (like QC's "special areas of concern"), though I guess these are now standardized maybe? In any case, some implementation details: the lockdowns will not be -
I finished a rewatch of House earlier this week; it's only my second time through the series. First time was during my stay in London, when I did a Netflix UK trial. I don't think I ever caught it when it was running on TV, but it's quickly become one of my favorite procedural shows. I thought I'd write a quick retrospective on the show. (Writing about stuff helps me remember details!) Seasons 1-3 The first few seasons set up the premise for the series: Gregory House, genius diagnostician, misanthrope, painkiller addict, and all-around asshole, able to solve and diagnose
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1 There was this link that did the rounds a couple of weeks ago: How I experience the web today. It's an accurate depiction of the many issues with the modern-day web. Such issues are already annoying on desktop web, but are often exacerbated and hence much worse on platforms such as mobile or tablets, especially given the more limited screen real-estate. Not just screen space, system resources are often scarce on these systems too. All of the popups and ads and whatnot inevitably tend to slow down the mobile / tablet experience. The worst case scenario has to be
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Today is the second Sunday of September, which apparently is Grandparents Day in the Philippines. A quote: My physics prof told me: "Math is the study of all possible worlds. Science is the study of the world we happen to live in. Someday we may find out whether those are different studies." -- Noah Smith The world: So we were supposed to ease lockdowns in Metro Manila last Sep 7, with restaurants being open again (at reduced capacity) and so on. At the last minute, the night before the lockdown was supposed to ease, the IATF walked back the announcement -
Random high school memory: I think it was in second year physics class maybe, we had an exercise / contest where we were required to create a rubber-band powered car from a plastic bottle. We didn't have the internet back then, but if we did, we could have easily Googled "rubber band powered car" and got a good sense of what the car was supposed to look like: you attach four wheels to the bottle then make a twisty thing with the rubber band to propel it forward. Indeed, all the other teams did their rubber band bottle cars this -
This is the second Le Guin piece I've read, following the short story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. This one is a full-length novel, though not particularly long. It took me about a week and a half to get through, reading a chapter or two a day. The book covers the attempts of Genly Ai, an envoy from the Ekumen, an alliance of spacefaring human worlds, who has come to the brutally cold planet of Winter to invite the residents to join the Ekumen. The residents of Winter, though human, are unique among all other known human species,
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Jeremy Keith wrote about the cage of algorithmic recommendations: But that’s not true. You don’t ask “the algorithm” for a recommendation—it foists them on you whether you want them or not. A more apt metaphor would be that you walked by a record shop once and the store worker came out and followed you down the street, into your home, and watched your every move for the rest of your life. What Peter describes sounds great—a helpful knowledgable software agent that you ask for recommendations. But that’s not what “the algorithm” is. And that’s why it feels like a cage.
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A quote: “Man is only fully human when he plays!” - Friedrich Schiller The world: Our MECQ period is due to end on the 7th, after which NCR is going to enter an experimental phase of "granular lockdowns" where people in certain areas will not be allowed to come and go at all. Presumably food and other supplies will be brought to them, and if they have to leave for work because they are essential workers, they can't come back - employers need to either provide temporary lodging or allow them to WFH. As if those things are easy! We'll -
Bond film no. 24, Daniel Craig's fourth, and the end of this year's James Bond run. At least until I somehow manage to watch No Time To Die despite it coming out exclusively in theaters and our theaters still not open due to the pandemic. Spectre is... okay. It's more or less the culmination of the past four movies of Craig's run. With all of his personal trials so far revealed to be the machinations of the head of nefarious organization SPECTRE and Bond's traditional archnemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Blofeld here (played by Christoph Waltz) is given a bit more
2021 August
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It's August's end, which means Philippine "Christmas season" is about to begin. This year feels like it went by quickly, but really, who has a proper sense of time anymore. A quote: "Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive." -- Howard Thurman The world: Once again we hit record-breaking case numbers, positivity and death rates towards the end of the past week. MECQ was originally scheduled up to end up Aug, but now it's extended up to Sep 7. Are -
I finished Horizon Zero Dawn a while back, after getting a free copy off PS+ in June. Then I spent a couple of weeks chasing the platinum trophy for the game. The PS+ copy also came with the Frozen Wilds DLC, so I spent another month or so playing through that expansion as well. I already finished all the Frozen Wilds quests and wanted to get all the Frozen Wilds trophies too. I already got most of the but the other day, one of them wouldn't pop, so I just gave up, so I can do this quick review + -
Your task lists / to-do lists should be broken down so that individual tasks are as small as possible. Smaller tasks make it easier to overcome the initial laziness / inertia before starting any sort of work. This is especially relevant to me as a lazy person. Goofing around with smaller tasks might seem like you're putting off the bigger, more important things to do, but accomplishing a series of smaller tasks can give you enough momentum to tackle the bigger problems. It helps you get into the 'flow' necessary to tackle bigger things. Focusing exclusively on the bigger tasks
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Rurouni Kenshin: The Beginning (2021) This is the fifth film in the series. Previously. The film is based on the manga story arc that covers Kenshin's time as an assassin during the fall of the shogunate, 10 years before the main story of the RK manga and anime. Basically the same storyline as the Trust and Betrayal OVA. Except it doesn't cover the earliest part of Kenshin's story - I was hoping Hiko Seijuro would make an appearance, so that's a bit disappointing. It's still weird that this came last after the fourth film The Ending, since chronologically it should
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A quote: "And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it." -- Roald Dahl (via swiss-miss) The world: We hit record-breaking case numbers and death rates towards the end of the 15-day ECQ period. In spite of this, the IATF in their wisdom has decided to loosen our quarantine level to "MECQ". People note that the described restrictions in this flavor of MECQ are mostly the same as with the just-ended ECQ, except the supposedly -
Well, comic strip collections, collecting the kind that comes out in daily newspapers, not the Marvel or DC stuff that comes out monthly. (Click photos to view full-size) Early this year, someone gave me a stack of them. I decided to go through them about a month ago after the last book I read, taking up my regular book reading slot. These aren't even the most well-known ones like Calvin and Hobbes, Dilbert or Foxtrot, most of these I hadn't heard of before. I don't think they've ever been syndicated to newspapers here; if I hadn't gotten them for free, -
A quote: "Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it." - Eckhart Tolle The world: We are one week into the current NCR ECQ lockdown. Covid19 and the Delta variant continue to rampage through the country; the DOH reported 14k+ new cases today, the 2nd highest daily rate since the pandemic started, the positive testing rate staying above 20% for more than a week (signaling not enough testing - WHO recommended rate is 5%). The hospitals are starting to fill up again. Rumors are already circulating that the -
Skyfall (2012) Bond film no. 23, Daniel Craig's third. I watched this in the theaters back in 2012, so this is the last rewatch of my James Bond run. Back then my main complaint was that Bond's plan in the last thirty minutes of the movie was terrible. The same complaint stands even now, especially given the eventual outcome of that plan. Make no mistake: the entire defending the house sequence is one of the best things about the movie from an action standpoint, but tactically it was terrible. The whole film is basically a swan song for Judi Dench's
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Had some trouble thinking about what I wanted to write for this year's birthday post. And while I was thinking about it I accidentally published an empty draft of this post earlier today. Sounds about right. I like to consider myself an optimist, but it's been a challenging 365 days. We are still very much in the throes of a pandemic, threatening to overrun our vaccine defense with mutated variants. The entire twelve months since the last birthday have been spent in quarantine. The world is burning, experiencing record levels of heat. The internet is dominated by big silos that
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A quote: "Ask yourself: Why am I seeing and feeling this? How am I growing? What am I learning? Remember: Every coincidence is potentially meaningful. How high your awareness level is determines how much meaning you get from your world." – Ansel Adams via Nitch via Swiss-Miss The world: Metro Manila is back under Enhanced Community Quarantine, this is season 3. The delta variant continues to spread, and the case counts over the past couple of days have reached peaks not seen since April. And the response from congress is to... investigate an independent research group that provides covid data