The Bangus Ultimatum

1.What did you do in 2005 that you’d never done before?

Went to Tagaytay on a whim.

2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

Not really.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

Nope.

4. Did anyone close to you die?

Thankfully, no.

5. What countries did you visit?

None. But I’ll be doing a lot of traveling in 2006 (hopefully)

6. What would you like to have in 2006 that you lacked in 2005?

I don’t know. It’s been a bountiful year.

7. What date(s) from 2005 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

Still not good with dates

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Getting a rinky-dink abstract accepted for a conference in Cyprus

9. What was your biggest failure?

Dropping in Evidence.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

My rhinitis (may pangalan na sya - si Alexis!)

11. What was the best thing you bought?

No major purchases this year.

12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?

My law school blockmates. Hurray for us!

13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?

Gloria Macapagal Arroyo

14. Where did most of your money go?

Mostly books (same as last year) and sundry activities and trips

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

Finally being able to take Intellectual Property Law. Teaching in UP.

16. What song will always remind you of 2005?

“Mr Brightside�? by The Killers.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
happier or sadder?
happier overall, with just the right dollop of angst
thinner or fatter?
I think I’m a bit thinner.
richer or poorer?
richer, money-wise

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?

Time to read, free time in general.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?

Surfing random stuff.

20. How will you be spending Christmas?

Spent it with my family, but of course

21. Who deleted question 21?

I don’t know.

22. Did you fall in love in 2004?

Erm. I’m not sure.

23. How many one-night stands?

None at all.

24. What was your favourite TV program?

Not much TV. I try to catch CSI whenever I can, though.

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?

No, not really.

26. What was the best book you read?

Susan Blackmore, “The Meme Machine”

27. What was your greatest musical discovery?

The Arcade Fire

28. What did you want and get?

Lots of cool new software and shiney new code.

29. What did you want and not get?

Still no world domination, and no brown puppy.

30. What was your favorite film of this year?

Wallace and Gromit and the Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Serenity!

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

Nothing much. I was 27.

32.What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

More facetime.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2005?

Same as usual.

34. What kept you sane?

My friends and hobbies.

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

Natalie Portman. But I recently found Josie Nutter

36. What political issue stirred you the most?

The Hello Garci Scandal

37. Who did you miss?

My old college friends, whom I didn’t see this year.

38. Who was the best new person you met?

No new significant “new” persons. Probably new aspects of a person, but I’m not telling

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2005.

That you can never stop the signal.

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.

“I’m coming out of my cage, and I’m doing just fine�? - Mr Brightside, by The Killers.

“Now here’s the sun, it’s alright…” - Rebellion, by The Arcade Fire,.

I’m posting this now just in case I miss blogging the next few days. Classes (studying AND teaching for me) are about to start and I’m grinding away with preparations. I ripped this off from Jovan: May pangakong taglay ang 2006 para sa akin. Believe and it will be.

Last time I posted this charm, something did happen. It was both wonderfully happy and devastatingly sad. But hey - I did get what I asked for and I made a whole lot of living and learning. I may have been too wary to post it last New Years - but here I am now, daring Fate again. Bring it on - I’ll live it, love it, and then blog it

Really significant upgrade, with lots of new features and under-the-hood improvements. I’m tempted to just go ahead and upgrade (I’m a sucker for point-oh releases), but the more prudent path is to have my dbase backed up, check my plugins for compatibility, and wait for post-launch bug fixes.

UPDATE: Went ahead with it anyway. Something seems to be buggy with the comments. Please stand by…

Got my first post published in The Man Blog, the blog for real manly men. According to the Pinoyblog of the Week review:

We’re merely pointing out that if you’re looking for serious stuff (romance, music or intellectual discourse), or if you’re a woman who gets offended with cockiness and misplaced bravado, the Man Blog is not the blog to visit.

Well, I guess my pretensions for a career in the academe would have to be deferred.

My vanity, of course, likens this to Alvin Toffler writing articles for Playboy. I doubt if Toffler ever wrote the word “gangbang” in one of his articles, though. To those wondering why I signed up, I guess the short answer is that I’ve always been suspicious of those who would divide the world of ideas between the pop/low/crass and the elite/high/intellectual. Philosophy and The Big Questions began in the marketplace, not in rarefied atmospheres of churches and universities. If Socrates were alive today, he’d be having a comedy troupe doing mall tours - or maybe he’ll be a pro-wrestler (I tend to favor the latter).

Still, the mandate I got from Man-Blog founder Mike Villar is clear: to balance all the talk of fellatio with sound analysis and thought-provoking insights. I hope I live up to that expectation.

For my first article I wrote about freedom of speech, a subject that’s dear to my heart. Get it through the Man-Blog.

This seems to be a tradition for me now: a blog greeting and a reference to Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol (heartwarming, relatively short, and copyright free!). Christmas may be about the baby Jesus. Or family. Or downright commercialism. But for the longest time now, the season for me has been about the Others. Those who shiver in the dark. We need to remember this. Now more than ever.

“Spirit!�? he cried, tight clutching at its robe, “hear me! I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been but for this intercourse. Why show me this, if I am past all hope!�?

Holding up his hands in a last prayer to have his fate reversed, he saw an alteration in the Phantom’s hood and dress. It shrunk, collapsed, and dwindled down into a bedpost.

Merry Christmas, everyone!!!

Tagaytay last weekend, where memory always waited in ambush. Storm winds moistened by the sea, and chilled by the mountain’s shadows. When I stood by the lake they mocked me in shrill voices. “Here you once spoke of fire and powdershot, and wrote poetry and counted stars. Now you return as but a child, all grown backwards!”

I hate the mountains. Sometimes.

Struck with the flu in Bulacan. What I hate about having the flu is the vivid weird dreams. This time around I was in a planet of discarded wires and data ports, rusting copper endings and static electricity. And there, waiting for me, was Claude Shannon.

I kid you not.

He told me that as always, my timing couldn’t be suckier. But that was to be expected, because I refuse to live (and believe) in the gaps. Clearly I needed to relax, and I should consider a trip out of town (too late).

Maybe I need to cut on my reading. And no more brownies!

This is too big for the sideblog. Tim Berners Lee (Sir Tim Berners Lee to you, pissants!), the guy who invented the World Wide Web (not the Internet, that one was invented by Al Gore) has a blog. A snippet:

In 1989 one of the main objectives of the WWW was to be a space for sharing information. It seemed evident that it should be a space in which anyone could be creative, to which anyone could contribute. The first browser was actually a browser/editor, which allowed one to edit any page, and save it back to the web if one had access rights.
Strangely enough, the web took off very much as a publishing medium, in which people edited offline. Bizarely, they were prepared to edit the funny angle brackets of HTML source, and didn’t demand a what you see is what you get editor. WWW was soon full of lots of interesting stuff, but not a space for communal design, for discource through communal authorship.

Now in 2005, we have blogs and wikis, and the fact that they are so popular makes me feel I wasn’t crazy to think people needed a creative space.

See? Blogging and wiki’s are embedded in the design and intent of the web