On the Brink

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Can’t blog. Slaving away on thesis. Final critique tomorrow, then I have a Flash piece in the afternoon, and a paper due Thursday. Get back to you next week. Cya.

Update, 11.30am: Fresh out of final thesis critique. Went quite well, all panelists liked it. Rachel mentioned Barthes’ “Death of the Author,” Grad Director Leslie Hammond was intrigued and took notes on the books provided, and The McCabe wants to see a deeper and more challenging critique of the community and subculture.

And now, on to my interactive piece on trains. The work never ends.

After the All-Nighter

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I spent all night in the MA Digital Lab till 9am this morning, working on a Flash piece, then came home and collapsed, and now it’s past 5pm. Where’d the day go? The whole point of working so late was so I could have the rest of today to work on more stuff, then crash over the weekend. I am definitely not up to working the hours I used to work back in my video editing days, when I could stay up on the computer for days at a stretch with almost no sleep. Now it just takes an all-nighter to knock me out completely. I’m getting old and gray. And incoherent.

Facing the Grill

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Critique of thesis with instructor in a few minutes, then final panel critique on Monday. Panic. (Update: Individual critique went well; just a few interface suggestions from advisor. Yay!)

The Hermit’s Song

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My heart is empty. All the fountains that should run

    With longing are in me

Dried up. In all the countryside there is not one

    That drips to find the sea.

I have no care for anything thy love can grant

    Except the moment’s vain

And hardly noticed filling of the moment’s want

   And to be free from pain.

Oh, thou that art unwearying, that dost neither sleep

   Nor slumber, who didst take

All care for Lazarus in the careless tomb, oh keep

   Watch for me till I wake.

If thou think for me what I cannot think, if thou

    Desire for me what I

Cannot desire, my soul’s interior Form, though now

    Deep-buried, will not die

No more than the insensible dropp’d seed which grows

    Through winter ripe for birth

Because, while it forgets, the heavens remembering throws

    Sweet influence still on earth,

Because the heaven, moved moth-like by thy beauty, goes

    Still turning around the earth.

– from C.S. Lewis’s The Pilgrim’s Regress

Cookies and BUCs

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Heads-up from Jesper:

The buggy “Remember Me” function in my comments is fixed, I hope, thanks to a javascript fix from the Waffle Dude. In the near future, I may opt to forego these “/comments/n/” rewrites altogether and stick to the less classy, but simpler, direct URL.

Heads-up from Richard:

Farewell to the Browser Upgrade Campaign. With the advent of the modern web’s more standards-friendly browsing environment, designers need no longer sully their markup with snooty web-standards “ahems.” Also in the near future, expect my own pesteng ahem to disappear.

Randomphobic

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Pia has now joined me and Raffy in the random layout hizzouse. Check it; she has 5 phobia-themed layouts up so far. (Who else is doing random blog layouts? I’m pretty sure I’ve seen more of you out there.)

SARS here, SARS there

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SARS is starting to go big time in the home land. I’m a bit surprised that it took this long to start spreading among Filipinos, considering the volume of human traffic between the Philippines and China (and the rest of the world), but it looks like the reports are catching up.

It’s really scary. I just talked to Mom on the phone over Easter, and she told me that relatives don’t kiss or shake hands with their titos and titas and pamangkins anymore, as a measure against the contagion. When fear of a disease starts to displace the strength of Filipino familial traditions, it must be bad.

Vanderwoning is blogging about it from HK, and Manuel Viloria has links.

Update: Well, looks like SARS is here in Baltimore. And in Sutton Place, too, which is literally right at my school’s doorstep.