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
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
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
Zire Dreams
SARS here, SARS there
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.
Zaurus Dreams
I found someone selling a secondhand Sharp Zaurus SL-5000D real cheap, and I’m very seriously considering it. Despite the OS X sync issues, the price it’s going for is well worth it for an expandable high-res internet-capable Linux handheld with rich media playback capability; I get a SD image viewer and MP3 player as well as a PDA, which is exactly what I’ve been looking for, short of a combo cellphone.
Send Later
How hard would it be for Apple to include “Send Later” and “Send Queued Messages” menu items in Mail.app, I wonder? Being a dialup user half the time, I’m not always ready to fire off my messages from the hip, so right now I need to hit the Send button, wait for a dialog, select Send Later, then restart Mail.app when I do connect so it sends automatically.
A message queue should be a fairly basic feature, and I’m happy with Mail.app otherwise.
Palm Overboard
Darn it, darn it, darn it. I lost my Palm yesterday; it must have slid out of my slacks pocket in the taxi on the way to church. Just a Zire, so it’s not too much of a blow to my finances, and I had the presence of mind to sync the same morning, so my data is all intact.
Well, if the taxi company doesn’t have it today, I’m effectively in the market for a new cheap handheld. That Zaurus would look good if it were only OS X compatible. Or maybe the Tungsten-T?
(Update: Whoa, the Tungsten is waaaay too expensive. I’m going to look at lower-end combo models first while I investigate better anti-loss solutions for keeping handhelds on my person. Buying another one is useless if it’s just going to slide out of my pocket again.)
Peace Be
On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.”
I’m very much in need of peace today; it has been another tiring, frustrating, and somewhat heartbreaking day for me; not much of an Easter, I must say. Yet there are blessings aplenty to be counted, and reasons enough for joy: Jesus, having paid the price for our sin, and trampled death under His feet, today He is risen, and we rejoice.
Update, one year later: Christos Aneste!