Let’s Wallow

.

Heh heh. Suddenly I’m glad I don’t have a TV in my room yet. (Link via Silflay Hakra, who has a great collection of links to today’s pertinent comics and editorial cartoons.)

Flaggone!

.

Whole Foods was giving out free American flags at the cashier, so I got one, brought it home, and taped it to my windowsill, where it proudly waved in the wind. But now the wind has just blown the whole flag away, and I can’t find where it flew off to.

I guess I’ll just have to express my patriotism by eating the stuff I bought at Whole Foods: red salsa, blue corn chips, and white milk.

Year After

.

That evening (Manila time), I had just gotten home from work, and was feeding the stray cats outside my door, when my roommate told me that the WTC in New York had been hit by a plane. Like so many others, I initially dismissed it as a freak accident, and played a little more with the cats, until my brother texted me to say that it looked like terrorism.

I joined my roommates in front of the TV, just in time to see the second plane explode. After several minutes numbly watching CNN, I speculated that this was the kind of event that starts world wars.

I was up till 2am reading blogs, gathering quotes, and of course scraping what news I could from whatever sites still had the bandwidth to deliver. As I settled into bed, I admit, with some wry shame, that part of me awaited a pretrib Rapture.

I was not particularly shocked, awed, or amazed at the catastrophe — partly because of natural Filipino jadedness, I suppose, a result of the way our country is incessantly pummeled by manmade and natural disasters; and partly because of distance. It was, after all, happening on the other side of the world.

Today, a year later, I’m here, on this side. It’s a bright and clear day, and the a cool wind blows flags at half staff. I really don’t have any other perspective to offer — but I can point you to The Dane, who puts it in context quite well.

IE5/Mac and standards

.

I don’t know why the gurus keep heaping praise on IE5/Mac’s “standards-compliance.” One must wonder what “standard” they had in mind when the browser absolutely insists on "text-align: left" even while the <div> class clearly says "text-align: center". Bottom-line is that many pages break in IE5/Mac and only there, when I know that my CSS is up to par. Mozilla gives me no such grief. Grrr.

“Okay, Murphy…”

.

Work three weeks to redo the site design and backend, test it across every single browser there is, stay up till 3am uploading and debugging the thing, fret all day about how it’ll look for presentation at Digital Thesis Seminar class… And then, whoa, hey, the school’s internet connection is down today.

And on the eighth day, God said, “Okay, Murphy, you take over.”

Inbound from 2001-2002

.