It seems like my blog is undergoing an identity crisis.
I put effort into composing meaningful and relevant blog entries. I obsessively debate over the right layout to use. I religiously edit entries whenever I spot grammatical errors in them.
But why do I do it?
Why do I do it when this blog is only an obscure bit of webpage stuck in a little corner of the Internet? Why do I do it when everytime I lovingly scroll down the blog page, I always see that nobody bothers to comment on any of my posts? Why do I do it when I know that nobody reads anything I write? Why do I put so much effort into writing meaningful posts when all of the creative energy that I've poured into the effort will eventually degenerate into senseless bits of gibberish and kilobytes, unread?
For whom am I writing? A small circle of friends and family members who, at the end of the day, will get
absolutely nothing from and will forget everything about what I wrote?
The truth is, nobody really cares about the mundane, banal, and day-to-day experiences of another person's life. No matter how well the blog's layout is designed and no matter how impressive my writing style and vocabulary is, nobody really cares about what I had for breakfast last Thursday, September 22. Nobody really cares whether I got an F in Filipino, or whether I had been freakishly bored during a two-hour-long break between subjects. The majority of web surfers won't find interest or controversy in the ordinary gripes of an ordinary college student with an ordinary life. There's nothing special about me that I should broadcast to the world; I'm not a PhD, a CEO of a major business establishment, or a famous celebrity or athlete. I am not a person whose life features a lot of achievements or intrigue; I'm not a personality who deserves to be put in the spotlight. Ultimately, what I write in this blog won't make a change and a difference in reader's lives. It won't trigger a cataclysm, spark a debate or even a discussion in a comment thread.
Nobody's interested, nobody cares, nobody gets inspired, nothing changes.So why do I do it?
I honestly don't know anymore. I don't know why I waste a lot of time in writing posts with stupid would-be reflective thoughts, when nobody reflects on them after all. Maybe it's because I can develop writing and critical skills in writing almost daily posts. But then, why publish those posts at all if they're merely meant for writing exercise?
So what's the point of blogging?
Maybe it's because I like feeling that I have a little corner all to myself in the vast virtual world that is the Internet. Maybe this is my way of establishing myself as an identity whose ideas and opinions are just waiting to be read. Or maybe something admittedly more selfish but somehow closer to home: maybe blogging for me is just a tool through which I siphon off reflections, complaints, and anger that otherwise rage inside my head, and publishing is just a way for me to admire
the written work itself in a fancy Photoshop-driven setting.
It's time I shed off all pretensions. If for no one else, I blog for
myself. For Steph.
And the number-of-page-visits counter can just go to hell.
When I'm a PhD, I will tinker with our genes and chromosomes to find a way to scrap the human necessity for sleep to increase work and study time, which will eventually lead to a dramatic increase in productivity, GNP, GDP, education levels, and overall work-efficiency. Instead, people will be in constant hyper-mode given high levels of consumption of
caffeine which will serve as their replacement method of energizing.
Hayyyy. I wish people didn't need to sleep.
Botany is a vacuum that slowly sucks all my life away...
Botany is God. And I am the human sacrifice.
Gone are the days when a blog is just my online diary. Gone are the days when this blog is merely a dumpsite of all my jumbled emotions, experiences, failed goals, whatever.
I am declaring this blog a serious blog. I mean it.
It's about time I do something meaningful with this worthless excuse for a webpage. It's about time I attempt to establish some sort of commentary of recent issues that take the world by storm. It's about time to kill the perceptions of people that a blog is an excuse to freely commit wrong grammatical errors and not have a teacher subtracting points every time you do. It's about time I take this blog to the next level, somewhere beyond the mediocre levels of dot-dot-dot and one-whole-yet-discontinuous-sentence-per-post blogs.
Why am I doing this? I got inspired, man (no, I don't have a new crush, haha). During my (relatively) long hiatus from blogging, I encountered really great blogs such as
The Sassy Lawyer's Journal (which is one of the greatest and most-visited Pinoy blogs),
Mini-Microsoft's blog, and
Molly.com whose posts really say something other than the ordinary humdrum of "Today I did [fill in the blanks]."
For starters, let me get started on a much talked-about (and blogged-about) feature from BusinessWeek about
the migration of Microsoft employees to Google.
Indeed, there are areas of excitement within Microsoft. One is MSN, the Internet operation, where the search group is the underdog competing against Google. Another is the Xbox group, which is racing full speed against Sony Corp.'s (SNE ) leading PlayStation 2 to win over the next generation of video gamers. It's launching Xbox 360 this Christmas, months ahead of PlayStation 3. "If you take a look at where we're going with innovation, what we have in the pipeline, I'm very excited. The output of our innovation is great," says Ballmer. "We won the desktop. We won the server. We will win the Web. We will move fast, we will get there. We will win the Web."
Here's a blog about that from
Molly.com:
The Web is not a prize to be won, and Mr. Ballmer’s attitude is deplorable in the light of what the Web means to the world, to users, to designers and developers and to put it into Microsoft parlance, customers.
The Web belongs to everyone. The Web’s core vision and value is to be platform independent. Microsoft has no right to think it can win a tool that is for the people, of the people, and ultimately - by the people.
No Mr. Ballmer, you will never win the Web for one very good reason: We the people will make sure you never do.
Although Molly (whoever she is) has an admirable People-Power-ish attitude, I can't help thinking that Microsoft actually
did somewhow "win" the web, and the people actually allowed it. Case in point: the vast majority of web users around the globe continue to use Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser even though it sucks (see one of my previous posts). People do have the option to use Firefox/Opera/Safari, but they still use IE, and what's more, they even tailor their websites to be "best viewed in Internet Explorer". Admittedly, monopolizing the browser used to view the web is a far cry from "owning" the web itself. But still, given Microsoft's history of bashing out the competition and hogging all the customers with its cheesy virtually-the-same-after-ten-years software (think the Windows OS and the MS Office apps), would the day come when it will actually "buy" and "own" the Web (gulp!).
But then, maybe Ballmer's "deplorable" statement is actually just a pep talk to his not-so-happy shareholders. Haha.
But how dare he say that "the output of our innovation is great"? What innovation? Microsoft nowadays is considered as a big, lumbering, slow fuddy-duddy company that follows on the heels of other smaller yet more creative companies.
One reason some employees say Microsoft isn't innovating enough: It's too busy upgrading Windows. With some of its key breakthrough features gone, Vista's improvements include better handling of peripheral devices, such as printers and scanners, and cutting in half the time it takes to start up. Those are needed improvements, and there's no doubt that hundreds of millions of copies will be sold as people upgrade to new PCs. But the changes are hardly the stuff of cutting-edge software engineering. "So much of what Microsoft is doing right now is maintenance," says Mike Smith, a former software architect at Microsoft who left the company in 2003 to work for a Bay Area startup.
And that leads to an even more worrisome problem: discontent among its software programmers. Instead of coming up with the next great technology, Microsoft programmers have to cater to its monopolies. But top-flight engineers want to tackle the next great challenge. "They want to create new worlds, not defend old ones," says a former senior executive at Microsoft. "They want to storm the Bastille, not live in Versailles."
I can't blame Microsoft employees for wanting to shift to Google/Yahoo. Finally we have the answer to why the Start button on the Windows taskbar has never disappeared since Windows '95. Finally we have the answer to why each update of Windows seemingly brings only software facelifts and nothing more.
You probably know about this already. It's the hate letter said to be written by American radio talk show host Art Bell (though it was established long ago that he did NOT write the letter) circulating like wildfire around the web since the early nineties. Whoever wrote that stupid hate letter should be shot, tortured, killed, strangled, frozen, incapacitated, incarcerated, castrated, and basically just never allowed to see the blessed light of day ever again, not only for his apparent lack of logic, but for his outrageous lack of grammatical skills and basic knowledge of geography.
Of course, it is to be expected that I would feel offended by any hate letter directed to our race and our country. It is natural; any person with a sense of nationality and identity would feel that way. But this letter not only offends my sense of nationality but my common sense as well (increasingly we get the sense that common sense becomes less and less common).
To clarify this, why don't I post an excerpt of the hate letter? This is taken from the excerpt in my English module (see, the hate letter's so damn infamous that it even snaked its way into my usually boring English class!).
Filipinos....*make me puke* ("Hate letter against Filipinos")
As we've all come to notice, in the past few decades, Filipinos have begun to infest the United States like some sort of disease. Their extensive involvement in the US Armed Forces is proof of the trashy kind of qualities all Filipinos tend to exhibit on a regular basis. You can see this clearly by studying the attitudes and cultural icons of most Filipino Americans.
Origins of Pinoys/Pinays: Are they really Asians? Well we've come to accept the fact the Filipinos come from a part of the world known as South East Asia. But the term "Asia" is used in the wrong way. You may notice that contemporary Filipino Americans try very hard to associate themselves with groups that we know as Asian. There is no connection and here's why. The Philippines is a Third World country.
Nothing respectable has EVER been created by Filipino people during our entire human history. Young Filipino men in America have become obsessed with "import racing". They have an enormously perverted affection for Japanese cars. It's a common phenomenon. In their minds, these Filipinos somehow believe that they are Asian and that it somehow connects them to Japanese people and Japanese cars. It's even funnier that, in Japan, Filipinos are heavily discriminated against. The only Filipinos that can live successfully in Japan are the Filipino prostitutes. But that's the case for most Filipino people no matter where they live in the world.
Now we've come down to this fact...and it is a fact.
Nothing in Filipino culture can be seen as Asian. They have no architectural, artistic, or cultural influence which is in ANY way Asian. Thinking of the great countries in Asia such as Japan, Korea, and China there is no way you can possibly connect the Philippine Islands. This assault by Filipino Americans to connect themselves with the great peoples of North East Asia is foul and disgusting. Try visiting a young Filipino's web site too. You'll see something called the "Asian IRC Ring". It has to do with the chatrooms. The most horrible thing about this is that these TRASHY people are trying to associate themselves with Asia again!! People in Asia don't act, like this at all. What we are seeing here is the natural Filipino in it's element with full access to technology and this is how they act! You will consistently see this behavior over and over again. They must believe that they are some how related racially or culturally to North Asians. But it's completely WRONG! There might have been some distant contact with China and even less with Japan during World War II, but these people are actually more closely related to African Americans and Mexican Americans. This is the natural "Trash" element in Filipinos manifesting itself. Nothing good has ever come from the Philippines and nothing good ever will.
My initial thoughts after reading this is that the writer must be absolutely stupid. He is closeminded and biased and his arguments have no basis at all. He does not even seem to possess knowledge on the most basic geography. His arguments are so prejudiced to the point of ridiculousness. For these reasons, I disagree with him (of course!).
For one thing, the author seems to be working under the notion that the only Asian countries are Japan, Korea, and China, while other countries that geographically belong to the continent Asia but whose cultures seem to be different from East Asian culture should not be considered Asian. If such were the case, then India is not an Asian country. Neither are Malaysia, Thailand, Saudi, Indonesia, Iran, and Pakistan. But obviously, this is not true (check the world map if you're doubting). Such is the character of Asia - diverse cultures not limited to Shinto shrines, belief in dragons and Chinese calligraphy. So how did the author know that "people in Asia don't act like this at all" given Asia's cultural diversity?! Thus we can see the narrowmindedness of the author.
It is stupid to conclude that the Philippines is not Asian because it is a Third World country. A country's racial and cultural identity should not be compromised by its economic performance. It is true that there are a lot of Filipino prostitutes in Japan, but they are not the only Filipinos who can live successfully there and in other countries in the world. Who does the author think supplies the world with qualified doctors, nurses, scientists, engineers, and a third of the world's seafarers?! Who does he think teaches English to young Chinese and Japanese children, and cares for their senior citizens? Who does he think provides cheap labor to manufacturers so that the profits of global companies would be maximized?! His argument is based solely on observation. It has no basis on objective fact, and is tantamount to racial discrimination.
There are also several points which I find funny. Since when has the Filipinos' involvement in the US Armed Forces a proof of their "trashiness"? Does this mean that all soldiers are trashy just because they are in the Armed Forces? And for that matter, is it really a fact based from objective data that Filipinos are "extensively involved" in the US Armed Forces, or is that based on mere observation? Also, why is it that the author concluded that "nothing respectable has ever been created by FIlipinos" just because they like Japanese cars (which a lot of people, not just Filipinos, do) and because some like to join Asian chatrooms? I am a "young Filipino", and I have a web site (this blog), but I do not join Asian IRC Rings. Again we see that the author's arguments are not logical because they form prejudiced conclusions based on little observations.
Needless to say, the author's intentions backfired on me. Instead of being convinced that Filipinos are trashy, I remain resolute that it's the author - and his letter - who should be chucked in the bin.
Whew, it's been a long time since I posted here (cleans off the cobwebs and dust).
You might be wondering why I changed layouts AGAIN after using the last one for less than two months (what?! *gasp*). You see, I wanted to scrap the whole Iframe-based concept and change my blog into a tables/div layout. Why? For a lot of reasons: to save space, to make the content centralized (and less scattered among obscure pagehosting sites in the Net), to increase the blog's loading time......AND because I finally ditched Internet Explorer for Opera (Opera doesn't support transparent Iframes, so viewing my blog on that browser is a sort of headache).
You might be asking "why did I change my default web browser to Opera, when it doesn't even support transparent Iframes?". It is because Opera's incapacity to view transparent Iframes is a small price to pay for Opera's speed, better-looking and more space-efficient user interface (it is skinnable and it supports tabbed browsing, meaning my taskbar will never be cluttered again), and security.
Case in point: web viruses, spyware, trojans, malware, etc. These programs are usually directed to Internet Explorer, since it is the most widely-used browser on the planet (about 94% of people around the world use it). Thus, only very few malicious programs get directed to Opera. Thus, I wouldn't be barraged by the usual porn pop-up ads, and my computer won't crash again (yay! my computer crashed two times already because of spyware).
The only problem is, it's hard to make sites that would look nice on both browsers (as well as Firefox). Just a while ago I was admiring this blog's new layout on Opera (Puss in Boots is sooooo
purrrfect!), and suddenly it crossed my mind to view it in Internet Explorer, just to see if it looked the same. Lo and behold, the background of the content and navigation divs looked all messed up; I had to put an extra bit of background-repeat code in the internal CSS stylesheet to fix it up.
Oh well. It's just another reason why I hate, hate, HATE Microsoft.
On the lighter side, I have received my advisory marks about a week ago. And here they are (just to be on the safe side, I won't tell what school I come from. that'll deter the potential kidnappers. :D)
Communication in English: B+
Intro to Literature: B
Sining sa Pakikipagtalastasan sa Filipino: C+
Botany Lab: B
Botany Lecture: B
Modern Math: B+
Taekwondo: *
Whaha. I always knew Filipino would be my Achilles' Heel, what with the Terrifying Penguin Hermeneutics-obsessed Ph.D. candidate as my teacher.
Not VERY good, yet not bad at all. :) At least, not as bad the usual gloom-and-doom predictions of most first-year students.
About Taekwondo: it's really senseless to have PE as a subject, because it's grades are not computed in the QPI. HOWEVER, I am rejoicing because after half a year of struggling at the bottom of the Taekwondo food chain, I have finally been promoted to a
High Yellow Belt. Yup, I skipped the Low Yellow part. :) Great!
Yes, I know that I'm cramming at least a month's worth of experiences into a single post, but give me a break here: that month was so FULL of long exams, midterms, projects, essays, etc. that I could barely breathe for life.
