August 4, 2007
| Song Title | Artist |
|---|---|
| Say Hello | Rosie Thomas |
| Throw It All Away | Brandi Carlile |
| Just a Dream | Great Northern |
| Our Bleeding Hearts | Great Northern |
| Home | Great Northern |
| West Coast | Coconut Records |
| The Quiet Things No One Ever Knows | Brand New |
| Shitty Day | SoKo |
| Alfie | Lily Allen |
| Until June - You Do | until june |
| Four Winds | Bright Eyes |
| Young Folks | Peter Bjorn and John |
| If This City Never Sleeps | Rosie Thomas |
| Boy With A Coin | Iron And Wine |
August 5, 2007
August 6, 2007
David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous points out this interesting bit:
Writer Sam Anderson maintains that the bottom of your queue of movies to rent from netflix.com is “the person you want to be - Eraserhead, the eight hour BBC Bleak House, the complete Werner Herzog - while the top is the person you actually are: wedding crashers, Scary movie 4, the bridges of Madison country….
While I don’t have a netflix account, I’m curious as to how my movies selection defines me. Luckily I keep a record of movie ratings. So assuming if the lowest ratings in the queue is ‘the person I want to be’ and the top is the person I actually am… (I know this is a flawed assumption but Sam’s hypothesis is not necessarily making sense either)
the person I want to be
the person I actually am
So we can somewhat safely assume that what I really want to be is some kind of ugly-to-the-max chainsaw-winding freakshow that is an accidental byproduct of a nuclear lab, who happens to live in another dimension (or a cave in the middle of a desert) where he can only talk to human using specific, 4th dimension channel in a short, limited timespan. That or I just want to live in a museum filled with stone age nomads.
But what I really am is a normal guy riding in a yellow mini van with magical and mystical creatures and they can fly and make colorful mini explosions with a wag of their mini fingers and they are so cute with their mini-decibel chipping sound and their mini tails and mini wings. That ugly-to-the-max, one eye, flabby creature who has no name has to sit on the back because he tries to eat all my mini fairies. Samuel Jackson is the driver and Christina Ricci is the pathfinder.
August 8, 2007
Mortimer & Bracket is Andrew Chesworth’s senior thesis project at MCAD.
I spent over 16 months working on it, in addition to my other projects, classes, and my internship at Make, LLC (which became my full time job right after school.) I finished the project just a few months ago, before my graduation in May of 2007. A lot of sweat, blood and love went into “Mortimer & Bracket”, and I hope you enjoy their story!
I did enjoy it. A lot! Nice work.
Google sent 377 total visits via 230 keywords to Daily Misery last month. Here are the top 10 keywords.
To all those poor souls that have stumbled across this site via Google when searching for ‘little dick’, I’m sorry to tell you that Google has misled you. My winnie poonie is anything but little. And it is certainly, for surely, without any doubts, not dead.
Now I wish I’d chosen better words for this post title.
August 9, 2007
Cutie pie Christi (it’s ok to call a male that if he’s your junior) sent over a link to his online album just now. Ah those photos remind me of all the good times I pretended to have when my face was within the crosshair of his camera…
I’m seriously thinking about making this my official profile photo. For future speaking engagements, interview sessions, profile representation or promotional articles, please use this photo. I can prepare a cropped version if you ask nicely. I’m the one on the left, btw.
Ah I miss bleu bleu. She’s the only one who would let me flash my middle finger behind her back without chewing off all my finger nails afterward. To show how much I miss her, I had to photoshop this photo because the original one lacked contrast and we both deserve a photo where our foreheads shine and we look cuddly.
I figured I should include a picture where I don’t make fun of myself or my friends. And I like this picture a lot. Three precious smiles in there.
August 10, 2007
User interface design involves some preliminary steps before one actually gets down and does the dirty work in Illustator/Photoshop/Gimp. They usually are test cases, personas creation, wireframing the spec and of course, prototyping (in no particular order). Svenfoo’s recent blog post titled paper prototyping for fun and profit offers a great insight on how you can let users, with just a notepad and a pen, do the initial mockup prototype for you.
Of course, the UI team of Hanmail (Corea’s largest webmail provider) took the concept of paper prototyping to a whole new level. ^_^
August 11, 2007
August 12, 2007
What was meant to be a short film review somehow got rewritten many times over and eventually turned into one of my lamest attempt on the subject of the philosophy of life.
Grizzly Man is a very personal film that I think only Werner Herzog could have done it so well. It’s a heart aching film.
It’s almost too easy for us to say Timothy Treadwell and Amie Huguenard deserved their silly death. In my opinion, he was so into what he was doing and felt very passionate about his cause it made him acted somewhat irresponsibly towards his own life and Amie’s. But so few of us can say that about our way of life and our work these days, I think he managed to achieve in a few years what many of us have been searching for in our entire life - something to be passionated about. It just turns out his passion is bears and protecting them. For him, being killed by a bear he is trying to protect is an acceptable risk worth dying living for.
Maybe that’s all there is - an acceptable risk worth dying living for.
August 14, 2007
Some of these are pretty crude, so brace your ears…
“Going to the auto show and looking at the minivans is like going to the strip club and looking at the DJ” [I think I love my wife]
“If god had intended us not to masturbate he would have made our arms shorter.” [onmylist.com]
“Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.” [onmylist.com]
The thing is, being a good programmer actually pays pretty well; being acknowledged as being world-class pays even better….So I think I would have missed the opportunity of my lifetime if I had not made Linux widely available [rather than made it proprietary and built a company around it]. [Linus Trovalds]
If you’re not a fluent speaker of a particular language, you’re often forced to stretch your limited vocabulary into bizarre, descriptive phrases instead of the exact words that say what you mean. Maybe you remember the last time you were overseas and asked directions to the “shop of changing banknotes.” In the same way, you’ll mostly see similes in specifications provided by clients who may not know how to say that they want “database of user registrations with reports X, Y, and Z” or “JavaScript menus that degrade into CSS-formatted lists.” [Jack Zeal]
August 15, 2007
August 16, 2007
I picked this up via reddit.com. It’s so true it’s not even funny. Ok maybe a little bit funny. Ok I’m laughing my ass off.
Excuse me, can you tell me where I am?
A short storyA man piloting a hot air balloon discovers he has wandered off course and is hopelessly lost. He descends to a lower altitude and locates a man down on the ground. He lowers the balloon further and shouts “Excuse me, can you tell me where I am?”
The man below says: “Yes, you’re in a hot air balloon, about 30 feet above this field.”
“You must work in Information Technology,” says the balloonist.
“Yes I do,” replies the man. “And how did you know that?”
“Well,” says the balloonist, “what you told me is technically correct, but of no use to anyone.”
The man below says, “You must work in management.”
“I do,” replies the balloonist, “how did you know?”
“Well,” says the man, “you don’t know where you are, or where you’re going, but you expect my immediate help. You’re in the same position you were before we met, but now it’s my fault!”
August 17, 2007
Over the last few days, there has been a lot of discussions bordering heated bickerings about components of the web standards such as W3C, WaSP, WG and HTML 5.
Molly and Molly and Molly, Zeldman, J. Keith, James Edwards all wrote about it. Now if Tantek and Henri Sivonen can join in with a blog post, this superstar meme will be complete.
I just want to take this little space in my blog to show my appreciation to these people.
The potential of the web is their passion and hell if that’s not a good thing, I don’t know what else is.
I just hope no one is ultimately discouraged by all these discussions that thing starts to move south into the ‘if you’re not happy, you leave’ war zone. Most of us remember all too well how bad it went when David Baron, Brendan Eich, Björn Höhrmann and a few other people who I respect and whose works I greatly admire left the W3C workgroup.
August 20, 2007
so visit wetriffs.com and submit your picture. Like many people, I can’t even begin to imagine my life without xkcd.
August 21, 2007
In the spirit of today’s theme, which is uhm…turtles having butt sex and whatnots, I hereby present you the ultimate Mocha Liquid Kiss.
August 22, 2007
August 23, 2007
Back then, one of my ex-gf loved to wear my big size soccer jersey to bed. Actually she liked wearing all my clothes and we had a couple of small fights about that because I was running out of stuff to wear! But had she known how to transform a big size soccer jersey into a sexy mini skirt, I might not have complained that much at all.
August 24, 2007
August 28, 2007
As this coming Friday is the Independence Day of Malaysia, it is of course a customary practice for all Malaysian patriots like myself here to share some sort of congratulatory stories about the birth of our nation. Half a century of standing on our own legs, from being an under-developed country to a developing one, all without being tainted by any major, unfortunate dark history such as genocide, civil war or invading or being invaded by another country. Malaysia is a blessed child indeed.
While the nice things I mentioned above are true to some extend, and I have no doubt some of us have fought and are still fighting hard to make it remain so, we are at the same time losing many things that are fundamental to our forefathers’ dream 50 years ago.
At only 50, Malaysia is very ill - sort of like an internal bleeding, if you will. The Orang Utans are dying. Trees are going and gone. Malaysians are having less sex. Keris production is booming. The parliament is turning into a gung-ho chicken fight show. Everyone is depressed. No love at all.
It is best for me to not merry-go-around my readers into believing that I will write an entry with similar tones to the likes of Dr Chris Anthony’s ‘Merdeka – a non-Malay perspective‘ or Meng’s ‘This Merdeka, say ‘no’ to race-based parties‘ or Jac SM Kee’s ‘Nothing to celebrate if we ignore basic rights‘. All great articles I should say, pragmatic and matured tones in most regards but sadly, idling in the after-effects.
Initially, I was kind of hoping if I can throw in a few foul words or include an indecently exposed picture of my hairy ass facing a copy of Utusan Malaysia, maybe, just maybe it might create enough stir and shouts in the websphere to make these 1000 words at the very minimum, a memorable and controversial one. Something like ‘yeah, penyebar fikiran rakyat my ass!’ might work.
It’s just that I’m tired of shouting and being angry all the time. Being angst-y is so exhausting. At the same time, it’s not like the Gandhi cum pacifist approach of Jeff Ooi, SUHAKAM and the opposition party is making any leeway. Progress? maybe. Breakthrough? hardly. Of course, it’s stupid and naive of me to think anything might happen in an overnight. But self-reassuring measure to make myself feel better just because I care can only go so far. And to the next page, life goes on.
** the next paragraph is where the background music of What a Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong comes in as I will try my best to make it sounds as passionately touching as humanely possible **
I always believe common Muslims, Chinese, Indians and all other ethnicities in this country have every intentions and would give all possible efforts to live peacefully and harmony together. I still do. Naive and idealistic, I’m sure. But I grew up having Malay friends calling me a ‘cibai cina’ and me calling them back ‘babi melayu’ and then we later would play soccer together and ate burgers sitting side by side on the sidewalk whistling and making sexist hyena sound towards all the ‘ahmoi and awek’ passing by. We were young and color blind. But when clueless and ignorant high marky-marks like the DPM and UMNO youth kept making retarded remarks like how Malaysia is an Islamic state or how blunt tanah melayu keris is, it only makes things harder for everyone. Personal agenda or not, most of us can care less but when they use the constitution or social contract or what-the-fuck-ever as a basis of their pretentious attempt to defend our ethnic rights, they are putting Ah Beng and Abu in the boxing ring and that my friend, is how political officials get elected.
** music ends **
NEP is a racist issue, no matter how much olive oil you put on the gasing trying to spin it. Any discussion on topics regarding two different ethnic groups is a racial issue. This article you’re reading right now is racist, I shall not fight to claim otherwise. You can put as much GAY GAG orders to try to ‘control the discussion of sensitive issues’ but it is still gay. Everyone from my aunties in kopitiams to your abangs in mamak stalls talk about it, everyday. People talk about stuff whenever there is an inequality. But true, good equality can only be achieved by putting in place properly managed inequalities. In other words, there’s no such thing as purely equal. The reason why you and I are getting an equal slice is because someone else out there is getting a much smaller slice.
Having said that, it can be fairer. much fairer.
How? I don’t know. I don’t know how to do that without having a dialog with other Malaysians. When was the last time all of us sat down and had an honest discussion about NEP from ground up, detailed level? Uhm, 50 years ago? There are smarter people than you and I out there from all ethnic groups that are willing to talk about these so called sensitive issues in a civil and open way. These people are in many ways more tolerant and patriotic than Alvin the smart ass or the current administration will ever be.
Sadly, all the smart people are being gagged.
So let everyone talks. If talking about these ohmygod-this-is-so-sensitive-I-almost-have-a-premature-ejaculation issues will lead us to the path of May 13 Incident, 1969, then so be it (and we all know it won’t). We will kill each other soon enough anyway, judging by the growing rate of the number of my Chinese friends who hate Malays because of NEP and vice versa. The question is, if it eventually does lead to bloodshed, will it be because:
But we are all free people.
There are no justifiable needs to hand out GAG orders like toilet papers. There is no need to use government to threaten others who have different standards, or to be threatened by them[1]. Looking to our Founders, our traditions, and the Constitution, the government should be ashamed. Our forefathers are spinning in their graves because the only few times you (as in the government) ever put us in the front page of the world is when something stupid or shameful happens.
Who is the current administration to say which one of you get to say what, when and how? Who are they to say we, the Indians, Malays, Chinese, Ibans, Kadazans and etc, can’t have a matured and intelligent discourse about our national crisis and our citizens’ rights without resorting to stabbing and poking each other with Keris or chopsticks? For one thing we are all civilized, for another we all are damn tired of this already and if not for anything else, I don’t want to hate or fear when I don’t know what in all our mothers name is really going on. We can all solve this, if we will just take a step back and listen to everyone.
I have faith in Malaysians. I believe we can talk this through. Every times the government starts arresting bloggers, issues GAG orders, censors the media and whatnots, that’s every inch closer we are getting to killing each other. Because we will start guessing. We will start fearing. Malay fears Chinese will take everything away, Chinese is angry because Malay is not playing fair and the Indian is angry because they are getting all the leftover. And the government is “protecting” us from killing each other by spreading and fanning the FUD. Then the ‘Youth’ fraction of main political parties get all ‘youthful’ and adrenaline pumped up every time this happens because they get to compare whose penis is longer and whose wrinkly balls are bigger. I choose to hear it directly from a radical Malay that he is calling me a ‘cibai cina’ than from a government warning that if they don’t prevent him from speaking to me, he is going to call me a ‘cibai cina’.
It’s heart aching that some of us have actually forgotten that exactly 50 years ago, Tunku Abdul Rahman and the Malay Rulers had asked that “in an independent Malaya all nationals should be accorded equal rights, privileges and opportunities and there must not be discrimination on grounds of race and creed.”[2].
I’m sorry if this post doesn’t come across much as a congratulatory story. The selection is pretty limited nowadays. There are only so many times you can replay the Mount Everest or Nicole David story.
Happy Independence Day, everyone.
Love, AL
August 29, 2007
How I can grow up and become a normal person, I will never know. I never did drug, crack, joint or ecstasy. Hell I never even put a cigarrette on my lips before. But many times I wish I can replace the last 3 things with stories where I had hurt myself badly, repeatedly.
In Safari, when you try to create an image object (a DOM 0 method) and later attach it to the document tree using appendChild() or other DOM functions, it will throw out DOM Exception 8 error message. Actually that isn’t the end of the problem, it turns out the object’s - this - scope is entirely messed up too. This is a messy bug.
Workaround?
Instead of using:
var imgObj = new Image();
use:
var imgObj = document.createElement('img');
This bug has been fixed in Safari 3.
August 30, 2007
I love creative, peaceful demonstration.
Saturday May 26th the VNN Vanguard Nazi/KKK group attempted to host a hate rally to try to take advantage of the brutal murder of a white couple for media and recruitment purposes.
Alex Linder the founder of VNN and the lead organizer of the rally kicked off events by rushing the clowns in a fit of rage, and was promptly arrested by 4 Knoxville police officers who dropped him to the ground when he resisted and dragged him off past the red shiny shoes of the clowns.
“White Power!” the Nazi’s shouted, “White Flour?” the clowns yelled back running in circles throwing flour in the air and raising separate letters which spelt “White Flour”.
“White Power!” the Nazi’s angrily shouted once more, “White flowers?” the clowns cheers and threw white flowers in the air and danced about merrily.
“White Power!” the Nazi’s tried once again in a doomed and somewhat funny attempt to clarify their message, “ohhhhhh!” the clowns yelled “Tight Shower!” and held a solar shower in the air and all tried to crowd under to get clean as per the Klan’s directions.
At this point several of the Nazi’s and Klan members began clutching their hearts as if they were about to have a heart attack. Their beady eyes bulged, and the veins in their tiny narrow foreheads beat in rage. One last time they screamed “White Power!”
The clown women thought they finally understood what the Klan was trying to say. “Ohhhhh…” the women clowns said. “Now we understand…”, “WIFE POWER!” they lifted the letters up in the air, grabbed the nearest male clowns and lifted them in their arms and ran about merrily chanting “WIFE POWER! WIFE POWER! WIFE POWER!”
August 31, 2007
I’m a big fan of Wellsfargo online banking, from their application UI to the ‘less steps makes users happy’ mantra. Most people probably won’t notice how easy it is to use because that’s what a good UI is all about - being invincible and taking out those ‘WTF’ moments. I have two other bank accounts with IGN and Bank of America and everytime I try to use their online banking (especially BOA), it makes me want to pluck my eyeballs out, literally. That’s probably why I’ve came to appreciate my online experience with wellsfargo.com. So much luv going on there.
