Dream
I don’t remember dreams as vividly, and as oddly complete, as the one I had an hour ago:
I
It was dark inside the church, but it was daytime. The church was full of young grade-school boys, who seemed rowdy as I saw a few books being thrown high above their collective height. I assumed the event was an exercise of some bigger, official event, but whoever was leading in front of the altar seemed to have no control, and was just standing there. More books were thrown, and a chaotic thing happened that I don’t remember witnessing.
II
Up on the church tower, there was something that involved an uncontrollable mass happening below that made the atmosphere unbearably tense. I’m not sure how I got there. A few minutes later, a thirty-something couple joined me, the sort of tandem who didn’t look either good or bad in the soap operas. Not neutral, just characters willing to go with the better, winning side.
III
I was leaving the town with the couple, when a boy in his early teens, who was with a smaller girl sitting inert on their motorized tricycle, approached me, and showed me his notebook. The boy knew me, seemed to trust me. The notebook had drawings of men in boats with worried faces. The few other drawings shows the townspeople in danger. The boy didn’t speak, and the couple I was with seemed to tell me to either hurry up or disregard whatever the intention of the little runts were, and that this was an unnecessary pitstop. The boy left me with the notebook, gave me a disappointed look, and sped off.
Liveblogging: Windows 7 Installation
1:00 PM
Still backing up Windows 7 RC files. Failed to install Wordmobi (Symbian) on mobile phone (for mobile blogging), needs Python, which I can’t be bothered to install right now. Documents and Downloads folder finished transferring.
2:09 PM
Win 7 RC backup DONE. Ubuntu 9.04 backup DONE. After not using Ubuntu since Win7 RC, I just realized how faster, and how antiseptic the user experience is on Linux. Oh well, 3 days to go before Ubuntu 9.10 anyway. But for now, BYE Win7 RC and Ubuntu 9.04! I will be wiping out both of you for the final Windows 7 FINAL install!
2:51 PM
Install DONE. Now that was fairly easy, almost painless, except for the usual wait. That’s it for this liveblog session! Now downloading latest NVIDIA graphics drivers.
The First RangefinderFilipinas Workshop: The Camera
A workshop about Photography’s Main Tool: The Camera – Its origin and evolution, and the different types it has evolved into.
A discussion on what the Classic Camera was, before it had largely degenerated into another computer peripheral.
An in-depth course on how the Camera works, its parts, and its application.
My Own Anime Filmfest (Part 1): On Makoto Shinkai
For someone who prefers reading and writing short stories, I prefer movies to consume-in-bursts TV series. I could come up with several reasons as to this choice, but movies just tend to be a less compromised creative output, if you ask me.
That, I believe, is another thing that differentiates me from the typical otaku, but I’m referring to the stereotype though: he, or she, who follows the popular, and the latest and greatest in, say, anime. On my end, I put on my wannabe-critic cap, and do some online research first, consult with Noel Vera if he has written about it already, and screen movies based on directors. Anime or NOT anime, that’s usually how I am before deciding to watch a film.
5 Centimeters Per Second
Makoto Shinkai has been touted as the next Miyazaki, and the movies I’ve seen so far does prove that Shinkai’s output is more than impressive to the eye, his storyline a few notches up versus the typical mecha-context love story, but this is not in the vein of Miyazaki’s timeless works. The imagination seems to be limited to the what-if’s of middle-school friendships and crushes, and growing up and being involved in modern Japan’s space alien battles (Voices of a Distant Star), and post cold-war scenarios (The Place Promised in Our Early Days). I’m not dismissing what he’s done so far, but I find the Miyazaki comparison a long shot.
Keeping Passwords
Password phishing scares don’t usually affect me, and today’s news isn’t really enough to make me go through the trouble of changing my passwords across all my online accounts, but its the usual mix of nothing-to-do-today and the realization that I haven’t really changed passwords for a long time got to me. We all know the unfortunate hacking incident that (allegedly) happened to Jacque Bermejo, right?
So after spending time figuring out the new passwords I’d use, I also looked up possible password management solutions, and came up with this pretty straightforward approach:
- Use Passpack (for online password management).
- Use Dropbox and store an encrypted backup copy of a list of my new passwords.
This setup was partly inspired by this post, though I simplified and made that part of the solution my backup method. Yes, not exactly a geeky solution, but these were based on a few considerations:
- Passpack looked good, and it did feel nice and secure once I actually used it. I know that hosting sensitive data on a web service that you don’t host yourself is an iffy thought, but then self-hosted solutions aren’t always the best solutions to less-than-complex needs. I use Gmail for all my email needs, and with Windows Live (Hotmail) and Yahoo Mail also giving out unlimited storage, who needs their own POP (or similar) personal client-side mail solution these days? In contrast, I haven’t been enjoying the frequent self-hosted WordPress updates, and the idea of just moving to a site hosted on WordPress.com has been brewing in my head for some time now.