The Gloucesterman's song
A passionate tale written by Bill Wittliff (based on a novel by Sebastian Junger) and recited by George Clooney, who plays a fisherman in The Perfect Storm (2000).

The fog's just lifting
You throw off your bow line, throw off your stern
Head out the south channel
Past Rocky Neck, Ten Pound Island
Past Niles Pond, where I skated as a kid
Blow your air horn, throw a wave to the lighthouse keeper's kid on Thatcher Island
Then the birds show up
Black backs, herring gulls
Big dumb ducks
The sun hits you
You head north
Open her up to 12
You're steaming now
The guys are busy, you're in charge
You know what? You're a goddamn swordboat captain
Is there anything better in the world?

Two years ago, the first time I watched this movie in the Odeon in Bournemouth, when Bobby wrote his last love letter to Christine in his mind, I cried. (No, you're not allowed to quote me on that.)

I hate cold-IM chatters
For some strange reason or other, ICQ has the instant messenger monopoly in Asia. I guess partially because some years ago, someone back-engineered it and came up with an unofficial Chinese language version which became extremely popular.

I use ICQ because that's the first instant messenger I grew up with, everyone on the Clanlord online game was using it and it was the first to offer some website interactivity scripts. And also because I couldn't be arsed to change. Now that there are cross-platform instant messenges like Fire and Proteus for the Mac, I won't have to.

But the drawback of using ICQ is that many Malaysians take advantage of it to chat up strangers -- a behaviour they wouldn't normally engage in without the anonymous mediated environment of the internet.

I get several dozen people bugging me every night. Usually, they're girls in their early twenties who habitually engage in small talk in which I have little interest. It wouldn't be so bad, except that they ritually insist on talking to you without first introducing themselves. Furthermore, they often insist you introduce yourself first. Talk about being brought up in a barn!

I could just make myself invisible or unavailable, but I'd rather offer the freedom of conversation to blog readers who would like to chat off-the-cuff about the entries. (Not that anybody ever does... but in the hope that they do, I'd still rather not restrict access.)

Just now I simulated the cold-chat behaviour and found that these random chatters select their victims based on gender and age. It wouldn't do me any good to disguise my gender as female because then I'd get bugged by the guys. So I changed my ICQ profile info to 50 years old to successfully cut the irritating chatters down to 0.

Ahh. Peace at last.

The four word film review site
I support Four word film review. The movie review site for the staccato-inclined.

Mulholland Drive - my explanation
It's 5am and I can't sleep because... I watched Mulholland Drive. I can't figure it out and I'm on the net looking for answers. To their credit, not one of the movie critics gave away the plot. Then again that might be testimony to their confusion, not their professionalism. So I scanned some viewer-comment sites hoping for insights.

So far I think I got it. I'm going to put what I think happened here and you tell me whether I got it or not.

<-- spoiler warning -->

<-- urm, actually not really a spoiler because even if you read this whole entry, you won't get it until you finish watching the movie at least once -->

The reality is that Diane, the blonde girl is the jilted lover of Camilla who is screwing Adam, the film director on the side. We don't realise that until much later as her dream state reveals.

Often when we hear people say, "I had the weirdest dream last night", it's usually because the sequence of images had been jumbled up and that the mind had been working double-shift trying to sort them out in its own way. Likewise, David Lynch has reconstructed this movie jumbled-up like a dream trying to sort itself out. It has both dream-sequences and flash-backs and he leaves it up to us to sort out which is which. But it seems obvious by the end.

In the beginning of the movie, Camilla is on the way to Adam's Mulholland Drive house. But Diane has hired hit men to kill Camilla. The joy-riding kids hit the car and Camilla escapes.

Actually, the care-free jitterbug dance title-sequence is also significant as we see Betty making her debut in the pink sparkly top and twinkly eyes, harking back to more idealistic times. That's because whenever we see Betty (aka Diane) and Rita (aka Camilla), we are in Diane's dream state, where she imagines a better life in which she is the one in control of their lesbian relationship. In a role reversal, Betty is idealistic and innocent -- the white knight -- while Rita is the dark horse.

The cafe scene with the two men, we see the frightened man talking about his dream of death seated in the place where Betty was later to occupy. Symbolically, he's Diane because in reality, DIANE IS DEAD. That's right. The two-men scene was Diane's psyche slowly realising that she is dead -- she committed suicide after she commissioned the hit on Camilla. The bum/monster that gives the man the fatal heart attack is metaphorical of Diane's guilt which drives her to shoot herself.

In the scene where Rita and Betty find the dead body in Diane Selwyn's apartment is another instance where Diane's psyche is trying to come to terms with her own death. We realise this because in a later scene, a flash-back scene where the neighbour from apartment 12 comes to collect her things, we see Diane rousing from the exact position the body was in.

The Cowboy is symbolically also death. (Diane's psyche cooked-up his image after seeing a cowboy in the background at Adam's engagement party.) The meeting between Adam and the Cowboy is Diane's hopeful imagining that bad things will happen to Adam for his complicity. The Cowboy says, "If you fail, you'll see me twice." ie the first time when I come to receive the results of your movie, the second when I come to collect your soul. Late in the movie, we see the cowboy (aka death) trying to rouse Diane from her bed, as if trying to nudge her into realising that she must accept her death.

The sequences with Diane and Camilla are all flash-backs, whereas the scenes with Betty and Rita are Diane's post-death dreams. Some scenes such as the bumbling hitman are cut-aways to reality. aka "meanwhiles". Adam's meeting with the studio executives could also have been a "meanwhile" but it doesn't really matter even if it was part of Diane's death-dream.

The Club Silencio sequence is the ultimate moment when Diane realises she is dead. That's why she cries to the music which carries on after the singer has collapsed and been carried off stage. As if she realised that life (the music) has left her. Soon after that the flash-backs to her real life start to happen and we begin to piece together Diane's and Camilla's relationship, Diane's jealousy and the events prior to her death.

The significance of the two elderly people we met when Betty arrived in Hollywood -- throwbacks of a care-free era -- reveal themselves as icons. It is as if they are representative of Diane's grandparents, people whom Diane was afraid to disappoint. (Roger Ebert suggests they're judges of the jitterbug contest which Diane won.) They come back later to haunt her, moments before she pulls the trigger. When they get into the taxi at the airport and pull their grotesque smiles, they're our first inkling that things are not what they appear to be.

The significance of The Sylvia North Story, the movie which Adam is forced to cast and the movie which Diane lost the part to Camilla, is really not that significant. Someone on Metafilter thought it was an anagram, which is a nice attempt but not confirmable. Like a lot of details in dreams, such as the form of the cowboy as death and the box (which is merely the last thing which Diane lays her eyes on as she dies), they're just details -- visual garbage which the mind throws out while trying to sort out the truth. (BTW, at the moment of writing, sylvianorth.com has not been registered yet. ;-)

In other words, Mulholland Drive is another rendition of Roman's Polanski's most excellent 1994 movie, Una Pura Formalita, which Sixth Sense completely ripped off without credit.

Seen it yet? Comments?

PS After I wrote this entry I found Salon's explanation which confirms a lot with my theory.

Singer Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes dies in car crash
BBC report and obit.

dong_resin: "I blame poor depth perception." Via Metafilter.

(I'm going straight to hell for finding that funny.)

World's largest magnifying glass
This is sooooo much better than any Sim. Hint: Are poodles flamable? (Nyuk-nyuk-nyuk!)

Thanks USA Today.

Shampoo
I mistook my shampoo for my liquid shower soap. I now have dandruff-free armpits.

Local boys go to war
From Google: alt.jokes.

Saddam Hussein is sitting in his office wondering whom to invade next when his phone rings.

"Hallo, Mr. Hussein!", a heavily accented voice says. "This is Paddy down at the Harp Pub in County Sligo. I am ringing to inform you that we are officially declaring war on you!"

"Well, Paddy," Saddam replies, "This is indeed important news! How big is your army?"

"Right now, there's myself, my cousin Sean, my next door neighbour Seamus and the entire dart team from the pub. That makes eight!"

Saddam pauses. "I must tell you, Paddy, I have one million men ready to move on my command."

"Begorra! I'll have to ring you back!"

Sure enough, the next day, Paddy calls again. "Mr. Hussein, the war is still on! We've managed to acquire some infantry equipment!"

"And what equipment would that be, Paddy?"

"Well, we have two combines, a bulldozer and Murphy's farm tractor."

Saddam sighs. "I must tell you, Paddy, I have 16,000 tanks and 14,000 armoured personnel carriers. Also, I've increased my army to a million and a half since we last spoke."

"Saints preserve us! I'll have to get back to you."

Sure enough, Paddy rings again the next day. "Mr. Hussein, the war is still on! We have managed to get ourselves airborne! We've modified Harrigan's ultra-light with a couple of shotguns in the cockpit and four boys from the Shamrock Pub have joined us as well!"

Saddam is silent for a minute then clears his throat. "I must tell you, Paddy, I have 10,000 bombers and 20,000 fighter planes. My military complex is surrounded by laser-guided, surface-to-air missile sites. And since we last spoke, I've increased my army to TWO MILLION!"

"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! I'll have to ring you back."

Sure enough, Paddy calls again the next day. "Top o' the mornin', Mr. Hussein! I am sorry to tell you that we have had to call off the war."

"I'm sorry to hear that. Why the sudden change of heart?"

"Well," says Paddy, "we all had a long chat over a couple of pints and decided there's no way we can feed two million prisoners."

OS X
I have been dreading the move to OS X, but it seems inevitable.

Up till 2000, all the OSes for the Mac have been improvements of the earlier versions so that there was a sense of security for me to use a system that was familiar and safe. After that, the look of the OS completely changed.

So much so I have to re-configure everything all over again. In OS X, there is no import option for system preferences because all the system preferences have changed. The Favourites folder isn't where it used to be, and I have to install all the favourites again.

It looks like a bloody 6-hour job. If I wanted that kind of aggravation I'd go buy a PC. A TV commercial from the late 1980s, done by the Chiat/Day agency for Apple, showed a couple of business executives trying to install Windows into a PC in a cafe. Several cups of coffee later, the waitress comes up to them and asks, do you guys know what you're doing? Ironic that I find myself in the same situation a decade later.

While there is still a huge amount of support for OS9, more and more softwares are coming out that are OS X-only. Like the cross-platform instant messengers Fire and Proteus. In OS9, there is no application that allows me to use AIM and ICQ in a single application and I hate having to open up two applications when one will do.

The entire OS X seems to something against me.

Me: Computer, please find Network Access Preference.
Computer: Cannot locate "Find" command.
Me: Have you tried looking in the Applications Folder?
Computer: Fuck you, asshole.

It's enough to make me want to commit Window-cide.

My hero
I just found my hero, Robert Young Pelton, author of books like Fielding's the World's Most Dangerous Places -- essays on places where you can get shot and killed.

Paul Theroux with a death wish.

He goes to these places and writes about them, the latest being Afghanistan for National Geographic.

The Amazon blurb on his book reads:

Fielding's The World's Most Dangerous Places is not a comforting book; its pages bristle with tales of land mines, war zones, terrorists, mercenaries, mafiosi, massacres, kidnappers, drug smugglers, and all the other travel disasters that are the stuff of nightmares. But then, as the editors point out in their foreword, "as travelers are kidnapped and executed in Cambodia, a recognized dangerous place, they also are hunted down and murdered in Los Angeles." In other words, the most dangerous place in the world is more of a state of mind: ignorance.

There's a version of it on his website.

Not that I would ever want to go visit these places (yeah right, tell them another one, psycho).

Thanks Robot Wisdom.

Pope says no place for pedophiles in church
"They can all go to temple just like everybody else," he adds.

In other news, murderers also banned from taking holy communion.

Monday Mission 2.16
I can't believe I'm doing this. I wonder if there's anybody over the age of 14 who fills one of these things out. Couldn't think of anything else to write today.

1. Ever had a love that you still think of as "the one that got away?" What's the story there?
Probably have. But I forget. I'm one of those incredibly shrunken people who insists he's never been in love.

2. What was the last book that you finished reading cover-to-cover?
I'm ashamed to say it was Usagi Yojimbo over a year ago. It's been ages. Yes, it's an illustrated novel! Got a problem with that? Apart from losing books by the pool, losing books by the beach, losing books in the mess in my room, my only other excuse is that I never finish what I star

3. Did you ever get up and walk out of a movie? Which one and why?
All the time. I can't stand movies that don't have some entertainment value and bores me. Usually because the editor has lingered on scenes which should have been cut much sooner. Four weeks ago I walked out of La vie de Jesus (1997) at the film club. It was about the decrepit life of teenagers in a north French village. It described how boring their lives were. It made its point. Then went on to reiterate its point. And if you didn't get it the first time, went over the point again.

4. If we were to go out dancing, what song would you want me to ask the DJ to play as I slipped him a $20?
I'd like to see you get a DJ to play Panis Angelicus by Charlotte Church for any amount of money. Too gay? I have no idea what you mean.

5. What was the coolest toy you had when you were a kid?
It was Twist n' Turn Barbie with the spin-action waist. I have no idea what you mean.

6. When was the last time you felt lonely?
I'm in my room, it's 5am and I have no idea what you mean. Nah, it was about nine months ago, I got back from England. Wanted to contact all my old friends again and then I realised how short my phone list was.

7. Do you have any minor anal-retentive character traits?
I don't dance. But if you're going to slip me that $20, I might.

BONUS: Can't you see what I mean ?
With blindfolds, baby.

Revolving door foreign policy
I posted this on Metafilter a few days ago to suggest a revolving Bush administration foreign policy where the terrorism and human rights were concerned. Post 9/11, Bush seemed to believe that the ends justified the means. Here's the post.

As late as July 4, the US State Department described Malaysia's Internal Security Act, which allows for indefinite detention without trial as preventing people from "exercising internationally recognised rights of free speech, political expression and assembly" and therefore (more diplomatically-speaking) a cause for concern. Yet when it was recently used to detain those connected to terrorism, Bush decides to invite the Prime Minister of Malaysia to thank him for a 'stirring response' in combating terrorism. Eh?

Only got a few responses. I guess nobody could locate Malaysia on the map.

A poster called Aaron defended Bush's actions saying that it's fine as long as the terrorists are stopped and arrested. Yet, he didn't address the fact that Bush is thanking Mahathir for doing something that basically contravenes everything the foundation of the American society, the US Constitution, does to protect personal liberties. Can you see the irony in that?

But Bush isn't getting everything he wants because in the latest developments the prime minister has refused to hand over the suspects.

I couldn't care less either way. I was just amused how fast new friends are made where politics is concerned.

Scam of scams
Today this girl at a shopping centre tried to sell me some costume jewellery (similar to this) for almost USD$100 that could have been made in any 5-cent Indonesian sweat shop.

The only thing remarkable about it was the gall that she had of demanding that much money for something she cobbled together in her spare time simply by branding it Swarovski. Cottage industry with the delusions of grandeur.

But the women were going ga-ga over the crystal jewellery like they discovered the fountain of youth. It's hand-crafted, I hear someone say. It's superior quality, says another. I got boogers in my nose that will last longer than that crap.

These crystals, I found, are made by a cult family spouting a pseudo-confucian philosophy that would make the moonies proud, somewhere in Austria. That's right, MADE, not dug out of the ground with back-breaking sweat. Pieced together by a chemist and a few field hands.

So these crystals heal you or something, right? Or provide ESP, win you friends or 38-DD playmates or something that can justify the price? No chance. They're just plastic. They ain't no Waterford.

Can you believe that shit? USD$100 for a piece of cheap plastic.

I just don't get women.

Chit-chatting on ICQ at 2am in the morning
Random Chatter: Hello.
Me: Hello... who are you?
RC: c my info
Me: Already did... you're a 24 year old Chinese girl from Cheras
RC: Want to chat?
Me: There's a good reason why my ICQ info says: If you're going cold-IM me, at least introduce yourself in your 1st message and have a good reason. I can talk about my blog, my blog entries, muay thai, travelling, any kind of movie, advertising and dotcom business development. But NOTHING ELSE! ... did you miss that?
RC: So what are doing?
Me: If you must know, I'm downloading academic articles on internet business models in PDF format from a library in the UK through a university server in Australia using a stolen student ID
RC: Wah!
Me: So what are you doing?
RC: Having sex
Me: Carry on
Me [put Random Chatter on invisible list and delete Random Chatter]

Yup, I get along very well with the rest of the ICQ community. BTW, thanks for the Emerald password, Jamie!

Top 10 Popular Tourist Destinations for the Japanese
1. The Tibetan royal palace
2. England vs Scotland friendly
3. Israeli street cafes
4. Canadian military training camps
5. The haj in Iran
6. Columbia central police station
7. The British rail system
8. Zimbabwean polling centres
9. The lush jungle of Basilian island
10. Singapore on sale-day

Trust in blogging
The thing about blogs is that readers tend to think of them in terms of diaries -- as biographical works of non-fiction. Despite the fact that occasionally we come across blogs or stories of blogs which are works of fiction such as the various celebrity blogs (ie Christopher Walken's and Brad Pitt's), given few corroborative works, readers are excused to see blogs as the absolute truth about the author's identity.

Perhaps because the author is seen as "opening up" to the anonymous reader, thereby offering trust, readers tend to offer trust in gratis. This is due in no small part to the essence of anonymity on the web which provides the reader with enough of a shield that he can freely offer trust. Until such time that the author is revealed as a phony, readers implicitly trust the author's point of view because.

Trust is the basis for any relationship online and offline, because it suggests patterns and predictability of behaviour. Therefore ways of breaking that relationship is for the author to behave unpredicatably such as being inconsistent in views, in posting regularity and portraying views that are fundamentally inconsistent with those of the reader.

The blog author-reader relationship is technically one-way because the reader can remain anonymous. Blog authors often overcome this to a limited extent through the use of counters and feedback loops such as comments scripts to gather information on the reader. But to the reader, this relationship is perceived to be two-way because of the exchange of trust.

Having realised the presence of trust in the relationship between myself and my readers, I desired to extend them and build on them beyond the online variety. The Put Up A Blogger project was conceived toward that end, like one of those blogger gatherings but on a smaller scale. This was therefore not the first online relationship to expand into an offline one. Its uniqueness however relied on cross-cultural exchange, between a person from Malaysia and people from other countries.

Before I set out for India last month, I came to know a reader of my blog called Saurabh who lived in the town of Indore in the state of Madhya Pradesh. He didn't have a blog of his own, and I hardly knew anything about him except for snatches and terse quips on ICQ. But the fact that he read my blog told me something about him: that he trusted me.

Saurabh therefore became the first participant in the Put Up A Blogger project. He went to appreciably great lengths to do so. He obtained his parents' permission. He got the acceptance of the other members of his family, including his grandmother and his brother. He spent four days bringing me around his town on his bike and showing me the sights and bringing me to meet his best friends.

The most memorable part of the trip was two hair-raising experiences in rock-climbing to reach Tincha falls � first down a vertical cliff without the aid of safety and the second up a near-vertical slope covered in loose pebbles.

But there was that trust there that allowed us to bond over the course of just a few days, creating an environment to confide in one another.

In ten weeks time I hope to make a similar trip to the States, trying to find bloggers along the way who can put me up between New York City and Ottawa. And of course, to materialise that trust.

Japanese tourists blunder into warzone
A Japanese couple wander through Bethlehem smack into the centre of a war zone, oblivious to the bullet-holes in buildings and tank-smashed debris around them.

They were rescued by journalists in flak jackets.

I wish I was them. Call me psychotic but the fact that I could be killed is the biggest attraction of Bethlehem to me. (Besides it being the birthplace of a guy called J.C., that is.)

If I survive, I would have one of the world's best stories to tell, just like that Japanese couple have now.

I'm jealous.

US Embassy
It isn't harder to get into the States these days. It's always been difficult. Well, tedious, more than difficult. The diplomatic services' answer to the immigration problem: make the paperwork so boring, nobody could be bothered to finish it.

Went to the American Embassy yesterday to collect the forms. It's 10 weeks before my flight to the States, but I thought I'd better apply early anyway.

It's going to cost me USD$50 for the visa application. And the key to the process is providing ample reason to suggest that you have to leave the country after your visit.

It's enough to have a letter from an employer saying that you have a job, that you're important to the company and that you're emotionally attached to your desk which you have named 'Woody'.

This question on one of the forms cracks me up:

Q: Do you have any specialized skills or training, including firearms, explosives, nuclear, biological, or chemical experience?

A: Does farting count?

(Only the most fanatical would stand a chance at completing the damn things. Opps, did I say the f-word?)

The Canadians on the other hand don't require visas. You just get there and they let you in, as long as your face doesn't resemble a moose which is liable to get shot off during hunting season.

The problem is now, I have to get a job. I thought I was going to just kick back for a few weeks. Damn it. It seems visa applications are America's way of tackling the worldwide unemployment issue.

Of course, I could always do it the old fashioned way and join a flight school in Florida.

Mail2Web
I've got an email account with Mac.com -- it's POP3-only so I can only collect email from a local application like Outlook Express or Eudora. Which isn't really convenient when I'm travelling.

I could configure Hotmail to collect the POP3 mail for me. But the Hotmail is not customisable delivery system. Replies will come from the Hotmail server, not the Mac.com server. So reply address will reflect my Hotmail account. Not ideal since I want to keep my Mac.com account exclusive and private.

Along comes Mail2Web to the rescue. It's service that gives me a special webpage that I log into to collect as well as send POP3 emails. It also supports multiple accounts so I can configure it to collect from both my Mac.com and my Lycos.co.uk POP3 accounts.

(However, the multiple-account configuration doesn't seem to be working. Then again it could be because I was using my iBook and not all web applications work smoothly for all platforms.)

Woo-hoo!

New technology, new pranks
As you know if you live in the UK, the British isles were one of the first places to embrace the concept of free SMS messages. Sites like Lycos.co.uk allow you to send anonymous text messages to a mobile phone from the website.

Of course, you ought to sign off with your mobile number so that the other party can reply.

Imagine what would happen if a naughty someone knew the mobile phone number of say, M. Blackburn, a Labour Party representative (which might happen to be 07930392443) as well as the mobile phone number of say, J. Carroll, a Tory Party representative (which might happen to be 07801266341). And say that someone were to use the free Lycos service to...

Muah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

Free domain names
This is a great scam. Glad somebody caught onto it. :-)

DotTK is a website for the island of Tokelau in the middle of the Pacific Ocean where "there is nothing to worry about". There are so few people there. And since there's not even email, the citizens have little use for the right of ownership of domain names accorded to them by iCANN.

So Dutch couple Balder and Eline decide, with the support of the Government of Tokelau and PowerDNS in Amsterdam, to sell .tk domain names to everyone. And those domain names are free as long as you don't mind that DotTK owns the rights to them. What the hey, a free domain is a free domain. And it even comes with free URL forwarding too and five free email addresses!

But there are also paid domains. Some cost as low as USD$9.95 like whatthemother.tk or as high as USD$1,000 depending on what DotTK deems as "extra commercial value" like at.tk.

They're great if your initials are T and K or if the name of your metal band is called Trash Kompaktor. But hurry, DotTK domains are going fast!

Thanks Internet Magazine Site of the Week!

Nosuch.org
Nosuch.org is the blog I've been going to every day for the past year or so, because (as I've said before) he's a good writer and is an all-round funny guy.

Alex and I played this Mac online game called Clan Lord and I got to know him because his character and mine had coincidentally similar pseudonyms. He introduced me to blogging when I found his blog and discovered it was a free service. "Wow! You mean people actually want to read the garbage I write?"

I like Alex's blog so much I wrote a ham-fisted review of it for Rasmus' P2P review site which is still pending publication. Having read it again (the review, not the blog), I thought it sounded like it was written by someone with a hangover. It practically begs you to visit his blog. But that is the wrong impression to give because, as I wrote again and again, Nosuch.org is one of the great blogs.

So here it is:

When I got the notification email from Acutecut telling me which blog to review, I was deathly afraid I was going to have to pore through six months of teenage angst and He-loves-me-he-loves-me-not crap. But of all the thousands of weblogs in the world, I get selected to review the one who writes better than Jason Kottke, has the intelligence of Jeffrey Zeldman and the sarcasm of Scott Adams. Thank you! Thank you! I must have been Gandhi in a previous life.

Welcome to the world of Mr Nosuch, aka Alex Shaffer. A 30-something programmer who works in New York ("at the World Asbestos Financial Center") and who spends his blogging time gabbing about his various NYC adventures. Such as the joy of sitting next to epileptic Gameboy maniacs on the subway and trying to get bondage devices through airport security.

Oh yes, Alex is also into BDSM which should be setting off warning signals already. Except he isn't into the hardcore stuff and he describes the practices with intelligence and consideration for the vanilla (non-kinky) people. Kind of like an ambassador for everyone who enjoys getting tied up and whipped. Lightly, of course. (Man, he's even got me talking about it!)

But BDSM is rarely the topic of his blog entries. He also talks about the love of his life, ("the lovely Conny") from Munich whom he met through his blog. As well as about the few years he spent in exotic Cuba. And occasionally on the sensitive side, his divorce from his ex-wife.

Alex's writing has that kind of way of attracting people to him, no matter whether he writes about things you nor I would get into or experience.

Perhaps Alex's attractiveness comes from the fact that he is acutely aware that he has readers. There's something very considerate in his practice of creating links in his text that bring up little javascript windows that describe who is girlfriend is and who is closest friends are.

An extension of his considerate behviour, as an article on A List Apart once proscribed, Alex provides both content and consistency. He has a funny story to tell every day. And never goes for two days without one. Post 9/11 hasn't dampened his sense of humour. He still raves about Times Square touts ("America is truly the land of discount t-shirts!") and fundamentalist Christian organisations ("Let's be honest, I don't think there's a lot of sex going on in a place like the Family Research Council.")

Admittedly, as a reviewer I am a bit biased since Alex is a fellow Mac-user and non-smoker. But as Mark Twain once said: "There ain't no god-damned shame in fucking good writing!". I could be paraphrasing though.

Fixed site
Spent the weekend fixing the site. I moved host once again since Portland.co.uk and all its subsidiary sites went belly-up a couple of weeks ago. I have finally gone legit and am on paid hosting. Really cheap at USD$30/year with all the frills.

Thanks to Alex who helped me troubleshoot as a tester, I managed to fix all the bad links on archives and created an archive page. Got rid of the javascript pull-down menus so that Google could spider the archive and give my favourite sites a bit more priority.

Also brought back a couple of javascripts from Moreover and played with some PHP server side includes as well.

Geek, moi?

UPDATE: Fixed the dotcomments script as well. Thanks for the heads-up, Julie! I wouldn't have known about it if you hadn't SMSed me. My bad! :-)

Today's itinerary
Boy, I've got a packed day today.

1. 9am - work out at gym
2. 10.30am - window shopping
3. 11.30am - surfing at internet cafe
4. 1pm - lunch
5. 2pm - read a chapter from On Competition (Michael E. Porter, 1996, Harvard Business School Publishing) while sipping coffee at cafe
6. 4pm - apply SPF8 by the pool
7. 6pm - work out at gym
8. 8pm - watch movie at film club

Yup, I am a jobless bum considering my options.

I have succumbed
I don't do these internet quizzes. Usually. I have finally given in and I... have... found... that... they are fun!

In this quiz, I get to answer questions to determine if I am cannon fodder or the over-paid movie star if I played a character in a horror movie. Apparently I get to live because I am a "monster masher". Heh-heh.


Would you survive a horror movie? Find out @ She's Crafty

"Hi honey, guess what. I'm in Venice"
Talk about wild alibis. This company sends anyone you want a postcard postmarked in Venice. A REAL postcard from Venice, not a fake one.

Here's how it works. For USD$15 they mail you three postcards featuring landmarks in Venice that can only be obtained in Venice itself. You write your messages, address the postcards, then mail the postcards back to them. They'll take the postcards to the local Venice post-office for franking and mailing. Simple.

Be the envy of all your friends! Fool your spouse! Why stop there? Fool police officers!