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Before I was a blogger, I was a blog reader. And one of the very first blogs I used to frequent was sixthseal.com.
It wasn’t the drug posts that attracted me to the site - I’ve never done drugs, nor do I ever intend to. But I wasn’t enough of a saint to go round judging other people for their vices.
It was the style of writing. I’d always believed that addicts and drug users were, to put it bluntly, a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic. But at sixthseal.com, it was obvious that the writer was quite an intelligent young man, with clear, coherent thoughts and well-drafted arguments.
Here is a blogger who won an MAC Red Ribbon Media Award for his post, Guide to HIV Testing in Malaysia.
His various food review posts are one of the highlights in a local blogosphere that’s running out of fresh and original ideas.
Anybody following the blog in recent times would know that he’s also someone who accepts his weaknesses and attempts to deal with them the best way he can. He has tried several attempts to put some of his worse vices behind him, and he has reduced drastically his posts regarding drugs.
Which is why I find it weird, that after all this time, a local tabloid has decided to highlight his blog on the front page under the headline ‘Laman Web Dajal‘ (kinda means ‘evil website’).
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As you can see, I’ve changed the template for the blog. My intention was to have a slightly more ‘polished’ feel as compared to my previous template, but with much of the same features.
The Rin theme was one of the winners of Alex King’s Wordpress 1.5 Theme competition. It had what I was looking for, which was essentially a simple, uncluttered, minimalist design, with a narrow 2-column design for the index page, and a single wide column for the individual posts. Also, it had a very high versatility factor i.e. there’s a lot of scope for design hacking.
However, upon installing the theme, I discovered that the comment script had some issues with Spam Karma, and anyone trying to comment would have had SK flagging the comment as spam.
The problem, as it turned out, was that the comment script itself was compatible with WordPress 1.2 and not with 1.5. Fortunately, a fix is described at the Broken Kode Discussion Forum.
There were also some minor style issues with IE (as usual), but I think I’ve fixed most of them.
I’d greatly appreciate any feedback regarding the look and feel of this Rin-enabled blog, as well as how the commenting system is working. I’m especially interested in knowing how things look on an 800 x 600 resolution, and on alternative browsers like Opera, Safari or Flock.
Sekian, terima kasih.
An old friend from secondary school (and fellow Liverpool supporter) Terence Beck recently become a father to a baby girl, Liberty Beck.
Photo from Terence’s blog © Terence Beck 2005.
Cool name, eh?
My congratulations to Terence and his wife.
League table image from PremierLeague.com
I know it’s still early days yet, and while the odds are on Sunderland and Birmingham to be relegated come the end of the season, the question is who’ll be the ones joining them? Portsmouth may be a favourite for the drop, given their poor performances and lack of pedigree and history at this level - but I’m holding out for the remote hope that the third team to go down this season will be Everton.
Putting aside my obvious bias against the Blueshites, there is a factor or two that leads me to this way of thinking. Portsmouth manager Alain Perrin is almost certain to face the sack soon, which means the future of Pompey will probably depend on a new manager come the new year.
Already there’s some talk of manager shortlists being scrutinised by club officials, with a surprise inclusion of Roy Keane for a possible player-manager role. (He’s still likely to sign for Celtic, though).
Regardless of the person selected, the point is that a new manager could possibly rejuvenate Portsmouth into trying to secure Premiership survival.
Everton, on the other hand, have a disadvantage in this regard. David Moyes‘ track record with Everton means he is unlikely to be sacked at this stage (or even if they do end up going down in the summer). His only hope lies with being able to use the limited funds at his disposal to acquire a player or two during the January transfer window and try to work his old magic on his players.
In other words, while Portsmouth will expect to be recharged from the outside, Everton will have to look within themselves for new strength.
I, for one, look forward to the historic possibility of Everton finally relinquishing their long hold on to their top-flight status* and join the ranks of the Football League where, frankly, most of their players probably deserve to play.
* Everton hold the record for most seasons spent in the top-flight of English football (113) and only Arsenal have a longer unbroken spell in the top flight than Everton ).
We know online polls don’t necessarily mean too much. Actually, most polls of any kind tend to be meaningless anyway.
As such, I’m not about to discuss the validity of this particular poll [Top 20 Geek Novels] or the interpretation of the results [Top 20 Geek Novels - Results!], and instead I’m just gonna see how many of these books I’ve actually read.
So far, 132 people have voted for the best geek novels written in English since 1932, in spite of Survey Monkey’s rubric saying free polls were limited to 100 responses. The top 20 is therefore as follows, with the numbers in brackets showing the number of votes.
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1. The HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — Douglas Adams 85% (102)
2. Nineteen Eighty-Four — George Orwell 79% (92)
3. Brave New World — Aldous Huxley 69% (77)
4. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — Philip Dick 64% (67)
5. Neuromancer — William Gibson 59% (66)
6. Dune — Frank Herbert 53% (54)
7. I, Robot — Isaac Asimov 52% (54)
8. Foundation — Isaac Asimov 47% (47)
9. The Colour of Magic — Terry Pratchett 46% (46)
10. Microserfs — Douglas Coupland 43% (44)
11. Snow Crash — Neal Stephenson 37% (37)
12. Watchmen — Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons 38% (37)
13. Cryptonomicon — Neal Stephenson 36% (36)
14. Consider Phlebas — Iain M Banks 34% (35)
15. Stranger in a Strange Land — Robert Heinlein 33% (33)
16. The Man in the High Castle — Philip K Dick 34% (32)
17. American Gods — Neil Gaiman 31% (29)
18. The Diamond Age — Neal Stephenson 27% (27)
19. The Illuminatus! Trilogy — Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson 23% (21)
20. Trouble with Lichen - John Wyndham 21% (19
I’ve read some of the top books on the list, while there’re some I’ve been meaning to read for ages but have never got round to yet - books like Asimov’s Foundation series, and the classic graphic novel Watchmen.
Others I’ve yet to get my hands on are Microserfs, Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Diamond Age and Trouble with Lichen.
Anyway, this list comes at a good time for me - I’ve been actively increasing the size of my personal library now with the latest addition being DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little. At least lists like this make a good reference point for future titles I should look out for that appear to be timeless in nature.
Any other recommendations?
Picture sourced from Google Images (search query: aedes aegypti).
No religion has been able to teach a man on how to avoid the most difficult of all temptations - scratching a mosquito bite.
*scratch*
If my fingernails were as sharp as shark teeth, I’d have no skin left, I assure you.
*scratch* *scratch*
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Back in the day, when my moustache was but a mere collection of small whiskers, I used to live and study in The University of Nottingham.
Many things happened to me there - things that I’m not going to discuss here. Suffice it to say that I had some great times there, and some really tough times too.
Anyway, this post is a result of coming across two blogs on PPS today: Buttshaker, and manusia gelabah. Both posts were about the annual Nottingham Malaysian Games held in Nottingham U, which brought together Malaysian students all across Britain to compete in various sports and of course to partake in the makan sessions. (There’s also another post on the games at Idlan’s blog.)
I participated in two Games, the first as one of the umpires during the badminton matches (where I quickly learned that my understanding of badminton rules was non-existent), and the other as a co-organiser of the badminton tournament. It was all immensely fun.
Anyway, reading the above blogs got me thinking about my old pictures that I used to snap around the place. My camera back then was the typical point-and-shoot film cameras, and all my pictures are now safely stored away in photo albums which are now kept under lock and key in a castle surrounded by a moat and guarded by hungry dragons with short tempers.
Some of them, however, are also stored in digitised format in my harddisk. I had scanned these pictures when I first started my webpage in Geocities all those years ago. That website is gone now (or is it?) and these pictures have remained hidden all this while. Until today lah.
An so I present to you some of the pictures from my days wandering around Notingham Uni. Click on the thumbnails below to see the larger version.
A note about the dates on the pictures, though - the clock on the camera was screwed up. Most of the time, I did not even realise the date setting was wrong until the pictures came out.
Aah, whatever did we do in the days before digital cameras, eh?
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Image sourced from Bluetights.net
The most eagerly awaited movie of next year is without doubt Superman Returns. Slated to be released on June 30, 2006, it stars newcomer Brandon Routh as the titular superhero, and is directed by Bryan Singer, the man behind the excellent X-Men movies and The Usual Suspects.
Superhero Hype, meanwhile, has received confirmation from Warner Bros that the teaser trailer for Superman Returns will be shown in theatres with the screening of Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire. (This of course applies in the USA - hopefully it is also true for the rest of the world.)
Oh, and while I’m at it - guess who’s gonna be the villain for Spiderman 3? The clue is at the official website. (If you’re not into Spiderman history, Google the name Flint Marko.)
We interrupt your weekend programming schedules to bring you a word about the RSS feed for this blog.
I was recently informed that there was some sort of problem with my feed. While I have not found any problems with the current feed specs, I realise any problems that may exist is probably down to incorrect feed URI.
I’ve made several changes to this blog’s structure over the months, including shifting the blog from a sub-folder (/wp) to the root folder. This is quite possibly the main source of errors for those trying to access my feeds.
And so, in order to protect against future problems of this sort, may I suggest that - if you do subscribe to my RSS feeds - you please change the subscription URI to http://feeds.feedburner.com/sashiweb/feed.
This is because in the event of any changes to the feed directory or location, I only have to make the appropriate change in my Feedburner account, and it will automatically re-route the above URI to the new feed location.
In other words, you’ll never have to change the feed URI yourself. You can be always be assured that the RSS feed for sashi-isms will always reach your newsreader without interruption, come rain or armageddon.
Here’s the new feed address again: http://feeds.feedburner.com/sashiweb/feed.
Thank you. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
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