Chawlk

1. Drawar
2. Fenxy
3. Decaflon
4. Two Credits
5. Wriging
6. Loose Suits
7. Chixe
8. Dud3s
9. Wing Colors

 

I've yet to tweak Ubiquity to its fullest, but I already use what it has now and it's become one of my favourite Firefox add-ons (next to another one of Mozilla Lab's plugins Weave).

The hardest thing about it is to break my old surfing habits of say, using the search bar to look for what you want. But after that, all I have to do is use Ctrl-Space and I can search on Google, Wiki and IMDB. I can do instant translations, define words, do quick calculations.

While there are other command line programs out there, the fact that Firefox is always the first thing open makes this easy for me.

I'm going to try and see if I can edit the command list to do other things as well. It's flexible enough, but I still don't have anything I can think of that I can use with this. It seems to do everything I need.

@Shadowsun: Command line interfaces have never really died out. It's just that the general public has been spoiled with icons and the excessive use of mouse clicking. I find it very easy to call on interface with hotkeys and just type out what you want. In fact, it's not just Firefox that I now run with CLI, but my Windows desktop as well, so no desktop icons whatsoever.

Guess it's not complete without a little wisdom from the other side. You can die at any time at any moment. You don't need your birthday to remind you of that. In retrospect, having a little planet that could travel one more circle around the sun doesn't put it into any perspective either.

If you're wondering what you have accomplished through life, let your friends be a testament of that. If you're wondering what else are you going to do through life, let yourself be the hand that writes that.

It's hard to measure a lifetime of goals when all you can see is the immediate point around you. So what matters has always been the now. To work as hard for what you want to achieve today. To play as hard for what you want to fun with today.

Because achievements are just frozen memories in time. If you're going to spend once a year wondering about them, you might as well make them count right?

I've got to putting down other people's blogs because they are good. Problem is that some of them are anonymous. Makes it hard to put their full name down anyway. Would love to show the world how good they are.

You don't. That's why you go out with them.

Then again, when chatting them up, you usually do get a feeling whether they work well with you or not. Your experience in having women talk about how the men they've dated are jerks and all that. I go through that with almost every single girl I chat up. Even if I'm not on a date, it happens.

I've deduced that this is due to the nature of how I portray myself to be. It's not that it's bad or anything and I've learned to just listen. I do get the idea that women do this on their own whim because they want someone to talk to who'd listen. If I can do that, then why not?

Going back to your problem. I guess it's a matter of one moment at a time. If you get along with the person today, go ahead at it the next day and so on so forth. Keep doing that until you hit a bump on the road. If it can be fix and you think it's worth fixing, then fix it. If not, regrettably take your leave and move on.

You can't figure whether you good with a person one day. The best you can do is understand what it is in yourself that requires you to look for in another person. The rest is about discovering it from there.

You can't resist a good penguin. Especially a geeky penguin.

It's a double edged sword to use your blog to complain. On one hand, it can make a difference, on the other, it can backfire on you. The trick is to always back up what you say with a valid point. Even then, personally, blogging for me does nothing but get it off my mind. I still need to do something about it. I've never taken it any further than having the other party confront me about what I have to say.

Hope you make a difference with it.

The only way I could suffer through Titanic more than once is to eagerly await the final sequence where everyone dies and start laughing at their floating bodies. I kid you not I actually laughed at that aloud in the cinema while people were crying next to me. I had funny looks after that.

I don't think Dark Knight would smash the record Titanic made. It'll come close, but I doubt it would. You'd need a sappy love story with an overplayed love song to top that. I somehow doubt "Titanic 2: Rose Meets Gilligan" would play big at the box office.

I don't know if guilt is too strong a word but I've always used it (the word, not the action, well...not really).

The way I see it, most men don't want to see a woman be all emotional and would go to great lengths not to see them throw a hissy fit or cry. A lot of actions I've noticed especially in relationships between men and women, hinge on that, from getting to know them to breaking up even. It's like a pathological fear of seeing an emotional women. I think I've mentioned this before on some note somewhere.

So maybe it's not intentional guilt which would piss a lot of us off, but our inability to handle emotions that way that plays us right into women's hands.

You know, this list can be narrowed down to something I tell all women who say they don't get men. Men are driven by two things that take precedence in their lives.

1. Sex.
2. Guilt

Control that and you control almost every man there is. :)

Wait a minute, doesn't magazines like this prey on the insecurity of the normal female? That tells you a lot about the people who read it seriously. Though in defense of some of the people who read it, I know people who read it just to laugh at it. Some times, it's just hilarious what they come up with.

When you think of it that way, it isn't so surprising isn't it?

It was awesome. I watched it twice. I dare say what for a villain, he's just as cool as The Joker. Dr. Horrible is an inspiration to all us mad scientists.

I read a science fiction blog called io9. I first heard it there ages ago. Then again, I've always been a Joss Whedon fan, so I would have heard about it anyway regardless. :)

Too bad it's only going to be shown for free till the 20th of July. I would recommend this to everyone I know, if they were online to watch it.

Pure awesomeness. In fact. I'm planning to watch it again. It is overhyped though and it is not the second coming. But watching the Joker play up totally makes up for it.

Never has darkness been so delicious.

It's not just quiet. It's also ahead of schedule. I mean, when is the last time a WordPress release was actually on time, let alone ahead of time?

Besides, 2.6 isn't really packed full with features. Like the post said, a lot of it is meant to streamline what they have now rather than adding completely new features, which is a good thing and I actually appreciate them for this.

The good thing is that in all my 50 over plugins, I don't have any problems with compatibility. They said it wasn't meant to be anyway since it's pretty much the same as 2.5.

It takes me 20 seconds to update each WordPress site I maintain though. SSH is a Godsend.

@Dreamweaver: You should update your WordPress though for a number of reasons. One are the critical updates that come with it. Second is that if I remember correctly, Search engines like Google or Technorati doesn't index older versions of WordPress. I'm not sure if they meant version numbers or older versions of WordPress that have security vulnerabilities which rules out the patched legacy 2.0. Though, come to think of it, it's been 2.0.11 for ages. I thought it was supposed to keep updating as soon as new security flaws come through?

When people mention hardcore, I do include straight vanilla porn as well. As long as it's people having sex, on screen, that's my definition of hardcore. BDSM, fetishes and all that are genres much like TV shows and movies have different genres to the whole thing.

Not I'm not going to argue on whether or not the porn industry is degrading to women because as far as I'm concerned, there are already 3 men here defending why porn is alright and I'm not a woman so I can't speak on that behalf. What would be interesting is whether a woman can come up here can defend the pornographic industry. I've read plenty of articles from women in the porn industry that defend their actions with pride (most notably this one and is SFW), but none from everyday women outside the industry.

Any other women aside from Tyme care to say that there is nothing wrong with porn?

I got a large collection of interesting material because straight vanilla bores me to death. My girlfriend doesn't mind one bit, though it doesn't do anything for her, instead watching what I have purely out of curiosity (because shes never watched porn before I introduced her to it) and humour (the ones I got to laugh at in the first place). But she always remarked that women in the porn industry seem to always have good shoes.

That's true but when people hide the "important" things, that is cause for concern. Things they know will impact the other person they claim to care about. Of course some people can't take it but isn't that an indication of a mismatch in personalities?

The problem is, most people do not know what's important to themselves much less know what's important in a relationship. It always appears to me that relationships for a lot of people are a hit and miss thing. They don't know what they want because they can't understand or admit to what they want. So how do you know negative aspects of a persons life isn't important in a relationship?

Taking myself an example. I know my girlfriend cannot handle the explosive stream of emotions that I emit when I'm down. I know this for a fact because she is my complete opposite. She is a machine when it comes to emotions. Insensitive and unyielding without a trace of empathy. I had no choice but to learn to hold the full range of my feelings back from her simply because I know it would make it worse for both of us. Does it imply we're not compatible? No. I've never met someone who compliments my actions so perfectly.

While opening up simply leads us to trusting a person believing that there is no harm in being vulnerable, maybe we forget that people can't necessarily return your trust or even appreciate it in kind.

So maybe being emotional isn't about opening up and spilling everything inside. It's about understanding what emotions are, what they mean to us and what they mean to other people. It's about learning how to deal with it. To strike a balance between letting it out and keeping it in.

To that end, men hide behind their masks, acting cool, never understanding how to deal with their own feelings as well as those of others. It doesn't mean they have to be emo, it just means it's another thing they have to learn how to deal with, not by running away but with a completely different set of ways to fix it.

@Joshawesome: It's always about culture and how you grew up. I've known women in my life that show no emotion and say what they mean, when they mean it. There are exceptions to the rule but I say they can't be the who they truly are if their life experiences didn't help it along. It's always refreshing to know people like this and truthfully I make it a point to get to know them better...usually them ending up as good friends or people I've dated or both.

I am learning though how to be more of the machine that I love. Being vulnerable or rather being emotional, often means that we put what we feel above what's needed to be done. I think for the most part, a lot of people fail in this where it counts, even men.

Not everyone is ready to handle the full brunt of what a person can feel. Not anger, frustration or every negative emotion that's out there. I think it's hypocritical when a person says they want to someone to tell them how they feel...and then can't accept it when they realize it's not what they expected.

I think it's much more simple that that. Men don't show their emotions because men are incapable of dealing with emotions, both theirs and of other people.

It's an emotional insecurity perpetuated by culture for men to bottle things up. The problem with bottling things up is that at the end of it, the frustrations build and lead to some pretty twisted things. So men have grown up not to care perpetuating the "macho" attitude or become sick twisted individuals with serious issues.

That's why I think with men as with women, something is always wrong. It's just that men have grown to just forget about it and put it aside. A form of compartmentalisation of emotions. Men aren't trained to deal with things that they can't deal with. So if it can't be dealt with, it's not important to them, even if it actually is important.

The problem is as you both Scrivs and Tyme demonstrated is what both genders assume about what the other person is feeling. People complicate things and take the empathy of what a person is feeling completely out of context, making the situation worse. So rather than making an ass out of you and me, I've learnt to go with the flow and deal with things as it is.

Then again I've always been the odd one out as a guy who wholly wears his emotions on his sleeve. The good thing about it is that I can be sensitive to what people feel and empathise that. I've always been the shoulder to cry on and a lady's man because of it. The problem is that being a guy, I've yet to deal with the emotional insecurity made worse by being open about it. For women at least, they are generally comforted by their female peers. Emotional men generally throw people off with a defying stereotype, you don't expect many men to run to someone when they are down. But I do, I just don't have anyone who'd receive me the same way my female friends do when they are down. That creates a whole new screwed up in so many ways for me.

That's my 5th...element. I knew I was forgetting somebody. Milla Jovovich.

I thought stars rarely look good outside the screen instead planing with us in front of cameras and whatever official photoshoots. That photo you got Scrivs looks like it was gotten off the primere of Sweeney Todd. Was it?

I can't say about anyone else, but it's her characters. That insane dark character. Hell...I find that sexy.

I don't know if this is a situation you can wade your feet before diving in. I suspect like many things in life, it's either all out or none at all. To which the consequences to you or your family would be apparent.

I trust that people are good enough to not take it too far as to single out your family as well, but I've faced things like that for different but equally culture/taboo breaking reasons and I don't really want people to face that same thing. Living a two face lie in the community to protect yourself and your family is one of the toughest things I have ever done in my life.

Because of that, I say that sometimes we have to temper who we are to protect the ones we love. That was my point. I'm not sure how much of an impact this would cause in your community and your family (close and extended), but to do so would sometimes mean you have to stop giving a damn about the other people that can be affected in your wake because you're too busy fighting your own wars to protect others.

Sometimes that's one of the hardest things to do, but it's got to be considered all the same.

I wonder if this makes sense.

I think the question isn't whether you should do it or not. I think the question is as you asked yourself, can you live with the consequences of your actions after you've done it?

Yes this isn't something as simple should you eat that pie that's been left sitting on the table or should I knife that guy in the back because he stepped on my shoe. But your life as a whole hinges on how far you're willing to go for something you believe in yourself.

Can you live, being ostracised by your family, by people around you, perhaps even risk being singled out, even harmed, in the pursuit of being true to yourself? Are you ready to step out of your comfort zone into a world with unknown consequences? Have you got all the i's dotted and the t's crossed to handle such a transition? What if your family and not you pays for the consequences of your actions?

I think it's admirable. Not many people would have the courage and willpower to. Not many people would choose their own freedom over their own comfort. If anything, I stand by your conviction. I know things like this need someone to be there for you to lean on in moments of weakness, but you've got a friend here at least who will say, hold true to what you believe. That sort of faith at least will see you through the darkest of times. I know it did for me.

Actually, you're not the only one who thinks so too. Check this out though, while Johnny 5 is the most obvious robot Wall.E took after, there are some more on the list as well.

The Robots That WALL-E Stole From

Let's see.

Natalie Portman

Summer Glau

Helena Bonham Carter

Amy Acker

Hmmm...I don't really have a 5. Though I know I'm forgetting someone. Maybe it'll come to me in a dream.

I hate to admit it. But right now its The Call by Regina Spektor from the Prince Caspian soundtrack. It was either that or the full version of this:

You can tell I made the right call on this one...or not.

Sweet Jesus!!

I still never got the hair and makeup part. Why would you pay shit loads of cash for something that doesn't change much of how you look (assuming it's not some insane hairstyle or makeup that looks like it came from the 70's and 80's)?

The only thing I can think off is that it makes WOMEN feel better about themselves. It's the insecurity/confidence booster thing. That's the only thing I can think off. I mean...they have to know we think it scares the pants of little children. They have to...right?

Often enough that I hear the lines "Why are all the good men taken?" from all my single female friends.

But in retrospect, having the a relationship that would last is more of how well a person deals with it rather than whether they are nice or not. You can be the sweetest guy in the world, but if you're completely clueless about what's important, you're still going to botch things up in the end.

Just that In terms of attraction, what women who want in the security of a relationship and long term commitments. Nice guys tend to have the quality they want. Mind you though, I still do get out, flirt and date women when I have the opportunity, being with a woman who let's me is no reason to stop what I'm good at doing. It's just that after so long, I know how to flaunt that nice geek side of myself. It kinda makes sense in a world where women are always weary of the the bad boys. They just never see it coming from that unassuming person sitting in the corner.

You make "it" their last. Make "it", the relationship, not "them".

It's been a long day at the lab working on my experiments. Way to botch up a cool closing.

New study? Well that was a complete waste of time because can the rest of us respond to it with a big "Duuuuuh".

Then again, I rebut with what I wrote about before:

"Macho men get the young girls, the ones that want to have their fun in life. Sensitive men get the responsible women, the ones that want to stay with you for life"

Not saying you should be wimpy crybaby though. Just saying that nice guys keep what they finish. It doesn't matter if they make you their first. It matters that you make them their last.

This is a no brainer.

Coco Pops.

Always has been and always will be. I can have it for breakfast, lunch and dinner. More so now that I'm a post-grad student.

I'm great with strategy games (real time and turn based) as well as RPG's and Adventure games. Never really good in all the first person shooters. I never had that much of a quick reflex for it anyway.

I have played against Koreans anyway...and people from Hong Kong, Taiwan and places like those. I'm not great, but I can hold my game of Starcraft and Warcraft III (especially the Defense of the Ancients custom maps) against them.

Of course, I love World of Warcraft, loved it so much I had to go cold turkey because it damn near destroyed my grades.

These days though I'm playing old abandonware bames like Theme Hospital, X-Com and Master of Orion 2. Something that doesn't take up much of my time but still gets me going anyway. Those were the days.

Maybe I should fight evil stick men in Ultima I if I can find it somewhere.

Downloaded on my computer here and my computer at the lab. So that works perfectly. Then again, I've been using it since RC1 and loving it anyway.

Yeah Gnorb, it's all there. I'll put it down from memory what they wrote for the top 12 Sci-Fi series in no particular order.

Quantum Leap
Twilight Zone
Sliders
Stargate SG-1
Babylon 5
Outer Limits
Doctor Who
Star Trek
Farscape
Firefly
X-Files
Battlestar Galactica

Alien Nation!! That was good. Not awesome but good, though...I'm not sure Twin Peaks can be considered Sci-Fi. Sure it had weirdness, but it's too supernatural to be Sci-Fi. V scared the shit out of me as a kid. Especially when the invaders removed their fake eyes and jumped at the screen.

The War of the Worlds TV series was also one show I was addicted to. It's totally better than the Spielberg remake of the movie.

Another one that scared the shit out of me was a show which I couldn't remember the name. It was a cross between Aliens and body snatchers. Aliens would hide in the bodies of humans and when they attack it would be lethal to any human around because of the radiation from their bodies. The aliens were black and huge with spikes on their bodies. I wonder if anyone remembered a show like that?

Lost is Sci-Fi, but I think as a whole show itself, the plot is too convoluted to make any sense. It is awesome, but it needs to be easier to swallow.

@Scrivs: Because I refuse to watch it until I've watched the miniseries that came out before the series. I'm actually waiting for BSG to finish its run and come out with the complete boxset + miniseries and kill everything in one stone. Plus I don't usually have time to watch prime time. Most of what I have is on DVD or downloaded.

As an avid fan of Sci-Fi, I totally agree with the list. I was expecting them to forget stuff like Babylon 5 and Doctor Who but I'm surprised that they put those in there. I have watched every single one of them though. With exception of the new Battlestar Galactica (I watched the old version). Man...thisbrings back the good old days.

I remember sneaking up late at night to watch Quantum Leap every week and then missed the LAST 15 minutes of the LAST EPISODE of the series when my TV went kaput.

Now I feel like getting all the series on those lists and having a back to back sci-fi marathon. Pure geek awesomeness.

Everyone needs sleep. It's required simply because of the metabolic/biochemical changes that only take effect when we sleep.

To put it simply, sleep replenishes depleted neurochemicals in our brain, maintains the production of hormones like the human growth hormone which in turn, along with the lowered metabolic rate of the body helps heal wounds or increase the growth rate (like in babies and children).

It's all biologically set. It's only culture and external medication that affects this for better or for worse. We force ourselves to change our sleeping habits and ignore what our bodies tell us to do.

When was the last time you felt tired, weary, unable to concentrate or sluggish? Those are effects of sleep deprivation. We've unconsciously cheated through the way our body handles sleep and because of that we don't notice these small changes that ultimately affect us on a larger whole.