A couple of weeks ago on my way to work, I stopped behind a black SUV at a red light on the southbound RT112. The SUV had a sticker that reminded me that 9/11 was not far away. The sticker’s background had a drawing of Manhattan skyline including the Twin Towers and its foreground had a firefighter’s helmet with the number 343 on it. The upper left-hand side was written “In Memory of” and on the lower right-hand side, I read “Dad.” With tears in my eyes, I wished there was a way to let the driver of the SUV know that his Dad would not be forgotten. How can I? I can still see, smell and breathe in that smoke vividly in my mind. But of course there was no way for me to share this with the driver of that SUV. And soon he went on his way, and I mine.
That it is highly unlikely that the driver of that black SUV would read this is an understatement. But in the event that any one of the friends and family of those three-hundred forty-three who gave their lives that day happens to read this, I want to assure you. They will not be forgotten.
I fiddled with this blog last weekend and I finally managed to redirect yoonamania.com to yoonamania.com/blog. So from now on, you can just type yoonamania.com and come to this blog instead of putting “/blog” at the end. Sorry if you were getting errors over the weekend. For some reason, redirect 301 which works fine for some people didn’t work for me and it would go into an infinite loop. I meant to look into this much sooner, but you know me. I’m lazy.
I also finally scripted and scheduled automatic backups of the database everyday instead of doing it manually when I remember – once every few months, which is much to seldom. This was prompted by the recent security alert on WordPress. In case you still haven’t heard, there is a worm going around which is designed to attack earlier versions of WordPress, if it’s not hosted by wordpress.com. If you are using WordPress under your own domain hosted by anybody other than wordpress.com, you need to upgrade it to the latest version, and you need to do it YESTERDAY. And backup your blog database often if you don’t want to lose the whole thing.
This public service announcement is brought to you by the owner of this blog who couldn’t come up with anything to blog about today.
Have you noticed? On the sidebar to the right, under Old Nonsense and above Friends & Family blogroll. Yup, I signed up at NaNoWriMo. If anybody doesn’t know what it is, it stands for National Novel Writing Month. It’s an organization that promotes writing by challenging everybody to write a novel with at least 50,000 words in it during the month of November.
I found out about it only last year. I wanted to participate and started to squeeze my brain for characters and plot lines. I had nothing – nothing but smoke coming out of my ears. I still have nothing. I don’t know how I’m supposed to even start a thing like that. Plot lines? Nothing that is remotely similar to a plot line ever crossed my mind in my whole life. And characters? Yeah, fat chance I get an idea for any character, being the misanthrope I am. So when November rolled in, thankfully BEFORE my brain exploded, I still had nothing and I didn’t sign up.
Photograph by Ionushi, under attribution license
A few weeks ago, the chatter about this year’s NaNoWriMo started to show up here and there. Only thing I could add to that was I wish I could write or I wish I knew how to start or I wish I could come up with characters and plot lines and so forth. But the other day, Cylithria, who will be doing her 10th NaNoWriMo this November, told me that sometimes she just starts with one person, describing her boring job, etc without any other characters or plot lines in mind, just building on this one character. And the story just unfolds, sort of. The only thing is to write everyday. Well I thought, I can do that. So I signed up.
As far as I understand, you are supposed to start writing on the first of November, and by the end of the month, you are a winner if the word count of your novel is at least 50,000, whether or not the novel is finished. You are not supposed to edit it. You are supposed to just write, leaving typos and all kinds of errors untouched. By the end of the month, it’s supposed to be the first draft of your novel, and in the month of December, you edit it.
I’m encouraged to tell everybody that I’m going to write a novel so that I don’t quit. You know, it’s the same with everything. I mean the use of tactics that employs shame and embarrassment as the motivation to do something. Well, good enough for me. And I hope writing a blog post about it is good enough? Anyway, wish me luck. And if you are also participating, I’m yoonamaniac on NaNoWriMo. Buddy me up!
I haven’t had television for several years now. I mean I have a physical television set covered with a thick coat of dust and collecting more (totally intentional since I think the thick coat of dust will protect the TV set in case of it being knocked over or something despite its size and weight… you never know… it could happen!) in the living room corner but it doesn’t have any input unless I pop a DVD into the DVD player because I don’t subscribe to cable or satellite service. The main reason for that: I loved TV too much. You could say I was addicted.
For the longest time, I had resisted getting cable TV and just used rabbit ears. I didn’t really feel the need for cable TV except for better picture quality and not having to adjust the rabbit ears whenever I changed channels. I didn’t understand why people would complain about not having anything to watch on TV, and these people had cable or satellite TV with several premium channels. I always had something to watch. The show didn’t have to be good. If I started watching a show, I tended to get sucked in no matter how bad it was. Also, I never got sick of reruns even if I had seen it more than once already.
Do you remember my infomercial purchases? You don’t seriously believe I only bought thirteen items off infomercials, do you? I mean, consider the extreme lameness of the things I listed there. There are A LOT more convincing infomercials hawking products that look and sound much more practical and promising. You can infer that I probably watched almost all infomercials out there at the time, and you’d be right. I did. Many times, I could be found watching an infomercial at 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning. Most of the times I would resist the temptation to dial that 800 number and place my order, which led me to watch the same fucking infomercial over and over and over whenever it came on until I finally decided to make the call.
Now you see why I hadn’t needed more channels. But I finally caved in and subscribed to cable TV after watching a couple of episodes of The Sopranos at a friend’s place and got completely hooked. Now there were still more shows to watch, and I started losing sleep trying to watch TV. If you know me just a little, you just KNOW how much I looooove sleeping and so you might understand how much I was addicted to TV. And when I moved to a new apartment with Dish Network, I had even more to watch!
I realized I had a problem, but it was still hard to keep away from TV. All these years, the first thing I had done when I came home from outside was to turn the TV on, and it would be on until I had to go out again or until I went to bed. It was hard to break that habit. And did you know realizing you have a problem doesn’t make you stop loving the shows you’ve been watching? So one day, I canceled the service after convincing myself that it would save me about a grand a year. I missed it terribly for the first couple of weeks, but afterwards, I hardly thought about it except I occasionally missed Late Show with David Letterman, my all time favorite TV show.
It seems there are much more good TV shows to watch nowadays because I constantly see plurks or tweets about TV shows and how much they love them and how much they have waited for the season premiers, etc. But these TV talks have never really affected me other than feeling a little left out. It hasn’t really made me want to get cable or satellite service. UNTIL NOW, that is. Yeah, I have the itch. It’s been itching for a couple of weeks now ever since citizenjaney and some others live-plurked the goings-on of the first episode of What Would Brian Boitano Make on Food Network. And I must say, my eyes were glued on that plurk. Yes, it’s a cooking show and it’s highly unlikely I’ll ever make anything Brian Boitano makes on that show. But it was hilarious just to read about it and I can’t imagine how fucking hysterical to watch the actual show!
I’ve searched the net for a video, but I haven’t succeeded yet. So for two weeks, I’ve been agonizing over this question. Should I get it? I know it’s a lot of money just to watch a 30-minute cooking show, but once I get it, I will be watching more than just one show, so it would be worth it, right?And I would like to know what Brian Boitano would make every week. Is that so wrong? And Letterman every night to boot? That’s a fair price to pay, no? But will I fall off the wagon and devote my already too short time at home to watching TV? Should I, or shouldn’t I?
I was getting sick of orangy theme. So I tried a bunch and temporarily settled on this one. I liked several themes I tried, but there was always something that wasn’t displaying right after customizing each of them a little to suit my needs. There was one theme that I loved even after tweaking it a little. But then when I added widgets, they were displayed hideously. This is quite ridiculous. I thought after installing a score of themes, I wouldn’t have to look for another one for a while. But I guess my search for a better theme continues…
Do you like it better or worse than orangy one?
Serious Stuff. Seriously
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