Whimsical.nu

Welcome to a Whimsical Blog~

Hi, I'm Angela, a girl with a blog on five different psyches:
girl, geek, reader, writer, gamer
Choose your poison ♥

Library books

I’d been meaning to put into words my thoughts on one article I saw on Digg a week or so back — on facts about the Online Computer Library Center top 1000. According to it,

[They] compiled a list of the top 1,000 titles owned by member libraries—the intellectual works judged to be the most worthy based on the “purchase vote” of libraries around the globe.

It’s an interesting list of interesting (and sometimes bizarre!) facts about books that are found in most libraries. It’s US-centric, but hey it’s still interesting. I suggest you read the article to get all the trivia, but the ones that were most interesting to me were:

  1. William Shakespeare had the most work in the top 1,000 with 37 works which isn’t surprising; John Grisham was third with 13 works; and Stephen King didn’t place at all. The Stephen King work to get nearest to the top thousand is The Gunslinger. (Which is the first King book I’ve read…and I’ve never read any other save the DT series.)
  2. Highest-ranking written work by women were Wuthering Heights (E. Brontë), Jane Eyre (C. Brontë), and Pride and Prejudice (J. Austen). They are separated from each other by exactly one gap each (at 28, 30, and 32, respectively). I didn’t like the first, but the other two are my top two books of all time.
  3. Jesus is the most written-about person in the World Category (I assume that’s what they mean by “WorldCat”; correct me if I’m wrong).
  4. Comics in the library! Garfield is 15th.

It makes me wonder, really, how Philippine libraries would fare. I’ve never been to a library (that I could call a library) in a long time.

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Getting tickets for awards night

Okay, non-writing post. Bear with me, because I’m also a little confused at how this goes. I’ve been waiting for an email from them since I expect that hey, someone will get in touch with me regarding attendance on the said event. I’m concerned that they haven’t started disseminating information about the awarding night earlier, but well that’s that. I’m a little confused now since I haven’t gotten an email yet but on the 2007 Philippine Blog Awards blog, they posted that you post about the event on your blog to get your event tickets. Uhm, alright? So if I didn’t think to visit their website, I won’t get a ticket? Or, I’d have to pay on the event itself? Or, OMG what if I arrive late? And all the tickets are gone since it’s limited seating? What if I plan to bring a friend along? I have to post twice to get two tickets?

Seriously, I don’t think this has been thought through very well. I also don’t think it’s been thought through about the whole semi-formal/formal dress code for the evening. Last I know, the Webbys don’t ask people to go in such glamorous attire. And these are bloggers, for crying out loud. I’m not saying bloggers aren’t capable of being glamorous and dressing up for an affair, but bloggers, more often than not, are casual people. They’re everyday people sharing wonderful tidbits and thoughts and opinions. You’re asking these everyday people to come dressed up to the nines?

I suppose I will still go, after all, I don’t want to seem like I’m treating the whole event like it’s not that important. It is and I’m very honored to have been chosen as a finalist, given that stellar panel of judges. I’m just a little disappointed at how apparently difficult it is to get tickets, to facilitate me bringing along a friend or two since I don’t want to sit in some corner.

If anyone wants to argue that it’s not really difficult, then I’m all for discussing it. Maybe it just boils down to a lack of proper communication and dissemination of information.

Edited to add: Apparently it’s (just?) a lack of proper communication. Tickets are given only to bloggers to make sure the night is for bloggers, hence the procedure. Finalists get two tickets each. There, that’s the basic rundown of who gets tickets, and how.

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The domain hath returned, plus blog musings

Phew, seasonalplume.net (the domain) is finally back! It propagated sometime last night while I was sleeping, but I’d been too swamped in the office to comment about it. You can still see this website via the indisguise.org address, but now my real domain is back in action. I’m happy. Those two days were absolutely nerve-wracking.

But naturally those two days isn’t a complete waste: it spurred me on to re-evaluate Seasonal Plume, specifically its contents and architecture, the way it’s served (and designed). Of my three blogs, I suppose Seasonal Plume is the most “hazy” — even with tacking on the “writing and literary blog” handle to it, one might say I’ve always been trying to feel the waters and find the best Seasonal Plume reincarnation. Let’s face it: friends will read my haphazard rambling at my journal, and users of my scripts will always take a peek now and then at my scripts archive; but writing? And someone who doesn’t have 39857394562 bestsellers already published?

Those two things have been in my mind a lot more frequently over the last two months. One might say that I just need to read the 872398435 articles on “how to blog effectively” and “5872985679 tips on blogging” or whatever else the Internet spews out of its (significant) mouth; and I actually have. But I guess, coming from a time when the blogging phenomenon was juuuuust starting, I’m a little old-fashioned in the sense that I need more than just a blog in my website. A blog is a blog is a blog, but what about the content? (*hides from other bloggers*)

That’s why I kept fluctuating between a “regular-style” blog (like the Blue Semi-colons theme and the Wet Sponge theme), and a “blog-style” blog (like this one right now). That’s why I never seem to know exactly what to write here (it’s already complicated by having two other blogs after all).

The forced downtime of my domain somehow triggered a few decisions within me, and now I have an actual direction. It will take a bit of time before these soopersekrit plans actually take place, as I’m still laying everything out (plus I don’t think I should change my blog’s design just yet). I’m rather content about the decisions/plans I’ve come up with, though, so yay for that.

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Domain problems

Ugh. My writing blog, Seasonal Plume, was chosen as a finalist for the 2007 Philippine Blog Awards, for the Best Blog Design special category. I have to admit I’ve been on a sort of high about it since finding out; unfortunately right now everything’s sort of chaotic because seasonalplume.net, my domain, expired on me. (For now you can see my writing log at http://indisguise.org/~splume/.)

Words can’t express what I feel about this, seriously. The background of this whole situation is because when I bought my first domain, it was my friend who bought the domain for me way back in 2003. So the domain is in her account in NameCheap (I will not link them, damn them). I have my domains in another registrar, and I’ve always meant to transfer them over but somehow I never sort of got around to it; and now suddenly my domain is expired. It’s MY email address listed in the WHOIS database entry for seasonalplume.net, but NameCheap did not even contact me to tell me oy, your domain is expiring! Tell me, what sort of customer service is that? *shakes fist at NameCheap!*

The good news (sorta) is that they hold the domain when it’s expired for a while so hopefully I can get my friend to reregister it for me. Seasonalplume.net is my first domain and thus has a lot of memories attached to it! ;) I’d hate to lose it. And frankly, I’d hate to get disqualified from the blog awards because of this. I’ve commented on their website (there were no email addresses or contact forms available… I don’t blame them, but that does make contacting them difficult! I’m not going to go around and emailing/commenting on the organizers blogs, that would be rude) and told them about my domain expiring and where my blog can be found for now — I hope they’re able to do something about it, and get the word out to the judges.

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On giving up half a dream

I’ve decided to admit to cheating when I started reading Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer. It’s light reading, and I would have finished it already were it not for a certain book activity which I tried doing. I cheated and read ahead to the results interpretation, so the exercise is spoiled for me; but I think I know what the results are for me anyway.

Basically, the goal of the is to help you determine what sort of writing you’re more inclined to do. I’m sure that sounds like a no-brainer, but sometimes, I find that my brain ignores what’s right there in front of it. To cut it short, in my case, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m more of a short story writer than a novelist. Gasp!, oh noes! and general bellows of outrage! — the eye-opener met with quite a bit of resistance.

I suppose a part of myself has always known that I’m more inclined towards short stories than a full-length novel: there are lots of signs pointing to it. Previous finished work has always been under 25,000 words; I am irresistibly drawn towards exercises in brevity and enjoy writing them immensely. But I resisted; ever since I was a kid, I’d wanted to write books, and here was a book who was forcing me to see that I wasn’t really up for it. Or at least not yet.

The result was a long drought in writing. A subconscious strike? Maybe. I’ve been thinking more about it recently, though, and the more I think of it, the more I realize how I’m essentially strangling my writing and holding up practically every single creative thought-process. Because The Dream feels so difficult to reach, I subconsciously stopped reaching for the smaller dreams that may, who knows, one day lead to The Dream.

So, two days ago, I started fleshing out a short story plot, letting characters wake up and tell me their stories. I think I like this new phase.

I’d like to share something from the book that I’m still digesting:

…if you confess so much you are likely to go further and talk of the things you mean to write. Now words are your medium;…but your unconscious self…will not care whether the words you use are written down or talked to the world at large. …You will have created your story and reaped your reward…you will consider it as already done, a twice-told tale.

And before I leave — the culprit has been found: my namesake Angela was the one who nominated me for the Philippine Blog Awards (thank you!), who has just released the 2007 Philippine Blog Awards Finalists list. And, even more surprisingly, I made it. o.o;; I have no words as of yet to explain what I feel (such is my plight a lot of times these days). My co-finalists are: Far From Neutral Notions, Ironwulf.net: En Route, Midori-X, and Noel Perlas. You should check out all the rest. Good luck to everyone! *pompoms*

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Philippine Blog Awards

This isn’t connected to writing, so I apologize in advance, but I felt quite confused when I saw that Seasonal Plume had been nominated at the Philippine Blog Awards for Best Blog Design. I was confused because I hardly ever blog here ;) But thank you to whoever nominated my blog! I feel honored enough already. :) Good luck to the other nominees — check them out, they’re all fabulous.

With regards to writing — I’m afraid even journal writing has been sparse these days. This whole month, to be exact. I don’t know why, I guess I just feel somewhat out of it. However, just today while I was perusing Digg, I saw this article on Centralia, Pennsylvania and sort of went to a small OMG how romantic flight. I know Silent Hill was based on the doomed town, and I’ve never played that since I scare frightfully pathetically easily, but it still makes the story wheels in my head turn.

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WP’s plugin directory

Doing my quick online skimming of articles (my friend just got me addicted to Digg, though I’ve never looked at it before, really) and came across WordPress’s new plugins directory. It’s predominantly good. Finally! It’s been a long time, and it’s finally out, and I’m glad it is. It looks spiffy at the onset, there’s even a Featured Plugin ad, and pretty buttons. Only, what is up with that font? It looks like some really bad anti-aliasing monster had fun:

Weird Anti-aliased text in WP’s plugins directory

I tried increasing and decreasing the text size of my browser, but it stays the same. What is up with it? After a while, I try to ignore it, even if “FYI” looks like “TYI”. Having made a small plugin myself (but never released it), I try to see what’s up in terms of submitting it. I try to log in, thinking that maybe I can use my Codex wiki account. Erm, no, it’s not working. I try to register, using my ever-trusty “angelamaria”. It tells me, Your username was not valid, please try again. Uhm, what? Maybe it needs the first letter capitalized like the wiki! But it tells me the same thing when I submit “Angelamaria”. I don’t get it. Why is it not valid? It doesn’t tell me anything really helpful. I have (once again) the sneaking suspicion that maybe it’s telling me I already have a user with that username! so I try to reset my password instead.

Hooray! I’m in. But maybe it could have been a little more helpful, or maybe point me in the right direction where I could update my password? Alright, well, I check out how to submit a plugin. Now, I’ve tried my hand at an version control software (VCS), and my toy, that is, tool, of choice is Bazaar. I’m not totally clueless, but the mention of Subversion repository just makes me scared anyway. I suppose all other plugin developers will be much more VCS-savvy than I am, but whatever the case, it feels like such a big deal when I just want to share my plugin!

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Websites and PHP frameworks, part II

A few days ago I wrote about deciding on how to implement the revival of Indisguise.org and PHP frameworks, and I realized I haven’t yet mentioned any decisions made about that issue.

In the subject of Indisguise.Org implementation, I’ve decided to go with using WordPress. The biggest factor for this is time: I seriously have no time to create a script from scratch, even with the use of RAD frameworks. And I seriously have no time to learn a different script. WordPress served me well so far; I trusted that it will continue to serve my purposes, even if it’s slightly different. (And it’s going along well; more on that in another entry.)

As for PHP frameworks, I’m still leaning towards CakePHP, even though CodeIgniter is a very very close second. I found a couple of great articles which helped me a lot in terms of weighing the pros and cons and going with my personal choice. I’d like to share them with you:

At work we’ve decided to go with Cake, although a big factor in our decision is because our developer knows a few people who’ve used Cake, as opposed to us knowing people online who know CodeIgniter. Who knows, once I give Cake a test run, I may change my mind — but for not it’s Cake for me.

(This article has made me hungry.)

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The Bartimaeus Trilogy

I finally read and finished The Bartimaeus Trilogy a few weeks back, due to recommendations of friends. The trilogy, written by Jonathan Stroud, is made up of the books The Amulet of Samarkand, The Golem’s Eye, and Ptolemy’s Gate; it follows three principal characters, all of them coming from different backgrounds in life: Nathanial (also known as John Mandrake), blessed to be raised as a ruling-class wizard; Bartimaeus, a long-lived djinn of the fourth level; and Kitty, a magic-immune commoner girl chafing under the highfalutin wizards. They way these three characters interact and affect each other’s lives (and the world they live in) is both real and otherworldly: they draw you in even if they exasperate you plenty of times.

The Bartimaeus Trilogy

I can’t rightfully say which character is the best for me; they’re all portrayed with wonderful depth, drawing you in with their (usually suppressed) emotions. The book jumps from the perspective of one major character to the next, the narrator focusing on him; the difference is that when we’re seeing events through Bartimaeus’ point of view, the book shifts to a first-person POV. I feel that this is an ingenious way of differentiating Bartimaeus from the human characters; the book also makes use of footnotes to implicitly express the nature of Bartimaeus: in Stroud’s world, the djinn (and other beings) are able to see other planes of reality, while humans can only see one plane. In the same way, djinnn can think different thoughts at a single point in time, while humans, the oh so sluggish humans, can only think one thought at a time. The Bartimaeus chapters are then peppered with footnotes whenever Bartimaeus thinks of a rather interesting quip or trivia that he wishes to express.

Read the rest of this entry »

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What type of programmer are you?

I love personality tests, as I’ve always been the sort who believes that you should know yourself as much as you can to be able to use your strengths optimally and tackle the weaknesses you have the best way that’s suitable for you. I came across this personality test for programmers today and tried it out.

According to the author of the test, it’s based on the Myers-Briggs personality test and my results feel rather accurate, although I also feel like the questions were too few to be able to really encapsulate what sort of programmer you are.

I got the following results:

Your programmer personality type is:

DHSB

You’re a Doer.
You are very quick at getting tasks done. You believe the outcome is the most important part of a task and the faster you can reach that outcome the better. After all, time is money.

You like coding at a High level.
The world is made up of objects and components, you should create your programs in the same way.

You work best in a Solo situation.
The best way to program is by yourself. There’s no communication problems, you know every part of the code allowing you to write the best programs possible.

You are a liBeral programmer.
Programming is a complex task and you should use white space and comments as freely as possible to help simplify the task. We’re not writing on paper anymore so we can take up as much room as we need.

Interesting (geeky) stuff.

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