Managed to throw Moomai’s new layout together over the long weekend, and have focused a lot on simplifying the sidebar and tightening things up somewhat. We’re gearing up towards giving the underlying math for the ratings system an overhaul as well, which should be happening within the next week or so.

Overall, I think it’s starting to really come together finally. I’ve been having issues with moomai’s look and feel from the very first version I put together over a year ago and I think this recent overhaul might actually be The One We Go Public With. From here on out, I should be able to concentrate on just bug fixes, minor improvements and that Facebook app we’ve been putting off for like forever.

I’ve been listening to so much new music this past year, and I realized recently how much I really miss sharing it with folks. Back during my highfiber days, we’d have a weekly featured download with a short writeup of the artist. I doubt I can pull off a weekly effort, but I think I can at least manage to keep this semi-regular. We’ll call it “Viva Pirateria” because my first choice, “Download Free MP3s at Guttervomit.com,” seemed a little too much like search-whoring. (As always, these tracks will be deleted after 30 days. I can’t really afford the bandwidth costs involved in keeping them up indefinitely.)

Our debut batch of MP3s is all fun-rock; catchy toe-tappers you can play in the car with friends.

Spoon – The Underdog
From one of last year’s best albums. Spoon wrote a good two-thirds of the soundtrack to my favorite Will Ferell movie, Stranger than Fiction, back in 2006, and are the vanguards of indie rock.

Orson – Broken Watch
Orson isn’t the world’s hardest-working indie rock band, but they’re probably in the top ten. “Broken Watch” is from their 2006 debut. The whole album is full of sugary pop confections; perfect for a summer trip to the beach.

Someone Still Loves You, Boris Yeltsin – Modern Mystery
SSLYBY (and man, even the acronym is long) is oddly-named, but they’ve got a great jangly-rock guitar sound that’s reminiscent of Rogue Wave and Maritime. Their choice of name pretty much prevents them from ever going mainstream, so if you are a fan, you are 100% assured that these guys will never sell out.

Nada Surf – Weightless
I’ve been listening to Nada Surf since “Popular” back in 1996 (which is pretty much when everybody else started listening to them), but the recent two albums have exhibited a kind of growth to their musicality that has been both fascinating and off-putting for older fans. “Weightless” is very similar in technique to an older song “Killian’s Red,” but it’s got a much more fleshed-out outro.

In case any of the direct links above don’t work, ol’ Apache will hook you up.

Ah, the shopping lists of the young and sleepless.

So by now I guess we’ve all seen Janina San Miguel’s epic soliloquy on the important persons in her life during the recent Binibining Pilipinas 2008, a monologue that was only slightly more impressive in its scope and daring than Miss South Carolina’s treatise on geography last year. I actually have a bit of a rant regarding beauty pageants that I’ve been nursing quietly now for years, and this seems like just the right week to whip it out.

Now before I embark on my own epic soliloquy, I want to first address the feminist argument that beauty pageants should be abolished because they are degrading. I personally find that rather ridiculous, as beauty pageants are no more demeaning towards women than Jeopardy is demeaning towards smart people. Or hotdog-eating contests, towards guys that like a little sausage. I think that it’s important that we celebrate the things that are outstanding and exceptional in this world, and by golly, if we can have World Rock-Paper-Scissors championships, then a competition that judges female beauty is a no-brainer. (Haha, sorry, I couldn’t help myself.)

The problem is not that there are beauty pageants, the problem is in the rules. I find it frustrating that there are interview portions at all during these contests, because a contestant’s brains should have no effect on her overall “beauty” score. No Jeopardy player has ever lost because of his/her looks, because obviously, in a contest of wits, appearances are irrelevant. Strange that it doesn’t work the other way around.

Now, some people like to argue that beauty extends beyond just looks, all the way into the mind and soul of a given contestant. That’s all well and good, but if you want to accurately measure a girl’s mind, I think you need to base it on a little bit more than a single 60-second response, you know? Instead of having a single evening’s pageant, you need to have a week-long marathon with IQ tests and moral/ethical dilemmas mixed in with the bikini segments and talent portions. (That’s not a particularly bad idea either; get Mark Burnett on board and you’ve got yourself a real concept.)

I know that sounds like I’m being facetious, but I’m trying to make a point. Why do we even pretend that it matters whether a contestant is smart or not, when no beauty pageant has ever crowned a smarter girl over a prettier one? I personally think it’s this half-assed approach that makes beauty contests feel so farcical. The pageant industry’s desire to satiate critics by adding these silly question-and-answer portions has had the rather more negative effect of highlighting the fact that some of these contestants are real dullards. And it’s a shame because ultimately, they would have won regardless.

I finally got my Wii today, after "retiring" from gaming 2 years ago. I got a basic package for Php17,980 in Greenhills (console, controller, gun, and voltage adapter), and paid an additional PhP2,900 for a second remote and nunchuk.

Had a bit of an interesting time getting the thing running with my Samsung LCD monitor, as the Wii only supports composite or S-Video signals (read: television sets). Fortunately, I was able to find a cheap TV-converter that accepts various video and audio inputs, then remixes them into a VGA-compatible out (it’s the little black box sitting on top of the ipod hi-fi).

Even better, the Samsung connects to the Macbook Pro via a DVI cable, so I can switch between the Wii input and the Mac input by pressing a single hardware button. Unfortunately, my sound setup isn’t quite as simple, as I haven’t found a way for the MBP and the Wii to share the hi-fi are their respective outputs. (The hi-fi was originally connected to my Airport Express, so I could stream music wirelessly to it. Seemed like a good idea at the time :/ )

Images from Zack Snyder’s upcoming Watchmen adaptation found their way online yesterday, and you can immediately see why Alan Moore has pretty much given up on Hollywood. You can check out the rest of the images here, but the Comedian depicted above says it all. Now, before I embark on this geekboy rant, I want to first say that when I saw Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead, I was thoroughly impressed. It was a great start for a young director; it was creepy, funny and thrilling in most of the right places.

I was less impressed by his take on Frank Miller’s 300, because it showed exactly how young this guy really was. 300 was a song played with a single note, and the volume cranked all the way up. Visually it was quite engaging, but then again so is pornography, or a UFC match. Neither of them are what you would ordinarily refer to as a "feature film."

Which brings me to Watchmen and the dark, gritty stills that they just released of its main characters. Now again, these stills have a great visual styling to them. Very "Dark Knight" in its retro/modern, desaturated, shiny-leather look. But sadly, they totally miss the point of the story, which is why it depresses me a little to see them.

Alan Moore’s Watchmen, for those of you who haven’t had the good fortune of reading it, is a story about a team of Golden Age superheroes, after their "golden age" has passed. They’re old and retired, but some of them continue to work behind the scenes, quietly maneuvering global politics and economics towards one unbelievable outcome. I’ve always thought that Watchmen was impossible to adapt to another medium because of its complexity. It’s got about a dozen separate plotlines that come together at the perfect moment towards the end, and the epic nature of the story can’t really be felt if you experience the whole thing in a 2-hour movie session.

Likewise, you couldn’t adapt it into a traditional text-only novel either, because a huge part of what makes Watchmen so special is the cornball "Golden Age" look of the superheroes. The story itself was a commentary on the comic-book medium you see, and how "real life" has finally caught up with our aging lead characters. Snyder’s images above are disappointing because he’s traded the feel of "old cowboys on their last ride" for chrome gear and glossy leather straps. Sure to please the general moviegoing audience, but unlikely to satisfy anyone who’s actually read this book.

A bit of music-related geekery today:

Ubuntu Linux has made something of a tradition of christening each release with an alliterative animal name, perhaps as a both an homage to and parody of Apple’s own feline operating systems. The current release is "Gusty Gibbon," while the upcoming April distribution is referred to as "Hardy Heron."

Last week, a list was published that itemized all of the upcoming release names, thusly:

* 9.04 - Jovial Jackal
* 9.10 - Kissy Kipunji
* 10.04 - Loyal Lemur
* 10.10 - Modest Mouse
* 11.04 - Nifty Nematode
* 11.10 - Open-minded Ostrich
* 12.04 - Petulant Porcupine

"Modest Mouse." Well. Clearly someone on the Ubuntu team is an indie music fan. Now when I first heard the news, I thought it was quaint and all; pop-culture crossovers always are. After a little bit more thought though, I imagine that this particular name would hurt both Ubuntu and the band, at least from a search perspective. It’s already happening right now: typing "ubuntu modest mouse" on Google gives you a weird mishmash of music-related and Linux-related links. What happens when Ubuntu actually releases "Modest Mouse," or when Modest Mouse releases a new album? Absolute chaos, folks, absolute chaos.

Ayala Avenue, Makati City. 29 February 2008.

People perched atop the statue of Ninoy on the corner of Ayala and Paseo had one of the best views of the whole event (not counting the offices that were directly facing the intersection, of course). I wanted to get a better vantage point but unfortunately, street-level was all I was able to manage.

Pretty much every TV station had an elevated platform setup before the festivities kicked off; several camera jibs hovered over the crowds, and streets were crowded with OB vans and uplink trucks.

And of course, where there are crowds, there are street vendors. Rallying really gives one the munchies, after all.

I personally dislike how they have to pander to the religious leanings of the masses in order to get them to participate (they referred to this event as an "Inter-faith Rally"). I’ve said this many times before, but I’ll say it here again for emphasis. People need to stop using religion as a compass for morality and common decency, because religion is far from moral, or decent. But that’s a subject for a different rant, I suppose.

Come to the light, you mindless zombies, and leave all your garbage behind.

It turns out that I am extraordinarily apolitical. It was fun to blow an hour’s time at the rally, although I think that the frequency of these events have reduced their impact to pretty much nothing. People are about as responsive to these things as they are to advertising on the web; the vast majority simply ignore them.