Quick entry, just to let everyone know what I’ve been doing. (Because clearly, you don’t get enough of that from my .) June has been insufferably eventful, perhaps more so than previous months because I can’t seem to focus on any one thing and have been pirouetting ungracefully between Client Work, Company Work, Hobby Work and Beer for most of this period.

I brought back Highfiber.org two weeks ago, and earlier today I overhauled most of the layouts on Octales.com. Over the past two weeks, syndeo::media has bought a whole mess of new machines too – 2 Macbooks and 2 Macbook Pro’s – so there’s been a lot of installin’ and configurin’ going on. This is particularly impressive when you consider that I bought the 4 machines from 3 different dealers, each in a different city. We’ll probably be selling our old ones pretty soon, but at the moment the machines outnumber the humans two to one. Oh, and Tim joined us formally two weeks ago too, so we’re now 8 people total. Tim’s not a machine, btw. (I’ll resist the obvious introvert-programmer joke here.)

Earlier in the month, I spent some time learning how to deal with the effects of Tanduay Rhum, which is information that I hope to never use again. I also learned a little about Domain Keys, SPF, and ImageMagick, and captured and edited my very first videocast with ScreenFlow. None of those things had anything to do with rhum though. (The final screenflow video was posted on Youtube. I’m not linking to it formally because it was meant to be an Octales demo, and my recent layout changes have rendered it obsolete. Go, me.)

Saw The Incredible Hulk (good), The Happening (ugh) and Wanted (so-so), went to Mogwai twice (both times failing to do what we had set out to do there). Listened to the new Coldplay (great), the new Sigur Ros (really great) and the new Ladytron (good, but gay). Drove to Subic just to , attended the first Philippine Pecha Kucha night, spent waaay too much money on comics at Fully Booked (3 weekends = over PhP8k worth of new reads), and spent way too many Saturday nights at the frickin’ Meatshop along Katipunan. June’s event highlight was last week’s visit to Fely J’s, GB5 though; good food and good company.

Ah, the shopping lists of the young and sleepless.

So by now I guess we’ve all seen during the recent Binibining Pilipinas 2008, a monologue that was only slightly more impressive in its scope and daring than 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.

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.

I have no idea how long this has been available here, but I was pleasantly surprised to find the world’s most expensive(?) non-custom cellphone on sale in Lucerne at Glorietta this evening. See that six-digit number at that foot of each unit? That’s the price in pesos — roughly the cost of a decent second-hand car, or a really tricked-out Mac Pro.

As you can imagine, the specifications of this thing are utterly laughable if you’re coming at it from a price-to-performance perspective. (It doesn’t even have 3G for goodness’ sake.) Instead it has non-tech-related features like "flawless leather," "ceramic keys" and a "locking device that took two years to design" (see un-deep-linkable Flash website at http://vertu.com for more marketing speak).

I love the idea of having outrageously expensive devices on the market, because there’s always someone who’s reckless enough to buy them. Think about the unboxing videos you could take with this thing! The entire store probably falls silent to allow an on-call string quartet to set the proper mood.

It’s been awhile since I’ve written about anything substantial, so I figured that a suitable comeback would be a little subject I’ve very recently been boning up on, i.e., the end of the world. Or I really should say, The End of the World, since title-casing is much more ominous. I’ve been watching Lost again these past few days (season 4 is a triumphant return to form), and as usual, the theories have been flying around the net with terrific intensity. A couple of these theories use the Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar as a foundational concept—the calendar, of course, being the main topic of this discussion.

The Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar is, as the name suggests, a system for counting long periods of time. (At a glance: 1 Winal is 20 days, 1 Tun is 360 days, 1 K’atun is 7,200 days and 1 B’ak’tun is 144,000 days.) The calendar itself kicked off on the 11th of August, 3114 B.C, so all its counting essentially just picks up from that point in time. It’s similar to how we picked an arbitrary point in time to start counting dates using our 2,000-year-old Gregorian calendar, or how January 1st, 1970 UTC marked the beginning of UNIX Time due to the fact that we track computer time by counting the seconds since that point. (Rather ironically, UNIX Time has its own unique apocalypse approaching in circa 2038.)

But we were talking about The End of the World, weren’t we?

Hidden in the analysis of the Mesoamerican Calendar is a belief that it wasn’t just meant for tracking time, but for foreseeing the future. The Mayans believed that we (i.e., all humans) are currently in a creation cycle, with the past three cycles of creation having ended abruptly right before the new one came along to take its place. As it happens, the cycle that we’re currently in (called the “4th world”) is winding down on the 21st of December, 2012. The theory was first brought forth by Terence McKenna, one of the most prominent figures in the New Age movement, and is actually one of many, many theories in a field of inquiry spanning religions, cultures and eras called Eschatology (literally, “the study of the End”).

Nearly every belief system has an eschatological branch—as Christians, we know about Armageddon, and as geeks, we know about the Nordic Ragnarok. Islam, Zoroastrianism, and even the Native Americans all believed in a coming “Day of Judgement,” where the world was to be purified in some final way (the precise reason for which is unique to each religion). But what I particularly love about the Mayans was that they actually cast a date, so that there was no doubt as to when it was supposed to happen. Their counting system was precise enough over 5,000 years ago to tell us that we’ve got about 4 years left, even with the Mayan civilization itself long gone.

This is fascinating stuff, and I’ve been poring over every bit of Mayan-related info I can get my hands on. I’m a fairly secular person, and I have a natural dislike for the vagaries and ambiguities of religion. As such, the wonderful exactness of this eschaton has really got my curiosity piqued. See you all in 4 years, 10 months and 11 days!

A few dozen photos here. Some commentary and mildly racist observations from a third-world gaijin to follow over the weekend.

Hit the clubs last night, with my sister and her girl friend, the French baker.

It rained the entire evening, and Shibuya was a sea of transparent plastic umbrellas. I’m not much of a clubber, but Gaspanic was a nice place to hang out, in spite of (or perhaps, due to) the fact that they had somehow managed to cram 80 people into a space the size of my apartment back home. I learned some things about how the Japanese males move in these places, mostly from observing the 2 dozen or so propositions my two companions thumbed their noses at throughout our stay there. (Unfortunately, the Japanese females are nowhere near that forward.)

300 decibels later and it’s Saturday noon. Time to visit the Apple Store in Ginza, hooray! Didn’t matter if I already had every Apple-related product I needed for the foreseeable future; this was a visit of obligation. (Interesting tidbit about the building itself: the elevators in this 4-storey Mac monolith don’t have any buttons. You just step inside and let Apple take you where it wants you to go.)

Two blocks down the road was the Sony Building, which showcased some of the bleeding-edge gear from Japan’s biggest consumer electronics manufacturer. It didn’t seem particularly interesting until I rounded a corner on the 4th level and saw a crowd of people packed around a small glass case. It was the Rolly, an egg-shaped music device foretold by the wise men. I watched it flash and spin and sparkle, and came to realize that that was what I was in Japan to buy.

The Sony reps gave us the expected perfunctory warnings about how the device wasn’t meant for sale outside of Japan, and as such had no English manual or software. Of course, by the time the dude had finished talking my money was already in his hands, so it was a moot point. The Rolly cost JPY37,900, a little more than you would pay for an 8gb iPod Touch. It’s neither the best music player or portable speaker I’ve ever used, but it’s certainly the cutest. One could make the argument that it was the Pamela Anderson of music devices, but that ignores the fact that the Rolly is actually quite brilliant. I’ll write a more detailed entry about this later on, but suffice to say that I managed to get it working with no manual and software that wasn’t even Mac-compatible.

For dinner, we went to Alcatraz+ER, a theme restaurant in Shibuya. The whole place is decorated in the style of a prison-hospital, complete with handcuffs for the guests and jail cells instead of tables or booths. The “hospital” part of the theme was mainly just so they could dress their waitresses up as hot nurses, I guess.

Single best feature: after our first hour there, all the lights go out and a menacing face appears in the various TV screens mounted on the walls. After growling some (unfortunately for me) unintelligible threats at his dumbstruck audience, the lights come back up in discotheque mode, and the prison is transformed into the set of the Munsters. One of the male nurses runs around the restaurant singing in what I can only describe as a J-Pop rendition of Rocky Horror Picture Show. He’s followed by an escaped inmate who tries to scare the guests, who is in turn pursued by a female nurse with a gun. Then, just to make sure you get the idea, Michael Myers comes along armed with two decidedly anachronistic six-shooters and starts blowing everyone away. If you can think of a more bizarre dinner venue, I’d love to hear about it.