Lilfe Doesn't Have an Autosave

It was on. I had brought my A game. It all started with a furious smattering of keys (in a somewhat consequential order), followed by a pause, and further smattering. Again I paused with hand on chin, and then smattered some more. It had good links in it and well thought out paragraphs. I proofread it several times, as to improve on my writing style and word choice. Being the multitasker I was, I was surfing off in another window. Happened to click a link to a PDF file, and then BAM my browser crashes. Thank you very much Adobe Acrobat Plugin. It seemed fated that this is how I would discover that blogger.com doesn't have an autosave feature. Lost the blog post I had laboured for.

The post on Music, Literature and Film will have to wait. Life doesn't have an Autosave... after a blunder we can't just revert to a previously saved reality.

Until then, 3 guesses on what "Fire Exit" is in Welsh, and the first two guesses don't count.

Photo takens by friends from the Schloss
while visiting a castle in Wales

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Perspectives

Life as we know it is governed by our perspectives. Something can happen that person A and B both experience, but can exist as completely different experiences based on their perspectives. Our perspectives hold great power over the way we interact with the world. Hence, improving our perspectives (in truthfulnes and wisdom) becomes a very worthwhile activity.

A neat site I came across helped me experience a hypothetical perspective, which gave me a better global perspetive. What if the earth only had a population of 100, yet all the proportions of races, religion, wealth, standard of living and the such remained the same. Check it out at www.miniature-earth.com/ which has a neat flash presentation. This topic of perspectives has been on my mind...

in the days before the anniversary of September 11th, 2001. The question came - what do I know of 9/11? Sure I know the surface media story and the basics, and could regurgitate (roughly) what was replayed over and over and over on the news during that entire month. I can't name any of the individuals that were accused. I can't give any clear explanation on how the twin towers could collapse after burning for under 2 hours... (while in 1975 a fire broke out for over 3 hours over 6 floors with virtually no structural damage)

In fact tons of alternative theories began to abound, easily spread by the advent of the internet. The official 9/11 Commission Report was released three years after 9/11. ABC recently also showed a docudrama The Path to 9/11" was then based off of. Still, many people seem quite convinced that something wasn't adding up.

Before we just label these as mere conspiracy theories, consider: these theories are rapidly gaining support from educated people who actually know a bit of what they're talking about. Consider a movement such as the Scholars for 9/11 Truth. They have quite an educated membership of about 300 including people experienced in advanced research, engineering, physics, etc. The wikiepdia does point out however, notably no one from the American Society of Civil Engineers is yet part of this organization.

Haven't caught up on some of the hard criticisms of the official 9/11 Commission Report? Check out some of these videos, roughly handpicked: Jim Fetzer 9/11 Panel Discussion, the popular Loose Change documentary, an MIT Engineer's take on the WTC collapse. There's countless other organizations, websites, and videos, some of which are more reasonable than the others.

I wish I could have the right and truthful perspective on much of the world's happenings. 9/11 had huge repercussions, perhaps giving ease to the American public allowing its government to declare war on Iraq. That was based on one particular perspective of 9/11, that gave sympathy to the Americans and fueled anger towards the "terrorists".

I think exposing myself to more documentaries/movies/etc can help. Best not to shut one's eyes. My problem is more of fear and this is why I have yet to vote - I find myself a paralyzed agnostic when it comes to such matters. :(

Edit (2006/09/12) - Google Video is hosting an area with tons of eyewitness footage, plus a special film called "7 Days in September". Worth checking out - http://video.google.com/911anniversary.html

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The Unnecessary Webpage

For awhile I had messed around with making a personal webpage (ThinkTankProject.com, and currently allantan.net) but with the advent of the blog, its become practically useless. There's simply so much cool stuff out there. Here's a breakdown of my current setup:

At the base of it all I use Google's Blogger.com to host my blog (which allows anonymous commenting, and you don't need a blogger.com account to come see unlike services like facebook, hi5, etc). There's tons of templates to choose from, and with a little HTML I customize colors, layout, and add my own thingies ^_^. Made the move from Xanga to Blogger about a year ago and its been great.

Then I add on a few free services (all of you can see I've integrated into my blog along the right hand side):

Del.icio.us provides a way for me to share all my links out there. You'll see my tags under "my del.icio.us tags". So i.e. you can see my saved links related to literature by clicking the corresponding tag. It's a great service to share the most popular links out there. If I had to name one site that's revolutionized my surfing, this is it. When first looking for sites to help learn Cantonese, all I had to do was go to http://del.icio.us/popular/cantonese and I was able to benefit from all the best sites that others had found. A must-join site for the web savvy (in my humble opinion).

Flickr.com to host my pictures and give me a snazzy flash badge showing a random selection of my latest pictures. Again no membership required to see the pics, and has a nifty, ajax-powered interface. Other good alternative services include yahoo photos, fotki.com, etc.

LibraryThing is a new social book management site. You create an account and enter books you have, or want, and it organizes them all into a shelf for you. Searchs Amazon and other major libraries for book info. So as you can see on the side, I chose to have a badge that shows 3 random books off my librarything shelf. This site also has all the social networking niceties - tagging, ability to see other users that have books in common, ratings, etc.

StatCounter.com offers a no frills simple web counter. Can be set to visible or invisible.

As for me, I may finally give up on working on my own private website. I still am looking for a way to somehow have "articles", which are clearly differentiated from blog posts, and then have them tagged, organized, and linked on the side as well. Something tells me I could somehow superimpose another blogger.com page with its dedicated del.icio.us account to achieve this.. hmm.. *trails off*

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