The Construct

UPDATE: And they fixed it in a matter of minutes. Read Google’s official statement on the matter. (Thanks, Tina!)

All of a sudden all search results are flagged as harmful, even Google’s own! Hah, run around and do a Chicken Little! The world is ending folks! The Interwebz is broken!

Click the photo above for the whole search results page screenshot.

The title says it all. For those who spent their teens in the 90s, I’m sure you can remember that great Levi’s commercial that featured Portishead’s Glory Box. I’ve been searching far and wide and exhausting my Google-fu to find it on the net to no avail. I need not download it or anything (copyright issues?), just to view it one more time would be a treat.

Anyway, the music video’s available on YouTube which you can view here.

But come on. That Levi’s ad was the bomb.

Our educational system needs a revamp and fixing it by adding another year to college education is not the way to go.

Writing as a person who has taught college freshman courses, I can readily tell that the problem is not with college education but with the 10 years of basic education that should have prepared students for the rigors and demands of college education.

For example, language skills are best developed during formative years. Most of the mistakes that we observe in college student’s writing could not be credited as mere lapses since most are recurring and that students are apparently unconscious about their non-standard use of the language. And, given that I teach a cross-disciplinary field, I am also aware about their lack of mastery of other areas such as history and natural sciences. While I can only write about my experiences, I’m sure that colleagues from other areas would be able to share similar experiences.

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It’s quite scary when you hear about the thousands of lost jobs these days. It makes you think about the stability of any job position in whichever industry. I have previously posed a question of whether the the economic crunch will have IT freelancers turning their sights inward to the local markets or not. However, even the local market doesn’t seem to be as stable as well.

Friends immersed in the local job market have already received memos and announcements regarding frozen hiring policies and austerity measures. Those, definitely, are concrete signs that money, in general, will be scarce this year. Imagine going to work the next morning and the first thing you see is a termination memo. Oh boy. That’d suck.

While the web content industry’s looking a bit resilient, no one can tell for certain if the stability of web work will hold. There are a lot of bloggers and other IT freelancers who rely on outsourced work that come from the States but if this trend continues, I have to admit that I am really concerned at how ugly things might get. I just couldn’t help but wonder if we can still rely on the same stability and resilience web-based media as a revenue source will be in 2009.

On a personal positive note, I’m very happy that Bloggy seems to be holding up pretty well. My boss said that he’d do whatever needs to be done to keep us afloat and there’s no reason for me not to do the same.
If your revenue stream’s your lifeline, then there’s no reason for one not to fight tooth and nail for it, right?

Whenever my tool of the trade isn’t in fully functional condition, I get depressed. Attribute that to my OCD and AR perhaps. Bottom line is that my Asus A8Jr workhorse’s Achilles heel surfaced yet again – the dreaded hinge problem is back. It has been the design flaw of Asus’ A8 series but just when I thought I could finally live a happy computing life after I had it fixed last year, lo and behold, the LCD casing is cracked, yet again and the LCD screen has a nasty wobble.

This isn’t news exactly as countless others have reported of having to get theirs fixed more than twice already. I was just hoping that mine was fixed for all eternity after having it repaired once. The only good thing about this is that I still have a good five months left in the warranty though I was troubled when Asus World (the distributor’s service and showroom at SM Megamall) informed me that they still had to check whether they can still process my request. Two reasons: 1) because it was already my 2nd claim on the same issue and 2) because Asus already has their own office here in the Philippines .

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