The Construct
Discourse, Society, Language, New Media, and I
That Conan thing
In: Entertainment
18 Jan 2010
I like Conan O’Brien. And what NBC is doing to him is absolutely unjust. Jay Leno gambled with his own show. Too bad for him, it crapped out on the ratings. Now he wants Conan’s time slot and looks to be getting it.
Quite honestly, I find Conan the funnier guy. And Leno’s made already so why can’t he give Conan a decent break. Anyway, Jimmy Kimmel has the best potshots to Leno’s boring ass:
I guess underneath all that shiny veneer is the real ugly face of a cutthroat business. It’s just one of those things that remind you that corporate America still will rear its ugly head when it gets the chance.
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- Tags: Conan O'Brien, Entertainment, Jay Leno, Jimmy Kimmel, Late Night, NBC, TV
Breaking the carabao’s back
15 Jan 2010
And we complain about the “poor” command of English our graduates have. There’s no reason to play chicken and egg on a problem that is caused by many wrongs on so many different levels. But one thing that the academe shouldn’t do is make matters worse by implementing obviously detrimental policies.
I just recently heard from my good friend Randwin (a fellow MA student, former classmate, and instructor at UP Los Baños) that their administration has allegedly mandated their division to turn all English GE courses to large classes of 160 students or more.
Any ESL teacher would see the flaw in such an arrangement. The lower the student ratio is, the better. For starters, it allows for more interactions between student and teacher. The teacher will also be more capable of monitoring each student’s progress.
Grading 25 papers on the merits of the good old Content, Oragnization, Style, Grammar and Mechanics is already a huge task. Imagine doing that for 160.
Obviously, some people at Los Baños are not too happy about the matter. Here’s Randwin’s take on the matter.
Globelines using new IP ranges?
In: Internet and Web
14 Jan 2010Just a quickie. I just noticed that I get 180 prefix when I connect recently. Maybe starting around a week ago. I used to get the dreaded 203 or 222 prefix which meant that I’m on their oftentimes shared public IP.
I used to have such bad luck with Globe’s shared public IP addresses. That meant I can’t use file sharing sites Rapidshare and sometimes when some dolt Globelines user had been idiotic enough to get banned (by IP) in some sites, I’m locked out as well.
Those times, I had to reconnect for several times before I get a more decent IP address. But now that I’m getting the new 180 prefix. Still dynamic but it appears that I don’t have the shared IP problem with most sites. And my uTorrent is still getting that green notification meaning that my port forwarding settings are still good.
Looks like things are looking great.
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- Tags: DSL, Globelines, Internet, IP
I think I am not alone in saying that it is frustrating to be young academic at a university in a third world. Thanks to the Internet, we know that there are so many exciting studies and researches being done elsewhere. The reality that we are lagging behind has just become even clearer.
Even in the humanities, institutions elsewhere are factoring in technologies in their studies, even acknowledging the convergence, intersections and overlaps with the other fields. They have long employed trans-disciplinary researches.
But here are, continuing to dwell in Ivory Towers. We continue to claim exclusivity and authority while the rest of the world is thriving in collaboration. Some of us still even justify our pursuance of the field with our personal abhorrence for numbers and formulas.
It is 2010. And it is a damn shame if we still stick to 20th century thinking.
Check out Bennington president Liz Coleman on her call for a cross-disciplinary approach and the reinvention of liberal arts education.
Binarurot na tambakol
13 Jan 2010That probably happened to you. You fancied trying out a restaurant for the first time. You plunk down on your seat. You flip through the menu from end to end. Then you flip through it again. There’s not one thing that you’d like to eat. Then you think whether you’d get up and leave or just settle for what you think is their most palatable dish even if it’s named “Binarurot na Tambakol” or something.
That’s exactly the feeling I have looking at the choices among the candidates for president in the 2010 elections. Here are my current takes on the presidential candidates.
- Noynoy Aquino – The guy thinks that the presidency is a birthright. Not to mention that he doesn’t have any accomplishments to boot. If this guy wins, Kris will be the most powerful woman in the country.
- JC de los Reyes – Uh. Yeah. This guy.
- Jamby Madridal – Not really aware of her agenda so pretty hard to tell. Has a bit of a leftist leaning.
- Erap Estrada – ~@_@~ (Not a big fan of emoticons, but come on…)
- Dick Gordon – Good administrator from what you can see from SBMA track record so he just might be a good chief executive. He seemed to have slacked off for the past years though. And he’s running with Bayani.
- Gibo Teodoro – On paper, one of the better candidates. But he’s running as the administration’s The Chosen One so he’s like steak with shit as gravy.
- Eddie Villanueva – I don’t seem to be comfortable with voting a guy who straddles that line between Church and State as Head of State?
- Manny Villar - The “I wuz poor” thing has gotten old. He’s been rich for so long.
The thing is, with a dish, you really won’t know if it’s any good unless you’ve tried it.
About this blog
Hi! I'm Alex, a 20-something blogger writing about the discourses of social media. Once in a while I still let slip posts about the mundane, the asinine, and the trivial. Feel free to contact me.
- Basic IT as GE course
- Master baiter
- Globelines Broadband cheaper rates
- Idle Hands
- The land of heathen drivers
- That Conan thing
- Breaking the carabao’s back
- Globelines using new IP ranges?
- Outpaced
- Binarurot na tambakol
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