It’s amazing how quickly one can learn about WordPress themes when one is forced to use either the ‘classic’ or ‘default’ one. This one was put together (hastily) with the magic colour wheel and looking enviously at Thought Mechanics’ Benevolence theme.

There’s a nice new Dell laptop available. Gizmodo says, “It might even miss the Dell laptop curse, too, and stand more than 12 months of abuse.” My Dell Inspiron 2500 laptop has survived for 43 months, give or take a few hiccups that haven’t killed or maimed it. My speaker’s broken, though.

There is an online petition (Chinese only, sorry) opposing Japan’s application for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. My colleagues have just asked me to sign it, signalling my support for China and anger at Japan.

Eh.

“Why?”

“Because Japan shouldn’t get a permanent seat.”

“Why?”

“Because Japan doesn’t deserve to get a permanent seat.”

“But why not? Why are you objecting?”

“They don’t face their history. They refuse to acknowledge history.”

“And China does? China is just as bad at denying history.”

“No. China is nothing like that.”

Like I said. Eh.

Jemaah Islamiyah is regrouping and expanding, despite efforts by Southeast Asian governments to clamp down. Are we beating the bad guys the War on Terror™? Are we winning those hearts and minds?

Is this just a minor setback before we triumph and peace reigns forever and forever amen? Or are we doomed to eternal strife with the darkest parts of humankind?

If Bush fans can laud him for having something to do with developments in Lebanon and Kyrgyzstan, I can condemn him for strengthening terrorist groups in Southeast Asia by his diplomacy-challenged words and deeds. Who can claim credit for one and distance oneself from the other?

With great power comes great responsibility. Can our Dear Leaders see that beyond their own egos, battle scars, and paranoia? Unforeseen consequences can damn us all to hell (and we die).

So is George Bush’s strong and unwavering leadership responsible for this, too? Jittery Lebanese re-arm amid spree of bombings:

Pro-Syrian Christians have accused anti-Syrian Christians of planting the bombs to give the international community an opportunity to intervene.

As Lebanese watch their politicians bicker, they can’t help but remember where such squabbles have led before.

“Everybody is worried. Everybody can feel the tensions. We are living it day by day,” said Mohammed Barakat, 50, a shoe vendor in Beirut’s Shiite-dominated southern suburbs. “We want the politicians to make a solution. Nobody wants war, but we are worried because no solution is in sight.”

Although Lebanese overwhelmingly say they never want to fight again, there are some who remember the benefits of a war that brought employment for jobless young men, as well as lucrative business opportunities for militias in territories they controlled.

…

“All the Lebanese hate each other, you can be sure of that,” Jamous said. “Christian people can’t live with Muslims. This country was created for Christians, but Muslims, they want this country to be only for Muslim people. We cannot live together. We need a solution.”

Most Christians don’t take such an extreme view. But the United States’ support for UN Resolution 1559, which calls for the withdrawal of Syrian troops and for the disarmament of the Hezbollah militia, has convinced Jamous that America will support his goal.

“With George Bush, we have a chance,” he said.

That is precisely why Saleh, the Shiite grocer, decided he should take the precaution of buying a Kalashnikov. If America attempts to fill the vacuum left by the departing Syrians, Hezbollah will fight, he is sure.

“The opposition wants to replace Syria with America, and that will lead to conflict,” he said.

Ya can’t live with ‘em, and ya can’t live without ‘em. Eh. Pro-American supporters in countries like Lebanon might be a little too optimistic over what the Bush Administration can do for them — for all their grand ambitions, the Bushies are only human and (very clearly, as has been amply demonstrated) prone to folly.

If you’re viewing my site and have noticed I’m using the fugly WordPress default template, it means I’ve successfully upgraded to WordPress 1.5. I absolutely refuse to use the Kubrick theme on principle. Too many people use it.

Plus, this one’s so boring I’ll be forced to create my own, quick smart. Dave will be back.

(The default comment spam protection is this: all new commenters — I’m not sure if it means new since the upgrade — must have one comment approved before having their future comments posted without moderation. Or something.)

Running releases endorphins in the brain. This bloke must be an endorphin junkie — an ultra-marathoner who’s run 262 miles non stop. At least he eats pizza.

Neil did not bring a new battery for my Sony digital camera. He did, however, manage to work out why the camera wasn’t charging: the two-prong plug on the charger makes for a poor connection. Danger averted, life returns to normal.

It turns out that the Normal.dot template in Word had flipped out, and that, in turn, fucked with Word and made it freeze and fizzle. Deleting the file made Word and AntiVirus scanning become friends again. Panic over, life returns to normal.

Next, in the attempt to try and kill myself with unwarranted worry over my computer: upgrading to WordPress 1.5 Strayhorn. When I have time. I might start doing some themes too, just to keep things interesting — even if only for myself.

Campaign to stop Killer Coke, via The Nation. I’d support the removal of soda vending machines out of school because of all the high fructose corn syrup in the drinks.

• welcomed Neil back (woohoo!)
• had dinner at Tutto Bene
• pottered about and went to Jimei
• had dinner and several drinks at The House
• had a few drinks at Park Latin
• had one drink at KK (and were scared off by the music and an overly-friendly bartender)
• had incredibly good duck rice porridge at 4am
• stayed in bed all day
• had all you can eat Japanese
• had dessert at Javaromas
• stayed up far too late talking

If the makers of The Office: An American Workplace are as dry and clever as described, I cannot wait to see the first season. Via Shanghai Diaries.

Bloody hell, technology is a real motherfucker.

Anyone who knows me knows that I love gadgets and I’m practically having an affair with my laptop. It was a good day on Christmas back in 2002, because Neil had bought me a super cool, superstylin’ Sony digital camera. The camera and I have been inseparable since then, until a sad little incident a few weeks ago.

I tried to use my digital camera and the battery was dead. I plugged it into the cradle to charge it, and zip, zero, nada. No response. It wasn’t charging. Time to get a new battery, then. Fine, except that I can’t find a Sony distributor in Xiamen that sells the model of battery I need. So, in the hope that Neil got my message and bought a replacement battery (50 freakin’ pounds), my camera should be back in commission over the next couple of days.

If he hasn’t, I’m not quite sure what to do.

But the real kick in the proverbial nuts is that the deadline and final work on What’s On Xiamen’s second issue is staring me in the face, and my laptop, my baby, has decided to pack it in. I suspect it has to do with some abuse AVG AntiVirus must be hurling at Microsoft Word (insults about Bill Gates’ mum? I’ll never know), because every single time I open a Word document, it ‘requests a virus scan’ and then promptly forgets itself and just… kind of… hangs. That fucking hourglass just sits there and refuses to actually do anything. Anything I try to do to close or restart it brings about the dreaded BSOD. If I manage to close it and have only my standard system tray programmes running, I get a warning message that system resources are running dangerously low.

I use a Dell Inspiron 2500 laptop that runs Windows ME (best I could afford at the time, don’t start with me), and I am diligent about running defragmentation, spybot scanning, and virus scanning. I’ve never had to reinstall the operating system since I accepted delivery in 2001. No, I haven’t opened any attachments. I have used less than half the hard drive capacity. I ran Power Defrag yesterday and it worked fine. I plan to run the antivirus tonight and see if that works. I will get on the Internets and see if it makes my computer shit itself. If everything works, I’ll know Word is fucked. Unfortunately, the one thing I need to use to write and edit the magazine happens to be Word.

I don’t know WTF is happening, how AVG AntiVirus managed to break Word, and WHY ON GOD’S GREEN EARTH IT HAD TO SMACK DOWN MY LAPTOP THIS WEEK OF ALL WEEKS.

Fuck.

Update: Jeff thinks it might be spyware. I’ll run Spybot Search & Destroy too, see if anything gets picked up.

Joel Rosen is trying to raise US$4,500 for The Leukaemia & Lymphoma Society.

The Economist weighs in on The sad case of Terri Schiavo:

The Schiavo bill is an extraordinary piece of federal interference in the judicial system. In order to get it passed, the Republicans had to limit their bill to Mrs Schiavo; but it will surely justify a surge of similar heart-breaking requests. The bill also specifically tells the federal judge to examine the case “notwithstanding any prior state-court determination”. The Republicans, who are usually stern defenders of states’ rights, may come to rue the day when they urged the federal system to ignore them.

In short, for a mixture of motives—some sincere, some political—the Republicans have over-reached themselves. In the meantime, Mrs Schiavo’s case should remind any Americans who do not want to put their families through a similar ordeal to start writing their living wills right away.

I don’t know, and I don’t think, there’s a ‘correct’, ‘right’, or ‘moral’ course of action to take (legal pleadings notwithstanding). Letting me die by starvation or continuing to feed me through a tube in the vain hope that someday, somehow, there might possibly be a way to revive my brain is a choice I hope my family will never have to make. Using this poor woman as a political pawn, I hope, will come back to bite politicians in the arse later on (I’m lookin’ at you, Tom DeLay and George Bush), but knowing that the collective memory of the population tends to resemble that of a goldfish, I doubt that’ll happen.

People I can safely dislike: those who say, With my looks and personality I can get any woman I want. It’s a sure sign that you can’t, really.

You know how sometimes you get stories in the news (or the National Enquirer) about someone who’s been

1. arrested for serial murder or depraved sex acts, and/or
2. caught out having a torrid affair involving all sorts of torture implements

and you think, Wow, he/she doesn’t look the type. Neighbours are shocked and gasp, He/She was always so quiet, I never would have expected they’d be making monkey snuff porn and selling it on the Internets (just an example, I haven’t actually read about anyone making monkey snuff porn).

Well, I’ll have you know that I also lead a secret double life. You don’t know it — and I certainly didn’t know it either — but according to my sources, I get up to all sorts of shite when Neil’s not in town.

The ‘big news’ among the expatriate community, I’m told, is that I got together with a French bloke (let’s call him Dieter because that’s clearly not French) two weekends ago. Dieter and I were seen dancing and talking at Park Latin, so of course dirty primal (monkey) sex must have followed.

I have this on authority from people who weren’t there that evening, so it must be true.

(I hate to break it to the gossip hounds, but when we met up — omigod, just the two of us! — last night, nothing more sexy was discussed than our jobs, What’s On Xiamen, and of course, the news of our non-existent dalliance. Over a beer. Then he dropped me off in a taxi. Ooh, scandal.)

The Iron Rock sailing crew in Xiamen will attempt to relive Admiral Cheng Ho’s voyage around the world, as documented in 1421: The Year China Discovered the World (well, sort of). But they’ll have GPS, cameras, radios, and walkie talkies to help them along.

You know things are bad when vigilante justice is celebrated as a victory for the good guys. Defending themselves is a perfectly reasonable act — it’s just sad that the Iraqi police are being kidnapped and murdered and these civilians have to protect themselves in this way.

I chuckled along with everyone else (albeit less nervously, since I’m not American, my government gets their news from the state-controlled media, which is much more reliable) to read that George Bush gets his news from his staff. All he does is “…glance at the headlines just to kind of a flavor for what’s moving.” And that “I appreciate people’s opinions, but I’m more interested in news. And the best way to get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what’s happening in the world.”

This may be seriously old news, Bush’s tendency to trust one set of people’s opinions as objective but not others, but I realised this morning that an uncomfortably large number of us probably work in an environment where our top management rely on their personal assistants to get the lowdown on company morale and gossip, expecting them to report objectively, and not be subject to personal biases and agendas of their own.

I didn’t earn much of an income (if any) when I had a ‘home office’ (i.e. unemployed) for over a year, but I didn’t have to deal with company politics that I heard so many groaning about — So-and-so stabs people in the back to get ahead. So-and-so won’t talk to so-and-so, even if they’re in a meeting together. So-and-so thinks they’re something special and expects to be treated that way. So-and-so is in charge, but so-and-so is also in charge and they don’t talk to each other.

S’pose that’s the price you pay for being in an organisation. You have to work with other people. It’s pretty damn hard to stab yourself in the back when you work for yourself.

I do sometimes wonder how in God’s name companies can muddle along and not go bankrupt with all the bullshit that goes on — sheer luck and the fact that most other companies are the same, methinks.

I’m not sure of the real reason behind CAAS’ delay of cheap flights between Singapore and Indonesia (essentially), and if it was to get a better bargaining position with the Indonesian government. The Singapore government is, rightly or wrongly, a very practical organisation, so if the above reason is true, they see some benefit in holding back the landing rights to AWAIR.

Maybe the rationale is, if Changi does become the de facto ‘hub’ for cheap regional flights, budget airlines will want / have no choice but to stop in Singapore.