On Urduja, the first full-length Filipino animated film about a legendary warrior princess from Pangasinan:
Maybe our culture is so enmeshed with foreign culture that we can no longer distinguish one from the other. The story is ours; the animation isn’t. It would have been better if we handed our history and mythology over to Disney; I bet they would have created something more Filipino.
One of the best examples of the shift towards designing with web standards is the use of semantic HTML tags, rather than purely presentational ones (since we have CSS for that). Tags like <b> and <i> have gotten a lot of flak for doing nothing but make things bold or italic. They’re condemned semantically incorrect, even deprecated.
WordPress, among others, has since used <strong> and <em> their place. (Try writing a post and clicking on the “b” and “i” buttons.) Lots of people, including myself, have also adopted that same mindset. But <strong> and <em> only provide emphasis, and will not suffice for cases that require seemingly superficial formatting like boldface and italic.
Lately we’ve had several whistleblowers risking their lives so that Filipinos may know the truth. Those who are outraged have upgraded their means of communication from texting to blogging; they’ve even come up with a backronym for it: Electronic Data Swarm Against Arroyo (EDSA).
But that addresses only the current political crisis, and not the greater illness plaguing the whole government. How do you moderate greed and corruption? Could it be through a specialized wiki-turned-watchdog like Wikileaks?
Watch Orosman at Zafira. It’s beautiful, powerful, moving, inspiring. And it shows how a classic by the great Francisco Baltazar can remain so vibrant with today’s modern sensibilities. It’s perhaps the best play I’ve ever seen, considering every single play performed by the Dulaang UP is spectacular. More importantly, you will enjoy it. You will be struck by it.
The story so far: Yahoo! is in a rut, Microsoft wants to buy it for $44.6 billion, and Google is worried that the Internet’s “openness and innovation” may cease to exist if the two make a deal. Scary times.
Update (08/13/09): Yahoo! and Microsoft have agreed to join forces in search.
Update (05/04/08): Microsoft gives up on its bid. Here’s a good coverage and a timeline of the whole thing.
Update (02/09/08): Yahoo! seems to have rejected Microsoft’s offer. Ars Technica has more for those who aren’t subscribed to the Wall Street Journal.
But I’m not here to look at the deep ramifications of quite possibly the most influential tech story we’ve ever had—even if we haven’t stopped to catch our breath since the last ones. I’m going to look at how Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! announced their latest thoughts. It’s pretty revealing:
Yesterday marked the beginning of the UP Centennial celebrations, and it was a blast.
No, it was crazy! If you don’t have enough heart—and I mean both the love of UP and the will to wade through the crowd—you wouldn’t enjoy it as much. It’s easy for students and alumni who have been harassed by the pressures of college life to undervalue UP, but as someone who has lived and breathed the UP culture and excellence even before I officially studied there, UP will always be one of the most important things in my life.
No other university deserves the grandest and most meaningful of celebrations except the University of the Philippines. Happy Centennial UP! Let’s celebrate with some pictures!
