As much as I want to summarize this entire post by saying “Internet Explorer 7 is fucking gay,” it won’t really explain why Microsoft’s latest release of IE crushed my hopes of less frustrating work.

This blog looks fine on Firefox and Opera. Even on Linux (Firefox) and Mac (Safari), the only glitch is the search field which gets a bit wider than it should be. Heck, it even looks fine on IE6.

On IE7, the footer at the bottom by some means of forbidden arcane magic moves up considerably and covers certain portions of the site. I have no idea how it got there and why it’s only happening on this supposedly improved browser. I played around with my CSS to try and fix it, but I already had this feeling that it would amount to nothing.

My temporary quick fix is this conditional comment:

<!–[if lte IE 6]>
   Footer code goes here
<![endif]–>

I enclosed my footer in that so IE7 would ignore the code and seal off whatever ancient magics put in place by Microsoft’s development team. I’ll keep it in there until I figure out exactly what the problem is and fix it. Not the best course of action, but I doubt anyone will miss seeing the copyright text and page rendering speed for the time being.

The judging guidelines provided by the PWA state that they’re mere suggestions and are not exhaustive. So basically, as before, I can judge however the hell I want.

However, judging for the Blogs category will involve wading through a whole lot of crap, I’m going to say that upfront. To prepare myself for the inevitable shitcluster, I’ve come up with my own personal judging guidelines so I may stand firm on my scores. The scores I’m gonna be giving out are gonna be harsh, but it will be my only shield when charging head-first into this ugly, semi-pretentious collection of melodrama.

I’ve written them in the form of questions I would ask myself during my evaluations. Hopefully some of you readers (there’s like 1 of you out there) share my views.

Content

• First and foremost, is this person writing coherent entries?
• Do the entries seem sincere, or is this person sugar-coating the mundane? While sugar-coating isn’t bad, it requires skill to pull off effectively.
• How is this person’s spelling and grammar? By default, this person is subject to the holy tenets of the grammar nazi in you.
• Do you get the feeling this person’s entries exist for the sole purpose of getting site hits?
• When was the last time this person wrote a non-filler entry?
• Would I willingly subject myself to this experience a second time?

Design

• This is extremely important, how far did this person deviate from the default theme of his chosen CMS/blogging software/blogging service? If this person fails here, give him a score ranging from 0 to 2, forego the following guidelines and skip to the next criteria.
• If the design did not make you cringe or did not blind you, how purrrdy is it?
• Does the site look like shite in popular alternative browsers like Firefox and Opera?

Usability

• Is any of this person’s content readable by any discernable standard?
• How long did it take for you to realize that that blob over there is this person’s site navigation?
• Were you attacked by unnecessary Javascript alerts, prompts, or any other unnecessary steps to access this person’s content?
• Does the site transform into total shite when you disable the stylesheets?
• Has the site in any way, shape or form disabled or crippled your beloved keyboard shortcuts and normal browser functions?
• Does anything at all in this person’s site cause your browser to crash or respond slowly like that fucking Reuters video feed at the bottom of the layout?

Functionality

• Is the site even up?
• Is anything broken?
• Did you doze off while it was loading?
• Does looking at the source code give you a warm fuzzy feeling deep inside?

Now I realize my own blog may not pass my own standards, but I’m not entered in any sort of awards, so there. Bah, I’m going to continue judging later. That is, if the judging page cooperates and stops giving me that goddamn database error.

As you may already know (there’s 1 other person who actually comes to this blog), I was invited to judge again at the Philippine Web Awards this year. Anyway, so I login to the judge’s page –which by the way has a very classic feel (hover over dashed phrase) to it– and the list is quite long.

I wanted to test their web application out so I picked out a site from the list and visited it. The site was amusing in a very bad way, but that story is for another day. I enter my chosen scores, click the “Update Scores” button, then lo and behold:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error ‘80040e14′

[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]Incorrect syntax near the keyword ‘AND’.

/elimination_save.asp, line 20

I guess I won’t be judging anything today. I miss having this much held-back criticism for a higher pseudo-authority.

Mark your calendars boys and girls!

Is it so bad to let a client screw up his own site? The beginning of a project is usually so much better. Everything has been agreed upon, everything has been organized and laid out neatly just waiting to be created. More »

Because:

• Too expensive
• Too trendy
• No games
• Some people only buy one as a status symbol
• No games

Well crap. I just spent P300 trying to get a copy of my birth certificate only to receive, a few days later, a sheet of really fancy paper asserting that I, in fact, do not exist. The HR department won’t be happy about this delay. Sigh.

I’m skipping work tomorrow to get at least some of my other requirements straightened out. For now, they will have to settle for my tangible, physical presence.

I went out yesterday to the mall to take my passport picture taken. No, I’m not going anywhere, but I needed to renew it to claim some documents I need before I go back to working. After the photographer took my pictures, I was told to come back a few hours later to pick them up. I haven’t been to the movies in quite some time so I thought seeing a film wouldn’t be a total waste.

I saw the Aeon Flux poster and remember the extremely slick and stylized animations from MTV Oddities and Liquid Television from the 90’s when I was younger. The Head, The Maxx and Aeon Flux were quite possibly the coolest shows I’ve ever seen back then.

I simply loved how the protagonist, who looked like the poster child for anorexia, would just jump, flip, run and shoot in a way that would put any B-movie ninja to shame. The revealing leather outfits, the otherworldly firearms, the cyberpunk setting, the sex and violence, I loved everything. Exactly the reasons why my brain’s logic center switched itself off and why I picked to watch this movie over Memoirs of a Geisha.

I should have seen it coming. It’s a movie adaptation of a popular action animation, of course it’s bound to suck.

Charlize Theron, while really pretty, doesn’t look anything like Aeon. Perhaps someone like Famke Janssen or even Carrie Ann Moss would have been a more appropriate choice to play the role. Nonetheless, the hairdo while completely inaccurate, is actually not bad. My biggest complaint (same with most other guys) is the costume, hands down. Aeon Flux = 30% leather + 70% skin, a formula the filmmakers obviously missed.

While the setting was still surreal, it seemed too clean compared to the eccentric cyberpunk that I remembered from the animated series. I have nothing against this though, they were better off coming up with something they could believably pull off rather than try mimicking the original series knowing they can never emulate the same exact look and feel of it.

The plot was shallow, but passable. I can’t really compare it to the animated series because it was too weird for me to understand and piece together back then. The action was not what I expected, I was waiting for bullet-time effect like in The Matrix but they never came. I also wanted to see similar things from the series like tools hidden in Aeon’s… er… privates. Instead, we get an eyedropper hidden in her heel. Lame.

Aeon Flux is too tall an order to be a live action movie, I never should have expected anything more than a Hollywood eye candy movie created to take advantage of people’s nostalgia and curiosity. This movie is a great disservice to those who enjoyed the series back in the 90’s, when MTV was still cool.

Since I’m moving out soon, there’s really no point in keeping our cable TV service. For the past week or so, I’ve been stuck with local TV stations, unfortunately my cable-ready TV doesn’t have an antenna and I’m stuck with channels 2, 4, 5, 7 and 11. I’ve always had the general impression that local programming was somewhat lacking, but now I’ve seen it for myself and have come to the conclusion that local TV just simply sucks.

I don’t get why everything now on local TV should be in Filipino (Tagalog, in my case). My childhood upbringing as an English-speaking Filipino bias aside, it’s a little counter-productive to undermine our advantage as a reasonably competent English-speaking Asian country when we’re already down in the dumps.

I’ve heard and read enough mangled English from real life, from forums, blogs, and Friendster profiles, so why the hell are we encouraging it? I know that some countries do well with enough understandable English and still have successful economies, but obviously ours isn’t successful and now we’re being downgraded from having decent English to having understandable English. Oh joy, now we won’t have either. Way to go, Philippines!

Just being patriotic in my own pessimistic way.

And don’t get me started on all those Asian telenovelas. Urrghh..