Don't play with it

Check out this great MSN Video: Croc and fisherman, BFFs in Costa Rica

What to update on?

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It's been a couple days. Nothing exciting has happened really... just sketching...

New sketches on .... http://cestmoipics.blogspot.com and yes I coffee stained my paper myself (as a personal experiment). The following pics are a few off the site... Yea yea yea.. I know I was writing slanted, I used to be able to write straight. Don't worry, all skills return in due time.

I decided to pair my fave quotes, or those I stumble upon that pique my interest, with inspired sketches...




C'est tout.
Shelli. Deuce

I love Google. I really do. I believe Google even owns Blogger right now... and if they didn't, then I wouldn't have been one of the first to get exclusive access to Gmail when it was first launched... Since then Google bought Youtube and formed numerous partnerships... launched an awesome browser (Chrome) and so forth.

However, in the back of my mind I've always wondered, am I the only that sees a problem with all that power? I remember back when I discovered that Google tracks your searches, the sites you frequent. There's supposed to be a feature somewhere, not that I remember how to get back to it, that shows you the history of your browsing by day, week, month, year. Sure, cool? I say creepy. But that was years ago... This article here discusses the privacy issues from then and this one as of current.

I mean... don't you think it's weird that one company should have so much information about you? Your emails, your browsing, your chat conversations, phone conversations, etc?

No one man should have all that power...♫  The clock is ticking I just count the hours...♫

I've always asked, so what if one day Google should become interested in me then? Some grand scale lawsuit comes up that requires to pull information about my online habits? I mean the chances are slim, but it's not a complete impossibility now is it? Stranger things have happened, even if such a case hasn't happened yet, it simply means there's potential for anyone's goose to be plucked, stuffed and cooked with the ease of a few clicks. ...

CNET...

If search history, e-mail and registration information were combined, a company could see intimate details about a person's health, sex life, religion, financial status and buying preferences.

It's "data that's practically a printout of what's going on in your brain: What you are thinking of buying, who you talk to, what you talk about," Bankston said. "It is an unprecedented amount of personal information, and these third parties (such as Google) have carte blanche control over that information."

Sure, they won't reveal your information to 3rd parties. *Shrug* That's what they all say... I'm just saying it's not impossible for some shade of gray area to pop up requiring the information being released. And then what?


So what inspired this? Msn's article today about invasion of privacy by a Google employee.

Creepy Google stalker proves your privacy is an illusion

-Helen A.S. Popin

David Barksdale lost his job at Google after parents complained that the 27-year-old Site Reliability Engineer violated the online privacy of at least four minors, reports Gawker. According to the story, Barksdale used his elite position to tap into Google voice phone logs, accessed Google contact lists and chat transcripts, and in at least one incident, unblocked himself from a Google Talk buddy list after the teen account owner blocked him.

...As Ryan Single recently wrote on Wired's Epicenter blog (in a post delineating Google's better practices), "They hold onto search and other profile data for too long, and their'anonymization' of the data after 18 months could be easily reversed. They still turn on thecreepy 'Web History' by default for all account holders, which is an egregious privacy choice (however, this 'feature' only records your searches and the places you visit from a search result page, unless you use the Google Toolbar in your browser, which records everything when ‘Web History’ is enabled)."

...The problem is with people, and until Skynet, there's no getting past that reality. Speaking of egregious pop culture references, who here hasn't played "Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," embracing that tingly feeling of power you get when your search engine superpowers to uncover even the most benign intimacies belonging to people you know in real life?

...With elite access comes great responsibility, sometimes too tempting to resist. That creepy Google engineer stalker guy isn't so much an anomaly as he is evidence that your online privacy is gone gone gone, and it ain't never coming back.

So now we don't even have to wait for 3rd party prompting. We could just wait on some employee on the inside to abuse the information access. 

What do you think?

Shelli out.

I just spent the entire day working on my Political Science paper. I shall now proceed to go have dinner... then spend the rest of the evening doing my Critical Reading homework.

*sigh*

Too exhausted for a real update. But I could surely do with pizza. We should seriously have a Dominoes in Grenada so I could order delivery.

Shelli out.

Everyone loves a bit of drama, no?

So upon a little bit more research, the "Burn a Koran Day" post a few posts back... was actually inspired by the notions of building a mosque near the 9/11 site. I don't think it really came to pass though. 9/11 has come and gone. I believe the idiotic pastor changed his mind a lil' bit after my initial post.

Anyways, as anticipated, Muslims aren't too pleased about the whole situation.

Excerpt... (posted Monday 13th Sept. 2.19 am via Indian Express)

In Afghanistan, protesters chanting “Death to America” and “Death to Christians” clashed with security forces in Logar, south of the capital. Seven demonstrators were wounded, when Afghan security forces opened fire to disperse protesters marching to Pul-e-Alam. The police said two of the wounded died. “The Governor must give us an assurance that the church is not going to burn the Koran, otherwise we will attack foreign troop bases in our thousands,” protester Mohammad Yahya said.

While Jones abandoned his plan, there were at least two incidents of abuse of the Koran in New York on Saturday. Meanwhile, on Sunday, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, a cleric linked to the building of the Islamic centre near Geound Zero, said the burning of the Koran “would have created a disaster in the Muslim world. It would have strengthened the radicals”.

Like they didn't see that coming... stupes

At least they didn't go ahead with the burning though... it would've far worse.

***

Till... later
Deuce

I had an awesome weekend.

I didn't go to the Jhandi but I still got my seven curry. What is seven curry you ask? (Don't worry, I know you're thinking it... I didn't know myself) How my mom explains it, it's simply different dishes in portions. Each dish you call it a curry. For example, stew eggplant, curried katahar, etc... each is a "curry." So if someone comes to visit and asks you, "what curry you cooking?" - simply means - what dish are you making today?

I love Jhandis. I can't understand a single word in the prayer, nor am I Hindu so I don't need to understand it... But I love the whole cultural experience. I get to wear my shalwar... Hopefully someday I'll have my own sari.

And most importantly, with all Indian celebrations, there's always a LOT of food involved. That naturally is my most favourite part. The dishes don't have meat - but it tastes so good you don't need meat. My favourite dishes are anything with katahar in it. Why? Because katahar tastes like chicken. I remember the first time I ate it I asked my mom how come she said they don't cook with meat yet I'm eating chicken. *frown* She thought it was funny...

Anyways... After the prayer they give you this little brown paper bag that has all sorts of yummy goodies in it - generally sweet treats. There's a little bag of fruits such as a slice of apple, a banana, dates, prunes and grapes. Then there's a bit of prasad, rote(I'm not sure how to spell this one), pera, mithai/kumar, etc... And then there's the wide range of Indian dishes such as dhal puri (roti), various curries, stews, etc. as well as desserts. Yum.


What awesomeness did I do instead? I chilled with snooks and watched a couple movies. As usual, the ones I pick turn out extra sucky and much to my annoyance, in contrast, despite my reluctance to watch a pile of action movies, he always picks out the ones that are really good. All I could do at the end was mumble and mutter and grumble to myself.


I picked out  'Burning Bright.' Honestly, it wasn't awful but it wasn't that great either. It was like a 10 minute plot that got dragged out into a full length feature film. In a nutshell it's about this young woman and her autistic brother who get trapped in a house with a tiger during a hurricane. Sounds absurd? Not quite. How the movie explains itself is plausible enough... but it's not involving enough. Straight-to-dvd? Yes. Would I watch it again? Umm.... sadly to say, yes, just because of the suspenseful gasp moments with the tiger (and I cut through half of the movie and apparently we missed some exciting parts according to reviews on IMDB). The tiger was absolutely gorgeous and they used a real one(or three). But... the plot just didn't have enough to carry the whole film.



He picked "Salt" and "Knight and Day." I loved 'Salt.' It was very entertaining... nice plot line and development. A little love story, a little action, and lots of woman power - what's not to like? Tagline question is 'Who is Salt?' In a nutshell she works for the CIA and is accused of being a Russian spy. After reading through some reviews on IMDB some people seem to have gone too indepth with their analysis - going on and on about the Cold War, the impossibility of the movie, blah blah blah. It's just a movie, chill, an entertaining one at that.




 'Knight and Day' was alright. I think I almost fell asleep at some points, but that could be because I was tired as well. It had a similar action/romance trend to 'Salt' but (to me) less involving. However, it was more comedy and had a much lighter atmosphere and considering all the hype from the two action/suspense/thriller movies we watched prior, so that could be the cause of my prejudice. Maybe if I watched it in isolation of the other films and wasn't a tad sleepy then perhaps I would've loved it. I generally love all of Cameron Diaz's movies. Some people are after some powerful battery Tom Cruise's character in the movie helped create. They try to kill him, Cameron gets fenced in all the excitement inadvertently.

Jhandi this evening. Might be going. Wish I had a camera.... but I don't. Write about it later.

Deuce.

That is... Captain Corelli's Mandolin. There's a movie based on it as well.... I've never finished it but the language is so delicious and transforming... it's almost like watching an artist paint a painting except his words are the paint and the pages are his brush. And... as with painting, you don't fully always understand everything that's going on but you're so mesmerized and enthralled by watching and being able to share the process, you can't help but continue the journey and try to see like you're watching through the artist's eyes himself.

And I won't wait for you forever 

While you run around like JFK.. 

Cherise: How did u think i got so deep in it?

Now that I've broken the blog post drought.... onto the other updates.


***

It's been long overdue and every time I start a post there's been some grand intervention - be it power outage to random phone call.

Anyways, here goes.... updates.




My uncle passed away.

Xiaxue... (anti-smoking post excerpt from her blog)

I was just thinking about how anti-smoking campaigns are always going via the "soft" approach. You know, how it's like an addiction and there are hotlines, support groups and nicotine patches to help smokers quit.

Like they are going through some kind of unfortunate crisis.

Sure, there are also damn ugly photos on cigarette packets and maybe they work, but after a while, they lose their impact too! Honestly when I look at the photo of the reddish baby that looks like the baby octopus cold dish they serve at restaurants, all I think is, "URGH! That's hideous. I bet it's photoshopped for dramatic effect."

And when smokers see a photo of an abused, tarred lung, you think they pause and imagine that lung inside them and decide to quit?

No way. All these are effects that are not instant, so what happens is that they decide they willeventually quit, but not today. What's another week of smoking gonna do to a lung that's already soot black?

When you want people to quit smoking, you need to give them bloody good reasons, and because a lot of these reasons are not POLITICALLY CORRECT, nobody ever says them.

Obviously I don't mean that every non-smoker hates smokers. I have smoker friends. I'm just saying that I'd like then even better if they don't smoke. For example, if I have to only pick one friend to go on a free holiday with me, and I like both smoker and non-smoker friend equally, I'd pick the non-smoker friend. Why? Coz even if my smoker friend is really considerate, I still have to wait for him to finish smoking, thus eating up my holiday time. He'd ask if we can eat outdoors when I like indoors aircon and I don't like to have to reject people. I'd be alone while he smokes, etc....

Of course the opposite is true that smokers also prefer to have smoking friends but non-smokers WAY outnumber smokers. 

 Oh... and p.s. her stats include grandmothers, babies, children, etc...