The day I lost root privileges

I have (K)ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin installed on my Fujitsu Lifebook UH75/J (I've discussed about it in one of my previous posts). Needless to say, the experience was nice. It was the first time I ever used KDE as my primary DE for everyday use. I had used KDE on my desktop, but never thought about using it full-time, as I only switched to it whenever Unity felt a little boring.

Anyway, fast forward a couple of weeks, and suddenly I found myself unable to run commands with root privileges (with the `sudo' command). Every command which I prefix with `sudo' gets denied with a message telling me I was not in the sudoers file and that the incident shall be reported (gee, I wonder to whom they actually report these to). Frustrated, I've decided to log in directly as root with `su'. Then I remembered that Ubuntu, for some odd reason, does not allow logging in as root by default.

Instinctively, I turned to searching for solutions online. One solution told me to log in to Recovery Mode, log in as root from there, and then add myself back to the sudoers group. But even if I managed to do that, I still haven't answered one important question. How and why was I removed from the sudoers group in the first place? I don't remember intentionally nor accidentally revoking my own sudo privileges from myself. While trying out the solutions I have found, I thought of the reasons for my disappearing privileges in the background.

Then the realization hit me. I don't recall exactly how, but I remembered how exactly I lost my user privileges when I saw a command telling people how to add themselves into the `sudo' group (the group of users in an Ubuntu system who has sudo privileges). Quickly, I used the `groups' command to check what groups in my notebook I'm part of, then the horror showed up in my face:

aldo : vboxusers

Then I remember it all now. I was trying to get Virtualbox to work on my new ultrabook some time ago, and one of the things I had to do was to get USB devices to work from the host machine to the guest machines. It would involve having me put myself in the special `vboxusers' group, but because I don't really memorize console commands that well unless I have to use them a lot, I used a variant of the `useradd' command, which puts me in the vboxusers group ONLY, instead of appending the vboxusers group to the groups in which I belong to. I forgot that the `gpasswd' command was a much better solution when it comes to adding groups. I'll try to keep this in mind since I'll probably be administrating other people's boxes in the future. Screwups increase exponentially in severity the more users become affected by one's mistake.

Since Ubuntu doesn't allow root logins unless you were to go to recovery mode, I've decided to reboot into recovery mode, however, there was a conflict with the inteldrmfb and Vesa VGA drivers. After more frantic Googling, I removed `nomodeset' temporarily from the launch options of the recovery boot and I was immediately put into recovery mode. I proceeded to login as root, checked out all the available groups in `/etc/group' and `/etc/passwd', then added myself to the sudo group and other groups which I think I should be part of.

After rebooting, I was relieved to find that I now have my sudo privileges back. The world seems strange when you don't have root privileges, doesn't it?

I haven't told you about my Plan B: In case I get tired of fixing my problem, which usually never happens, I would replace Ubuntu with openSUSE since I was itching to try it out, and since I have quite a lot of free time this Philippine summer to reconfigure my system. However, since I have already fixed the problem, I don't feel the need to replace Ubuntu anytime soon. Perhaps I'll just move when another seemingly insurmountable problem arises.

NaNoWriMo 2012

Today marks the first day for the National Novel Writing Month of 2012. Actually, that was yesterday, but I did plan writing this post earlier though I procrastinated by watching a couple of very well-made films made using the Source Film Maker on Youtube, and so I digress. Don't worry about the name though, NaNoWriMo is actually international. There's also conveniently a community of WriMos in the Philippines, which, of course, I immediately joined.

I took on the challenge of joining the NaNoWriMo this year because I find that it's a perfect challenge for me to pursue on my road to self-improvement. 50,000 words in 30 days. Not a pretty hard challenge to do especially with me being a man of dedication and perseverance.

I've been concocting a faint idea of my novel for a while, as I rode my commute from school to my home, a period where I am strangely more creative than usual. It's the story of a young girl who lives in a dystopian Philippine society of the future where the entire country was ruled by an autocratic theocracy. And that's basically an explanation of the story in one line.

I plan to license my novel using a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license once I finish it, so that I can distribute e-book copies of it for free here on my blog, and just earn revenue through the sale of physical books, similar to what Cory Doctorow did to his book, Little Brother. I don't really care about book royalties, I'm more concerned with delivering a message.

I'll keep you guys posted on my progress. Right now it's the second day of the NaNoWriMo and so far I've done 7700, according to my last word count update at the time of writing. My estimated time of completion should be somewhere around the middle of November, if not, a few days after mid-November.

Some friendly requests to professors and instructors everywhere

This probably isn't news anymore for some people, but I recently jumped ship to another college and I do not reside anymore in De La Salle University-Manila. Old news aside, I like my new school, and I'm going to be staying in it for a good two years or so. The place is great (the places around it are better though), and most people there have quite some eccentric tastes and are actually interesting.

However, there are some do's and don'ts (mostly don'ts though) that I'd like to point out regarding my professors and instructors there. These will probably apply to everybody else out who are teaching to at least one other person besides themselves.

Don't put your class's/section's group on Facebook.

I for one try to avoid Facebook like it is an ugly part of town, but sometimes it just comes back like a bad habit and I end up being there anyway. For example, this post gets automatically advertised on my wall and every unfortunate person on my Friends list's news feed. Other notable examples include looking for someone, trying to communicate with people I barely meet every week, and checking out a group my professor made for the class I'm taking.

And the latter isn't really supposed to be there. Facebook is still a long, long way from being a good choice to organize serious groups, like groups between co-workers or, in my case, groups between instructors and students. For one, every privacy issue associated with Facebook profiles apply to groups as well. You really don't want outsiders knowing what your little private group is up to. That's why some companies opt for private corporate "social networks" because apparently people can't communicate on the Internet anymore if it doesn't involve a news feed or an instant messaging platform. I still communicate through old fashioned e-mail, and handle most instant communication through IRC (and sometimes VoIP), so that probably means I'm old.

What's a good alternative for Facebook groups? I'd have gone and suggested Yahoo!, but to me Yahoo! is just a silly company trying to be like Google but instead became a Google clone for those with inept computer skills and awful English. Google Groups is a good place to start, and there are also a lot of other services out there besides Facebook and Yahoo! that you can try out.

Stop handing out documents to students in formats other than PDF.

I like the Portable Document Format ever since it became an open standard at around the year 2008. It does a great job of preserving the original content and format of documents and its sheer portability and commonness is due to Adobe pulling a Microsoft move and telling everybody that their PDF reader and authoring tools are the only things that matter, when there are actually a lot more better readers out there and numerous ways to create PDFs. I can read PDFs on my desktop, my ThinkPad, my tablet, my phone, and my Kindle. And that is good.

However, some instructors thought it was a good idea to hand out documents to their students in their original, editable document forms. The "editable" part isn't the problem here, I actually do not give a shit whether I can manipulate my copy of the document or not. The problem is, handing out documents in such formats hinders portability, because, for example, files that use Microsoft's new formats (*.docx, etc.) look messed up when you're not using something that has Microsoft's name on it to open them. Sure, LibreOffice has done a good job of at least trying to preserve the original formats and looks of Microsoft .doc and .docx files, but when I open these files in my tablet or my phone, things get really ugly. I haven't tried opening .doc, .docx, or .odf files on my Kindle yet, probably because I think that's a very stupid idea.

Instructors should save all the documents that they're going to hand out to their students as PDFs - this goes for presentations as well. This saves me (and other students as well) a lot of time trying to figure out the original format of the file when LibreOffice is having a hard time opening it. Don't know how to save a document as a PDF? Your (probably pirated) copy of Microsoft Office 2010 has that functionality built inside it already.

Don't upload your materials to Rapidshare (or some other bad "filehost").

Right now as I'm typing this, I'm also downloading an economics textbook encoded as a PDF about 69 megabytes big. The size really shouldn't be a problem here - 69 megabytes are downloaded in less than 10 minutes by my connection on average. But right now the estimate says it's going to take a bit like 40 minutes to download (not adjusted to compensate for how badly Chrome estimates remaining download times). The problem lies where the file lies - Rapidshare.

Rapidshare has earned its share of popularity for being the [probably most popular] site that annoys people trying to access it and ripping off people stupid enough to avail of their services by coughing up some euros. The site throttles down your download speed when you're just getting your files for free, and you can't even download more than 2 files at once; both problems are remedied once you've given in to your sanity and you've decided to pay up. They're also not the only one doing this, there are countless of other "file hosts" out there ripping off each other's business models.

The solution for this would be to use an actually decent file host, like Mediafire, or create a Dropbox account and share the files from there. And if the file is really big, it's not too hard to just make a torrent out of it.

Oh, and after finishing the first draft of this post, reading through it two times and doing some edits here and there, my download from Rapidshare isn't even done yet. That means I'm probably going to be staying up late again trying to create a very minimal presentation that no one can understand unless they listen to me talk while I'm presenting. Thanks a lot for making me lose my sleep, Rapidshare!

Books are dying, kept alive by tablets, e-book readers

Books are, in my opinion, one of the best innovations known to man. While many earlier forms of storing information and literature have existed long before people wrote shit on paper then binded them together, books have remained living until today. And by living, I mean it's currently holding on for dear life.

Electronic book technology has allowed people to read works of literature on their shiny tablets, Kindles, iPhones, etc. My Desire HD carries a large collection of ebooks of which I spend an hour or two everyday to read. While I do have a large collection of ebooks, I also have an equally large collection of physical books. You know, those that are written on "paper" and binded together.

Reading on paper is way better than reading on some LCD screen. I've never enjoyed looking at electronic screens anyway. No matter how many innovations in display technology are being made every day, like high resolution LCDs, LED-backlit screens and the like, I just really don't get the hang of reading text on a bright screen. I've even had a hard time writing this post because it appears that my laptop's screen is fucking me with its brightness. And that's why when I read text, I try to invest a lot in anti-aliasing and high resolution displays. Also, something that's not too bright on my eyes.

This kind of ranting is strange to hear from someone who spends his time in front of screens of all sizes, be it dark UNIX terminals on my laptop or my phone. But seriously, nothing beats the sensation of reading a physical book in the presence soft light. There's even the aroma of aged paper that pulls you in to read further. Additionally, while reading physical books, there's the strange effect where you won't try to skim the story or skip parts the first time you read it. In reading text in screens, your TL;DR instincts start to kick in. With physical literature, the concept of TL;DR simply could not exist (unless you're reading a shitty book).

I know this ranting makes me sound like I'm sixty years old, but honestly I'm not even of legal age yet. But it really sucks that lots of people (old folks included) begin to favor ebooks over the original, physical ones we've been enjoying for more than a thousand and a half years. But then again, who reads ebooks? The longest piece of literature the majority of people read today is probably a Facebook status message. And statistically, 99.99999% of Facebook statuses don't even count as literature. "Random shit jumbled into decipherable words" would be a more appropriate term for it.

TL;DR: E-books suck.

A sad case of focus loss

It's been more than a month since I last wrote a post for Sulatang Tapunan. It's been a frustrating October for me, even though that was the month where my birthday sits on. My ability to focus on one task is currently unoperational, as I have been trying to train my mind to multi-task everything. The human mind is not really a multi-threaded machine, and trying to multi-task on it is like telling your dog to do a handstand while he eats his food. It's never easy nor comfortable.

I managed to grab some time to write to Sulatang Tapunan by eagerly anticipating the arrival of my copy of Borderlands: Claptraps Robot Revolution DLC, instead of wasting my time playing Call of Duty: Black Ops (not really implying playing CoD:BO is a complete waste of time, that game is kickass, it's just that I don't really achieve much if I play it). Also, I am trying to fully adapt myself to turn Xubuntu into my primary operating system, and just resort to using Windows 7 if some game could not be run by Wine. As a consequence I wouldn't be able to use Windows Live Writer, a very good blogging tool developed by the folks at Microsoft, which I use frequently to write to Sulatang Tapunan, for its smooth, intuitive interface that is very similar to that of Office's.

Although the smooth ribbon toolbars and aero transparency is visually appealing to the eyes, it is also very, very distracting. When I first encountered the Aero interface I was very dazzled by the incredibly smooth blurring and transparency of the windows, and I would exclaim in my mind, "Holy shit, how did they do that?". My amazement was short-lived, though, as I quickly found ways to replicate the same effect in Windows XP, and more recently in a Linux Desktop Environment.

I wouldn't even dare go back to Blogger's default web editor either. Trying to work in a web browser is very dangerous to your concentration, especially today where my browser has an average of 30 tabs lying around (all sorted cleanly and beautifully by the way), waiting for me to click them, scan them, then maybe use my middle mouse to spawn more of them, until I become so absorbed in clicking that I forgot what I was doing. I came across a post in Lifehacker one day and found some great options for distraction-free writers. Distraction-free, as in, I am not given a beautiful GUI to work on, but rather, a dark (it could also be bright) void, waiting for me to type in my words. I chose TextRoom because, (1) it works on Linux, (2) It's as minimalistic as it could get, (3) It looks like it's based on Q10, another distraction-free writer, which is also great.

My color scheme is light grey on black, my favorite combination of monochrome, as it sorta looks like a xterminal. I don't really need formatting as I work, I can just do that later if I wish. Maybe I could also just lay out the HTML for the whole post and add formatting there, though, I would have prepared the pictures I'm going to include first before I finish up.

Other areas of Focus Loss

I'm also losing focus in physical activites, like how I get to jog less often, because I'm too busy either absorbed in studying, coding, or just playing around. It's horrible. Everything I do everyday now is quite unplanned and if this continues on I would be in serious disorganization. There's plenty of things I should keep up with, like my writing, my exercise, instead of just coding and playing around.

I don't even enjoy social networking, but look at me, I'm probably more disorganized than them. Maybe I should just stop lurking around on the Internet too much.

What not to do in the vicinity of a computer: Eating

You probably must have heard this quite a million times. You have heard in it television, you have read it one of your computers manuals (you did, right?), and maybe countless other people on the Internet have told you so. Maybe you stopped eating after hearing them, or maybe you just let your inner glutton out and just gorged away in front of your keyboard.

And what would happen next? Most likely you’ll attract the nearest ant horde, or maybe even have roaches gnawing under your keyboard. Hell, there are even stories of worms and even baby mice found in all sorts of places in a computer.

And guess what? This happened to me, quite a number of numerous times. Thankfully, the enemy are just some regular fire ants.

These guys, although they appear much smaller. 

First wave: Desktop keyboard

So I’ve been shitty in keeping my keyboard from being shitty. I became fond of eating all forms of breads and pastries in front of my desktop, usually while playing GTAIV or Left 4 Dead. The bread crumbs, which naturally fall down from the bread, also naturally attracts the local ant empire who illegally set base in my house long ago.

They immediately formed ranks and began scavenging my keyboard, making typing a thing for nightmares to come since every time you hit a key, there’s a high chance that a squad of ants will rush out from under that key and try to climb up your arm.

Thankfully the ants are no match for an air compressor. You don’t really have to kill them with fire, just a little blowing of wind would sort them out.

Second wave: Power supply

This was the costliest but least annoying of the ant attacks. Supposedly, a couple of ants made the weirdest and most retarded mistake of thinking that the best place to get their ant grub is the insides of my power supply. Of all places, my fucking PSU. So one night while I was probably sleeping or challenging sleep, they decided to raid my computer (which was on at the time) and committed mass suicide on my PSU.

The next morning I was surprised to see that my computer has mysteriously turned off, and believing ghosts are just pussies who believe in afterlife rather than zombification, I did what a good computer user would do. Turn the computer on again.

But it did not budge. I tried to turn it on again, but then again it didn’t. I checked the power lines for any loose or removed sockets, then traced the wires back to my power supply, where I noticed one little ant coming out of the PSU like a wounded soldier from Vietnam. I ignored him, but a few seconds later one of his comrades followed, and then another, and soon after you’ll discover a group of ants emerging from the PSU, battered and wounded, enough to inspire someone to create a Call of Duty game featuring ants.

I took the PSU out of the case and examined it. I lit up the inside and was slightly appalled at what I saw – a mass grave of dead ants, some dismembered, some clinging on the PSU cooling fans. Not that I’m appalled from what I’ve seen, as I enjoy witnessing corpses of all kinds, especially when they come in bunches, but I’m disgusted because I have to shell out a hundred and fifty dollars again to get the same exact PSU unit again.

Third Wave: My laptop, fuck

As much as I love or hate ants, I don’t really mind them running around in my house. I mean, they’re part of this weird thing environmentalists (read: hippies) call an ecosystem right? They’re just little fools whose main purpose is to clean up the little bits of food and help bacteria in eating off rotting carcasses. However, they appear to have looked for food in the wrong place.

Returning home after my finals, I received news that the ants have assaulted my laptop and is now making a forward hive inside. And I don’t mean that they’re just hiding underneath its keyboard or anything. I meant that they were inside, gnawing on the motherboard, riding the heatsink, etc.

My first idea was to blow the shit out of the ants using explosives TNT nuclear bombs compressed air, however it didn’t do much since I can’t blow much of the inside of my laptop with it being tightly closed. I tried the belief that ants hate heat, so I tried to keep my computer on for three days and two nights, but to no avail. They just get out of the laptop while it’s hot, then come back in when it begins to cool.

I opened up the laptop to peer at its internal organs and see that it’s currently infected with ant shit. Seeing that I don’t want to intentionally fry the components with vacuum or air static, I sent it to a nearby laptop technician, who accepted to clean up my system despite him insisting me to get an insect exterminator instead.

Currently I do not have my laptop with me, and I’m afraid it will stay that way for three or five days or maybe even a whole week if the technician decides to just procrastinate and wank off. Fortunately I won’t be needing my laptop at the moment, because I needed some time with my desktop, the whole week’s my semestral break and I don’t really need it that much.

Lesson

So, lesson learned. Don’t eat nowhere near your computer. If you are feeling the urge to gobble something up, make sure you stay out within a six foot radius from your computer. I’m sure you enjoy sitting outside, eating a pasty and drinking a cappuccino, while watching people get kicked in the nuts on Failblog, but don’t do it, for your computer’s sake. Otherwise, the situation with pests invading your computer could escalate to this:

Oh shit.

Why getting a 1337-ass computer nowadays is unnecessary

Most geeks like yours truly possess at least two computers: One “main” computer is used for heavy work, such as powerful 3D gaming, video editing, etc. And then there’s probably a “secondary” computer, usually a notebook or a netbook (or an iPad if you’re an Apple fan), which is usually used in travel and generally browsing the Internet.

Nowadays, I don’t really need a powerful computer. They’re too overrated. I’m so very much buried in college work, and I don’t have much time playing modern video games. Maybe I could sneak in one or two hours of Garry’s Mod every Friday (where I usually don’t have classes), but that’s just about it. I rarely find fun in video games these days, unless that game is an open-ended sandbox.

My custom-built gaming desktop, which I named the “Warmonger” (from the countless CS, L4D and CoD4 games it was into), is slowly turning to deteriorating and the only thing that keeps its coolers from accumulating dust is the occasional “turning on the computer because not using it would deteriorate it even more” habit. Also, it’s getting old.

This proud piece of hardware once ran settings at max in almost all games (maybe not Crysis). It helped me win games because I just calmly do my business while the opposition is busy dodging projectiles at 8fps and complaining about how old their computers are. Sadly, it appears that the Warmonger is going through the same fate also. I ran “Aliens vs. Predator” on the Warmonger at DX10 mode (my Radeon HD4870 cannot support DX11), and it ran at 26-35fps on high settings (mild AA), but I get spikes often when I look at wide open scenery. It sucks.

Now I’m pretty content just playing GTA: San Andreas, Quake III Arena and Warcraft III on my laptop because they’re awesome games despite their graphics being shitty. I have tried importing Garry’s Mod on my laptop, however, it’s mediocre Intel GPU that’s good only for desktop and light 3D graphics could not handle vertex shaders, thus making the waters of HL2 invisible from the surface.

Who needs games anyway? They’re just good ways of slowing down your PC. I find more fun finding lols on Cheeseburger than watching marines die in AvP. It’s just too repetitive for my taste, sorta like working in an Asian sweatshop, except you watch people in heavy armor die after just being punched in the face by aliens.

Quotes I like to ponder deeply about

I love quotes. I read at least five everyday. I have a Quote Reader in my desktop thanks to Rainmeter. I read through famous quotes by famous people, infamous quotes by infamous people, and sometimes not-really-famous quotes by not-really-famous people. Some quotes have the power to shape minds and civilizations, while others only send people clutching their ears because, well, it’s horrible.

Yet there are some quotes I come across that have some rather strange implications. These are quotes that have double meanings, or can imply something weird when you give examples based from it. Like for example:

You are what you eat.

Let’s take this literally. The person who spoke this (I forgot who) says that whatever you eat is you. Now for example I eat chicken. Does that make me a chicken? I eat pork. Does that make me a pig? I eat fish, etc. and so on.

But who wants to be an animal? Every human wants to be just as what he is – human. If people follow that quote above and wants to be human, guess what would be the trend?

Cannibalism. Pure and simple.

Here’s another one I like:

X to Y, Y to X.

Assume X and Y are variables referring to something in particular. Usually this widely-recycled quote is used with “Live” as X and a profession, practice, ambition, sport, etc. as Y. Like, “Live to race, race to live”, or “Live to steal, steal to live”, etc. The possibilities are endless.

A laptop without batteries - disaster

And so it appears that after four years of proud service, my Lenovo Thinkpad X60s’ battery has suddenly died out permanently. It’s not died out as in it just ran out of stored charges, in fact, it can’t store juice anymore. My laptop suddenly turned from an angry skirmisher to an old man in a retirement home. It can’t move around from one room to another without bringing its life support anymore. It sucks.

I’m currently in the process of ordering a new battery from Lenovo, but I don’t think when it would be coming. It’s a good thing Lenovo is actually here in the Philippines, as it makes the job easier since I don’t have to order from China or Singapore or wherever the nearest country Lenovo is at is located. Hopefully before Friday I would be getting a new battery, or I’ll be clutching wires with my notebook forever.

Pictures are worth a thousand words…

…but a thousand words can beat a thousand pictures. What am I trying to imply here? After using a greatly minimal approach on making Sulatang Tapunan look pleasing, I have concluded that pictures are now quite unnecessary for this formal-looking journal. This layout idolizes typography, and pictures only ruin the flow, rather than imply points as they should be. I will now try to use as less photos as possible. Not only will it make my blog look better, it will also teach me to use words to better emphasize my ideas and save the precious 100MB of space Google allotted for photos. I’m not using Photobucket or Imageshack, as photos do not last that long there and will eventually be deleted.

Hacked the entire layout

So, here it is, folks. Sulatang Tapunan has finally gone minimalistic. This is a huge redesign since most of the eye candy that were present in the last layout are now gone. No more of the annoying, common sidebar that most blogs use. That one’s getting old, and it’s a reminder of the web design of the 90’s, no matter what we add on them. Youtube widgets, translucency, Javascript and all other forms of 21st century Internet effects won’t make website sidebars better. That had to go.

Also, this typography style blog template that uses the “Georgia” font family is so elegant, that it feels soothing and relaxing. It helps the reader stay focused on what they are reading on the blog and will not get distracted by any unnecessary element in the website.

The template itself is focused on text. I wonder how it does for images…

 

Ah, it does the picture beautifully, just as I wanted it to. Take note that I am writing this post in the very awesome Windows Live Writer. It automatically adds the subtle shadow effect on every photo that I add while I write my posts. However, I can always choose to use other effects, but WLR does drop shadow by default.

Also, I hate color. Colored blogs hurt my eyes. Black text on colored background makes my eyes watery and tortures them in the process.

Blogger or Wordpress?

It has recently come to my attention that I’m getting tired of using Blogger. I’m a fan of many Google Apps myself but Blogger is just plain awful. Nothing much has changed about it. The interface is still the same. The WYSIWYG editor only underwent an upgrade once.

Why would I want to leave Blogger and head for Wordpress, where the grass is probably greener? Here's why.

The interface is much more intuitive. The white interface of Wordpress is serene, and makes me more relaxed and creative at the same time, unlike the Blogger interface which says nothing buy, "Oh my God, your post is way overdue, get working on it now or else". Excuse me if you think I'm such a picky person, but writing requires a calm and relaxed mind.

There are more tools and widgets there to help out. Blogger has its own widgets, but the only useful ones are those bland ones created by Google, such as Pages, RSS readers and text on the side column, all of which are too common and just necessary for blogs. Wordpress offers more widgets to help me, such as Twitter and Facebook widgets.

I can get more traffic there. Wordpress does a much better job of displaying your blog than Blogger, because the Blogger "Blogs of Note" area features blogs that are handpicked by other people, or you and your recommendations. Wordpress easily lets people view the lesser-viewed blogs that deserve utmost respect and criticism.

All the cool guys are there. Well, not all of them, maybe. But there are a lot of interesting people and awesome blogs which may not host themselves on the Wordpress site, but uses the Wordpress engine. Have you seen The Cheezburger Network? Those guys use the Wordpress engine.

But I wouldn't move my blog to Wordpress right away, since the transition could be difficult. I have to redirect people from the blogspot domain to my wordpress one, which could be inconvenient for many. I'll just wait until Blogger seriously acts up, then I can move my blog somewhere else.

Legal matters: So-called "appropriation"

 WARNING: The following post is serious semi-serious. If you cannot comprehend serious and humor at the same time, I recommend you avert thy eyes before thy mind shalt asplode before thee.

So, let me get this straight. Most of my articles written around my blog are primarily composed of rants, opinions and satire that belongs to those "undesirable" and "inappropriate" for viewing for the church folks. Now that isn't really very alarming, seriously. Probably the only serious church folk that comes around here consists of only 0.00000001% of the total reader population of Sulatang Tapunan, and even if that number reaches a hundred percent, why does it even matter?

Ok, seriously, speaking like a man about this matter, WHO THE FUCK CARES.

This is MY blog. You (yes, you) are just the reader, the critic, the one to be entertained. If you are not entertained by my arts, go away. If you think they're offensive just because they counter your beliefs, go away. I mean, really, go away, nobody's keeping you from doing that. You're free to go and masturbate play along with other people of your kind. I've got other people, mostly of the sane and understanding types, who value what I write here and not the implications it will make on other people. There are people out there who actually read this, laugh, and feel entertained. It appears that you are not one of those people.

To be honest, this guy right here understands freedom more than you do.

Being that this blog is MINE, I am in control of whatever is posted in here. Not you. You do no have control over this blog. Nor you have any control of my mind. Or my fingers, or any part of my body that I use to express my thoughts (Fun fact: I can type with my toes, not just my fingers.)

I'm a freedom writer, and right now I can see that you do not understand the concept of freedom. Probably because you spent your years getting shoving instruments of worship up your arse in temples and getting bitchslapped by the clerics inside. You are living as slaves, and for that matter, I don't really care. If you like being bitchslapped, so be it. I hope you feel the same about my writing ethics. If I want to be offensive, so be it. I just hope you still have five functioning brain cells in order to understand.

It is also unethical to use your computer as a kite, but why should you care?

Why the pressure on freedom? It's just so absurd. It's freedom that allowed technology to flourish, which in turn created machines that helped man, and ideas to benefit the future. It created America, which is now today's center of commerce, technology, intellect, and many other things you didn't experience in your life because you were in your room all day with your head up your arse asking some guy up in the heavens for help.

What you probably do most of the time.

I don't care if that guy in the heavens is real, but if he is, tell him I said hello and that I gave him the finger for not effectively controlling his follower's obsession of being his bitches. I live in democracy, and I'm just practicing my right of expression and speech. If you prefer living in an imaginary despot's world, so be it, go on, live in your miserable little world.

Oh, look! I'm offensive! I'm going straight to hell! Oh sweet! I hope they have nice accomodations there for my arse, for I prefer my arse being pampered like a king all the time!

Some poetry to read while you're fuming there:

For the wise man does not think
Under other people's beliefs but rather
Continue to create and believe his own and refuse to
Kneel in the belief of others.
Yet most men are not wise, for they
Only believe in what others say and become
Under one entity or another.

Let the serious debate begin! Oh, and if you can't see the comments section because your head is up your ass again and asking the heavens to smite me with impractical lightning, it's right below this post. Be as narrow-minded and biased as possible to your beliefs - I dare you! But once you post, you're there for life, and no chance of self-deletion will save you from the mighty screencap. And if you're a coward, you can report this post being offensive, but I'll laugh at your futile attempts at trying to save your already unstable beliefs by clinging on to freedom of speech (when you're already trying to destroy it).