Friends

My grandfather died 4am this morning. Please pray for our family.

And, um, if you would like to make me feel better you can hug me, or write me something. Anything. Fic or poetry or whatever. I would like, I don't know, something to read. Please don't worry about me, I'll be okay. Thanks. I love you all.

I was always known for one thing: having amazon woman strength. Even though I'm chubby, I always ALWAYS tend to destroy things by accident.

Incident 1 is the mouse. I was just happily using the left click button when suddenly, it just stops working. I do everything to make it work but it fails. Now I'm using one of our old mouses that is sorta broken.

Why was I given amazon strength anyway...?

OH, AND NODAME CANTABILE PARIS-HEN!! THE ENDING SONG IS SO BEAUTIFUL <333

It's remarkable how I can now carry on a conversation with my mother without feeling the seething/resentful/and general-all-around-grrrr-type anger. Maybe I've forgiven her or maybe I've just started really realizing that being angry is mostly a waste of time.

(Oh dear, does that mean that I can't feel angst anymore? Where has my youth gone? ;D)

The title: Remote Workers to IT: We're Not Godless Heathens Sending Security to Hell made me chuckle. The article's here in case anyone might want to read it. I'm sure any IT person reading it would: a. snort in disbelief b. roll eyes because planning for worst-case scenarios is part of the job (and really, it does happen).

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Stone Temple Pilots blasting away on NU on a nice Saturday morning drive with (relatively) traffic free roads is bliss.

I'll take care not to mention the exceedingly annoying Sunday drivers lovingly driving under the speed limit.

Because. You know. It's SATURDAY.

I dreamt I had fallen in love with my trainer -_- My very married trainer. WTF.

In other bizarre news, I got myself a +1. This +1 will accompany me to functions and parties where people won't have to ask, "Are you alone?" because seriously, yes, I am single. XD

This is funny.

Edit: Big pictures! Some are of the Philippines o:

I can't imagine having to take care of a family considering how free time is hard to find. Let's see. I went to the gym, rushed on over to attend Church (I was late >.>), had a huge buffet lunch with the family (extremely glad I worked out), wandered around the Fort Bonifacio with the sister and her fiance (lookin' around last minute house things -_-). Suddenly it was dinner time and we had to meet some people for work (well, mostly it was a dad and the sister person thing but I got dragged into it).

And here I was planning on sleeping. I hate shopping. Ugh.

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In other news, since my sister's getting married, I've got to help plan a ... bridal shower? I have no idea how it's going to happen since it's very short notice but her friend (let us call her the BFF - tongue in cheek of course) and I are hoping to have something by this Saturday. Haha. -_- I need to hunt for games we can play and questions to ask the fiance. Hrmm.

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Randomly: I had a Moroccan mint latte again yesterday. Love.

Does anyone know of anyone who has purchased and is using Amazon's Kindle? I am ... tempted. I've always thought about purchasing an ebook reader but never got around to it (mainly because I don't care very much for screen glare when I'm deep into a book). Plus, Amazon accepts credit cards from the Philippines (Threadless doesn't like me T_T) - regardless of shipping address.

Nothing replaces the feel of paper when I'm turning the page of a favorite book but ... well ... I can't exactly lug around all the books and magazines I'm reading everywhere I go o_O

Other random stuff: What is borscht and has anyone ever eaten it? I need to eat more beets (it's all this crazy nutrition stuff cause I'm turning 30 soon haha). That is all.

More random stuff: My legs hurt. HURT. It hurts to stand, hurts to sit, hurts to climb up stairs - it hurts to generally move my lower body. I curse my trainer. Ow.

October 3, 2008
Style Weekend, pp 14-15
Manila Bulletin

( pikchoors! )

I just realized that the pull-quote rhymes. Haha, I fail.

*off to do thesis*

So I finished Okami the other day. The ending is so beautiful. ( ’　Д　‘ ) Needs a sequel. o<

Now I'm playing Tales of the Abyss. Can you guess who my favorite character is? Can you? O: I'm not far into the game yet. But I'm loving it so far. =D

And to those who haven't read my previous entry concerning people hacking into their lj's, I suggest reading it HERE.

Kuroshitsuji animez now plz

GUYS GUYS

I'M IN THE MANILA BULLETIN TODAY

STYLE WEEKEND, PP 14-15

(ALSO JUDDHA IS ON THE COVER AND HE IS A VERY COOL GUY)

So I just copy pasted this from aoi_aka's lj... because I'm lazy that way. XD (ilu dearest aoi_aka)

There is a conspiracy afoot!

I have been told that there is blatant hacking into LJ accounts going on. I have no reason to doubt the people who have told me this. And no, they're not the voices in my head. They're too busy humping each other to pay attention to you or me.

Change your passwords to all your LJ accounts immediately! But most urgently if you have been "friended" by a Russian LJ. Due to these phantom friends, I have started to receive spam in Russian!

In two separate instances one person was hacked into their account and the default icon was changed. The other instance the person was hacked into their LJ and all their posts deleted (it was a writing LJ too, ouch) and only a post was left that led to a website that spread nasty stuff.

You don't want that to happen to you!

This is not a joke. It could happen to any of us and before it does, change your passwords! If you have heard of a friend that had that happen to them, beseech them to report it to the LJ abuse team. Go here and click on the More Info link. It'll give you more information about security and where to contact the team.

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WHICH IS PROBABLY WHY ONE OF MY ICONS FROM JUNJOU ROMANTICA CHANGED. GOD I CHANGED MY PASSWORD WITH LIGHTING FAST SPEED WHEN THAT HAPPENED.

Pet peeve #5924: papers with poorly specified definitions and variables.

It doesn't matter whether you've already written countless articles on the same subject, one of which happens to be a seminal work in your field, and you think anyone studying the topic should know those things already. Unless it is a convention in your field to call something f or whatever, state what you're doing to all these terms. And if you're going to feature equations, and talk about the logs of quantities, you'd better be especially careful when it comes to variables! Because if s stands for something like, say, actual exchange rate, and s^ is the logarithm of a "shadow" exchange rate, and you have

s^ = (1 - lambda)x_t + lambda*s_(t+1),

people will end up asking, "What the hell is s, the exchange rate or its log?" And if you have a pair of equations featuring s^ and s:

s^ = x + gamma*E*(ds/dt), and inside the target zone
s = x + gamma*E*(ds/dt) = s^

it gets even more confusing. Judging from the way the two rates were used, I would say that s is not the actual exchange rate, but the logarithm of the actual exchange rate. Then again -- I could be wrong. Now, this could have been solved if the author had simply stated at the start what all the variables meant, and how they were to be used. Considering that he was developing what at the time was a new model, I think the situation pretty much called for it.

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One of the things I found hard to get used to in economics was that everyone -- even textbook authors -- switched variables around like crazy. There is no single convention used for basic things like quantity or price. Even time, which in my experience has always been t, is sometimes denoted by something completely different.

It's driving me crazy, because in physics we're usually very careful when it comes to variable usage conventions; there are even conventions for which kind of alphabet (Greek or Roman) is used for a particular concept. A lot of my physics textbooks have a list of variable definitions in the first few pages (or last few pages). Most papers I've read state variable definitions before (or along with) the relevant equations: they go "According to this equation:

"(horribly long and scary equation here),

"where x is blah blah and sigma is something else etc etc."

Because of this, I've been trained to look at an equation and say, "Ah, this equation describes how the probability distribution function changes over time if energy is applied to the system*," because I know that in this context, f(r,p,t) is a function, most likely a probability distribution, involving position, momentum, and time, and E is energy, etc etc. But I can only say that because I'm reasonably sure that if the author used all those terms without defining them, it is because they are the usual terms applied to the usual concepts as seen in a thousand thousand physics textbooks.

You can't do that in econ. Not without confusing your readers. Variables don't stay the same between books or papers written by different authors; they change a lot, often without warning. I'm reading a paper that features s, an exchange rate, and x, a fundamental. Alongside that paper I'm reading a book on the model first featured in the paper, and in that book x isn't a fundamental, it's... a target zone boundary, which in the model was s. See? It's confusing! It messes things up! The equations look terrible!

When I was sixteen I used to complain a lot about having to take the time to carefully write out my equations and explain every variable, every step. Now I finally realize just how necessary all that was. I wish I could go back to my sixteen-year old self and shake some sense into her: "Number your frigging equations! Use your variables consistently! Don't leave physics!"

Okay, maybe not that last one. The deadlines must be messing with my head.


*for the record, I made that up; I don't know of any equation like that and I don't think you'd really use E to denote an application of energy to the system, but just go with it.