“If ‘pro’ is the opposite of ‘con’ what is the opposite of ‘progress’? “
-Paul Harvey

“The worst thing in this world, next to anarchy, is government. “
-Henry Ward Beecher

“It’s not the voting that’s democracy; it’s the counting. “
-Tom Stoppard

“Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made. “
-Otto von Bismarck

“Politicians and diapers have one thing in common — they both should be changed regularly and for the same reason!”
-Anonymous

Democrats say — “Give a man a fish.”
Republicans say — “Teach a man to fish.”
Libertarians say — “Go fish!”
-Anonymous

“It is better to die for an idea that will live, than to live for an idea that will die.”
-Steven Biko

By: Casting Crowns

Who am I?
That the Lord of all the earth,
Would care to know my name,
Would care to feel my hurt.
Who am I?
That the bright and morning star,
Would choose to light the way,
For my ever wandering heart.

Bridge:
Not because of who I am,
But because of what you’ve done.
Not because of what I’ve done,
But because of who you are.

Chorus:
I am a flower quickly fading,
Here today and gone tomorrow,
A wave tossed in the ocean,
A vapor in the wind.
Still you hear me when I’m calling,
Lord, you catch me when I’m falling,
And you’ve told me who I am.
I am yours.
I am yours.

Who am I?
That the eyes that see my sin
Would look on me with love
And watch me rise again.
Who am I?
That the voice that calmed the sea,
Would call out through the rain,
And calm the storm in me.

Not because of who I am,
But because of what you’ve done.
Not because of what I’ve done,
But because of who you are.

I am a flower quickly fading,
Here today and gone tomorrow,
A wave tossed in the ocean,
A vapor in the wind.
Still you hear me when I’m calling,
Lord, you catch me when I’m falling,
And you’ve told me who I am.
I am yours.

Not because of who I am,
But because of what you’ve done.
Not because of what I’ve done,
But because of who you are.

I am a flower quickly fading,
Here today and gone tomorrow,
A wave tossed in the ocean,
A vapor in the wind.
Still you hear me when I’m calling,
Lord, you catch me when I’m falling,
And you’ve told me who I am.
I am yours.
I am yours.

I am yours.

Whom shall I fear?
Whom shall I fear?
‘Thy I am yours.
I am yours.

Who am I?
That the Lord of all the earth,
Would care to know my name,
Would care to feel my hurt.
Who am I?
That the bright and morning star,
Would choose to light the way,
For my ever wandering heart.

Bridge:
Not because of who I am,
But because of what you’ve done.
Not because of what I’ve done,
But because of who you are.

Chorus:
I am a flower quickly fading,
Here today and gone tomorrow,
A wave tossed in the ocean,
A vapor in the wind.
Still you hear me when I’m calling,
Lord, you catch me when I’m falling,
And you’ve told me who I am.
I am yours.
I am yours.

Who am I?
That the eyes that see my sin
Would look on me with love
And watch me rise again.
Who am I?
That the voice that calmed the sea,
Would call out through the rain,
And calm the storm in me.

Not because of who I am,
But because of what you’ve done.
Not because of what I’ve done,
But because of who you are.

I am a flower quickly fading,
Here today and gone tomorrow,
A wave tossed in the ocean,
A vapor in the wind.
Still you hear me when I’m calling,
Lord, you catch me when I’m falling,
And you’ve told me who I am.
I am yours.

Not because of who I am,
But because of what you’ve done.
Not because of what I’ve done,
But because of who you are.

I am a flower quickly fading,
Here today and gone tomorrow,
A wave tossed in the ocean,
A vapor in the wind.
Still you hear me when I’m calling,
Lord, you catch me when I’m falling,
And you’ve told me who I am.
I am yours.
I am yours.

I am yours.

Whom shall I fear?
Whom shall I fear?
‘Thy I am yours.
I am yours.

I quote:

“it’s a very beautiful song. it touches me in so many ways as a christian. praise Jesus for His love.. He is real and if you just open your heart, you will feel his love..in times of pain, hurt, trials, He will always be with us to help us and to give us hope..i love you Lord.”

It is now my birthday. In the Philippines, we have a tradition that when you blow out the candles on your birthday cake, you should make a wish. Every year, as far back as I can remember, I’ve wished that I would see another birthday. It’s not that I’m afraid of dying, I just liked living.

Living is definitely harder now than it was then, but it’s also more rewarding. It’s been incredible to work with so many interesting people on so many great things. It’s also been difficult, stressful, and painful. But I press on, and continue looking for ways to improve.

“And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.”

So thanks, to my family and friends. Who has taught me more than I can remember, punched me (in a friendly way) and Esmie, who has given me far more than I could possibly deserve.

And to you oh LORD…Thank you for the GIFT of LIFE…Cherio!

NASA’s Phoenix spacecraft has landed safely on Mars, following a ten-month flight. Landing occurred yesterday evening at around 23:38 GMT (20:38 EDT), with confirmation being received by flight controllers around fifteen minutes later at 23:53, the communications delay due to the time taken for light and radio signals to travel from Mars back to Earth.

Phoenix was launched atop a Delta II rocket last August. It is the first Mars Scout spacecraft to be sent to explore Mars. It will search for water and complex molecules at the North Pole of Mars. It is the third spacecraft currently operating on Mars, joining the Mars Expedition Rovers Spirit and Opportunity, which are currently operating on the planet’s surface. Phoenix is expected to operate on the surface of Mars for 90 Martian days, about 92 Earth days. Scientists monitoring the landing at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California cheered as the news was transmitted by the spacecraft, saying it had landed safely.

According to the live broadcast on NASA TV, a systems check began in final preparation for landing at 22:20 GMT (7:20 p.m. eastern time) which was given the “all green”. At 22:22, Phoenix was confirmed to be properly aligned for entry into the Martian atmosphere. At 22:30 Phoenix began to accelerate into the atmosphere, where it will hurtle towards the planet at nearly 11,000 miles an hour. At 22:41 the data stream was successfully sent to Earth, Phoenix successfully separated from its boosters and sent a UHF signal to NASA. At 22:44 its main radio was confirmed to be on.

Scientists monitoring the MRO then confirmed the signal from Phoenix at 22:45. Approximately 3 minutes later Phoenix was confirmed to have entered the Martian atmosphere.

Phoenix landing information. Times are based on expected confirmation of event from Earth. Image: NASA/JPL. Phoenix landing information. Times are based on expected confirmation of event from Earth.
Image: NASA/JPL.

According to predictions before the landing – based on the sequence of events programmed into onboard computers – the cruise stage, which had controlled the spacecraft during its journey from Earth to Mars, separated from the probe which was to enter the atmosphere at 23:24:15 GMT. Entry interface occurred at 23:31:15, and the parachute deployed at 23:34:58. The heat shield was jettisoned at 23:35:13, followed by the rest of the “aeroshell”, which had protected the spacecraft during decent, and the parachute, at 23:37:13. Landing itself occurred at 23:38:36 GMT.

During descent, the spacecraft’s progress was monitored by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and 2001 Mars Odyssey spacecraft, already in Areocentric orbit. Mars Odyssey was in contact with Phoenix throughout the descent, including during the phase of the descent where maximum temperatures were reached, when controllers had predicted that data would be lost. The HiRISE camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was able to photograph Phoenix under its parachute during descent.

Phoenix’s goal is to gather environmental information about Mars to search for possible locations for the best signs of microbial life in the soil. It will also research the history of water on Mars. The mission is scheduled to last for at least 92 Earth days, or 90 Martian days.One of the first images returned by Phoenix of its landing site. The spacecraft landed in an area near the North Pole of Mars, unofficially named the Green Valley. It is an area about 250 kilometres wide, located in the Vastitas Borealis plains.

Phoenix is carrying a number of instruments to investigate Mars. Some of these were taken from the cancelled 2001 Mars Surveyor lander, and some others were derived from instruments flown on the Mars Polar Lander (MPL) spacecraft. MPL was launched in January 1999, but failed during its descent to the Martian surface. Landing on Mars is considered to be one of the most difficult challenges in space exploration, and one scientist working on today’s landing said that “this is not a trip to Grandma’s for the weekend”. More than half of previous missions to Mars have failed, leading to jokes that exploration of the planet is cursed.

This is the 38th spacecraft to be launched to Mars, and the 19th to arrive successfully, bringing the success rate to exactly 50 percent. It is also the 12th spacecraft to attempt a landing on Mars, and the 7th to successfully accomplish this.

Upon confirmation of landing, a flight controller was heard to exclaim “The Phoenix has landed, welcome to Vastitas Borealis!”, whilst others cheered, and congratulated each other on the successful landing.

Have an opinion on this story? Post it!

Sources

• “NASA spacecraft lands on Mars”. KDBC, May 25, 2008
• “Live broadcast”. NASA TV, May 25, 2008
• Justin Ray “Mission Status Center”. Spaceflight Now, May 25, 2008
• “NASA‘s Phoenix lands successfully on Mars”. NASASpaceflight.com, May 25, 2008
• Brent Shockley “Phoenix Landing Day Blog”. NASA, May 25, 2008

It seems that lately lots of writers have been bashing Java. Some people seem to think that Java has stagnated, and that the “hyper-enthusiasts” have left. Well, the rest of us are just quietly coding on a platform that is more exciting than ever. Other technologies like Ruby, PHP, .NET, or AJAX might get more hype and acclaim lately, but hype aside, Java still produces the majority of innovation in the software profession.

You can get a sense of Java’s health by simply looking at how many projects are out there using Java. Pop on over to Sourceforge and look at the number of projects by language: http://sourceforge.net/softwaremap/trove_list.php?form_cat=160.

Certainly Sourceforge is not the final measure, but it’s a reasonable reality check. Anyway, you’ll find 17300+ Java projects, the most of any language. That’s more than PHP (12675), Ruby (425), and .NET (3094 C#, 347 VB.Net) combined.

Because of its prominence, Java gets a lot of attention and with it much criticism, some of it valid. What many may not realize is that some big breakthroughs have arrived and that the Java development landscape is solving important problems. Let’s take a view of where Java is going to go in the next year or two as these ideas gain traction.

The first big arena of innovation is the addition of scripting support. Some people rightly claim Ruby or Python is better the Java for some tasks. Groovy and Beanshell solve these same problems and will become a standard (in the JSR sense) part of the Java stack. Each offers something better than standalone scripting. Both integrate into a truly mixed environment with compiled bytecode and interpreted scripts interoperating smoothly. Beanshell’s syntax offers as little surprise as possible for the Java developer and Groovy gives a Ruby-like syntactic efficiency, but can also be compiled to pure bytecode and reused seamlessly, a big improvement over JRuby or Jython.

Second, the days of heavyweight frameworks are gone. J2EE-style EJBs are out. Now, the lightweight frameworks like Hibernate, Spring, and HiveMind are the future of Java. The heavy Struts of the past is being replaced with two new directions: Struts Shale based on JSF and Struts Ti is a wholesale merge with Webwork. These projects share a common idea that the framework should stay out of the way of your object model. EJB3 takes the same view.

A third major innovation where Java leads is aspect-oriented programming (AOP). AOP will unclutter your code by moving “cross-cutting” concerns like logging and security to transparent method interceptors. AspectJ is the Rolls Royce for AOP, but Spring has lightweight AOP themes as does the new JBoss.

Take note on this PHP Developers:
Fourth, the PHP crowd had a legitimate gripe that banging out a simple web page took too much work if you were using JSP and Struts. But our templating solutions like Velocity, Freemarker, and now Groovy don’t make you choose between ultralight text generation and powerful mid-tier solutions. Groovlets should make for some rapid servlet solutions. For those people who really like PHP, keep it: Java 1.6 makes it the reference implementation for the new web scripting language bindings, so you can do your web views in PHP and use Java for model and controller.

Finally, Java’s traditional strength in the tools arena just keeps increasing. Eclipse is the best IDE on the planet, and it appears that Eclipse has reached critical mass like Ant and JUnit did, in that people simply expect solutions that extend it. Eclipse’s team coding capabilities for CVS and Subversion (via the Subclipse plugin) are first-rate. The refactoring and debugging support are top notch. Integration of standard tools like ant, compilers, JUnit, and javadocs are about as good as you can imagine.

So perhaps the hyper-enthusiasts have left and the buzzword mongers will proclaim that Java is dead. If Java is “dead,” it’s only because it was laid to rest so that a better, lighter, more agile, form of Java could replace it, so Long Live Java!

I’m appreciating that as my new working principle. It can be applied to all aspects of our life, in fact.

Google’s interface is “less”. Yahoo and MSN are “more”. Who’s got the more user base?

The iPod is less. Remember your Sony Walkman back in the 90s? Remember the multiple buttons “Play, Pause, Rewind, Forward”? iPod has one button that does everything.

At work, when I started doing less, I actually accomplish more. This has been my experience for the past 4 years of computer programming.

So I quote :
“Never increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything.”

So far, I embrace the idea. I can do more.

What do you have to do less so you can do more?

“Safe” is when you stopped pushing yourself to the limit because you are afraid of not knowing what will happen if you do.

“Safe” is when you…

* feel comfortable with what you know about your job. You do not try to improve. Time will come, you’ll stand on dangerous ground — everybody will be ahead of you.

* maintain the status quo in your marriage. Nothing special is happening, you just go with the flow of everyday life. Time will come, you’ll stand on dangerous ground — when a problem hits your family, you do not have enough love and closeness with your spouse to keep sailing.

* stay as an employee even if you feel you have the entrepreneurial spirit, because it’s much safer to just receive your monthly salary. Time will come, you’ll stand on dangerous ground — you’ll get burned out and start to hate your job.

* just go to church every Sunday (or every other Sunday for most people) because that’s how you were brought up as a kid. You do not want to make that next step of faith — to have a deeper relationship with Jesus and serve people through the church. Little that you know, you’re standing on dangerous ground. Your half-baked faith is no real faith at all. No unreal faith can save you nor can help you in your daily walk.

Step out of your comfort zones! Feel the discomfort. Feel the pressure. Stretch your limits.

- start learning new skills that will improve you professionally
- start dating your wife again. You were doing it before you got married, why can’t you do it now? Your love will go deeper!

- if you feel that you are gifted with that entrepreneurial spirit, go for it! Plan for that business venture! Start looking for funds. Start reading books and magazines about becoming an entrepreneur.

- make that decision to become a fully devoted follower of Jesus. Start reading your Bible. Start attending a Bible believing church. Start serving God through serving people.

Feel that holy discomfort. When you’re always safe, you’re in danger.

My inspiration for these thoughts:
Luke 19:11-26
“The Purple Cow” by Seth Godin

What “comfort zone” are you protecting? What can you do to go out of it and start doing the uncomfortable and break the status quo?

Excerpt from http://arnold.gamboa.ph/2007/06/safe-is-dangerous/….

Biography

Early life

Villa was born on August 5, 1908, in Manila‘s Singalong district. His parents were Simeon Villa (a personal physician of Emilio Aguinaldo, a revolutionary leader during the Philippine Revolution) and Guia Garcia (a wealthy landowner).^[3][4] He graduated from University of the Philippines High School in 1925. Villa enrolled on a pre-medicine course in UP, but then switched to pre-law. However, he realized that his true passion was in the arts. Villa first tried painting, but then turned into writing after reading Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson.^[3]

Writing career

Villa (standing, third from right) appeared with top American and British writers during a party in New York’s Gotham Book Mart on November 9, 1948

Villa was considered the leader of Filipino “artsakists”, a group of writers who believe that art should be “for art’s sake” hence the term. He once pronounced that “art is never a means; it is an end in itself.”^[5] Villa’s tart poetic style was considered too aggressive at that time. In 1929 he published Man Songs, a series of erotic poems, which the administrators in UP found too bold and was even fined P70 for obscenity by the Manila Court of First Instance. In that same year, Villa won Best Story of the Year from Philippine Free Press magazine for Mir-I-Nisa. He also received P1,000 prize money, which he used to migrate for the United States.^[3]

He enrolled at the University of New Mexico, wherein he was one of the founders of Clay, a mimeographed literary magazine.^[3][6] He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree, and pursued post-graduate work at Columbia University.^[5] Villa had gradually caught the attention of the country’s literary circles, one of the few Asians to do so at that time.^[2]

After the publication of Footnote to Youth in 1933, Villa switched from writing prose to poetry, and published only a handful of works until 1942. During the release of Have Come, Am Here in 1942, he introduced a new rhyming scheme called “reversed consonance” wherein, according to Villa: “The last sounded consonants of the last syllable, or the last principal consonant of a word, are reversed for the corresponding rhyme. Thus, a rhyme for near would be run; or rain, green, reign.”^[4][7]

In 1949, Villa presented a poetic style he called “comma poems”, wherein commas are placed after every word. In the preface of Volume Two, he wrote: “The commas are an integral and essential part of the medium: regulating the poem’s verbal density and time movement: enabling each word to attain a fuller tonal value, and the line movement to become more measures.”^[4]

Villa worked as an associate editor for New Directions Publishing in New York between 1949 to 1951, and then became director of poetry workshop at City College of New York from 1952 to 1960. He then left the literary scene and concentrated on teaching, first lecturing in The New School for Social Research from 1964 to 1973, as well as conducting poetry workshops in his apartment. Villa was also a cultural attaché to the Philippine Mission to the United Nations from 1952 to 1963, and an adviser on cultural affairs to the President of the Philippines beginning 1968.^[4]

Death

On February 5, 1997, at the age of 88, Villa was found unconscious in his New York apartment and was rushed to St. Vincent Hospital in Greenwich area. His death two days later was attributed to “cerebral stroke and multilobar pneumonia”. He was buried on February 10 in St. John’s Cemetery in New York, wearing a Barong Tagalog.^[3][8]

Personal

In 1946 Villa married Rosemarie Lamb, with whom he has two sons, Randy and Lance. They divorced ten years later.^[4] He also has three grandchildren.^[3][8]

Works

Cover of The Anchored Angel: Selected Writings by Villa

As an editor, Villa first published Philippine Short Stories: Best 25 Short Stories of 1928 in 1929, an anthology of Filipino short stories written in English that were mostly published in the literary magazine Philippine Free Press for that year. It is the second anthology to have been published in the Philippines, after Philippine Love Stories by editor Paz Márquez-Benítez in 1927. His first collection of short stories that he has written were published under the title Footnote to Youth: Tales of the Philippines and Others in 1933; while in 1939, Villa published Many Voices, his first collection poems, followed by Poems by Doveglion in 1941. Other collections of poems include Have Come, Am Here (1942), Volume Two (1949), and Selected Poems and New (1958).

In 1962, Villa published four books namely Villa’s Poems 55, Poems in Praise of Love, Selected Stories, and The Portable Villa. It was also in that year when he edited The Doveglion Book of Philippine Poetry in English from 1910. Three years later, he released a follow-up for The Portable Villa entitled The Essential Villa.^[9] Villa, however, went under “self-exile” after the 1960s, even though he was nominated for several major literary awards including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. This was perhaps because of oppositions between his formalist style and the advocates of proletarian literature who misjudged him as a petty bourgeoisie. Villa only “resurfaced” in 1993 with an anthology entitled Charlie Chan Is Dead, which was edited by Jessica Hagedorn.^[10]

Several reprints of Villa’s past works were done, including Appasionata: Poems in Praise of Love in 1979, A Parlement of Giraffes (a collection of Villa’s poems for young readers, with Tagalog translation provided by Larry Francia), and The Anchored Angel: Selected Writings by Villa that was edited by Eileen Tabios with a foreword provided by Hagedorn (both in 1999).^[9]

Among his popular poems include When I Was No Bigger Than A Huge, an example of his “comma poems”, and The Emperor’s New Sonnet (a part of Have Come, Am Here) which is basically a blank sheet of paper.^[11][12][13]

Writing style

Villa described his use of commas after every word as similar to “Seurat‘s architectonic and measured pointillism—where the points of color are themselves the medium as well as the technique of statement”. This unusual style forces the reader to pause after every word, slowing the pace of the poem resulting to what Villa calls “a lineal pace of dignity and movement”. An example of Villa’s “comma poems” can be found in an excerpt of his work #114:

Villa also created verses out of already-published proses and forming what he liked to call “Collages”. This excerpt from his poem #205 was adapted from Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, volume 1:

While Villa agreed with William Carlos Williams that “prose can be a laboratory for metrics”, he tried to make the adapted words his own. His opinion on what makes a good poetry was in contrast to the progressive styles of Walt Whitman, which he said: “Poetry should evoke an emotional response. The poet has a breathlessness in him that he converts into a breathlessness of words, which in turn becomes the breathlessness of the reader. This is the sign of a true poet. All other verse, without this appeal, is just verse.”^[10]

He also advised his students who aspire to become poets not to read any form of fiction in order for their poems “(not become) contaminated by narrative elements”, insisting that real poetry is “written with words, not ideas”.^[4]

Awards

Villa was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship in creative writing by American writer Conrad Aiken, wherein he was also awarded a $1,000 prize for “outstanding work in American literature”, as well as a fellowship from Bollingen Foundation.^[10] He was also bestowed an Academy Award for Literature from The American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1943.^[16] Villa also won first prize in the Poetry Category of UP Golden Jubilee Literary Contests in 1958, as well as the Pro Patria Award for literature in 1961, and the Heritage Award for poetry and short stories a year later. He was conferred with a honoris causa doctorate degree for literature by Far Eastern University in Manila on 1959 (and later by University of the Philippines), and the National Artist Award for Literature in 1973.^[3]

He was one of three Filipinos, along with novelist Jose Rizal and translator Nick Joaquin, included in World Poetry: An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time published in 2000, which featured over 1,600 poems written by hundreds of poets in different languages and culture within a span of 40 centuries dating from the development of early writing in ancient Sumer and Egypt.^[2]

Fellow compositors
and pressworkers!

I, Chief Printer
Frank Steinman,
having worked fifty-
seven years at my trade,
and served five years
as president
of the Holliston
Printer’s Council,
being of sound mind
though near death,
leave this testimonial
concerning the nature
of printers’ errors.

First: I hold that all books
and all printed
matter have
errors, obvious or no,
and that these are their
most significant moments,
not to be tampered with
by the vanity and folly
of ignorant, academic
textual editors.
Second: I hold that there are
three types of errors, in ascending
order of importance:
One: chance errors
of the printer’s trembling hand
not to be corrected incautiously
by foolish professors
and other such rabble
because trembling is part
of divine creation itself.

Two: silent, cool sabotage
by the printer,
the manual laborer
whose protests
have at times taken this
historical form,
covert interferences
not to be corrected
censoriously by the hand
of the second and far
more ignorant saboteur,
the textual editor.
Three: errors
from the touch of God,
divine and often
obscure corrections
of whole books by
nearly unnoticed changes
of single letters
sometimes meaningful but
about which the less said
by preemptive commentary
the better.
Third: I hold that all three
sorts of error,
errors by chance,
errors by workers’ protest,
and errors by
God’s touch,
are in practice the
same and indistinguishable.

Therefore I,
Frank Steinman,
typographer
for thirty-seven years,
and cooperative Master
of the Holliston Guild
eight years,
being of sound mind and body
though near death
urge the abolition
of all editorial work
whatsoever
and manumission
from all textual editing
to leave what was
as it was, and
as it became,
except insofar as editing
is itself an error, and

therefore also divine.

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