Coredump

dat’s da title of me friend’s website. he sort of reminded me dat da title of dz here blog is da same as his collection of poetry & wat-not.

not dat i ripped it off him. heh, well, mebbe i did, subconsciously, i think. (like m ripping off da way he writes in der his site. heh.) but i xplained 2 him twas jest co-accidence. “we’re, like, on da same wavelength, man,” i said, “both deranged and twisted.”

kinda reminds me of dem days way back n college. man, those were fun days, indeed. pangs of regret’s also biting me now. oucchhh! shoulda put down dem thoughts b4 on da web. but, no, m ur traditional journalist (as in, one who keeps/writes journals. heh.) so put em ramblings in dead trees, i did. lost a few notebooks in da process. damn!

not like me pal, killyrbf: he placed them “psychotic ramblings,” as he put it, in a tripod site — one of the early ones, i may add.

and when i finally got to assembling all them random things that keep flippin me mind sideways and backwards, this blog happened.

thank god 4 weblogs!

A minor one, that is. Finally, I’ve found a free image-hosting site. It’s called PhotoBucket, which offers 100MB space and limits uploads to 250KB.

Credits to Dave Shea for the granville header photo. Don’t worry, if I’ve made any copyright infringement, I’ll correct it today. Promise. I just tested the functionality of the image-host.

Another facelift. Well, okay, this isn’t even *nice*.

See, I’m just experimenting with CSS positioning in this new template. And take note: this is my own template. I’m just poking around, is all.

That’s no excuse for ugliness, I know. But hey, in the next few outings, I’ll be changing this. Notice that this is still very raw. You may want to view the source to see how raw this is.

And I still don’t know how to link images from another server. One, I haven’t found a server for that purpose; and two, I’m aware that there are performance issues involved in this scheme.

The color scheme is still all wrong, but I’m concentrating with the structure and the overall layout first so that I can focus on the other aesthetic elements later.

This blog is having a makeover. From the default templates available from Blogger, I’m trying to make a custom template. I’ve based the current look from one available in Blogskins.com.

I’ve tweaked a bit, cleaned up some of the CSS, but this still needs a lot of work. First of all, I really don’t like the color scheme. This is just something I work with to get things started. Although the title of this blog denotes the rants and raves, I don’t want it to be doom and gloom. Later on, I’ll firm up on a cheery color scheme.

Secondly, the tables. As much as possible, I want to follow the current web standards, refraining from using table layouts. The basic layout is okay: a sidebar and the main body. I’ll be adding images later, to enhance the site. Blogger does not allow the local storage of images so I have to find server space for the images. Right now, I’m walking through the CSS Zen Garden for, uh, enlightenment.

I’m still trying to get a grip on Blogger syntax and its data objects. Next time, I’ll get it down pat. Seems pretty straightforward, once I’ve seen a couple of templates.

As I’ve said, I’m going to beef up this site. Of course, content will always be king. Watch this space.

No, I’m not gonna do a la Proust on this one.

More like, serendipity. Yep, that’s it. I was trying to tweak Google’s page-ranking system to see if how this blog hits on the search engine, so I was fooling around with some keywords.

I typed in my name, and voila! on the fourth hit, it was related to our case against AMA Computer College. Actually, there were two Supreme Court rulings related to our case:

1. A complaint against the judge who handled the case for gross ignorance of the law; and
2. A complaint by our counsel against the counsel of the other party for unethical conduct.

But first, a backgrounder on the case:

I was the editor-in-chief of the AMACC student publication, Dataline. We came out with a lampoon issue that tackled on issues like tuition fee increases, undelivered services, and other misconduct and abuses by the school administration. Obviously, we cannot do that out front without subjecting ourselves (I meant, my editorial staff and me) to the fascistic tendencies of the school admin, so we had to do it in a contorted albeit truthful way. Thus, the lampoon.

We actually lampooned the tabloid trash, replete with its slangs and nuances — whatever that is. *It was a lampoon. * Apparently, the admin took it seriously, so they charged us (the editorial board) with obscenity, slander, and misappropriation of funds. That was December 1996.

Allegedly, there were hearings by the student tribunal, a three-person panel composing of a faculty member, a student leader (the then chair of the student council), and the dean of studen affairs (who happens to be the complainant!). Now where can you find a trial where the principal complainant also renders judgement on the complaint? They have a phrase for it: a “kangaroo court”.

To cut the story short, after the hearings — where I was not able to attend, by the way, because I was not even properly informed that there was a case against me — we were expelled. The school admin was not satisfied, they even filed a libel case against us. The libel was promptly trashed for lack of merit.

We were expelled in the middle of the final examinations. Our recourse was to file for preliminary injunction so that we can at least take the finals and enrol for the next trimester. The ignorant judge (yep, there’s already a ruling on that, see above) dismissed the civil case for lack of cause, or something to that effect, rendering judgement on us — that the school admin had all the right to expel us because, really, we were obscene and slanderous good-for-nothing pen-pushers — without the benefit of a trial. That’s two against us.

Lawyers of the school even held so-called “consultations” with individual members of the board, with the result of four members issuing letters of apology and a motion to withdraw the civil case. Again, the Supreme Court ruled that it was unethical. Sheesh! Lawyers! Don’t they know that you don’t ever make “gapang” your client’s opponents? Or is that standard practice?

So now, the rest of the editorial board had gone their separate ways — none of them ever went back to schoo again, I think. Even me.

Yep, I’m an undergraduate, not because I was a lazy student who wasted my parents’ hard-earned money, but because some people thought they could push us around and play with our future, like the insipid fascists that they are.

I’d like to think that I’ve moved on, but not really. What riles me is that whenever I see the school’s ads on TV (it’s a university now, by the way), they actually think that they can pull it off, spreading gloss and floss over their shortcomings and sell the unaware students — their prey — short. They have the gall of pronouncing that they’re the foremost IT academic institution in Asia when inside, really, students are devoid of rights such as of assembly and speech. Ask any AMA University student if they’re satisfied with freedom on campus. Most likely, they’ll look at you as if you just dropped from another planet. That’s precisely because they are never even aware that they have the freedom to congregate; to air their grievances; to demand for quality education without their parents selling off their legs and an arm.

Sad. But I’m not losing hope. Our case is still pending — it’s on appeal, I think. No, I’m not about to hope on going back to AMA. As I’ve said, I’ve moved on. But this case, just this case — us puny students against them IT-school biggies — will show them that they cannot ever mess with students who know how to wield the power of the pen.