Wednesday, March 25, 2020
So I've finally got time to post now. Most countries in the world have announced lockdowns and restrictions on movement, thanks to COVID-19. No different here in Toronto. Pik Lin and I have been at home for several days, so it's given us a lot of time to do "errands" and all.
Hm, well, I guess since there's so much to update, there's no easy way to mention everything. But basically, Pik Lin and I moved out from my grandma and auntie Elkie's place in Richmond Hill, and rented a place of our own near Yonge and Finch. So with the place all to ourselves, it's given us a lot of freedom, but that means we also need to take care of the trash, clean the place and maintain the basement unit we're staying at. It's small, but cozy, as many people have attested.
Either way, since we had time at home with the state of emergency, I managed to finish 2 big things. First, I finally changed my blogskin after 8 years. Probably the longest ever I've kept a blogskin, no thanks to the 5 year absence from 2015. But also, because my previous blogskin was white, I had to change my HTML to fit the black colour all over again. Yeah, I'm sorry but I got bored of white, lol. I made a simple blogskin using the artwork of Takato Yamamoto. I've always had meaning for my previous blogskins, or a theme. In this case? It just looked cool. And I really just wanted a change of blogskin too. But I like this, simple but cool. My HTML code is about 15 years outdated. Despite Blogger having new, dynamic and responsive themes, I've chosen to stick with the old HTML theme editor, simply because it's what I'm familiar with, and for a bit of nostalgia. I've also decided to keep the hilariously ancient HTML marquee tag for old times sake too. For some reason though, my stat counter and cbox stopped working when I amended my background image. So I had to find my old accounts and copy the HTML over again, which looked kinda different after 15 years. My cbox works now, but the stat counter works occasionally in Chrome, but 100% of the time in Firefox. Not sure why. Also, since Photobucket has become a shithole, they said my account was no longer able to host free images. So 16 years of image hosting down the drain there, and I certainly didn't want a giant watermark over all my images. Huuulllllooo Imgur.
Second, I finally read A History of the Bible by John Barton. It's an amazing and fantastic book, and I think deserves a post on it's own. I wrote a Facebook post, hoping to summarize as best as I could, but there's no way such a short post could've done justice to that huge tome. I was already familiar with plenty, but it taught a lot and filled in plenty of gaps in my knowledge. I'd been dragging on finishing it for several months, leaving it at the halfway point for a month. Finally bothered to finish up the remaining half over the last 5 days. Totally worth it. My historical knowledge of the Bible has increased tremendously with this book, and general reading over the last few years. Hope to keep it up.
On a tangent, this morning I woke up to take a piss at 9am. Last night on my WhatsApp group Dukes & Duchess (which is basically the group for the ex-colleagues I had at Star Media Group in Malaysia), they were bored and lonely at home and so organized a Zoom group call session. They posted this at 2AM, and I didn't think I'd wake up at 9 just for it. But since I did, I thought I might as well join in. Was a great time catching up with everyone. 7 of us took part and updated each other on our lives, mostly with how the coronavirus has affected all our jobs. But we also chatted about stupid things and other irrelevant topics, and Melvin updated us on his horrible time at Razer, which confirms the article I read recently on how the CEO is verbally abusive to all his staff and throws temper tantrums all around. Aye, what a pity. It was a brand I very much respected, and I was quite proud how a Singaporean company had grown into a worldwide gaming entity. So much for the Steve Jobs of gaming tech.
For dinner, Pik Lin and I had meat-lovers pizza today, 'cause we were craving it. Hey, we can be slobs here and there.
Anyhoo, this seems good for my first proper post in 5 years. I really hope I keep updating regularly. I used to blog daily, then about weekly, and then several weeks. Whatever frequency I post, I hope it stays consistent, whatever that will end up being.
Chronicled
11:17 PM
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