my wife's visual dna

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my visual dna

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back issue

I just got a copy of People Asia's December 2006 - January 2007 issue, as well as the February and March issues for this year. No, the cover image you see on the left is not one of the covers of the issues mentioned; it's just an old image I got from the Internet. I have to post an image, right?

Right. Anyway, I remember doing a food slash restaurant review for the Dec-Jan issue, but I can never find a copy. Sam, who works for People Asia, and is a classmate in the MA Creative Writing program at UP Diliman, gave my wife these issues when she passed by Sam's office.

The photos inside the Dec-Jan issue were trademark portfolio shots. Neat. The article, mine, was, well, what it turned out to be. Whoever breathes over the shoulder of the layout artist gets to condense whatever articles any contributor turned in, because space is scarce and photos that visually define the page mood are priorities. And then there are other considerations. Ho-hum.

So, my main article, a food review, and three little sidebar stories, got mixed into one continuous piece. It lost the author's voice, as is expected. These things happen. I used to work for a publications office in UP Diliman, which used to condense my articles with space, image, and feature-worthiness in the editor's mind. That's a reality check for you. No blames being thrown here, just one big sigh. At least my reality (pay) check for that article has been snail-mailed. I wonder when the mailman will knock on my door. Meanwhile, I have these three glossy issues to browse through. So many pictures.

balance

Man, I'm tired. Trojans by the dozen had swarmed into my wife's laptop. With the antivirus program expired, I had to download a new one, while sweeping the harddrives for spyware, while turning off recurring programs in the task manager, along with programs that duplicate the ones already running, and let's not forget that I had to clean the registry.

As this QWERTY keyboard as my witness, I hate Microsoft Windows XP. I know, I know, XP, you are so friendly to users, but you extend the same easy smile to viruses, trojans, worms, and spyware.

XP will sleep with you, assuredly. It will sleep with everyone else as well. Oh well.

I put up with you, XP, only for the games I can buy off the racks which run on you smoothly. If I had world enough and time, I would return to my beautiful Open Suse Linux, which dual boots with XP, too, for the games. None of these tedious house maintenance in Linux, at least none after you install the codecs and other dependencies so you can watch and burn and rip music and videos. But also none of the games, and the fonts, that I love.

Oh well. Win some, lose some.

And so, just how many Trojans did I win?