Pak Lah Is Nice!

I am in my aunt's car, on the way back from Judo, and I am sweaty, smelly, and bandaged in all the usual places. I tap the white cloth tips of my fingers on her dashboard and the conversation turns to politics, as it usually does these few days after the opposition's unprecedented win in the parliamentary elections.

"It's such a pity about Khairy, you know." she is saying, "Everyone was hoping so much from him, and he still had to play the race card."

"It's easy." I reply. "You get instant support from the ultra-Malays that way."

"Yah of course it's easy. Even the dap does it -"

"The what?" I say

"D-A-P."

"Oh."

A pause. My aunt turns into Tabuan Jaya. Then: "Well the current hot topic now seems to be Badawi stepping down."

"Mahathir, right?"

"Yeah. It's Mahathir who wants him to step down."

"Which is kinda stupid! I mean, who else does he expect can take over? Najib?!"

"But Mahathir wants Najib to take over!" My aunt says, taking her eyes off the road for a second.

"What!? But Najib's an asshole!"

"And why do you say that?" Eyebrows raised.

"He's ugly!"

"And ...?"

I rack my brains for an answer. "He once said 'Parliament does not need opposition party because government MPs themselves can raise issues in sittings.' What kind of a stupid immature remark is that? Pak Lah will never say that!" I pause. "On the other hand, he never does say anything ..."

My aunt chuckles. "Well they do say he's weak and all. The nice guy ..."

We are turning into my lorong now, and there is silence in the car for awhile. Then:

"I just realized I said something very immature."

"What?"

I feel a grin spreading itself over my face: "Najib is ugly."

Eli James 4.0: The Redesign

It's a move back into green.

Eli James: The Blog is now officially version 4.0, with a few big differences. It's not a 3 hour job like the last time ... this version's clocked in about 6-7 hours, mostly due to dicky Photoshop skills and no prior knowledge of javascript.

Look Ma ... No Sidebars!

This version is one column (as you can all so clearly see), and it's constructed so as to highlight the writing on the blog, as opposed to pictures. When I started this redesign I wanted to test how far I could push the Blogger platform; to see if I could make this look like a Wordpress blog. I think I've succeeded, though I'm still playing around with the usability aspect of this design.

Peekaboo! I See You!

The peekaboo slider at the top of the blog is powered by jQuery. In simple language it's a write less code, do more fancy shwag Javascript library that condenses what might take over 50 lines to 5 lines. Learning the code for the slider took me 4 hours, and in the process I just about pissed off everyone who was chatting with me in WLM. For that I'm very sorry, and I reward you with ... a goat.

Okay not really.

This redesign is hardly finished ... I've to iron out little bits and pieces like a non-existent navigation and a link list. Taking down the sidebar has forced me to put things in very weird places, and the usability of this blog will suffer for the first few weeks.

Have patience, tell me what you think, and enjoy.