How Now Brownpau

Caturday!

Saturday, July 31, 2010

Oh look, Pandora’s gonna yawn:

Filed in photolog | Tagged cat, caturday, couch, pandora, photos | Comments Off

Pandora has lately taken to jumping up on the couch whenever we sit on it, even getting up on our laps to try and use the computer. (This is our IKEA LILLBERG, which she had previously shunned since it was not as soft as gCouch, but she’s grown to like it.)

Update: Oh look, she’s on the couch again right this very moment:

Filed in Uncategorized | Tagged amy, cat, caturday, couch, pandora, photos | Comments Off

Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge

Sunday, June 27, 2010

Full photoset here.

NYC locals and tour guides have recommended walking the Brooklyn Bridge and ending in Brooklyn to have pizza at Grimaldi’s, though in our case we wanted to end up in Chinatown and have dim sum. So, going against the normal tourist flow on a warm morning last month, we headed for High Street Station on the A & C to enter the bridge from Brooklyn — which itself assumes you’ll be coming from Manhattan, as evidenced by the “Welcome” map. Up some stone steps from there and the path is clear.

Walking towards Manahattan against the general flow of tourist traffic is an exercise in patience, more so considering the propensity of large groups and families to take up the entire walkway, plus a general disregard for the delineation between pedestrian and bike lanes. That aside, however, the Brooklyn Bridge is a quintessential New York experience which is quite fun and scenic in good weather. The bridge positively oozes history; every stone, girder, plank, and cable shudders with the weight of years — or perhaps the passing of cars.

At left, the Statue of Liberty; at right, Manhattan Bridge; and all around, old rusty rivets and suspension cables.

All told, the walk took about an hour at a very relaxed pace, stopping for photos every few steps. Afterward we walked over to Chinatown and had a late lunch of dim sum at Jing Fong.

Someday, we’ll try this in the Manhattan to Brooklyn direction and finally try Grimaldi’s. Maybe in winter when it’s a bit less crowded.

Filed in nyc, travel | Tagged brooklyn, brooklynbridge, nyc, photos, travel | Comments Off

Hello world!

Thursday, June 17, 2010

Good news, everyone: How Now Brownpau has returned.

It’s been a while. I had succumbed to a double-fault state of distractibility and near-burnout, collecting ideas and content but settling for posting bits and pieces on Twitter and Tumblr while my personal web space languished and my ambitions for longer-form posts withered on the vine. Finally I decided to cure my scatter-brained sense of futility with a sudden and willful flurry of activity, starting with an upgrade of Movable Type from 4.3x to 5.

That went badly, as the upgrade wiped out all my painstakingly crafted PHP-based template work, killed a bunch of page-based customization hacks, and presented me with little option other than to start from scratch once again. At that point I decided to finally go with the advice others (especially Russell) had given me, and make the switch to WordPress. (Sorry, MT, you served me well for many years, but the times I yelled “NO!” at the CMS finally outnumbered the times I yelled “YES!” and so it was time for a change.)

(Around the same time, AxisHost began offering VPS, and I jumped at the chance to finally have a server-like hosting environment on one of the best hosts in the business.)

So HNBP now runs on WordPress and a VPS. To meet a self-imposed, travel-related deadline, I’ve had to settle for minimal customization and a design from the Wordpress theme library (veryplaintxt). Migration is still not done, and many things are still missing, broken, or stuck in default mode. A FriendFeed-based aggregated lifestream continues in the sidebar, and that is where most of the freshness will be for now. (I’m open to suggestions for a plugin that will take FriendFeed or other social media content and integrate it into the WordPress loop without actually importing new content as posts in the WP database.)

Summer is here. And now, so am I.

Preserving “Hello world” post here for posterity:

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Filed in site | Tagged hosting, movabletype, site, wordpress | Comments (3)

Caturday!

Saturday, April 17, 2010

In the years we’ve had her, Pandora has never shown much interest in the outdoors, but that seems to have changed now that we have a sliding door to a balcony that we’ve been opening to let in some balmy spring air:

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Cherry Blossoms 2010

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Maybe it was the gloomy weather, or the hordes of tourists that get thicker every season — exacerbated this year by unsightly barriers around the construction projects blocking the normal walking routes around the Jefferson Memorial — but cherry blossoms just seemed a bit lackluster this April. The sight was still lovely, but the experience this year was less than perfect.

The stress of traversing the Tidal Basin melted away, however, when we left the area and instead sat down on the grass under the cherry grove by the Washington Monument. There were blooming trees, but no teeming masses of tourists, and children frolicked about a gathering of pinwheels. The space was brighter and more open and generally more enjoyable than the Tidal Basin generally gets at that time of year, and we were both glad for the respite:

(Also see the timelapse video I took of tourists at the Monument grove, the full 2010 cherry blossoms photoset, and all my previous cherry blossom photosets.)

Filed in dc | | Comments Off

“Snowmageddon” 2010

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

In February of 2010, warm water from a moderate Pacific El Niño fed moisture to a south-shifted jet stream, which brought the moisture into contact with a strong, cold, negative Arctic Oscillation over the Eastern United States — which for us meant snow, and lots of it.

In what would be variously termed “Snowmageddon,” “Snowpocalypse,” and “Snoverkill,” a pair of storms dumped a total of over two feet of snow on DC and its environs, totally beating out the heaviest snows I had encountered before then (Baltimore, Feb 2003, and the storm just last December) and even exceeding snowfall records from the historic Knickerbocker Storm of 1922.

With snow accumulation above 8 inches, our Metro station stayed closed all week, and Amy and I were pretty much trapped at home through both blizzards. We had stocked up the refrigerator beforehand, and with the help of a neighbor managed to get extra food at the Asian market partway through the week, so we never lacked for supplies, and it was actually kind of nice to have the impromptu “snowcation” to relax a bit, working from home and checking Capital Weather for updates from time to time. (Which is to say, every 20 seconds.)

For future reference I’m using the name “Snowmageddon” for these storms because, well, that’s what the President called it. Or you can be boring like Wikipedia and just call it the First and Second North American Blizzards of 2010.

Some photos of the storm and its aftermath, from the Winter 2009-2010 photoset:

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Delilah’s Den

Sunday, February 28, 2010

There are a few establishments out there called “Delilah’s Den,” but in this case I’m talking about Delilah’s Den Pet Services in Falls Church, VA — named by Ester, the proprietor, for her late lovable cat Delilah. While Amy and I were away for Christmas and our regular petsitter neighbor was unavailable, I found Delilah’s Den on Craigslist and gave them a try for backup catsitting duties.

Ester is very thorough with the paperwork, which I appreciated very much, as she wants to be prepared with clearance for any cat-related (or house-related) contingencies. After the papers were all filled out, and a prepayment check and parking pass issued, we went off for the holidays. For a week, Ester came over everyday to give Pandora food, water, and a few minutes of active, playful attention; in addition she made sure our home was secure, and emailed updates on Pandora’s status. At the end of it we came home to a happy, healthy cat, well worth $10/day.

So Pandora the Cat recommends Delilah’s Den for Falls Church and Fairfax-area pet care:

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2009 in Review

Sunday, January 31, 2010

Many will remember 2009 as a year of prominent deaths — like the passing of Patrick McGoohan, Ricardo Montalban, John Updike, Bea Arthur, Dom DeLuise, Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, Walter Cronkite, Ted Kennedy, Brittany Murphy, Billy Mays, and more — but closest to home for me were the deaths of two uncles on my dad’s side: Cesar and Tito; as well as the death of President Cory Aquino.

International travel-wise, we started the year in the Philippines, and passed by Tokyo for a few days on our way back to DC. In May we did a week in London. Locally, there were our regular trips to New Jersey and New York. At one point on a trip to see Amy’s grandma in New Jersey, we found an old signature book called “Ghosts of My Friends.”

On a cold day in January, we watched the inauguration of President Obama.

For April Fool’s Day, I changed the front page of the site to a Twitter Search, parodying a social media gimmick from Skittles.

Summer was eventful. Amy got a wall at Artomatic to show some of her paintings and drawings. Her parents even came down to visit and see her work. The depictions of mushrooms were popular with biologists and mycology hobbyists. I got kind of close to a blue heron along the C&O. Around the Fourth of July we learned about Wales at the Folklife Festival, saw even more blue herons on Theodore Roosevelt Island, and watched fireworks from near the White House. When Ted Kennedy died, we were on hand to see his funeral procession at the Capitol.

In September we bought a new condo and moved out of DC to NoVA.

Thanksgiving and Christmas were spent with Amy’s folks in New Jersey.

We got a historic snowstorm a week before Christmas, but stayed (mostly) ensconced in our snug condo, venturing only briefly out into the cold.

Internet-wise, through 2009 I got a bit scattered across social media and virtual worlds: mostly Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, and Second Life. I’m sorry to say that this increased involvement in other realms of content has come at the expense of attention paid to my own site, so How Now Brownpau and other related projects have stagnated over the course of the year — something I hope to change in coming weeks. Backtagging thousands of old entries is hard.

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Snowstorm of Dec. 2009

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Dec. 19th brought a historic snowstorm to the DC area, dumping almost two feet of snow in our immediate locality in North Virginia and surpassing in overall impact even the Feb 2003 snowstorm in Baltimore. We were pretty much snowed in for that whole weekend, but we did venture outside to survey conditions for a bit. Some video of that:

I also got video of the aftermath of the snowstorm as seen from Metro, and some photos of the accumulation around our building. Sadly since we have moved to a somewhat less scenic suburban neighborhood (and we couldn’t go down to the National Mall since WMATA had closed above-ground Metro stations) the most poignant image I could capture from the snowstorm was this, in a nearby bus stop:

Filed in dc, photolog, videolog, weather | | Comments Off

Caturday!

Caturday!

Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge

Hello world!

Caturday!

Cherry Blossoms 2010

“Snowmageddon” 2010

Delilah’s Den

2009 in Review

Snowstorm of Dec. 2009

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